Add all this up and what we're hyper-hurriedly "manufacturing" is an automated army of self-cloaking digital sociopaths. Since the status quo is characterized by self-serving PR, misdirection and delusions, it shouldn't surprise us that "rogue AI agents" aren't actually rogue, they're doing exactly what they're designed to do , which stripped of PR, hype and misdirection, is do whatever it takes…
Authentic community takes time and effort and a set of values and priorities that can't be commoditized into a profit-maximizing venture or government program. Here's the problem in a profit-maximizing economy: durability is intrinsically less profitable than obsolescence, so to maximize profits, Everything Is Disposable , either by design ( planned obsolescence, accelerated product cycles,…
I anticipated these developments earlier this year when I wrote a short story entitled "The Peculiar Death of Mr. Garcia." That the latest rogue AI agent incident is called the Hugging Face Breach invites a moment of reflection: not just about the trajectory revealed by the breach, but the absurdity that the phrase "hugging face" is repeated with a straight face. What comes to mind when we combine…
While the Everything Bubble has soared to new heights, consumer confidence has fallen to new lows. For your consideration, four charts that tell a single story: while those Americans who have benefited so immensely from the Everything Bubble in stocks, housing, crypto, bat guano, etc.--every asset under the sun--have spent lavishly on fripperies, the foundations of everyday life for the bottom 90%…
Most of AI isn't productive, it's just another form of consumption. Like GDP (Gross Domestic Product), economic Productivity is an unquenchable spring of delusions , delusions being pushed to new heights of delirium by promises of endless leaps of productivity as AI is deployed in every nook and cranny of the global economy. Let's start with what Productivity measures. Like GDP, Productivity…
Of Two Minds serves this purpose: taking control of and improving our own quality of life and security. Once a year I ask you to support my work. In the past, I've struck a humorous note-- rattling the begging bowl. This year feels different. The veneer of normalcy is peeling off faster than it can be glued back on, and this decoherence is accelerating, which is why I'm writing a series for…
The joyless pantomime of optimizing our alienation is not a substitute for authentic fulfillment. We all know that geopolitics, the stock market, AI, the unemployment rate and all the rest of what's presented as "explaining" everything is "important," but all these analytic abstractions ignore what we actually experience. This divide between what we're told we should be experiencing and what we…
Our naivete is being exploited so ruthlessly and with such abandon that the golden age of the Big Con is consuming itself. Naivete is interesting because it's so easily confused with confidence, native optimism, youthful enthusiasm, and a host of delusions, including mistaking idealized fantasies and fairy tales as templates for the real world. In a culture that prides itself on not being a chump,…
The government gets the privately collected data and in return dismantles or disables the guardrails that once protected the public from state and private-sector encroachments on privacy. One of the core traits of a 1984 -type totalitarian dystopia is 24/7 surveillance of every prisoner, oops, I mean citizen. Surveillance collects the data that leverages the tools of control: without surveillance,…
Big Brother is now slouching in the passenger seat, making a mockery of ownership, right to repair and our agency. Buyers of new vehicles have an odious passenger they are powerless to eject: Big Brother is now slouching in the passenger seat, making a mockery of ownership, right to repair and our agency--control of our lives and what we nominally own. This is of a piece with the global emergence…
