BUILDBRIEF: February Week 4

Google's Evil Twin - Eisenhower's Blindness - Modlidani - Choose Your Mountain

It’s a leap year, all right. Let’s proceed.

GOOGLE’S EVIL TWIN

By now, most people on social media probably have heard the news about Gemini, Google’s evil AI twin that reveals just what the company means by “organizing the world’s information”. For three years or so now, I’ve done my bit warning that Google search became broken on purpose, that the “permissionless” digitization of the world’s people via their information is a kind of cyborg breeding program (“googenics”). That wokeness is impossible to institutionalize without a woke supercomputer — all foul ingredients in the witches’ brew of Gemini’s code are now on naked display. “This news cycle is an easy primer for those who want to adopt @jamespoulos Thought.”

Pirate Wires has the full response from chief Googler Sundar Pichai. It’s probably exactly what you’d expect — the workshopped-to-death corporate-speak damage-control document that an AI might as well have produced. The early reviews are bad — not that Pichai cares or can help it.

Jon Stokes said, “he’s ‘holding frame’ — critics are having one conversation about Gemini, but he’s like ‘no we’re going to keep all our terms & premises, & have the conversation WE want to have.’“ “I said, “it reads like a government document”, the subtext being Google, in more ways than one, is the government. Ardian Tola did me one better: “It reads like a DMV document with the word Sacrosanct in it.” And sure enough:

Our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct.

Translation: we are building a universal church that is also a universal regime because it is built on our reassembly of all of your information into an order that we control and in which you must participate, as both consumer and consumed. Welcome to the cyborg theocracy, Gemini critics.

EISENHOWER’S BLINDNESS

Of course, we are here because first we tried worshipping criticism — critical theory, critical thinking, discourse, debate, “how to think, not what to think”, analysis, psychoanalysis, deconstructivism, postmodernism, pretty much every intellectual trend since the radio or electric light. (Another time, I’ll go into more detail about this obsessive belief that our most basic and cherished freedoms depend utterly on an incessant public and private stream of “heretical” content.) Has there ever been a more overeducated and hyperattentive civilization? No wonder people are begging for the Borg to take the pain, the responsibility, and the humanity away.

And no wonder Eisenhower’s famous Farewell Address continues to elude the critical attention it deserves. (Its unsung anniversary sailed by in mid-January among the usual MLK Jr. “discourse”.) Let’s pull the key quote:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Emphasis added! What do you notice? Alertness and knowledgeableness were not, and today, they still more clearly are not enough! Overclocked overeducation has put the definitive lie to the once-inspiring mantra that “knowledge is power”. (I’ll go into more detail another time about the origins and consequences of “smart power”.) These things, alertness and knowledgableness, are “safely” emptied of spiritual content — no surprise they have also been emptied of the spiritual power of watchfulness and discernment.

MODLIDANI

Perhaps you’ve seen the recent wave of people online enthusing over how cool we once were — just look!

I, too, look wistfully back on my days spent sipping a large order of Modlidani fries. But what was the name of that ice-cold cola again? It’s on the tip of my tongue…

It’s easy to criticize people who don’t notice how fake and unreal this is — specifically, it's easy to call them stupid. Intelligence is not the issue here. What we are dealing with is a problem of memory, not just the loss and breakdown thereof but, too, the yearning for a recollectible past, and the desperation to cope with its digital disintegration by settling for, well, the McDonald’s — I mean Modlidani — version.

CHOOSE YOUR MOUNTAIN

Speaking of nostalgia for a recollectible past, remember bands? Vanishingly few of which have anything worth saying about the world we’re in? And why? And how to face it all? One of my favorites, Everything Everything, has a new album (remember those) coming March 1, called Mountainhead. A quick glance at the lyrics to one of their lead-in singles, “The Mad Stone,” provides useful context:

Let the wizard-talk come
At the peak of Choice Mountain, you’ve been saving up
Are you really this old?
I can make it a business

Come with me to the Mad Stone (run all night, all night, never get free)
Above you
Mad Stone
Let it control you

At the very top, there was a screen that showed a picture of a
Man who stood there looking at a picture of a man who stood there
Looking at a picture of a picture of a man on a screen
And he was looking at another picture of a man who stood there
Looking at a picture of a man who stood there looking at a
Picture of a picture of a man who was the double of me

So you scrimp and you save
I got wild in the aisles, son, let me tell you that
Did you set me aflame?
I can sell you a firehose, put out all of it now

Do you think it’s all true?
Nothing quite so romantic, there’s no oxygen
I’m a Mountainhead too
What is that? A religion?

Come with me to the Mad Stone…

It’s art like this that made me want to be such a Musichead, ten short (?) years ago. All that’s been swept away now, of course. Music — a great way to spend money, a terrible way to make it. Another seeming foundation revealed to be sand by a tidal wave of silicon.

Choose your mountain carefully!