I’m more pessimistic. I don’t think it’ll take 20 years. The Philippines gets an average of 20 typhoons every year. We’re watching islands sink, and yet the west is debating whether climate change even exists.
I think the death of journalism is around the corner within six months to a year. The internet is getting worse by the day, and there are absolutely no guardrails put in place, even as news organisations are being forced to pay for that, and our content is exploited. It is a very predatory online world, and that has translated to the world we live in.
— Maria Ressa / “How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation” / The Guardian
i set myself on fire atop pottery shards an incongruent sight on the public square what corner have you backed into, huh i abraded my burns with salt before the machine steamrolled me into the macadam im afraid i made up my mind
fatalism
is best shaken then stirred when i burn people listen disregard the penalty kick this ship is listing in dire straits the mother verandah crumbles we are all low hanging fruit and the petrol’s tangy mouthfeel electrifies my soul these fanciful superimpositions please use my useful molecules after invoking eminent domain
What I’m Reading:
There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp’s globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.
Most Germans in 1933, for example, were not psychopaths. So why did they vote for Hitler?
Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
It will be very interesting to see what happens when Trump finally dies, and what will happen to this movement, how much of it is truly beholden to his unique celebrity status, which he has over any of the other members of this movement. If you remove that, what happens to the movement? Does somebody else manage to come in and replace him and be the new focal point of the cult of personality? I don’t know that any of them have the juice for that.
— Mike Duncan, to Nikki McCann Ramirez / “Are We Witnessing the Fall of the American Empire?” / Rolling Stone
As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish. The fish was in my mouth. My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.
I fell like this for years, in the fishy air.
— Edward Salem / “My Aerodynamics”
After that Hathney had been silently pensive sometime, he askt the Monk whether the Spaniards also were admitted into Heaven, and he answering that the Gates of Heaven were open to all that were Good and Godly, the Cacic replied without further consideration, that he would rather go to Hell then Heaven, for fear he should cohabit in the same Mansion with so Sanguinary and Bloody a Nation. And thus God and the Holy Catholick Faith are Praised and Reverenced by the Practices of the Spaniards in America.
— Bartolomé de las Casa / A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Large language models (LLMs) don’t have intentions or understanding, but they can scheme and lie. For example, tests have shown that various popular models would engage in blackmail, corporate espionage, and even actions that could lead to death in highly contrived scenarios. In a separate test, a model that was told it had control over a robot attempted to disable its ethics module, make copies of itself, alter logs, act dumb, break out of the lab, and hack a car’s computer. Researchers suggest part of the cause might be the fact that LLMs are trained on so many computer-betrayal stories — think Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey — and that papers describing LLM scheming could actually make the problem worse.
— Flora Graham / “AI models that lie, cheat and plot murder” / Nature Briefing
None of us asked to be where we are … What we control is our actions once fate puts us there.
— Hugh Howey / Wool
The fact that the Nazi and Stalinist regimes were founded on cruel fantasies and shameless lies did not make them historically exceptional, nor did it preordain them to collapse. Nazism and Stalinism were two of the strongest networks humans ever created . . . In the twenty-first century, some new totalitarian regime may well succeed where Hitler and Stalin failed, creating an all-powerful network that could prevent future generations from even attempting to expose its lies and fictions. We should not assume that delusional networks are doomed to failure. If we want to prevent their triumph, we will have to do the hard work ourselves.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
What I’m Listening To:
I broke my finger Playing middle C I keep tryna get you Just to notice me Betrayed
the sages touch upon ritual quarrels that invoke divine nests of bugger birds and brawny brigands / please bring entities to return faith in humanity ‘cause we’re bereft of sustenance and my breathing is labored / another voyage obliterated without process hearing or justice by a self appointed tyranny / we observe we impotent flail we powerless eyeless and without voice / humility an extravagance long dried up / we die in hails of bullets and missiles so the rich and potentates may become more so so happy to have served as your steeping stones / sir
sir i’m sore i’m tired my strength has flagged please use my back so your feet stay from the mud / what immense magnificence to cower and assure you live as unparalleled sun king / let them eat chaff you say and i assure you we are happy to oblige we thirst and desiccate / between the hexagram and egg we’re given empty envelopes and blank ballots and we must be thankful for this largesse / and we’ll celebrate your bullets and bully boys ‘cause we deserve the fraudulence of our fatuous and flatulent choices / we deserve the muck we wallow
silent flares darken the night
we are allies of nothingness
masters of nothing
consorts to oblivion
What I’m Reading:
Homo sapiens is by far the most intelligent species on the planet, and it simultaneously is the most deluded species: humans believe the kind of nonsense that no chimpanzee or elephant or rat would ever believe. We are now creating a superintelligence, and there is every reason to think that it will be super deluded.
— Yuval Noah Harari / “How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation” / The Guardian
Panda cycling and recycling, panda-demics, and panda demotics. Find yourself in the world of widespread fraud and plate tectonics in response to politic-tonics — those gestures and flourishes that are not of this society, of this culture, right? Write!
Go on and write so much so that you can pare down and shape it into something resembling cohesion — that will catch a sovereign ear rather than the father of the mishmash masterclass, of the pell mell muttering, and argy-bargy desultory twisters.
Meaning is at once nonsense and resoundingly salient only to itself, its maker, and to ladies who lunch coiffed in Viking hair and festooned with scratchcard lanyards. Heep hoop!
All that frantic bedlam.
Pick up the dry cleaning.
What I’m Reading:
We are come to a world within the world. In these alien reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Illshapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland.
He lives with ephemeral creatures beneath his feet and stanchions around his bed.
A case study in diverting his elbow’s loose skin and the stubbing of his tender footing.
In the darkness outside sycamores make wide arm imprecations and water themselves with wines of every variety.
His ambition is drained in a scruff of the neck twist—a meager remembrance of his days spent in a robe.
His teeth are chattering. Tomorrow he starts his apprenticeship as a bellows fellow at the smithy.
“Fou!” says the Past, inserting its finger in god knows what—¿El lapiz de Extremadura?
He slogs, knee deep, in hummingbird angles, all-stiff and blur-fast. Before him shine the bones of the pitiable Condors of Lima.
Is he comforted by this knowledge—that the afflatus was hard won—speaking in tongues while wearing the cloaks of invincibility? Or did he don the cloaks of imbecility?
In any case, his body is taught with a dab of holy pedantry.
***
She, on the other hand, hears a clacking coming from the road. She feels the steering wheel shudder to the sound of the clacking. Is there a compromised tire up front? What is making that sound? She feels the steering lock and she drifts to the shoulder.
The car’s thermometer reads 115 degrees. The empty road heat shimmers in the distance—an ocean opens in the desert.
This is not something she can afford to do—leave the safety of the car and expose herself to the environment or to potential marauders in wait.
She intuits Inuit umiaks on a Fata Morgana in the heat shimmer ocean before her—all this in invisible increments of …
***
And you say: “Stanchions? Cloaks? Condors of Lima? Wha?! Are you insane?”
What I’m Reading:
. . . If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? We are at one and the same time both the smartest and the stupidest animals on earth. We are so smart that we can produce nuclear missiles and superintelligent algorithms. And we are so stupid that we go ahead producing these things even though we’re not sure we can control them and failing to do so could destroy us. Why do we do it? Does something in our nature compel us to go down the path of self destruction?
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
A vibrant tuning fork in hand— This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.
You tell me to videograph your heartache. You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism and your love for your fellow human. Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out. You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best. It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic. Over the next couple of weeks before October love forlorn, love clinically enervated, will disappear permanently.
Fuel for the broken heart. Food for stormy weather.
What I’m Reading:
But being with an addict was the most alone I would ever feel.
a star’s fleeting arc across the night a bright and obscene refulgence a cold relief buried in that errant ecliptic it shapes itself as the sky congeals around it
goes on to better things does not go on at all now gone
consumptive reductive absent
What I’m Reading:
Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.
Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies. This is why even technologically advanced societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have been prone to hold delusional ideas, without their delusions necessarily weakening them. Indeed, the mass delusions of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies about things like race and class actually helped them make tens of millions of people march together in lockstep.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
When the prison door bangs shut behind your back— that’s when you think about freedom.
— Tomica Bajsić / “When You Hit Yourself with an Axe While Chopping Wood”
For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narco-terrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D. Vance posted, “Don’t give a shit.”
— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker
I just remembered, remembered freedom was life’s great lie,
remembered body is another word for cage, remembered
night knew my name before I ever had reason to fear.
— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”
American white supremacists have tried to justify their position by appealing to various hallowed texts, most notably the U.S. Constitution and the Bible. The U.S. Constitution originally legitimized racial segregation and the supremacy of the white race, reserving full civil rights for white people and allowing the enslavement of Black people. The Bible not only sanctified slavery in the Ten Commandments and numerous other passages but also placed a curse on the offspring of Ham-the alleged forefather of Africans-saying that “the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25).
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss. But haven’t we built such beautiful homes on the hillside coming down. Empires of one-one brick and pillar post. Empires of galvanise and dirt.
— Anthony Joseph / “Empires”
Information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information, they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are. For tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions-about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about Al, and about a great many other things. While each individual human is typically interested in knowing the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies. That’s how we got, for example, to Nazism and Stalinism. These were exceptionally powerful networks, held together by exceptionally deluded ideas. As George Orwell famously put it, ignorance is strength.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
What I’m Listening To:
Like Saint Joan Doing a cool jerk Oh, I want you Like a kanga roo Ooh
thee istsfor manity reader 