Tag: collapse

‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State

LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.D08.wM9J.LUKIOA-Md2ip&smid=url-share

“… President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).

What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.

“This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”

Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data…”

And if you can’t get to the NYT article due to the paywall, here’s a PDF of the NYT article.

Opinion Elon Musk’s Legacy DOGE’s Construction of a Surveillance State - The N

 

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL.

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

LINK: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/

Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades.

Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades. Many also WANT this to happen: they WANT the biological world to be replaced by a new digital world. They WANT "posthumans" to take the place of humans. A 🧵:

— Dr. Émile P. Torres (@xriskology.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T19:58:32.783Z

The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’

RIP Uncle Ted
RIP Uncle Ted

Episode Description
Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure.

Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.

Link: https://pca.st/07odumi7

2073

2073

2073 is a 2024 British science fiction docudrama film directed by Asif Kapadia. Set in a dystopian future, the film is inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetée, which follows a time traveller who risks his life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity.

Torrents: https://www.1377x.to/torrent/6305616/2073-2024-1080p-AMZN-WEB-DL-DDP5-1-H-264-FLUX/

 

 

‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday

Liberals in the US make up about 15% of the prepping scene and their numbers are growing. Their fears differ from their better-known rightwing counterparts – as do their methods

‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday

One afternoon in February, hoping to survive the apocalypse or at least avoid finding myself among its earliest victims, I logged on to an online course entitled Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.

Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisis called climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.

READ ARTICLE: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/17/preppers-liberals-climate-collapse

What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero

The Old Leatherman, a sort of real-life Northeastern Sasquatch, g​ave me an excuse to step outside my own life.

The Old Leatherman, a sort of real-life Northeastern Sasquatch, g​ave me an excuse to step outside my own life.
Sometime in the 1850s or ’60s, at a terrible moment in U.S. history, a strange man seemed to sprout, out of nowhere, into the rocky landscape between New York City and Hartford. The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a mystery, and a very greasy and ill-odored one.” Other papers referred to him as “the animal” or (just throwing up their hands) “this uncouth and unkempt ‘What is it?’”

But the strangest thing about the stranger was his suit.

LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-walk-new-york-connecticut.html

Permafrost thaw beneath Arctic lakes poses surprise pollution threat

Permafrost thaw beneath Arctic lakes poses surprise pollution threatThermokarst lakes, formed from thawing permafrost, in Alaska

As the Arctic gets warmer, large quantities of greenhouse gas could be released from the sediment at the bottom of lakes, a source that has previously been overlooked.

The frozen soil of the Arctic has already started to thaw, triggering the release of more methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This climate feedback is well known, but most modelling only accounts for thawing in the top 3 metres of Arctic soil.

LINK: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2462580-permafrost-thaw-beneath-arctic-lakes-poses-surprise-pollution-threat/