so, every argument in favor of autocracy works based on magical thinking.

autocracies have one point of articulation. it might be a very clever point of articulation, but there is only one of them. simply meaning: it’s very hard to govern a diverse group-culturally, geographically, or otherwise- with the orders of one guy. then you have to rely on other people to actually carry out those orders, to interpret them at various levels down to, say, putting bricks on top of each other or shooting dudes. which means they always have to act in deference to an imagined version of this one guy. why would they do that? how do they feel about that? how fucked in the head do they have to get to reliably execute his orders pretty much as he would wish them, even assuming that isn’t regularly a terrible fucking idea?

now, you can solve this by giving the people under the autocrat a lot of autonomy. say, “hey army, go conquer this place” and give the army resources and have them go do that, with no more interference from the autocrat. now that’s no longer the autocrat’s accomplishment. now you have to count on the loyalty of all those now battle hardened officers, from captains to generals/admirals, to not think they’re better leaders than the autocrat. and they probably have the loyalty of all their troops, who just either won a war, or got their asses kicked in a nonsense war they had to fight but could not have won. autocratic armies, for example, tend to be a lot more brittle and a lot more reliant on rigid ineffective command structures than democratic armies. but it’s not just war-everything is like, that, everyone has to be controlled by pissy political maneuvering at all times, so they don’t try to be the autocrat and just kill the last guy. but it gets even more complicated! see, near the end of world war one, and there’s a lot of argument that this is the thing that caused the end of world war one, there was a new (well, resurrected from one particular group in ancient greece) military doctrine: that power should be devolved (put lower on the power structure) as much as possible, with more tactical and operational decisions going to people of lower ranks. this worked ridiculously well. but this also means there are more people practiced at giving orders and keeping loyalty in your military. which is very very dangerous to an autocrat, especially if those people are pretty good at war/killing.

the core concept of democracy, and one that neoliberalism absolutely does not buy into, is that if a society is clearly in everyone’s best interest, and stays egalitarian enough, with nobody totally left behind and everybody given at least a chance, then nobody will try to fuck with the system too much, and anybody who does will be dragged out into the street and made an example of by just about everyone around them. and this, to a shocking extent, does actually seem to work as long as it’s applied. egalitarian societies with a less focused power structure do seem more resilient on average against power struggles and the regular shocks a civilization might suffer. the problem is they get fucked up and less egalitarian over time, because nothing is stable, humans are complicated, and entropy is a bitch.

like, armies. okay, so, which is better, a huge conscript army, or a small core of focused professional-by caste(knights! jannisaries! etc!) or volunteer(think the american system)-soldiers?

you might think this is a question of ‘lots of barely competent soldiers’ vs ‘a small handful of badass operators’. and that factors in, kinda, but it’s not actually the main difference. it’s loyalty, and how your society reacts to the routine costs of war. who comes back from war trained and capable of fighting the government? who suffers at home when half your army gets killed in ten minutes because you did a whoopsie, or the people you were fighting were awesome, or luck just wasn’t on your side? who sees spoils and plunder? if you’re fighting a defensive war against an aggressor with genocidal war aims, a conscript army actually works pretty well, with very few down sides. if you’re fighting an obviously nonsense imperial boondoggle, using conscripts is a good way to get your entire ruling class beheaded.

it’s all complex as fuck, and it’s all weirder than you would think. generally though; a more egalitarian society, where decisions can be varied and adaptive, without deference to some dipshit in nuremberg/constantinople/versailles, is more adaptive, more stable, and more functional.

that said, there are different things that make these societies work. autocracies are most stable when the populace is stupid, xenophobic, and stratified enough that when someone in the mid levels of power fucks people over at the king’s explicit orders, the peasants can say “damn I bet if the king/fuhrer/presidentforlife knew about this, he’d fucking hang the bastard”. democratic egalitarian societies are most stable and functional when the populace is educated, informed, and empowered.

in practice these power structures are never quite as a binary. the anthropologist david graeber did a lot of really cool work on this. ‘on kings’ which he co-wrote with marshal sahlins and ‘the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity’ which he co-wrote with the archaeologist david wengrow, are fucking great reads. read them instead of my inchoate text wall; I’m delirious as fuck right now.

because murdering truth is not good for science. fascism is not good for science funding. researchers use search engines all the time. academia is struggling with a LLM fraud problem.

if he’d stuck to calling them weird and attacking them, maybe it wouldn’t have been useless. but they dropped that, tried to buddy up with the fascists, and brought on insane endorsements like fucking liz cheney.

if they’d run sanders/walz, even late after biden convinced even party leadership that he couldn’t win, they would have crushed that shit with historic numbers.

if they had let a palestinian talk, or given the most mild ‘please tone down the genocide shit’ they might’ve had a chance.

it was like they were trying to lose at every step. truly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

and seriously, you can do better, sauces tend to keep for a while, especially the quality youd get there, and YOU CAN MAKE BETTER OMG. a five dollar (fuck) bottle and two dollars of ingredients makes a years worth of most of these kinds of sauces in bulk.

it’s a known nazi dog whistle, dude.

I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around or in the milleiu of silicon valley, but there’s a LOT of fascist shit there. all the major funders of this technology are literally fascists. many of them sig heiling nazis, or assholes who talk openly about the need for a fuhrer/king. this is not secret. one of them, without this technology, has helped multiple far right governments into power, aided multiple genocides, and turned all of your older relatives into nazis. one of them is known as ‘the vampire of silicon valley’; the guy who invented the whole ‘blood boy’ thing (yes that’s real) and has dedicated his vast vast fortune to ending democracy, likes to name his shit after stuff from LOTR; first big one was ‘palantir’. look up what those are for in the books. since its modern resurgance, most of the investments from his VC fund have been in this technology.

im skeptical but open to that. it’s just that these models are pushing pushed into literally everything, to the point they’re hard to avoid. I can’t think of another kind of specialized lab tool that has had that done. I do not own, nor have I ever owned, a sample centrifuge. I don’t have CRISPR tools. I have never, outside of academic settings, opened wolfram alpha on my home computer. even AUTOCAD and solidworks are specialist tools, and I haven’t touched any version of either in years.

because these models, while not good for anything anyone should ever actually want outside a lab setting, are also very very good for fascism. they do everything a fascist needs to, aside from the actual physical killing.

and I don’t think the level of development and deployment that these tools get, along with the wildly inflated price of the hardware to run them (or anything else) and death of web search, the damage to academic journals, etc, is a net benefit. even to specialized researchers who have uses for specialized versions of them as the statistical tool that they are. certainly not to the fields over the long term.

fun how you didn’t respond to a single one of my points. because you can’t.

into? probably. helped by? probably larger.

WTF

okay then. you tell me what these models are. at a technical level. how they work. what do they actually DO? do you know? are you just shilling? can you cite any sources? I’ll show you mine of slightly better quality, if you show me yours. don’t be shy, babe. hit me with that academic good-good. don’t worry, im currently bedbound and have (some) journal access.

it’s an easy fight to pick

no it’s not. i’ve been saying this for years, and the constant failure of these systems to have a single god damn utility for the average person while absolutely ruining every part of the internet we used to treasure as they’re shoved into everything in an enshittification push we couldn’t have imagined fifteen years ago is only just starting to convince people. fuck your fascist nonsense.

but the enemy is not there

they literally are. peter thiel’s seqouia capital, elon musk, and every other billionaire, even the less explicitly fascist ones, are shoving this wildly unprofitable technology into everything. they literally lose money on every query, massive amounts of our productive capacity has been dedicated to making the hardware that these run on. countries are having brown outs and water shortages to run that fucking hardware. I actually used to enjoy video games, but I haven’t been able to buy a new graphics card in like a decade. why, if not this? if peter thiel is not your enemy, then you are either ignorant, or your are my enemy. if elon musk is not your enemy by march of 2025, then you either just woke up from a very long coma, or you are my enemy.

something useless

then why are we putting so many fucking resources towards it? you don’t see me fighting against minecraft or fucking roblox. im not ready to riot about adobe’s subscription model. I have a closet full of pretty clothes that are wildly impractical in my current climate.

wasted of resources and spirit

feels like it sometimes, when people shill for this crap day and night, but none of them ever seem to know what the shit you’re talking about.

the true enemy, they have been oppressing you since before electricity

who is ‘they’? because we both agree that people have been largely oppressed since before electricity, but i get the feeling that when you say that, you mean ‘the jews’ and not ‘the parasitic nobility who used them as a middleman to get around a technicality to do something their religion explicitly forbade while giving them a sacrificial firewall they could slaughter every few decades in a good pogrom whenever the peasants got too upset about being exploited, plus their modern counterparts’.

A lot of systems we have already made are super fucked up. this is true. a lot of them were designed to fuck shit up, and be generally evil. we do that sometimes.

these systems only serve to magnify them. see, there’s been a massive marketing push is to call these things “artificial intelligence”. they’re not. they tell you it’s all to complex to explain, but type something on your phone. no, really, do it. like a sentence or two. anything.

you just used the small easily comprehensible version of a large (thing) model. the problem is, as you try to scale complexity on these, both accuracy and compute resources grow exponentially, because it’s literally the same kind of algorithm as your software keyboard uses to autocorrect, but with a bunch of recursion in it and much larger samples to reference every time someone hits a key.

there are some philosophical implications to this!

see, there is no neutral. there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. which means these systems are not. they need to be trained on something. you don’t just enter axioms. that would be actual AI. this, again, isn’t that. these are tools for making statistical correlations.

there’s no way to do this that is ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. so what data do you think these tools get fed? Lets say you’re a bank, let’s say you’re wells fargo, and you want to make a large home-loan-assessment model. so you feed it all the data from your institution going back to the day your company was founded. back in stagecoach and horse times.

so you have names of applicants, and house statistics, and geographic location, and all sorts of variables to correlate and weigh in deciding who gets a home loan.

which is great if your last name is, for example: hapsburg. less good if your last name is, for example: freeman. and you can try to find ways to compensate, if you want to. keeping in mind that the people who made this system may actively want to stop you. but it’s possible. but these systems are very very good at finding secret little correlations. they’re fucking amazing at it. it’s kind of their shit. this is the thing they’re actually good at. so you’ll find weird new incomprehensibly cryptic markers for how to be a racist piece of shit, all of which will stay within the black box and be used to entrench historical financial bigotry.

death is the great equalizer, but this system can be backed up indefinitely. it will not die unless somebody kills it. which could be really hard. people can learn to be less shit, at least in theory-we can have experiences off the job that wake us up to ways we used to suck. this system can’t though. people can be audited, but aside from rebuilding the whole damn thing, you can’t really do maintenance on these things. the webs of connections are too complicated, and maybe on purpose, we can’t know what changing an already trained large (whatever) model will do.

so these systems are literally incapable of being better than us. they are designed to be worst. they are designed to justify our worst impulses. they are designed to excuse the most vile shit we always wanted to do. they are forged from the jungian shadow of our society, forged from the sins, and only the sins, of our ancestors, forged with the intent of severing our connection to material reality, and forcing all people to surrender. to lay down arms in support of the great titan truth that has always stood between regressive agendas and their thousand year reich.

so please stop shilling for this neon-genesis-evangellion-ass-fuckery.

you’re not gonna get one.

a reflection of who is in charge of it

not even that. it’s an inherently more regressive version of whatever data that person feeds it.

the two arguments for deploying this shit outside of very narrow laboratory uses, where everyone was already using other statistical models.

A. this is one last grasp at fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, one last desperate scream of the liberal order that they want to be regressive shit heads and build the abdication machine as their grand industrial-philosophical project, so they can do whatever horrible shit they want, and claim that they’re still compassionate and only doing it because computer said so.

B. this is a project by literal monarchists. people who wish to kill democracy. to murder truth and collaboration; replace it with blind tribalistic loyalty to a fuhrer/king. the rhetoric coming from a lot of the funders of these things supports this.

this technology is existentially evil, and will be the end of our society either way. it must be stopped. the people who work on it must be stopped. the people who fund it must be hanged.

AI would be fine. we do not have artificial intelligence. full stop. none of the technologies being talked about even approach intelligence. it’s literally just autocorrect. do you know how the autocorrect on your phone’s software keyboard works? then you know how a large language model works. it’s exactly the same formulae, just scaled up and recursed a bunch. I could have endless debates about what ‘intelligence’ is, and I don’t know that there’s a single position I would commit to very hard, but I know, dead certain, that it is not this. turing and minsky agreed when they first threw this garbage away in 1951-too many hazards, too few benefits, and insane unreasonable costs.

but there’s more to it than that. large (whatever) models are inherently politically conservative. they are made of the past, they do not struggle, they do not innovate, and they do not integrate new concepts, because they don’t integrate any concept’s, they just pattern match. you cannot have social progress when decisions are made by large (whatever) models. you cannot have new insights. you cannot have better policies, you cannot improve. you can only cleave closer and closer to the past, and reinforce it by feeding it its own decisions.

It could perhaps be argued, in a society that had once been perfect and was doing pretty well, that this is tolerable in some sectors, as long as someone keeps an eye on it. right now we’re a smouldering sacrifice zone of a society. that means any training data would be toxic horror or toxic horror THAT IS ON FIRE. this is bad. these systems are bad. anyone who advocates for these systems outside extremely niche uses that probably all belong in a lab is a bad person.

and I think, if that isn’t your enemy, your priorities are deeply fucked, to the point you belong in a padded room or a pine box.

and it’s altadena, which was recently the hub of some pretty big mutual aid efforts, so there’s a chance some of that might actually happen!

if you’re poor when you get the money, you still get taxed for being poor, and the sin of class mobility. only money made AFTER you get rich is safe.

because capitalism needs to function like cancer. shit’s built on old imperialist logics, where you must always be claiming more. red queen’s race bullshit. or cancer; pick your metaphor.

it must be profitable because while productivity increases, due to imperial conquest and advancing technology, the profits of the owning classes (remember; this is the literal definition of capitalism-value being produced by owners rather than workers. yes it’s insane, they are insane, this system is insane.) must also increase.

the fact the working class have no more to squeeze from just means we get closer and closer to slaves, which is maybe intentional, maybe just a cool bonus for them.

there’s a cool poem that explains it. check out part 2 https://poets.org/poem/howl-parts-i-ii

no, and they’re eager to, but I think if they ever tried to not, things would go badly. that’s bad for the market and drives down everyone elses profits. there would be a lot of solidarity against them by the class of people that own the police.

capitalism is the idea that value comes from ownership, rather than labor. landlording is just the purest expression of capitalism.

why the hell didn’t you vote for delacruz? she’s electable if you vote for her. maybe you should have fallen in line and sided with the people you claim are your natural god damn allies after your candidate went obviously senile and clearly couldn’t win?

look up your local water treatment infrastructure. look up all the suppliers, and their suppliers, so you know who to talk to when you’re the last thing between your city and mass dysentery. maybe get some reserve chemicals and commonly broken parts, if you can afford it.

and figure out how to keep your local nazis from destroying all the infrastructure. they love doing that shit.