They want you to feel like you've already lost and just need to make the best of it. They want you to believe there's nothing you can really do for your friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, students, fellow citizens, humans. They want you to feel like once you've "made it" - from renter to owner, contractor to full time, pedestrian to driver, nontenured to tenured - that there's nothing so wrong with the world it's worth sticking your neck out.
I know this is oversimplifying, but I find it very hard to read about any part and theater of the history of the Long 19th Century and not come away with the conclusion that the British Empire was an exceptional evil that repeatedly won: truly the greater evil. Maybe the BeNe(Lux) were as bad
Among OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and the rest it’s highly unclear and shifting to me which one is the greater and lesser evil, a real race to the bottom. Being able to survive war or a curtain falling between say US, Canada, EU, India (much less other places) is an important negative indicator
Could people who aren’t Christian have anything to say about what it means to be a person???? Maybe even ethical approaches to relational identity and non-human beings that illuminate aspects of “AI” distinct from individualism, legalism, and dualism????? Impossible.
This is theater but even so the implicit Christian nationalism from the self-described liberal utilitarian AI startup is rather telling and damning. It fits with their broader support for hawkish foreign policy (all-US staff, neo cold war framings) alongside performative guilt & calls for regulation
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/11/anthropic-christians-claude-morals/
Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders.
Anthropic met with Christian leaders including from Catholic and Protestant churches to discuss its chatbot Claude’s moral development.
Walking around, looking at signs, bulletin boards, and printed or inscribed matter, while some global events are signified, it is almost impossible to find evidence of the war: our potentially apocalyptic war on a densely and vibrantly populated region, home to 1 of the ~4 places Empire was invented
of course, claude code would start several sub-billies and send them to different supermarkets then aggregate the results of whichever billies made it back, and throw out everything that doesn't match the description of vanilla extract, which was generated by another billy. billy returns with a bottle of soy sauce, which mommy merges into production i mean puts in the baked goods because it passed the test suite that billy wrote (is it brown? is it liquid? is it edible?). the dow soars
One of the reasons i find shortform video ominous is how it reaches deeper into our habits of being even than photos. Our inflections of looking, and walking and talking and dancing. They, too, are pulled into context-collapse alongside hyperdifferentiation
If you want to understand technology, start instead by thinking from an electronics sales & repair market in a big poorer country. At least a Varoufakis's flawed theory is always tied to a tactical program of agitating & organizing for liberation. But Minnesotta Press bros just want to play with intense concepts
The modern analog whose influence i can't stand is the left-accelerationist media theory circuit: even a Mark Fisher. Not just because they're wrong about a lot of details but because their gestures of thought are tedius, repulsive, and naive to me. There, I said it.
JP
allison