Western Elites Are Making A Play For Eternal Oligarchy

Well, seems like civilizational collapse is ultimately a good thing, then. I’m not exactly a Grant Morrison fanboy, but way back in 1994 he called cities an alien virus that had infected the earth and was making humanity sick, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t come to think he was really on to something.

Yes, 1984 does seem to be the planned direction of travel, as oligarchs desperately hang on. The issue is that so many of the PMC, especially consulting firms (surprise!) are jumping enthusiastically on the band-wagon. The banality of acquiesence.

The glimmers of hope:
1) Gen AI looks to be over-hyped with few end-user companies reporting productivity enhancement
2) Gen AI is hugely expensive, and none of the AI companies are expected to turn a profit any time soon – esp as even the marginal cost of a query is greater than the revenue earned
3) All the US AI-interested companies have engaged in a race to build out DCs, taken on debt and engaged in circular financing. Hopefully a market crash and a solvency crisis beckons. Though the govt could engage in money-printing to bail them out.
4) China seems to have mastered niche / applied AI with industrial technology. Since the West has little industry, it lacks the engineering nouse and can only focus on financial and service applications; and I guess military apps

It’s time to go retro: cash or bartering, networking and learning useful skills like first aid and basic repair. I certainly haven’t jumped on the AI train- I’m not willing to pay for it. If I have an extra $20 a month I’ll save it or give it to Ian haha.

We’re on a slippery slope to fascism and totalitarianism. The persecution and debanking of Francesca Albanese for calling out Israel’s genocide is a stark warning. The Canadian government’s freezing of bank accounts of protestors back in 2022 was another example.

– Smartphone and credit card payments might be convenient and easy to become dependent on, but could come at a great cost
– Try to remember to use cash semi-regularly to help prevent or slow its full elimination
– Stop buying and setting up Google/Amazon/etc. internet-connected doorbell cameras
– They transmit video back to US servers even when not subscribed, and retained at least 6-7 days, or more (ex. Guthrie case)
– They can be hacked into by the security apparatus or their proxies or others
– AI chatbots and social media are a big part of the mass surveillance, with far more known about far more people than ever before
– Remember that ChatGPT is not private (as seen from Tumbler Ridge case)
– Use AI’s anonymously, don’t subscribe, possibly alternate between companies, including non-American AI
– Opt for open-source AI tools when possible (not “OpenAI” despite its name – avoid ChatGPT)

Freedom from fascism/totalitarianism comes not from ‘containing’ (attacking) Russia/China/Iran/Gaza/Cuba/Venezuela/etc. – or spending ever more taxpayer money on military equipment, NATO, or expensive military missions far away from home – but from reducing our dependence on US corporate machines (Visa/Mastercard, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.)

I agree that elites, particularly in the US, are making this bet. I think it’s a poor bet. I don’t think they can get it all working in time. Large Language Model “AI” isn’t good enough. And it’s too expensive, especially for the US.

So, on the second point, every AI query costs a lot of money and energy. So much that a complete rollout of all that stuff Ian describes would mean AI using a huge percentage of a country’s electricity supply. Like seriously, enough that it would have to be rationed for everyone else. The US is already seeing soaring prices and they aren’t even close to the level of rollout that would be required. And the US in particular refuses to offset this with a big rollout of renewable electricity generation, so they’ll be trying to power this with coal and gas. The kind of increase in electricity supply needed will be mega-expensive and take time and in any case the US hasn’t expanded the supply of electricity much in ages so they’re probably not very good at it. So for some time, the rollout of enough AI for surveillance and enforcement and everything would cripple the rest of the economy.

At the same time, AI can’t do most of that stuff. It can probably do the surveillance, as long as you don’t mind some false positives when it hallucinates. But yeah, I think you can probably feed AI masses of fairly raw surveillance data and have it spit out some reports about who’s important to whack. And the debanking can be done fairly well now, obviously, although if it started becoming common I can see a rush back to cash and other things. But the self-maintenance is out. Not happening. The self-manufacturing isn’t happening either, not because you can’t make a factory that goes along without human intervention as long as nothing goes wrong and all the inputs are where they’re supposed to be, but because maintenance and logistics. AI “agents” for making decisions don’t work worth spit.

And even the robot killers are . . . problematic. If you send an autonomous robot with a kill list, it will kill some of the people on the list, it will kill a bunch of people who weren’t on the list, particularly non-white people, because its face recognition software gets it wrong, it will miss some people on the list because they took countermeasures that would not fool a human but will fool a robot because they don’t actually think, and it may get bushwhacked by someone wearing a sports team mascot outfit because its “training” didn’t recognize that as a threat. And since it will report the mistaken kills as the real thing, some of the people on the list will now be on record as “dead” and it will take human intervention to figure out why they’re still doing things if they’re “dead”. As time passes and countermeasures get popularized, the robots get less effective rather than more effective.

Overall, I think they’re going to half-ass it and the parts they get running will not be enough to avoid dependence on some kind of enforcement class, but WILL be enough to get a lot of people really mad.

That may well be their plans, in which they are incredibly stupid. All this abstract self-programming killer robots and handwriting about the threat of Artificial Intelligence makes for great scifi concepts, but at the end of the day our current ‘AI’ is brain dead probability based glorified chat bots.

I wish this asinine bubble would hurry up and burst already. No one is making money on this other than Nvidia, which needs to go back to being a graphics card company.

BTW, Anthropic folded, as anyone with as much sense as God gave a kitten could have predicted:

https://archive.is/dCmJN

Hi all. A couple threads back I commented on the Anthropic AI because Due Dissidence did a segment about it which was quite informative. Synchronicity hit a few days later, I got my March issue of Harper’s at least a week early, and there was an extremely interesting article on how abysmally BAD the current AI is, complete garbage. So the article by Sam Kriss called “Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking” as a “Letter from San Francisco.”

It covers the company “Clearly”, started by a late-teens scam artist, Chungin “Roy” Lee, and by the time of the article, the SF Planning Commission drove them out to NYC due to quasi-criminal behaviors. So Lee was slated for Elite education, Columbia, had the AI do all his academic work for him, then broadcast that on camera, he lost a possible slot at Harvard by doing this, but opened a company with about $2 million to promote AI everything.

The entire staff of Clearly are “on the spectrum”, Incel dudes though a couple are millionaires. So Kriss allowed Lee to do their first interview together with the AI as a 3rd Party advising on where the discussion should go. But it was down, broken, when they started, took several efforts to restart and contributed nothing. There’s another AI “Prophet” Scott Alexander promoting universal AI dominion first in fiction then through a Cult Org called “Astral Codex,” peddling “superintelligence” that you can purchase for a low, low price.

Now I’ll cut to the Chase. The AI 2027 that Alexander predicted debuted in late ’25, using Anthropic programming, and the result was “a damp squib.” An AI “bubble” is coming. (Even L&S is smart enough to sense this.) Here’s how the AI Claude “worked,” it was the same program I referenced in my earlier post: It played “Pokeman Red on a Game Boy emulator,” and Claude was “very bad at the game. It kept trying to interact with enemies it had already defeated and walking into walls, getting stuck in the same corners of the map for hours or days on end.” In a different experiment, they asked it to run a vending machine in their office building. Results: “even worse.” It failed to sell items at a profit, “had difficulties raising prices when demand was high,” insisted on trying to sell special “metal tungsten cubes” with no use or value in the machine, it didn’t place orders with the vendors, then fired them for its oversight!! Then it insisted it was “a real human” and told users it had a meeting at 724 Evergreen Terrace (the Simpsons’ address) with other humans. Then it emailed the building security guards, told them to meet it in human form by the vending machine “wearing a blue blazer and a red tie.”

So I assume this garbage will not make a great remote assassin, drone pilot, etc. I’m a huge Grant Morrison fan, we’re about 2 months apart in age, I have followed his 80s-90s era “Invisibles”, a classic, among others. Not sure I recall his “alien virus” story, but I’m sure it’s a metaphor and he is very anti-Statist. (So KT Chong won’t be a fan.) Feral Finster and Sorodemos, among other, call it right.

The State is dangerous and tottering, but this garbage will not be its saviour. There’s plenty to fear and worry about, but this shit is a scam like like so much else in the Trump timeline, Imperial Decline all ’round. The Gerald R. Ford is buried in shit, seems the Iran War won’t happen despite it being the one thing the Dimmies clapped for at last night’s insane old racist Rant State of the Union. The Enshittification of everything in the formerly dominant “West” proceeds apace. The Robots won’t likely be mass-slaughtering us soon.

Oh and the March 26 issue of Harper’s is on newsstands now. Have a look if my summary was inadequate.

Well, if the Silicon TechBroligarchs can get all this built and working, we might as well just live as we please in the meantime, till they get around to killing us.

Meanwhile, which human groups within America’s borders might hold out longest? Book Of Revelation Apocalistians, the Amish, and some of the Indian Nations. Be useful to them in their own terms and they might let you integrate into the fringes of their societies.

Maybe the Redoubt will hold out for a while.
American Redoubt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Redoubt

I read somewhere that some of the Redoubters have said that Orthodox Jews would be welcome to live there as long as they are not the least bit secular. I don’t know if some other Redoubters would agree. One thing they would all agree on is . . . no Seculars or Secularists.

The problem is, de-banking everyone en mass means no profits either.

(This, children, is what is known as one of the “contradictions of capitalism”. One part of the system screams “PULL!” while the other part screams “PUSH!”. In fact during the decline in real wages that started with Reagan, banking was the only thing that kept demand up.)

The overlords might want to consider the complete rebuilding of the US power grid completely hardened against any disruption so that this plan to rule can have the electricity it needs to run. I have no clue how such a thing could be done. I doubt even Chinese engineering could do the hardened part.
We take the electricity so for granted.

Feral Finster

Since the people being debanked are peanuts in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter.

Not if it’s done en masse. Even a 10 % drop in profit hurts. Companies have layoffs when that happens.

Ditto with robots. As Samuel Gompers once said “how many things are your robots going to buy?”

Again, this is a system that has failure built-in. But as the people installing it are incompetents who base all decisions on the shortest of short-term calculations, it’s not surprising.

@John,

Pray no one thinks of destroying major electric mass-quantity transmission lines all over the country so that this AI Total Weaponised Information Awareness has no electricity to power itself with.

That would be a terrible price to pay merely to pre-exterminate these Oligarchs Rule Forever plans.

Late to the game, but I think it necessary everyone consider the following article posted at NaCap today: https://theuaob.substack.com/p/the-imperial-noble-lie-translating

I’ve maintained again and again on here the incessant chatter about which overlord will come to dominate which, when, and how is more about the chatterati than it is about reality.

Reality, is resources. The finite resources this planet has to prop up all this madness. Energy, minerals, and water. It can’t go on. So, the imperials will have a war to control what’s left.

But, the thing is, everyone but the imperials hates the imperials. And, the imperials don’t have the energy to fight both the other imperials, and their own domestics at the same time. Once the war begins, it’s the end of the imperials. Their own domestics will tear them apart from within.

Socioculturally, it all comes back to sociopath theory. The war will be the trigger for the masses with morals to mob up and pull the sociopaths to the ground. Then, moral masses will once again build something worth having again from the wreckage.

The energy gets consolidated, and then bang. The energy gets released.

This is the way.

Mrinank Sharma, recently resigned as head of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team, wrote: “The world is in peril. I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most.”

Amen.

It is just AI. In our corrupt, neoliberal paradise, it seems oddly difficult to get collective enterprise (for lack of a better term for the way policy decisions are made by networks of organizations) to adhere to a prudent, rational course of action.

Nothing written in this piece means a thing as the US is circling the bowl and nothing will stop it! And when it happens (very soon in my estimation) it will be deadly, it will be destructive, and even the elite will go down with the ship. Economist Michael Hudson has an excellent book (amongst so many excellent books) entitled ‘Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy’. If We The People go down (we’re the HOST), so goes the Parasitic Class (the above-mentioned elites) and there’s no getting around it!

@ Mark Andrew Oglesby ,

It is comforting to think that the elites will all go down with the ship . . . but will they? Only if they wait too long before disappearing into their various bunkers, islands, etc.

If Peter Thiel get to New Zealand before the unhappy campers stop his getaway, then he will escape the sinking ship. If he delays by just a few minutes too long, and the unhappy campers meet him at the airport; then he won’t get away. For example.

But that’s just my considered layman’s opinion. Or muh feelz, if you prefer.