Tech Jeremiad

Jeremiad

Gates, Bezos, Musk, Brin Have Plan to Fry Your Brain and Eat It

Robots will punish you for wrong-think

The grim, absurd future of corporatized totalitarian tyranny in America is here

U.S. citizens no longer live in a democracy, but rather amidst the formation of an advanced system of corporate tyranny — one that controls most of our institutions and has its gaze set on the goal of colonizing the American mind. Microsoft’s purchase of ChatGPT earlier this year is a distinct trail marker in the development of the next stage of the corporate colonization of our inner lives. Together with American regulators’ refusal to curtail TikTok use — as the Chinese government does with their own creation — the rise of chatbot software has revealed the corporate colonist”s endgame: Distribute soma in the form of hyper-addictive digital content that has already produced a pandemic of depression and suicide among teenage girls; then, with the population thoroughly distracted, construct the AI circuitry needed to fulfill capital’s long-held dream of "full automation." Then, ruthlessly surveil whatever freelance human activity remains, using something akin to the HAL 9000 computer …

Essay

The Turtle Boy of Austin

Testaceous land-waddlers incapable of generosity or gratitude

To live and die alone

Philosophical genius L. Wittgenstein sagely remarks: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”

By Michael Lind

Turtle sex is as weird as you would expect it to be. In the case of the ornate box turtle, terrapene ornata, courtship begins with the male pursuing the female and bumping into her. When the male mounts his mate, he locks his legs into her shell. Several hours can pass before the male slides off or falls backwards and the pair go their separate ways. When I, at the age of nine or ten, caught a box turtle couple in our family’s backyard in Austin, Texas, in flagrante delicto, the mounted male was leaning backward like a water skier, while the bored female plodded along through the grass. I later witnessed the results of that or a similar encounter. Trimming a hedge in our backyard garden, my father found a hole where a female box turtle had laid her clutch of eggs. We checked them now and then and were rewarded one morning when we found a couple of hatchlings pushing themselves out of their leathery eggs, having cut them open with the help of “egg-teeth” on their beaks — small …

Tech Jeremiad

Good-Golly, Glenn Annie!

The Turtle Boy of Austin