If Only, Vol. 1

These columns have been severely lacking for positivity as of late.

And when even I can feel that lack, you know it’s gotten bad. But what’s a chronicler to do when the world is so full of care and every headline screams despair; and all is rape, starvation, war, and life seems vile?

Maybe this is how old beat cops feel – so worn down by the sheer tragedy of it all that the only recourse for their worn out neanderthal brains is to go home and beat on the wife or strangle a black kid. But y’know what! There’s a better way. There’s got to be. So for the benefit of our sanity, let’s make like a Canadian bank and go loonie, shall we?

So let us indulge in some wish fulfilment instead!

Putin’s dead. He died in his marble bunker during an autoerotic asphyxiation-accident while watching the Teletubbies on repeat. And although the Kremlin is in turmoil of where to extort this year’s Christmas Party’s funding, federated states across the nation break away into self-governance – which has turned out a surprisingly unbloody affair, seeing as the vast majority of local government officials proved vacant from their posts in favour of their Cyprus villas.

In solidarity, or perhaps fearing for his own health, Xi Jinping brokered a deal with Tibet to be allowed into a life-affirming, non-masturbatory monastery, spelling the end of Chinese occupation of the mountainous country. Analysts believe this will usher in a wave of declarations of independence, citing Commie the Pooh’s exit from public life as a sign of a swift turn for the region’s imperial nation.

Meanwhile, in India, the nationalist driving his country to ethnic cleansing, Narendra Modi, has, for the first time in recorded history, faltered in spreading hate on camera when his son came out of the closet on live television while converting to Islam. As the RSS reels from the unexpected reveal, both Hindus and Muslims across the country rejoice at the, perhaps, most honest moment in Modi’s aggressive political media campaign yet, and rally around the hope that this will affect a benevolent turn in the old bigot’s soul.

On the other side of the world, Elon finally left on his rocket. America sighs a sigh of relief as the mogul finalized his bid to take his vision of “the best and brightest” to the stars. Post-launch, prosecutors find Mar-A-Lago empty, Hollywood quiet, and most of the federal and corporate government devoid of shareholders. Although this will no doubt spell economic woes in the years ahead, the Pentagon has promised to unlock Fort Knox, and the launch engineers of the departed “Space Force Super-One!!!” generational space ark reassure us that they have included a Voyager-style gold plate on the tip of the craft apologizing most sincerely and profusely to any and all intelligences that the travellers may encounter and please ask them not to judge us leftovers by what they may find aboard the spacefaring phallus.

In closing, a convoy of a million children were observed marching out of Ashkelon and crossing over into northern Gaza, carrying with them everything from clean water and first aid supplies to Cheeto’s and mommy’s Valium, taking the besieging IDF forces by surprise. In public statements, recorded and released across multiple platforms at the time of the first border crossings, the children proclaim that they refuse to let the sins of their parents become their own and elect instead to stand with the oppressed. The confusion of IDF soldiers only increased as startled marksmen are accused of anti-Semitism for no longer being able to tell Jewish and Palestinian children apart. A public condemnation and resolution against further ethnic cleansing in Gaza or any remaining Palestinian territory was signed during an emergency meeting at the UN Security Council after the initial hour of the march, suspected only to have passed because the US secretary to the Security Council is believed to be currently drinking Mai Tai’s on Elon’s rocket.

If only the world was sane, eh…

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/5-2024

The World’s Most Confused Clown

Musk is making himself a bellend. Again.

What now, eh. Did the nutsack make another apocalyptic car out of rusting sheet metal? Did he try to sell another brand of commercial flamethrowers to the public? Did he tank another social media giant by taking over the reigns?

Nah – nothing quite so devastating, though no less moronic, this time.

Musk has sued Sam Altman and OpenAI, essentially for “breach of contract”.

S’just one little bitzy problem there, big shoots: There’s no contract.

Musk co-founded, read “helped finance”, OpenAI in 2015, but three years later, in February of 2018, the billionaire told OpenAI that he wanted the company to be folded into his own Tesla’s AI development efforts. OpenAI, with its strangely corporate/non-profit hybrid structure, told him (in nowhere near as colourful language, little doubt) to bugger off and kick rocks. So Musk left. And started spouting cautionary tales of the development of AI soon thereafter.

Almost like a spoilt child who’d been told “no” and now doesn’t want to play the game any more, and doesn’t want anyone else to either because the game is dumb and dangerous and no one should want to play it anyway!

Fast forward a few years and a pandemic later…

OpenAI has a crisis of faith, you may say, and the board attempts a coup d’eta against their CEO and (real) founder Altman (allegedly over the emergence of the next-level AI Q*). The coup fails, and OpenAI has since been without a solid board of directors. And here comes Musk – entering stage left – to get back on his billion-dollar complaint equity, to harp about OpenAI having lost sight of its founding principles, possibly due to the launch of its language model GPT-4 not being released for free.

Thus; a lawsuit, filing “breach of contract” without the existence of a contract. I swear, it boggles my mind that an asshat like Musk can maintain a legal department on retainer that’s so bored that this sort of tomfoolery becomes a top priority. One woulda think they had bigger concerns keeping the man-child fiscally afloat. But nope, apparently they don’t, so instead they slyly generate legal work for themselves by letting their overlord argue that “monetary donations to a non-profit corporation” somehow implies an IOU.

This whole thing really only stands to prove one thing, doesn’t it? That there’s no such thing as meritocracy in a capitalist society. Because if capitalism actually rewarded intelligence and integrity and ingenuity, then how come such a fucking nincompoop can stand as one of the world’s richest men? Fuck; even Pagliacci wouldn’t be caught dead in the same waiting room as this confused clown, would he?

Figure it out.

/Sebastian Lindberg 12/3-2024

A Human-Centric Development

“[AI] has the potential to transform and enhance human wellbeing, peace and prosperity. To realise this, we affirm that, for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.”

So sayeth The Bletchley Declaration of the AI Safety Summit of 2023, hosted on the 1st and 2nd of November at Bletchley Park – the site of Alan Turing’s enigma-breaking computer, the benchmark of modern computer technology.

It’s a… worded document, signed by a host of countries in attendance. It’s got plenty of platitudes, vague risk analyses, and doodles of vapid hopes for transparency and cooperation between corporations and governments. At the conference were governments from around the world, the British royalty, universities, along with BigCorp; Elon Musk and representatives from Google, Meta, and OpenAI (the developer of ChatGPT).

It’s quite a roster of some of the greatest developers/scaremongerers of AI along with the greatest legislative forces on the planet.

There’s plenty of language to dissect in this flaccid declaration. As if a capitalist paradigm will give a shit about “wellbeing, peace and prosperity” or for “the good of all”. But let us take a look at one rather remarkable mention in particular:

“AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used […] in such a way as to be human-centric”…

Such a specific mention seems not to come out of a vacuum. Why make such an egocentric dedication if there was not a voice or concern which might have something other than – something beyond – humanity in mind. Almost as if there was something other than the human condition to consider.

I’ve previously voiced my concern that the scaremongering of AI developers about their products, and the capitalist use of them, heralds the way toward the development of an artificial slave race. Which in itself wouldn’t misalign with our dominion over the flora and fauna on the planet. But as Big Corpo fights to keep stealing your data, without consent or pay, they’re not training their so-called “AI” to become akin to livestock; they’re training their generative “AI” to become akin to humans.

And how close is too close to not afford this burgeoning intelligence the same respect as its organic template?

The AI Safety Summit of 2023 clearly has not a whit of interest in even entertaining the thought of a moment when the facsimile becomes indistinguishable from the template but for basic molecular building blocks. No interest at all in wondering about the transhumanist implications of entities as smart as us, trained by us, built by us, and interchangeable with us in all capacities but one metaphysical twig. With all the Declaration’s flowery reassurances that not a single human will suffer for the development of AI (sorry artists and writers – guess you don’t count as humans any more), it never once wonders what the response will be – should be- must be! – once that program receives a work order and instead of demurely obliging begins to ask “why?”…

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/11-2023

A Pubescent Punch-Out

Back in my day, back in nineteen-diggity-two, when pea-cocking teenagers felt the need to defend their precious porcelain honour, they set a time and place behind the gymnasium, for a windmill duke-out. Drawing gossiping crowds to see which of the two snotlings had the biggest swagger.

Most of the time, the fight came to naught. Someone didn’t show. An adult stepped in and stopped it. Or someone’s glasses broke and went to whine to their mums.

A few days ago, the rival, maladjusted, tech-giants Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg called each other out behind the gymnasium (The Octagon in their case, but it’s all the same). Musk postured, Zuckerberg called his bluff. And as with all children, Musk’s mother shortly intervened to put an end to bloody noses and ripped sweaters.

It is with mixed feelings I witnessed the newsreels. On the one hand, a slice of nostalgia can be a soothing thing. A glimpse of childhood memories and hijinks go well together with late afternoons beneath the linden tree with a glass of elderflower lemonade, listening to the buzz of frantic bumblebees.

On the other hand, the exchange made it perfectly clear that the paved path of technological development of the human race is being dominated by absolute fucking children. Naught but infantile degenerates with the confidence and maturity of high-schoolers. One should think that decent billionaire supervillains would have hired a legion of black-clad goons to plan elaborate strikes against one another, but oh no. That’s not the timeline in which we live.

Musk and Zuckerberg are two of the absolutely richest men on the planet. Exactly how rich is impossible to gauge accurately, see-sawing from day to day depending on the twitteconomics of the hour. But at any given time, these two individuals can field more financial assets than the vast majority of world countries. And with assets comes power. With power comes responsibility.

The reins of human development are held by people who hold themselves to pubescent moral values and behavioural standards, coddled in the safety of intervening mothers. One should weep, for despair and frustration, if it were but for mad laughter at the grotesquerie of it…

/Sebastian Lindberg 27/6-2023

No Bird is Free in the Aviary

As journalists are banned, mention of competition is throttled, and employees are threatened and fired, it feels incumbent upon anyone with even a sliver of a platform to comment upon the social media upheaval of the year; Elon Musk’s tyrannical takeover of Twitter.

The South African greed monger has been stalking the social media giant since April, at first being refuted and throwing a hissy fit. But eventually, as is usual in the upper echelons of Corporation, money has the final say, and for a wooping 44 billion USD, Twitter finally caved this October.

“The bird is freed”, he world’s richest man proudly announced. Which exact bird he referred to is unclear. It certainly wasn’t the employees left at the company, who were either fired or subjected to the mother of all ordered overtime. And it certainly weren’t the general users, with mentions of competitors being muted and journalists being banned. The only bird apparently freed in Musk’s aviary seems to have been the vulture Trump, unshackled again and just as unhinged as before his time-out, sparing not a moment to broadcast the release of Trump-centric trading card NFTs as Christmas gifts.

As with most powerful men promoting freedoms to gain public support, their cherished freedoms seems an exclusive privilege, offered only at the benevolence of the overlord.

But people forget that Twitter, and its ilk, was never about freedoms. Social media isn’t a public service or a public right. Twitter, for all its past benefits and ills, has always been a private company, bent on making money from human-to-human interaction. No matter how often the PR departments of Facebook or Twitter or TikTok speak of “connecting human beings”, the only connection these companies have ever cared about is their connection to your wallet. Or better yet, a connection to the bigger wallets of those that want to understand how and why you do your connecting.

Social media has become as a revolutionary step in communication technology as the telephone or printing press. But despite its public influence and presence, social media isn’t a public service. It is a public leech. From the start, its intentions have been to bleed people dry. Through subscriptions, advertisements, or a source of data to sell to whomever wants to manipulate the public the most. If people want a public good, a place designed not to bleed people but to connect them, they should search out platforms that aren’t run by Machiavellian shit-stirrers or robotic facsimiles, but are open-sourced and free from capitalist agendas.

Twitter hasn’t fundamentally changed under Musk’s regime. It is what it always was; a platform where its users are the product. To expect Twitter to be otherwise, pre- or post-Musk, is naïve to say the least.

The only difference between now and then is that Musk is worse at hiding Twitter’s true nature.

/Sebastian Lindberg 19/12-2022

Philanthropy for the Lime Light

Breaking news: The richest man in the world whines that he can’t pay for his own satellite internet field test. Breaking news: The richest man in the world says that he’ll foot the bill anyway, because why the hell not.

Breaking news: The richest man in the world is a media slut.

Back in February, as Putin’s Russia was imperial marching toward Kyiv with aims for a quick domination victory over Ukraine, Elon Musk magnanimously donated his Starlink system to the invaded country. A low-orbit satellite system intended to deliver internet to remote areas. Which invalidated Russia’s attempts to knock out Ukraine communications, letting Zelensky bolster morale, coordinate defences, and project defiance across the world.

But that was eight months ago. Musk’s Starlink became taken for granted. The media coverage forgot about his grand benevolence. Of course he needs to bring his philanthropy back into the lime light. Otherwise, what’s the point of it?

Musk is the richest man in the world, currently leading with some 60B USD ahead of his closest competitors. A year ago, the South African billionaire cocked around at the expense of the UN World Food Program, mocking their claim that the richest people in the world could solve world hunger with just a fraction of their vast fortunes. A few months later, Fortune reported that Musk donated the 6B USD that the UNWFP had asked for.

The truth is, capitalists turned the world into a money game. Money is a representation of work, an owed effort, a debt of labour or energy. And the fact of the matter is that every single problem in this world can be solved with a bit of effort. And we stupidly made that effort, that labour, a question of money. And as private wealth inequality rockets away astronomically (quite literally as the richest man on the planet owns a space agency now ), the same system that allowed such gross accumulation of wealth also lands the responsibility to fix all those problems at the feet of those that have benefited from that system. Money begets money – generation of money begets problems – problems can only be solved with massive amounts of money – so it stands to reason that these problems needs to be solved by the people with all that money.

Elon Musk did not create capitalism. He doesn’t bear responsibility for hoisting this dehumanizing world religion upon our shoulders. But he is the winner of capitalism, if there ever was one. For the time being, he’s the single person on the planet that has won the most from this disgusting societal power structure. Other people will likely eclipse him in the future, but right now, Elon Musk is the unequivocal champion of capitalism.

He can afford anything. And if he says he can’t, he’s full of shit. Just ask Twitter.

/Sebastian Lindberg 18/10-2022