Neoreactionary Networks: Mapping extreme and mainstream Twitter
Hello everybody, after a lengthy delay, my talk to the University of Sidney about Neoreaction and the ways I tried to map its various communities, is now available. Please ignore the coughing. My keynote slides were very dusty.
Is there a compendium of Elon+Twitter badness?
I want to make the case to my employer that we should drop Twitter/X as a promotional channel. I could go drawing together the various examples of disinfo spreading, instating CSAM posters, rise of content inciting violence etc, but I thought I’d check to see if someone hasn’t already been tracking this. The sooner I can pull the info together the better but I don’t have time right now to go compiling it myself. Anyone know if there’s a site, wiki, resource, thread etc that could set me up?
Balaji Srinivasan Launches “The Network School” in Singapore
AI Kids: Just Say No - AI classrooms speak to a larger question of why we're willing to replace human practice with AI in the first place
Revered friends. I wrote a thing. Mainly because I had a stack of stuff on Joseph Weizenbaum on tap and the AI classroom thing was stuck in my head. I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s certainly written.
The learning facilitators they mention are the key to understanding all of this. They need them to actually maintain discipline and ensure the kids engage with the AI, so they need humans in the room still. But now roles that were once teachers have been redefined as “Learning facilitators”. Apparently former teachers have rejoined the school in these new roles.
Like a lot of automation, the main selling point is deskilling roles, reducing pay, making people more easily replaceable (don’t need a teaching qualification to be a "learning facilitator to the AI) and producing a worse service which is just good enough if it is wrapped in difficult to verify claims and assumptions about what education actually is. Of course it also means that you get a new middleman parasite siphoning off funds that used to flow to staff.
UK's first 'teacherless' AI classroom set to open in London
The Politics of Urbit
With Yarvin renewing interest in Urbit I was reminded of this paper that focuses on Urbit as a representation of the politics of “exit”. It’s free/open access if anyone is interested. From the abstract… >This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’…While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual."
Devs and the Culture of Tech - Final part
Hello all. People were very kind when I originally posted the start of this series. I’ve refrained from spamming you with every part but I thought I’d post to say the very final installment is done. I got a bit weird with it this time as I felt like I had an infinite amount to say, all of which only barely got to the underlying point i was trying to make. So much that I wrote I also cut, it’s ridiculous. Anyway now the series is done I’m going to move on to smaller discrete pieces as I work on my book about Tech Culture’s propensity to far-right politics. I’ll be dropping interesting stuff I find, examples of Right Libertarians saying ridiculous things, so follow along if that’s your jam.
Generative AI is a climate disaster
The cost of simply retrieving an answer from the Web is infinitely smaller than the cost of generating a new one. Great interview with Sasha Luccioni from Huggingface on all the ways that using generative AI for everything is both a) hugely costly compared to existing methods, and b) insane.
John Ganz did a good coverage of the ideological side of tech, particularly using Herf’s book Reactionary Modernism that looks at the role of engineers in building Nazi ideology.
You can read Reactionary Modernism for free on the [Internet Archive] (archive.org/details/…/2up)
