Lying Machines
The tech mob depends on them to keep consolidating their power.
Since the advent of the Worldwide Web, there has been a great blossoming of psychopathy due to the incidence of the so-called Great Internet Fuckwad Theory (not my term, you can look it up) and more refined and academically presentable related concepts like the online disinhibition effect. Notably, some of the more virulent strains of this psychopathy found its way into the American business world around the time the Web was taking off: the Dotcom Bubble saw the rise of many phoney businesses and scams, but more importantly the rise of its eponymous mob.
This ‘dotcom mafia’ is a loose grouping of people who made their initial fortunes through that bubble, and it’s a superset of the more well-known PayPal Mafia that includes such luminaries as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The one thing consistently stringing them all together is their exploitation of legal grey areas, with the success followed by more bog-standard soft racketeering operations like what we see being anti-trusted by the United States government. They’re not very good at conducting legitimate businesses that create value for any customer base, so they resort to corroding society and leaving the pieces to be picked up by everyone else. “The technology was inevitable! Someone was going to lock you all in your homes with this anyway!” they exclaim, bloody murder weapon in hand. This isn’t communist China, so I’m not buying that.
How does all of this come to pass though? Well, the psychopathic algal bloom beckons an unfortunately common viewpoint about the nature and utility of computers, at least to the extent they are connected to the Web: to them, they are lying machines. You see, for psychopaths, their lack of inherent empathetic emotions makes life a challenge to live, as they are constantly burdened by having to fake interest and feign care for other human beings in order to maintain their social standing. Dexter famously spun this with his habit of bringing doughnuts to work, and it’s indeed quite common for psychopaths to lean on rituals and habits bearing high legibility with low effort in order to cope. But none of that is necessary when one logs onto the Worldwide Web: there is no need to bother making facial expressions for others, and even so there is a huge amount of time asynchronicity that can be leveraged endlessly to allow them to better manage falsifying appearances as well as manipulating others’ situational comprehension. The Web is a veritable Garden of Eden for psychopaths, and that reality forms the bedrock of how they see the Web and by extension computers in general. This view is then exported by them, naturally, far and wide for all to come to believe in as true because it is useful. Let us count the ways.
First: the rise of social media upped the ante for maintenance of appearances and the manipulation of perceptions to levels that are unattainable for 99% of the human population, but this is business as usual for psychopaths.
Second: the advent of cryptocurrency completely sidestepped a century and a half of financial regulations designed to protect the general public from both hurting themselves with instruments they don’t understand and to obstruct and punish bad actors who seek to manipulate public ignorance for their own financial gain. Completely disregarding all of that societal wisdom, scores of psychopaths descended upon the public—who were weary and desperate due to long-term declines since 1971 and the recent Great Recession—and they promptly robbed them all through countless blatant pump-and-dump scams. Most of these criminals still roam free today.
Third: now, the advent of image generation and large language models via machine learning advances have shown their teeth as both a tool for lying and, for the first time, as a direct threat levied by their psychopath wielders against the general public: they intend to replace your livelihood with automatically generated garbage. This reflects their deep cynicism, disregard and disgust for other human beings. It’s also as much a threat of outright replacement as it is a first admission of one nuance to their strategy to dominate everyone else: often the best form of lying is by overwhelming the opposition with meaningless information that they are helpless to deal with. AI is deliberate garbage that chiefly serves to drown out the humanity the tech mob psychos deem so worthless.
Fourth: I’ve said before that their next stop once the AI hype train is ran through is the farce of ‘quantum computing’, but admittedly they are taking their time since the AI hype has not run out of cash just yet. But rest assured, once it does, even the most credible companies like Google and Apple have had products cooking in their phoney R&D ovens for over a decade now, and when they get the signal, the press will never shut the fuck up about it and will actively run cover for them like the 1990s news media during the Gulf War. Social media algorithms will be actively steered to not only suppress serious criticisms regarding its preeminent uselessness and consistent failures to live up to its grand promises just like the previous scams involving cryptocurrency and AI, but also to actively promote cherry-picked weak sauce criticisms that conveniently miss the heart of what is wrong with all of this.
All of these scams chafe my ass, because unlike the people comprising the dotcom mob, I both enjoy computers and am quite skilled at engineering them. Now that I watch them gambol into government, credibility intact by overwhelming the market, ruthlessly acquiring and snuffing out competition (it’s for losers, according to them), I know I cannot sit idly by and merely create and program honest machines (though I do). This is part of why I have recently entered electoral politics. If I don’t give chase, who will? Someone needs to stop these guys before they lock us all in virtual cages and throw away the key before disappearing to their compounds with their conspicuously social-media-free children and royal entourages of servants and armoured security details.
I wish it was enough to make Anodyne and have the world would come to appreciate it as it naturally would, but when the world of tech business has been corrupted into a shell game and media has been co-opted to obscure and lie to everyone about this loss, what else can I do? Anodyne is pointless if it’s just fated to be strangled in the crib by a cabal of billionaire psychopaths who see it as a threat to their power. How much is humanity losing to these criminals for their efforts to force their shitty will onto the world? Who else will join me in meaningfully and effectively fighting this?