Nothing Makes Sense
And Everything is War
I’ve been really overwhelmed by the news recently. So much so that last month I wrote everything into a fictionalised narrative where a mysterious new invention is powered by the crushed bones of the dead. This was a fun way to try and make sense of what has become an extended universe of chaos. It worked for like five minutes. I feel like I’m living in a never-ending cascade of ‘events’ with absolutely no grounding stories.
To start, failed president killer Cole Tomas Allen wrote a manifesto explaining his actions at the fascist press dinner and it somehow makes more sense than Palantir’s recent tech bro listicle on why Silicon Valley’s supreme power is just, and frames their participation in war as a moral good. It also says “Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice,” which is a sentence you can only write from an evil lair. It’s hard to do any sense-making, or in fact anything productive, when every progressive is using their mad typing fingers to yell at Taylor Lorenz for going or not going to the correspondent’s dinner (literally who cares??), or for engaging in too much screentime, or for just generally existing. Meanwhile she’s doing some really excellent reporting on the dark money campaigns that make American’s fear China and love AI. But yeah sure, she sucks, you’re right. A reporter can be very good at their job, and have an online presence that isn’t to your liking. Both things can be true.
Speaking of assassination attempts and nothing making sense, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house a month ago, somehow inspiring a term that flew by so quickly that it didn’t even have time to leave a smell in the room: ‘AI Populism’. I hope it doesn’t become a thing because author Jasmine Sun places the Molotov guy in the same ideological ilk as data centre activists. This is one hell of a whacky comparison, Jasmine. On the one hand you have a violent 20-year-old who used Effective Altruist logic to calculate that throwing a Molotov cocktail at a billionaire’s house was worth it and would do something. On the other hand you have you have community activists who don’t want to live next door to a humming pile of GPUs. These people do not operate in the same reality. EAs don’t care about ‘short term harms’ such as the environmental degradation caused by AI infrastructure. They are more concerned with preventing imaginary mass extinction events.
While we’re on the subject of wasted human life: AI is being used in war to kill a lot of people in one go while men monitor the situation in American pubs AKA ‘sports bars’ (but for war). Smooth-brained head of the DoW (Department of Why Don’t You Just Die Already) Pete Hegseth announced in January that any one caught trying to do military stuff without AI would have their budgets reviewed. There’s a lesson here, and it’s that if you want your vapourware AI products to actually make money, you have to sell to the most degenerate tech addicts in the world: the US military. “What should I bomb in Iran?” they type into ChatGPT and/or Claude with one hand, while scrolling X with the fat calloused thumbs of the other. OpenAI have been Very Good Boys to the DoW whereas Anthropic took a second to think about the implications of killing with AI and so came out looking like the ethical consumer choice — just another example of nothing making sense but also business as usual for the slimiest supervillains of the 21st century.
Anthropic really are taking the piss right now tbh. Everyone is falling for the Mythos Preview marketing stunt. They say it can identify zero-day vulnerabilities with just one prompt. They’re doing exactly what OpenAI used to do; apparently they’ve built something so powerful that if released to the general public, we would lose our minds and use it to kill god and then ourselves. The forty industry partners that get to test it out are ones that will only benefit from talking about how powerful it is. And yes, it’s already working, the US military obviously want a piece of the cybercrime machine.
So I think it’s fair to say that they only thing I can make sense of is this: AI is not a product, it’s just an ongoing project to obscure power. And to keep men occupied while they rot their brains with ketamine. But we already knew this; I think it’s just never been more obvious.
Side project time: Sexy Hot Lips
The other day I used the phrase ‘sexy hot lips’ and my girlfriend and I agreed that it would make a great magazine title. I then thought of the least sexy theme for the first issue: shipping.
Long story short we’re starting a self-published magazine called Sexy Hot Lips and issue one’s theme is shipping. If you think about it, shipping is super broad: pirates; trade wars; fandoms obsessing over fictional relationships. I just spoke to a friend about this and she said “actually, shipping containers are the first truly interoperable technology” — YES.
We’ve decided that this should exist in print only — no digital edition, no website at all beyond maybe a landing page. We will self-publish, and send to the UK only to save on… shipping.
If you have an idea and want to get involved, please respond directly to this email. But as mentioned if you don’t live in the UK, you may not be able to get your hands on a copy once it’s made lol.
