2404 – The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF (the Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience) I+II part (2024)

I am indebted to Rusty Foster to these incredible pastiches of Adam Curtis.

“Silvia Dal Dosso predicts that The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF but the present is already in the past and the weird future ahead is here right now.”

SCAM FACTORIES

Yes, magicians, managers, and PR agents have always multiplied illusions to our disadvantage, but what if technology and innovation do not enhance reality but make scams even easier? Can one detach AI from what is happening in the actual geopolitical ‘shatter belt’ – like Myanmar (which is completely overshadowed by the ongoing genocide committed by Israel in Palestine). Nobody even talks about this region that used to be associated just with the Golden Triangle drug trafficking. From the Rohingya massacre to the Myanmar civil war, there is increasing instability and organized crime spilling over into China – but also fake gambling towns built overnight posing as “fake” part of the Road & Belt Initiative BRI – China’s and currently the world’s most ambitious infrastructure project. Also, fake job offers are becoming more and more sophisticated. It would be uncomplete to ignore how hustle culture online scamming and human trafficking have transformed into an industry since COVID. The Chinese movie “No More Bets” – was turned into an unlikely diplomatic success. While initially banned by several SE Asian countries the movie managed to bring about cooperation in “combating transnational crime and promoting cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region”. 

MACHINE LEARNING ILLUSIONISM

Machine learning consumes a lot of energy. It also seems to hallucinate a lot and upset a lot of people. What are we to do with this unregulated proliferation of illusions, deceptions, and mimicry in an era of post-post-post-post truth? Is it ok if AI offloads dreams and nightmares on us? Is this another externality? Does it matter if it gets powered by the sun’s seemingly inexhaustible energy? Or it doesn’t even matter what we think anyway since our energy thirst is just unstoppable – 20th-century industries and Carbon Technocracies have helped design our insatiable and energophage present. And then there is Oliver Stone promising us that nuclear power is the answer to the climate crisis and that several of his friends are working on it. Yeah, and seriously why blame Oliver Stone for cozying up with dictators when powerful CEOs dream of becoming absolutist monarchs and anti-state monarchists (Reichsbürger) are conspirationists with a pedigree? How is it that would-be emperors are invited as speakers and anarcho-capitalists cryptobros meetings, well maybe the answer is that technobros are actually turning the neocon world into a simulation theory by actualizing a form of the Truman Show.

It is weird as fuck already, and tomfoolery is the order of the day. AI hype boosterism combined with a good dose of deep fake scare is making things feel irrecoverable and irretrievable fucked. How to build up a coherent video of all the AI rampage and hyperbolic BS out there? Well, Silvia Dal Dosso demonstrates just that. Documentarists seem relegated to the trashbin of history because even Hypernormalisation sounds passé. Well, let us see what morphings and monstrous becomings entice and grab our attention. Who then will also offer us a fluctuating lifeboat through AI sludge and is this really unprecedented? As the YT video shows, animals were always cheating, fooling around and with each other. Octopi are masters at camouflaging themselves. Game theorists were always trying to find how cooperation developed, how animals (or plants, or viruses) evolved, and found ways to counter cheating, and the reality is that both mutualism and cheating promote multifarious complexity and deception is always a sign of intelligence no? (check Frans de Waal) At the same, there is a need for a broader genealogy of decision-making, the reconceptualization of reason, decision-making, and “freedom” – that for Orit Halpern “underpins contemporary relations between machine learning, reactionary politics, and neoliberal economics“. A change that he locates between 1950 – 1970 and that “systems might change and adapt nonconsciously”.

Play is everywhere, but today’s neoliberal regime has made it very easy for cheaters by deregulating (“desire for unsupervised learning in nets and the agglomeration of ever larger data sets” – Orit Halpern).  Everything was a bet on industries and corporations that would self-regulate and self-organize. Well, that almost never happens. When things get so tragic it is hard not to feel we’re at the butt of the AI jokes. We are hunted down by constant doppelganger effects, and it feels like Techgnosis and High Weirdness researchers Erik Davis and Naomi Klein critics of shock therapy and destruction capitalism meet on the same page of irreducible weirdness and farce.

Scams are innate to capitalism, and Eastern European countries entered capitalism by being exposed to nation-wide multiple pyramid schemes. Oligarchy in the East was born out of that and “financially illiterate East Europeans” became easy prey. On the other hand in a heavily mediated online world people are being now scammed precisely when they look for EXPERIENCE (aka unmediated and immediate immersion), AI -technology-empowered scammers had a field day since COVID struck and many developed into corporate-size businesses (not to say that corporations aren’t themselves overvalued scams). So it is not what tech billionaires are warning about – but simply put capitalism + AI = turbo-charging scamming. Already voice-assisted and image-assisted distress signals are being used to scam parents out of their savings.

Mimicking Adam Curtis does the trick but also completely outperforms Curtis at his best game – The Future Ahead will Be Weird is as weird as Fuck and dangerous as Fuck (to quote Whitehead) is a rare good addition, building up on all the online fake deluge and even historicizing it. Watch it laugh and despair!

2370 – The Secretive World of Germany’s Super Rich (ZDF report 2023)

Full report (in German) here: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-die-geheime-welt-der-superreichen-100.html?at_medium=Social%20Media&at_campaign=YouTube&at_specific=ZDFheute (available online till 12.12.2028)

Like any other successful capitalist society, Germany sports some of the highest inequality rates in the world (according to the Gini Inequality researchers Julia Friedrichs and Jochen Breyer have also made a documentary for the German ZDF channel – sadly it is not yet available on English translation, but I felt it was important to post about it here to complete the last series of dedicated posts. Currently, as of 2023, Germany has 237 billionaires (China has 969 and US has 691 resident billionaires). This is a really insightful look into the special tax counseling the rich get. A majority of the secretive richie rich refused to be interviewed but a few accepted – so Jochen Breyer goes on their private jets and yachts to get their opinion on several key issues. So even if the others seem especially camera shy, we still get to meet Hans-Peter Wild (majority holder in Wild Flavors – maker of Capri Sun and leading manufacturer of so-called natural flavors for the food industry) and one of the richest people in Switzerland (he left Germany long ago for the Swiss tax and banking heaven). Billionaires are also a highly volatile transnational bunch, so in order to satisfy their tax phobia, states or rather their governments are constantly lowering taxation and establishing special Economic Zones beyond the purview of democratic regulatory means of control.
They also exert incredible influence on policy for a so-called social market state that prides itself on its social welfare programs and democratic values.

I herby have to acknowledge the ever-informative newsletter by economics historian Adam Tooze Chartbook 254 on world macroeconomics. His recently titled Crazy Rich Germans .. . and the hypocrisy of the “social market economy” was just epic, and below is a telling extract for you to chew on.
By the way, Adam Tooze is also the foremost expert on the economy of the Third Reich with such key books as “Statistics and the German state 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge” (2001) and “Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi economy” (2006).

“When it comes to monitoring elite wealth, the sources are much scarcer. Forbes magazine counted 117 individual German billionaires in 2023. But since large wealth is organized in family holdings, it is more meaningful, as Germany’s Manager Magazine does, to count billion-euro “fortunes” (Vermoegen). The Magazine in 2023 counted 226 such fortunes. The list, however, is clearly incomplete. And the magazine has acknowledged that it has been subject to behind-the-scenes legal pressure to omit several notable families.

We know this startling fact thanks to a new surge of public interest in inequality in Germany. German activists are beginning to flex their muscles and unlock the power of expose and muck-raking. Websites like ungleichheit.info do a great job telling the dramatic story of inequality.”

The two richest German families own more wealth than the bottom half of the German population.

The distribution and gender of Germany’s super-rich is also telling. We are talking here about white, manly, and predominantly West German. Statistics and data analytics are always important, even if hard to come by for us mere mortals amongst so much noise – but ZDFs researchers and investigators made it easy just scroll down on the https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/superreiche-vermoegen-deutschland-100.html?at_medium=Social%20Media&at_campaign=YouTube&at_specific=ZDFheute to the map provided and click to find out where the top 25 Germany’s richest actually live.

And if the data is to be believed, by the 2010s German wealth-holding was more concentrated than in any other European society (!!). In terms of the gini coefficient (Gini ratio= a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent income inequality, the wealth inequality, or the consumption inequality), Germany is closer to the US (wealth gini 0.81-0.86), than other European countries like France and Italy who have a gini closer to ex-socialist countries like Czech Republic or Poland.

2247 – TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before Congress (full hearing)

On several accounts, this is probably one of the most interesting pieces of current politics as a spectacle I have seen recently. It is several hours long and it is really interesting to skip through, on several accounts that I want to detail below. It is basically an almost textbook example of double standards and also a way to see how Congress politicians (US) that would normally disagree on almost everything (Medicaid, immigrants, Green New Deal etc.) are agreeing on one thing: that the popular social platform TikTok cannot stay under Chinese ownership. That’s a strange form of nationalisation- something that is anathema for both US liberals and cons. Also, one cannot understand this sudden Tiktok phobia without previous measures taken to curtail reliance on Huawei infrastructure or the whole scare around G5, with the Chinese leading the new global technology standardisation measures. So here it is:

1. This hearing is an unexpected proof of the links between the Silicon Valley tech giants and NSS, an institutionalized relation that has been amply explored by Linda Weiss in American Inc.?. That amazing book from 2014 gives so much insight into the e U.S. innovation system. It ends on a warning note – a perceived un-productivity or inefficiency that has stifled innovation, a decline that has only accelerated these last years. This history of institutional bootstrapping that has grown out of the Cold War pursuits of technological supremacy and permanent defense preparedness in front of external threats – has produced a very successful combination indeed, yet it has stopped bringing in the expected results. This combination of geopolitical threats and domestic political constraints that has been such a catalyst for countless start-ups, for huge technological breakthroughs in robotics, space technologies, and nanotech, and that had this tip-toe coordinating role in the private-public relationships was starting to wobble and crack up. Financialized corporations are being regarded as stifling innovation and actually boycotting R&D in today’s world. Since about 1910s monopoly capitalism has been the name of the game, and huge corporations (big firms socialized by banks and stock markets) found themselves not in competition with other firms so much as with the growing power of trade unions. Responding to these pressures as well as Bolchevik fear mongering, Maynard Keynes opus called The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money basically (as Charles Mudede put in a recent post) basically advices and advocates for the transformation of the working class (mostly white) into white collar workers that defined the second half of the 20 century. Now that middle class has declined in the West and is mainly growing in China and India (and probably Africa in the future). According to others he didn’t stabilize capitalism as much as save a crumbling British Empire. Right-wing Keynesianism and military deficit spending may try to do just that for the American Empire but there’s other forces at work. BRICS (India, Brazil, China, South Africa, Russia) signals a change and willingness to avoid over-reliance on the dollar as an international currency reserve (and by extension the US Fed). What’s more fascinating than to see a world power that promoted free trade for decades turn into a “protectionist”?!
2. The fact that this TikTok hearing is not like the Facebook Zuckerberg hearing before Congress four years ago is also a sign of the times. There not only a premium of Congress to show off its patriotic alliegence and anti-China sentiment in public, but also a huge benefit to be reaped for Big Tech that has shown itself a national assett on the global stage. Everything is allowed on the global hegemony stage, even kamikaze gestures like fucking up the careers of scientists that have previously worked for you, and are now considered unreliable or potentially a liability in the new climate of China Initiative launched by the Trump government in 2018 and continued under Biden.
3. Another thing that comes across from various reactions and comments and online memes produced after the hearing (from the Sinosphere as well) is that it is all a witch hunt. The majority of proof brought by the Congress was frankly laughable. This hearing has been really working against the intentions of the Congress, and actually gained support and even celebrity status for the relatively unknown Shou Zi Chow, a citizen of Singapore not mainland China.
4. What is again quite clear is that politicians (US and elsewhere, with the exception of China maybe) are completely at the mercy of technologies that they do not care to understand, regulate or mitigate. They are basically (as one friend put it) surfing platforms that are managed by their campaign managers or specialists, while they live in a sort of blissful ignorance. It is very clear that they do not care to understand what these platforms are about, as long as they can reap benefits or if they think that the surveillance, misinformation and addictive-behavior-inducing apps at home is provided by what they consider American-patriotic platforms. Also, Red Scare is apparently not a bygone thing, and everything can be mobilized in the new Cold War. It basically made them look both ridiculously united and also completely out of their milieu in terms of the Internet and social media.
5. The increasing sensation that TikTok has somehow gamed the algo capitalist economy and has suddenly offered or at least intensified things in a new direction. As my friend Cristian Dragan and Ion D sez (both have taken to exploring TikTok new hybrids), the platform seems to create overnight popularity, turbo-charging popularity sky-high like nothing seen before (with the likes of Insta or FB) and also allow a much higher degree of horizontal shuffling or at least a combination of otherwise invisible content (from countryside location, to menial jobs, to the city to areas considered completely isolated). This comes with a greater susceptibility to vibes and to hybridization of styles visual or musical.

Bruh, I don't recommend watching any of the TikTok Congress hearing.

It shows how technologically behind our governmental officials are.

Peep this fucking dude.

My pupils are so fucking dilated right now bruv. pic.twitter.com/zPfVtq0KC9

— AMadamWebuss (@AplatypussTV) March 23, 2023

1980 – SFTV shows (2021)

There are a series of shows made in the Timpuri Noi: Xenogeneze ale SF-ului Show. They follow the format of regional TV shows on local stations dedicate to the Sci-fi that sprouted all over Romania starting with the late 1970s and 1980s and boomed after 1989 in the 1990s.

After 1989 this was a typical example: the minister for Sports and Tourism became Alexandru Mironov one of the key figures of the SF fandom and its educative branch. He would talk during the news on TV station and then after a certain hour he would be part of the ufology shows – for example discussing the ‘dissection’ of extraterrestrial bodies (probably Roswell related) on the same TV set but during a different time slot. So you had this two contradictory instances and yet at the very same time co-existing one in the same medium.

We tried to expand and deviate – and include artists as well as former members of SF clubs from the 1990s and makers of DIY zines and discuss with interview them on this shows. We hosted various syster alien entities such as: Irina Gheorghe, musical acts such as PLEVNA and FRAGA, Carolina Vozianu to talk about queer speculative fiction and feminist SF, Marius Leftarache to talk about SF sound effects, Jean Lorin Sterian to talk about Constanta SF fandom and COCALAR COSMOS with a live performance.

In the future, we hope to add EN subtitles to these shows, till then they will sadly be only in Romanian. Whoever wants to help out with the translation is very welcome to contribute.

1807 – The Bayesian Trap (Veritasium 2017)

Useful references: The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

“I didn’t say it explicitly in the video, but in my view the Bayesian trap is interpreting events that happen repeatedly as events that happen inevitably. They may be inevitable OR they may simply be the outcome of a series of steps, which likely depend on our behaviour. Yet our expectation of a certain outcome often leads us to behave just as we always have which only ensures that outcome. To escape the Bayesian trap, we must be willing to experiment.”

Incidentally Thomas Bayes gets mentioned in Adam Curtis last series of documentaries.

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Bayes’ theorem

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