Category Archives: Writing

In which I discuss my writing process, including research and related issues.

Political, Writing

The Lexicon of Terms to Discuss Online Hyperreality and Hypernormalization

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Less heavy but not unheavy, I’ve been trying to think of words to frame some of the issues caused by our collective obsession with social media and its consequences. (1)

The first relevant term I learned, personally, was “future shock.” Roughly, it’s the state where people suffer emotional distress because everything is changing so fast! I suspect we’ve all felt it: that moment when, at work, something changes. So, you’ve got to abandon your expertise with the previous system for something else, which is often riddled with bugs, and just when you’re getting good with the new one, bang, they change it again. It can also be felt with the rapid rise and subsequent fall of social media networks – or just their sheer proliferation – as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and others compete in the same crowded space. And, lately, I’ve been seeing the final stage of future shock: the kids have it. Much of the discourse against gen AI is from young people who are seeing their futures stripped away by the rise of the AI shoggoth, its tentacles into everything.

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Ayn Rand, Political, Writing

A Way Forward: the Significance of Authorial Intent in the 21st Century

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I’m trying to figure out what I can do – concretely do – to help the world. While it comes down to “keep on writing,” I think a bit more is needed. I think that we need to talk about the problem leftists have with art and messaging.

Short form: leftist and liberal political institutions fucking hate art. Or, more exactly, they hate the idea of art and artists butting into political business.

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Political, Science, Writing

Humans and Social Media Are the Problem with Spreading Misinformation, not AI

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I had been thinking of writing a post about how it seems obvious that many of the posts that people make about AI errors are deceptive if not outright lies. Screenshots are easily fabricated! And I am unable to recreate any of the errors, even when I know the exact prompts and chatbots – even their versions – involved. Plus, it’s reasonably easy to “gaslight” an AI into giving ridiculous output by, for instance, starting a conversation and priming it with contradictory information and then demanding it reconcile the contradictions. Absurdity often results. And, yes, AI sometimes says stupid things to well-formed, innocuous posts, but the sheer scale of articles and videos about AI “mistakes” has grown so commonplace that it seemed to me, at first blush, that deception was involved.

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If God Did Not Exist, Science, Writing

Transitioning Away from Capitalist AIs and If God Did Not Exist

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I took a pause from the If God Does Not Exist stories because I realized that the early stories needed revision. The speed of progress for AI is so fast that even things written a year or two ago now look retro! I have a footnote (1) about the literary problems I was kicking around, but the key thing is that, boy, was the break intellectually fruitful. Let’s talk about how AIs are built!

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Political, Writing

They have Come Again and Again

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First, they came for the opium dealers, the first war on drugs,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Chinese.
Then, they came for the pot dealers, reefer madness,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Mexicans.
They ignored the cocaine dealers in the US.
It was okay to go after Colombians but not Wall Street coke dealers, oh, no,
And we focused on crack, saying it was a hundred times worse.
We pretended it wasn’t because crack dealers were poor and black.
They came for them, though.

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Political, Writing

Superheroism in the Decline of the American Empire

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I.

I asked a question on Bluesky, and I’ll repeat it here: what happens to US superheroes when the US is obviously in imperial decline? (And, moving forward, I am only talking about mainstream superheroes, almost exclusively the ones owned by Marvel and DC. Indie comics are a wild and wonderful woolly world of weirdness and likely to remain so forever.) The response I got on Bluesky, since I used Captain America as an example, is that now and then, Cap will leave the role to someone else, such as during the Watergate Era. But my question wasn’t what would superheroes do when the US made a mistake but about American superheroes in an age of imperial decline (and despite a few instances when they do something, most of the time they are silent; Cap has yet to opine on an insurrectionist rapist being in the Oval Office currying favor with tyrants over democratically elected leaders being invaded by those tyrants… if Cap quit over a bit of light spying by Nixon, you’d think he’d quit over that, but times have changed.) I think it’s a question worth looking at, given the cache that superheroes have had on the global scene with the rise of the MCU.

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Political, Writing

Killing Conspiracy Theories is Killing Social Media

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When I was a younger man, I was interested in conspiracy theories. I didn’t believe in them, but I was interested in them and the people who did believe in them. This was pre-Internet. While there were some big-name conspiracies – “who shot JFK” and “alien autopsies in Area 51” stuff – most of it was in the dark corners of the world: a few nutjobs with pirate radio stations rambling into the desert ether, mimeographed newsletters full of rambling purple prose, and badly edited and barely readable books. I was fascinated both by the horror and credulity of conspiracy theorists. They combined a totalizing belief in a nightmarish fantasy with a profound level of intentional ignorance that I found – and find – chilling.

Today’s conspiracy theorists are out in the open, often in high office. But how did it happen? How did we get here? I believe I have the answer, and the answer is social media.

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Political, Writing

Down with Publishers! Down with Them All!

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I fell into an interesting hole in Bluesky: people who are aware the publishing gig is rigged. I’ll elaborate on my experiences and observations.

I wrote a book, Simon Peter, which is an atheist take on the life of Jesus as the leader of a death cult. I did a bunch of research into cult leaders and concluded along the way, yeah, this had legs. The life of Jesus – taken without the theological flourishes of the past couple of thousand years – follows the typical patterns of a death cult. A charismatic leader who vacillates about their divinity, but as his followers grow to believe it, he becomes bolder in expressing his godhead while preaching the end is near while antagonizing the government and forcing them into an apocalyptic showdown. It follows the same overall pattern as David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, and countless others. While doing my investigation, I also found other parallels that historical death cult messiahs had with each other but missing from Christianity. Mainly that they were deeply disturbed people, usually suffering severe childhood abuse (often sexual in nature,) and that death cult messiahs almost always got around to sexually abusing their followers. I came to believe (and still do) that you can see hints of this in the official record of Christianity (which I believe has about as much credibility as the Scientology website about L. Ron Hubbard.) Specifically, the dismissal of marriage and the fixation on fallen women are extremely common in messianic death cults.

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Science, Writing

AI Romantic Partners is a Brave New World

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As someone who has written stories about the threat of AI, this piece by Visual Venture on YouTube goes over some of the concerns about AI friends and lovers. But I think they stop a little short of understanding the real horror. While it is absolutely a tragedy that “friend” chatbots have factually abetted people who have killed themselves and are being used by greedy corporations to make money (and will continue to do so in the future,) I think the greater problem is that AI friendbots will become better than humans at human relationships.

Most people think that an AI takeover will be something like Nineteen Eighty-Four or “The Terminator.” AIs will either create a tyranny where they control all aspects of human life but where humans will be miserable (popularly called “the torment nexus” as I write this) or, at some point, they’ll just kill us all. There’s a third way. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World is a dystopia that is created by love. Motivated by a genuine desire to help people, a society is created where people are engineered and chemically enhanced to fit roles in society with the total absence of pain, presence of pleasure, but also the perceived lack of real joy.

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Political, Writing

History Has No Sides, Trump Edition

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I dislike the saying “the wrong side of history.” History doesn’t have a side. It’s the study of the past, that’s it.

Granted, some historical narratives can seem like historians are choosing sides, but they aren’t. So, yes, I fully expect that the historical consensus on Trump will one day be, “The Trump administration weakened the foreign policy of the US by attacking traditional allies with strong democracies and siding with authoritarian leaders in Russia, China, and other places. His policies at home drove dissent, worsened inequality, sparked civil conflict, and saw a reduction in the US standard of living. He was also responsible for stalling global action about climate change which had disastrous consequences while worsening wars all over the world.”

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