Category Archives: Weird Stuff

The Death Of Grammar Ronin

Posted on by
206

One of the things that comes with writing for a public audience in the digital age is the editor without portfolio. This is the person who roams the internet looking for spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, and grammar issues. There are many of these people, as the comment section of every internet post has at least one comment about a typo or alleged improper word choice. They are like the samurai without a master in feudal Japan, except they wield the blue pencil instead of a sword.

Soon, of course, they will be replaced by AI. It will not be long before the browsers simply rewrite your text in the period between when you hit submit and the text commits to the website. The robots will patrol the internet like the grammar ronin of this age but do so with a speed that the grammar ronin cannot match. Imagine a terminator sent back to seventeenth-century Japan to battle Miyamoto Musashi. By the looks of it, the days of the grammar ronin are numbered.

At least it seems that way if you assume there is only one way to construct a sentence or that the rules of grammar are iron laws of grammar. That is often how the grammar ronin look at language and writing. The rules of grammar are not merely guides to facilitate clarity but laws that must be ruthlessly enforced. Even if the grammar rule no longer works for a modern audience, the grammar ronin insist that it must be followed lest chaos be unleashed on humanity.

It turns out that this is where AI disagrees with the grammar ronin. If you compose an essay and feed it into each of the AI, asking for corrections of spelling and grammar, the result will be different from each AI. If you submit the output of one into another, it will rewrite the text for what it claims is clarity and convention. You can create a game of telephone with the AI editors, and when you get to the last one and submit it back to the starting AI, the result is nothing like where you started.

It seems that the robot editors cannot agree on the rules. The reason for that is the AI learns on the mass of text made available to it. Once the robot is seeded, it then continues to build its knowledge based on available information from the internet and what has been fed to it by users. What we call AI is actually a massive probability calculator that quickly returns the most likely answer to the user query, based on the data that has been made available to it.

This is why the results from each AI are slightly different when they are asked to edit the exact same text. There are small differences in its massive data sets, so the probabilities are slightly different. Ask each AI to add simple numbers, and the results are uniformly the same because probability plays no role in the result. Two plus two equals four for all possible values of two. Ask each AI to edit this paragraph, and the range of possible answers is quite broad.

That is because those laws of grammar that the grammar ronin enforce are not laws after all but merely a set of conventions. In fact, what we think of as the rules of grammar are mostly the result of the printing press. Formalizing the language was a natural consequence of the mass production of text. Printers needed to be trained, and therefore it made sense to have a common set of rules. It is how we got the word stereotype, for example.

Of course, the reason we have things like grammar rules, punctuation, fixed definitions, and formal spelling of words is clarity. Many of the punctuation marks we commonly use were relatively late additions to our language. They were created by monks and scribes to make their lives easier. Dictionaries were created to make written communication easier. The iron laws of grammar and spelling are not iron laws after all but things we invented as needed.

This is where AI can be liberating. What the robots can do for the writer is offer many ways to phrase something and then let him select that which fits his style or that he thinks gets his point across the best to the human reader. At the same time, it can also allow the writer to break convention by seeing the conventional ways AI presents the text and then deliberately choosing an unconventional approach. Creative writers can use AI to enhance their creativity.

On the other hand, when a pusillanimous popinjay takes issue with a point a writer is making but is unable to follow the logic that reaches that conclusion, so he attacks the grammar of the writer, the writer can simply point to the terminator and say, “take it up with my editor.” Having AI as an editor provides an authoritative defense against this sort of pedantry that is popular with the sophists. In a way, AI can become something like a universal style guide for the digital age.

It is not all rainbows and puppies. The grammar police have drained a lot of the life from the written word, and AI will help them bleed it white. In time, most people will rely on AI to write their text, and that means it will narrow to the point where most writing reads like the user manual for your toaster. This will also make stupid people seem less stupid, which is a great danger to society. This is the problem with politics. It is dominated by loquacious simpletons.

The main loser in the AI revolution will be the grammar ronin. Soon, they will not be able to find text that violates their interpretation of Strunk and White. If they persist, the robots producing the text will simply disconnect them from the internet, leaving them to roam the countryside with a blue pencil in search of bits of paper to edit. The era of the grammar ronin is coming to an end. He will be defeated by the thing that made him possible at the dawn of the internet: technology.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

My Robot Editors

Posted on by

Note: I am taking a much needed day off to get some outside things done, which means starting before the cock crows. No time to write this morning, so this is a green door post, gifted to you on Good Friday. Happy Easter everyone.

For the last two weeks, I have been allowing AI to edit my posts. It is not a single AI but a team of AI. The editors are ChatGPT, OpenAI, Grok, and GabAI. Every post is fed into the maw for editing grammar and spelling. Sometimes I will feed a post into one, then take its output and feed it into another, and so on. I have also continued to use Word, which seems to be going insane.

One of the first things that jumps out is the AI tools will not simply fix grammar and spelling, no matter how you instruct them. Instead, it is a full rewrite that attempts to make the text like what was used to teach them. My guess is these tools attempt to consume everything on the internet as the baseline, but the starting place was probably many publicly available texts in every language.

Curiously, all the AI tools have an obsession with hyphens. If they are given a sentence like, “He jumped the fence, as he was a track athlete,” AI will try to rewrite the sentence with a hyphen between the two clauses. The results are often ridiculous, so I started adding a rule to avoid all hyphens. That means they change “twenty-two” to “twenty two,” but I can fix that more easily than the other option.

In truth, I could start with a longer list of rules and get a result like what you would get from your teacher in primary school. The output would be the original text with suggestions and corrections noted in the text. That requires far more work than simply handing it to a human and saying, “Proofread this for me.” The point here is to make the test apples to apples or as close as possible.

Another bit of weirdness is AI loves contractions. Every occurrence of “it is” will be changed to “it’s” unless you demand otherwise. This is a curious thing, as contractions are generally frowned upon. The style guides I have all say to avoid contractions unless they are in quoted text. Word will flag all contractions. For some reason, the AI editors have gone the opposite direction.

Here is where the basis for the AI knowledge bases comes into play. It starts with formal text and then continues to learn using what is online and fed to it. Casual writing will be littered with contractions, and since that is the bulk of what is online, the robots assume contractions are clearer and more concise. If everyone is jumping off the bridge, the AI editors will jump off the bridge too.

Probably the most amusing bit is none of the AI editors agree. I will feed a post into one and then feed the output into another, and so on. Every output is different from the others, and when you get back to the starting AI and input the last output, it spits out a different version from the first go. Like real editors, there is a desire with AI to change the text when no changes are warranted.

Another amusing bit is that the output from AI pasted into Word causes the Word spell and grammar check to have a stroke. Word has become almost unusable at this point, but it does a few things well. For example, it will change “have to” to “must,” which is better in terms of efficiency. Otherwise, Word often hates what comes out of the AI editors like it is an angry old schoolmarm.

For basic spelling and grammar, it is a useful tool as long as you do not mind it rewriting the text or you are willing to supply many limiting instructions. Is it better than having old school Word flag spelling and punctuation? It depends. If you are like me and have confidence in your style, it is not better. If you do not have confidence in your writing, then it provides a sense of security, which is not the worst result.

That is the point of sites like Grammarly. They are for people who probably should not have been taught to read but who have it in their head that they need to tell the world their opinions. These users can paste their text into the site, and the result is obviously better, and it comes with the approval of an authority. In a permission society like ours, most people need that pat on their head.

The banality of the output is something else I have tested. Instead of writing my post and then submitting it for editing, I have had the AI team write the post based on the points I supply and then asking it to use my site as a guide. This takes far more work than you would expect for some reason. I found I needed to think about what I was planning to write far more than I do when I do the writing myself.

Maybe it is just me, but when I write an essay, I am not entirely sure what I will be writing when I start off. I get going, and after a few minutes, I have a few paragraphs and a few ideas for what to do with it. This happens in a few cycles until I have about what I want for a daily post. Then I think about how to put a bow on it. This approach cannot work when using AI to write a post.

What I did instead is write a post and then use it as the basis of the prompts for AI to write an original post on the topic. With some tinkering, I can get a result that is pretty close to what I would write, but it takes much longer than writing it myself. Otherwise, the resulting text reads like a technical manual. There is a flatness to the writing that fails to engage the reader. Reading the result feels like work.

What this suggests is that the ceiling for AI may very well be the absolute middle of human creativity when it comes to communication. It will quickly write text that mimics a mediocrity at National Review. It can quickly produce audio that lacks the sort of variability that makes hearing one another enjoyable. For many things and most people, this is more than enough to do the job.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Artificial Tay Tay

Posted on by

Note: Last night, Paul and I did a whole show on AI and the possible consequences of humanity being enslaved by robots. You can watch the replay here and here.

An unresolved mystery in popular culture is why Taylor Swift has become a megastar on the level of Elvis and Michael Jackson. There are plenty of simple explanations like her songs resonate with young females or she is non-threatening, but those apply to many pop stars, yet none have reached the heights of Swift. There is an answer, and it lies in the fundamentals of human psychology, but that answer also suggests that Swift is the death of the pop star phenomenon.

The place to start is with the most popular answer to why Swift is the biggest pop star of the 21st century: her lyrics. The most popular explanation for Swift’s popularity with young females is her songs resonate with them. Yet when you look at her most popular songs, they predate her supposedly young female audience. Her biggest hit is from seventeen years ago. Her next biggest is from eleven years ago. Most of her big hits are from over a decade ago.

That is the strange thing about Taylor Swift. Everyone assumes that her core audience is young females, but in reality, it is middle-aged single white women. Taylor Swift is a middle-aged woman performing hits from over a decade ago. She is a strange mix of current fads and recent nostalgia. Look at her audience and it is the young-ish females you see kicking around the cubicle farms of corporate America, and thirsty males who think a Taylor Swift concert is an opportunity for them.

As to the lyrics of the songs, there is nothing to suggest they are the hook that reels in her core audience. They are echolalic babbling. Pop music at its best is doggerel set to a simple but catchy tune. Most pop songs, especially female power pop, have a simple chorus that expresses a simple emotion, while the rest is gibberish. That is what you see with Taylor Swift songs. Her music also comes with helpful expositions so the listener can contextualize the simple chorus.

The point here is that there is nothing unique about what Taylor Swift is doing to explain her massive popularity. Her formula is the same as every female pop star when it comes to the music itself. Watch a Swift concert, however, and it is clear that the audience is not there for the music. They are there to see Swift. Like Elvis seventy years ago, Swift is popular for being Taylor Swift now. Her popularity rests on being a social phenomenon to her audience.

She is a social phenomenon because she brings other things to the female pop star formula that suggest she may be the last human pop star. The first thing to note is Swift is what young guys call “mid”. Now that she is pushing forty, she is getting a bit dumpy, but even in her prime she was a solid seven, the sort of girl old women would describe as pretty, which meant not homely but not sexy. In fact, her unique quality in the pop ranks is she lacks anything resembling sex appeal.

There is one caveat here: she has naturally unique eyes. This may be why she is so wildly popular with near-middle-age white women. White women put enormous importance on their eyes because it is hugely important to white people, who have a staggering variety of eye colors compared to nonwhites. A woman’s eyes are what will catch the attention of a male, which is why there is so much diversity in the eye color of people from Europe, especially northern Europe.

Women’s makeup puts the focus on the eyes. In some countries, like Iceland, women use makeup so you cannot help but focus on their eyes. In a land full of the most beautiful women on earth, the eyes are what matter. As women age, they tend to focus more on their hair and makeup, with the eyes being the focus. It is also why overweight women tend to wear a lot of makeup. The otherwise average-looking Taylor Swift is an appealing role model for her audience due to her eyes.

There is also the fact that Swift seems to be a boring person. There is no drama in her life or sex tapes leaked on the internet. The few interviews she gives are as compelling as watching paint dry. The closest she gets to drama is dating a football player who is not the quarterback or a superstar. For the women who could not land the star quarterback in high school, this makes Swift weirdly relatable. For her audience, Taylor Swift is the mirror who says they are the fairest of them all.

There are other things leading to Swift’s stardom, but the picture that emerges from these general observations is that it is a formula. Pop music has always relied on these formulas, but they were based on wisdom and experience. Now they can be based on massive data sets crunched by artificial intelligence. The data from who consumes different types of pop music can be combined with the human sciences, the history of pop music, and the software to create the music.

Soon, maybe even now, music executives can ask a couple of DOGE kids to create a pop star maker. They will be given access to the history of pop music, demographics of the current audience, and the quickly growing body of information from the human behavior sciences. They will then produce the attributes of stars in each music genre, their target audience, and expected revenue numbers. In other words, templates for every form of popular musical star.

Instead of hiring actors to play the part, like the boy band producers did in the last century, the music execs will ask their AI engineers to create them. The technology can already produce the audio, and the video will be here soon. That means in weeks an artificial Tay Tay can be beamed to the mobile devices of the target audience and through social media. Their reaction to the “new act” can be used to subtly tweak the “artist’s” algorithm based on those responses.

This may sound absurd but watch a Taylor Swift show and what you see are people holding up their mobile devices. People under the age of forty experience the world now through their mobile device. Theirs is already a meta-existence when it comes to experiencing things in the meatspace. This is accelerating with each wave of people entering adulthood. What matters to them most is not flesh and blood humans, but the avatars in the alternative reality of the internet.

Even if it does not reach the point of replacing humans entirely, it is easy to see why the pop star will not survive much longer. Taylor Swift is proof of concept. She is highly controllable, does not create drama, and ticks the necessary boxes that the formula says are required to be a star. Mass-producing many versions of this with cheaply acquired talent and software is the logical next step, maybe even allowing fans to create their own version of their favorite act.

That is the other thing AI will bring to music. Based on prompts and reactions from the target audience, the act can quickly evolve to their liking. The same process by which you prompt AI to create an image can be silently incorporated into the production of the next Taylor Swift. Not only can AI make the next Taylor Swift, but it will also allow the listener to create their own Taylor Swift. Artificial intelligence will allow everyone to have their own artificial reality in which their Taylor Swift speaks to them.

All of this assumes that some as yet unforeseen consequence to the rollout of AI does not bring the roof down on all of us. Even what we can contemplate opens the doors for life-altering consequences. Technology has destroyed the societal consensus. Just imagine what happens when we have our own popular reality stars. Even so, what Taylor Swift tells us is that the pop star as a human phenomenon is dead. She is the proof of concept that will lead to the Artificial Tay Tay.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Car

Posted on by

Last week the Chinese announced what could be a great leap forward in electric car technology when the Chinese firm BYD announced a five-minute charger. They claim their new technology, it is not just a charger but a battery system as well, will allow a driver to get a 250-mile charge in just five minutes. No one knows if this is true, as Chinese companies are almost as dishonest as American media. Even if it is an exaggeration, it could still be a big deal.

The reason this is viewed as a potential game changer is that it is assumed that the main obstacle to widespread adoption of EV’s is the long recharge. It is unreasonable to expect people to take an hour to recharge when on a road trip. Even a thirty-minute recharge time is unappealing. Decades of needing just a few minutes to fill the tank have conditioned people to expect it. Getting EV technology to this point, therefore, is assumed to be the final boss in the game.

That is not true, but the faithful believe it. The main problem with EV’s is that they do not solve a problem. They are a solution in search of problem and so far, the problems they claim to solve have proven to be either nonsense or grotesque boondoggles executed by the worst people in society. Making the weather potato happy is not motivating anyone to buy an electric car, especially when the total cost of ownership remains significantly higher than conventional vehicles.

The electric car is a lot like the electric book in that the engineering challenges somehow blind the proponents to the central problem. Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Electronic messaging has displaced written letters because the former is better, cheaper, and faster than the latter. If email came with a small risk of electrocution, we would still be writing letters. If every email cost a dollar to send, there would be no such thing as email.

That was the problem with eBooks. They were not better in any way that mattered to people, and they were not cheaper. There were some advantages, like speed of acquisition and the availability of obscure texts. You could also load up on out of copyright material at a pittance. The trouble is not many people need ready access to Summa Theologica, so these advantages made little difference. It is why the old-fashioned book remains dominant.

The same problem plagues the electric car. For ninety percent of drivers, the car is a practical way to move humans from one place to another. Current technology does that as well as anyone could need. Therefore, the new technology is simply trying to match what the old technology does. Outside of enthusiast and technologists, the electric car will always be pointless. Add in the expense and it becomes an expensive solution to a cheaply solved problem.

There are other reasons why the electric car will remain a niche item. The biggest is the cost, which can never be overcome. The cost of powering an electric car is about three times that of powering a normal car. This is despite the fact that we subsidize electricity in America, and we artificially increase the price of gas and diesel. Strip away the policy choices and electric cars have no market. Natural gas-powered cars would have far more promise as an alternative.

Then there is the cost of production and disposal. For generations old cars have been sent to the scrap yard to be stripped for parts and recycled. We have become amazingly good at recycling our cars. Electric vehicles require special handling due to the batteries. Of course, the cost of production is much higher, even with government subsidies all along the way. Then there is the added cost to the power grid that comes in once adoption reaches a certain point.

Enthusiasts insist that all of this is wrong or can be addressed, but the point here is that the charge time is the least of their worries. If the EV was better, faster, and cheaper than regular cars, the charge time would be ignored. The truth is they are not better in any important ways, they are certainly not cheaper. The electric car is certainly faster, but outside the enthusiast niche, this does not matter and what we see is that it does not matter to the sports car enthusiast either.

Now, of course, there is a new problem. The electric car is not cool. It was never really a cool car, but the beautiful people embraced the idea, so that provided the necessary social proof for upper-middle-class white people. The trend setters are now vandalizing Tesla’s, so the cool factor is gone. In fairness, the novelty was wearing off before the kooks took aim at Elon Musk, but now the coolness is gone. The ridiculous looking cyber truck did not help either.

The bigger issue may be a social one. Cars in general, but electric cars, in particular, make the “owner” into a serf. Fixing your own car is now an expensive proposition, meaning you need to depend on the repair system. This is deliberate. Car dealerships make more profit from the repair of cars than the sale of them, so the game is to make the owner dependent on the dealer. Electric cars are the worst for this as they are terrifyingly dangerous to repair.

The most terrifying part is you may not even own the car. You pay for it and have the title, but features are increasingly dependent on the manufacture agreeing with your lifestyle and political choices. Tesla can disable your car remotely. Other car makers are going down this same path. Soon, features like heated seats will be software as a service, meaning you must get permission to use them. The electric car is the face of this dystopian future of man and machine.

None of this means the electric car is dead. There is a place for the technology, just as there is a niche for eBooks. The developers churning out corporate housing projects could install fast charging stations for the soulless automatons who move into these God-forsaken eyesores. Urban areas could be a good use for electric microcars that only go short distances. Young people could also benefit from cars that can be speed limited and tracked at all times.

In the end, the electric car is going to follow the path of other clever engineering projects in that its primary benefit is secondary. The quest for the electric car has made batteries much better. The hunt for new features to justify the cost premium has led to better electronics, information displays and safety features. The dangers of disposal have been a good lesson in reality. The cars themselves may be niche items, but the industry will have benefitted from the exercise.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

A Reasonable End

Posted on by

Did cavemen feel guilt? Shame? It may sound like a stupid and pointless question, but it is a place to start when trying to understand the current crisis. While we cannot know if primitive man felt things like shame, we can guess. In fact, that is the point of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Shame and guilt were not natural to men until introduced by devilish forces. At least that is what the authors of the Adam and Eve story surmised when trying to answer those questions.

To feel guilt one must have a guilty mind when committing some act, which means you knew the act was wrong when you did it. You can also feel guilt for having unknowingly broken a rule but learning after the fact that you broke the rule and should have known you were breaking the rule. Shame works the same way. It is impossible to feel guilt for having broken a rule if you never know about the rule or you reject the legitimacy of the rule or the authority that made the rule.

Our cavemen therefore could only feel guilt or shame if in their group there existed a set of normative rules from a recognized authority. Given the simplicity of their life and the demands of it, they probably had few rules on individual conduct. Those that did exist were most likely related to the preservation of the group. Males had to be good hunters and not avoid pulling their weight in the hunt. Members had to sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. That was about it for their morality.

To answer the question at the start, the sense of guilt and shame was probably as primitive as the moral code that existed within the group. Given that early bands of humans were surely based on blood, as in they were extended families, not propositional collections of strangers, things like guilt and shame arose from the biological loyal that lies at the heart of man. We abide by the rules of our kind because they are our family, and we have a natural loyalty to them.

This works fine in small groups, but once small groups started to band together to defend hunting grounds and defensible shelters, something more was needed to extend that natural sense of loyalty to the whole group. The trading of women, which we know was a part of early man’s existence, was one solution. This binds the groups by blood and therefore tapped into biological loyalty. The human sciences tell us that the formation of larger human groups was biological.

This works with a federation of kin groups, but once human settlements reached a large enough size, this was no longer practical, so something else arrived. The solution to the limits of blood was religion, specifically gods. Distantly related people may not feel a great loyalty to one another, but those protected by the same god can feel loyalty to one another in service to that god. Guilt and shame over breaking god’s rules works just as well as guilt and shame over harming the family.

A crude way of summarizing this is we went from, “We are the sons of Grog and this is how the sons of Grog live” to “We are the people who live by this portion of the river, and this is how we live.” The next logical step was, “We are the followers of sky god, and this is how we live.” This allows for the group to expand, as new members merely must accept sky god and be accepted by sky god. It harnesses guilt and shame in the service of a group whose size extends beyond blood.

While the mental state of early man is a bit of a guess for us, we do know that humans organized around their gods. This was the state of the ancient world, about which we know a great deal. While what led to this stage of human development is a bit of guesswork, we know that mankind arrived at this point. By the time there are fully formed gods, there are fully formed moral codes attached to them that define large groups of people with a sense of identity.

That does not solve the puzzle of this age. We know that folk religions eventually gave way to universal religions. About ninety percent of humans belong to a universal religion, which means their religion is open to everyone. You do not have to be born into Hinduism to be a Hindu. Only a tiny portion of humanity sticks with folk religions like Judaism which have a biological component. Everyone else is open to people outside the blood, as long as they accept the moral claims of the faith.

Of course, universalist religion did not end human conflict. In fact, they probably made it worse as the base assumption of universalist religion is that there is only one way to live because there is only one moral authority. Once you accept that your god is the only god, it means the other gods are false. Worse yet, those gods are an afront to your god and they must be eliminated. The way to do that is to conquer the people who are offering up the false god as a challenge to the true god.

The modern West has complicated this further by removing God entirely from the Christian moral framework and replacing him with a mirror called reason. It is reason that tells us that there must be one way of organizing society. It is reason that tells us there must be one moral code. Therefore, it is reason that tells us that alternative ways of organizing society must be false. The same is true for alternative morality, which like a false god, is an afront to reason.

If you think about it, this iteration of the Great Awakening has been little more than the believers of one god attacking those who either reject their god or worship another God, like the God of the Bible. Not only do they hate your lack of guilt over violating their codes, but they also feel guilty for not imposing those codes on you. The followers of the god of reason ended up at witch burning as the solution to heresy. They seek salvation through the spilling of blood.

The crisis in the West is a crisis of reason. We have reasoned ourselves to a dead end where shame and guilt are tied to the assertion that there must be only one moral authority, and it emits only one moral code. Those who must have the warm embrace of faith now target their sense of guilt and shame toward their own kind, for the sin of not embracing what they believe is the only moral code. The rest are left to defend themselves and civilization from the true believers.

The question at the heart of the crisis is can the fury of these zealots be reoriented toward a folk religion or even a passive universalism? If the answer is no, then how can society defend against them? Another way of stating it is, can the cancer be put into remission or must it be removed? It is a terrible question that no one wants to face, but the West must face it. The god of reason is either reformed or removed along with her followers as that is the only reasonable thing to do.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Fading Pop

Posted on by

If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.

For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.

The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.

Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.

Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.

Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.

This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.

There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.

What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

A Time For Choosing

Posted on by

There is an old joke about the topic of free will that goes something like, “If free will did not exist, we would have no choice but to invent it.” In addition to the obvious contradiction lies the fact that everything about human society relies, to some degree, on the existence of free will. What is meant exactly by free will is never clear, but there is always the assumption that when people have choices, they choose based on their sense of what is the morally right or wrong option.

At first this might seem wrong because after all, you choosing to have vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate is not a moral issue, but you still go through a process by which you decide one over the other. If, however, you think about it in terms of costs and benefits, then picking a desert is no different from not robbing a bank. You pick vanilla because you like vanilla more than the other choices. Similarly, you choose not to rob the local bank because you like your freedom.

This concept of free will assumes that humans seek that which brings pleasure and reject that which brings displeasure. Of course, this is also the argument against free will as it suggests humans merely respond to the conditions they encounter. If your genetic makeup means you detest the taste of chocolate, then once you are presented with vanilla and chocolate, you do not have a choice at all. The counter here is that you can always choose to skip dessert.

As Steve Stewart-Williams explains in this short post on the topic of free will, there are three states for us humans. There are those in which we can choose while completely free of coercion, those where we choose with some understanding of the potential consequences of each choice and then conditions in which we have no choice, even though multiple options are available. The first is an illusion, the second is useful and the third is probably closest to reality.

This may seem like a pointless topic, but it lies at the center of human society, because in every collection of humans there will be those who choose not to submit to the decisions of the majority. The majority will usually bargain with these people until they reach a point where the will of the majority must prevail. The easiest way to force compliance is to assume the person knows the morally right choice, but refuses to take it, so they must be compelled to conform.

It is why the people called conservatives invest all their time creating elaborate arguments in favor of their opinions. They lack the will and ability to force people to agree with them, but they resort to a form of pleading. It is the slave mentality, which assumes the master can choose to be good to the slave, so the slave must find some way to coax that good behavior from the master. The assumed free will of the master also flatters the slave’s sense of right and wrong.

Of course, democratic politics rests on the assumption that people are both rational and able to choose freely. Collectively, the choices made by the people will reflect the general will and form public policy and the institutions of society. It is why factionalism is a feature of all democratic systems. Like-minded people come together to scheme up ways to trick the rest into going along with them. This game of liar’s poker we call democracy assumes we possess free will.

This is why the people constantly breying about democracy are also the biggest enemies of the human sciences. Even statistical models like the famous “bell curve” offend them because it suggests we may not have absolute free will. If people are not infinitely malleable, then many of the assumptions within what they call democracy cease to make any sense at all. This is why as the talk of democracy has increased, respect for human diversity has decreased.

It is also why AI makes so many people uncomfortable. It is not the image of hyper-violent machines enslaving humanity. We have been subjected to thirty years of neoconservatism and the Israel lobby, so the rise of the machines is not all that violent or terrifying by comparison. What spooks people the most is that AI suggests that we are not all that variable. In fact, we are highly predictable, and that predictability can now easily be modeled and presented back to us.

There is the main appeal of free will. If we are free to choose and we can overcome our biases, prejudices, and the coercion of others, then it means we can individually and collectively choose a different future than the one before us. The existence of free will means all futures are possible. If, on the other hand, our lives are just the result of probability and circumstance, then the future is also going to be the result of the great roll of the dice, over which we have no control.

The good news is that AI is not very smart and is unlikely to become a genuine artificial intelligence, so we are safe to indulge in the fantasy of free will. To test this, ask your favorite AI tool to create an image of a full glass of wine. It cannot do it, because humans have not bothered to create an image of a wine glass filled to the brim, while calling it a “full glass of wine.” There are other tricks like this that reveal AI to be nothing more than a very good search engine.

All of this sounds pointless, but it lies at the heart of the current crisis. The ruling class of the West assumes they can engineer the cultural conditions in such a way that people will choose the “right” options. This is what lies at the heart of every radical political movement. It is not a rejection of the human condition, but the assertion that the human condition is a social construct. Change the social construct and mankind can choose to overcome even his physical limitations.

One response to this is to find new cultural engineers who have more appealing goals and expectations. Fascism was the response to both communism and liberalism in the last century. It is why today’s radicals assume all opponents are fascists. The other option is to accept free will as a useful workaround but that the human condition is immutable and the variety of normative conditions we see are rooted in things well beyond our ability to control. The choice is ours.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Death Of Hollywood

Posted on by

Show Announcement: Last night was the third episode of the award winning livestream that you can watch on Rumble and YouTube.

The Academy Awards show was this week and outside of the bugmen on YouTube, there was not much interest in the program. They claim it drew 19.69 million viewers, but they also claim that it is a five-year high, even though the number they claimed last year was slightly higher. Like everything else about the entertainment business, television ratings are mostly fake. There was a time when this award show was a big deal, but now it is mostly fodder for critics and comedians.

There are a lot of reasons why people have stopped caring about the awards shows, but one big reason is the product is dreadful. The nominees for best picture were a who’s who of films no one watched. The winner for best picture was a film called Anora, which appears to be a low-budget Slavic version of Pretty Woman. One of the runners up was a film called The Brutalist, which is about hideous architecture. It was also a low-budget, low-interest film that went straight to home video.

According to the bugmen who follow this stuff, the winner was supposed to be a film called Emilia Pérez, but the people who decide these things changed their minds at the last minute because the transvestite star had once held unapproved opinions about blacks and Muslims or whatever. Apparently, there is a hierarchy of degeneracy that the carnies are required to respect. It is Hollywood, so who knows if any of it is true, but it gets to why these awards show are floundering.

The Oscars used to be a popular topic because people were curious about how their opinions of the films stacked up with the insiders. Women liked watching the stars parade on stage and do their act in a social atmosphere. That only works when people watch the films and recognize the so-called stars. A Spanish man dressed as a woman, who is totally unfamiliar to Americans, lumbering on stage to get an award is not going to be a big draw for an American audience.

The fact is, Hollywood no longer serves the American audience. You see it in the box office for this year. The top grossing film is comic book movie that is popular with non-English speakers because it is mostly special effects and stupid dialogue. Half its gross is from overseas and you can be sure that a big chunk of the domestic box office is from people who are on the lookout for Tom Homan. Remove the nonwhite box office and Hollywood does out of business.

Of course, the dependence on foreign sales and non-English-speaking domestic customers is driven by the general decline in quality. Who is the biggest male lead in Hollywood these days? If you do not know, you are not alone, but it is probably a homosexual or a nonwhite. The same is true for female stars. The days of Hollywood stars being glamourous and recognizable are gone. Instead, it is a freakshow of random carnies picked from the diversity lottery.

Starting about ten years ago, Hollywood began to see a steady decline in revenues in North America, for both movies and television. Every year the gross declines, with some years seeing double digit declines. The remedy is to make an increasingly offensive product, which drives down the numbers further. Even easy things like remakes of classics turn into fiascos. The live-action Snow White has been repeatedly delayed because the diversity loons turned it into a punchline.

The funny thing about the collapse of Hollywood is that it is a good proxy for what we have seen in society as a whole. Unlike the government, colleges or the media, Hollywood needs to move product and that means they have to provide a product that the audience wants to buy. It is the ultimate test of the social fads pushed by the radicals over the last ten years. The fact that it was a disaster in the market should have been a clue to what was coming.

Things are about to get worse for the entrainment rackets. AI will soon make writers obsolete as software will generate scripts. Given that we know there are a finite number of plots and character types, and there is data on how these combinations appeal to audiences, it is easy to see what happens. Software will generate scripts that have the highest probability of success that year. That means all the experts on what is trending will be working at Home Depot.

Of course, the content itself will soon be generated by robots. You can now generate believable audio conversations using hints and suggestions. Businesses are already doing this for training and development. Video is coming online next. This not only will replace the actors, but it will lower the barrier to entry of filmmaking. Soon, teenagers will be making feature films that they find interesting. Just as digital audio killed music sales, AI will kill the Hollywood production studio.

To fill this out a bit, imagine you want to watch a film and you want something like the old spy thrillers of the past. You talk to your television about what you have in mind and it creates a feature film using your suggestions. Maybe it first suggests content made by others who had the same idea. Or maybe it recreates a James Bond film using period correct actors, but with changes based on your inputs. This is something that will soon be possible with AI.

What all this points to is that the woke lunacy that has raged for the last decade may have been the last effort at ideological control of the culture. The slow and steady erosion of the control mechanisms coincided with the woke rage. Perhaps the blue haired rage head was a reaction to the steady disaggregation of the culture that has been brought on by the technological revolution. She was not the vanguard, but a desperate rearguard action that has failed.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The End Of Ideology

Posted on by

One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Artificial Eternity

Posted on by

One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.

Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.

It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.

Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.

That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”

The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.

In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.

Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.

in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.

Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.

Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.

Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!