“Instead of democracy, we will have basically tech feudalism — fiefdoms run by tech corporations. They’re pretty explicit about this point.”
LINK: https://futurism.com/billionaires-corporate-dictatorship
Tag: death
Is AI Apocalypse Inevitable? – Tristan Harris
In this episode, Tristan Harris explores the 2 most probable paths that AI will follow, one leading to chaos and the other to dystopia. He explains how we can pursue a narrow path between these 2 undesirable outcomes. Tristan Harris is a prominent technology ethicist known for his influential critique of the attention economy and persuasive design in tech. Tristan is Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to align technology with humanity’s best interests. He regularly briefs heads of state, technology CEOs, and US Congress members, in addition to mobilizing millions of people around the world through mainstream media. Tristan has explored the influences that hijack human attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, from his childhood as a magician to his coursework in Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab to his leadership as a Design Ethicist at Google. Today, he studies how major technology platforms wield dangerous power over our ability to make sense of the world and leads the call for systemic change. In 2020, Tristan was featured in the two-time Emmy-winning Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. The film unveiled how social media is dangerously reprogramming our brains and human civilization. It reached over 100 million people in 190 countries across 30 languages. As a co-host of the top-rated technology podcast, Your Undivided Attention, he explores the drivers behind social media’s race for attention, its destabilization of society, and potential solutions. Learn more about Tristan’s research at https://www.humanetech.com/
The pharma CEOs aren’t safe in new trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia
The dark comedy is set to hit theaters on October 31st.
CEOs would be nothing without the labor of their (typically) underpaid employees, and the unfairness of that reality seems to be what’s causing all the chaos in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming film, Bugonia.
A remake of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 feature Save the Green Planet, Bugonia zooms in on the life of Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy-minded beekeeper who works for a massive pharmaceutical company run by Michelle (Emma Stone). As one of the company’s many workers who spend their days laboring to make a fraction of Michelle’s salary, Teddy sees a lot of parallels between himself and the bees who live only to serve their queen.
Teddy knows that he, like a beehive’s drones, is expendable in the grand scheme of Michelle’s plans as a CEO. Teddy’s frustrations and delusions about an alien invasion convince him that Michelle probably isn’t a human. And that’s enough for him to hatch a plot to kidnap his boss under the auspices of saving the planet.
Though the trailer skews a little whimsical, it’s fairly clear that Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy are telling a dark story about people pushed to the edge by economic inequality. The movie also seems like it’s going to touch on how people not having proper access to quality mental health care is a very real societal problem, which is probably going to make Bugonia feel timely as hell when the film hits limited theaters on October 24th before its wide release on October 31st.
AI Scams Are the Point
Propaganda and deceit are a feature of AI, not its downfall.
Why does it matter how we talk about artificial intelligence? Some, mainly tech firms and their useful idiots, maintain we are about to immanentize the eschaton (which translates roughly as: dissolve all of society’s problems). Others insist we are summoning a false god in the form of an artificial general intelligence that will destroy civilization. Those feelings of awe and terror aren’t particularly assuaged by the numbers: Tens of billions of dollars are raised each year by startups in this sector—incumbents hope to raise trillions more.
Elon Musk Built an Al Super Computer in our Backyard
Elon Musk’s massive xAI data center is poisoning Memphis.
It’s burning enough gas to power a small city, with no permits and no pollution controls.
Residents tell us they can’t breathe and they’re getting sicker.
EPISODE #243: THE MAD BOMBER OF TWENTYNINE PALMS
The maniac who blew himself up outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic is our latest High Desert dingbat to make the national news. Luckily, those injured in the Palm Springs terror attack have been treated and released from the hospital. But who bombs fertility clinics? Meet America’s worst new subculture, the violent anti-natalists, and their new hero from Twentynine Palms.
This is EPISODE #243: THE MAD BOMBER OF TWENTYNINE PALMS with geographically appropriate soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver. Written & hosted by Ken Layne. Listen on the radio in Joshua Tree and across the Mojave High Desert on Z 107.7 FM, 10-11 p.m. Fridays.
The Death of an Innocent
sources:
Into the Wild, by John Krakauer
The Journal of Chris McCandless
The Wild Truth, by Carine McCandless
The Entire Benadryl Lore Collection
Benadryl has some incredibly disturbing lore. In fact, it’s one of the darkest corners of the internet. Reddit threads, memes, schizoposts and of course the Hat Man. This compilation is a thorough and comprehensive look into the psychotic world and all the lore surrounding Benadryl. Compilation: includes 4 on my own videos.. including one you’ve probably NEVER SEEN BEFORE You will see; New edits, commentary, and some good ole’ extras, have fun and enjoy.
Zuckerberg’s Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI
Archived WSJ article
Meta’s CEO is promoting a future where artificial intelligence is increasingly intertwined with people’s lives
Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents.
In Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances.
“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe’s annual conference.
Dignity
I read this when it came out in 2011, while we were still thinking about Occupy and 2008. Here we are in 2025, and it is still relevant. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor.
A packet of hand-scrawled letters found in a stranger’s backpack tells of self-sufficient communities growing from the ruins of California’s housing collapse and the global recession. In unfinished Mojave Desert housing tracts and foreclosure ghost towns on the raw edges of the chaotic cities of the West, people have gathered to grow their own food, school their own children and learn how to live without the poisons of gossip, greed, television, mobile phones and the Internet. Encouraged by an enigmatic wanderer known only as “B,” the communities thrive as more families and workers are discarded by an indifferent system. But this quiet revolution and its simple rituals cannot stay unnoticed for long, because the teachings of “B” threaten an entire structure of power and wealth dependent upon people toiling their lives away to buy things they don’t need.
“But to understand the social mood as embodied by a group like Occupy, it may help to look at literature that captures its zeitgeist. One of the books that seems to have become a standard bearer for the Occupy movement is Ken Layne’s ‘Dignity.’ In a book that can only be described as a series of modern-day letters on the gospel of communal simplicity, you can see what kind of world some of the Occupiers might envision: communities occupying vacant suburban or exurban subdivisions, farming the land themselves, bartering with doctors and the like, and shunning modern technology.” — Minyanville.com