The Automation Charade: https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade
from 2018.

for those curious what stage we're at: "great news folks! dead internet theory is happening! be the first to optimize for it!"

very serious orb

"So I told Mozilla it sounds like you're just feeding your users to the for-profit proprietary LLM companies and his mascot Kit started crying"

> "For months, in private conversations with founders and executives at major AI labs and big tech companies, I’ve been hearing the same concern: the public hates what we’re doing. It has been a simmering anxiety, and with this past weekend’s events and new data from Stanford, it just became impossible to ignore."
crickets from the "it's already too popular to stem the tide, best we can do is try to make an 'ethical' version of it and steer people towards that" crowd, of course.

"class traitor technologies" is a useful concept to install into your worldview: anything that invites you to think of yourself as a little dauphin, a temporary aristocrat reclining on a chaise of screaming human bones, languorous finger directing some new marvel of labor, anything that discourages you from thinking of that labor as the product of other humans' hands and minds, product of a real place with soil and air and human community. technology to invisibilize & obliterate all that.

for those tracking John Carmack's descent into right wing total moral disorientation, he's now at "Palmer Luckey should buy Wired and do to it what Elon Musk did to Twitter".
he's full fash at this point. totally gonna deliver AGI by 2030 though.
increasingly disgusting that he named his shitass company after Commander Keen, a joyful little video game from before he became a millionaire and was empowered to become his worst self.

"ban-and-punish won't work, it's unenforceable etc" is not going to matter when the economics of this shit collapse completely, sometimes there are multiple reasons not to do a thing

nothing the fascists do can ever change the fact that the world is immeasurably better with trans people in it