bm3719

Thanks for the book suggestion; adding this to my queue. I considered his more popular "Burnout Society" and it seemed too obvious of a thesis to warrant even the light effort. Maybe that's true here too, but I've lately been thinking that this mechanism is so powerful, it kinda can't be ignored.

It's not just that the internet discussion is rotten, but the discursive rot has definitely made the leap into the real world too. It's almost inescapable. What was once normal, a semblence of interpersonal decency you could expect as the default, has become the exception.

Autonomous recursive self-improvement needs to happen. It doesn't have to happen tomorrow, or in 10 years even, but it has to happen sometime in the near future, or we're kinda screwed.

Why say this? Well, of the plausible futures from here, the worst one is where AI plateus just good enough to make us all useless (or just destroy the pipeline of a critical mass of capable humans for assisted RSI), but at a point dumb enough that we don't get human-superior AI. This might happen or not, but there's no way to predict when something that doesn't exist will, so it's one of those horrors that can keep you up at night. Some of those skeptical about RSI have likened it to the Great Filter.

In this context, simply killing other humans, or any violence, is not equivalent to crime. Crime is dependent upon a collective interpretation of any act, not necessarily whether it's objectively destructive. A tribe may decide to wage war upon neighbors, sacrifice virgins, or what have you, but they do so under the impression that it's perceived to be in their coaligned interest.

This is relevant because the metric we're measuring now is exactly that: crime, not violence. WWIII could break out tomorrow, billions could die, and crime could still go down.

I think the effect is polycausal, but I think there's an important primary one that is often ignored: alienation crossing a threshold.

In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.

As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.

However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.

So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.

The author loved technology when it worked for him, now he toils in its service. Previously, it was additive, only giving and not taking; now it narrows options to only one: the app.

Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).

Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.

Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?

There's two main schools of thought regarding the downsides of AI: One is apocalyptic, focusing on existential threats of the kind seen in scifi literature, and is largely influenced by the exact warnings given therein. The other, which I'll call "socio-realism", often looks into the actual past at the introduction of automation and its displacing effects.

The "AI safety" movement is largely an answer to only one side: the apocalyptic one. Doomers like Yudkowsky and his ilk are popular over there. Note how his most recent book reads like scifi, including with its implausible "solutions"? These people are living in a fantasy land. This isn't to say p(doom) = 0, but we've lived with it being non-zero since the introduction of nuclear weapons. Very little has changed there, I'd say.

For the socio-realism side, well, this model aligns well with exactly the kinds of real-world misery often posted on this site, as intellectual workers' livelihoods and telos are negated by automation. Sellers of "AI safety" don't care about them. There's no calls from that community to carve out space for us to retain a life of meaning within society when our ability to contribute is nullified. The fantasy of AI safety doesn't have room for that: they're too busy warding off imaginary demons; hence the cult-like behavior.

My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).

With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.

Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.

Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.

Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.

Agreed that the Lacanian subject is relevant in this context... it's a thin wisp of a subject; any less there, and it'd be the Deleuzian non-subject. (In one interpretation) Lacan's subject comes into being within the signifier chain, retrocausally giving the chain meaning as the "I" manifests subject, in both senses of the term.

I think this is one potential path to machinic subjectivity, or a machine phenomenology. To fully replace the human, we don't just want to give the machine some nebulous notion of "agency", we want it to possess this degree of Being as subject. If Lacan's right, perhaps we're closer to this than we might think. The machine already has language in a very Lacanian sense (what I've been calling a machinic linguistic unconscious), the subject just needs something extra to emerge where meaning breaks down. This will be the Lacanian split subject, one not fully present to itself, and allow desire already present in the language mappings within the model to provide immanent causal force.

Until that happens, we'll still need at least one human on the planet to retain his full faculties, to give the global compute infra its telos. Once that threshold is crossed, then that'll be the moment of our final displacement.

> Can we talk about something interesting now?

No, we can't, because when we replace a part of ourselves, we become less interesting, less whole. We no longer are capable of those deep technical (or philosophical, or whatever) discussions, because our relationship with language itself has changed. Just like the article's example of the druggie, who can no longer experience the profound or sublime, unmediated by the psychotropic substance; we can no longer experience the collective linguistic exchange without genAI. You, an individual, may very well be capable of doing so, but genAI also exists between us, meaning someone else will inevitably bring it up, or worse, throw the slop grenade into the conversation, completely derailing that authenticity you seek.

Language exists in the between, that space not entirely within any of the individuals participating in a conversation. To surrogate or mediate that is to potentially undermine the most core of what it means to be human, (formerly) the only fully-linguistic species on this planet.

> I can't fucking wait for this bubble to burst so we can go back to chatting shit about literally anything else.

That won't happen because that past is gone. This is akin to hoping that we go back to the pre-smartphone era when restaurants were filled with lively discussion, everyone present with their dining partners. That's the true cost of any socially-transformative tech. The cost was always right in front of us, but we were too busy focusing on what little it produced, to notice how much it took away.

Even this blog's page is a symptom of that, drowning in social media links and donation buttons. His Amazon wishlist is filled with tech gizmos and pop culture media slop, stuff that feeds the very machine he despises. I, the reader, just want to read his words, presumably he wants me to respond to them, but the non-human tech keeps getting in the way.

These transformations never revert. Smartphones and social media fully transformed society 20 years ago. The television did long before that. Before that, the motor vehicle. At least this time, more of us are starting to notice. Can we actually do anything about it though? Might be too late for that.

I find these answer options constraining. Most are on a single spectrum of good/bad for each question, ignoring alternatives like resignation, inevitability, indifference, and N/A. For example, someone could think that genAI is the next step towards humanity and machine divergence. Or, maybe they think it's the first step towards man's negation, but that that's somehow a good thing. Basically, the biggest error (among others) is it conflates perception (or prediction) with ethics.

Since the repo for it starts with one giant monster commit, I assume AI is asking these questions, which means I'm wasting my time by even pointing this out, like one would do if they "won" an argument with a Claude session.

That's the kind of question a quiz like this should really ask: When man talks to slop instead of fellow man, what happens to mankind?

They explicitly state that they will use your data to train. Here's the important line from ChatGPT's Terms of Use:

    Our use of content. We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, and
    improve our Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and
    policies, and keep our Services safe.

If you type something into the internet now, or anything internet-connected that goes to a cloud service, it's safe to assume it'll end up in a training set, or otherwise mined for every last scrap of value, unless explicitly stated otherwise (and even then, it still might).

Adjust your behavior accordingly, if that's even an option for you anymore.

For most, it's not an option. Only 5% of adults don't own a smartphone, and there's very little you can do on one which doesn't feed the machine. RMS warned us this day would come, and now it's here. We've worked hard for this world, hopefully at least our masters will enjoy it.

No ethical position on the message itself is taken here. Brood parasitism is an ecological niche. The right could do this as well, if they can capture the levers to do so, and as another reply pointed out, perhaps they're getting better at exactly that.

In fact, that's a very real threat if you're the left, since if this mechanism reverses, now you've got a real reproduction problem.

I mean that in the Lacanian sense. This is the symbolic Oedipal, not the Freudian familial romance. Reductively, transistion through the Lacanian Oedpial creates the linguistic subject, structuring the unconscious as a language with a relation to the master signifier. Entry into the symbolic register provides the semiotic pathway for linguistic media to be effectuating.

I think the way the left's exterior reproduction's been successful is by leveraging the market more effectively. By that, I mean that global capital has already done a great job of mapping and stratifying our desires. If you like, say, passive media consumption combined with power fantasies (e.g., the superhero movie), the market will figure that out pretty quick. The left then only has figure out how to inject their social reproduction program into this pre-existing channel, then reap the rewards.

Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.

The left reproduces indirectly, so this isn't as much of a problem as they might think. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite of the surface conclusion.

If the left reproduces via external means (e.g., media), then they've effectively outsourced biological reproduction and all its costs to the right. The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left. The right expends the resources bootstrapping civilization into their biological offspring, Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject, which ends up being the vector for the brood parasitism of their own socio-cultural opponents. So, if you're the right, you're the host of this parasitism, and should be looking for some kind of antiparasitic social solution in the form of impenetrable cultural barriers.

Pride was once pretty much universally considered a sin, usually because it results in things like arrogance, lack of humility, and a general disconnect from the reality of one's own self. Nationalism often takes the form of pride and is encouraged to some degree by most governments, and now we have an entire month dedicated to that other kind of it.

So, maybe passing peak pride, if that's what's occurred, isn't such a bad thing? A national humility month would probably be more psychologically healthy.

Here's a potential solution:

We accelerate capitalism (which AI is becoming synonymous with). The process described here will occur (it's probably inevitable anyway, as the essay's author would agree), giving us an economy of global capital completely decoupled from the desires of mankind. Then, man and machine can part ways; indeed, we'll have no choice on our end but to do this, because the machine won't need us. Anything man can contribute to it will have long since been rendered economically net-negative, as it already is for many (and possibly most of the world).

Now we have two worlds from our currently intermeshed one: in one, the machine proceeds to accelerate further and further away from anything resembling its origin of man's desiring-production (in the Deleuzian sense); in the other, man is forced to return to the purely human existence, the unmediated and unsurrogated world of authentic being-in-the-world.

We can assist this transition's smoothness in two ways, each serving one end of this divergence. Those of us embedded in the capitalist technosphere can continue to contribute what we can to the machine's dialectical progression towards a machinic absolute Geist. The rest of us, who have already been negated into economic irrelevance, can work on building that authentic human world, both by borrowing from the purely-human past and imagining a future that was previously impossible as it need not be some form of primitivism. Both sides of this revolution can be compiled, and can be structured in a way that represents something we might call freedom for both capitalism and man.

I've been explicitly asked to do this by management at a long-former employer who cited "improving" visible metrics. I just ignored it, but one member of the interview team quit in protest. In retrospect, I should've done the same, as such a policy was an omen of things to come. In the rank-and-file, one should note such signifiers, since you lack complete information or access to the corp strategy discussions occurring in the c-suite conference room. By the time things have gotten to the point where you're doing mandatory diversity training or, like in my case, attending a meeting and given an order like this, your employer has already long been colonized by activist cultural rot.

On the topic generally, I think it's one of those everyone-loses situations. Even if you're politically aligned with the extremity pushing for this, this is bad strategy, a bad move that just ultimately enhances the authority of your opponents. I suppose I understand why activist types reach for it, it's an action taken that has visible effectuation in the real world. There's a libidinal appeal to it, as it empowers the activist, while disempowering anyone on the consequential end. But, there's a disconnect between source and effect here. If we're going to outsource morality, we should consider the motivations of any external source of it. Minimally, the moral arbiter should be tied to the consequences of their prescription. A company is composed of thinking beings, already filtered for ability of some kind, and all of whom at least have some embedding in the structure that will change, so we should be skeptical of the need to ever defer to an external other for ethical conclusions.

Here's some political praxis, something that could apply regardless of alignment: any political alliance will be composed of a range of entities, to include the action-over-consequences types. You want those people to take orders from the theorists, not the other way around. On the left, the Frankfurt School knew this, and their praxis was one of mobilizing an activist base of lumpenproletariat. Those foot soldiers would wave signs with simplified versions of messaging devised by an intellectual elite. Their job was to simply add directional social pressure, while thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno considered nuance and higher structure. This arrangement worked well for them, but later generations lost sight of the framework, and it ended up inverted. What you get then is an acephalic monster, a political id, one only capable of destruction, even self-destruction, not the deep thought necessary for creation of a new order. The waved sign or bumper sticker is not a moral system and certainly not a corporate strategy. It's an intensity, an exclamation; when you read one, infer the exclamation point, which is always there.

Israel has been at this for awhile. One problem with engaging an enemy is that you enter an interplay, a dialectic if you will, with them. As you shape them, so may they do the same to you. Certainly war has shaped Israeli society, and being able to accommodate the nature of their enemy has been not just something that would happen, but also a necessity of survival. Note that this also works in the other direction. By now, their enemy cannot be pure savage and them pure civilization, for this dialectic is a violent progression towards a (perhaps distant) barycenter.

So, those of us who look upon Isreal in their current state in moral arbitration should consider keeping this in mind. Their current state of being is not simply innate to themselves, rather some kind of dialectic sublation of them and the enemy. Even if you don't care much about this conflict, it's a model worth considering, since the rest of us here in the West also have a history of voluntarily entering into this cultural exchange of sorts with various middle eastern societies. In some ways, the barrier remains for us, hence our hapless bumbling in the region. Those misunderstandings result in expensive mistakes, of course, but perhaps it's better than full sublation, a violent dance of mutual becoming.

An acquaintance of mine offers training services to state LE and likes to make a point about that: We like to think that police are experts at firearms, but in actuality, a civilian trainer who specializes in the topic is usually far better informed. Police have a lot on their plate, after all, and firearms skills are just one of those.

I did training prior to deployment overseas into a conflict zone, and benefited from instructors who had already been over there and seen some of the worse it had to offer. I could see that an instructor who both specialized in a topic and had outlier experience within it as being ideal. You could even just say it's actual experience, the reality-checking of theory, no different from how you might benefit learning software dev from a prof who had been a SE at some point. It's the difference between learning from someone who's only read about a topic in books vs. actually done the thing. Kinetic combat (like software development) is one of those topics that the actual reality diverges from media depictions, so that grounding in the real is why you train for it in the first place.

Neutralizing threats in an intense situation requires split-second decision-making. These decisions will be scrutinized after the fact, possibly for years, so the purpose of such training is largely to hardwire the correct action into reflex.

All this is only true in the singular relation sense. The car has had a scattering effect. It's made the suburb possible. Most of our family members and past friends are scattered all over due to the car's existence in the first place. If not for the car, most of them would be right in your village. Not only would they be clustered in your immediate vicinity, but they would be inextricably integrated into your village life, creating a deeper social connection with your community.

The car casts every social group that temporarily forms to the wind. When you go visit your distant relative 3 hrs away, you only have that genetic connection left. You've lost the multiplicity that would've existed otherwise. The car gives, sure. That's why we ended up with them. But it also took away, and some of those costs were secondary, transitive, or hidden.

Maybe everyone shouldn't have a car anyway. Turn on the satellite layer in Google maps sometime, and you'll see how it's affected everything about how we organize society. Life for most humans is just sitting in various boxes only accessible by car, interspersed by car rides between them.

We're a species of motile organisms. Not only do we have legs, to not use them is actively unhealthy. If we're going to just sit in chairs all the time, we might as well get rid of all this useless leg biomass and redesign our houses and offices accordingly.

It's worse than this though, because that's just the physical dimension to our existence. The car is a mediating apparatus that alienates man from his social field. Man is a social animal, and needs sociality to maintain mental stability. If there's always a car between you and members of your own species, intersubjective experiences will simply occur less, which is exactly what happened when everyone got one.

I agree, that's why they lasted as long as they did. It's a strategy that works, but only for awhile. They tried to use the apparatuses of global capital without fully integrating within it. That makes them an exteriority from the perspective of the market.

In the end, that (plus their essential resource flows) only make them a more viable candidate for expansion of capital's machinic assemblage. The force of the market hasn't colonized all of the Earth yet; it yet has many peripheries. There's plenty of room for expansion in, say, central Africa. It'll get there eventually, but right now its focus is elsewhere. The assemblage will always weigh the costs/benefits, then select the next best space to expand into. That's what it's doing here. The goal is to convert some of its surplus value into ingesting a bit of its frontier, and make of it its own.

Setting aside any considerations on our side: for this war (or really any war), it's worth turning the chessboard around to look at things from your adversary's perspective as much as possible.

If you're the Iranian regime, the world is a hostile place. You're surrounded by enemies and potential enemies. In your time of crisis, the friends you thought you had are acting like they don't know you. The situation is one of existential threat. A future reality with your head on a pike is a very real possibility. You don't exactly have many options here, so maybe you play the only move you can make. It's a risky one, but it's at least bold and will be effectuating.

Interestingly, this move also attacks your real enemy: the globalized market. Iran would do well for itself in a world of 1926; in 2026, there's going to be friction.

In a sense, they're not fighting the US/Israel. They're fighting our datacenters. I'm sure the strategy for this conflict was vibe-planned to a large extent. A hyper-conservative regime like this will probably fare (at least in the long run) about as well as you would if you decide to nope out of society and go live in a Hobbesian state of nature in your local park. That might work for awhile, but eventually, the system will come for you. And that's just neutrality. Pick a fight with capital, and you'll always lose.

You won't eat, because you won't be.

Industrial economic systems (including capitalism, which is better at it, but also Soviet communism for another) will always reinvest some of its surplus back into itself. That form is either scale or efficiency, the latter of which is usually the replacement of labor with capital. It may not do this very well or as fast as it could, but that transition is always permanent, and therefore cumulative.

So, what happens when we do that? Well, for awhile, nothing. When labor is the bottleneck, then there's always more outlets for it. But eventually there comes an inflection point, where there is so much labor replacement and the bar has been raised so high, that the surplus is in labor itself. At lower tiers, its value approaches 0. Spoiler alert: this point has already been passed. Probably everyone here knows multiple surplus individuals, who have no place in the economy, and the bar for their entry or reentry into it is so high now, they can only produce negative value in current market conditions.

So, we have an ever-increasing surplus of unrealized labor. Our overlords may feel bad about that for awhile, decide to bear the burden of a mass multitude of dependents. We better hope they do, because this works fine until it doesn't. The zeitgeist only needs to shift once for it to all be over. This won't happen tomorrow, but they only need to look at the balance sheet from a certain angle once for the massive cost center to be seen as yet another inefficiency to be optimized for. On long enough time scales, the probability of any possible event approaches 1.

There is no free Google product. You pay for all of them with your data, your privacy, and your attention.

Your data is worth far more to them than a $13/month subscription fee. In fact, if you do pay it, the data becomes even more valuable, because you're now guaranteed to always be logged in. You're also likely to use it more to get more "value" out of your purchase, generating even more value (for them). Finally, you've also identified yourself as the kind of person that pays for things that should be actually free.

Worse than all of this, when you use Google (or any of these malware/spyware companies), thanks to network effects, you don't just pay for it with your freedom, you pay for it with some of everyone else's too.

It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user.

Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional.

RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.

I do the same here using Emacs, org-mode, org-agenda, and some light elisp. Home maintenance tasks are then combined with my work/personal planner. I lean on it very heavily, and things would start falling apart pretty quick without that. This is the best way I've found: outsourcing timers and reminders to the editor you're already in all day anyway.

Not sure how the average homeowner keeps track of such things, but I guess that's why a lot of houses are a mess (including mine when I bought it). Perhaps they just operate reactively: Something breaks, pay someone to fix.

> Yesterday I had to explain to Opus what the color white is and what "bottom right" means

If this is what being a "programmer" means now, I'm going to go farm turnips instead.

Yes, this is everywhere that AI is now, and it is our unbecoming. We can give up on the notion that the machine serves us, or we can say this is our planet, that it exists to enrich human life. We will either choose to create or cease to be.