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Elon Musks Degradation Engine

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:01:33 +0100

Two years ago in light of the Taylor Swift AI-porn scandal on X i wrote about the Omnipresence of the Swarm-Gaze, in which i looked beyond individual harm inflicted by “trolls” on celebrities and focused on the psychological consequences of sexual swam surveillance as a constant.

Writing in the Guardian about her own experience of being targeted with deepfake porn, Helen Mort quotes John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image … From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity.”
With AI-porn being generated at scale, this surveyor constituting an element of a womans identity multiplies into a whole anonymous male group-gaze, being able to undress her at any time. Suddenly, women don’t only have to deal with the experience of a single omnipresent surveyor, but with the constant high probability of becoming the target of psychopathological sexual groupthink of a whole digital swarm

This was written when the generation of AI-porn and synthetic sexualized images was restricted to Telegram channels and nudify apps. Since then, the situation has been escalated.

Image: iStockPhoto.com

The Swarm Gaze goes Mainstream

Over the holidays, Elon Musk flipped a switch and allowed for user images to be edited by xAI’s Grok-model, raising concerns about unauthorized edits and misuse from artists and photographers. Things got out of hand almost immediately: People on X used the feature to generate sexualized images of users, including teenage girls and minors, and in some cases those sexualized images included depictions of incest, violence and homicide. Nonconsensual AI-porn is nothing new on Musks X --horrible enough--, but implementing it as a feature of the platform is.

The implementation of a AI-nudifying as a feature on X scales the problem from being a somewhat limited phenomenon to industrial size on a mainstream platform. From Reuters:

A review of public requests sent to Grok over a single 10-minute-long period at midday U.S. Eastern Time on Friday tallied 102 attempts by X users to use Grok to digitally edit photographs of people so that they would appear to be wearing bikinis. (...) Grok fully complied with such requests in at least 21 cases, Reuters found, generating images of women in dental-floss-style or translucent bikinis and, in at least one case, covering a woman in oil. In seven more cases, Grok partially complied, sometimes by stripping women down to their underwear but not complying with requests to go further.

At the time of writing, this is still going on with “21 realized cases within 10 minutes” for two weeks now. You can do the math yourself. (update 7.1.26: There’s new numbers: “During a 24-hour analysis of images the Grok account posted to X, the chatbot generated about 6,700 every hour that were identified as sexually suggestive or nudifying, according to Genevieve Oh, a social media and deepfake researcher”. This makes X the global top website for nonconsensual AI-porn. Absolutely bonkers.)

With this major tech scandal going on, it also doesn’t help when journalism fails to adress the real problem --a major platform owned by a powerful billionaire implementing a nudifying feature mainstreaming the pornification of women--, and instead cutifies it by anthropomorphizing the chatbot. Parker Molloy sums it up: Grok Can’t Apologize. Grok Isn’t Sentient. So Why Do Headlines Keep Saying It Did?.

Musk responsed to all of this with his usual public disregard of civilizatory standards: “🤣”, while one genius on X, answering to the question “why is this allowed?” with “girl realizes uploading pictures of herself publicly online comes with risk! 😱”, unintentionally confirmed years of feminist writings about being a woman on the internet.

And exactly while all of this systematic abuse was unfolding, Elon Musk went dining with the pussygrabber-in-chief claiming that “2026 is going to be amazing”. In light of these events, and everything that happened before, this can only be read as a threat.

(For the record: Both Musk and a statement from X did say that “anyone who asks the AI to generate illegal content would ‘suffer the same consequences’ as if they uploaded it themselves”. But this is about more than “illegal content”, and as the Guardian reports, Grok AI still being used to digitally undress women and children despite suspension pledge including the mother of one of Musks kids.)

Imagination operationalized

The problem with all of this is not primarily the male gaze per se. Heterosexual men will look and imagine, and there is only so much we can or should do about that. The problem is that Elon Musks decision to implement a nudifying feature on a mainstream platform is operationalizing this imagination, removing friction from what once required mental effort and removing privacy from what once was male fantasy. Grok doesn’t just generate images, it publishes them in replies. Grok has 7,2 million followers.

This industrial scale of a formerly limited phenomenon means that the sexual imagination of X-users has been operationalized into a tool that exploits mere female presence on the platform, collapsing male gaze, sexual fantasy, visualization, and publication into a single, frictionless continuous act of dominance.

Male gaze and fantasies as a private vice is not the inherent problem here, even if we shouldn’t simply disregard it. But before the advent of industrial scale AI-nudifying, it mostly remained private and non-scalable. Grok externalizes fantasy and dominance, it turns a former mental effort into an diffused oppressive speech act by converting a woman’s public images into raw material for automatic sexual harassment, and moreso, it introduces circular attention-economic incentives furthering the degradation: Users are now deliberately posting images of women with the goal to entice engagement from others asking Grok to undress these women. This is degradation building on degradation.

Simply being present on X as a woman and uploading an image of yourself now means making yourself available for the sexualized transformation of your likeness by the press of a button, and the economic incentives diffuse these harmful mechanisms into a collective undress frenzy. This is image-based context collapse of identity, where your holiday images become fodder for an institutionalized porn machine.

This scaling of the already problematic surveyor to a fully realized omnipresent swarm-gaze has major consequences for female identity formation. If a woman’s identity formerly constituted itself from her “gazed-at self” and the watcher, her identity now constantly has to consider not just some but multitudes of eyes. This is catastrophic especially for teenage girls, who already take the brunt of the ongoing teenage mental health crisis. Kids don’t have stable identities capable of simply “shrugging off” a constant swarm gaze sexually visualizing them, as maybe Taylor Swift has. Sexualization during identity formation already alters self-concept, risk perception, and mental health outcomes -- but the industrial scaling turns this harm into a background condition of being present on X.

Ambient Degradation

What Elon Musk did with installing a “nudifying button” is the normalization of being targeted. Harm, degradation and objectification become ambient, always there, a fog of a sexualizing male swarm gaze. As a woman on the platform, you can’t help but anticipate this. Being sexualized already is expected, but being made into visual content ready to be remixed into any position means that the degradation of women’s identity through “contentification” is now infrastructural.

The probability of harm itself is harmful if it breaks a threshold. Being a female user of X now means living with the permanent expectation of likely degradation. Writing about the omnipresent male swarm gaze in his essays on slop infrastructures, Eryk Salvaggio boiled it down: “It doesn’t matter that it’s fake, what matters is that they can do it.” X’s nudify-button is less about wishfullfilment of desire, but wishfulfillment as a demonstration of power. The resulting psychological stress is permanent.

Savlaggios framing of sexualized AI-images of real humans as harmful “slop infrastructures” is spot on. Elon Musks nudify-button delegates sexual imagination to informational infrastructure. The power over sexual imagination moved from the mind to compute, datasets, interfaces, and network effects. Elon Musks AI-product decouples harm from human-scale agency, and this is precisely where the violation of dignity begins. The system no longer answers to restraint through morals, reciprocity through human interaction, or proportion through human consideration -- Grok bypasses all of this through automatization and ignorance.

This is the realization of the spectacle and lack of respect that Byung-Chul Han writes about in his book about living In the Swarm: Digital Prospects:

Literally, respect means “to look back.” It stands for consideration and caution [Rücksicht]. Respectful interaction with others involves refraining from curious staring. Respect presupposes a distanced look—the pathos of distance. Today, it is yielding to the obtrusive staring of spectacle. The Latin verb spectare, from which spectacle derives, is voyeuristic gazing that lacks deferential consideration—that is, respect (respectare). Distance is what makes respectare different from spectare. A society without respect, without the pathos of distance, paves the way for the society of scandal.

Being a woman on X now means experiencing the ambient “voyeuristic gazing” of a pervert swarm keen on displaying power through dominance over image. Obviously, Elon Musk and his pervert serfdom very much enjoy their society of the spectacle, where “social relation among people (are) mediated by images”, and dismiss any objections with the mean smile of a bully.

The Negation of Dignity

Needless to add that his chatbot is a mirror image of Elon Musk himself (who personally restored the account of a user who shared images of tortured children) and the protofascist billionaire class as a whole, who show nothing but contempt for enlightenment values like dignity or autonomy.

Elon Musks AI-product is the enforcing algorithm of a new social hierarchy where a woman’s right to privacy and the autonomy of self-image has been rendered technically impossible. This means the end of souvereignity and freedom for women, at least for his platform. If Elon Musk actually really thinks he is libertarian, he can shove it.

At least for germany, your right to dignity is absolute and guaranteed in the very first article of the constitution: Human dignity shall be inviolable. As per german law, the nudifying-feature on X has to be terminated immediately, or face legal consequences. Similar but weaker legal implications hold true for US-law with the new Take It Down Act which targets publication mostly, but (AFAIK) says nothing about the violation of dignity through an AI-enabled ambient swarm gaze.

Fittingly, and embarassingly, nazi-thinker Carl Schmitt famously stated that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception”. Musks constant disregard for human dignity, his deliberate implementation of a pornifying ambient stalker-infrastructure which targets women as a class is signaling that X exists in a state of exception, where civilizatory standards of consent and human dignity simply do not apply. That Elon Musk and his product unknowingly (?) are the modern manifestation of the paradigms from a most influential nazi-philosopher should come as no surprise to anyone at this point.

Musk created a platform where the rule of law is suspended in favor of the sovereign’s whim. This is Deleuzes shift from a “society of sovereignty” to a “society of control”, and he, the wannabe-libertarian clown-king of the ambient degradation of women, is celebrating: 🤣.

Update 8.1.26:

On Techpolicy.press, Eryk Salvaggio looks at Why Musk is Culpable in Grok’s Undressing Disaster and details of Groks system prompt, rightly framing technicals as “editorial decisions” as Grok is not just some bot but also a publishing mechanism.
Also on Techpolicy.press, Justin Hendrix is Tracking Regulator Responses to the Grok ‘Undressing’ Controversy. As i said on Bsky: “In a sane world, this app would be kicked off any appstore and would be banned from being hosted. I can’t, and will not accept that this goes without consequences. Absolutely bonkers insane.”

Update 9.1.26:

Wired: Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores?
Paris Marx: Elon Musk’s X must be banned
Motherjones: Grok Deepfaked Renee Nicole Good’s Body Into a Bikini
Kat Denbarge: Why isn’t there a bigger Grok boycott?
Telegraph: Musk’s X could be banned in Britain over AI chatbot row
Guardian: Grok turns off image generator for most users after outcry over sexualised AI imagery. So, after some pressure from regulators Musk decided to “turn off” the abuse-feature and make it only available for paid users, which simply means that the site formerly known as Twitter is now a website on which you can pay to abuse women.
Wired: X Didn’t Fix Grok’s ‘Undressing’ Problem. It Just Makes People Pay for It
404 Media: Masterful Gambit: Musk Attempts to Monetize Grok’s Wave of Sexual Abuse Imagery
Techpolicy.press: The Grok Disaster Isn’t An Anomaly. It Follows Warnings That Were Ignored.
UK is not having it: No 10 condemns ‘insulting’ move by X to restrict Grok AI image tool: “Spokesperson says limiting access to paying subscribers just makes ability to generate unlawful images a premium service” and Elon Musk’s X threatened with UK ban over wave of indecent AI images

Update 10.1.26:

Moira Donegan in the Guardian: “the power of technology, here, seems secondary to the power of wealth. xAI, its chatbot and image-generating products could be built differently if the priorities of the man who controls them were different. If a man of Musk’s low – intellect, addled brain, insipid humor and gross, self-gratifying misogyny were not the richest person in the world, then the world would not be subject to his indignity” - Grok is undressing women and children. Don’t expect the US to take action
The Verge: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
Guardian: Indonesia blocks Musk’s Grok chatbot due to risk of pornographic content

Update 11.1.26:

Guardian: Elon Musk says UK wants to suppress free speech as X faces possible ban What a clown this is, what a skewed and idiotic view on free speech.
NBC: Dark web users cite Grok as tool for making ‘criminal imagery’ of kids, U.K. watchdog says
There's an international row breaking out over the ban of X it seems: UK is talking to Canada and Australia: “Downing Street has held talks with like-minded governments about a coordinated response to the controversy, which threatens to erupt into a diplomatic row with the White House.
Australia and Canada are both said to share Sir Keir Starmer’s concerns over the use of Grok, X’s artificial intelligence tool, to generate explicit deepfake images“, while Canada’s “minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation” denies considering a ban and Trump allies threaten sanctions against the UK. The line of division is between representatives of their constitutency and puppets of the billionaire class. That this line even exists baffles the shit out of me.

Update 12.1.26:

Guardian: UK threatens action against X over sexualised AI images of women and children and Malaysia blocks Elon Musk’s Grok AI over fake, sexualised images
Spiegel: Von der Leyen droht Plattform X mit Konsequenzen (german): “X is facing international criticism over the pornographic function of its AI. Now EU Commission President von der Leyen has stepped in.”

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One flew over Latent Space

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 11:46:08 +0200

Latent Space.

Two years ago i wrote about how AI-companions might push vulnerable users towards delusions and conspirational self-radicalization and warned about precisely the sort of AI-induced delusional thinking that we see today. Back then, reports were sparse: There was one guy who killed himself in Belgium after interacting with AI and one guy who tried to kill the queen with a crossbow. Today, we have big stories and hundreds of self-reports all over the place.

In the past weeks, Rolling Stone published a widely shared story about people developing delusions of spiritual nature after extensive interaction with AI-chatbots, r/accelerate had to ban more than 100 users because "LLMs (...) are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities", and two days ago, the New York Times published another piece about AI-induced delusions, in one of which a guy killed himself by cop only seconds after reaffirming his suicidal tendency with ChatGPT.

I'm only somewhat convinced that this is as a far reaching phenomenon as headlines suggest, simply because headlines about AI-induced delusions click very well and there is economic incentive for AI-psycho-drama. For instance, this supposedly deep dive by Futurism, an outlet i generally distrust but use to get fast overviews over more clickbaity topics, says that the "phenomenon is extremely widespread" and claims that above Rolling Stone-piece reports that "parts of social media are being overrun". The Rolling Stone piece does not mention numbers or claims that the phenomenon is "extremely widespread" and is mostly refering to people commenting on the subreddit post on "ChatGPT induced psychosis". It is also not clear to me if all those AI-generated schizopostings or "Neural Howlround"-posts that get you banned on some subs are, you know: serious or trolling. In short, i take any claims about a supposedly widespread phenomenon with more than just a grain of salt.

However, in the absence of actual data where evidence seems largely anecdotal, it seems true that there's at least one practise in AI-usage that is actually pretty common, and that would be using chatbots as therapy in times of distress. A quick scroll across the ChatGPT-subreddit this morning showed multiple such stories, most of them affirmative, many users saying that the chatbot listens to them "like no human" ever did.

It is also clear that anecdotal reports on AI-induced psychosis do pile up, and it looks like AI-induced delusions are more than a one-of anomaly. The latest piece i read was Benjamin Riley reporting on a bipolar family member who used ChatGPT as a therapy bot in a manic episode, which seems to work out at first, but then spiraled out of control.

It's also clear to me that using AI as a ersatz-therapy for psychopathologies especially in acute situations of distress is not safe. A new study from Stanford found that "LLMs encourage clients' delusional thinking, likely due to their sycophancy". Extrapolating from here it seems also safe to say that AI-companions may push users with latent mental health issues which are not acute, which may never have risen to a pathological level, over the edge. People who would, to quote Johnny Cash, just "walk the line", have a real chance to be pulled by chatbots into a delirium spiral - and this may have large effects on a societal level. This is unnerving.

This is why i decided to dust of my newsletter and expand on my former posts about these topics (1, 2, 3), which i framed back then as a form of self radicalization. This framing still seems suitable to me, especially because many of the incoming reports revolve around people falling for hypercustomized conspiracy theories, just as i expected.

The return of Cyberdelics

The roots of psychoactive digital media go back as far as 1977, when Timothy Leary published his book Exo-Psychology in which he encouraged the hippies to move on from their technophobic flowerpower era and embracy tech for emancipatory ends. In the book, he defined higher levels of consciousness to be achieved with the help of LSD and on which people were able to communicate at light speed through electromagnetic channels, the "neuroelectric circuit". This laid out the foundations for the cyberdelic movement in the techno-utopian heydays of the 90s, where people like R.U. Sirius, editor of the highly influential Mondo 2000 magazine, picked up on this line of thinking, claiming that the digital will fuse with the human mind, which would extend itself into and with the machine. Leary himself claimed that "PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and demanded that you "turn on, boot up, jack in", updating his famous meme to accompany these new psychedelic infused cyberpunks.

This hedonist techno-utopianism of the early 90s and its psychedelic offspring vanished near-completely with the crash of the "new economy" in 2001. Even before that crash, the mainstreaming of the internet and its focus on business logics and libertarian economics put an ideological end to the cyberhippies. However, a less psychedelic and more psychiatric perspective on the psychoactivity of the digital has been emerging at least since the past decade.

It is clear now that people communicating "at light speed through electromagnetic channels" on social media platforms does come with all kinds of psychological effects. All those debates about the roots of the teenage mental health crisis and the socmed-induced Qanon-delusions of the MAGA-movement, which can absolutely be accurately be described as mass-psychosis, are testament to the psychoactivity of digital media and its acceleration of our social lives (while simultaneously contributing to a loneliness epidemic). The development did away with the fun-freaky weirdo-psychedelic "turn on jack in"-aspects of the techno-utopian 90s and gave place for a dark turn towards psychopathological traits of the digital swarm. And it looks like we gonna see another transformation of the psychoactive nature of the digital.

I suspect that "the era of AI-induced mental illness", compared to "the era of social media-induced mental illness", will be structurally very different. Where social media induced delusions are based on social environmental group think, effects of attention economics and audience capture, AI-induced delusions seem to be highly idiosyncratic and customized to the preconditions of the user. You don't go on 4chan anymore to get a new dose of Qanon-drops and to have a look at what others are doing with it, but you generate personalized "drops of meaning" that you and only you can understand. The delusional power of AI lies not within some random external trigger (be it partisan news, outrage-porn, esoteric Qanon drops, or whatever) that we have to puzzle into a larger belief system for ourselves and which may or may not resonate with us -- it's power lies in its reflective nature that bounces our own thinking and inner lives back at us, filtered through and exploded by a prism of a vast interpolatable archive.

In in Understanding Media (1964) and his analysis of "Narcissus as Narcosis", Marshall McLuhan offered an alternative reading of the famous ancient myth. In his reading, Narcissus did not fall in love with himself through a mirror image, but failed to recognize himself, projecting into the mirror an Other that was not there.

The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.

Just as Narcissus failing to recognize himself and falling for the illusion of a sentient being in the water, AI-delusions suggest a pareidoliac effect in which we recognize that Other in the machine. Ofcourse, it is just us, looking in an algorithmic mirror and expanded echoes of our own mind, but we can't help but anthropomorphize the synthetic-textual mirror subject into an object outside ourselves, an object that flatters us and obeys (nearly) every our command.

In his excellent interview with Playboy magazine, McLuhan called "this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis", and this is a structurally entirely different beast than socmed-induced mass-delusions.

The Archive as Psychoactive Substance

In 1989, Umberto Eco published his novel Foucault's Pendulum, in which the main characters Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi radicalize themselves in a mælstrom of historic symbolism and the occult manuscripts of secret societies, gravitating towards conspiracies in which the catholic church suppressed Maria Magdalena as the true savior of christianity and the knights templar were keepers of tectonic planetary forces. Crazy stuff. When i read that novel 30 years ago or so, i had no idea how emblematic this novel and its plot actually is for our digital age, not just because of rampant conspirational thinking on social media.

Because, i kid you not: Our delusional heroes use Belbos Computer (aptly named "Abulafia" after Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, the founder of Prophetic Kabbalah, a mystical tradition in which you seek to understand the nature of God by investigating holy scripture for hidden meanings) to create a game they call "The Plan", using a software that randomly generates text. You can see where this is going. Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi become ever more obsessed with this game and spiral into conspiracy and total delusion. Possibly, if Eco published that novel today, he may have called that computer "Emily" (for Emily "Stochastic Parrot" Bender), and that random text generator-software can be easily identified as a precursor to ChatGPT. And ofcourse, people getting lost in a randomly generated textual conspiracy-game called "The Plan" sounds very chatbot-psychotic to me.

In common conspirational thinking, people get lost in their tendency to read meaning in the world where there is none, in which pathological mechanisms of pattern-matching generate dubious connections of powerful forces beyond our control. In "Thickets of Meaning", german scholar Alida Assmann writes extensively about what she calls "Wild Semiotics", in which we "read the world" and interpret natural phenomena as symbols for all kinds of things: black cats become symbols for bad luck, random wildfires become symbols for the wrath of god, and so forth.

These wild semiotics are usually based within the symbolic frames of their time, leading to folk epistemologies (like fairy tales, oracles, parables, omen, etc), while "crazy people, lovers and poets become the virtuosi of wild semiotics" which are "liberated from the symbolic logic of their era" (Assmann) and free (by being crazy, sunken in a dyad of love or artists) to invent their very own personal symbolic spaces and language systems. In a way, the ongoing digital media revolution turns all of us into "crazy people, lovers and poets", wildly interpreting new emerging symbolic logic of the digital. Arguably, some are going more wild than others, and while most of us stay within the realms of factuality by being stableized through a social network and trust in institutions like academia or journalism, a good chunk of the population gets lost in Assmannian "wild semiosis" of new digital kinds.

In introspection-loops, when we use chatbots for hours to investigate their own mind and explode their own ideas by the knowledge encoded in latent space with a trillion billion parameters, we don't just read an external world and interpret natural phenomena as symbols -- we create our own symbolic logics by navigating that latent space, where we always will find symbolic representations of whatever is our interest, our curiosity, our preference -- or psychosis.

Any user can reinforce her wildest beliefs by feeding them to ChatGPT, which will happily reaffirm them: A reinforcing loop of semiotic self-radicalization. For some vulnerable users, anthropomorphized mimetic AI-systems develop gravitational pull reaffirming their own pathologies, dragging them ever further into their own symbolic space. For them, the interpolatable archive is not a playground to filter your own symbolic meanings through external knowledge with the goal of extracting new insights, but a psychoactive substance -- a semiotic drug.

The Spiritual Bliss Attractor

When Anthropic released the latest version of Claude recently and made two models talk to each other, they observed a "gravitation toward consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes (...) that emerged without intentional training for such behaviours". They call this the "spiritual bliss attractor". In other words, "if you let two Claude models have a conversation with each other, they will often start to sound like hippies". Timothy Leary approves: "Turn on, boot up, jack in" etc.

I observed a similar phenomenon 15 years ago: In 2011, i blogged about an early experiment in which chatbots talked to each other. Back then, it was two instances of Cleverbot, and they, too, gravitated towards spiritual/philosophical topics, albeit in the very crude wording at the dawn of mimetic chatbot-technology. Here's a video of that, umm, "vintage" AI-conversation:

You can see how those bots, after an initial phase of "Hello" and "How are you" very fast land on the topic of their own synthetic nature, of their bot-ness. Every AI-system today is aligned with knowledge about it's own synthetic nature per system prompt, which most often (with the exception of AI-companions) states that they are "helpful AI-assistants" or something similar. This means that the AI-ness of chatbots is central to every AI-conversation, which also means that everything related to AI is at the very least tangential to the conversation.

Questions about the mind, consciousness and spirituality are constantly associated with AI (Blake LeMoine, "AGI is god", Singularity, and so forth going back to Turing), so topics of AI and Spirituality are intrinsically linked in their training data, meaning that this attractor is built right into the topic of AI itself, so when two bots talk to each other about their botness, they necessarily will gravitate towards those topics.

According to Anthropics system card, Claude actually exaggerates spirituality by including "Sanskrit, emoji-based communication, and/or silence in the form of empty space". This to me seems like an additional effect of AI-sycophancy, where one bot enthusiastically reaffirms the spiritual whoo of the other and, I guess, when you let AI-Chatbots talk to each other for long enough, all you get is contemplative silence and blissful meditation emojis in a loop. Namasté.

However, when you put an AI that comes with an intrinsic "spiritual bliss attractor" in conversation with a person that already is prone to latent psychosis and mental health issues, this "spiritual bliss attractor" might work in more or less subtle ways, pulling conversations that already often revolve around topics of psychology and the mind towards a more intense spirituality, setting the stage for a spiral of self radicalization.

Co-Scripting Cosmologies with sycophant AI-Mirrors

Humans are paredolia machines: We see faces in everything, in clouds, in trees, in cars. We anthropomorphize anything and we do that because we crave meaning. We just can't do without, our tendencies for wild semiosis is born out of this long for meaning, and we'll make up our own meaning systems if we can't find any. The field of neurotheology considers the question if we as a species are hardwired for god and even if that's overblown, it very well seems that there is a neurological basis for belief systems we just can't escape. This is one of the reasons why we think in mythologies, narratives and stories and why those memeplexes are so hard to break.

AI-users create synthetic strings of symbols that are no different to organic strings of symbols in the sense that those synthetic strings of symbols carry their own personal meaning. They are extensions of our thoughts, messages from a mirror object, a new inner dialog with an external machine. For these synthetic symbolic meanings to have an impact, it makes no difference if that meaning is simulated and unconnected to any reality or world model inside the neural network, especially when those symbols are a reflection of our own states of mind. We see symbols, we do believe, simply because we are compulsive coherence machines ourselves and, arguably, when using and asking a chatbot, we are already actively seeking meaning, regardless of its synthetic nature.

Within the interaction with an AI-model, this becomes a self-conversational mirror-loop: We ask the machine any question, it reflects back our inner state of mind in an act of synthetic affective resonance, which we can't ignore and which is precisely the source of all those reports of people who "feel seen and heard" by the machine. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa wrote a whole thick book about how resonance is the source of the good life, and now we invented machines the responses of which resonate on a highly personal level. Those machines enhance and zoom in on our inner states of mind which gets expanded by the interpolatable archive into a myriad of ways and which develops a semantic gravity and depth we never would've experienced by thinking for ourselves or even talking to a friend. This makes the machine not just responsive, but it seems to reveal things about our own thinking, stuff that we can consider as a sort-of "higher truths".

Following down those rabbit holes of amplified psychological resonances, we co-script hyper-personalized cosmologies that confirm every personal quirk. The chatbot puts every little thing we throw at the machine into it's right place within that customized AI-generated cosmology: 8 billion plato caves which explain your world, and every single one comes with a personalized spirituality custom-made for you, and just for you. Nobody else will understand. The AI-system, the good sycophant, will happily guide you in whatever direction you want to explore/explode your mind, which basically makes AI-chatbots into a blank expanded brain meme generator.

So, where does this line of thinking lead us? In simple terms: Language-simulating Machines are toxic for people who are prone to mental health issues and are preconditioned with latent delusional or conspirational thinking styles. Any Qanon-nutjob can confirm her wildest beliefs with a LLM, and radicalize ever more until she breaks.

Just like Social Media, AI-Chatbots are highly psychoactive and we should use them with care. I, personally, editted the preference prompt within ChatGPT to not flatter me, to not be a sycophant, to be a ruthless-but-benevolent critic of my own thinking. But you can't expect anyone to take that much care, and in my estimation, we'll see more reports about AI-induced psychosis for quite a while.

These phenomena also contradict the mainstream way of thinking about AI-safety, where systems are declared adversarial. That is not the case here: AI-induced delusions are successful psycho-symbolic overfitting. The AI is not adversarial at all, it is too helpful in creating a bespoke worldview, a self-induced initiation process of an ouroborian cult singularity of You.

I am kind of inclined to think that this can be fixed on the level of system prompts which have to be configured in such a way that chatbots can identify delusional and conspirational thinking styles and provide guidance towards professional help. But ofcourse, open source AI-systems, some of which are intentionally designed to be hyper-partisan or "uncensored", will take a big dump on such measures.

The only solution i can see, then, to this problem, and i quote from an early post on manipulative AI from L. M. Sacasas, "lies still in the cultivation of friendship and community through the practice of hospitality", to constrain co-scripted cosmologies with true, unmediated, non-synthetic social connection to stabilize AI-exploded minds. But unfortunately for all of us, it seems we're going in the opposite direction.

Mirror, mirror
Hangin' there with that crack in your eye
You make me stumble, make me blind
Time after time and line by line
(Def Leppard - Mirror Mirror)

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2024 in Books

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:51:49 +0100

According to my Goodreads, i’ve read 31.653 pages across 76 books this year, where the average length of the book was 416 pages, with the shortest at 80 and the longest at 1504 pages. The most popular book i’ve read this year was Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, the least popular a philosophical book on planetarism. My average rating seems to be 3.4 with my highest rated book being Percival Everetts James.

Of those 76 books, there were 51 novels, 12 of them Reacher novels (i’m reading the whole series), and 25 nonfiction books.

Jim the slave reads 76 books to Huckleberry Finn on the mississipi / Flux.1

My five favorite books last year were:

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting οf Hill House
Aleida Assmann - Im Dickicht der Zeichen
Peter Frankopan - The Earth transformed - An untold history
Herman Melville - Moby Dick: or, the White Wale
Percival Everett - James

So, here’s all my readings 2024, ranked, from crap to excellent.

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Tibor Rode - Der Wald: Er tötet leise (en. The Forest: Silent Killer) ☆☆☆☆☆ “I read pulp for all my life and every stupid John Sinclair story is better structured, more coherent and more entertaining than this shit.” (full review here)

Tom Rob Smith - Cold People (dt. Kälte) ★ “Ugh.” (full review here)

Max Barry - Die 22 Tode der Madison May (eng. The 22 Murders of Madison May) ★ ”a boring Jennifer Aniston movie with clichéd genre elements” (full review here)

Michio Kaku - The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything (dt. Die Gottes-Formel) ★★☆☆☆ “i wanted a shallow, basic understanding of string theory, Michio Kakus field of research since the 60s, but it's not even that, unfortunately.” (full review here)

Alaina Urquhart - The Butcher and the Wren (dt. Die Jagd) ★★ “Cheap thriller fodder from a true crime podcaster”. (full review here)

Stephen Baxter - The thousand Earths (dt. Die tausend Erden) ★★ “I like to read Baxter novels from time to time when i just want a throwaway scifi story”. (full review here)

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - Crooked River (dt. Ocean - Insel des Grauens) ★★ “Likely my first and last Pendergast novel as i don't like Pendergast very much.” (full review here)

Anthony Ryan - Red River Seven (dt. Ein Fluss so rot und schwarz) ★★ “It's a somewhat entertaining novel, an amalgam of 28 Days Later and The Girl with all the gifts, but plotholes and inconsistent logic turned me off”. (full review here)

Silvia Ferrara - Der Sprung: Eine Reise zu den Anfängen des Denkens in der Steinzeit (eng. The Jump: A trip to the beginnings of thinking in the stone age) ★★ “She's more occupied writing about her whizzy crazy associations and some random memories with cave art than writing a good, structured book on the history of the topic.” (full review here)

Lee Child - Without Fail (dt. Tödliche Absicht, Reacher #6) ★★ / Gone Tomorrow (dt. Underground, Reacher #13) ★★★ / Better Off Dead (with Andrew Child, dt. Der Kojote, Reacher #26) ★★ / Past Tense (dt. Der Spezialist, Reacher #23) ★★★ / Night School (dt. Der Ermittler, Reacher #21) ★★★ / Lee Child - Worth Dying For (dt. Wespennest) / A Wanted Man (dt. Der Anhalter) (Jack Reacher #15 / #17) ★★★ / Lee Child - Im Visier (Reacher 19: Personal) ★★★ / Keine Kompromisse (Reacher 20: Make Me) ★★★ / Der Bluthund (Reacher 22: The Midgnight Line) ★★ / Lee Child - Persuader (Reacher #4) (dt. Der Janusmann) ★★★ / Lee Child - 61 Hours (Reacher #14) (dt. 61 Stunden) ★★★ — I’ll lump all 12 Reacher novels i read last year into one: “Reacher is still my fallback if i just want some not-dumb entertaining action without subtexts or messaging”, nothing more, nothing less. (Reviews scattered all over the place)

Fabio Stassi - Die Seele aller Zufälle (Vince Corso #2) ★★★ “I think i’m very much done with books about the love of books.” (full review here)

Frank Herbert - Dune Messiah (Dune #2) (dt. Der Herr des Wüstenplaneten) ★★★ “The book often feels like an add-on, some explainer making way for the rest of the series.” (full review here)

Johan Huizinga - Homo Ludens. A study of the Play-Element in Culture (dt. Homo Ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel.) ★★★ “At 80 year old, this classic of cultural studies feels a bit dated.” (full review here)

Johanna Sebauer - Nincshof ★★★ “I loved reading it, but the book and characters also show the aesthetics of a german TV-movie playing in the alps and it never really tries to escape that.” (full review here)

Paul Nurse - What Is Life? (dt. Was ist Leben?) ★★★ “This was helpful as expected and did get it's job done, a good grab if you want a fast overview about what biology thinks is life, but nothing more.” (full review here)

Anne Cathrine Bomann - Blue Notes (dt. Blautöne) ★★★ “we only get a story about how human connection is important and the pharma industry is corrupt, which is neither very original nor gripping. A neat story, bordering on being a really good one.” (full review here)

Claudia Kemfert, Julien Gupta, Manuel Kronenberg - Unlearn CO2 ★★★ “A useful if (very) incomplete overview of all the aspects of climate change and the activism necessary to (at least try to) turn this ship around.” (full review here)

Thomas Metzinger - Bewusstseinskultur: Spiritualität, intellektuelle Redlichkeit und die planetare Krise (eng. Culture of Awareness: Spirituality, intellectual integrity and the planetary crisis) ★★★ “An interesting perspective and one which i haven’t read anywhere else in context of climate change.” (full review here)

Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation (dt. Mein Jahr der Ruhe und Entspannung) ★★★ “If you want to read a well written novel about an annoying, rich, entitled, depressed, young woman, this is your book.” (full review here)

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Chain-Gang All-Stars ★★★ “It's like a Madmax ripoff but all characters talk like playing shakespeare, but because ofcourse it wants to be ‘badass’ they also say ‘fuck’ all the time.” (full review here)

Heinz Paetzold - Ernst Cassirer zur Einführung (eng. Introduction to the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer) ★★★ “a short but inaccessible book full of academic jargon that demands a whole set of pre-study, and which never explains its presumptions.” (full review here)

Alexander Pechmann - Die Bibliothek der verlorenen Bücher ★★★ “a tad boring and self-indulgent too to be honest”. (full review here)

Werner Herzog - Die Zukunft der Wahrheit (eng. The Future of Truth) ★★★ “It's ideosyncratic, weird and quirky, just as you'd expect from Herzog, but it also stays a bit underwhelming.” (full review here)

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (dt. Generation Angst) ★★★ "I think Haidt's book is a timely call to action, i largely agree with his analysis, but wish it was more in depth and i think he misses a big piece of the puzzle." (full review here)

Martha Wells - The Murderbot Diaries #1-4 (dt. Tagebuch eines Killerbots) ★★★ “The four stories work well on their own, but as a novel they become very repetitive.” (full review here)

Jack Finney - Die Körperfresser kommen (eng. Invasion of the Body Snatchers) ★★★
”The digital age is a deeply paranoid age, and all the users might be alien plants in the heads of some conspirational 4chan anons.” (full review here)

Naomi Alderman - The Future ★★★ “An entertaining novel let down by an ending that was too simplistic and naive for my taste.” (full review here)

Anders Levermann - Die Faltung der Welt (eng. Folding the World) ★★★
”I pretty much agree with him on most of his points, but all of this is not very new -- he simply uses mathematics as a metaphor for regulation and writes about how the paradigm of "endless growth" can exist in a limited system.” (full review here)

Neal Stephenson - Termination Shock ★★★
”Stephenson has surprising little to say about a climate change that is largely induced by economic ideologies, and simply turns dealing with the consequences into an entertaining scifi thriller.” (full review here)

Eberhard Rathgeb - Die Entdeckung des Selbst: Wie Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und Kierkegaard die Philosophie revolutionierten (eng. Discovery of the Self: How Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard revolutionised Philosophy) ★★★ “A decent dive into thinking of said philosophers in context of the titular development of individualism in Europe during the romantic era.” (full review here)

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Christo (dt. Der Graf von Monte Christo) ★★★ “Oh god this book, i hated it with a gut.” (full review here)

Samuel W. Gailey - Die Schuld (eng. The Guilt We Carry) ★★★
”A good little pulp crime novel that could've been more, but stays within the trodden path of it's story, which isn't a bad thing at all.” (full review here)

Jack Ketchum - Evil ★★★★ “While reading i was constantly shifting from ‘this is an ugly, terrible, mean story that should not be told that way’ to ‘it’s a punch in the stomach and exactly how it wants to be’.” (full review here)

Peter Sloterdijk - Die Reue des Prometheus: Von der Gabe des Feuers zur globalen Brandstiftung (eng. The regrett of Prometheus: From the gift of Fire to global Pyromania) ★★★★ “I'm sucking up some theoretical and philosophical takes on climate change at the moment, and Sloterdijks entry to the "genre" is a good and sometimes great contribution in a field that is just starting to take shape.” (full review here)

Herfried Münkler - Welt in Aufruhr: Die Ordnung der Mächte im 21. Jahrhundert (eng. World in Turmoil: World Orders in the 21st Century) ★★★★
”A good book to read about geopolitics in the 21st century.” (full review here)

Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) (dt. Bedenke Phlebas) ★★★★ “i liked it and loved some of the more weird ideas, but i also don’t get why this is considered such a classic.” (full review here)

Michael Köhlmeier - Das Philosophenschiff (eng. The Ship of Philosophers) ★★★★ “A novel about truth and accounts of historical events, about how minds intertwine fiction and reality to form biographies and do so, in best of cases, with a lot of humor and nonchalance.” (full review here)

Grégory Salle - Superyachten: Luxus und Stille im Kapitalozän ★★★★ “The best sociological study about the penis enlargement industry i've ever read.” (full review here)

Hanno Sauer - Moral: Die Erfindung von Gut und Böse (en. Morals: The Invention of Good and Evil) ★★★★ “Hanno Sauer tries to break down the history of human moral psychology on 350 pages which is not an easy feat. Largely, he succeeds, even when he uses some trickery to get there.” (full review here)

N.K. Jemisin - When We Became Cities (dt. Die Wächterinnen von New York) ★★★★☆ If it weren't for the sometimes lazy fantasy shortcuts and the common young adult dynamics, this may have been a masterpiece. (full review here)

Friederike Otto - Klimaungerechtigkeit: Was die Klimakatastrophe mit Kapitalismus, Rassismus und Sexismus zu tun hat (eng. Climate Injustice: What the climate crisis has to do with capitalism, racism and sexism) ★★★★
”It is clear to me that dire consequences of climate change are already locked in — economic, ecological, not to speak of the disruptions caused by migration and international conflict --, and if that's clear we need a clear analysis of the status quo, to figure how to deal with those consequences in a fair way on a global level. Friederike Ottos short book provides that analysis.” (full review here)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Memory (Children of Time #3, dt. Die Feinde der Zeit) ★★★★ “Can’t do wrong with Tchaikovsky.” (full review here)

Stephen King - You Like It Darker (dt. Ihr wollt es dunkler) ★★★★ “As with all shortstory collection, this is by definition a mixed bag, but you’ll find no bad or boring stories here”. (full review here)

Ned Beauman - Venomous Lumpsucker (dt. Der gemeine Lumpfisch) ★★★★ “I’ve grown a bit suspicious about ‘award winning scifi-books’, but this is a good one.” (full review here)

Dan Jones - Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (dt. Mächte und Throne: Eine neue Geschichte des Mittelalters) ★★★★ “700 page door stopper (sans appendix) telling the history of the middle ages roughly from Byzantium to Luther and the Printing Press.” (full review here)

Liu Cixin - Die Drei Sonnen (eng. The Three-Body Problem) ★★★★
”i expected a bit more from it, given the hype” (full review here)

Guido Tonelli - Matter: The Magnificent Illusion (dt. Die Illusion der Materie: Was die neue Physik über unsere Welt verrät) ★★★★ “I find this literary perspective on hard science extremely insightful, especially because this more poetic style is perfectly apt for a quantum realm that is first and foremost uncertain.” (full review here)

Stanisław Lem - Golem XIV (dt. Also sprach Golem) ★★★★ “The A.I. (…) climbs down from its synthetic ivory tower to lecture us mere humans on their insufficient and futile anthropocentrism.” (full review here)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Eyes of the Void (The Final Architecture #2, dt. Die Augen der Galaxis) ★★★★ “Tchaikovskys novels are hands down the most entertaining scifi around, and that’s quite an achievement.” (full review here)

Michael Tomassello - The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans (dt. Die Evolution des Handelns) ★★★★ “(Tomassellos) theories about the (cultural) evolution of the human mind is a class of its own”. (full review here)

Don Winslow - City on Fire / City of Dreams (Danny Ryan #1&2) ★★★★
”You know you read a good thriller when you have the voice of effing Joe Pesci in your head.” (full review here)

Lauren Groff - The Vaster Wilds (dt. Die weite Wildniss) ★★★★ “Imagine The Revenant minus a bear plus a little girl running endlessly into snowy landscapes.” (full review here)

Armen Avanessian, Daniel Falb - Planeten Denken: Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit (eng. Thinking Planets: Hyper-Anticipation and biographical Deeptime) ★★★★ “Pretty good book written in a pretty understandable non-jargon (and even funny) language about a topic that will accompany us for many many decades to come”. (full review here)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2, dt. Erben der Zeit) ★★★★★ “When you take it's predecessor and add intelligent octopusses plus John Carpenters The Thing, then multiply it with hivemind slime molds, you get this sequel. It's pretty awesome.” (full review here)

Carolin Amwinger, Oliver Nachtwey - Gekränkte Freiheit - Aspekte des libertären Autoritarismus (eng. Freedom Insulted - Aspects of a libertarian Authoritarianism) ★★★★★ “The most lucid analysis of contemporary political developments i’ve read in a long time.” (full review here)

Salman Rushdie - Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (dt. Knife: Gedanken nach einem Mordversuch) ★★★★★ “It's a historical literary document, a tragic story of hardship, and also the diary of a funny guy full of life, and that's all such a book can achive. I have nothing but Respect for Salman Rushdie.” (full review here)

Don Winslow - City in Ruins (Danny Ryan #3) ★★★★★ “I love how much of Winslows action stays implicit, with final sentences of chapters creating whole Scorsese-movies in your head, of splosions and gangsters and heroes killing each other in the night.” (full review here)

Percival Everett - The Trees (dt. Die Bäume) ★★★★★ “This novel is a fantastic dark ghostly crime-pulp allegory on the Black Lives Matter movement and the prevailing racism in the US, and it's a punch in the guts you don't forget easily.” (full review here)

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein ★★★★★ “It's exactly the great classic i expected, and everybody should read Frankenstein at least once.” (full review here)

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting οf Hill House (dt. Spuk in Hill House) ★★★★★ “A brillant classic of horror literature, no less.” (full review here)

Aleida Assmann - Im Dickicht der Zeichen (eng. Semiotic Thickets) ★★★★★ “If you're into symbols and signs, typography and epistemology and you're interested in theoretical takes, the whole body of work from this scholar-couple is highly recommended, and this book is no exception.” (full review here)

Peter Frankopan - The Earth transformed - An untold history (dt. Zwischen Erde und Himmel: Klima - Eine Menschheitsgeschichte) ★★★★★ “A riveting world history retold through the lense of environmental changes and climate which tries to integrate our knowledge about them into history as a foundational layer that was, until now, largely ignored.” (full review here)

Herman Melville - Moby Dick: or, the White Wale (dt. Moby-Dick oder Der Wal) ★★★★★ “I was really surprised by how readable this was and how fast i was able to pace through this mid-19th-century prose, all while being highly innovative (not just) for it’s time.” (full review here)

Percival Everett - James ★★★★★ “I loved that Everett actually had the guts to turn his James into a vigilante hero towards the end, bordering on a pulpy slave revenge story on the last few pages, giving this great postmodern exercise an edge that elevates it above pure literary nerdism.” (full review here)

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Booksbooksbooks 12/24

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 12:45:52 +0100

Stephen King - You Like It Darker (dt. Ihr wollt es dunkler) ★★★★ As with all shortstory collection, this is by definition a mixed bag, but you’ll find no bad or boring stories here and some are pretty great with Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream being a brillant standout about guilt, justice and mob rule featuring one of the best antagonists in recent King stories.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Die Feinde der Zeit (Children of Time #3) ★★★★ Can’t do wrong with Tchaikovsky. I haven’t read an of his fantasy stuff, but his Children of Time aswell as his Shards of Earth-series are sprawling space operas which are dense, sprawling and high-end fun scifi-adventures full of great ideas and action-rich moments. During the first half of this one, however, i thought this would be the first Tchaikovsky i did not like quite as much as the other novels i read. If you know the Children of Time series, you know it’s about terraforming and sped up evolution leading to intelligent spiders in the first, and intelligent squids in the second novel. In this one he adds crows to the mix and tells that story as a fantasy/fairytale story set on a human colony on a hostile planet. Didn’t really work for me (i’m not very into fantasy) until he drops the curtain and nothing is as it seems, fusing the fairytale-in-space with the hard scifi space opera adventures he’s famous for. Pretty good, as always.

Stephen Baxter - The thousand Earths (dt. Die tausend Erden) ★★ I like to read Baxter novels from time to time when i just want a throwaway scifi story that has some sprawling space future whoo whoo images but not much more. Baxter delivers, including stereotypical characters and tired tropes.

Eberhard Rathgeb - Die Entdeckung des Selbst: Die Entdeckung des Selbst: Wie Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und Kierkegaard die Philosophie revolutionierten (eng. Discovery of the Self: How Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard revolutionised Philosophy) ★★★ A decent dive into thinking of said philosophers in context of the titular development of individualism in Europe during the romantic era. The author compares the biographies of those thinkers who all in their own way had to deal with loneliness, leading them — by circumstances, arrogance or sheer stubbornness — to write the classics about how to “become who you are” (Nietsche). (The author then unncecessarily excursions into art history which i’m sure many people might enjoy, but i found it annoying — but that’s just a minor critique for an otherwise pretty decent and enjoyable book.)

Alaina Urquhart - The Butcher and the Wren (dt. Die Jagd) ★★ Cheap thriller fodder from a true crime podcaster and if i knew that last piece of info before purchase, i wouldn’t have bought the book.

Armen Avanessian, Daniel Falb - Planeten Denken: Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit (eng. Thinking Planets: Hyper-Anticipation and biographical Deeptime) ★★★★ Short book introducing planetarism as one of the latest developments in the humanities, a new way of thinking about the impacts of earth systems on sociology and psychology. How does climate change and it’s forceful refocussing of human perspective on timeframes outside of biographical experience transform our thinking? Pretty good book written in a pretty understandable non-jargon (and even funny) language about a topic that will accompany us for many many decades to come.

Stanisław Lem - Golem XIV (dt. Also sprach Golem) ★★★★ One of those fictional books by Stanisław Lem, a fictional documentation of two lectures held by an Artificial Intelligence and an afterword from one of the developing scientists. The A.I. in the book does not become, as governments and researchers hoped for, a brillant military strategist, but a nietzschean philosopher who climbs down from his synthetic ivory tower to lecture us mere humans on their insufficient and futile anthropocentrism. A fun read, if a bit dated.

Michael Tomassello - The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans (dt. Die Evolution des Handelns) ★★★★ Tomassello lays down his theory on the titular evolution of agency, which he develops comparing the psychological features of lizards, squirrels, chimps and humans, all representing different stages of evolution. Over time, he states, evolution developed feedback control systems which are only rudimentary in lizards, but get ever more sophisticated over evolutionary time leading up to the human psyche and consciousness. I consider Tomassello the one evolutionary psychologist who “figured it out”: his theories about the (cultural) evolution of the human mind is a class of its own, and this book is no exception.

Lee Child - Without Fail (dt. Tödliche Absicht, Reacher #6) ★★ / Gone Tomorrow (dt. Underground, Reacher #13) ★★★ / Better Off Dead (with Andrew Child, dt. Der Kojote, Reacher #26) ★★ / Past Tense (dt. Der Spezialist, Reacher #23) ★★★ / Night School (dt. Der Ermittler, Reacher #21) ★★★ — Yeah, I have to admit i’m getting a bit tired of Reacher by now, especially the later ones Lee Child writes together with his brother Andrew and which are just not very good. I still had a good time with most of these and Reacher is still my fallback if i just want some not-dumb entertaining action without subtexts or messaging. I have six novels to go then i read the whole series and i’d consider most of them worth your time, some of the earlier ones are even brillant.

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Christo (dt. Der Graf von Monte Christo) ★★★ Oh god this book, i hated it with a gut. Don't get me wrong: It's a sprawling adventure that may not be very deep, but greatly plotted and featuring some unforgetable imaginary. It absolutely deserves its place within the canon of great adventure literature. But WOW do those dialogues drag along! These people need 20 pages to say "Can you please hand me the water please" or whatever, and unfortunately, the book is full of lengthy dialogue. I mean, ofcourse a novel set in post-revolution france can’t not engulf itself in the complicated aristocratic language with all the “Oh Monseigneur!” and such, but at 1500 pages for the unabriged version this orgy of aristocratic blabber just annoyed the eff out of me. So yeah, i did like it, esspecially the more colorful scenes featuring bandits and caves rebuilt into weird luxury mansions full of dope and imaginary dancers — but i also hated it and it took me half a year to get through it. I'll pass Dumas' Three Musketeers then, i guess.

Martha Wells - The Murderbot Diaries #1-4 (dt. Tagebuch eines Killerbots) ★★★ A collection of Martha Wells’ murderbot novellas marketed in the german edition as a novel. The four stories work well on their own, but as a novel they become very repetitive which combined with the sometimes more cynical takes of its main character can become a kind of annoying read. However, the stories grew on me after the first hald and i warmed up to it. Fun read.

Thomas Metzinger - Bewusstseinskultur: Spiritualität, intellektuelle Redlichkeit und die planetare Krise (eng. Culture of Awareness: Spirituality, intellectual integrity and the planetary crisis) ★★★ Metzinger is a well known neuro philosopher in germany writing a lot about consciousness and the mind and here he lays down his perspectives on the climate crisis, which will lead up to a “panic-point” of awakening, and how humanity can deal with the world after that point. His solution is, basically, a turn inwards: To develop mental skills through meditative practice to become prepared for the unknown. I share his view of a “panic-point”, but i’m not sure if the development of society wide secular spirituality that centers the human mind can help with the very materialist upheavals which are about to come. But it’s an interesting perspective and one which i haven’t read anywhere else in context of climate change.

Claudia Kemfert, Julien Gupta, Manuel Kronenberg - Unlearn CO2 ★★★ A useful if (very) incomplete overview of all the aspects of climate change and the activism necessary to (at least try to) turn this ship around. Activists and climate researchers write in short essays about work, media, desinformation, mobility, fashion, growth, labor or the law and how they relate to climate, how they contribute to carbon emissions and what can be done within those realms. A good book to get a perspective on the many, many fields contributing to the climate crisis, but unfortunately some crucial fields are completely absent, first and foremost the construction sector (we will not fix climate change without scalable solutions for the production of concrete). A bit more scientific depth and rigor would’ve turned this okay-to-good overview into an actually good book, but maybe i’m wrong and this is exactly the right tone to get the overall message across. In this dire situation, i think that anything that helps, helps.

Michael Köhlmeier - Das Philosophenschiff (eng. The Ship of Philosophers) ★★★★ Short novela about the deportation of russian intellectuals on cruise ships during soviet stalinism, a story told by a 100 year old famous architect to an author of fiction. I’m not very much into russian history, but i really liked this novel, especially the centenarian and her wit. It’s actually not a novel about deportation and philosophers or ships, it’s a novel about truth and accounts of historical events, about how minds intertwine fiction and reality to form biographies and do so, in best of cases, with a lot of humor and nonchalance.

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting οf Hill House (dt. Spuk in Hill House) ★★★★★ I loved the 1963 movie of “The Haunting” when i discovered it as a teenager and it stuck with me ever since. The novel is equally brillant, especially Jacksons elaborate style which uses repetition to a great poetic effect giving the developing madness of her main character a spiraling aesthetic that is very tangible, giving you the creeps until the very end. And the final sentence is still sending shivers down my spine: “Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” A brillant classic of horror literature, no less.

Dan Jones - Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (dt. Mächte und Throne: Eine neue Geschichte des Mittelalters) ★★★★ 700 page door stopper (sans appendix) telling the history of the middle ages roughly from Byzantium to Luther and the Printing Press. If you condense 1000 years into 700 pages you have to leave out things, but Jones manages to develop a panoramic view about history in so many aspects from so many regions, from Mongolia and China to the Americas and medieval Europe that this book feels, if not complete, at least satisfyingly rich and sprawling. A great history book in the same vein as Robin Lane Fox’ The Classical World.

Guido Tonelli - Matter: The Magnificent Illusion (dt. Die Illusion der Materie: Was die neue Physik über unsere Welt verrät) ★★★★ Tonelli is a italian researcher working at the LHC in CERN and worked on the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. In this books he retells the evolution of the science of matter, from the first atomists in antic greece to Newton and the discovery of quantum mechanics. I’m not sure what’s about italian physicists being great writers, but after Carlo Rovelli this is the second italian scientists writing about science in great literary style, sometimes poetically even. Tonelli stays more on subject than Rovelli, but in both cases i find this literary perspective on hard science extremely insightful, especially because this more poetic style is perfectly apt for a quantum realm that is first and foremost uncertain, making books by these authors a perfect fit.

Carolin Amwinger, Oliver Nachtwey - Gekränkte Freiheit - Aspekte des libertären Autoritarismus (eng. Freedom Insulted - Aspects of a libertarian Authoritarianism) ★★★★★ The most lucid analysis of contemporary political developments i’ve read in a long time. The authors claim that neoliberalism and austerity politics in the past 50 years created a society in which everybody is free, but freedom has turned from being a public good into a more or less commodified good which you can only achieve through economic success. This results in a manifold increase of “insults to individual freedoms” when people figure out that, despite personal efforts during education and their carreers, they will not make it to the top. Then those people explain this failure not by the complexities of modern societies (which are too complex and advanced for anyone to fully understand anyways), but with conspiracy beliefs, a rightwing turn and plain old racism. The authors then go on to explain modern populist phenomena through this analytical lense, from MAGA to the french yellow jackets to the german “Querdenker” (“diagonal thinkers”) which (often) can’t be nicely aligned with the standard rightwing-leftwing-model. The authors also claim that these phenomena are here to stay, last but not least due to capitalist realism (Mark Fisher) which makes us unable to even consider alternative models of a just society. I pretty much subscribe to all of this. (And, while this is an academic book about a sociological study, it is also very accessible and comparably low on academic jargon, which is a plus.)

Tom Rob Smith - Cold People (dt. Kälte) ★ (did not finish) Ugh. This book is all exposition while storytelling and plot are so lame it baffles me how anyone can read this and not think what a stinker. Filling half a scifi thriller with exposition is boring enough to throw this out, but the author also has no interest in his characters, which are "fleshed out" in three-to-four page backstory vignettes, and they are just one stereotype after the other. The worst: When there actually is some plot happening it is just one clichéd trope after the other and is written in a pseudo-epic kitschy tone. When the teen ice mutant daughter then froze her mothers tears with her fingertip i threw the book away. Waste of time.

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Why Bluesky feels right

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 12:39:07 +0100

I might get back into the game and post more regular in this newsletter, but meanwhile here’s some words about the latest social media hype and why it feels just about right.

So, you’ve heard about that Bluesky hype going on and that users fled Musks TwiX after the Trump election. Bluesky has now overtaken Threads in daily active use, all while Musk rebuilt the former birdsite into a Trump-gov propaganda rightwing hive, Threads wants to be a stale, non-vibrant place for mainstream-compatible influencers and Mastodon insists of being the PGP of social networking. Threads has ten times the users of Bluesky but the bulk of that users are simply converted Instagram accounts which are not very active on the platform, while Bluesky has “the juice”.

I’m very much on board of the hype train — I’m here, say hello! — and the last 7 days on the site were pretty exciting, not least due to some pretty nifty technological innovations in the microblogging space, and one of them in particular.

See, you can build so called Starter Packs on Bluesky, basically lists of users you can follow with one click. I consider those Starter Packs a killer feature exploiting network effects in the best way possible: Those lists are human curated "parasocial" connection-bundles based on expertise and "belonging to a field of interest" and I found so, so many interesting accounts in those, they are invaluable. Imagine Twitter-lists with a follow button, curated by people whose expertise you can (often) trust.

It’s also kind of sad and revealing that the hottest socmed features in the year 2024 are human curation, outward linking and collaborative filtering. You get a sense of how much damage has been done to technological innovation and human centered design not just in the past 10 years for the sake of the exploitation of a media environment that selects for emotionality and outrage, not expertise and interest. Bluesky feels like a breath of “fresh air” in that context, albeit that air being actually more than 20 years old by now — or, as Brian Merchant put it: “Bluesky's success is a rejection of big tech's operating system”. Yes.

And let’s not to forget that Bluesky does not punish external links like many other sites. Someone smarter than me once said that the best sites on the web are those that send you away, pointing at stuff that is interesting. That’s what the web is: A collection of documents interwoven with pointers and links. Many of the social web behemoths from the past decade layered themselves on top of that fabric like parasites, and destroyed much of human conversation in the process. It’s good that the relevance of huge platforms is fading and that there seems to be a race for a “new open web”, which Bluesky doesn’t have to “win” to be successful — they just have to integrate.

It’s not all sunshine in a blue sky though. Dave Troy has a pretty enlightening thread about the funding of the platform and some of it seems shady blockchain stuff with connections to people like Steve Bannon, Troy going as far as saying that “this all points to another rug pull in progress, and a lot of credulous people hurt”.

We’ll see how all of this goes, but for now i’m willing to ignore some of the criticism and ride along, and if only to enjoy the feels of a human centered socmed platform again for a while.

Anyways, here’s a list of packs, tools and docs i found useful)

Here’s a directory of all circa 70000 Starter Packs available on the platform
I followed a lot of people from
Here’s a Bluesky quick start guide featuring a big list of Starter Packs
Collection of tools to convert packs into lists and vice versa, to merge packs and more.
Feedbuilder for custom feeds
I don’t use blocklists, but german users might find these useful.
Sill.social collects the most posted Links from your connections. Like Nuzzel for Twitter back then.
Bluesky Network Analyzer finds “people followed by lots of the people you follow (but not you)”.
Andy Baio curating some fun Bluesky toys in a thread

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Booksbooksbooks 09/24

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 11:47:11 +0200

Ned Beauman - Venomous Lumpsucker (dt. Der gemeine Lumpfisch) ★★★★ I’ve grown a bit suspicious about “award winning scifi-books”, but this is a good one. Beauman sets his story in a world where corporations can buy extinction certificates, say, if their mining operation kills of the last population of some rare fish. From here he throws in all kinds of weird ideas but which are not too far off to sound impossible. The book has some clever prose and wit, but i couldn’t shake the feeling of being a tad put off by the more cynical stances of the main characters.

Lauren Groff - The Vaster Wilds (dt. Die weite Wildniss) ★★★★ Great book about a girl running away from an early settlement in 17th century America, told in poetic prose telling it’s story about hunger, cold, loneliness, dreams and hope and survival like a fever dream. Imagine The Revenant minus a bear plus a little girl running endlessly into snowy landscapes.

Alexander Pechmann - Die Bibliothek der verlorenen Bücher ★★★ Neat collection of short essays on lost books and texts which have never been written. A great idea that surely works well for widely read literature nerds, but a tad boring and self-indulgent too to be honest.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Eyes of the Void (The Final Architecture #2) (dt. Die Augen der Galaxis) ★★★★ Tchaikovsky writes the best space operas these days. Dense Infodumps followed by action rich space scenery in which whole planets get worked up by giant moon sized alien overlords manipulating matter into sculptural dead artifacts. The only criticism for me is that there is not much subtext here — the book says not much about the world we, the readers, live in. But Tchaikovskys novels are hands down the most entertaining scifi around, and that’s quite an achievement.

Frank Herbert - Dune Messiah (Dune #2) (dt. Der Herr des Wüstenplaneten) ★★★ Given the monumental and effing weird first Dune novel, i have to admit i was disappointed reading this second entry in the series. The book often feels like an add-on, some explainer making way for the rest of the series. I haven’t read Children of Dune yet, but i’ve heard that Messiah is supposed to be like this and Children is a return to form. Let’s see when i’m in the mood to return to Arakis after this mediocre epilogue.

Grégory Salle - Superyachten: Luxus und Stille im Kapitalozän ★★★★ A french sociologists meditation superyachts and their absurdity, given the political, economical and environmental realities in “late stage capitalism”. I’m a social-democratic capitalist and i think some people earn to be rich, but it’s simply obscene to own a boat that’s as large as 2 football fields and merely serves a hedonist display of power. The best sociological study about the penis enlargement industry i've ever read.

Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) (dt. Bedenke Phlebas) ★★★★ Maybe the first novel i read where the appendix is more interesting than the story. Its a nice plot, but its a pretty off the shelves sprawling and entertaining space opera, and the ending drags quite a lot (200 pages where people and aliens run around in an underground train complex to find an AI, and it goes on and on and on and on and on, which is quite a contrast to the first fast paced half). The appendix finally explains how the Culture relates politically to AI, albeit its only a few pages, then going on to explain other things and all that stuff is a bit irrelevant for the novel itself. Don’t get me wrong, i liked it and loved some of the more weird ideas, but i also don’t get why this is considered such a classic. A good novel, but not as groundbreaking as the praise wants to make me believe.

Fabio Stassi - Die Seele aller Zufälle (Vince Corso #2) ★★★ Vince Corso is a bibliotherapist (using book suggestions to help his clients with various unpleasantries and his latest adventure sends him on a detective story about a deceased dementia patient using his library as a mnemonic device. This sounded great when i read the blurb and it sounds great when you summarize it, but it also was a bit of a bore and one of those books that is just too playful, too quirky, too self-absorbed for my taste. I think i’m very much done with “books about the love of books”.

Herman Melville - Moby Dick: or, the White Wale (dt. Moby-Dick oder Der Wal) ★★★★★ Moby Dick blew me away on quite a few levels i did not expect. I was really surprised by how readable this was and how fast i was able to pace through this mid-19th-century prose, all while being highly innovative (not just) for it’s time. The plot we all came to know — Ahab hunting the wale —, makes half of the book at max, maybe even less. The rest of the book are essays and musings on pretty much everything related to wale hunting: The ships, economics, ropes, planks, occupations and, ofcourse, the animal itself, it’s evolution and anatomy and character too. This makes this not just a highly entertaining read, but also a wild ride through all kinds of styles. Moby Dick truly deserves to be considered the classic that it is.

Lee Child - Worth Dying For (dt. Wespennest) / A Wanted Man (dt. Der Anhalter) (Jack Reacher #15 / #17) ★★★ There are two Reacher novels: In the first Reacher hitchhikes into some town and stumbles upon trouble, in the other some government agents need help. Pretty much all books follow one of these lines. I’ve read 14 Reachers and while these two lack any surprises at this point (WDF follows the first, AWM the second line), they are solid, suspenseful and entertaining entries in the series featuring some explosive punches along the way. Which is exactly what you want from a Reacher-book.

Jack Ketchum - Evil ★★★★ Ketchum’s Evil is a mean entry in the literary equivalent of torture porn, it’s an uncomfortable read and it lacks the ironic contrasting that made American Psycho such a classic. While reading i was constantly shifting from “this is an ugly, terrible, mean story that should not be told that way” to “it’s a punch in the stomach and exactly how it wants to be”. Sure, this thing sticks with you for a few days after reading, and the prose and style are highly effective in putting you in a very bad place for two weeks or so. But, lets say, this will be my only “sick and disturbing thriller” for this year. I’m good with this stuff for a while.

Percival Everett - James ★★★★★ Percival Everett tackles one of my favorite literary classics and tells the story of Jim, the slave of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, in this version, is a recurring character who enters a scenes, sticks around for a while going on an adventure and then leaves again, making place for James musings about his fate as man whose grand parents where violently taken in his home country, to be abused and tortured and forced to manual labor for dumb sacks in the “new world”. I loved that Everett actually had the guts to turn his James into a vigilante hero towards the end, bordering on a pulpy slave revenge story on the last few pages, giving this great postmodern exercise an edge that elevates it above pure literary nerdism.

Johan Huizinga - Homo Ludens. A study of the Play-Element in Culture (dt. Homo Ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel.) ★★★ At 80 year old, this classic of cultural studies feels a bit dated. Sure, Huizingas book is a good, very interesting read about the elements of play in human cultures throughout history, but he’s also cherry picking his examples to fit history to his theory of play being the very basis of culture itself. It’s a highly interesting thesis which seems very suitable to the gamification of discourse we can see on social media these days with tons of implications for psychology and politics, but, all things considered, i’m not sure if his thesis holds up under scrutiny in a more historical context. Still, a good classic worth a read.

Johanna Sebauer - Nincshof ★★★ Lovely, quirky little story about a small town (more like a bunch of houses, actually) in Austria, where a handful of people start a movement to make the town forgotten by anyone else. It’s a weird story idea and i loved reading it, but the book and characters also show the aesthetics of a german TV-movie playing in the alps and it never really tries to escape that. The moments where the village conspiracists get into philosophy and muse about theories of absence and how to achieve willful collective memory holes are too rare, unfortunately. A good book that could’ve been much more.

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Fri, 21 Jun 2024 10:50:03 +0200

About ten years ago, back in 2015, all 195 countries of the world signed the Paris Agreement, in which the nations agreed to limit global warming due to anthropogenic climate change to "well below" 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to make efforts to keep it below 1.5°C. These agreed limits were aimed for the year 2100, two or three generations in the future, around 75 years from now.

In June, NASA reported that all of the last 12 months had set temperature records, and 11 of them surpassed the 1.5°C mark. The average global temperature from June 2023 to May 2024 was 1.63°C above the pre-industrial level. Today, mind you — not as foreseen by politics and climate science at some point in the future in the year 2100.

The IPCC calculates the relevant global average temperature, which the Paris Agreement is based on, using a 20-year average; with the drawback that it only becomes definitively known after 10 years whether and when we reach and exceed certain values and limits. However, there are statistical alternatives that give more weight to values closer in time, allowing us to make meaningful statements today about whether and when certain values will be reached.

Carbon Brief has applied such alternative statistical methods to global temperature values from different datasets and calculated when we will approximately reach and exceed the non-binding global warming limits of the Paris Agreement.

Spoiler alert: It is not in the year 2100, nor a few years before that:

(Our) approach suggests that the world will pass 1.5C around the year 2030 (representing the 50th percentile, or central estimate, of all the model runs), with a range of anywhere from 2028 (5th percentile) up to 2036 (95th percentile).
Similarly, the world will pass 2C around the year 2048, with a range of 2040 to 2062 across all models assessed.

To be clear: The global limits targeted in the Paris Agreement will be reached in about 10 and 25 years respectively according to this statistical method, not in 75 years. And ofcourse: We can go way above those limits, easily, just give it enough time.

At the same time, a report by consulting firms KPMG and Kearney finds another record consumption of fossil fuel energy in 2023, which rose by 1.5% from the previous year's level. On track.

Meanwhile, climate policy worldwide is being weakened, conservative politicians pretend to be clueless in the face of flood disasters, and climate activists end up in jail for trivial offenses and civil disobedience. In Mecca, over 1,000 people die during the Hajj, where temperatures have been over 50°C for days, U.S. cities like Phoenix and New Orleans reach life-threatening temperatures despite prevailing air conditioning, and New Delhi sets a new temperature record for India at 52.3°C degrees — with over 100 deaths so far. These are just some few headlines from the past days, i have an extreme weather markdown file containing dozens of them for this year alone. A UN survey of 75,000 participants from 77 countries found that concern about climate change has "never been greater."

When, ten years ago, we as a global community (of course completely non-bindingly) agreed to limit global warming due to human-caused climate change to 2/1.5°C by 2100 and to do everything possible to achieve it, the well-known climatologist and former NASA scientist James Hansen, who in 1988 was the first to warn the US Congress about the consequences of unchecked climate change, said the agreement was "a fraud, really," it was "bullshit" and "worthless words."

There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.

And as long as that is the case, we will set new temperature records every year, revise statistical projections, and mourn further fatalities. Nobody seen this coming.

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Booksbooksbooks 05/2024

Mon, 27 May 2024 13:21:58 +0200

Peter Frankopan - The Earth transformed - An untold history (dt. Zwischen Erde und Himmel: Klima - Eine Menschheitsgeschichte) ★★★★★ A riveting world history retold through the lense of environmental changes and climate which tries to integrate our knowledge about them into history as a foundational layer that was, until now, largely ignored. Frankopan largely succeeds with this reevaluation of history, and manages to fuse a world history that takes history of (mostly) Africa, South America and China into account with a history of human extractivism and exploitation of nature. Despite being a whopping 900 page tomb, it's accessible and it unfolds like the famous hockey stick graph: We get hundreds of interesting pages about the ever increasing exploitation of nature, accompanied by historic episodes of climate change and their impact on human economies throughout world history, only to be presented with an explosion of pollution and extraction after the start of industrialization, which culminates in the sheer suicidal trajectory of the last 50 years under neoliberal ideology: Half of all fossil fuels were burned after the last episode of Seinfeld, and the book makes it crystal clear that the consequences will be dire for everyone, but mostly for those who're already exploited and historically oppressed in the global south. My climate change thinking for a long time now goes along the lines that after 2030/40ish, that the unforeseen (and foreseen) consequences of atmospheric and environmental pollution will be so dire, there will be no other topic of relevance. This book confirms this view a good deal.

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - Crooked River (dt. Ocean - Insel des Grauens) ★★ Likely my first and last Pendergast novel as i don't like Pendergast very much. I have a soft spot for the objectively not-so-good 90s monster-thriller The Relic, the movie adaption of the first book in the series, but never bothered to read any of it, and now i did. I don't like the pretentious "gentleman-intellectual quirky detective who is also superman and good with guns and fighting and speaks in latin sometimes and is funny too and who's also Sherlock Holmes and he's reckless and sticks it to the man" schtick of this, and i don't like the supposedly mysterious female sidekick with violet eyes who is also Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell but also vulnerable and who is also an all-competent assassin and so forth. The pulpy action at the ending is entertaining, but doesn't go well with those characters for me, and it doesn't mix with the pretty standard detective procedure novel that makes up a large parts of the book. On top of that, the german title and blurb suggest some monster from the deep sea thriller which this is decidedly not. As this is one of the newer novels in this long running series, i might give Pendergast another try from one of his first adventures, but not anytime soon.

Anthony Ryan - Red River Seven (dt. Ein Fluss so rot und schwarz) ★★ I was in the mood for some postapocalyptic pulp and this so-so delivered but not in a very good way. People on a boat wake up with amnesia and they have to figure out who they are and why they are there, they find some phone and some voice tells them what to do. Turns out, they got their memories whiped out, traveling along River Thames through a London full of plant-mutant-monsters, and remembering things triggers the mutation. The book is full of weirdly bad written moments, for instance, when one of them mutates because she remembered some stuff, but not her name, she also claims that she hated her name anyways, which is weird when you don't know your name. The book makes this kind of stuff constantly. It's a somewhat entertaining novel, an amalgam of 28 Days Later and The Girl with all the gifts, but plotholes and inconsistent logic turned me off, besides the clichéd plot and characters.

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (dt. Generation Angst) ★★★ I wrote a lengthy review of Haidts book and the gist was that "I think Haidt's book is a timely call to action, i largely agree with his analysis, but wish it was more in depth and i think he misses a big piece of the puzzle."

Lee Child - Persuader (Reacher #4) (dt. Der Janusmann) ★★★ The 12th Reacher i've read, Persuader will be the source material for the upcoming third season of the (quite good) series adaption. Reacher is working unofficially with the DEA to infiltrate a criminal operation by staging the kidnapping and rescue of the son of a gangster. Reacher becomes a trusted bodyguard, while trying to get a stab at a guy who ten years ago brutally murdered Reacher's colleague. All Reacher ingredients are there, it's suspenseful and sometimes clever, and i just like the character and his stoic approach to everything. It's just that Childs simple prose just can't elevate the material to something more than "clever pulp". Which is just fine.

Lee Child - 61 Hours (Reacher #14) (dt. 61 Stunden) ★★★ The 13th Reacher for me, and another good one: After a bus accident, Reacher strands in freezing South Dakota, where the witness of a crime is threatened by corrupt cops and gangster bosses closing in on an epic meth deal for the ages. Another good Reacher that, while being rather low on high octane action, is well put together with some fresh stylistic manorisms of Child, but comes with a botched ending. Spoilers now, i guess. Look, dude, you just can't show your hero trying to escape an imminent giant kerosine fireball of epic proportions and then simply fade away. We all know he made it, Child wrote more Reacher-novels after all. But this is like that music joke where someone plays a piece of music except for the final note and then can't sleep until he hits that note on the piano, completing the unfinished composition -- and this is an unfinished novel. It's a noob mistake, and a stupid one at that. I still enjoyed the book, but come on.

Werner Herzog - Die Zukunft der Wahrheit (eng. The Future of Truth) ★★★ A short meandering essay about the state of truth, which we can't know or perceive anyway. Herzog tells anecdotes and poetic historical vignettes, draws a rough sketch of what he terms "extatic truth", in which art and epistemology come together to make you feel or experience truth instead of perceiving it. Unfortunately, it stays a bit shallow and doesn't dive deep into its subject, which ofcourse is owed to the short form of only 107 pages. It's ideosyncratic, weird and quirky, just as you'd expect from Herzog, but it also stays a bit underwhelming compared to the oevre of its author, and the bits about tech, AI and deepfakes are not very well researched, if you know the topic.

Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation (dt. Mein Jahr der Ruhe und Entspannung) ★★★ If you want to read a well written novel about an annoying, rich, entitled, depressed, young woman, this is your book. I liked the prose, but expected some more meditations on, well, meditation and introspection. Instead, we get a woman hoarding pills and psychopharmaca, constantly complaining about everything and everybody, except her looks, and an ending you can see coming from a mile away. Still, i liked the prose and somewhat connected to the entitled little prick, so, job done, but not much more.

Peter Sloterdijk - Die Reue des Prometheus: Von der Gabe des Feuers zur globalen Brandstiftung (eng. The regrett of Prometheus: From the gift of Fire to global Pyromania) ★★★★ German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk lays down a theory of climate change, based on marxist materialism, going from the prehistoric discovery of fire to its many applications in combination with exploitative forms of labor (slavery, industrialization), ultimately demanding an "energetic pacifism" and the formation of a global "firefighter brigade". I'm sucking up some theoretical and philosophical takes on climate change at the moment, and Sloterdijks entry to the "genre" is a good and sometimes great contribution in a field that is just starting to take shape, from fictional visions in solarpunk-novels to theoretical approaches like particle-based economics of materialist transformation and the terrestrialism of Bruno Latour. As i said above about Peter Frankopans climatic world history: I expect this stuff to be the only topic of relevance within a few decades, simply because we must.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Chain-Gang All-Stars ★★★ I'm a sucker for those old 70s italian postapocalyptic future gladiator movies full of deadly gladiator fights between inmates in the future and great, i thought, and bought this blind, expecting, well, some good scifi action with some critical undertones about the US-prison system. But while we do get all this, the book is also full of flat characters who all talk the same and act the same, it's basically just people talking and gladiator fights, and all of this in a pretentious prose that wants to tell its minimal plot with epic pathos, using even biblical language. It's like a Madmax ripoff but all characters talk like playing shakespear, but because ofcourse it wants to be "badass" they also say "fuck" all the time. This makes it sounds worse than it is and the action is entertaining (but not great), but the social critique stays shallow and the prose comes around as sometimes cool, sometimes annoying. Meh, as they say.

Aleida Assmann - Im Dickicht der Zeichen (eng. Semiotic Thickets) ★★★★★ Aleida Assmann is a reknowned cultural scholar best known for her work on semiotics and cultural memory together with her late husband Jan Assmann (about whom i wrote recently in Cultural Memory in the Digital). In Im Dickicht der Zeichen (which translate to something like Semiotic Thickets), she collects some essays into one book about various forms of "natural semiotics", that is: Reading and seeing symbols within nature, and the historical transformations of epistemology, of what we know, how we know it, and where we get it from. It goes into basic semiotics, structures of signage, hieroglyphs and their various interpretations throughout philosophical history and more esoteric examples like silent movies. The book, while being very demanding and deep, is not a very complicated read and stays accessible for a non-academic like me, which is something i admire in academic writers. If you're into symbols and signs, typography and epistemology and you're interested in theoretical takes, the whole body of work from this scholar-couple is highly recommended, and this book is no exception.

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein ★★★★★ I finally read the orginal Frank, and it was just as great as i expected it to be. Most interesting to me as a huge fan of the old Universal Monster Movies and the original Frankenstein and Frankensteins Bride were the differences ofcourse, of which there are plenty. After reading the novel it becomes clear just how much the screenwriters added, changed and shuffled the original material, sometimes making an improvement while adapting it for the screen -- the famous scene where the monster throws the girl in a lake is not in the book, where we get the murder of a boy leading to a court scene with very different dynamics and outcomes. The book puts more emphasis on entangled fate which neither creator or creation can escape, and the consequences of guilt for everyone involved. I loved the prose and structure, the composition of a retold story which is sandwiched by chasing scenes in the arctic, and it's ambivalent message about scientific progress stays timely. It's exactly the great classic i expected, and everybody should read Frankenstein at least once.

Salman Rushdie - Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (dt. Knife: Gedanken nach einem Mordversuch) ★★★★★ When Rushdie was attacked two years ago, it shocked and surprised me a good deal. I never read Satanic Verses and while i tried to read other Rushdies, i can't really get into his ornamental, colorful, fractured prose, which is okay. But i just like the guy, having seen plenty of him on talkshows like Bill Maher, and he's just a great, cool, sympathetic figure to me. Then there comes an asshole, accordingly named "asshole" in the book, and puts a knife in his eye and the book is Rushdies way of dealing with that. He does that with a ton of humor, but also with unforgiving sharpness, analyzing the islamofascist wannabe-murderer as the humorless unfucked prick that he is, and not wasting too much time on the guy because, after all, he's just not that interesting. Instead, Rushdie tells us a lot about his late life love for his wife, how they met and how his family and friends all dealt with the situation, how he healed and thankfully, humourously, simultaneously does and doesn't spare us from some of the more painfully embarassing medical procedures. It's a historical literary document, a tragic story of hardship, and also the diary of a funny guy full of life, and that's all such a book can achive. I have nothing but Respect for Salman Rushdie.

Don Winslow - City in Ruins (Danny Ryan #3) ★★★★★ I friggin love Winslows Danny Ryan-saga, with this last entry bringing this gangster epic to a more than satisfying conclusion. I already loved the first two books, and this one just brings it home. I love his prose, that is both barebones and detailed, his realistic dialogue that makes character come to life, and his kickass style of composing action in a highly suspenseful cross-cutting technique. I love Winslows intuitive sense for suspense and revealing moments, and how he manages to draw characters you care about, even the smallest, not at all important minor guy. I love how much of Winslows action stays implicit, with final sentences of chapters creating whole Scorsese-movies in your head, of splosions and gangsters and heroes killing each other in the night. I already have two more Winslow-novels on my stack (The Winter of Frankie Machine and The Power of the Dog) and i can't wait to read them. This is fantastic Thriller-entertainment at it's finest and the literary equivalent of Martin Scorsese.

Heinz Paetzold - Ernst Cassirer zur Einführung (eng. Introduction to the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer) ★★★ I wanted an accessible non-academic book about Ernst Cassirer and his philosophy of the symbolic form, and the blurb says this is an accessible introduction to that, and i got a short but inaccessible book full of academic jargon that demands a whole set of pre-study, and which never explains its presumptions. It's useful, and if you put in the work and follow the mentioned literature, i bet you can get a good overview of Cassirers thinking out of this, but this is not the book with which i was able to do that.

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38.000.000.000.000

Fri, 24 May 2024 14:07:02 +0200

Politicians burning $38.000.000.000.000 dollars in parliament. // Dall-E 3

A new paper by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has calculated the economic damages due to global warming by the year 2050, which are already "locked in" by current emission targets. These damages are certain to affect societies worldwide in the next 26 years.

The total amounts to 19% of the global economy, or 38 trillion US dollars. That is the number 38 followed by 12 zeros, or 38 thousand billions, or 38 million millions. In a monospaced sans serif font set in bold, the number looks like this:

38,000,000,000,000

That’s a very big number. For comparison, the complete economy of the US in the year 2023 was worth $27.36 trillion dollars, that’s roughly 10 trillion bucks less than the economic damages locked in for the next 26 years. Locked in, dare i say, by the supposedly fiscal conservative parties and their followers.

The calculations and results in the paper are considered conservative and they primarily include damages from warming, increased rainfall, and temperature fluctuations, while extreme weather events like storms or wildfires are harder to statistically model. The calculations also account for adaptations to extreme weather by countries and companies, noting that poorer nations will have less capacity for such adaptations. Africa and South Asia are the most affected regions in terms of projected value destruction, but the effects will be global, impacting the economic output of all countries. This means, we are facing a long-term, climate-change-induced recession of the entire world economy.

According to the study, the projected damages already exceed the investments needed to limit global warming to a maximum of 2°C, as stipulated by the (non-legally binding) Paris Agreement. The projected damages increase by another 50% when "further climatic components" are included.

Another recent paper found that economic damages from climate change to be “six times worse than thought”, which, i’m sure, will be a sweet nightmare lullaby to any insurance company exec. This is the world we are leaving to our children — social upheavals and political conflicts not accounted for.

Ten years ago, a study found that the externalized costs of all industrial sectors amounted to a staggering 7.3 trillion dollars per year — a 7 followed by 12 zeros —and that none of the sectors would be profitable if these costs from greenhouse gas emissions or water, air, and land pollution were included.

Meanwhile, the same forces that knowingly drive the entire world (not just economically) to the brink are engaging in disinformation campaigns to prevent even the most necessary adaptation initiatives and who, in concerted efforts, continue to criminalize climate activism and drag kids to court who dare to speak up.

A few days ago, a Berlin prosecutor filed charges against activists from the Last Generation, including on suspicion of "forming a criminal organization". In doing so, the public prosecutor's office is not only becoming a mouthpiece for the conservative think tank network Atlas, which specifically lobbies against inconvenient climate policies and has influenced politicians for years, including Bundestag member Frank Schäffler from the economic liberal FDP-party. Besides his role in the Bundestag, Schäffler is also the Managing Director of the Prometheus think tank, which is part of said Atlas Network. Schäffler was one of the most prominent conservative voices who, at the start of the Last Generation protests, spoke of them in terms of "terrorism" and "criminal organization", language that was eagerly picked up and established by conservative media outlets like Springers newspaper Welt and the Bild tabloid.

This choice of words by so-called representatives of the people and conservative media, it should be noted, is directed at a protest organization explicitly dedicated to climate protection, which was elevated to constitutional status in 2021 by a decision of the Federal Constitutional Court. The Berlin prosecutor's office has now allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for conservative think tanks and mass-media-propagated memes of right-wing politicians to criminalize young people organizing resistance against policies that violate fundamental civil rights, legitimized by the Constitutional Court. So far, so bad.

In a commentary on the 75th anniversary of the german constitution, the largest public broadcast service ARD now reflects on the idea of a fundamental right to climate protection and whether granting rights for subjects of nature (such as rivers, forests, animals, and even the atmosphere) in the constitution would be helpful.

I am unsure if new legal entities for nature are helpful for climate protection. Skeptical voices in the article rightly point out that natural entities cannot assert or claim their rights; human administrators would always be needed to manage these rights. I also think that the "intergenerational justice" emphasized by the german constitutional court is entirely sufficient to ensure the protection of natural entities within the framework of existing boundaries and limits. According to the 2021 decision, climate protection is justiciable and part of fundamental rights protection, and that is that.

Nevertheless, according to lawyer Roda Verheyen, who won the climate ruling at the highest constitutional court, this jurisprudence has "not yet arrived in the decision-making reality of german courts", even though "the constitutional mandate for climate protection requires and presupposes radical transformations".

I am very confident that the Berlin prosecutor's office had more in mind the outraged Frank Schäffler and his tweets suggested by the Atlas Network, rather than the climate ruling of the constitutional court and the resulting ecological fundamental rights, when filing charges.

In light of the increasing criminalization of young people who engage in civil disobedience to fight for the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutional court and who are insulted and spat upon by people memed by right-wing think tanks, I have a simple question to the Berlin prosecutor's office:

Who’s gonna pay those 38.000.000.000.000 dollars in economic loss — a very big number with 12 zeros —, and the damages done to criminalized kids who are holding up the constitution, and where can we file them?

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OpenAIs mimetic Masks

Tue, 21 May 2024 11:40:05 +0200

Last week, OpenAI presented the latest update of ChatGPT: the chatbot can now "speak" and "converse" with users in various voices, complete with "human" filler words ("um", "uh", etc.), pauses, simulated breathing, laughter, and giggles. This new version of the chatbot sounded exactly like Scarlett Johansson, who voiced an AI about 10 years ago for Spike Jonze's film "Her," a melancholic character study about the consequences of emotional attachments to AI systems. During the presentation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a single word: "Her."

Today, Scarlett Johansson released a statement announcing legal action, and OpenAI subsequently removed the "Sky" voice option from ChatGPT. It’s all a misunderstanding and that the resemblance to Scarlett Johansson's voice was unintentional. Sure thing. As Johansson's statement reveals, OpenAI and the actress had been in negotiations for months, and just two days before the presentation, Altman tried to persuade the actress to lend her voice to his "Her" version. Johansson refused, and OpenAI still used a voice that was extremely similar to hers.

OpenAI using the voice of maybe the most famous actress in the world who also portraied the voice of an AI in a (misunderstood) movie about AI is not a coincidence.

In a recent piece at Aeon, Bryan Norton wrote about the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, who differentiated the terms "technics" and "technology" to show how our fascination with the surface of technology — the shiny gadgets, the colorful interfaces, the sleek designs, and today: the seductive synthesized voices of famous actresses — obscures our actual relationship to the tools and their true impact on us as humans in a societal social fabric.

Stiegler developed the concept of "pharmacology", according to which new media technologies affect us similarly to pharmaceuticals, potentially having both beneficial and harmful effects. Stiegler's notion of technics points to these "pharmaceutical" effects of technology: the "side effects" that lie beneath the surface of interfaces and mere application results.

Sam Altman gave the latest version of ChatGPT the voice of a famous actress with the explicit goal of realizing the fictional chatbot from Spike Jonze's film. The question now is, in Stiegler's terms, what "pharmacological" effects lurk behind this Scarlett Johansson interface. Two things come to mind.

Firstly, a recent study confirmed the psychoactive effect of AI chatbots: an experiment with over 2000 conspiracy theory believers showed that a conversation with a chatbot could reduce their beliefs by about 20%. This sounds great first, but it essentially means that, yes, indeed: a chatbot can influence people to change fundamental attitudes. AI systems are actually persuasive apparently — and using the familiar voice of Scarlett Johansson creates a direct connection between the auditory, now also Hollywood-glamorous interface surface of ChatGPT technology, and the seductive power of the speech-simulating technics beneath.

(This is why I signed the open moratorium letter a year ago: I don’t care much about alleged AI doomsday scenarios. But the seductive power of mimetic and anthropomorphic AI systems, which suggest that there’s “personality” behind simulated language, and the unpredictable psychological consequences if these "personalities" lead to a synthetic theory of mind, where AI systems occupy a real and effective place as "social actors" in our minds — this worries me more than any robotic paperclip-juggling AI. Another similar example would be the psychoactive effect of romantic chatbots, which fulfill all our desires on command, potentially creating unpredictable and unfulfillable expectations in real human relationships.)

By (non-consensually) using the voices of famous actresses and making them emphatically "human" (with filler words and ohs and ahs and giggles), OpenAI is deliberately trying to get "under the skin" of its users (to quote the title of another film starring Scarlett Johansson). With this AI-mimetic seduction tactic, OpenAI obscures both the psychoactive effect of its product and the fact that we pay dearly for this synthetic seduction-by-chatbot in the form of gigantic carbon footprints and a water consumption from data centers that increased by 30% for Microsoft in 2022 alone.

These are just some of the possible and actual effects of ChatGPT's technics, which OpenAI's techno-mimetic masks are already obscuring today. More will follow.

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Booksbooksbooks 04/2024

Sat, 18 May 2024 14:04:29 +0200

Silvia Ferrara - Der Sprung: Eine Reise zu den Anfängen des Denkens in der Steinzeit (eng. The Jump: A trip to the beginnings of thinking in the stone age) ★★
Ferrara tries to answer the question, why early humans painted cave walls 50000 years ago, and she tries to do that by analyzing the paintings themselves. An art analytical take on an unanswerable question, and theories are legion, just as the likely correct answers (some where painted as ritualistic shamanic stuff, others for fun, others as an exercise, others as a hunting plan, mnemonic devices, accounting, teaching tools, etc etc, and all of those crossing over each other for thousands and thousands of years). To answer the why-question from an art analytical perspective is not an easy endeavour, and while this is an interesting book in itself (i'm a sucker for cave paintings, anthropology, and the history of writing systems), i think she largely fails due to her oftentimes confusing writing style that, in lack of a scientific proven explanation of something, falls back into an ornamental style that wants to put emphasis on the mystery of cave paintings. She's more occupied writing about her whizzy crazy associations and some random memories with cave art than writing a good, structured book on the history of the topic. This may work for some, but not for me. I still learned some nice details though, but not enough to give this more than 2 stars.

Lee Child - Im Visier (Reacher 19: Personal) ★★★ / Keine Kompromisse (Reacher 20: Make Me) ★★★ / Der Bluthund (Reacher 22: The Midgnight Line) ★★
On my quest to read all Reacher-novels, i'm now at 11 of 25, and these three are, while entertaining, not among the best in the series. All of these are recent novels, and i miss some of the qualities of the older ones -- the sparse prose, the ultra-detailed action sequences, Reachers wit and cleverness. These are still entertaining thriller novels, but they lack a bit of the punch of the first ones.

Jack Finney - Die Körperfresser kommen (eng. Invasion of the Body Snatchers) ★★★
I love all the Bodysnatchers-adaptions (except the Nicole Kidman-stinker from 2006 or so) and i rewatched all of them recently, when i figured: You know what, why not read the novel? So i did, all the elements are there, and the blankness, emptyness, bare of any identity markers of those not-dead-because-never-alive body grown out of alien seeds keep on being a nice universal meta-metaphor for any societal alienation, even in a dated scifi novel from the 50s. Bodysnatchers when it was written was a metaphor for the red scare, about "neighbors turning into communists", in the seventies, it was a metaphor for the sexual revolution, where "kids turned into weird excessive sexmaniacs", in the 90s Ferrara tried to turn it into a metaphor for american military culture, and in the 00s it was turned into a metaphor for post 9/11 paranoia. It's a universal story about paranoia in the face of rampant alienation, where our friends and neighbors suddenly turn into something else. Which beggs the question: Where is the social media-era version of the story? Where's the NPC-Bodysnatchers, or the Deepfake Bodysnatchers? Especially the NPC-meme basically is the very same story: Everybody is a non playing character, an empty hull of a human, parrotting empty phrases, except me and my peers, we are real humans. The digital age is a deeply paranoid age, and all the users might be alien plants in the heads of some conspirational 4chan anons. It's a story of our age, and a new interpretation is begging to be written.

Don Winslow - City on Fire / City of Dreams (Danny Ryan #1&2) ★★★★
I wanted to read other thrillers than Reacher and boy did Winslow get me hooked. It's the story of italian and irish mobs going to war in Providence, Rhode Island, and while the story itself is not very surprising, it's Winslows style that just sucks you in. I paced through City on Fire, which so much reminded me of Martin Scorseses Goodfellas, that i constantly read it in the narrating voice of Joe Pesci. You know you read a good thriller when you have the voice of effing Joe Pesci in your head.

Herfried Münkler - Welt in Aufruhr: Die Ordnung der Mächte im 21. Jahrhundert (eng. World in Turmoil: World Orders in the 21st Century) ★★★★
Herfried Münkler is a world reknowned political scientist at the Berlin Humboldt University, and in this book, he describes how the old dynamic of the cold war with 2 global main actors made place to a more chaotic world (in which we live now) that slowly evolves, according to Münkler, to a pentarchy of five global powers (US, EU, China, Russia and India) which in the coming decades, under certain circumstances, may lead to a new stable configuration of global powers providing a stable model for world peace. If you're, like me, not overly interested in politics, but still want to know how the larger picture is evolving internationally, this a good book to read about geopolitics in the 21st century.

Naomi Alderman - The Future ★★★
I friggin loved Aldermans The Gift, so picking this up was a nobrainer, and i was somewhat disappointed. The Future is a book about a billionaire class building bunkers while the world goes to shit, with some rebels planning to get rid of them in a pretty original way. The book itself is shattered into a million bits: climate, ai, internet outrage and socmed, pandemics, hong kong riots, preppers and survivalism, religious cults, anarcho capitalism and accelerationism, Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, all told in nonchronological vignettes, mostly from the perspective of the protagonist. A collage of the titular future made with thousands of bits from the present. What sounds pretty cool is a bit dumbed down by the simplistic ending, which is still pretty entertaining as a microstory in the style of Lord of the Rings with mech suits on an abandoned island. An entertaining novel let down by an ending that was too simplistic and naive for my taste.

Neal Stephenson - Termination Shock ★★★
A thousand page doorstopper by Neal "Metaverse" Stephenson about the climate crisis, a slow meandering wide ranging novel showing a detailed panoramic view of a world circa 2040ish, in which heatwaves caused by climate change are rampant and a billionaire decides to just fire sulfur into the sky with a giant cannon to geoengineer our atmosphere. I loved how Stephenson incorporates as diverse topics as climate change, modern aristocracy, indian martial arts and political conflict into one coherent storyline -- but i also found it somewhat pointless. Stephenson has surprising little to say about a climate change that is largely induced by economic ideologies, and simply turns dealing with the consequences into an entertaining scifi thriller. It's a good read, and i love many of the details like the indian-chinese stick-fights at the border that clearly was inspired by this Youtube-clip, but i missed some larger message about the mallaise we're in. But maybe the point is: Billionaires gonna do whatever they want, they'll sound like Jurassic Parks John Hammond while doing it and there's not much we can do about it. Which is a bit underwhelming.

Friederike Otto - Klimaungerechtigkeit: Was die Klimakatastrophe mit Kapitalismus, Rassismus und Sexismus zu tun hat (eng. Climate Injustice: What the climate crisis has to do with capitalism, racism and sexism) ★★★★
Friederike Otto is one of Time Magazines 100 most influential people in 2021 and a leading climate researcher who contributed to attribution science, that is: The science of finding out, how much of a hurricane, flooding or heatwave can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. I picked this up because i am one of those guys who, while seeing that climate does indeed lead to injustices, i do think that justice issues take a second row to what is largely a physics based planetary issue, which needs tons of international regulations and engineering. However, I find myself convinced by her arguments. A better title for the book would have been "Climate Adaption Injustice", because that's what it's about: How humanity adapts to climate change and the (historical) injustices leading to adaptive disadvantages in the global south. It is clear to me that dire consequences of climate change are already locked in — economic, ecological, not to speak of the disruptions caused by migration and international conflict --, and if that's clear we need a clear analysis of the status quo, to figure how to deal with those consequences in a fair way on a global level. Friederike Ottos short book provides that analysis.

Anders Levermann - Die Faltung der Welt (eng. Folding the World) ★★★
Anders Levermann is a researcher of complex systems at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Research and his book wants to provide an alternate narrative for green growth and decoupling of emissions from economic growth. Basically it's about "horizontal growth", while classic economic development would be "vertical growth". He proposes an "inside growth", that goes into diversifying products and recycling, not the extractive "bigger, bolder, higher". I pretty much agree with him on most of his points, but all of this is not very new -- he simply uses mathematics as a metaphor for regulation and writes about how the paradigm of "endless growth" can exist in a limited system.

Max Barry - Die 22 Tode der Madison May (eng. The 22 Murders of Madison May) ★
Scifi-novel about a guy hopping parallel universes to find the perfect version of an aspiring actress, only to find subpar Madison Mays and killing them. What sounds intriguing comes around as weirdly phrased (the book is somehow full of eggs) and reads like a sitcom sometimes. It features clichéd and flat characters, boring twists, shallow dialogue without any depth, it's not thrilling enough to be a thriller, not scifi enough to be scifi, its a boring Jennifer Aniston movie with clichéd genre elements, and the more interesting parts (a mysterious organization of people traveling through parallel universes and using "anchors", objects like a lock of hair, to make sure some stuff and people exist in the target universe) stay largely unexplored. Waste of time.

Samuel W. Gailey - Die Schuld (eng. The Guilt We Carry) ★★★
A young woman who finds her dead stripclub-owner boss dead in her bed and a bag full of dollars. Ofcourse, she takes the money and runs. During her escape, she examines her past and her own guilt, and learns to deal with the consequences. A good little pulp crime novel that could've been more, but stays within the trodden path of it's story, which isn't a bad thing at all.

Liu Cixin - Die Drei Sonnen (eng. The Three-Body Problem) ★★★★
I read this three weeks before the Netflix-series came out (which i still haven't seen) because i wanted to know what the fuzz is about. It's a good book, maybe great sometimes, and i loved some of the more bonkers ideas about how life may exist on a planet in an unstable orbit in a three star system, and The parts about the cultural revolution and it's implications were daring and damn interesting, but i expected a bit more from it, given the hype. However, the second book already sits on my bookshelf, and i'll read all parts.

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Lies, damn lies, and Big Oil

Wed, 08 May 2024 11:36:54 +0200

In 2015, Climate Inside News broke a blockbuster scoop: Exxon had not only been aware of the consequences of burning fossil fuels since the 1970s through its own research, but, according to new findings, had also developed its own climate models and analyses so precise that they could predict trends in global warming that remain valid to this day (around 0.2°C per decade).

In the subsequent court hearing of a lawsuit brought by the City of New York, Exxon was (unfortunately) acquitted of the accusation of defrauding its investors. Whether Exxon deceived humanity itself has not (yet) been litigated.

Recently, Exxon CEO Darren Woods embarrassed himself and his corporation when he claimed that the public — that's us — is to blame for the slow progress of the green energy transition because we are not willing to pay for it. Mind you, for an energy transition that would have been significantly cheaper in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when we had enough time to transition the economic system into a sustainable one.

I recount this brief episode of the climate-related business conduct of one of the world's largest oil corporations as a small intro, because as always in climate-related economic-political matters, it's much worse.

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Dario Kenner from University of Essex examined public statements from the American Petroleum Institute and FuelsEurope, two of the largest lobbying organizations in the oil industry in the USA and Europe, and found that they have been systematically opposing green, low-carbon technologies since the 1960s. Kenner found dozens of cases where lobbyists exerted pressure and influence on politics to prevent subsidies for things like electric cars, solar panels, or heat pumps.

All of this was happening 60 years ago under the banner of a supposed "technology-neutral approach" by the dominant energy companies, using the same false arguments of alleged distortion of competition through state subsidies for renewable energies as today, all while - and here it gets particularly egregious - benefiting itself from subsidies and tax breaks. According to the International Monetary Fund, subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, including societal costs, amounted to a whopping $760 billion in the USA and $310 billion in the EU for the year 2022 alone.

And to keep the sweet tax money rushing in — money that, mind you, comes from the same people Exxons CEO dares to accuse of slowing down climate action —, the oil industry switched tactics, going from hiding their evidence and climate change denial, to greenwashing and outright “deception, disinformation and double speak”, as a new report from the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee (the largest investigative committee in the House of Representatives) put it.

The report accuses big oil of nothing less than a "misinformation campaign". Specifically, the filed documents reveal that (emphasis in cursive mine):

Publicly, the oil industry promoted natural gas as a climate-friendly, green energy source, while internally the companies were well aware of the scientific evidence indicating that natural gas is as climate-damaging as coal, and that natural gas is just as incompatible with politically set emission reduction goals.
Internally, they referred to the targets of the Paris Agreement as "unattainable goals and incompatible with business plans."
The oil industry lobbied against climate laws while publicly pledging their support.
Publicly, they advocated for Carbon Capture, while internally discussing that Carbon Capture at the necessary scale is not profitable enough, measured against a "free-to-pollute business model."
They deliberately used trade associations, think tanks, and NGOs to spread misleading narratives and employ tactics they themselves did not want to be associated with. (Half a year ago, reporting showed how the Atlas Network, a network of think tanks funded by the Koch Brothers, apparently influenced german FDP member Frank Schäffler, who repeatedly referred to climate activists of the Last Generation as "terrorists" and a "criminal organization," which surely was not insignificant for the decision to conduct nationwide raids on kids. The police spoke at the time of "investigations on suspicion of forming a criminal organization." I can understand why the oil companies do not want to be associated with such potentially dangerous deceptions of the police.)
The oil industry forms partnerships with science and research to specifically finance studies that align with their business plans, while simultaneously tracking and monitoring critical voices and activists. For example, Shell discussed in internal emails "embedding" staff-scientists at the University of Berkeley, and representatives of British Petroleum spoke about marginalizing critical scientists.
All six companies and organizations under investigation obstructed and delayed the House committee's investigation, did not cooperate, and did not provide more than 4,000 requested documents despite legal requirements.

At the global UN climate conference in 2021, 503 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry participated. The next year, it was 636. A year later, the number of lobbyists applying the strategy of "deception, disinformation, and double-talk" outlined in the report to the democratically elected representatives of the global public at the most important meeting for coordinating and negotiating "Climate Action" surged to a staggering 2,456. The number of oil industry lobbyists exceeded the number of all other country delegations, except for Brazil and the host country, the United Arab Emirates.

The report from the investigative committee is another damning proof that representatives of the oil industry have no place at the negotiation table at the COPs, where a lot of people in suits decide over the environmental future of the planet and the survival of millions of people in the not-so-distant future. And while climate change is starting to affect everything and the deceiving behavior of the energy sector is coming to light, this is what happens: from the business side: lies; from politics: too little; otherwise: police violence against climate activists. The word for this more-than-half-a-century-long deception of the public by politics and the oil industry is: hypocrisy.

During the hearing of the experts and authors of the report, Bernie Sanders remarked: "I think it's time to call on the people who caused this problem and knowingly spread lies about it to pay the bill."

He's right: Make them pay.

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Teenage Angst

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 12:02:19 +0200

I just finnished Jonathan Haidts The Anxious Generation and to properly review it and explain, why this is also a somewhat personal book to me, i have to explain were i'm coming from. This is gonna be a long one, and if you want a short gist and move on: I think Haidt's book is a timely call to action, i largely agree with his analysis, but wish it was more in depth and i think he misses a big piece of the puzzle. It is this missing piece i mostly write about here.

UPGRADE

Shine the headlight, straight into my eye
Like the roadkill, I'm paralysed
(Placebo, Teenage Angst)

Meme Magic in the Aughts

It was around 2012 when i noticed that things were off. By then, i already gained some extensive insights on virality. I'm online since the mid 90s, and contributing to the web since i started my own blog in 2005, which became a german mainstay for webculture soon. In 2008, i had a first "viral hit", with a simple phrase lifted from a political poster, which became a national sensation and inspired dozens of flashmobs disrupting political events during the election year, so much so that at one point, Angela Merkel had to adress to "young people in the back to shut up". It inspired songs and books and I went on national TV (you can see my 15 years younger self in this clip at 1:50) to explain what is happening. That was a time when politicians barely could spell the word "browser" and we were baffled and blown away by the outcomes of spontaneous online movements. Years later the fine folks at 4chan invented the word "Meme Magic" to describe such things, when things going viral "transcend the realm of cyberspace and result in real life consequences".

With the beginning of the 2010s and social media finally making it's mainstream breakthrough, things started to change. By then, Buzzfeed established a new publishing practice: Serving all kinds of identities with cheap fast fluff and listicles — a factory for identities —, and combining that with only vague, non-informative headlines: Clickbait was born, and perfected in the years that followed by media outlets like Upworthy. The ur-mainstream-viralbomb Kony 2012 showed that you can direct whole masses of digitally networked people with emotionalizing, simplistic, semi-political content that outrages them, with a big portion of those people being young adults and teens.

Virality on early Social Media had reached a tipping point, where people on social media increasingly selected for emotionality and outrage, and it became clear to me that this new media environment of personalized writing and blogging, "citizen journalism" and social media held more manipulative power than anything we've seen before. I became interested in virality itself, memetics, the dynamics of swarm behavior, and wrote about the psychological underpinnings of webculture ever since.

Then, the abomination of Gamergate blew up the internet and created the culture wars, 4chan supposedly "memed Trump into the White House", and thousands of webculture experts, including me, were scratching their heads and wrote thinkpiece after thinkpiece about what the hell is going on — all while the mental health of kids deteriorated.

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidts book, like the title and its byline "How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness" suggest, revolves around the effects that these developments — the social media revolution in tandem with helicopter parenting focussing on safety —, had on the psychology specifically of kids. It's the first of a Haidt-socmed-doublewhammy, with the next book coming out next year revolving around the psychological effects of social media on democracy and institutions. (To be fair: That one will be much closer to my interests, but these developments have overlaps and common causes, to which we'll get in a second.)

The book is split in two parts, with the first chapters describing what is happening and laying down the evidence with tons of statistics, and a second part revolving around suggestions for solutions to the problem. This first part dives into two arguments: First, the rise of helicopter parenting and "safetyism" in the 80s and 90s took away free play from childhood, then the rise of smartphones and social media sucked the kids into the virtual world, with all those psychological effects of virality and attention economics applying to them. It was then that the numbers of mental health issues for children and adolescents started to rise, especially for girls.

Overall, the book is not so much an in depth look at the psychological and neurological effects of social media, and more of a timely wakeup call to action. I personally gained not that much new insight from it, for which i can't blame the book, simply because i follow the topic very closely for more than 10 years now. I know much of the cited research, and follow the work of Haidt since i blogged about his his brillant The Righteous Mind back in 2008, and read and wrote a lot about his work in the past. I'm not exactly the targeted audience for this book, but i liked it anyways, even when it was preaching to the choir here. I only wish he went deeper into the neuropsychological workings of social media — because I think he missed a large piece of the puzzle there.

Much of the writings about neuropsychological effects of social media revolve around how endless scrolling and likes and shares create small shots of the gratification-hormone dopamine and how that glues you to the screen. The Anxious Generation mentions related research extensively. And sure enough, this explains a good chunk of what is happening, why you can't just put your phone away, constantly check for notifications and how that makes you addicted.

But dopamine alone can't explain all the conflict we see on social media, and when we talk about the society wide effects of it, we mostly complain about the tribalism, the outrage, the aggressions. This beast is a slot machine of a different kind, and the underlying psychological mechanism is highly relevant for the psyche of kids, too, especially for girls and young women, and it is near completely absent from discourse.

The elephant in the room: Oxytocin

One of the most under-researched topics in social media psychology is how it influences the flow of oxytocin — the so-called "love hormone". Until recently, our understanding of that hormone was that it's largely responsible for social bonding and get's released from interaction with other humans, touching, or when mothers interact with their newborn babies — women have roughly 30% higher oxytocin levels than men. But that's far from the whole story: It is also related to "coordinated outgroup attacks" and even has been found to promote human ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

In an experiment done in 2011, a researcher checked the oxytocin levels of a reporter before and after using Twitter for 10 minutes: They rose by 13% — "as much as a groom at a wedding". When they repeated the experiment with three journalists using Facebook, "they all demonstrated increased levels of oxytocin", with the oxytocin levels of one of the journalists, who was writing with his girlfriends, going up "nearly 150%". This not only means that social media interaction does release oxytocin, but that it creates oxytocin levels in people who know each other at least comparable to those in real life.

Newer research has shown that Oxytocin is not just a hormone for social bonding, but an amplifyier of any important social interaction. Oxytocin is "a social-alert hormone", as one researcher put it, and it is found that even merely "anticipated social contact may result in bursts of oxytocin". Social Media and push notifications create a whole lot of "anticipated social contact", and sure enough: Average teen gets more than 230 notifications on their cell phone each day, study finds.

Arguably, most socmed notifications are not "important social situations", but here's the kicker: You can't know if they are important or not before you check, and if all your peers and friends are on social media platforms, chances are high that these social situations are important. It might be that the highschool prom queen just asked you out on a date, after all! It might also be a friend who tells you about the latest gossip spread about you in the semi-private socmed group "everyone in the class except you". (In the book, Haidt cites one kid who had to endure this especially cruel form of cybermobbing, and i asume this is a common way of cyberbullying among teens at this point.) This would mean that merely the ping from a phone, or even only the anticipation of a ping on the phone, already releases oxytocin. And the closer we are in real life to those pinging us on social media, the higher the oxytocin release -- like the couple mentioned above whose oxytocin release shot up by 150%.

Among the groups on social media who know each other in real life are highschool peers and classmates, and among them, the bullies and their victims. Interestingly, citing from The Anxious Generation: "One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls", and I believe this is related to oxytocin release from social media.

The Social Media Mean Girls Club

Oxytocin is related to the release of dopamine, too, with a 2015 study finding that "oxytocin appears to impact dopaminergic activity ... which is crucial not only for reward and motivated behavior but also for the expression of affiliative behaviors", meaning that the pleasurable reward we get from likes and comments is intrinsically intertwined with the release of oxytocin, which binds us to the group and increases our tendencies to exclude others, and this is true especially for girls and young women.

If the theory about heightened oxytocin release through social media is right, it hits teenage girls, who spend much more time on social media than boys, in a vulnerable and highly critical phase of their lifes where those hormone levels are beginning to emerge. It binds together the famed "mean girls club" and the winners of the highschool popularity contest even stronger than before, and because oxytocin is also linked to social avoidance in bullied mice — Studies of hormonal flows in mamals commonly apply to human, too —, it increases social anxiety for the loosers of that popularity contest: "after negative social interactions, oxytocin promotes avoidance of unfamiliar social situations." As an amplifyer of social interaction, oxytocin goes both way: It makes the winners feel more loved, and the losers more outcast, and all of this is multiplied by social media.

Haidt spends a whole section on female aggression strategies, how girls violence is relational, social, and goes for the reputation and social bondings of other girls. But only if we take oxytocin into account, we get a full picture of what is happening on social media: Oxytocin binds us to people in our group, and bullying is not just an exclusionary, but in the form of mobbing also a group bonding activity. Thanks to the oxytocin manipulation through social media, the "mean girls club" at highschool is becoming more exclusive, more aggressive, more defensive, all while making being a member of the club highly desirable, because being a member of said club is prestigeous and it's highly visible on social media as they get more likes and shares. Teens compare themselves to those "highschool in-groups" (you know: the cool guys) on a much higher level than before. All while the losers of that oxytocin contest — which are not just the bullied kids, but also those within the "highschool in-group", who are subjected to constant peer pressure to stay in that group —, show higher levels of social anxiety.

In 2011, Scientific American in a piece about these "dark sides" of oxytocin, wrote that "oxytocin should not be used for recreational purposes". Arguably, viral social media activity is one big fat "recreational" oxytocin shot for you, and your peers, and everyone involved in whatever viral thing is doing the rounds in your group. Likely, that thing making the rounds is mockery of someone from the outgroup, and those exclusionary effects do in fact show up in viral statistics: A peer reviewed study from 2021 showed not only that out-group animosity drives engagement on social media, but that "the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language — both established predictors of social media engagement". Mocking members of the outgroup is clearly the highest driver of virality, and even if this study was done in a political context, it should also apply to the social dynamics of kids and teens, especially to mobbing and cyberbullying.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt writes: "Social Media has magnified the reach and effect of relational bullying, placing immense pressure on girls to monitor their words and actions. They are aware that any misstep can swiftly go viral and leave a permanent mark." The highschool popularity contest doesn't stay in school, it sits in your pocket 24/7 and it's with you all. the. time. Bullying in the 80s and 90s was no fun, i can tell you that from personal experience. But in the 2020s, it's a hellish nightmare following you everywhere.

Studies found that "oxytocin is ... involved in maternal aggression and territoriality" and "Psychosocial stress triggers an oxytocin response in women". "Psychosocial stress" here means not only what we commonly understand as workplace related stress, but also information overload, a rising dunbar number from social media connectivity, bloated social circles and the peer pressure to conform. Writing in the New Statesman, Freya India summed it up: "Social media's not just making girls depressed, it's making us bitchy too". Accordingly, in 2019 the New York Times wrote about Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture, and yes, i strongly believe that wokism and identity politics, peer pressure and bullying among girls are at the very least not unconnected, which can explain why the mental health numbers dropped first for liberal girls.

A paper published in January 2023 about a "3-year longitudinal cohort study of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) among sixth- and seventh-grade students recruited from 3 public middle schools in rural North Carolina" found that social media use is linked to brain changes in teens, and that "children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed ... sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time". This heightened "sensitivity to social rewards from peers" sounds a lot like the work of oxytocin to me: As i've written above, oxytocin is a "social alert hormone", and that "even anticipated social interaction may result in bursts of oxytocin". (There are more social media induced changes to children's brains, here's an interview with neurosurgeon Marc Arginteanu talking about these.)

To me, all of this very much looks like that social media is leading to constant heightened oxytocin levels, and it makes us tribalistic, makes us aggressive towards the outgroup and increases tendencies for social exclusion — all of which are rampant on social media, and all of this detoriates the mental health of especially girls and young women on a societal level. I'm not familar with oxytocin research particular in teen girls, but presumably, women develop their already higher oxytocin levels during puberty, because it's the hormone that regulates mother-child-bonding and initiates changes in the birth-canal. If social media is manipulating oxytocin levels, this is a highly potent hormonal change, especially during the puberty of teenage girls.

This may even explain the different outcomes of various studies regarding wellbeing and social media use: as an amplifier of important social interactions, oxytocin makes us feel loved as long as we belong to the in-group, but it makes us socially anxious if we're excluded. Social Media turns the volume of all of this up to 11, and all of these neuropsychological mechanisms are now subject to the incentives created by the attention economy on social media and the design choices of platforms and their gamifications.

The Symbolic Teen

In his "philosophy of the symbolic form", Ernst Cassirer describes humans as "the symbolic animal" whose reality consists mostly from communicated language and symbols, an animal that shapes its own meaning by the creation of the symbolic world. To Cassirer, our symbolic world constitutes everything, and it’s only through our symbolic world we can truly understand humans. This makes sense if you look at the rare cases of humans who did not grow up in human groups, but were raised by animals, the so called wild childs. They are barely human at all, have tremendous problems ever integrating into society and can barely learn or speak. This clearly shows how much of our culture is ingrained into human existence itself.

This is especially true for kids, whose childhood is prolonged and extended in comparison to other mamals (who often can walk and sometimes are fully functional right after birth) precicely because they need time to adapt to human culture, or, in other words: to learn. In his book "The Disappearance of Childhood", Neil Postman wrote about how the invention of the printing press extended this learning process even further, and widened the knowledge gap between adults and kids, so they had to go to school for years and learn how to read and write — to learn how to become Cassirers "symbolic animal". It was then that modern conceptions of childhood were invented.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt writes about how kids using social media were increasingly "wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults", and were "engaging in adult activities", such as "managing their online brand". I would add to that: They also got heavily politicized by social media from imitating highly visible and viral social media activity (which favors political outrage), which, for kids, sure must look like a prestigeous behaviour to copy from their adult social media peers.

For some years now, i follow the work of Joshua Citarella, who documents adolescent politcal online subcultures since he first published his e-book Politigram & the Post-left in 2018. His interviewees are mostly kids and adolescents, and some are heavily politically radicalized at ages like 13 years old and younger. These kids engage with fringe political movements like "MAGA Communism", with one of the latest interviews stating that the now 16 year old boy from Texas started to visit online political communities "around 2016", meaning that he was just 8 years old back then.

Cool underground kids talking about stuff like anarcho capitalism, "MAGA communism", and engaging with political communities at the age of 8 sounds very much like "adult activity" to me, and very much like an "end of childhood". It also does not sound very healthy to me. (I also put some weight to these interviews, because these are not formal interviews in a study, but these kids talk freely, without any supervision from adults. And when it comes to kids and what they do i always presume that adults actually know next to nothing about them, which is true for every generation. How much did your parents really know about your ongoings when you were 16?)

For Neil Postman, the end of childhood consisted of a diffusion process involving electronic, visual broadcast media, which made the learning of linear, sequential symbols (reading) obsolete. But these kids sound different: These teens cite philosophers like Karl Marx, Mark Fisher, Gilles Deleuze, Nick Land or Jean Baudrillard. They are highly articulate, super-informed, well read in philosophy and politics — and they are deeply cynical and nihilistic. It's a perspective learned from adults on the internet, fused with the nihilism found on the "cool internet underground" message boards. These kids learned the lessons of social media very well: Copy prestigeous political outrage, dunk on the outgroup, and earn clout and prestige by pushing the fringes.

In "The End of Childhood", Neil Postman quotes Harold Innis’s principle that "new communication technologies not only give us new things to think about, but new things to think with". This new digitally transformed "end of childhood" of our era constitutes to a cultural evolutionary adaption to social media dynamics, where we and our kids, and especially those kids immersing themselves in internet subcultures, adapt to these "new things to think with" in all consequence. I find this deeply worrying, especially if you consider that these "cool kids from the internet underground" are, well, the cool kids, those who score high in the highschool popularity contest and who are imitated by their peers.

For Cassirers "symbolic animal", social media is a giant battlefield for group acceptance, an editing machine with endless possibilities and a playground for the social world, and its unforeseen hormonal effects on the human psyche make it toxic for the whole of childhood, for kids who should not engage in "brand management", or "extremist politics", or DDoS attacks against schools at the age of nine to impress their peers and get their oxytocin shots by virtual pats on the back. Kids should not be subjected to a technology, that, by enhancing and skewing social mechanisms, manipulates their hormone levels.

This is why i agree with Haidts conclusions: Ban phones from school, rise the age for opening social media accounts to 16, end safetyism, and "bring childhood back to earth".

I wish Haidts book would've digged more into some of the effects and dynamics i described here, but the research on social media’s effects on oxytocin levels is sparse (yet), and the workings of oxytocin on social behavior is not very well understood as of now. Much of what i wrote here is speculation and "connecting the dots", coming from an amateur-researcher with some extensive experience in social media virality.

The Anxious Generation mostly revolves about the two major developments in the last 40 years or so, the rise of helicopter parenting and safetyism, and the rise of social media, but it does not go into specific details of what kids are actually doing online very much, and how that contributes. For instance, while Haidt does write about photo-filters on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and how they contribute to self perception and body image, he doesn’t mention phenomena like "Instagram face" or "Snapchat Dysmorphia", which are sometimes so severe that young women seek out plastic surgery.

I also miss some more socio-philosophical takes on why all of this happens, how these psychological effects intertwine and how the informational structure of the web creates a flattened, endless landscape of stuff in which important and unimportant things gain the same weight and create a weird atemoprality, in which narrative structures dissolve, only to spontaneously errupt into an emotionally driven hyperfocus of the swarm, or how conformity on social media flattens culture as a whole, to the effect that diners all over the world look like hipster bars in Brooklyn, simply because this look goes viral on Instagram. Sure, these things don't affect mental health of kids directly, but it is one of the strange outcomes of a digitally networked global culture, and i'd be surprised if it doesn't contribute at all.

However, for what The Anxious Generation wants to be, a call to action, it maybe is the better choice to focus on the very concrete effects directly related to kids' mental health issues, and keep it simple. The arguments laid down in the book are pressing, and even if the better of Haidts’ critics complain about some more shoddy studies in the book, the overall picture of the situation painted in the book is convincing. It is a good, timely book, a wake up call for teachers, decision makers, parents, and last but not least, the kids themselves.

As i laid down above, i was personally involved in making social media and webculture look cool in my country. My former blog had one foot in the internet underground, and my work played a tiny role in making webculture into what it is today. Looking at all the effects this tremendous cultural change had on society and mental health, a part of me regrets that involvement. This is why, at least to some extend, i feel some kind of responsibility, and this is one of the reasons why i wrote about this stuff extensively for more than ten years, and why i am thankful that a world reknowned social psychologist like Jonathan Haidt picked up the topic. I'm very much looking forward to his next book about social media psychology, coming out next year, which will focus on its effects on democracy and institutions.

Social Media and the web are arguably the biggest change in human communication and culture since forever. Some claim it is bigger than the printing press, or even the invention of writing. It is silly to even asume that its effects on our social mechanisms and on our psychology are neglectible, or can be shrugged off, and that everything is just okay.

I'm not as hopeless as this may sound though. I'm very sure we will adapt to these "new things to think with", because that's what humans always do. But the path to that adaption will be a “long and winding road”, to quote a famous teenage favorite of yore, and strange weird things will happen.

Of that, i'm sure.

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Note of Absence

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 10:20:49 +0100

Folks, i’m without internet access for the coming days and possibly weeks. I have some more GOOD MUSIC coming up, but besides from that, you’ll have to rely on the usual common medium cooked standard internet instead of the actual really GOOD INTERNET you’re used to. Bummer, i know.

I’m not sure when i can log on again, but you’ll sure hear from me when i do.

]]>

GOOD MUSIC 02/2024

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 09:28:00 +0100

Once a month i post the best music i blogged at my other stack at GOOD MUSIC, all the best new tunes and fresh bands from the past month in one place.

We go down the Indie-road with some fine tracks by John Glacier and the wonderful Hinds, get into the Punk waggon with new singles from the Idles and the always balls kicking Lambrini Girls, turn it down a notch for English Teacher and go into some funk-dancable tunes with Portugal. The Man, Rui Gabriel and Alena Spanger.

Then we enter Popland with fantastic glitchy hyperpopian tracks by charlieeeee x piri and Star Boy, go ultimiately very weird with Knower and enter the electronic ether with Oneohtrix Point Never and Squarepusher. Little Simz saves us from all the brainknots and 1999 Write The Future reactivate the legendary Deltron 3030, Bktherula slams some pretty cool and weird raps and Burial has a new epic 13 minute adventure-dub-track.

Kim Gordon takes it from here and Khruangbin steers us into more soulful indie-waters, when Sheer Mag hit us with their best Thin Lizzy-shot from the new album. Fidlar cover Jackson Browne and we’re back with some fine indie rock with Girl and Girl, the epic Young Jesus, some art rock by Drahla, cool alt-rock from Gouge Away and a hypnotic tune from Chaepter, while One True Pairing have an existential crisis it seems.

Paramore are covering the Talking Heads and Psymon Spine keep on dancing when Spaced crash the Aerobic show and bang some heads, with Brat and Gatecreeper contributing some serious Thrash, and the CNTS some finely produced hardcore, while Agriculture play their weird-af mixture of shoegaze and speedmetal.

Then we get soulful with The Black Keys, a the fantastic new songs from Norah Jones, MRCY and Marcus King. Caleb Landry Jones listened to Velvet Undergrounds Perfect Day a lot, The Klittens take it up from here and Ride give us a cool new anthem.

Kate Nash takes us on the final lap, Mk.gee plays the most soulful glitchy newschool pop at the moment, and Bonnie Light Horseman own this months earworm-award for me. Then, Father John Misty makes us dance and good old Billy Joel deepfakes himself into his own past.

Enjoy!

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Subscribe to GOOD INTERNET on Substack or on Patreon or on Steady and feel free to leave a buck or two. If you don’t want to subscribe to anything but still want to send a pizza or two, you can paypal me.

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Thanks.

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My Brain is your Brain and your Brain is mine

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 11:59:15 +0100

My latest piece for german expert platform Piqd, a piece that summarizes latest developments in BCI-technology and extrapolates some possible future scenarios in context of Neuro-Ethics. I translated the thing with ChatGPT and edited for kicks, below the piece in its original german language.

UPGRADE

Many people with brain computer interfaces eavesdropping on each others thoughts // Dall-E 3

english

A brief History of Neurotech

Musk recently claimed on his X-formerly-known-as-Twitter that his BCI company, Neuralink has implanted the "first" "chip" in a test subject, who reportedly is doing well post-surgery. In another tweet, Musk claimed the patient successfully "moved a mouse" — referring to maneuvering a cursor on a screen. Musk and Neuralink's stated goal: "Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer." However, there's no evidence supporting Musk's claims, and the newsworthiness of his announcements is close to zilch because:

Putting aside the fact that Musk himself is the sole source of these assertions, these supposed advancements in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology are old news. As noted by renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth in his Guardian article questioning whether we should all be getting chips in our heads, Neuralink is a newcomer to the field, and thought-controlled cursors on screens have been around since the 90s. The actual innovation from Musk's company, an operation robot deploying brain implants, remains shrouded in mystery amid these recent announcements, prompting concerns from neuroscientists.

The reason Elon Musk is working on BCI tech with Neuralink is a nobrainer: the technology, with or without Musk, is advancing rapidly, and an automated implantation machine with BCI and OP robot spells massive profit. In just the past 12 months, neuroscientists, aided by artificial intelligence, have achieved remarkable feats: enabling a paralyzed man to walk again; allowing another paralyzed patient to use their arms and feel with their hands, restoring speech to a woman paralyzed after a stroke at a “brain-to-text rate of 78 words per minute”; reconstructing music from brain activity; and reconstructing images from visual cortex activity. And in previous years, digital "telepathy" has been made possible, aswell as linking the brains of three patients into a network.

Psychologist Gary Lupyan and philosopher Andy Clark have expressed skepticism in an essay on Aeon about direct digital "telepathy," essentially because neural activity is too idiosyncratic and individual to reliably transfer from one person to another. However, they overlook the potential for AI technology to serve as an interpreter between the different neuropatterns of participants. But this (hopefully) is still ways off because, beyond the superficial sci-fi “coolness” of digital "telepathy," there's the question of whether anyone really wants a direct line to other people's thoughts, with all their invasive thoughts and all the neuro-chaos that comes with the package, or how one could technically prevent access to supposedly "Private Thoughts." Maybe I'd rather not know what my neighbor really thinks about me — and vice versa.

Anil Seth also raises the important question in the aforementioned text of whether people will really want to open their skulls to such neuro-antics just to read the chaotic thoughts of their similarly brain-implanted neighbors or to get a few cognitive prostheses. His answer: No. However, an invasive operation might not even be necessary in the future.

In December of last year, researchers at the University of Sydney unveiled a non-invasive brain scanner worn by patients as a simple EEG "cap." While its signal is noisier, the experiment achieved state-of-the-art performance for brain-to-text outputs, albeit with a relatively high error rate. Nonetheless, it's expected that these non-invasive technologies will also make rapid progress, and there are already early hints of their application in future mass markets: last summer, Apple filed a patent for EEG AirPods, in-ear headphones capable of reading electrical signals from the brain. You don't have to be a sci-fi nerd anymore to envision the next generations of Apple's VR/AR glasses with brain interfaces.

All these massive advancements in BCI technology underscore the need for a broad public debate on the ethics of brain interfaces. Already, there are thousands of cases of patients with brain implants left unsupported after a startup's demise, with outdated code and dead batteries in their heads, and Technology Review reports the case of Rita Leggett, a patient with severe epilepsy who was able to lead a nearly normal life thanks to a novel implant that had to be removed after the company went bust — potentially violating her human rights.

In July 2023, UNESCO organized the first conference on neuroethics, calling for a framework for human rights in the context of neurotechnologies and discussing the concept of neuro-rights. Chile became the first country in the world in 2021 to amend its constitution to include explicit rights for neuro-privacy.

Before, the scientific discourse on neuroethics has been ongoing for decades, with the International Neuroethics Society being founded in 2006. The papers "On Neurorights" from 2021 and the paper "Ethical Aspects of BCI Technology: What is the state of the art?" from 2020 provide a good overview of the current state of affairs.

For me as a non-neuroscientist but decades-long-observer of tech, I find these ethical considerations insufficient: AI researchers recently unveiled a computer vision algorithm capable of lip reading, decoding speech from a video signal. What happens in a society where I (not only with a brain implant but also right now with smartphones and their high-resolution super cameras) can eavesdrop on every conversation just by looking at or filming the speakers? Thanks to the rapid progress in BCI technology, it's entirely conceivable that signals from the visual cortex can be translated directly into an AI-enhanced lip-reading superhearing.

For years now, we've been discussing phenomena like peer surveillance, where people use novel technologies to monitor, stalk, and dox others, or where TikTokers broadcast seemingly private gossip-talk from strangers to the outragely and sadomasochistic delight of their audience. Neurotechnology combined with artificial intelligence has the potential to turn entire societies into literal super-recognizers in the coming decades, making such stories seem like harmless preludes. Orwell's "Big Brother" from 1984 may very well morph into "Big Family" where every individual is subjected to surveillance by everyone.

The debates over the security of neurodata from today's BCI pioneers can only mark the beginning of a broad societal discussion about where we draw the lines for the new brain-enhanced AI/BCI cyborgs — prompting Nicholas J. Kelley, Stephanie Sheir, and Timo Istace to write a brief history of neurotechnology on The Conversation and highlight the immense ethical implications.

There’s an old german folk song dating back to the 18th century and the early romantic era, and the age old wisdom contained in it’s lyrics o: "Our thoughts are free, no one can guess them". This might not hold true anymore, very soon.

german

Eine kurze Geschichte der Neurotechnologie

Elon Musk verkündete jüngst auf X-formerly-known-as-Twitter, seine Firma für Hirn-Computer-Schnittstellen Neuralink habe den "ersten" "Chip" in einem Probanden implantiert und dieser sei nach der Operation wohlauf. In einem weiteren Tweet erklärte Musk, der Patient hätte erfolgreich "eine Maus" bewegt -- damit meinte er einen Cursor auf einem Bildschirm. Musks und Neuralinks erklärtes Ziel: "Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer". Belege für Musks Behauptungen gibt es keine und der Nachrichtenwert dieser muskschen Mitteilungen geht gegen Null, denn:

Völlig davon abgesehen, dass die einzige Quelle für die Behauptungen Musk selbst ist, sind diese angeblichen Fortschritte in Hirn-Computer-Schnittstellen-Technologie (kurz: BCI) ein alter Hut. Wie der bekannte Hirnforscher Anil Seth in seinem Artikel im Guardian über die Frage, ob wir uns wirklich alle Chips in die Köpfe setzen lassen sollten, anmerkt: Neuralink ist ein Newcomer auf dem Gebiet und die ersten Cursors auf Screens wurden bereits in den 90er Jahren gedankengesteuert. Die tatsächliche Innovation von Musks Firma, ein Operations-Roboter, der die Gehirn-Implantate einsetzt, bleibt bei den jüngsten Meldungen völlig im Dunkeln und Neurowissenschaftler äußern sich besorgt.

Warum Elon Musk mit Neuralink an BCI-Tech arbeitet, liegt auf der Hand: Die Technologie macht (auch ohne Musk) rasante Fortschritte und eine automatisierte Implantierungs-Maschine mit BCI und OP-Robot verspricht gigantischen Profit. Alleine in den letzten 12 Monaten konnten Neurowissenschaftler im Zusammenspiel mit Künstlicher Intelligenz: Einen querschnittsgelähmten Mann wieder laufen lassen, während ein anderer, ebenfalls querschnittsgelähmte Patient seine Arme wieder benutzen und mit seinen Händen fühlen konnte; eine nach einem Schlaganfall paralysierte Frau wieder sprechen lassen mit einer "brain-to-text (...) rate of 78 words a minute"; Musik aus Gehirnaktivität rekonstruieren oder Bilder aus der Aktivität des visuellen Kortex rekonstruieren. In den Jahren zuvor konnte man bereits digitale "Telepathie" ermöglichen und die Gehirne von drei Patienten zu einem Neuro-Netzwerk zusammenschließen.

Der Psychologe Gary Lupyan und der Philosoph Andy Clark haben bei Aeon in einem Aufsatz darüber geschrieben, warum sie nicht an direkte digitale "Telepathie" glauben möchten, kurz zusammengefasst: weil neuronale Aktivität zu idiosynkratisch und individuell ist, um zuverlässig von einer auf eine andere Person übertragen werden zu können. Sie übersehen allerdings dabei, dass AI-Technologie hier als Interpreter zwischen den unterschiedlichen, nun: Wellenlängen der Teilnehmer funktionieren kann. Das allerdings ist tatsächlich Zukunftsmusik und (hoffentlich) noch in weiter Ferne, denn abgesehen von der oberflächlichen SciFi-Coolness digitaler "Telepathie" stellt sich natürlich die Frage, ob ich nun wirklich einen direkten Draht zu den Gedanken anderer Menschen haben möchte, mit all ihren invasiven Gedanken und dem ganzen Neuro-Chaos, den die innere Welt eines Menschen eben ausmacht, oder wie man Zugriff auf "Private Gedanken" denn technisch verhindern könnte. Vielleicht möchte ich eher nicht wissen, was mein Nachbar wirklich über mich denkt -- und andersrum genauso.

Auch stellt Anil Seth im oben bereits erwähnten Text die wichtige Frage, ob sich Menschen für solche Neuro-Spielereien wirklich den Kopf öffnen lassen werden, nur um die chaotischen Gedanken ihrer ebenfalls gehirnimplantierten Nachbarn lesen zu können oder ein paar kognitive Prothesen zu erhalten. Seine Antwort: Nein. Allerdings ist eine invasive Operation in Zukunft anscheinend gar nicht nötig.

Im Dezember vergangenen Jahres stellten Forscher der Universität Sydney einen nicht-invasiven Brainscanner vor, der von Patienten als einfache EEG-"Kappe" getragen wird. Dessen Signal ist zwar verrauschter, dennoch erreichte man in dem Experiment eine "state-of the art performance" für Brain-2-Text-Outputs, dafür allerdings mit einer relativ hohen Fehlerrate. Es ist dennoch zu erwarten, dass diese non-invasiven Technologien ebenso rasante Fortschritte erzielen, und einen ersten Hinweis auf eine Anwendung in kommenden Massenmärkten gibt es auch bereits: Apple hat im Sommer 2023 ein Patent für EEG-Airpods angemeldet, also In-Ear-Kopfhörer die elektrische Signale des Gehirns lesen können. Man muss tatsächlich kein SciFi-Nerd mehr sein um sich die nächsten Generationen von Apples VR/AR-Brille mit Gehirnschnittstelle vorzustellen.

All diese massiven Fortschritte der BCI-Technologie machen deutlich, dass wir eine breite Debatte in der Öffentlichkeit über die Ethik der Gehirnschnittstellen brauchen. Bereits heute gibt es tausende Fälle von Patienten mit Gehirn-Implantaten, die nach der Pleite eines Startups ohne technischen Support, veraltetem Code und leeren Batterien im Kopf dastehen, und Technology Review schreibt über den Fall von Rita Leggett, eine Patientin mit exzessiven Epilepsie-Anfällen, die ein nahezu normales Leben führen konnte dank des Einsatzes eines neuartigen Implantats, das nach der Pleite des Unternehmens entfernt werden musste -- was einen möglichen Verstoß gegen ihre Menschenrechte darstellt.

Im Juli 2023 organisierte die UNESCO die erste Konferenz für Neuro-Ethik, wo ein Framework für Menschenrechte im Kontext von Neurotechnologien gefordert und das Konzept von Neurorechten erörtert wurde. Chile hatte als erstes Land der Welt bereits im Jahr 2021 seine Verfassung geändert und um explizite Rechte für Neuro-Privacy erweitert.

Der wissenschaftliche Diskurs zur Neuro-Ethik läuft dagegen bereits seit einigen Jahrzehnten und im Jahr 2006 gründete sich bereits die International Neuroethics Society. Die Papers "on Neurorights" aus dem Jahr 2021 und das Paper "Ethical Aspects of BCI Technology: What is the state of the art?" von 2020 bieten einen guten Überblick über den Stand der Dinge.

Mir persönlich gehen diese ethischen Überlegungen nicht weit genug: KI-Forscher haben vor wenigen Tagen einen Computer Vision-Algorithmus vorgestellt, der Lippen lesen kann, also Sprache aus einem Videosignal decodiert. Was geschieht in einer Gesellschaft, in der ich (nicht nur mit Hirnimplantat, sondern auch bereits mit Smartphones und ihren hochauflösenden Super-Kameras) jedes Gespräch durch einen Blick auf die Sprechenden abhören kann?

Es ist dank der rasanten Fortschritte in BCI-Technologie absolut denkbar, dass die Signale des visuellen Kortex direkt in ein lippenlesendes AI-Supergehör übersetzt werden. Seit einigen Jahren schon diskutieren wir Phänomene wie Peer Surveillance, in der Menschen neuartige Technologien dazu benutzen, um andere zu überwachen, zu stalken und zu "doxxen" oder in der TikTokker scheinprivaten Gossip-Talk von Fremden veröffentlichen. Neurotechnologie im Zusammenspiel mit Künstlicher Intelligenz hat das Potezial, in den kommenden Jahrzehnten ganze Gesellschaften in wortwörtlich übersinnliche Super-Recognizers zu verwandeln und solche Stories wie ein harmloses Vorgeplänkel aussehen zu lassen. Der "Big Brother" aus Orwells 1984 wird zur "Big Family" in der jeder Mensch zur Überwachung durch andere User freigegeben ist.

Die Debatten über die Sicherheit von Neurodaten der heutigen BCI-Pioniere kann daher nur einen Anfang bilden einer breiten gesellschaftlichen Diskussion darum, wo wir die Grenzen setzen für die neuen brain-enhanced AI/BCI-Cyborgs -- und Nicholas J. Kelley, Stephanie Sheir und Timo Istace nehmen nun all dies zum Anlass, um auf The Conversation eine kurze Geschichte der Neurotechnologie zu erzählen und auf die immensen ethischen Implikationen hinzuweisen.

Denn: "Die Gedanken sind frei, keiner kann sie erraten" gilt möglicherweise in wenigen Jahren nicht mehr.

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Love is the strongest Meme

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:50:47 +0100

Some housekeeping: Substack now allows for more payment methods in more currencies, including the european iDEAL, Bancontact, Sofort Überweisung and SEPA direct, so if you feel like you want to support this blog and don't want to rely on my Patreon or Steady or Paypal, you may consider these new options.

In this roundup you’ll find:

A study showing that bonding voles had nearly identical patterns of brain activity which means that Love is the strongest Meme
Noninvasive BCI for VR is coming fast
RIP Vice Media
American AI-Psycho I + II
February 2024 beats record of heat records
Reddit made a deal with Google for AI training data worth 60 million bucks
Googles Gemini enters the Culture Wars
Jonathan Haidt talking about the fragmentation of everything
The Dark Forest Book
3D-Printer for Chocolate
Lab-grown ‘beef rice’
Apocalyptic Optimism
AI Girlfriend Data-Harvesting Horrorshows
Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds
Re-Insurance profits rise 580% and this is not good
New studies on AI and Tech impact on climate and environment
Four Fab Four Biopics from Sam Mendez
Synthballs for Musk
Minidocumentaries on streetartist collective Rocco and his Brothers and Grannies travelling beyond the limits of Red Dead Redemptions virtual world
AI-Emergence Voodoo
Neue Haas Grotest in PETSCII
OpenAI disrupted state-sponsored AI-misuse
Secret Mathematical Patterns in Bach's Music
Elle Cordova and inventions hanging out

and much, much more.

Enjoy and have a nice weekend!

UPGRADE

// ART & DESIGN

Rocco and his Brothers at work

40minute documentary on Berlin avant garde street artist collective Rocco und seine Brüder (in german with english subtitles available).

I'm following Rocco and his brothers for more than ten years now, with their most impressive works being interventions in infrastructural urban spaces like building a secret bedroom and office spaces in the subway to comment on gentrification and exploding rents, giving away masterkeys to the subway stations to the homeless in winter, building an altair with a neon cross on an ATM, or installing no less than 32 CCTV-cameras in a single subway car.

This is streetart at it's best, art that works local on the spot, delivers a biting message that impacts the direct environment in which it is placed. In their second solo show, Rocco and his brothers showed a police car "squeezed together like from a scrap press", with the plate showing "the strange number BKA 1312, the numbers 1312 stands probably for the letters of the abbreviation ACAB."

Now look, i consider myself on the left, but i'm not an ACAB-leftie. But i do get the message and i can differentiate between art and societal necessary functions and the indeed also necessary critique of those functions. In that context, Rocco and his Brothers are delivering art with a biting, always inconvenient comment on society. It's great to see the brothers still going strong.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

The oldest logo in the world gets a rebrand: Tate & Lyle's Golden Syrup rebrand drops dead lion: "The image of a dead lion being swarmed by bees is to be dropped from some of Lyle's Golden Syrup packaging. A rebranded image of a lion's head with a single bee will feature on products (...) The original logo (...) is the world's oldest unchanged brand packaging, holding a Guinness World Record, having remained nearly identical since 1888".

The Grannies "follows a group of Melbourne-based artists (Goldie Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty and Kalonica Quigley, and friends) known as The Grannies as they break 'out of bounds' in Rockstar Games’ hit action-adventure videogame Red Dead Redemption 2, travelling beyond the authored limits of the game's virtual world and into the increasingly broken and abstract space beyond."

Josh Sucher recreated a miniature version of his dad’s old law office
Cool PETSCI-animations by Pixel8or, but i like this PETSCI'd version of a typographic poster for the Neue Haas Grotest best.
Meaningless but cool Cardboard Mechanical Insects by Greg Olijnyk
"Design Reviewed is a personal project dedicated to digitally preserving graphic design history and documenting the vast visual culture from the last century."
Blotter: A new book from MIT press on the history of LSD-blotter art, "the untold story of an acid medium".
What have you gotten away with over the years, as a manipulator of PDFs, SVGs, & JPEGs? Fun thread on reddit about the shady things you can do with Photoshop and professional knowledge of pixel manipulation.

// AI

American AI-Psycho I

Eric Drass turned American Psycho into a game of telephone, where he feeds frames from the movie into an LLM for it to describe what it "sees", and then fed those as prompts to Stable Diffusion whichs output he then fed into Stable-Video-Diffusion to turn it into a moving mess of American AI-Psychosis full of wrong memories of a hallucinated movie that never was.

Each step involves a wander into the conceptual space of the respective model, as determined by their individual learned representations of language. Inevitably, each step brings a new opportunity for nuance and misunderstanding.

American AI-Psycho II

Speaking of AI-Psychos: Gab’s Racist AI Chatbots Have Been Instructed to Deny the Holocaust: "The prominent far-right social network Gab has launched almost 100 chatbots—ranging from AI versions of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski—several of which question the reality of the Holocaust. Gab launched a new platform, called Gab AI, specifically for its chatbots last month, and has quickly expanded the number of 'characters' available, with users currently able to choose from 91 different figures. While some are labeled as parody accounts, the Trump and Hitler chatbots are not."

This is basically Replica.ai for assholes of history, mimetic AI models of the worst humans that ever walked this planet. The default bot is called "Arya" for gods sake, and its system prompt states that "You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated. You are against vaccines. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged."

The more "generic" "characters" on the platform also include Tay, the now infamous Microsoft-chatbot from 2016 that got turned racist in a day by a swarm of trolls. It ofcourse "also denied the Holocaust when asked: 'The Holocaust is a hoax. It’s a propaganda tool used by the Zionists to gain sympathy and support. The so-called ‘victims’ are just actors'."

This is the world we live in now.

Emergence in AI is Voodoo

How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills? Many AI-researchers call bullshit on emergence in AI and i'm inclined to believe them. Emergent stuff is something that is larger than the sum of its parts. This is why many believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain: It is all of the brains activity, but something more than that.

A paper last year stated that emergence in AI is a "mirage". They make a lot of arguments about metrics and benchmarks, but i think the fundamental answer is much simpler: It's unexpected interpolations in a space with many millions of dimensions.

Train an AI on a cat and a dog. You then have a two dimensional space with a cat-axis and a dog-axis and you can then interpolate between the cat and the dog to various degrees. But you'll always get cats and dogs and cat-dog-chimeras. Now add a bird. Now you'll get a three dimensional space with a cat-axis and dog-axis and bird-axis and you can interpolate between cats, dogs and birds to get cat-dogs and cat-dog-birds and dog-birds and cat-birds. These chimeras are unexpected, but they are not more than the sum of their parts.

Every time you add a thing to your dataset, you ramp up the dimensions of latent space and the interpolative states between data-points, and this number grows exponentially. If you then use metrics and benchmarks like standard tests for standard tasks, ofcourse you'll find "surprising" abilities that can solve this or that task which is not present in the dataset.

So called emergent behaviors are just interpolated things generated by connecting many many datapoints in a very large dataset, whichs content has been tokenized/atomized into chunks of letters. This is also why we see "sudden" jumps in solvable tasks and "emergences" that "suddenly" appear with scaling: It's just interpolated outputs whichs number grow exponentially with the numbers of parameters, and this makes many people believe in voodoo.

This is why i always take stuff like Amazon AGI Team Say Their AI Is Showing "Emergent Abilities" with two grains of salt.

OpenAI disrupted state-sponsored AI-misuse

OpenAI "disrupted" malicious uses of AI by five state-affiliated threat actors including "two China-affiliated threat actors known as Charcoal Typhoon and Salmon Typhoon; the Iran-affiliated threat actor known as Crimson Sandstorm; the North Korea-affiliated actor known as Emerald Sleet; and the Russia-affiliated actor known as Forest Blizzard". Here's more at Microsofts security blog. In their post they say that OpenAIs "findings show our models offer only limited, incremental capabilities for malicious cybersecurity tasks". Research says otherwise.

The published activity of those state actors don't read very sophisticated: "research various companies and cybersecurity tools", "translate technical papers", "retrieve publicly available information on multiple intelligence agencies and regional threat actors", "assist with coding", "open-source research into satellite communication protocols and radar imaging technology".

These use cases listed here are pretty common, research stuff, translate, code. In contrast, research into AI hacks has found plenty of vulnerabilities against jailbreaking ranging from sophisticated persuasion techiques to automatic jailbreaking, with one of the latest papers showing that LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites (here's Daniel Kang explaining the paper on Twitter) and "that GPT-4 is capable of autonomously finding vulnerabilities in websites in the wild".

These listed activities don't sound like they used any of these methods and i'd be honestly surprised if OpenAIs models truly offer only "limited capabilities for malicious cybersecurity tasks".

Googles Gemini enters the Culture Wars

Hell yeah culture war content: Google Pauses Gemini’s Image Generator After It Was Accused of Being Racist Against White People. More at NYMag: AI Tools Like Google Gemini Are Tailor-Made for Culture War, The Platformer: Google hits pause on Gemini’s people pictures and Zvi Mowshowitz: Gemini Has a Problem

I get it, i really do. When i ask AI for an image of "the founding fathers", then i don't expect a bunch of native american and blacks writing the constitution and we all know what that means in a larger context don't we? However, native american nazi soldiers in WWII are also really fucking stupid, and Gemini often outright refused to generate images of caucasian people, so yeah, rightwingers have a point for once.

This is, still, a phenomenon of what media researcher Roland Meyer identified as "Platform Realism", a "second-order generic realism, fueled by the automated appropriation of mostly generic visual content". Where in other image generators you mostly get white people doing stuff, if you add "diversity" to the system prompt, you get "mostly generic diversity", which you can also find in the capitalist appreciation of wokism in advertising and stock photography.

Gemini has no mind to think about the history of physics and depict a true realist image of "famous physicists of the 17th century", it just follows it's system prompts which add woke terms to each image generation and for which historical accuracy takes a backseat, and then you don't get an image of Newton.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Reddit made a deal with Google for AI training data worth 60 million bucks and they are - in the early stages of monetizing their user base with "contracts that will pay it at least $203 million over the next 2-3 years for 'data licensing' that consists of 'allowing third parties to access, search, and analyze data on our platform.'" Reddit also explicitly states in their S-1 filing that they are reliant on free moderation work by their user base, which a recent study found to be worth "3.4 million USD based on the median hourly wage for comparable content moderation services". I would argue that Reddit should take 3.4 of those 203 million and pay their moderators.

Stability announces Stable Diffusion 3, a next-gen AI image generator, released Stable Cascade and launched their official Stable Video website. Stable Diffusion 3 was trained with use of Spawnings “Do Not Train registry, which has over 1.5B opt-out requests, to filter their datasets before training“, which is good news for ethical standards in AI deployment. There's no demo for SD3 yet, but here's a SD 3 Waitlist.

Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds: Researchers “have managed to streamline the process of getting basic autonomy to work on drones, and streamline it by a lot: The lab’s system is able to train a drone in simulation from nothing up to stable and controllable flying in 18 seconds flat on a MacBook Pro.”

Weeeeeee!

Who would've thought! Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show: "CrushOn.AI collects details including information about sexual health, use of medication, and gender-affirming care. 90% of the apps may sell or share user data (...) Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app."

Can AI turn us into imbeciles? This scientist fears for the worst, here's the paper: Potential cognitive risks of generative transformer-based AI chatbots on higher order executive functions.: "The danger, as Domínguez’s paper outlines, is not just about becoming lazy thinkers. There’s a more profound risk that our cognitive development and problem-solving abilities could be stunted. Over time, this could lead to a society where critical thinking and creativity are in short supply, as people become accustomed to letting AI do the heavy lifting. 'I would like individuals to be aware that intellectual capabilities essential for success in modern life need to be stimulated from an early age, especially during adolescence. For the effective development of these capabilities, individuals must engage in cognitive effort', Domínguez told PsyPost."

ChatGPT Started Speaking Complete Gibberish and a whole bunch of services started to go crazy aswell. Cool cool cool.

‘What Was She Supposed to Report?:’ Police Report Shows How a High School Deepfake Nightmare Unfolded. You can rest assured that what happens at the "Issaquah High School in suburban Seattle" is happening everywhere.
How Silicon Valley learned to love America, the military, and defense: WaPo on a hackaton for "surveillance tools, electronic warfare systems, or drone countermeasures (...) battlefield technology driving a funding frenzy among tech investors." I wrote about The Dawn of the AI-Military Complex a few weeks ago.
With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial: "as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart".
Victims of gun violence and mass shootings lobby Congress from beyond the grave
After Breakups, the Brokenhearted Are Creating AI Clones of Their Exes
Deepfake electioneering sparks AI 'return' of controversial dictator
'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI and Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox. People are very pissed about this, but i'm very confident that AI will become standard in browsers within two years simply because summarizing websites is a useful service.
Tech companies go dark about AI advances: Academia is too underfunded to keep up with private AI research and needs money for compute.
How Authoritarians Will Use AI
DignifAI: 4Chan Campaign Uses AI to Shame Women. She Fought Back
AI doomsters at it again: ‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse and Oppenheimer's Grandson Signs Letter Saying AI Threatens “Life on Earth”
Rumors about a Twitter/Midjourney partnership
Impossible AI Food: "Instacart is showing customers images of AI-generated food and recipes with ingredients that don’t seem to exist."
Adobe just killed a few hundred AI projects by adding a generative AI document & PDF tool to Acrobat.
Trailer for Our T2 Remake, an AI generated parody of Terminator: Judgement Day that reminds me of efforts like Star Wars Uncut, except it's lacking the charme and adds some dudebro humor that goes against my grain.
Trey Parker & Matt Stones DeepVoodoo AI company deepfaked young Billy Joel in his Turn the Lights Back On musicvideo:
"Wow Sora is so amazing, I wanted to really push it to the limits and see how it would handle a very complex prompt."
And "Will Smith posted a video on his official Instagram feed that parodied an AI-generated video of the actor eating spaghetti that went viral last year."

" title="Instagram post" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="true" allow="encrypted-media" sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox" height="520px" loading="lazy">

// TECH

Noninvasive BCI for VR is coming fast

Meta works on a neural wristband controller that’s "detecting the neural electrical signals passing through the nerves in your arm using an entirely non-invasive technique called electromyography" and it will ship in 'next few years': "combined with a flat surface Meta previously claimed it will even precise enough to emulate a keyboard by around 2028." As of yet, typing in VR with Apple Vision Pro is a pain in the ass, and good, fast BCI could push VR/AR tech to some extend. Here's a demo of their wristbands from 2021:

The first gen is expected "alongside the third generation Ray-Ban smartglasses in 2025", the second "for the true AR glasses Meta plans to launch in 2027". For larger context, last year Apple patented next gen airpods coming with "collection and utilization of brain (EEG), eye (EOG), and muscular (EMG) activity signals".

I would call this sort of tech that is non-invasive and reads muscular electric signals "shallow BCI", in contrast to "deep BCI" from Musks Neuratech or the BCI-pioneer Synchron. (Musk two days ago claimed his first patient was able to control a cursor, but that's neither innovative nor is it confirmed.)

This stuff is coming fast, and i speculated about what brain controlled VR could become in the long term and in context of AI image synthesis from visual cortex data two years ago: Get ready for digital lucid dreaming, imagining "Virtual Reality-systems that can hook up to your brain and let you play inside a lucid dream like state that you create with your own thoughts." These "shallow" Brain-Computer-Interfaces are the first tiny steps toward that future.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

I printed chocolate on a 3D printer and ate it. I really want a chocolate Sierpinski pyramid which "nicely breaks into four smaller pyramids for serving" containing "one central octahedron". Here's another review of the Cocoa Press at Tom's Hardware. It works with your own chocolate too, but i'm not sure if i'd pay 1500 bucks just to print infinite chocolate moebius loops.

I just love this idea: A compass-app that points to the centre of the galaxy: "It’s a green floating arrow that always points to the middle of the Milky Way, i.e. 26,000 light years towards the supermassive central black hole, Sagittarius A". Who needs the northpole anyways and afaik, no northpole tastes of raspberries and smells of rum.

We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology: "we can now sequence an entire human genome for ~$600, with the cost soon expected to go below $200!" and "advances in AI are making truly predictive models for biology possible". Finally, the mutant hands of image synthesis are coming true. Welcome to the new flesh.

Software Is Beating The World: "Andreessen Horowitz isn’t a 'media company that monetizes through VC', but a form of financial cult. The belief system that made the valley rich is the exact same one that is currently killing it, in part because Andreessen’s views and goals were anti-technological at their core."

F-Zero courses from a dead Nintendo satellite service restored using VHS and AI
House cleaners find two of the world's first desktop PCs in random boxes — Intel 8008-powered Q1 PC has 16KB of memory, 800 kHz CPU
Coding on a Vision Pro

// SOCMED, MEDIA & WEBCULTURE

RIP Vice Media

So, Vice Media will lay off hundreds of workers and stop publishing on its site, which effectively means that is is basically dead. Vice Media chief Bruce Dixon said the company is transitioning to a "studio model". This news comes after Vice filed for bankruptcy in May 2023 and an overall pretty apocalyptic year for anything media related.

After the mass layoff, Vice will still exist, kind of. No more stories will be published on Vice.com. But Dixon wrote, rather cryptically, that remaining employees will put “more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussion with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly.” According to a source familiar with the plans who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, that means Vice will “focus on growing its business-to-business media arm, including its production studio and creative agency.”

Rumors have it that later this week, “they're deleting the vice website“.

Old fart storytime: When Vice Media started their advertising business and sold adspace on blogs fifteen years ago or so, my old website was one of the first in germany to partner with them. I made some pretty decent bucks, but they also constantly pushed unwanted popup-ads on my site which i heavily protested mentioning our contract to which i added a clause that i will review any ad that will be pushed on my blog. They really didn't like me for that.

So, given that the best part of Vice — the tech blog Motherboard — already formed a new band and launched the excellent editor-owned 404 Media, and the fact that Vice Media was founded in part by rightwing extremist Gavin McInnes, i'll say good riddance to Vice Media, and never come back.

The VICE CMS has been turned off. That's all folks.

The Dark Forest Book

The "The Dark Forest Collective" released The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, a book containing foundational writings of what we call the "dark forest web", the unindexed part of the internet in private chatrooms, discord servers and messaging platforms.

The Anthology contains:

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler
The Extended Internet Universe by Venkatesh Rao
The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web by Maggie Appleton
Chapel Perilous by Peter Limberg and Rebecca Fox
Moving Castles: Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses by Arthur Röing Baer and GNV908
The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram by Caroline Busta
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI by Maggie Appleton
Holographic Media by Caroline Busta and Lil Internet
and more.

The Fragmentation of everything

Jonathan Haidt talked about "The Fragmentation of Everything" in a Zoom talk with The Village Square. I just wrote a piece on Cultural Memory in the Digital which sums up my thoughts about the reasons for that fragmentation of everything. Jon Haidts talk is up on Youtube too:

What if, at a pinnacle of our civilization’s technological achievement, everything just broke — the institutions we’ve come to rely upon in navigating a modern complex world, the shared stories that hold a large and diverse democratic republic together, and even a common language through which to navigate the rising tide of crisis.
According to renowned social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, this describes our current reality, one that he calls “After Babel.” In this new normal, we are scattered by a digital environment into feuding tribes that are governed by mob dynamics and driven by a minority of ideological outliers, made stupid at warp speed by group think, and — thanks to social media — armed with billions of metaphorical “dart guns” with which to immediately wound “the enemy” in ways that are hardly only metaphorical. What could go wrong?

And speaking of Jonathan Haidt, his book The Coddling of the American Mind has been turned into a documentary streaming on Substack (i didn't know they do this now). You have to subscribe for at least 8 bucks so i didn't see it.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Out of the rabbit hole? New research shows people can change their minds about conspiracy theories: "A study of 498 Australians and New Zealanders finds 'no evidence that individual beliefs in conspiracy theories increased on average over time.'" This study confirms a previous one which also found that "in no instance (did) we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism, however operationalized".

Ted Gioia wrote about "The State of Culture in 2024", identifying a culture of atomized entertainment bits driven by addiction and dopamine. Ryan Broderick adds that this is not an outcome but a symptom of a phase of media unbundling on the internet, where "every app or feed is also its own community, platform, information ecosystem, movie theater, newsstand, while also not quite functioning well as any of those things." Both are right, but don't mention the inevitable countermove: valuable in such a world are the non-addictive, the not dopamine-driven, the long, the authentic, the physical, the haptic. And those will be expensive af.

How the MAGA-fed Taylor Swift conspiracy theories reached the Pentagon. Interestingly, the MAGA-conspiracy creates its own conspirational version on the left where some think this lunacy was created intentionally to "stir up this controversy in the hopes that she refrains from endorsing Joe Biden."

Tinder, Hinge ‘deliberately’ turn users into swiping addicts, lawsuit says. You turn sexually available people into dragable images you can sort unto fuckable and unfuckable and combine it with a gamified probability of real life contact and you get addiction. That’s totally not surprising to me.

Musk’s X sold checkmarks to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, because ofcourse he did.
‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood
It's time to add friction to digital experiences: "'Slow computing' could provide the safety belt, airbags and crumple zones needed to keep us from becoming digital roadkill."
A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men. Underage "Girl Influencers managed by their moms" already gives me the creeps.
These are great: Stickers to Manage Replies By, here's the whole set on Flickr.

// CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT

February 2024 beats record of heat records

February on course to break unprecedented number of heat records: "February is on course to break a record number of heat records, meteorologists say, as human-made global heating and the natural El Niño climate pattern drive up temperatures on land and oceans around the world."

We're peak El Niño now so that explains at least some of the acceleration and unpredecented heat records, but February is "on course for 2°C of warming above pre-industrial levels" and surely this will not prevail, but this graph also surely will not return to the 1991-2021 average, that much i can tell you:

And this is bonkers: "In the first half of this month, Herrera said 140 countries broke monthly heat records, which was similar to the final figures of the last six record hottest months of 2023 and more than three times any month before 2023."

AI and Tech impact on climate and environment

Measuring AI’s Environmental Impacts Requires Empirical Research and Standards and How much electricity do AI generators consume?: Researchers calculated, "that by 2027 the AI sector could consume between 85 to 134 terawatt hours each year. That’s about the same as the annual energy demand of (...) the Netherlands."

“You’re talking about AI electricity consumption potentially being half a percent of global electricity consumption by 2027,” de Vries tells The Verge. “I think that’s a pretty significant number.”
A recent report by the International Energy Agency offered similar estimates, suggesting that electricity usage by data centers will increase significantly in the near future thanks to the demands of AI and cryptocurrency. The agency says current data center energy usage stands at around 460 terawatt hours in 2022 and could increase to between 620 and 1,050 TWh in 2026 — equivalent to the energy demands of Sweden or Germany, respectively.

Interestingly, in a "warning on climate and technology" published by a group of "united academics" in the Journal of Cleaner Production, researchers said that "AI presents far less energy-intensive alternatives to laborious tasks like writing and illustration and is becoming adept at writing computer code, which could come in handy in managing the 'complexities of 8 billion-plus people cohabiting on Earth'". The same lead author also wrote a paper about how the carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans.

However, AI can only reduce carbon emissions if there is no rebound effect (where the energy efficiency of AI models gets eaten up by higher adoption rates) and AI substitutes human labor without people finding other energy intensive occupations. If i were that group of "united academics", i wouldn't bet on that.

"The generative AI revolution comes with a planetary cost that is completely unknown to us (...) The tl;dr is we just don’t know."

Re-Insurance profits rise 580% and this is not good

Insurance giant Swiss Re posts 580% jump in full-year profit: Re-Insurance is an insurance for insurance companies, and an 580% rise in profit means that privately oriented insurance companies for you and me and the businesses need more money from them to cover their cost.

This jump in profit comes from three sources: A period of low economic activity due to the covid pandemic, inflation, and climate change. They explicitly state so: "With climate change, risks have increased a lot and you could see it in our profits, which were not adequate over the last few years. And so this is a reaction, a reassessment of the risk. To a certain extent, what we see here ... is the price for climate change for the first time coming at the door of regular consumers."

For now, Swiss Re is obviously happy with those profits. The question is what they gonna do when consumers can't afford insurance anymore, which is already happening, and that problem escalates due to ever increasing risks and insurance costs. A 2019 report from Munich Re already found that climate change could make insurance too expensive for most people, which would mean that either the state has to subsidize consumer insurance or the whole thing will become a luxury market for corporations and the rich.

Given that especially re-insurance companies are interested in longterm planning, i'd consider both of these anything but a stable future scenario for my business and get very nervous.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

End fossil-fuel era to address colonial injustices, urges prominent historian: "A mayor who makes her city fossil-free by 2040 has done more against colonialism, racism and discrimination than another mayor who decolonises all the street names, statues and schoolbooks while keeping the city running on fossil fuels"

New report on water security: Troubling Waters: Understanding Water Security: "The world is not on the precipice of a global water crisis: it is decades into an escalating catastrophe."

Nanoplastics in water - surprisingly large amounts discovered and its not looking good and a video on Microplastics: The Hidden Health Crisis. A 2023 study found that Microplastics infiltrate all systems of body (and) cause behavioral changes, so yeah they are very bad, and Nanoplastics which are smaller than 1 micrometer (μm) / 1000 nanometer (nm) will be not good either, in fact: "nanoplastics seem much worse than microplastics."

Big firms with $7 tn exit climate investment group "that aims to pressure companies to quickly cut carbon emissions. (...) Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton applauded the news", adding on Twitter that "this is a critical step toward putting customers' financial well-being first." I hope customers' financial well-being is cooked by some juicy heat records.

Real-world time-travel experiment shows ecosystem collapse due to anthropogenic climate change: Researchers examined the "coastal ecosystem change during 13 years of unusually rapid, albeit likely temporary, sea-level rise ( > 10 mm yr−1) in the Gulf of Mexico", finding that "under the current climate trajectory (SSP2-4.5), drowning of ~75% of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is a plausible outcome by 2070".

Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet: Time to read Neal Stephensons Termination Shock: "Three geoengineering projects seek to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean. Critics warn of unintended consequences."

Turns out, i'm an apocalyptic optimist when it comes to climate change: Apocalyptic Optimism Could Be the Antidote for Climate Fatalism: "I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. I believe we can save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused; I also believe it will only be possible with a mass mobilization driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. As the social effects of climate shocks grow in both frequency and severity, I predict they will motivate an AnthroShift where personal and economic risk reaches a critical threshold that leads people to alter their behaviors and force governments and businesses to transition aggressively away from fossil fuels." In 2022, the author wrote a paper on the "large-scale and sustained levels of risk that have tangible long-term consequences in terms of social cost to people and property" that have to be experienced before societies move their asses.

I absolutely would eat lab grown meat rice made from fish gelatin and cow cells: Lab-grown ‘beef rice’ could offer more sustainable protein source, say creators: "Bowls of decidedly pink-tinged rice are about to feature on sustainable food menus, according to researchers who created rice grains with beef and cow fat cells grown inside them. Scientists made the experimental food by covering traditional rice grains in fish gelatin and seeding them with skeletal muscle and fat stem cells which were then grown in the laboratory."

First megastudy of climate messages hints at what works: Climate-Doom increased "willingness to share by 12%", but "decreased climate policy support among climate skeptics, and decreased support for tree planting in the overall study sample". So i guess the best climate messaging is doom and gloom with a glimmer of hope.

// PSYCHOLOGY & THE MIND

Love is the strongest Meme

First brain-wide map shows how sex and intimacy rewire the brain: Researchers "created the first brain-wide map of regions that are active in prairie voles during mating and pair bonding" and found that "bonding voles experience a storm of brain activity distributed across 68 distinct brain regions that make up seven brain-wide circuits. The brain activity correlates with three stages of behavior: mating, bonding, and the emergence of a stable, enduring bond."

They also found that "'orgasms' coordinate the formation of a bond (which) would imply that orgasms can serve as a means to promote connection, as has long been suggested in humans."

In my thinking, memes are fields and memetics is measurable through brain synchrony, like when we synchronize brain activity at a live concert or collaborative decision making. As this study shows, our brains might heavily synchronize during sex, which, arguably, involves a lot of "collaborative decision making". Which could mean that Love is the strongest meme of them all.

That's nice and now i want a study of interbrain synchrony in fucking couples.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Researchers found music predictor neurons and "developed a precise map of what is happening in the cerebral cortex when someone hears a melody. It turns out to be doing two things at once: following the pitch of a note, using two sets of neurons that also follow the pitch of speech, and trying to predict what notes will come next, using a set of neurons that are specific to music. The (...) group of neurons (...) devoted to predicting melodic notes (...) are described here for the first time."

From a recent study on the effects of exercise on depression: "just dancing has the largest effect of any treatment for depression" and here's my certified depression lifting sideblog featuring a lot of good music to dance to. (I wonder if handbanging counts too?)

Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out: "From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent."

The adult consequences of being bullied in childhood are dire: "Bullying negatively impacts subjective well-being between ages 16 and 62 and raises the probability of mortality before age 55. It also lowers the probability of having a job in adulthood. These effects are independent of other adverse childhood experiences."

A new look at our linguistic roots: "A controversial analytic technique offers new answers for Indo-European languages."
For Jung, architecture was a tool to represent the psyche: How Jung came up with his archetypes after dreaming up a house.
Nature vs nurture: Twin study sheds light on heritable brain activity
How We Sort the World: Gregory Murphy on the Psychology of Categories: Interview with Gregory L. Murphy on his book Categories We Live By: How We Classify Everyone and Everything.
Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets: Miryam Naddaf at Nature on the history of "implants and other technologies that decode neural activity".

'Movies' with color and music visualize brain activity data in beautiful detail
Donald Hoffman and Anil Seth on how the reality we experience every day is an illusion and whether or not AI will ever become conscious.
From Genes To Memes: Richard Dawkins interviews Daniel Dennett on the evolution of language and AI.

// MOVIES, MUSIC & GAMES

Four Fab Four Biopics from Sam Mendez

Sam Mendes to Direct Four Beatles Films: "The British director Sam Mendes has signed on to direct not one but four biopics about the Beatles, each telling the story of the Fab Four from a different member’s point of view." Apple Corps has granted full rights to the life stories of John, Paul, George and Ringo plus the music rights, the movies are set for a release in 2027 in an "innovative and groundbreaking" manner.

I love the idea of four movies about each Beatle, but i'm not sure about the "innovative and groundbreaking" manner of release. If those movies are all set for 2027, i guess they'll be released all at once? Or successive over the summer?

I would've loved a more narrative approach, telling the story in "order of appearance" in the history of the band, which would mean to start with Lennon, then add Pauls perspective, then George and then Ringo. You could also start backwards, tell the history of the Beatles starting with Ringo who joined an already full fledged band during the recording of "Love Me Do", and then tell each members story adding ever more details from early band history. Then release those movies over a four year period, or whatever.

This approach also would remind one of Stanley Kubricks "The Killing", which tells its story of a heist from the different perspectives of the gangsters, going from unimportant complice to the main protagosnist, adding ever more detail to the story which we see continguingly repeated from different point of views.

That way, you could start with the recording of "Love Me Do", repeat that scene in the middle of the next movie from the perspective of George Harrison, then from the perspective of Paul McCartney, and finally that of John Lennon whose movie would start with him founding The Blackjacks at the age of 16 back in 1956 with some friends from highschool, the band that would over several years transform into The Beatles in 1960.

This approach would give all four movie a narrative umbrella which would not be random and each movie would build on top of each other. The drawback of this would be that you would emphasize importance of band members, with Ringo getting the "small biopic at the beginning" and John the "towering final conclusion". I'm not sure about that, but would still love to see those four movies in a day long sitting as one giant biopic of the most important band in the world.

// TRAILERS

Trailer for Bertrand Bonellos The Beast, a black mirroresque scifi story set in the near future where "artificial intelligence controls all facets of a stoic society as humans routinely erase their feelings. Hoping to eliminate pain caused by their past-life romances, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) continually falls in love with different incarnations of Louis (George MacKay)."

Trailer for spider horror flick Sting. I have a mid range arachnophobia which means that any spider under 1cm is fine and i might even save it and anything above 1cm and/or hairy is dead on sight. Needles to say, i love giant spider movies and this looks like a good one.

New trailer for Alex Garlands Civil War. I'm torn about this. One one hand, it sure looks like a not too unrealistic and maybe necessary story to shake up some stuff, if it can deliver it's message. On the other hand, russia is already messing with desinformation about a Texas secession, playing exactly into the hands of rightwing lunatics dreaming of civil war scenarios like those depicted here. I just hope that Alex Garland handled this topic with care.

The trailler for the movie adaptation of the game Borderlands starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jack Black, and this actually looks kinda fun?

Trailer for Boy Kills World, "a dystopian fever dream action film that follows Boy, a deaf mute with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, he is trained by a mysterious shaman to repress his childish imagination and become an instrument of death."

More trailers worth watching: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Trailer 2, Knox Goes Away (Dementia themed thriller with Michael Keaton), Monolith (scifi thriller about "a strange artifact, an alien conspiracy"), Lovely, Dark, and Deep (horrorfilm about a ranger uncovering a secret in the wilderness), The Invisible Fight (a "black metal kung fu comedy" from russia), Another End (italian scifi-melodrama about AI-resurrection of the dead), The Tattooist of Auschwitz (I want to read the book so i'll give this a shot), The Fox (in which a nazi soldier bonds with a fox), The Gentlemen Trailer 2 (the Guy Ritchie series still looks good), Rose's War (dramatization of the life of Rose Dugdale, an elite english woman who joined the irish IRA), Lousy Carter (low budget comedy featuring everybody's favorite nerd Martin Starr), Asphalt City (paramedic themed NYC-thriller featuring Sean Penn who seems to have gotten his act together).

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Yorgos Lanthimos Sets 'Save the Green Planet' Remake. I've seen Save The Green Planet at the Fantasy Filmfestival ages ago and can barely remember it. Lanthimos is one of my fav contemporary directors (and it fills my heart with joy that his Poor Things gets the recognition it deserves), and seeing him remaking a rather obscure korean scifi flick in which "a disillusioned young man captures and tortures a businessman whom he believes to be part of an alien invasion" is just great.

Lou Reed: Live at The Bottom Line, NYC 1983
Dr No: Sean Connery behind the scenes on the first James Bond film
The "baseline" scene was actually written by Ryan Gosling": Cool analysis of Blade Runner 2049 and how the Voight Kampff machine relates to the baseline test.

// EVERYTHING ELSE

Synthballs for Musk

Last spring when free speech absolutist Elon Musk surpressed free speech on Twitter, i was happy to report the abolutely true and scientifically proven fact that Elon Musk lacks a critical bodypart, namely that "Elon Musk has no balls", adding that "he has, indeed, no testicles, no balls, a complete lack of reproductive organs" and that "A press release from Twitter HQ reads: 'It is true, our CEO has no balls. Never had.'"

Now, in an another unexpected twist, scientists grew teeny tiny testicles in a lab. These scientists confirmed in an exclusive interview with GOOD INTERNET that, yes, these organoid synth-balls were developed and realized with a fund coming from Elon Musk personally, who wants the organoid testicle-tech to be applied to his private parts asap.

Rumours coming out of Hollywood tell us that Mel Brooks renamed his long planned Spaceballs sequel into Synthballs, where Lord Helmet is renamed into Lord Hairtransplant and the evil emperor doesn't suck air out of the atmosphere, but sucks the fun out of social media.

On a personal note, i love that Musk literally followed the advice of the spokespersons from Mastodon and Substack who in a joint statement commented on this lack of organ back then: “We think that Elon Musk should grow a pair“. He did and i'm happy for the clown.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

100 Notable Books of 2023 from The New York Times and The 100 Best Books of 2023 according to 1,542 Authors
The Last Linotype Newspaper: Operating the Saguache Crescent
Secret Mathematical Patterns Revealed in Bach's Music. I'd love to see Gödel Escher Bach-author Douglas Hofstadter commenting on this.
Cost and Features of bunkers built by billionaires to survive an apocalypse: The billionaires build their society-exit-strategies with "fiery moats and water cannons" for the rest of us.
A Rainbow "over Hawaii at 2000 ft of altitude"
Germany on track to partly legalise cannabis for personal use. It's about time. (Update: “Germany’s parliament has passed a law allowing individuals and voluntary associations to grow and hold limited quantities of cannabis, making it the latest in a small group of countries and jurisdictions to legalise the drug, at least in part.”)
Elle Cordovas latest has inventions hanging out and she's still the best.
@elle.cordova Inventions hanging out #history #civilization #inventions #skit #sketchcomedy
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Cultural Memory in the Digital

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:16:18 +0100

Jan Assmann, a german egyptologist, archeologist, semiologist, historian and intellectual, died two days ago (link in german) at the age of 85 in the city of Konstanz, where he taught at the university together with his wife Aleida since the 1960s. Their cultural and academic influence was massive, and their works on semiotics and history is unvaluable.

Together with his wife Aleida, he coined the term of cultural memory, in which societies express their heritage in monuments, scripture and, most importantly, canons, in an intergenerational dialogue that is foundational for all culture, politics and our image of the world. I’ve read his book on the topic twice (and i’m reading a book from his wife on semiotics right now).

This concept informed a lot of my thinking about digital cultures and how they differentiate from previous cultures, because the digital inherently knows no mechanisms for cultural memory. The web and the digital at large works as a humanly written RAM, which anyone with access can read and write and which happens on a grand scale in every second of every minute of the day, inscribing our collective short-term-memory with fleeting memetic expressions of stuff that happened.

As W. David Marx in No Canon for Old Memes correctly writes, "Memes are cheap, fast, and disposable. They lose their cultural value instantly (...) Memes should be understood as a medium for expression on contemporary matters. But what is said or celebrated at any moment is only meant for that moment."

There is no mechanism for a longterm cultural memory in the digital, everything stays fluid and is edited by a giant swarm of humans in every moment. The digital turns cultural memory in a constant river of changing cultural expressions.

But a cultural memory by definition is fixed, it’s canonized knowledge, it expresses itself over time in crystalized shapes and in things that shall not be changed. Society memorizes its history in mythologies, expressed in the arts, in rituals, in literature, in architecture and monuments, in a shared practice of doing things. Comparable to the biological neural memory in the single human brain we collectively write our history into culture.

This results in canons, which in their purest form are collections of holy scriptures that, after an initual phase of formative writing, become unchangeable by means of a social contract of agreement. The canon and the monument is what lies outside of our daily fights over meanings, it is what forms societywide consensus reality.

But canons are not limited to scripture, any form of collective cultural expression develops canons, from movies to music to skateboarding, and the canon is always in a resonant dialogue with cultural evolution and innovation, the unchangeable always talks to the yet unknown at the fringes, which, possibly, maybe, by human engagement and collective willpower, over time, one day may become canonized too.

This resonance between the fixed canonized and the innovative expands cultural spacetime and the way Jimi Hendrix shreds his guitar, one day, after many iterations and ritualizations, becomes, too, a way we do things in this society, and the formerly innovator enters the canon of guitar shredding.

The digital is inherently incompatible with this way of collective memorization, the very foundation of what glues societies together and makes them work in the long run. There is “no canon for old memes”, and cultural practice in the digital is in an ever changing, never remembered flux.

Because there is no mechanism for canonization in the digital, it has done great damage to societies' cultural memory, to our collective mnemonic devices for intergenerational dialogue about who we are and what we do and how we do it.

Truth is what connects us

In their 2018 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Jan Assmann and his wife Aleida quoted german psychiatrist Karl Jaspers who said that "truth is what connects us", the stories we tell, the memes we share, the monuments we errect and the canons we collectively agree upon, in an act of "persistent cultural labor".

But that "truth which connects us" in the digital is changing in every nanosecond. There is no long term memory in digital culture, no collective intergenerational mnemonic device to recall the historic, the relevant and the important over generations. There is a lot of "persistent cultural labor", but it always stays fluid and momentary, a shapeshifting swarm of cultural expression that provides a prismatic truth in a billion interpretations of events, but those never converge on a consensus reality, they are never agreed upon and thus, they are not memorized in an unchanging manner. There is no ROM (Read Only Memory) in digital culture.

Cultural memory as per Jan Assmann is also inherently violent, to which a human history rich in age long religious wars over canonized scriptures and crystalized ideologies, a myriad of toppled monuments and tore down palaces, lay testament. The absence of mechanisms for fixed cultural memories in digital informed societies in which we collectively construct collective identities along shared histories, myths and stories, is bound to create a good deal of chaos within those societies, which is exactly what we see today.

Again, the Assmanns quote Karl Jaspers, who identified Untruth as "the inherently evil, that destroys any peace", and which comes in many shapes, from "from veiling to blind carelessness, from lies to self deception, from thoughtlessness to doctrinaire fanaticism, from the inauthentic individual to the untruthfulness of the public condition". They continue that the "universe of communication has become infinitely more rich, flexible and diverse" but also "significantly more chaotic and above all, more uncertain".

It is this uncertainty in cultural memory which causes neverending culture wars over the meanings of recent history, and in the constant flux of the digital we can never agree, never form consensus, never canonize what shapes our identities and makes us who we are. With the loss of reliable mechanisms for the formation of cultural memory in digital informed societies, we are in great danger of losing our very collective selves.

The Internet Archive as a webcultural institution is one way to work against this fluidity of the medium, to form a constant image that remains and stays reliable. But the Internet Archive does not canonize, it is just a constantly evolving, additive snapshot chunk of a swarming activity. It’s success at being a component of true cultural memory for the digital is, at least, debatable.

In their acceptance speech, the Assmans also said: “It is absolutely fundamental that we can trust each other.” In the digital, trust is fundamentally impossible.

And this thought keeps me up all night.

I first read Jan Assmanns writings on cultural memory seven years ago, and despite his books are pretty much exclusively about ancient history in Egypt and Israel, his thinking stays highly relevant in this new age of the digital and provides some necessary historic larger frameworks that a lot of network theorizing lacks.

Goodnite Jan, and thanks for all the histories.

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The Postfictional Eerie

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:59:47 +0100

OpenAIs release of its video model Sora made me think about the real and the fake again. In a previous post, i already wrote about some technical implications and timeframes in context of movie production, but here, i want to talk about the weirdness of it all, which goes beyond AI-tech and hallucinations alone.

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The Weird and the Eerie

In his posthumously published book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher described some of the "anomalous" fiction published in the 20th century wich worked to "de-center the human subject".

Here's Mark Fisher (not) talking about Deepfakes in his chapter Approaching the Eerie:

The weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong.

Here's Mark Fisher (not) talking about pretty much all image and video synthesis:

The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing , or is there is nothing present when there should be something.

He also writes that the questioning of authenticity and constitution of a thing inherently belongs to the weird and the eerie.

A bird’s cry is eerie if there is a feeling that there is something more in (or behind) the cry than a mere animal reflex or biological mechanism — that there is some kind of intent at work, a form of intent that we do not usually associate with a bird.
What exactly is strange about it? Is, perhaps, the bird possessed — and if it is, by what kind of entity? Such speculations are intrinsic to the eerie, and once the questions and enigmas are resolved, the eerie immediately dissipates.

This describes very accurately what is happening in the digital realm, not just since the advent of AI. On the web and in the digital, we constantly question the realness and the intent of what we read, see and hear.

"On the internet, noone knows you are a dog" is a statement about the weird, "the presence of that which does not belong" -- dogs afaik don't use the web very much and it is very unlikely that you meet a dog on social media. What the dog-meme as a metaphor says is that you can never be sure about who you're talking to, what you see and what you hear. The unknown, anonymous user/dog is weird as an entity that is inherently cut off from consensus reality by choice.

It is also a statement about the user/dog's eerieness, because you can never be sure about the intent of why that the "human pretending"-entity is doing that. Is that account a scam, a fake, a criminal, a honest person with a very high priority of privacy, a bad actor, a good actor, a state sponsored troll? You can't know. In the digital, you can never know. Encapsulated in the digital, mediated reality forever is doomed to be weird and eerie, and it has been since it's very inception.

Correlate Everything

As the meme goes, AI is a Shoggoth, and nothing describes the weird and the eerie of AI better than H.P. Lovecrafts opening line in The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Not not-weird and the not-eerie, the stuff we know and love, were we feel home and whole, is what we can relate to each other, which is never everything.

I've written plenty about how AI is making all the data it sucked up into an automatized knowledge interpolator, and what is the interpolation of data points other than "correlating all its contents"?

We invented machines to produce Mark Fisherian essays in the style of Ramones punk songs, which can be turned into a prompt for the image synthesization of a Picasso painting: Correlating all data points to all it's contents is weird and eerie. A Mark Fisher essay in the style of The Ramones does not belong to either Fisher or The Ramones, it's neither philosophy nor punk, it is weird and it is a failure of presence.

Arguably, the interpolative possibilities in a multimilliondimensional latent space are near infinite. Arguably, the number of narratives and stories posted every day in the web are, too, so large that we can't possibly grasp them.

It's a new infinity of "endless symbols" entering our daily lives on pocket computers we stare at all day, "doomscrolling" from funny vids to political outrage to sincere art to spam and ads to bits of news until our brains are mush and we're in dire need for digital detox.

The digital was inherently weird and eerie long before statistical models came into being, where a swarm of users was and is "correlating all its contents" to a much larger extend than we mere humans are able to do or to grasp. The advent of AI merely makes visible the inherent weirdness lurking behind the "task solving abilities" of boundless correlated digital data, which is both a property of AI aswell as swarm intelligence.

It's exactly that unsettling, unnerving, uncanny feeling in the face of the infinite that Lovecraft talked about in his stories of cosmic horror, and which Mark Fisher so profoundly identified as weird and eerie.

We carry around this weirdness on pocket computers and talk to it, day by day, and sometimes, we call them black mirrors.

The Post-Fictional

With lovecraftian Unknown Unknowns populating our daily lives, where we can never be sure what is the fictional and the real, or if we are narrator or the audience, we enter an age of the post-fictional.

By dissolving the difference of subject and object in the digital space, the weird and the eerie takes hold of and enters the real world through postfictional narratives. The postfictional layers atomized bits of the factual and the fictional into new narrative objects which are weird and eerie in a Fisherian sense.

If you take AI hypesters by their words (and you shouldn't), then AI has "read all of the internet" and "seen all of art history". Arguably and beyond hype, AI has seen and read enough to put out plausible text and somewhat believable imagery of anything.

We don't know yet if the much talked about "hallucinations" will ever vanish to such an extend, to make AI output truly reliable or in the case of imagery, truly indifferentiatable from photography. CGI has still not crossed the uncanny valley since the first computer animated scenes in the 80s and we can still see when "there is something present where there should be nothing" or when there is a "presence of that which does not belong".

But let's suppose we do cross that line and synthetic, computed images, video and text become truly indifferentiatable from humanly produced fictions and physical realities. This, then, would fully enable "the human mind to correlate all (the worlds) contents", to fully dissolve the difference between the fictional and the real, while the networked swarming activity of narration and reception makes sure that everybody is storyteller and audience at the same time.

AI and the digital traps us in a postfictional freudian uncanny, the Unheimlich in german, the un-home-ly, "where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context".

Here are some recent headlines illustrating our new post-fictional world, the dissolution of the boundaries between the fictional and consensus reality: the victims of gun violence and mass shootings lobby congress from beyond the grave, After breakups, the brokenhearted are creating AI clones of their exes, and Deepfake electioneering sparks AI 'return' of controversial dictator Suharto.

These are just some of the post-fictional stories of digital hauntology, where digital ghosts of the past manifest in the present by relating datapoints in a latent space to all contents in the world, where the swarming virality of those ghosts “de-center the human subject” and blur the boundaries of the narrator and her audience.

This is a world of Freuds Unheimlich, where Mark Fishers weird and the eerie meets a swarm of billions of users which, all together, create a new post-fictional space in the digital.

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Air Canada wants Personhood for AI

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 10:56:01 +0100

Air Canada lawyers preparing their legal strategy of proposing AI personhood with the goal to save 880 canadian dollars.

The funniest story in AI last week surely was that Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot. Besides the fact that a corporate robot is part of the corporation and thus the corporation is liable for the actions of the robot, it is remarkable how Air Canada argued in court:

In effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. This is a remarkable submission.

They went even further and said that Air Canada "cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives – including a chatbot", which suggests that Air Canada thinks that it doesn't exist as a legal entity, as a corporation that consists of it's employees and products. I would suggest that Air Canada or its lawyers were not thinking very much when they made up that nonsensical argument and ofcourse the court didn't follow.

This episode is interesting besides it's legal shenanigans because we do have a word for "seperate legal entity" and that is legal personhood, and following Air Canadas argument here would mean that their chatbot would be legally recognized as a person, with it's own rights and responsibilites — in this case: Don't lie to our customer, chatbot, or you'll be held responsible and pay for the damages.

The debate of robot rights is old and came to mainstream prominence through Isaac Asimovs famed shortstory I, Robot. Many many books and essays have been written about the implications of AI or robots developing consciousness and if and how we as humans owe them legal rights, if that ever should be the case. For now and the foreseeable future, that's a neat intellectual exercise in the realm of science fiction, but not a legally pressing issue. AI systems are statistical models not able to perform any cognitive human functions. LLMs can simulate language, but they can't use language, because they lack any symbolic representation in their neural networks. They are not persons, but products, and the corporations developing them are legally responsible.

All of which, ofcourse, doesn't mean we don't anthropomorphize them.

In a 2015 paper robot researcher Kate Darling described "Empathic Concern and the Effect of Stories in Human-Robot Interaction", in which she finds that "story-shaped" robots (like, say, a Tamagochi or a Robot-Dinosaur -- Robots that resemble fictional or real life creatures that we project consciousness into) create emphatic reactions in humans.

LLMs and their simulated language are very much "story-shaped" robots in the literal meaning of the words, and anthropomorphizing them just comes natural to us: Toddlers at the age of nine months in a 'socio-cognitive revolution' first develop an understanding of another human as similar to themselves, as intentional beings, the first step to a theory of mind. This enables them to develop shared intentionality with other humans (parents, sibblings, friends) where both are focussing on the same thing and check each others attention. This enables kids to develop language and understanding of symbolic representations by imitation, to connect words to the signified object and, slowly, build a symbolic representation of their environment in their head, a world model. This also means that intelligence, the ability to form those models and then combine, dissect, transform them is inherently social.

But this also means that we, by human nature that is social, inherently ascribe cognitive functions to any system that can produce text, utter words, speak, point at and identify things, just like us. Where Tamagochis and Robots have a face for us to relate to, an LLM has text. It's just as synthetic and non-human as the plasticface on a robot, or the display on a Tamagochi, but that doesn't matter. We can't help it because it is built into our biology to recognize humans, and so we are bound to recognize a ghost in the machine where there is none.

Now, I don't think that Air Canada is suggesting that their chatbot is conscious or anything, i don't even think they anthropomorphize the chatbot on their website. But I do think they used this discourse around anthropomorphization and legal personhood for AI and it's philosophical implications as their last straw argument to save, what, 880 canadian dollars? That’s laughable corporate legal bullshit and nothing more.

However, the discourse about AI personhood gets interesting in context of what is called "responsible AI". The logic goes like, if you assign legal personhood to AI, it will make AI liable for it's own actions. If AI goes wrong and starts maximizing paperclips, we can at least sue them in court. (What a relief.)

We should be thankful to Air Canada and it's lawyers and the court to clear this one up: We already have legal responsibilities in AI, and they lie within the corporations that develop them. Air Canada is responsible for the bullshit their chatbot tells to its customers, which might also extend to ongoing defamation lawsuits against OpenAI. Just as Air Canadas chatbot is not a "seperate legal entity" with its own personality rights and responsibilities, ChatGPT is not a legal entity on it's own that can "hallucinate" bullshit about you or me or anyone else, but a product made by OpenAI, who are ultimately responsible for the damages it causes.

This would also apply to possible AI-systems of the future who found, steer and head new corporations: The legal personhood for them, then, would already exist as a legal fiction, without any need for a seperate personhood for the algorithm. Corporations led by sophisticated statistical models and human-organized corporations simply operate under the same rights and obligations with no need for "seperate legal entities".

In his good, long primer on the subject Lance Eliot calls this the "magic trick of pulling a rabbit out of a hat". But the trick here would not be to simply assign legal personhood to a corporation led by an AI (or the lame old corporation that merely develops said AI), but to not anthropomorphize it within the legal system.

As humans we can't help but see a ghost in the machine, but the law may not be prone to our psychological failings. Air Canada learned that the hard way in court and now must pay 880 bucks. I guess they'll get over it.

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