Praising by Faint Damn

A chat about an eugenicist in California made me think about rhetorical tricks. My gentle readers are familiar with objective allies, where the centrist journalist cries “that candidate is horrible and awful and I am going to put his words on the front page and in the prime-time news every day” and watches the ad revenue roll in, while the candidate launches a line of propaganda on the theme “look how much those elitists hate me and how powerful I am” and hires a new accountant to track his donations. Ever since smartphones came out, vlogs and podcasts are funded by people declaring another influencer the enemy, launching a five-part series to attack them, and sending their viewers to the ‘enemy’ channel until the ‘enemy’ returns the favour by launching a counter-video or anti-episode. This pays much better than useful factual videos on knitting or woodworking. There is a related concept whose name I am trying to find.

The eugenicist explained that after he discovered the online far right, he decided to share their ideas by posting about them a lot and rebutting some of their peripherial points but not the ones he agreed with. He hoped that people would follow his links, read the original posts, and decide they agreed with some of them. He is not the only person to use this gambit.

In his 1764 treatise against execution and judicial torture, Cesare Beccaria included a brief chapter on the crime of heresy:

rational men will see that the place where I live, the present age, and the matter at hand do not permit me to examine the nature of such a crime. It would take me too long and too far from my subject to prove how a perfect uniformity of thought is necessary in a state, the example of many nations to the contrary not withstanding; how opinions that differ only in a few subtle and obscure points altogether beyond human comprehension can nonetheless disturb public order if one of them is not authorized to the exclusion of the others… It would take me too long to prove that, however odious the triumph of force over human minds may seem, since the only fruits of its conquest are dissembling and, consequently, degradation; however contrary it may seem to the spirit of gentleness and brotherly love enjoined by reason and the authority we most revere; it is still necessary and indispensable

This was enough to pass the Neapolitan censor, but in 260 years I do not know anyone who has read that chapter and believed that Beccaria thought heresy should be a crime. He just refused to say that heresy should be legal.

Under Communism, writers learned to summarize the best arguments for a position, then denounce it with a cookie-cutter party-line teaching.

This is similar to but not the same as irony, sarcasm, or litotes. A summary of a book or thinker and a weak criticism can be superficially sincere, even if the author has a hidden agenda.

This is related to crit-hype, where a critic accepts the premise that a new technology will be almost godlike rather than asking whether that is true and whether the real dangers are in the present. Since 2019, American chatbot companies have been telling reporters that their next product might be too dangerous to release. Then they release it anyways and look for a new reporter who they can tell the next version is even more powerful.

Edit: This is connected to all publicity is good publicity, but is deliberate. The average person responding on corporate social media and thereby promoting the thing they hate in the algorithm does not know what he does, but this tactic is a deliberate attempt to spread an idea or a thinker without endorsing it.

Lastly, this is related to the attention economy, another concept which I do not understand (I would expect an attention economy to reward dense, high-quality information, but many people just want to hang out online with someone articulate and energetic). We would all think it odd if Kat Connor accepted a challenge to a MMA bout from a spotty fifteen-year-old, and there is something just as odd if a professor of computer science at UWaterloo agrees to debate an anonymous account which says obviously P = NP but has never even released a preprint.

I come from Internet culture. The way social media works makes my skin crawl. In our culture, if an idea is bad you make an exhaustive book or website explaining all the ways it is bad, but in social media culture, it is a red flag that your career is funded by posting angry attacks on other social media figures that send your viewers to their content. One reason why I am at a loss this decade is that I have not found a way to respond to this new environment and still be me or someone I would like to be.

You damn someone with faint praise by saying mildly positive things about them. What should we call the reverse, where you share an idea or thinker then make a half-hearted criticism? I am off to do something outside with other people but maybe the Internet can help.

(scheduled 13 June 2026)

The Great Rebalancing

In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.

When a certain Codomannus became Darius, Great King, King of Kings, he inherited enough gold and silver to run his empire for several years without collecting taxes and tithes.1 It had been squirreled away by the kings before him through all the wars with Egypt and the Ionians. Older historians often said that this showed the Achaemenids were foolish kings who did not understand how to use silver, even though Thucydides boasted that the Athenians had enough coined silver in the Acropolis to run their empire for ten years (Thucydides 2.13.3– look it up!). A few years later, Alexander the king of the Macedonians overthrew Darius and took his treasures. Thirty years later, most of them had been spent on grandiose construction projects and wars between Alexander’s generals, and buried in pots in Thrace or set in motion between Sidon and Carthage. Empire gathered all those sparkling treasures into a few pillared rooms with mud-brick walls in Persepolis and Damascus and Ecbatana. Once the empire was divided, the treasures scattered like water from a burst skin.

When Barack Obama left office, he saw a United States which had been the center of global finance for almost a hundred years. Many Americans resisted their new role, and the global capitalist system that caused the Great Depression, but by about 1950 American institutions stood behind the new order. And slowly in the Great War, then faster and faster, capital started to flow to the United States like silver flowed into Mughal India and Ming China. The United States headed the global institutions which governed the postwar world and enforced a policy of free trade and free navigation. The United Nations headquarters was in New York City not Kuala Lumpur, the International Monetary Fund was based in DC not Vienna, Canada extended copyright when the Mouse told them too, and every Internet standards meeting had representatives from American megacorps who pushed in whatever direction the NSA was pushing. Someone who looked at the world in 2016 might have thought that this was natural. Someone who looked at the world in 1906 might have expected that China would always have an emperor and Britain would dominate global finance for decades until the United States or Germany finally caught up. Things changed more quickly than expected, as they often do. The people who did best when the coal-burning empires collapsed were the people who understood that things could change and took precautions, and the people who saw that they had changed and moved much faster than their friends thought was wise.

One of the basic principles of investing is rebalancing. If one part of your portfolio grows much faster or shrinks much slower than everything else, that might seem like a good thing. Exponential growth compounds. But this means that if anything goes wrong with that successful investment, more and more of your total assets are at risk. So prudent investors check every so often, and sell off some of what is doing best to buy a bit of everything else. The classic example is selling some stocks and buying bonds or other fixed-income assets when stock markets are booming. Fixed-income assets rarely make much money after inflation, but they rarely loose much money either. And when stock-markets crash, central banks usually lower interest rates, which causes the value of bonds paying the older higher interest rates to rise. Just as important is selling stocks in a sector that is booming and buying some boring banks and fertilizer companies and carmakers who ignore the nagging economists and pay dividends. One day soon BreX or Nortel or pets.com may be worth nothing. But if you have turned some of your wins into something safer, you keep them once it goes away.

The Internet gave us many good things, and a few people found value on corporate social media. However, corporate tech is driven by greed and the desire to surveil and control. All around the world, millions of us are considering what to do: should I learn how to block Google’s and Gemini’s crawlers to improve my webmaster skills at the cost of a few visitors, or even install Iocaine to poison their training data? Sticking with big tech is easy, and in the past they gave us free email and web search that just worked. Even if you are grateful for those things, it would be wise to take some of the money and time they freed up and invest it in alternatives.

I am not a prophet. But in my view, it is very likely that in twenty years, the power of a few American web service corporations will be much less than it was in 2016. Google’s business was showing you ads next to the search results, then ads on the site you visited. They would not be blowing up that model if they thought it was sure to survive. Facebook can’t launch a profitable new business to save its middle managers’ bonuses, and Microsoft struggles to keep one version of Windows functional. The people who run these companies are not serious or skillful at anything except gathering power and keeping their quarterly bonus. Sometimes the latest outrage is not a brutal expression of power, but King Lear’s cry to Regan and Goneril before they threw him out into the storm:

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth!

If the power of these corporations does collapse, anyone who built their life, their business, or their university around them will be left like farmers on their housetops in a flood.

The great institutions can’t move fast enough. If the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund sells half its US stocks, someone has to buy them. Before the French government finishes moving off Microsoft software, it will have to build the FOSS systems it requires. The Prime Minister of Canada is torn between ordinary Canadians and security personnel who understand that we have to move now, and the useful idiots and middle managers who spent their careers and climbed the ladder integrating Canada with the United States and don’t see any reason to change course. But anyone reading a blog like this can reduce their engagement with big tech.

Maybe the open web will lose and drown in an ocean of slop or be locked away behind ID checks and requirements to use the company’s hardware and the company’s software to read simple HTML. Anyone who claims to know the future is selling something. But if you assume that the US’ information and financial domination will last forever, and could not go into rapid decline, you may find yourself like a moneylender waiting at the palace gates in Ecbatana for payment when the treasury contains only cobwebs and rats’ nests. Moving your email to Fastmail and your web searches to Mojeek is not the easiest choice or a path to wealth and power, but it is a way to prepare for the possibility that the world could change.

For (Mark) Carney (in 2019), the dollar system had structural flaws. It was inherently unsustainable. For (Israeli-American banker Stanley) Fischer, there was no reason to move on from a system that had been working when the problem was not structural but political (and he named a specific politician in DC). … For Carney, the dollar system must necessarily pass. For Fischer, it can only collapse if America is foolish enough to let it. Every disagreement about the future of the (US) dollar comes down to one of those two arguments.

Further Reading

Nicholas Taleb gestures at some of these ideas in his Incerto pentalogy. The Opt Out Project has pretty good advice for people who got entangled with Google and want to unwind. Dan Bortolotti has a good introduction to rebalancing as risk management on his blog and in his book Reboot Your Portfolio (2021). Journalism and blogging are full of bold speculations about the future of corporate tech and American hegemony, from mild newspaper columns and firm essays to spicy blog posts by Timothy Snyder or Baldur Bjarnason. They are also full of examples of executives, major investors, and board members at these companies talking like Lothrop Stoddard. I took a moment to write to Shopify Spotify about a particularly egregious example since in theory they are Canadian and we don’t accept that poisonous nonsense here.

Edit 2026-06-14: Leah Elliott’s Contra Chrome is one of many excellent explanations why someone who cares about privacy should have nothing to do with Google products.

(scheduled 25 May 2026)

“We … find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity.”

https://ai-on-the-internet.github.io/ #AI #StateOfTheWeb