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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

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thebibliosphere · 8 months

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Hi, yeah. I'm aware one of my older posts about essential oil safety is circulating again. And I'm really glad that it's resonating and still helping people to realize that what the MLM cults are promoting is not safe.

However, that does not mean I want to engage with anyone about alternative medicines and my own background in alternative meds.

My knowledge in that field comes from growing up in a Christian adjacent new-age cult where I suffered profound medical neglect. The reason I know so much about alternative medicine and holistic therapies is because that was all I was allowed.

It does not come from a love of the alternative. It comes from a place of deep pain, suffering, and neglect. I made those posts to hopefully warn people and open their eyes to the harm that was being promoted.

I also got harassed endlessly back when my posts about essential oil safety were first doing the rounds. People went so far as to try and run me off the internet. The MLM cult mommies didn't like that I was calling them out on their child endangerment meets ponzi scheme. Funny, that.

Anyway. I'm not mad at anyone for being interested. This is just a blanket statement that I will not be engaging in that kind of conversation. I'm glad if alternative medicine has helped you. But I will not be fondly reminiscing with anyone about it.

Thanks for being chill about it.

(And if you're not being chill, fuck you 😘)

#personal

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tim-official · 8 months

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people lump NFTs / the cryptocurrency craze of 2021 in with AI as "just another thing that tech grifters are excited about," and people love posting gifs of people cheering under news stories about OpenAI hemorrhaging money. this is a naive read on the situation, i think NFTs didn't work and never could. a ponzi scheme by definition cannot last. chatGPT, DALL·E, etc are things that sometimes work, and which work marginally better every month. this is infinitely more useful than NFTs, which are useless to everyone. as a result, some people actually want them - or, at least, people with capital think people will want them, which is just as good. also unlike NFTs, there is nothing about AI that means it inherently has to take huge amounts of electricity and clean water. the environmental cost of NFTs effectively gave them value; meanwhile, there are thousands of papers published and thousands of careers laser-focused on reducing the compute cost of machine learning. this is good, but keep in mind they're doing it because they want to put machine learning crap in all the fridges they crammed WiFi into five years ago, not because they care that much if the oceans boil

The people making NFTs were no-names trying to give everyone else FOMO for a quick buck. OpenAI is pouring cement mixers of Microsoft money into trying to generate a new market, and judging by the sheer number of people who have incorporated ChatGPT into their everyday routines, they are succeeding, and attracting insane amounts of investment in the process. When you have as much capital and market share as Microsoft you are freed from the obligation to ever make anything profitable. this is late capitalism: "supply" and "demand" are completely uncoupled, society is organized around production solely based on fictions and superstitions in the heads of private equity goons anyway. this is not an "AI is evil" or "AI is good" post. just don't compare the situation to NFTs or crypto and assume it's all the work of "techbros" or whatever. it's not comparable, by orders of magnitude

#ai #ai discourse #machine learning #nfts

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jpitha · 7 months

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You have to understand.

At least at first, I didn’t mean to do it. I had just gotten out of College, a kid with a degree in History and an eye watering amount of debt. I made the mistake of telling the professor I did early 21st century historical reenactments for my summer job and he let me take on a titanic amount of debt for historical realism. I’m not sure who I owe the money to, since we live in a post scarcity society, but I sure worry about repaying it, so I have that going for me. Extra points for realism.

After I graduated - with an ulcer from stress worrying about the debt, another point for realism! - I was bumming around the orbital looking for a way to earn some quick cash and I realized how I could put my degree to use. Everyone has everything provided for them by the government because - after the Unpleasantness - we figured out that was easier and cheaper than giving everyone on the planet a gun.

But that means that everyone has mostly forgotten how to keep an eye out for scams. Who is going to scam you anyway when you all have the same access to cheap and easy housing, food, and Space Cocaine?

People who have mountains of debt due to historical accuracy, that’s who.

I set up shop right outside the exit from Customs on the station. Rubes-er People from all over the Galaxy would come, hellbent on seeing the sights of my planet and before they could hit up the Cøffee Haüs they would find me.

I started small; ran a couple of three card monte tables, but without a partner, convincing people they could win without them actually winning was tough. I hacked a janitorbot into being my assistant and soon enough I would have a crowd watching.

This, while effective was incredibly boring, so I changed to my plan B and just started making fake supplements. For maximum compatibility across all of the galactic species, mine were pure carbon (to absorb toxins you see). This increased who I could sell too without worrying (too much) about inadvertently poisoning anyone.

A few people were sad I moved away from scamming people with cards, but they became my first ‘partners’ in selling my supplement. I had to actually explain how a Ponzi scheme worked though, nobody remembered. I told them about how so long as they found more suckers underneath them, they wouldn’t be left holding the bag and it took off like an oxygen accelerated fire.

There was also an oxygen accelerated fire, but that can’t be traced back to me.

Three weeks later, I was the richest human in the Galaxy. Honesty, I didn’t even know where everyone even got the money, I thought we had eliminated it, but here I am, rich as hell. I feel a little bad about it, but if I admit the whole thing was a ploy to pay off my student loans, I worry that they’ll turn on me.

I still haven’t paid off my loans either. I don’t think I can swing the payments and the payments on my Super Dreadnought. Did you know they’ll build anyone one so long as you put the deposit down?

Anyway, do you want to get in on an incredible deal on the low effort world of supplement sales?

#writing #sci fi writing #jpitha #humans are deathworlders #humans are space oddities #humans are space orcs #humans are space capybaras #humans are space australians

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chaifootsteps · 6 months

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Stans defending Viv with their lives and then demand to know why we hate her so personally. It's like, they don't know her any more than we do. Difference is, I'm personally against Viv because she has lied to ME. Me as a person. She has lied to my face and as far as I am concerned is a conman, misappropriating money like a ponzie scheme. Idgaf if there is a show. If she posted 10 hrs of paint drying and that would be a show too. It isn't what I paid her to do. I paid her to pay her animators, not hire fucking Kesha. I paid her to make her story she said she wanted to make, not to fuck off to Japan to torture some owls. And like, there is no narrative to the show. There was no planning. Where is the budget for preproduction!? Why is this so disorganized and such a shit show!? Why would you lie about Hazbin!? That's why I hate this woman. She lied to me PERSONALLY. And she lied to all of them too, they are just too damn stupid to realize it.

My sympathy goes out to those of you who put real money towards this woman, especially the amount of money some people have. It's true, you guys paid her way and supported her in the understanding that she was going to do her best by her employees and by indie animation.

Instead she did what she's always done, catered to herself and only herself.

#Anonymous #vivziepop critical #actual blog post

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centrally-unplanned · 2 months

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Loving that my post that is a math joke about inflation vs price levels now has people 18 reblogs down discussing how the Federal Reserve is a ponzi scheme and fantasizing about murdering all politicians. God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.

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devotion-disorder · 2 months

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ponzi and. kuunya....................................

#sillydoods #yandere oc #kuuya posting #noel posting #ponzi posting (?)#hes soggy..............................

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transparentgentlemenmarker · 2 months

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75 years ago, the NATO "Defensive" alliance was created to counter a perceived fear of communist expansion into Europe. Regardless of the fact that there was no plausible evidence that the Soviets ever planned to invade "Europe," When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, so did NATO's marginal rationale for existence. However, the "defensive" alliance kept expanding against the advice of many western voices and those of the Russians. These protests and warnings were, of course, ignored as the Alliance continued to peddle a North American world view to Europe and its expanding Eastern European membership. NATO today has proved itself to be a fractious weapons sales scam and political platform, not a military alliance. It has energetically participated in numerous illegal and brutal unilateral military actions serving the political rationale of the Washington, London, and Brussels elite. From Belgrade to Tripoli, NATO has delivered its brand of "freedom" by bombing civilians, their homes, and societies. The coming collapse of the Ukrainian misadventure represents such an existential threat to the viability of this paper tiger that it will contemplate almost any avenue other than acceptance of failure. Rather than defending Europe from War, NATO looks destined to become part of a self designed self-fulfilling prophecy of War and destruction. Rember, nothing of the Machine ever works against the machine, and NATO is, despite what we are told, a giant profit Mill and ponzi scheme, peddling fear to sell weapons while the citizens of Europe face poverty and societal discontent. Russia and the Russians have no designs or desire for a War with NATO, no serious academic or political analysts outside of the echo chamber of Atlantasist fantasy believes that. Remember, if there's a people on earth that understand the devastation of war, it's the Russians. If you actually want to examine the engine of the Ukraine war (and all other post WW2 conflicts) and any conflict thay flows from it, lift the bonnet on the Washington and London elites and their greasy association with the corporations profiting from the War. Neither they nor their bureaucratic appointees will see their children, brothers, or fathers doe in a War with Russia or indeed wIth China. That is an honour they will bestow on the ordinary taxpayers of the EU and US, and while they're at it, they'll also convince you to pay for it all too.

Il y a 75 ans l’OTAN était créée pour contrer la peur perçue d’une expansion communiste en Europe. Indépendamment du fait qu’il n’existait aucune preuve plausible que les Soviétiques envisageaient d’envahir « l’Europe », lorsque l’Union soviétique a cessé d’exister, la justification marginale de l’existence de l’OTAN a également disparu. Cependant, l’alliance « défensive » a continué à s’étendre contre l’avis de nombreuses voix occidentales et contre l’avis des Russes. Ces protestations et avertissements ont bien sûr été ignorés alors que l’Alliance a continué à colporter une vision nord-américaine du monde à l’Europe et à son adhésion croissante à l’Europe de l’Est. Aujourd’hui, l’OTAN s’est révélée être une escroquerie de vente d’armes et une plate-forme politique, et non une alliance militaire. Il a participé énergiquement à de nombreuses actions militaires unilatérales illégales et brutales servant la logique politique des élites de Washington, de Londres et de Bruxelles. De Belgrade à Tripoli, l’OTAN a défendu sa « liberté » en bombardant les civils, leurs maisons et leurs sociétés. L’effondrement prochain de la mésaventure ukrainienne représente une telle menace existentielle pour la viabilité de ce tigre de papier qu’il envisagera presque toutes les voies autres que l’acceptation de l’échec. Plutôt que de défendre l’Europe contre la guerre, l’OTAN semble destinée à faire partie d’une prophétie auto-réalisatrice de guerre et de destruction. N’oubliez pas que rien de la Machine ne fonctionne jamais contre la machine, et que l’OTAN est, malgré ce qu’on nous dit, une gigantesque usine à profit et une chaîne de Ponzi, colportant la peur pour vendre des armes alors que les citoyens européens sont confrontés à la pauvreté et au mécontentement sociétal. La Russie et les Russes n’ont ni l’intention ni le désir d’une guerre avec l’OTAN, aucun analyste universitaire ou politique sérieux en dehors de la chambre d’écho du fantasme atlantasiste ne le croit. N’oubliez pas que s’il y a un peuple sur terre qui comprend les ravages de la guerre, c’est bien les Russes. Si vous voulez réellement examiner le moteur de la guerre en Ukraine (et tous les autres conflits de l’après-Seconde Guerre mondiale) et tout conflit qui en découle, levez le chapeau sur les élites de Washington et de Londres et leur association graisseuse avec les entreprises qui profitent de la guerre. Ni eux ni leurs représentants bureaucratiques ne verront leurs enfants, leurs frères ou leurs pères participer à une guerre avec la Russie ou même avec la Chine. C’est un honneur qu’ils accorderont aux contribuables ordinaires de l’UE et des États-Unis, et pendant qu’ils y seront, ils vous convaincront également de payer pour tout cela également.

Otan = Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord

Nato = National Association of Theatre Owners

#nato #otan #National Association of Theatre Owners

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doginprogress · 11 months

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Ponzi

I have so so so much to say about Ponzi but I’ll make this post brief. Some of you may remember Evie, the smooth Ibizan girl I was watching for a friend. I fostered her for about nine months, and then she went back to her original owner. I was offered pick puppy from her litter and had the privilege of being involved in the decision making process, seeing her progress through pregnancy, and meeting the puppies when they were still wee fresh babies. Ponzi came home with me at 8 weeks as my show, sport, and foundation prospect. She’s now just over a year old and is the funniest dog I’ve ever known. I’ll make individual posts later about some of the moments we’ve had along the way.

#ibizan hound #podenco ibicenco #punchie pie #sighthound #snootblr

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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Come see me on tour!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour

My next novel is The Bezzle, a high-tech ice-cold revenge thriller starring Marty Hench, a two-fisted forensic accountant, as he takes on the sleaziest scams of the first two decades of the 2000s, from hamburger-themed Ponzis to the unbelievably sleazy and evil prison-tech industry:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

I'm taking Marty on the road! I'll be visiting eighteen cities between now and June, and I hope you'll come out and say hello, visit a beloved local bookseller, and maybe get a book (or two)!

21 Feb: Weller Bookworks, Salt Lake City, 1830h: https://www.wellerbookworks.com/event/store-cory-doctorow-feb-21-630-pm

22 Feb: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, 19h: https://www.mystgalaxy.com/22224Doctorow

24 Feb: Vroman's, Pasadena, 17h, with Adam Conover (!!) https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle

26 Feb: Third Place Books, Seattle, 19h, with Neal Stephenson (!!!) https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow

27 Feb: Powell's, Portland, 19h: https://www.powells.com/book/the-bezzle-martin-hench-2-9781250865878/1-2

29 Feb: Changing Hands, Phoenix, 1830h: https://www.changinghands.com/event/february2024/cory-doctorow

9-10 Mar: Tucson Festival of the Book: https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?action=display_author&id=15669

13 Mar: San Francisco Public Library: https://sfpl.org/events/2024/03/13/author-cory-doctrow-bezzle

22 Mar: Toronto: Wendy Michener Memorial Lecture: https://events.yorku.ca/events/wendy-michener-memorial-lecture2024/

24 Mar: NYC: Word Books (with Laura Poitras): https://shop.wordbookstores.com/event/word-presents-cory-doctorow

29-31 Mar: Wondercon Anaheim: https://www.comic-con.org/wc/

11 Apr: Harvard Berkman-Klein Center (with Randall Munroe) https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/enshittification

12 Apr: RISD Debates in AI, Providence, details coming soon!

17 Apr: Anderson's Books, Chicago, 19h: https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1

19-21 Apr: Torino Biennale Tecnologia https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia

2 May, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337

5-11 May: Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/

6-9 Jun: Media Ecology Association keynote, Amherst, NY https://media-ecology.org/convention

Calgary and Vancouver – details coming soon!

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clawbehavior · 7 months

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what we do in the shadows

summary: judge kim gaon presides over the case of a recently apprehended serial killer, but not everything is as it seems.

pairing: kang yohan/kim gaon (the devil judge tv show). rated mature. cross posted to a03.

----

gaon rolls his shoulders, rearranges his expression to one of cool neutrality, and knocks twice.

'come in,' comes the reply. minister cha cuts a striking figure from where she's leaning against her desk when gaon enters her office. she's dressed in all white today, a blinding and sterile shade designed to be unnerving, and could be if gaon wasn't so used to her little displays of power.

'kim pansanim,' she says as gaon shuts the door behind him. 'meet judges oh jinjoo and kang yohan. they'll be presiding over juk chang's case alongside you.'

gaon tamps down on the tidal wave of frustration well before it reaches his face. he had advocated against this very thing, citing his early involvement in the case back when it was a string of murders in the downtown core starting with a homeless firefighter and an unemployed security guard connected by nothing but poverty and a strange MO, until the killer targeted a prolific businessman and the case was propelled into the public eye.

gaon holds her gaze unflinchingly, catches the brief gleam of something, irritation? excitement? anger? before she breaks eye contact and nods to the two people seated beside her. only then does gaon focus on them.

keep the legal expertise in house, gaon had advised minister cha, with officials who understood the context, who understood the conditions of the urban poor and what might drive a person to become a killer. but he could tell the longer he spoke, the more her dislike of him grew. she had hired him fresh off an early career win over a ponzi scheme so he could be a pretty face for the ministry. but the more he resisted that role, the more she attempted to force him into it.

‘oh pansanim has a background in juvenile detention and poverty reduction efforts, so she can provide valuable insight into the legal strategies we’ll encounter in the court room,’ minster cha says.

oh jinjoo is a beautiful woman with straight hair, intelligent eyes, and a charming smile. gaon’s first instinct is to trust her. his second more battle worn instinct is to curb the impulse. he’s had enough experience with people in power to recognize when charm conceals ambition. he nods collegially, receiving an open smile in response, before his eyes land on the handsome man seated cross-legged beside judge oh.

the man's posture is completely at ease but his gaze is disarmingly direct. he has lovely eyes, gaon notes before squashing that feeling too.

‘kang pansanim is a veteran of the criminal justice system,' minister cha explains as gaon takes a seat across his new colleagues. 'he joins us following a fulsome career in federal court spanning financial crime, international relations and security. he's accustomed to working high profile cases, and will take point on our communications strategy with the public.’

gaon’s eyes flick back to minister cha. he can read between the lines just fine: oh jinjoo will provide a compelling testimony for why a killer, even one raised in abject or inhumane conditions, is still a killer, while kang yohan exploits every legal loophole to put juk chang away for life. because that’s what’s going to happen, now that they have someone to pin the murders on.

‘the blue house wants a quick resolution given the high profile nature of the case,’ minister cha says with a genial smile, already anticipating gaon’s pushback. he can empathize with the blue house. the killer's vendetta against corrupt powerful figures was very obvious.

‘in that case, what’s the rationale for hosting a public trial?’ gaon asks bluntly. ‘when we could expedite sentencing and control the release of information by preventing the public from attending.’

minister cha’s smile becomes strained but her voice remains collegial. ‘while i agree with your sentiments, we have to balance the benefits of a closed door session with the expectations of public service.’

‘and if the public uses this as a forum to host demonstrations over our recent safety measures, like increased police presence in already highly policed communities?’ gaon presses. ‘as you said, this is a sensitive case.’

‘i only want to be on the same page about managing expectations,’ he continues blithely and very undeterred by minister cha’s warning look. ‘lest we end up with public demonstrations inside and outside the courtroom and general unrest broadcast live.’

he feels almost bad for taking this approach when he is a known proponent for public transparency and accountability, but gaon wants to limit outside influence of any kind as much as possible for this case.

‘if i may,’ cuts in an amused voice.

gaon doesn’t respond to it outwardly.

judge kang continues after a beat. ‘the public will protest whether or not we provide them with an avenue to do so. but in conducting a public trial, we can restore public trust by reiterating our commitment to justice, including bringing all evidence to light.’ he manages to sound conciliatory and derisive at the same time. it’s an intriguing effect.

‘kang pansanim is right. we will give the defendant due process,’ says minister cha, failing to keep the patronizing tone from her voice as her supporters rally around her as intended. ‘all men are innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law.’

in any other situation, gaon would respond to her duplicitousness with well-contained fire. she’s making a show out of the justice system. he knows. she knows that he knows. it’s why they’ve been butting heads. but gaon has more important things to think of about than their vendetta right now.

‘it’s great that we have such passionate team members with diverse viewpoints,' judge oh says brightly. she says it so genuinely that it dials the tension down in the room.

minister cha says something in response. gaon uses the opportunity to sneak a glance at his co-panelist, face giving nothing away --

-- only to find kang yohan staring at him.

see, the thing is, gaon knows juk chang is innocent. not of crime -- the incidents of public violence and hate crimes that gaon can tie juk chang to number in the double digits, but what juk chang hasn’t done is murder a string of corrupt business owners.

the reason gaon knows this is because the real killer has been calling him.

at first his killer had done it to taunt him. if only kim pansanim knew what the defendants on the bribery and corruption cases he was presiding over were truly capable of. but when gaon refused to back down or give up in fear, the calls had grown more frequent, accompanied by untraceable mail left at gaon’s house, the locked drawer of his office, inside the glove compartment of his car. all contained clues on his cases. it was info inadmissable in court, so gaon used it to dig deeper, to probe his defendants for answers, thereby turning cut and dry cases into lengthy investigations that made defendants sweat.

why do you pick up when i call? the killer had mused over the phone one day while gaon was making his way to his car after a particularly grueling day in court.

because you’re angry, gaon had said, a full day of work loosening his tongue. and i know that anger. if there’s any emotion i understand, it’s anger.

the killer had remained silent while gaon unlocked the car and stored his bag in the backseat.

how can you reconcile your anger with working in a corrupt system? the killer had asked quietly. it said a lot about his mental schema and his understanding of gaon that he had skipped over accusations of hypocrisy and straight into questions of intent.

because that’s the system, gaon paused before getting into his car to reply. even if we hate it, that's the system.

whatever the killer was going to say next was cut off by the sound of a truck horn blaring at the intersection. except gaon could hear the sound over the phone too, clear as day.

where are you? he’d demanded but the killer had already cut the line, leaving gaon alone in a sea of faces milling around the courthouse.

and so the calls had continued to evolve, as gaon used the information the killer provided to track the man down while making it harder for the elite to game the system. he was getting too invested he knew, the longer this clandestine relationship continued. the longer this secret isolated gaon from everyone around him.

‘do you know what i would do to you if i had you in my grasp?’ the killer had asked one evening over the phone. because that’s what it had come to, the killer calling gaon on his home phone, when gaon could count on one hand the number of people who had that number.

‘kill me?’ gaon replied, picking up the knife.

the killer had scoffed.

‘shake me down for information?’ gaon had guessed, in the midst of preparing dinner. he deftly sliced the mango into thin slices to use as garnishing for his salad.

‘mm, no,’ the killer had replied so placidly that gaon was unprepared for the follow up. ‘i’d put you on top of me so i could eat you out.’

gaon had gasped, knife slipping from his clumsy fingers and clattering loudly in the sink. he hadn’t dropped his cell, however.

‘you’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ the killer had asked, clearly thrilled by that effect. his voice had dipped lower, trailing through the line like fingertips over gaon’s skin. ‘knees on either side of my face. i’d leave stubble burn along your thighs and cheeks.’

gaon’s body had gone tight at the words, tongue thickening in his mouth.

‘you'd go into work the following morning feeling me every time you sat down.’

gaon had turned and pressed back against the kitchen counter, clenching his pelvic muscles, hard. it was crazy. he was crazy. it was dangerous. the combination had been heady, unlocking something that had remained tightly latched inside him ever since his parents died with ferocious want spewing forth.

‘think about it,’ the killer had continued. ‘you, a pinnacle of justice and dignity in a perfect suit and neat hair. no one would know you’d had me between your thighs the night before.’ he had sounded so unlike himself at that moment, different in a way that gaon couldn’t quite place his finger on and not because gaon had been reaching for the hem of his loose pants to get a hold of his throbbing cock.

‘oh,’ gaon had moaned in quiet relief when he finally got himself in hand, pumping his heated, silky flesh with sticky fingers.

‘kim gaon,’ the killer had said then, and his voice was -- it was affected. this cold killer could be undone by something, could want something other than vengeance and cruelty, and what he wanted was gaon.

gaon had come from that realization alone, eyes squeezed shut and panting softly before he slid to the tiled floor with shaky legs, cataloging the audible hitch over the phone. the speed with which he had become aroused then orgasmed had made him dizzy.

they had crossed some invisible line long ago, but now there was no turning back. staring at the white streaks in his palm, and with the killer still on the line, gaon had been only slightly surprised to find he didn’t care.

and this was the real reason why gaon was running interference on this case. it was why he had led minister cha to believe he was motivated by some misguided attempt to ensure the justice system treated everyone fairly, including suspected killers, in order to conceal his true motivations of pushing for time. because the moment word came down of the killer being apprehended was the moment a clock had started ticking.

it was only a matter of time before the killer struck again. once he did while juk chang was in custody, it would bring all the heat of the criminal justice system down on him.

it was only a matter of time before the killer was pulled from the shadows.

‘i’ve heard a lot about you, kim pansanim,’ judge kang says with all the affability of a new colleague as minister cha moves to her seat. ‘it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.’

gaon’s lips part of their own accord under judge kang’s eyes that miss nothing, including the delicate flush to gaon's cheeks.

because that voice, that’s the voice of gaon’s killer.

#the devil judge #kim gaon #kang yohan #kim gaon/kang yohan #gahan #lawful husbands #but au style #my ficlet #my fic ideas

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