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“Every day, there were fewer and fewer kings.”
The Achilles Trap doubles as a surprisingly sympathetic study of a man who, as his powers slipped away, spent the last decade of his life jerry-rigging monuments of his own magnificence. Coll draws much of his material from extensive interviews with retired American intelligence officers and former members of Saddam’s bureaucracy, as well as from a previously unavailable archive of audio tapes from Saddam’s own state offices. What emerges is a portrait of Saddam as an eccentric in the mold of G.K. Chesterton—if Chesterton were bloodthirsty, paranoid, and power-mad—a man driven ultimately by deep reverence for the sense that hides beneath nonsense. from Saddam’s Secret Weapon, a review of The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll [The American Conservative]
A lot of the best Graeber has an “undeniable” quality
It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. Particularly in On Kings (2017), his collaboration with his mentor Sahlins, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), co-written with the archeologist David Wengrow and completed just a couple of weeks before his death, Graeber’s politics grew more “mainstream” in a number of respects, even as his narrative of the origins of political authority and economic hierarchy remained fresh, radical, and richly documented, and even as his prose style retained all its charm. But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all. from What Happened to David Graeber? [LARB, ungated]
We may live in chaos, but there are mechanisms of control
According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.” ... A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.” from Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control [NY Magazine; ungated] [CW: abuse & manipulation]
Babar is not quite happy
Laurent de Brunhoff, ‘Babar the Elephant’ author, dies aged 98 [CNN]; Laurent de Brunhoff, l’un des pères de Babar, est mort [Le Monde]; Décès de Laurent de Brunhoff, père d’un Babar controversé [Le Soir]
“Time slip” stories are fairly common
The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities. from The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled [Atlas Obscura]
Ritual is part of my nature. I would call all of my pieces “rituals"
We hear from Budapest that the eminent composer Peter Eötvös died today. He was 80 and had endured a long illness. After an apprenticeship with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Eötvös emerged in the 1980s as a leading voice in late and post-modernism. Four of his operas were internationally premiered – Three Sisters at Lyon, Love and Other Demons at Glyndebourne, The Tragedy of the Devil at Munich and Sleepless (2021) in Berlin. His final opera Valuska, was premiered in Budapest on 2 December last year.
A fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone
But the underlying online vs. real life opposition is harder to dispel. Here it is attached to consumerist identities, like an exploded version of the chain stores vs. mom-and-pop stores opposition from the No Logo era. There is a genuine, authentic way to make a spectacle of the self, but it needs to tap into a rooted habitus and recondite practice (a “context”), and not simply reflect haphazard free play with readily available cultural signifiers (mere “content”). That is, the correct and real self is rooted in distinction (in Bordieu’s sense) and not differentiation. The internet is supposedly undermining the kind of distinction that should matter and proliferating the kinds of differences that are superficial rather than culturally binding. from Spacing the cans by Rob Horning
Closet logic
"I could watch Carrie and her pig blood, Pam on a hook in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I didn’t mind Seth Brundle spouting wings and pus, Regan MacNeil going from twelve-year-old girl to devil spawn. But when Tom gets bolder, when he transforms, I found it hard to stomach. I didn’t watch the movie again for years. Conceiving of Tom as only a murderer—sociopathic, obsessed platonically—I could ignore how queer he really is." from My Funny Valentine, an essay about The Talented Mr Ripley and realization by Michael Colbert
The idea that it was mostly white guys was totally true
I don’t think it has anything to do with the audience for this stuff. I don’t think it has anything to do with the buzziness or the culture surrounding the site itself. I think it is just these money people coming in and making bad decisions. If they’re going to lay off people in Boeing and cut safety protocols or whatever, they’ll do it to anyone. from The Oral History of Pitchfork [Slate]
In the realm beyond this one, my dad made sure I listened to Fishbone
By all accounts, my father was not a punk. Nothing about the clothes he wore made me think he was punk. I don’t know much about his music taste. He saved a Prince concert ticket in a childhood photo album along with CDs by the Fugees and KRS-One that I found with his other belongings, which also included lectures from Islamic scholars of the early ‘90s. From the books he left behind, I knew he was political and very pro-Black. I knew he converted to Islam when he was young and had an affinity for ‘90s clothing. He was stylish, but it wasn’t anything I could explicitly link to a subculture. Yet somehow, he found himself listening to a band called Fishbone. from Finding Portals: Fishbone’s “Fishbone” EP [Bandcamp]
—You got the wrong guy, pal.
If Minute 9 is the first time we hear the names Deckard and Blade Runner, it’s also the first time we meet the plainclothes cop who will play a key role in LAPD surveillance of Deckard — and in the changed emphasis of four subsequent versions of Blade Runner released over the next twenty-five years. from Minute 9: Blade Runner [3 am magazine]
Relentlessly material
To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat. from The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud [MIT]
Kith and Kin-fluencers
There is only one state in the entire country—Illinois—where child influencers are legally entitled to a percentage of the money they help earn by being featured in monetized content. Although similar legislation has been introduced in several states this year, the fact remains: As of publication time, the vast majority of children who generate profits for their influencer parents—whether through brand deals, sponsorships, or direct payment from platforms—are legally unprotected and could be left with nothing in an industry valued at $21 billion in 2023. In the teeming, controversial world of family content creators, what happened to Vanessa is not uncommon. She spent the majority of her life up through her teenage years working on and being featured in her mother’s profitable blog and social media accounts, and she never saw a dime for her labor. from What’s the Price of a Childhood Turned Into Content? [Cosmopolitan]
Everyone has an anecdote about García Márquez
I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise. from Ten Years without Gabriel García Márquez: An Oral History [The Paris Review; ungated]
Their Toeses Are Roses
Sucker Carlson
Toward a New Ameri-canon
This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. from The Great American Novels [The Atlantic; ungated] [CW: a list which almost by definition lacks your favorite American author or novel]
The head on the car is a dream
Magnets for fantasists, plutocrats, oddballs, and corrupt businesspeople
The society’s traditions extended to what historian Holger Hoock describes as “an elaborate set of pseudo-Masonic ceremonies and symbolism.” Membership, strictly capped at 24 men, was a coveted privilege, even for George IV, the Prince of Wales, who had to wait his turn. New members underwent highly theatrical initiations, pledging their oath with a kiss on the beef bone of the day, blindfolded and led by a mitre-wearing guide while other members, as Arnold describes in his account, were “all decked out in incongruous and absurd dresses.” from A Rare Look Inside Britain’s ‘Sublime Society of Beefsteaks’ [Atlas Obscura]
Rodeo Clowns of the Sky
The aircraft they are following, the one they have been looking for, is not like the others in the group. She wears a paint scheme any other Liberator would think humiliating—white from chin turret to trailing edge, covered in a pox of bright red and blue polka dots about 18 inches in diameter. Aft of the trailing wing edge, she is army green, but the pox extends down her flanks in garish red and yellow dots. And she has a face... perhaps it was meant to be that of a shark, but it grins like a dim-witted dachshund. It seems to pant in the heat of the turbulent air. The spotted markings make her look like a massive flying bag of Wonderbread. from Polka Dot Warriors – The Assembly Ships of the Mighty Eighth
'Yeah, that's my mosaic.'
"Last of all comes the pavement trodden by imperial feet, made of disks of porphyry and serpentine, not thicker than a silver dollar, framed in in segments and lines of enamel, white and gold, white and red, or white, red, and green. The colors are perfectly brilliant. Fancy the deck of a modern yacht inlayed in enamel." from Roman Emperor Caligula's coffee table [CBS]
Conservatives, on average, trust everything less
What changed since 2008 is a vivid example of a larger upheaval in American politics. The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still say raw milk is dangerous and the state dairy lobby sent lobbyists to the Iowa Capitol to defeat Schultz’s bill. But Iowa has flipped — it’s a Republican state now, from the presidential vote to the governor’s office to the near-supermajority Legislature — and that flip has occurred alongside even larger shifts in national politics, spurred on by the rise of Donald Trump. With Trump has come a new GOP electorate, one more rural, more working class, less ideological and generally more distrustful of lobbyists, big business and “the experts.” And that has been a big help for a cause that is bucking just about every one of those groups. from How Raw Milk Went from a Whole Foods Staple to a Conservative Signal [Politico]
This is the story of the Theranos of marshmallows
Maybe you've heard of Smashmallow; maybe you even bought some. In the couple of years before the pandemic, they were everywhere. Now? Pfft. The problem wasn't the marshmallows — they were, by all accounts, delicious. The problem was scale. Smashmallows were designed to look like an artisanal, boutique product, but that wasn't enough for Sebastiani: He wanted to manufacture billions of them, to build a company that would bestride Candyland like a squishy colossus. That meant he had to grow fast and figure out the engineering on the fly — the classic entrepreneurial strategy of Silicon Valley. When it works, you get Tesla; when it doesn't, you get Theranos. from Silicon Valley tried to mass produce fancy marshmallows. It got messy, fast. [Business Insider]
To claim that science is impartial and bloodless is incorrect
To know a tree best, it’s important to move beyond biology and to the emotions and sensations it stirs. Beauty as a branch of biology is underrated. from The Extraordinary Lives Of Coast Redwoods [Noema]
Disarmingly simple, but only after the fact
The dexterity required bears emphasizing because resistance to the idea that an enslaved 12-year-old person of color could make a major botanical discovery endured well into the 20th century. In a 1938 racist historical novel Les Vanilliers, white French author Georges Limbour depicts Albius as possessing “the clumsiness of an ignorant insect.” Many botanists had tried to work out how to pollinate the plant by hand and failed. In the 1830s, Charles Morren, professor of botany in Liége, Belgium, successfully pollinated vanilla using a microscope and tiny scissors. But the method “takes probably 20 minutes” Jennings says, and was not useful for agriculture. from The Boy Who Was King of Vanilla [Nautilus; ungated]
Porn can speak to desires that are not spoken to elsewhere
Who knows where we get our desires from? That’s a question feminists were asking back in the 1960s. And also: Would it be possible to exorcise patriarchal or heteronormative desires from a feminist sexuality? There are quite considerable debates right now about whether we can identify healthy or authentically feminist sexual desires, because how do we know which ones are created by the patriarchy? A young woman’s interest in romantic heroes, for example, could be entirely dependent on a patriarchal fantasy. But how do you get rid of that particular fantasy? I don’t think it’s possible. from Is This Desire?, an interview with Clarissa Smith [CW: talking about porn]
There's always a cereal and there's always a legume
You can build a complex society on that pairing, and many times over the course of human history, people have. In the ancient Middle East, lentils were one of the main sources of protein, far more important in most people's diets than meat or animal products. from How the lentil was tamed – and helped human societies thrive [BBC]
The game is not entirely historically accurate
The Oregon Trail is not just a game, it's a cherished piece of gaming history that transported players to a bygone era of exploration and survival.
The new economy of contraction
The consequences of sustained population contraction are the stinger in the tail of our current predicament, because it wasn’t just our technologies that were designed around the short-term condition of rapid growth driven by abundant fossil fuel energy—so were our economies. It seems like simple common sense to most people nowadays that assets will on average increase in value, investments will yield a return, and businesses will make a profit. Stop and think about that for a minute, though. Why does this happen? Because the economy grows every quarter. Why does the economy grow every quarter? There are many reasons, but they all ultimately boil down to the fact that the population increases. With every passing year, there are more people joining the workforce, buying assets, making investments, and purchasing goods and services. Thus population growth is the engine behind economic growth. from An Unfamiliar World by John Michael Greer [Ecosophia]
We are truly in the golden era of absurd TT helmets
Look, I’m sure a ton of science and hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) worth of research went into creating Giro’s new time trial helmet, which was recently unveiled on Visma-Lease a Bike’s Instagram. And I’m sure its design helps save a watt or two, which, at the upper echelon of bicycle racing, absolutely matters. Especially when you’re talking time trials. But… and it’s a big but… look at this thing. from Visma-Lease a Bike’s New Time Trial Helmets Are Ridiculous [Bicycling]
A negligible chapter in a long and successful criminal career
Markets are inherently fragile, rooted as they are in a common delusion, and the carbon market was especially chimerical because so many participants knew that they were profiting from a farce of their own making. They were trading for the sake of trading, fabricating the impression of value and demand where none existed. “In some countries,” Europol reported, “up to 90 percent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities.” from Watch It Burn; Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century [Atavist; ungated]
There would be no safety in this film
There are no rules on literary adaptation. You’re trying to keep the plot. And obviously there are key plot things that we do keep. And we keep almost all the dialogue: apart from one big scene, with the secretary and the date, almost all the dialogue’s from the book. Because I think Brett has a great ear for dialogue. But as a novel, American Psycho is quite experimental. It’s very slippery. It shifts unexpectedly from first person to third person. It’ll go from something very realistic into a sort of dreamscape or something very hallucinatory. from On adapting ‘American Psycho’ by Mary Harron [LRB]
Plague Data
One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern London was plague. Starting in 1603, government officials published weekly plague mortality statistics in a broadside series known as the Bills of Mortality. The bills grew to include not just plague deaths but also dozens of other causes of death, ensuring their continued publication for decades after the final outbreak of plague in England. Between 1603 and 1752, almost 8,000 different weekly bills were published. Death by Numbers aims to transcribe and publish the information in these bills in a dataset suitable for computational analysis.
Iris Apfel, Eye-Catcher With a Kaleidoscopic Wardrobe, Dies at 102
Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked the socks off the straight fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died on Friday in her home in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 102. [New York Times; ungated]
Fat profits are one of the telltale signs of an illegal monopoly
The amount of profit that Amazon makes from third-party sellers, as opposed to AWS or some other division, might sound like a technical distinction, but it’s essential to the case against the company. The FTC alleges that Amazon’s low-price image is a mirage: According to the FTC, the company actually keeps prices higher than they would be in a competitive market—not just on Amazon but across the internet—squeezing consumers and small businesses in the process. from Amazon’s Big Secret [The Atlantic; ungated]
We don’t want to categorise people, so we don’t
Sites that are for adults should cater to all of grown-ups’ interests. Lots of people who are over 18 like sex, but they also like comedy and sports and music, so [it’s about] being able to cater to our audience base and to be able to provide opportunities for creators. from Keily Blair, OnlyFans: ‘We are an incredible UK tech success story’ [FT; ungated]
Orchestral Devices in the Light
I play music covers using electric toothbrushes, credit card machines, typewriters, and other electric devices. I control the devices using a microcontroller, some wires, and my programming skills. Thanks to the ideas of my subscribers, my devices now have googly eyes, and some even wigs and pipe cleaner arms. Sometimes I also make the devices perform choreographies, by making the devices move each other. it's Device Orchestra
What’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected
The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between. from We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them by Brad Bigelow [The Neglected Books Page]
The payoff was vague, but in his mind immense
Though Bateson was never truly on board with Lilly’s project of teaching dolphins how to speak, he spoke vaguely but fervently of the institute’s work as somehow connected to his larger goal of healing a sick society through interdisciplinary science. “I hope from the dolphins we may learn a new analysis of the sorts of information which we need — and all mammals need — if we are to retain our sanity,” Bateson pronounced grandly to reporters at a fund-raising gala for the institute. Anyone observing his daily work at the lab might have been surprised by such claims. from Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab [Chronicle of Higher Education; ungated]
If It Ain't Woke, Don't Fix It
As we have seen before with other image models like DALLE-3, the AI is taking your request and then modifying it to create a prompt. Image models have a bias towards too often producing the most common versions of things and lacking diversity (of all kinds) and representation, so systems often try to fix this by randomly appending modifiers to the prompt. The problem is that Gemini’s version does a crazy amount of this and does it in ways and places where doing so is crazy. from The Gemini Incident by Zvi Mowshowitz [Part I, Part II]
"Joking in humans requires quite complex cognitive abilities"
The teasing behaviour was similar to that adopted by young human children, according to the researchers, in that it was intentional, provocative, persistent and included elements of surprise, play and checking for the recipient’s response. The human equivalent might be sticking your tongue out at someone and then running away to gauge their reaction. This style of teasing could even form the foundation for more complicated forms of humour. from Why some animals have evolved a sense of humour [BBC]
How did poetry manage to fall down the stairs of relevance?
Fast-forwarding to today, it seems that poetry no longer garners the attention that it used to. In the whirlwind of today’s society, poetry has found itself fighting for attention against newer art forms such as film and music. Movies and music have seamlessly captured the raw emotions and societal complexities that once danced within the lines of poems and they have done so in a manner that is outwardly more entertaining and approachable. All the while, poetry has taken a dramatic shift and evolved into an art form that is highly confessional and often accompanied by illustrations and other visuals. It is certainly possible that this increasingly personal style of poetry has not appealed to all enthusiasts of this genre and this may attribute to a decline in readership. from Should Modern Newspapers Publish Poetry? [The Artifice]
Not every prediction came true
The top thinkers of 1974 were gathered together in the pages of “Saturday Review,” for a special issue celebrating that magazine’s 50th anniversary. In a series of essays, each one tried to imagine their world 50 more years into the future, in the far-away year of 2024 ... The future they’d hoped for — or feared for — is detailed and debated, offering readers of today a surprisingly clear picture of the future they’d expected in 1974. from 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974 [The New Stack]
The changing political cleavage structures of Western democracies
The causes of populism are at the heart of the most significant political and social science debates. One narrative contends that economic globalization resulted in real suffering among less-educated working-class voters, catalyzing populism. Another narrative contends that populism is an adverse reaction to cultural progressivism and that economic factors are not relevant or only relevant symbolically through perceptions of loss of cultural status. Even though the evidence suggests that the generational change argument suggested by the canonical book of Norris and Inglehart does not hold empirically, the cultural narrative nevertheless seems to be particularly influential. from The Populist Backlash Against Globalization: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence [Cambridge University]
Those seams we are seduced into not seeing
Let me offer a couple examples of how the arts challenge AI. First, many have pointed out that storytelling is always needed to make meaning out of data, and that is why humanistic inquiry and AI are necessarily wed. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles (2021: 1605) writes, interdependent though they may be, database and narrative are “different species, like bird and water buffalo.” One of the reasons, she notes, is the distinguishing example of indeterminacy. Narratives “gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and embrace the ambiguity, while “databases find it difficult to tolerate”. from Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?
They Should Have Sent a Porpoise
I asked Gruber himself what he would say to the whales. He said that he has been taking requests. Most people tell him that we should start by saying “Sorry,” for the bloody rampage that was industrial whaling. He agrees. “We pulled the oil out of these animals’ heads,” he said. “We used it to make lipstick.” Perhaps now we can atone. from How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold [The Atlantic; ungated]
Even with all the efforts, loopholes remain
Bowmouth guitarfish amulets are just one example of the boundless number of protected wildlife products sold online, where a global Grand Bazaar of seedy vendors hawk their wildlife wares, and anyone with internet access can find products from rhino horns to exotic orchids to tiger claws with just a few clicks. With lax regulations, even weaker enforcement, and a lack of legal culpability, not only is wildlife trafficking able to fester online, but algorithms actually amplify sales, boosting the platforms’ profits. from For Sale: Shark Jaw, Tiger Claw, Fish Maw [Hakai]
“The most neglected of American fruits”
Until the mid 1800s, pawpaws were strictly a foraged food due to their woodland abundance. Indigenous people and enslaved Africans ate them as part of their seasonal diets, and the recorded anecdotes of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Daniel Boone describe subsisting on the native fruits during their journeys through the wilderness. Eventually, pawpaws, or custard apples as they were sometimes called, were sold at market. Though cultivated by Indigenous tribes like the Shawnee, the pawpaw was relegated to a wild folk food eaten by impoverished rural people, earning nicknames like the “poor man’s banana” and the “hillbilly banana.” from Consider the Pawpaw [Belt]
“They’re noticeably different, except for a few”
Meanwhile, Rybak and Hearn say that prospective buyers regularly call or email asking for guidance in authenticating this or that painting, worried they may have sunk large sums of money on worthless imitations. Some buyers were bilked out of their life savings. For the fraudsters, of course, the scheme was nothing more than a way to make money. But the devastation to honest buyers, to Morrisseau and his legacy, to Indigenous culture, and to Canadian art writ large is incalculable. Morrisseau’s works were not meaningless paintings but precious, irreplaceable examples of the Anishinaabe experience in Canada and the world. from Inside the Biggest Art Fraud in History [Smithsonian]
The underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability
Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds. from The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; ungated]
The Premonition of a Fraying
"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski]