“Interview with Ross Douthat” [Nick Burns, New Left Review]. “[DOUTHAT:] A columnist is mostly trying to understand and describe history, rather than to change it. There are moments when a columnist can be a political actor, but I haven’t experienced many of those in my stint at the Times.” • I’m not sure what The Bearded One would think about that. Still, it’s interesting to see Douthat at the NLR. Strange choice by both? Or perfectly natural?
“Shamans and ‘Dark Agencies’: War, Magical Parasitism, and Re-Enchanted Spirits in Siberia” [MDPI]. “These informants disclosed to this author that hostile individuals employed “magicians” to extract parts of a vital “soul complex” inherent in Tuvan persons, in a deliberate attempt to undermine their well-being or even send them to the grave. This procedure of gradual collapse or dissolution of the totality of a human person, embedded in the “soul” (sünezín, Tuvan) as an individual’s (alienable) property, is crucial for documenting the upsurge of an operation of magical parasitism throughout the author’s fieldwork in Kyzyl.” • The author, an anthropologist, believes he has achieved “rapport” with the local shamans.
“The enshittification of tech jobs” [Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic]. “The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.” And: “In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.” • Yep.
“Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America” [The New Yorker]. Here’s the lead: “In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug [Yarvin] posted a serial manifesto under the heading ‘An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.’ … [T]he hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total ‘reboot’ of the social order. He proposed ‘the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,’ and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.’ This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison ‘decivilized populations.’ It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including ‘security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.’ Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive….” • Good call! Hoppe-head Yarvin is now part of the Thielverse. I wish these Silicon Valley types would stick to enshittifying their products, instead of theorizing future monarchies for themselves (as Yarvin, a monarchist, had built a permission structure for them to do). Yes, this is a hit piece, but from my reading, not inaccurate. And it seems rather familiar, somehow.
“AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt” [Ars Technica]. “Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron [not his real name] began… [b]uilding on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting. [H]e created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will ‘eat just about anything that finds its way inside.’ Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they ‘get stuck’ and ‘thrash around’ for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn. Tarpits were originally designed to waste spammers’ time and resources, but creators like Aaron have now evolved the tactic into an anti-AI weapon.” • Sounds ideal; here it is. Too hard for me to install, sadly, but perhaps readers will find it helpful. I wish there were a PHP library with the same functionality.
Add new comment