maandag 29 mei 2023
‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’
‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode
The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons
It was a tough week in tech.
The top US health official warned about the risks of social media to young people; tech billionaire Elon Musk further trashed his reputation with the disastrous Twitter launch of a presidential campaign; and senior executives at OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, called for the urgent regulation of “super intelligence”.
But to Doug Rushkoff – a leading digital age theorist, early cyberpunk and professor at City University of New York – the triple whammy of rough events represented some timely corrective justice for the tech barons of Silicon Valley. And more may be to come as new developments in tech come ever thicker and faster.
“They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see. They’re afraid that their little AIs are going to come for them. They’re apocalyptic, and so existential, because they have no connection to real life and how things work. They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us,” Rushkoff told The Guardian in an interview.
In his most recent book, last year’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff strung together a series of observations about the tech elite, often gleaned from his may encounters at conferences and private lectures with them.
Rushkoff said that he believes that the tech billionaires are in escape mode – planning missions to Mars, creating island bunkers or moving to higher ground – in the event of “The Event”( code for catastrophic climate collapse) and by creating a virtual “metaverse”, fulfilling the prophecy that the tech revolution was always about preparing us for a world in which it was no longer possible to go outside.
He’s called this “The Mindset” – an analysis of the way Silicon Valley technocrats think. “For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us” he wrote in the book’s opening pages. “They’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding an escape hatch.”
He cites a grim list of examples by way of illustration: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos pursuing space migration fantasies; Peter Thiel’s New Zealand compound; Mark Zuckerberg’s digital universe and others pursuing technologies toward longevity, cloning and those creating large, multiple partner families.
The problem with this behavior, Rushkoff points out, is that it does not and will not work.
“They’re not getting off the planet, they’re not going to live forever. They’re just living out their fantasies. They are eugenicists. There’s a reason why they got along with Jeffrey Epstein and Richard Dawkins – people who say genes are the only things that matter, we live in an entirely material universe, there is no soul, humans can be auto-tuned and anything between the ones and zeros is just noise,” he said.
Rushkoff continued: “It’s a pure form of the same sort of sociopathic capitalism that we saw from the British East India Company or Hobbs talking about Native Americans. But now they have a technology that amplifies sociopathic tendencies.”
To Rushkoff, author of seven books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace in 1994, government warnings of the kind seen last week about social media are belated.
“What happened to the cigarette companies will eventually happen to the social media companies,” he predicts. “They’ve had all the research for 20 years, and they’ve been knowingly saying this stuff is not harmful when they know it to be harmful.”
At the same time, he’s noticed that gen Z may have a less pathological relationship to technology – their phones – than millennials or their parents. Talk to kids and you discover that “their only problem with phones is that their parents are on them too much and don’t make eye contact”.
Rushkoff’s renunciations are not new. The gen X techno-optimist was, at one time, a proponent of decentralization, crypto-currency, file-sharing and other technologies initially hailed as disruptive and corrective to the old order. But alongside some benefits, they have also produced extremism, secrecy, environmental damage and fraud.
With a new tech revolution in the works in the form of AI, cyber-futurism is looking even less palatable. And its proponents and leading figures are looking less free information revolutionaries and more like reactionary capitalist moguls.
Elon Musk’s decision to platform Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Twitter, notwithstanding the glitches, was significant in confirming Musk’s alignment with Republicans. The direction of political travel for the tech lords was apparent four years ago when Zuckerberg and Thiel had dinner at the White House with Donald Trump.
But Rushkoff isn’t a fan of the surgeon general’s warnings, either, swathed in worried concern.
“They often come off as controlled, restrained and in favor of slowing down the wheels of progress. It often comes off with a squeamish, hand-wringing, pearl-clutching tone. It’s not that it’s just unattractive. It’s infantilizing and it doesn’t help anybody. I want to become Musk-ian myself at that point. It’s like, ‘Fuck it, fine!’”
The solution to the modern world’s explosion of tech challenges, he argues, is not government, but in personal choices and responsibility.
The only way to rebel is to be human and aware, Rushkoff says. “Be social, get your feet on the ground, make eye contact, have sex, meet people, breathe the air. The more real-life ballast you have, the less this brittle, ideological, abstracted, social media-mediated universe bears upon your daily existence.”
How Jewish Is the War Against Russia?
How Jewish Is the War Against Russia?
Let’s be honest about who is promoting it
RSS
Five years ago, I wrote an article entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s wars.” It turned out to be the most popular piece that I have ever written and I was rewarded for it by immediately being fired by the so-called American Conservative magazine, where I had been a regular and highly popular contributor for fourteen years. I opened the article with a brief description of an encounter with a supporter whom I had met shortly before at an antiwar conference. The elderly gentleman asked “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”
In my article I named many of the individual Jews and Jewish groups that had been leading the charge to invade Iraq and also deal with Iran along the way. They used fake intelligence and out-and-out lies to make their case and never addressed the central issue of how those two countries actually threatened the United States or its vital interests. And when they succeeded in committing the US to the fiasco in Iraq, as far as I can determine only one honest Jew who had participated in the process, Philip Zelikow, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel.
There was considerable collusion between the Israeli government and the Jews in the Pentagon, White House, National Security Council and State Department in the wake of 9/11. Under President George W. Bush, Israeli Embassy staff uniquely had free access to the Pentagon office of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, not being required to sign in or submit any security measures. It was a powerful indication of the special status that Israel enjoyed with top Jews in the Bush Administration. It should also be recalled that Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans was the source of the false WMD information used by the Administration to justify invading Iraq, while that information was also funneled directly to Vice President Dick Cheney without any submission to possibly critical analysts by his chief of Staff “Scooter” Libby. Wolfowitz, Feith and Libby were of course Jewish as were many on their staffs and Feith’s relationship with Israel was so close that he actually partnered in a law firm that had a branch in Jerusalem. Feith also served on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which is dedicated to nurturing the relationship between the US and Israel.
Currently, the top three State Department officials (Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Nuland) are all Zionist Jews. The head of the Department of Homeland Security, which is hot on the trail of domestic “terrorist” dissidents, is also Jewish as is the Attorney General and the president’s chief of staff. They and their boss Joe Biden do not seem concerned that their client Ukraine is no democracy. The nation’s current government came into power after the 2014 coup engineered by President Barack Obama’s State Department at an estimated cost of $5 billion. The regime change carried out under Barack Obama was driven by State Department Russophobe Victoria Nuland with a little help from international globalist George Soros. It removed the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych who was, unfortunately for him, a friend of Russia.
Ukraine is reputedly both the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe, witness the Hunter Biden saga. The current President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and claims to have holocaust victims in his family tree, is a former comedian who won election in 2019. He replaced another Jewish president Petro Poroshenko, after being heavily funded and promoted by yet another fellow Jew and Ukraine’s richest oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is also an Israeli citizen and now lives in Israel.
It all sounds like deja vu all over again, particularly as many of the perpetrators are still around, like Nuland, priming the pump to go to war yet again for no reason. And they are joined by journalists like Bret Stephens at the New York Times, Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper at CNN, and also Max Boot at the Washington Post, all of whom are Jewish and can be counted on to write regular pieces both damning and demonizing Russia and its head of state Vladimir Putin, which means it is not only about the Middle East anymore. It is also about weakening and even bringing about regime change in nuclear armed Russia while also drawing some lines in the sand for likewise nuclear armed China. And I might add that playing power games with Russia is a hell of a lot more dangerous that kicking Iraq around.
To put it bluntly, many US government and media Jews hate Russia and even though they benefited substantially as a group by virtue of their preeminent role in the looting of the former Soviet Union under Boris Yeltsin and continue to be among the most prominent Russian oligarchs. Many of the oligarch billionaires, like Boris Berezovsky, self-exiled when Vladimir Putin obtained power and began to crack down on their tax avoidance and other illegal activity. Many moved to Western Europe where some bought up football teams while others went south and obtained Israeli citizenship. Their current grievances somewhat reflect their tribe’s demand for perpetual victimhood and the deference plus forgiveness of all sins that it conveys, with the self-promoted tales of persecution going back to the days of the Tsars, full of allegations about pogroms and Cossacks arriving in the night, stories that rival many of the holocaust fabrications in terms of their lack of credibility.
Many Jews, particularly younger Jews, are finding it difficult to support apartheid Israel and the constant wars being initiated and fought for no particularly credible reason by both Democratic and Republican parties when in power, which is a good thing. But Jewish power in Washington and across the US is difficult to ignore and it is precisely those Jewish groups and individuals who have been empowered through their wealth and connections who have been the most vocal leading warmongers when it has come to the Middle East and to Russia.
Interestingly, however, some pushback is developing. The Jewish peace group Tikkun has recently published a devastating article by Jeffrey Sachs on the Jews who have been agitating for war. It is entitled “Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster” and describes how “The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle…”
Tikkun explains how “The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).” It might be added that Kimberley Kagan heads the Institute for the Study of War, which is often cited in media coverage and even in Congress to explain why we must fight Russia.
It has long been recognized by many that a particular antipathy directed against Russia permeates the so-called neoconservative world view. The neocons are hugely overrepresented at the top levels of government and, as noted above, a number of them are running the State Department while also holding high level positions elsewhere in the Biden Administration as well as in the foreign policy think tanks, including Richard Haass at the influential Council on Foreign Relations. Likewise, the intensely Russophobic US and Western media, foundations and social networking sites are disproportionately Jewish in their ownership and staffing.
And beyond that, Ukraine is to a certain extent a very Jewish-identified place. The Jewish media in the US and elsewhere has been showering Zelensky with praise, referring to him as a genuine “Jewish hero,” a modern Maccabee resisting oppression, a David versus Goliath. T-shirts bearing his image are being sold that read “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh” while the largely Orthodox Jewish community in New York City has already been raising millions of dollars for Ukrainian aid.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that a “2020 demographic survey estimated that besides a ‘core’ population of 43,000 Jews, around 200,000 Ukrainians are technically eligible for Israeli citizenship, meaning that they have identifiable Jewish ancestry. The European Jewish Congress says that number could be as high as 400,000.” If that is true, it is one of the largest Jewish communities in the world and it includes at least 8,000 Israelis, many of whom have returned to Israel.
As US-Russian negotiations leading up the current fighting were clearly designed to fail by the Biden Administration, one therefore has to wonder if this war against Russia is largely a product of a long enduring ethno-religious hatred coupled with a belief in the necessity for a strong American military applied as needed to dominate the world and thereby protect Israel. The neocons are most visible, but equally toxic are the Jews who would prefer to describe themselves as neoliberals or liberal interventionists, that is liberals who promote a strong, assertive American leadership role to support the basically phony catchwords “democracy” and “freedom.” Both neocons and neoliberals inevitably support the same policies so they have both ends of the political spectrum covered, particularly concerning the Middle East and against Russia. They currently dominate the foreign policy thinking of both major political parties as well as exercising control over media and entertainment industry coverage of the issues that concern them, largely leaving the American public with only their viewpoint to consider.
There is plenty of other evidence that prominent Jews both inside and outside the Administration have been stirring things up against Russia with considerable success as President Biden has now declared insanely that his Administration is engaged in “a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression.” He has confirmed that the US is in Ukraine’s war against Russia until we “win.” How else does one explain the ridiculous trip by Attorney General Merrick Garland to Kiev in late June to help set up a war crimes investigation directed against Russia?
As Garland is supposed to be the US Attorney General, it might first be useful to investigate crimes relating to the United States. He might start with American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan or Israeli war crimes using Washington provided weapons in Lebanon and Syria, not to mention the human rights violations using those same weapons that occur on a daily basis directed against the Palestinians. Some conservatives are also wondering why the Attorney General spends his time pursuing “white supremacists” and has failed to investigate the rioting, looting and killing that rocked the nation in the BLM Summer of 2020.
Nevertheless, an undeterred and fearless Garland announced while in Kiev that Eli Rosenbaum, Jewish of course, and a 36-year veteran of the Justice Department who previously served as the director of the Office of Special Investigations, which was primarily responsible for identifying, denaturalizing and deporting Nazi war criminals, will lead a War Crimes Accountability team made up of DOJ experts in investigating Russian human-rights abuses. After the obligatory photo op sucking up to Zelensky, the diminutive but steely eyed Attorney General declared that “There is no hiding place for war criminals. The US Justice Department will pursue every avenue of accountability for those who commit war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine. Working alongside our domestic and international partners, the Justice Department will be relentless in our efforts to hold accountable every person complicit in the commission of war crimes, torture and other grave violations during the unprovoked conflict in Ukraine.” And if any further evidence required to demonstrate the Jewishness of that week in Kiev, actor Ben Stiller, also a Jew, visited Zelensky and gave him a big hug.
If Eli Rosenbaum is still seriously interested in finding Nazis he will find many more of them in Ukraine than within the Russian Army. So, one has to ask “Whose war is it and who is making it happen?” Can you please explain Joe Biden? Or, given your perpetual blank look, should I ask Merrick Garland or Tony Blinken or maybe even Victoria Nuland?
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/how-jewish-is-the-war-against-russia/
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