Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. If youāre wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
(EDIT: Changed ā29th Februaryā to ā1st Marchā - its not a leap year)
Link to the Zitron sneer
Itās a pretty wild read. This isnāt a rational doomer screed about the annihilation of life on earth, though it similarly bounces radically between being overly vague and overly specific to create the appearance of analyjsis and consideration and confuse when itās claiming a fact with when itās extrapolating a trend (hint: itās almost always the latter and the trend may or may not be real). Instead itās written firmly for the McKinsey set to convince them their bets on the AI future werenāt dumb and actually itās the naysayers who will lose their jobs and homes. Also David might need to update his site because thereās an offhanded reverse-pivot back into crypto.
I regret reading that in full. Really, read the opener summary, stop at āWhat if pee pee was poo pooā and you will be wiser and happier.
Insane that people got paid large sums to write this.
āIntelligence Displacementā indeed.
Yeah, I probably should have included a warning about incoming psychic damage on that link. Sorry.
Although highlighting the phrase āintelligence displacementā does illuminate that the whole case they make is built on the same foundations as that other Rat fixation: eugenics and race science! Like, Iām not saying the author is definitely a eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, but their argument is based on the same idea of what āintelligenceā is in the first place. Itās a distinct commodity that is produced or contained in certain minds and is the ultimate source of the value that they create. If youāre a āknowledge workerā you donāt provide a specific perspective, experience, expertise, or even knowledge, you just plug your intelligence into the organization like connecting a new processor bank to a server farm. Because itās disconnected from a personās individuality and subjectivity we can model it effectively as a commodity and look to optimize its production, either by automating away the squishy human element with ai or by increasing the productivity of current methods by optimizing for the
whiteārightā kind of person.