The internet has made it possible for people around the globe to easily pass information back and forth among one another. This is taken for granted these days, but it is truly a revolutionary event. Since the dawn of civilization information spread no faster than a man could run. In the 19th century the train made this process a tiny bit faster then cars and planes made it even faster in the 20th century, but the internet puts all of us, if we choose, together in real time.
While this feels like a miraculous development for the curious and productive, it may also be a curse we are struggling to understand. The internet puts the smart, curious, and productive people together, but it also puts crazy people together. That nutty woman in the suburbs who thinks she is a psychic can now join up with other women who also think they are psychics. They can form a “community” online where they encourage and reinforce their delusions.
The apparent rise in the number of pedophiles is made possible by the ease with which these people can now associate. In the analog days, these people could not easily collaborate with one another. Those cursed this maladaptation could not easily access this material and there was high risk in trying to obtain it. The internet made it easy for these people to work together to produce and disseminate this stuff. The curious now find this material after a few clicks of a mouse.
Recency bias is the tendency to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences or the latest information when trying to understand current events. The news seems to be full of pedophiles lately, so we think it is a growing problem. The Left coming out in favor of pedophilia now certainly adds to the sense that it is a growing issue, so we have to adjust for that possibility. On the other hand, the number of cases is growing at the same time the Left is celebrating it.
In other words, when it comes to child abuse, the internet is making it easier for the pedophiles to meet one another, thus increasing the phenomenon, but the internet is also making us more aware of it. This increased awareness is made possible by people aware of this trend easily communicating the particulars. The same forces that allow the pedophiles to collaborate in their activity allows normal people to become aware of it and organized to oppose it.
Counterintuitively, the internet is tribalizing society. In the analog days, the pedophiles were a small and manageable problem. These were individuals forced to work in isolation and therefore caused the minimum of harm. Normal people could trust that the odds and the police would protect them, so they saw no need to know much about this issue or work with others to guard against it. The internet brought these people together and they formed two warring camps.
Obviously, the pedophile issue is an extreme example, but relevant due to corporate America embracing the child molesters over their customers. The same tribalizing forces unleashed by the internet are most likely at play here. The beautiful people who make corporate policy now see the Dirt People everywhere. Whenever they go online, they are confronted by Trump voters, heterosexuals, white people and all the other demons their “community” says are evil.
A part of what makes internet tribalization work is that it allows people with a minority view to interact with others holding the same view. This reinforces the belief, but also gives them the sense they are a growing community and therefore their minority view will soon be the majority view. When disconfirmation appears, these people can trust that their online pals will find a way to cope with it and thus provide them a way to not only explain it but reinforce group solidarity.
A good example of this is the recent events in the Ukraine. As events have gone against Ukraine in the war, online communities create pleasing alternative realties where their side is on the march. This guy spends all day everyday explaining to the likeminded why bad news is actually good news. This guy spends his days creating an alternative reality for the likeminded. These online communities operate like the UFO cult at the center of this famous study in the 1950’s
T. S. Eliot famously wrote “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” To some degree all of us are susceptible to escapism. We want some result, and we look for information that suggests it is happening. Some people, of course, go the other way and fear some result and look for information showing their worst fears are happening. It is two sides of the same coin and all of us are prone to it. Some people are more prone than others as belief operates on a scale like all human traits.
In the analog age, the limits placed on the flow of information left the believer in isolation unless he could physically connect with others. Joining a cult took effort, which is why so few people joined them. In the digital age, the internet is full of cults catering to every conceivable belief. Not only can you connect with thousands who hold your same hopes and fears, you can get instant confirmation that you are the good guy, and the rest of the world is the bad guy.
Of course, the internet is making us more aware of this reality. In the analog days we would have no idea that the Jewish guy across the street had a seething hatred for white people, but in this age we just look at his Twitter profile. Not knowing he hates you made it possible to not hate him. Knowing that he wants you dead makes it impossible to not hate him back. The more we know the more aware we are of the dangers that are lurking around every corner.
Since the dawn of the computer age, people have worried that the machines would become aware and then set about killing off humanity. The truth is, that process has already begun, except the machines are not doing the killing. Instead, they are holding up a mirror to society and letting us see ourselves. We do not like what we see, so we will find others who agree with us that we must kill off those other guys. It is not Artificial Intelligence that will get us, but Artificial Familiarity.
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I really miss the 1950s version of the future with big gleaming silver cities, robot maids, and pretty blonde ladies serving ice tea on Mars.
A nice precis of von Mises’ 1920 article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” No way for the command economy to give accurate price signals with the resulting distortions in input and output.
Yeah, if we could just give accurate price signals, our big problems would be solved.
“…the internet is making us more aware of this reality. In the analog days we would have no idea that the Jewish guy across the street had a seething hatred for white people, but in this age we just look at his Twitter profile.” I disagree. I think Z is guilty of confirmation bias because we are living in the Internet age. But frankly, history is full of one example after the next of people hating each other to the point of killing each other in the pre-Internet days. The fanatical abolitionists and guys like John Brown sure whipped up… Read more »
Z’s final sentence of his essay: “It is not Artificial Intelligence that will get us, but Artificial Familiarity.” I’m worried that the Familiarity is not Artificial. I’m worried that the Familiarity is REAL, and that Xman’s “1950s Amurrikkkuh” [as above] helped to artificially mask & camouflage & hide the reality of the Evil which we White Christians have been interacting with for roughly the last century. Of course they boiled the frog very slowly, but I think the frog is finally starting to wake up and notice the increasing humidititty. A coupla weeks ago, The Atlantic published a piece about… Read more »
“Z’s assertion that good manners kept all of this under wraps”
Sorry, that was Jeff Zoar’s argument, not Z’s. Mea culpa.
there’s a weird kind of geographic thing going on in this country. Like Joe Biden won in 2020 by a two point smaller victory than obama in 2008 (biden won by four or four and a half percent and obama won by seven points). Yet I would say that Biden ran ahead of Obama in 35-40% of the counties. There were even sixteen McCain/Biden counties: Maricopa, AZ Orange, CA Duval, FL Seminole, FL Gwinnett, GA Henry, GA Cobb, GA Johnson, KS Anne Arundel, MD Morris, NJ Fort Bend, TX Hays, TX Tarrant, TX Williamson, TX Virginia Beach, VA Chesterfield, VA… Read more »
1. “Educated” white women need to be able to abort their babies at any time, for any reason.
2. Massive influx of “skilled” immigrants from Asia are moving into suburban areas. They vote D more heavily than Hispanic and almost as heavily as blacks.
That’s why those counties are going blue. Americans as a whole are moving right, but Americans increasingly make up a smaller share of America.
Any resemblance between election results and what the people actually think is simply coincidental. GIGO. The top 1% decide, employing propaganda and other dishonest means, determine “election” results, to then force feed it to the bottom 99%.
Big Brother manufactures information in the Ministry of Truth. 2 + 2 = 5.
This is profound and one of your best.
“ It is not Artificial Intelligence that will get us, but Artificial Familiarity.” < that is brilliant and your unique insight on the impact of us seeing the truth.
(I am hardly in the Z fanboy club, as readers can attest, credit is due).
Having complemented will now point something out, not a real disagreement given the closing paragraph; Laws are ancient, the police a recent development in particular as far as enforcing the law, and in terms of crime, order and now decency , sanity, families, protecting children from fiends; The police are a mistake. In particular for the family, for however disgusted they are at family law (the police have a higher divorce rate and the same nonsense the rest of us do or worse as regards wives) however disgusted they follow the orders to let the father be evicted by the… Read more »
the police believe. in a pay-check.
Russian media appears to have published photos and videos from the most infamous laptop on Earth.
It looks like all the stories about round, doughy crusts that get topped with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese are true.
Normies want to be like everybody else; freaks want everybody else to be like them. It’s a massive difference in orientation that enables freaks to overcome a huge disadvantage in raw numbers.
I predict the pedoes eventually win. Our civilization now favors and fetishizes abnormality and perversion as a matter of habit.
“But the normies won’t tolerate that. They’ll bind together and stamp out this madness,” says those who have more faith in the normies than the normies deserve.
If normies will let their children get murdered by blacks and migrants then beg the court not to sentence the poor murderer too harshly, then they’ll do the same with pedos. Sure you’ll get the few men left in the world that will strangle the life out of the pervert that creeped into their child’s bedroom, but they’ll do the gentle giant/skittles/jogger/I can’t breev routine on them and have a kangaroo court lock them up for 300 years for trying to defend their children. After that, it will be “The Conservative Case for Child Rape”, leftist women dressing their kid… Read more »
Wow, the article covers a lot of ground. I do not want to go off on a tangent about pedophiles – and I won’t. In my case, the internet is responsible for much of what I believe in politically. I am a late boomer -65 y.o. and although I came from a conservative family, if it weren’t for the internet, I’d be like Sean Hannity -still singing the praises of Ronald Regan and William Buckley. Rather than overtly seeking a community online, I am more inclined to search for information (through articles, rather than reading someone’s Twatter profile) In my… Read more »
I am treasurer for a very small immigration restriction group. I like the folks there, and being with them is OK, though Wife thinks it a complete waste of time. I find it rather depressing that not only is the group small, but also old. No young energy. And the ideas these people come up with lack any imagination.
I think mass movements are fun. Going to a Trump rally in 2016 was FUN. This small stuff is a downer. Better to stay home and post comments on Zblog.
Clearly we weren’t meant to all live together happily in the same space. Whether that is real space or cyber space. Perhaps “meant” is the wrong word. Regardless, clearly it isn’t possible. Before the internet, this was more or less intuitively understood, even if it wasn’t always spelled out so clearly. To deal with this fact, we had something called manners, or decorum, which established a framework of how we could get along, in brief encounters, with these folks we wouldn’t be able to get along with if more of our “true” selves, unrestrained by manners and decorum, were on… Read more »
This is an excellent comment and a good reminder that we all need to check in on our ability to be temperate.
That said, the world is unhinged. The institutions are not online but they are filled with insanity. If it were comment sections and isolation among the population sure. But, government, corporations, the PR and propaganda industry, universities, now the entire primay education establishment are completely unhinged – in real life.
Not sure how all the genies they’ve unleashed get back in the bottle.
Social media did not do this, nor the Internet. This was all done by the elites and Boomers in the 1960s and in the 70s the 60s happened to everyone as the saying goes. Go and look, I was there, I was born in the mid 60s. Why do you think they want Reagan back? He was a return to normalcy. I was there. They slunk back under their rocks and snuck out again with the Clintons. Obama bought them back into respectability. All these movements for example legalizing pedophilia got going and got traction in the 70s. AIDS probably… Read more »
Every social ill we see now was established among the trendy people in the years immediately after World War I. Those clean cut ’50s kids did not turn into ’60s kids out of nowhere.
I’m 72 and I lived through those years as well.
I apologize that this is paywalled but you typically get a tree article by them. Haidt is obviously not our guy but he makes the same points here, even if he sometimes shows trump dislike in the essay
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
There was a video where Haidt correctly came to the conclusion that helicopter parenting and a hyper-safety conscious society has created neurotic messes in our young people, a sort of learned helplessness.
His solution? Meditation.
Even when the cause of our woes are clear, they can’t unplug from their programming.
Meditation?!? Did Haidt really say that? It’s so inane that I have difficulty believing it, yet I see no reason why you would make that up. Just goes to show, even on the rare occasions when an academician appears to be semi-sensible, just let him talk long enough and he’ll soon prove otherwise.
He can sell you a meditation program. He can’t sell you good old fashioned parenting and the kids doing hard work and risk taking activities with Dad.
This twit is an overeducated, over-credentialed idiot. Needs to be slapped and sent to pick onions on a farm until he becomes conscious of the real world.
I’ll say this, the Machine is becoming more subtle in dissemination of its propaganda. This Haidt dildo makes it go down smooth.
This reminds me of the stories of Victorian households right after electric lighting was installed in their houses. The lighting was great. Revolutionary. But they were fixated on all the dirt and filth around the house that they never knew was there until it was well lit.
Exactly what I thought of the article but you put it better. This Haidt nonce imagines that the problem is that via the internet some folks (like me) learned the truth about who has been persecuting them, why they are being persecuted, that they are not alone in being persecuted, and what (if anything) can be done about their decades-long, state-n-haidt sponsored beatdowns. Greatly enjoyed by half the country. Can’t have that! Why, it might foster distrust in Our Democracy and Our Institutions! But fear not, the clueless academic from The Atlantic is here to tell us what really happened.… Read more »
ray – are you sure you meant to reply to my thread?
In any event, Haidt’s message usually boils down to telling the far left to step back from that ledge and not bring the whole thing down.
Very sure. Meant no personal offense against you, don’t know you well enough for that, nor was there cause.
Meant everything else I said.
To reinforce Z’s thesis with an anecdote, as a young person I had all liberal friends and my parents had all liberal friends. Even back then while I still identified as a liberal I disliked the race baiting end of it, and was ambivalent towards the gay stuff. So my friends were all liberals, some of them gay, and they never really put me off with any ranting. There was nothing like the clips you saw with the Trump election where they scream and roll around on the ground crying, so I presumed them all to be sane. Until facebook.… Read more »
I think you can chalk much of that up to the Left moving leftward at hypersonic speed. Leftists who seemed to hold relatively normal views in 1983 hold batshit views in 2023. I’ve seen this with members (all Leftists) of the maternal side of my family. Forty years ago I could discuss anything with them cordially. Now, because of their radicalization, I’m estranged from about half of them.
If they could just be honest about it, then it would be easier to address. But they claim everyone else has moved to the “far right.” And they seem to believe it. Never mind that Trump’s base and Goldwater’s base are made up of basically the same people who want the same things now that they did then. They’ve hardly changed at all.
In their world, there are no CivNats (as I confess to be–ASPIRATIONALLY; actionally, I’m committed to identitarianism), no Burkeans, NO center-rightists, no nothing. We’re ALL (a) FAR-rightists, or (b) MAGA Republicans. House Minority Leader (and AA poster fella) H. Jeffries recited the usual gibberish about “MAGA Republicans” concerning the alleged debt deal. It would be amusing if it weren’t all so tedious.
They’ve just become a much smaller percentage of the population.
It is pointless to engage with those types. The digital age
either broke them or forced their true natures to the fore. I have a few relationships now that would (and likely will) end the nanosecond I respond in kind. We are in a cold civil war in our personal lives as well as writ large, and it will go hot as soon as we finally push back in a serious way.
I noticed that as well once things started getting bad in the Obama years. All it would take was one disagreement on an issue and the friendship was over, and I was still trying to be fair-minded at that point and not show my true power level.
Absolutely…I discovered on FB that many of my friends were fanatical followers of the Hillary cult, and impervious to the ugly facts surrounding her…7 years later, a few are drifting back toward normalcy, but the relationships are on life support…
But I have to think that the childless females and scrawny boy-men behind much of the left don’t strike me as very dangerous opponents…
Not in physical combat, but in their own weasely ways, they’re dangerous–and destructive–enough.
Social media was just the forerunner of Covidianism in that it revealed most people for what they are–batshit crazy hysterics who believe in far more supernatural things than God. I would caution against taking these crazed women and soy boys for granted due to their lack of physical conditioning, too. These types have a rich and storied history of killing folks and would not think twice about offing you.
One advantage of comprehensive communication at the speed of light is that it enables emergent behavior to play a major role in shaping modern society. The classic example is a cattle stampede triggered by a single gun shot. The drover could thereby “aim” the stampede by placing himself at the outer perimeter of the head opposite the direction of the intended stampede before firing this shot. Yet another more devious example is when the Stasi proactively triggered the Jan 6th protest through the use of covert agents provocateur. This enabled arresting and persecuting hundreds of dirt people on trumped up… Read more »
In the same broad category as what TomA discusses: Here’s a artful ficitonal (?) account of how a small group, or even an individual, with exceptional leverage, might manipulate a specialized group with the intent of accomplishing a political goal.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/idea-farm
So, digital technology is generating misanthropy, eh? Sounds plausible, and as something of a misanthrope myself, I can’t really lament this development. However, a question arises, namely how accurate is the digital mirror? Is the image we draw from social media more accurate than the one we obtain from our senses? This is not an easy thing to answer. On the one hand, the relative anonymity allowed by digital media means that people can say what they truly believe safe in the knowledge they won’t be punished for their views. On the other, it allows for LARPing, trolling, and nihilistic… Read more »
Not to mention there are small numbers of people in control of many, many sock-accounts. Some of them are just to make something appear more popular, some are for “gang-stalking” and some are just shilling. Next time you see some tweet promoting the most disgusting things that’s been retweeted and liked a thousand times, the majority could just be sock accounts. Frankly, you hear of all kinds of bizarre behaviors even exhibited by people who could pass for normal. The internet really unleashes these people. There was a couple on youtube (pure living for life) building an off-grid cabin and… Read more »
I’m trying to wrap my head around broadcasting to the world the details of your going off grid
On a less happy note, it makes it extremely easy for corporations or government to automatically collect dossiers on virtually all users of the net. They need not even eavesdrop on your actual communications. Merely having your search history (Google, etc.) or what web sites you connect to, would reveal much. And, unless I’m mistaken, those two are examples of information that is routinely sold.
Here’s something that ought to be passed around the earth to every last person.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/zero-young-healthy-individuals-died-covid-19-israeli-data-show
Zero, not 100, not 10, not even 1, zero.
Not that I think it will change many minds but it’s a fantastic pile of perfectly un-nuanced stinking sh*t to rub the faces of your local self righteous covidian fanatics.
Taking the article at face value, the Israelis are somewhat less than forthcoming with data. Of course this seems to be a syndrome with governments everythere, so perhaps it’s unkind of me to single out poor old Israel. Curious that they have no data on heart attacks for 2021 or 2022. Usually that’s the kind of public health statistic readily available in an advanced country in normal times. A paranoid sort like myself might suspect they have something to hide, but I’ve probably just been reading too many conspiracy theories lately.
Knowing means we are going to have to separate. I can let that person live who hates me ,my race, and my family.
Somewhere else.
But for that person who hates me to live next to me, there will eventually be blood.
His.
It’s a common misconception that Jews possess blood. Actually they are an invertebrate form of life with the structure supported by an exoskeleton which has cleverly evolved over time to resemble human skin. The inside is actually just a solid pressurized mass of phlegm, which exudes out through the nose during allergy season.
Got a feelin’ the SPLC is not gonna like that.
I think Z is alreaedy on their shit list because he once attended a VDARE convention or something 🙂
If I thought about the things I type before hitting the enter key I’d never say anything funny.
I remember when the internet was first taking off with the general public in the first half of the 1990s. People would commonly say “this changes everything!” But I really don’t think anyone had any concept of what was coming, I know I didn’t. Who would have thought it would bring in the weaponization of retards and perverts? A lot of people saw all the potential for how it could improve our lives, but few people saw the destructive power in the way it has arisen or the radicalization it enables. You can watch a video on how to fix… Read more »
Good point, Tars. Every silver cloud has an obsidian lining. And this is one of the key reasons I believe progress is a delusion. Every solution, every advance, generates a whole host of new unforeseen problems. It’s akin to trying to control water by squeezing a water balloon–the water just goes somewhere else.
It seems the hyper-socialized online eventually fall into one of the two traps of either becoming hyper-conformist to one’s online tribe or concealing oneself in so many layers of irony no one can really tell what one’s opinion is. This seems to be the case in Gen Z, where stating a coherent view is basically cringe, or the true believer who changed her views the second she sees where the tide is heading. Neither builds anything resembling lasting relationships, and neither gives any cohesion to people who want to build a family unit or transmit real culture. It’s pretty much… Read more »
I have seen posters on reddit ask explicitly, in these words, “what is our opinion” on whatever new current thing is trending
Imagine how empty (in every meaningful sense) your life must be to spend so much time trolling the Twitterverse for racism as this David Leavitt guy you linked to. I’d almost feel sorry for him, but I can’t get past my disgust.
Seems to be virtue signaling on steroids for Leavitt. Every post is a “pat on the back”—self inflicted, but nevertheless a dopamine dump. I too feel discuss, which is why I no longer use most of these social media sites. Never had a satisfying experience with any of them.
There were a couple of amazing troll memes in response though: a Lizzo as Anne Frank and a Ann’Quesha Frank Jackson from the original tribe of Israel in Afrika. It looks like some clever people on our side. I really think someone on our side needs to start doing some high production subterfuge of Jewish culture: – Black David and Bet’Sheba set in Africa where the Jews are Dinka tribesmen – The story of Einstein where he is Black and from Harlem – A film that shows them selling out the Visigoths in Hispania and opening the gates of Toledo… Read more »
Oh man I can just picture it, do a play called “Da Bomb” like Hamilton except revolving around all the Jewish physicists played by blacks. Einstein would have an afro, and you have them all jumping around yelling at each other in ebonics and randomly break dancing.
Samuel L. Jackson in the role of Einstein, Snoop Dog as Oppenheimer.
He’s the guy who called the cops on a Target store manager because she refused to sell him an $89 toothbrush for a penny a couple of years ago and then went on Twitter to complain about it. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1713257-target-tori
He was such an @ssh*le to her that somebody started a Go Fund Me to send her on a nice vacation.
The key sentence is “I have not been able to afford a dentist for three years”. These guys are losers and wokeness is an accepted way for them to channel their anger for a f*cked up llife
the pro-ukrainian people are remarkably mindless. absolutely useless for learning anything real about the conflict. i wonder what made them latch onto ukraine like a life preserver to a drowning man? maybe it’s the same impulse that makes a person take in a stray animal. in any event it will be amusing to watch them furiously cope as ukraine collapses under the weight of the russian operations. zelensky avoiding the place should give them a clue…
The thing I see about Ukrainians and their superfans is that they lie all the time. They just can’t help themselves. They lie and are pretty much instantly caught in the lie and instead of trying the truth for once, they tell an even bigger and more outrageous lie. Their supporters here swallow it all and are angry when they get called on their gullibility.
Steve Sailer is and always has been an arch-Covidian. I hope everybody reading your words will consistently apply the same logic to him. His latest shpiel is to recast lockdown deaths as “Deaths of Exuberance,” and to meme into existence the idea that George Floyd was responsible for it all. In his own flaccid way, he is doing the same thing as the Zelenskyites who continue to send men into the meatgrinder so as not to acknowledge their failures and crimes.
that’s what i don’t get; the pathological lying. it isn’t cost free, they are doing themselves a lot of harm. and for what? their lies are so obvious and so pathetic, they fool no one. oh well, their problem not mine.
https://arktos.com/2023/05/23/on-class-power-shift/ This is a good piece on power and the power groups. These people are the estimated 15% who are aspiring into the aristocracy. Whatever they need to say or do to stay in and get to that rung they will. These are the TedTalk lovers. In a perfect world the perfect test for selecting out or in of the elite would be to hold a Ted Talk and the first selection would be: you voluntarily attended you are permanently banned; you were given an invitation by me but you did not attend. I ask you why you did not… Read more »
It is the history of the region Karl. If half your grandparent’s generation were killed or starved during the war with the Soviets you’d hate on them with the heat of 1000 suns too. The blood feuds there are now into the fourth generation. Hatred’s that deep can invert reality and make for the damnedest alliances. We see the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion…taking orders from a jew. Jews won’t bat an eye in supporting them either…even though those guys all have swastika and SS thunderbolt tats.
The stupidity of it all boggles the mind sometimes.
Jews won’t bat an eye in supporting them either
But the jews arent the ones getting slaughtered. hmmm…
I’m quite enjoying the hysterics from the pro F-16 set.
Clearly this is a bunch who has enjoyed the filmIron Eagle, a low-budget Star Wars remake that features a magical negro advising the white hero from beyond the grave and ultimately rises from the dead, far too many times.
I make a difference between ethnic Ukrainians in the diaspora (I live in an Ukrainian neighborhood in NYC) and the rest of the mindless wombats who just believe anything the MSM tells them. I believe both sides are wrong in their support for the Zelensky regime, but will give some leeway to ethnic Ukies some wiggle room from an historical perspective (even though their version of history is faulty in itself.)
You omitted the Telegraph in the history. That was a real game changer.
Not to mention radio and then television.
and carrier pigeons, not to mention smoke signals.
*clears throat politely in 15th C. German*
Access to information leads to inflation of the useful/pro-social info as well as the bad groomy kind. In light of this post I was trying to think of a great quotation by, I think Anthony Powell, something to the effect of “Important discussion is brief but there’s never enough time to argue adequately over a cassock or a surplice”— about 15 minutes of trying to source this, I gave up (did find a good one by LBJ to the Greek ambassador on Wikiquote). Not only are search engines, within a remarkably short historical span, now totally useless, but I have… Read more »
“ask him about the cemeteries, Dean”..(an LBJ quote when a foreign leader demanded US remove their soldiers from his country, I believe it was France or Belgium)
And if Wilson hadn’t interfered there’s be fewer French dead in those cemetery’s.
Spectacular poast as usual Z. But I would argue: We already have the weapons to combat Artificial Familiarity. Just as in real life in the big city…there are areas you don’t go into and actively avoid because the locals and natives suck. You don’t go to a D&D tourney because it’ll be full a pastey faced propeller heads and poindexters. Ya don’t go down to hang on MLK Ave with the joggers. When these guys expose themselves you keep your distance but you keep a sharp eye on them too. If one DOES pop up in your airspace…it’s the same… Read more »
This is backwards. It would be more correct to say that pre-internet modernity introduced an anomalous age of artificial anonymity. The internet has rebalanced the scales; it has effectively reintroduced us to the society of the medieval village, where everybody knew each other’s business. The pedos, homos, and other freaks always existed. It’s just that in the medieval village, they were quickly dealt with by dagger and noose. The best thing about the modern age (one of the only good things about it), is that familiarity will force us to head back in that direction. When the whole village knows… Read more »
Good observation, but the examples I most decry are when we are not outing the crazies, but outing and suppressing the “truth speakers”. If the modern Internet worked only on pedo’s, homo’s, and freaks, then I could live with that—but it seems all to often to be the opposite and more and more of those folks whose opinions I value/need are being cast into the void.
Just so. I see precious little evidence–yet–that normal people, leaning heavily on individual and family honor, are crushing the depraved and the perverse who transgress it. On the contrary, the deformities are being normalized.
“Since the dawn of the computer age, people have worried that the machines would become aware and then set about killing off humanity. The truth is, that process has already begun, except the machines are not doing the killing”
What if that is the methodology that AI is already using to remove pesky humans? There’s a whole new cult/conspiracy theory in that thought
It’s even more depressing than you take because what the media hysterics are now calling AI is nothing of the sort, merely a stew of algos, statistical models, and fuzzy logic applied to language databases that are being brute forced by our unbelievably cheap and fast state-of-the-art computing hardware.
The fools who ended relationships and self-deleted based on the advice they received from these programs show just how dumb humans can be.
Reminds one of the TZ episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” where space aliens instigate a few electrical anomalies that, in turn, unleash innate human paranoia, hatred, and ultimately, self destruction. No need for a war of conquest; just provide a gentle nudge and the human race kills itself.
“What if that is the methodology that AI is already using to remove pesky humans?”
SkyNet is becoming self-aware.