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Paris Marx Profile picture
@parismarx
Sep 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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Grimes was interviewed in Wired and she truly is unhinged. Elon has a real knack for making dumb people think they’re brilliant.

Apparently she’s writing a book called “Transhumanism for Babies.” 🫠 What's Book 2? Book 2 is a treatise, or manifesto-type thing. I've been writing civilization proposals. But I also want to include something else. I'm working on a bunch of baby books. I'm working on one right now called Transhumanism for Babies. It's about civilization building, for my kids. I can show you some of the stuff from it, let's see. [She shows me illustrations- they are fanciful, anime-style drawings with a streak of Henry Darger.] The chapters are Culture for Babies, Fashion for Babies, Art for Babies, Vehicles for Babies. Interplanetary Babies, City Planning for Babies. Al Rob...
Another of her projects is a toy that uses ChatGPT to converse with people. Grimes says it’s to help mothers because life is hard for them. Forget social programs, maternity leave, child benefits; just give them some tech trash some idiot thinks sounds interesting. I take it you're riffing on Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Yeah, Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson kind of vibes. This is a baseline, entry-level educational project for me. I have a friend who I think I'm going to work with to develop something like a toy that can talk to you, like in Toy Story. You're describing a ChatGPT companion. Yeah, you're like, "Hey, what's the deal with volcanoes?" And it tells you, "This is what a volcano is." But it's more. It's got a personality. A pretty well-trained personality. Sounds like Chucky. I guess it could go awry. But in the short ter...
Taking about Elon and the “trans thing,” Grimes says he’s really just concerned about birth rates and trans people maybe not having kids. Her solution isn’t to challenge his deep transphobia, but to suggest some fantasy fertility tech! You mentioned Twitter. Did you call out to Elon that you were disturbed by some of his tweets? I don't want to talk about this too much. But take the trans thing. After that, we had a big, long conversation. I was like, "I want to dissect why you're so stressed about this." Getting to the heart of what Elon says helps me get to the heart of what other people's issues are, because it's this über guy situation. And it came down to pretty much every way that you transition can cause fertility issues. I was like, OK, you don't hate trans people, you hate woke culture. I get that it ca...
I thought this was really telling: She says she’s hopeful about tech because “Gen Z people” have a vision and AI people care about “doing the right thing.” Yet then she admits her crypto fantasies went to hell, but at least she was able to cash in while it lasted.

What do you think is the future of humanity? I think it can be pretty great. I think we can solve a lot of our issues. We haven't solved them before because we didn't get pushed up against the wall. Now we are there. We can solve climate change with Al and stuff. People hold San Francisco and the technocracy, or whatever you want to call it, in bad regard because when it started out, there was a lot of money-grabbing VC culture and Facebook, and it had pretty bad effects on people. But I see a renewed sense of responsibility to the human race now. You think that Big Tech is less evil than i...
artist and the engineer is a very important, valuable one. The people who have built things and those who define the culture-people don't realize how important both these jobs are, and how much they can affect things. Don't you fear that big companies in Al will have the same temptations as the social media companies had? Everyone I know working in Al cares about doing the right thing right now. It goes back to the Buckminster Fuller quote, don't destroy old systems, just make better ones. We can make a better education system at our houses. With Al you can be in some shitty town where you ...
You were very involved with crypto a while ago? Yes, that went really well. I'm sad about what happened to NFTs and crypto, because it got polluted fast with people trying to make as much money as possible. But I do want to think about compensating artists, especially digital artists. And I hope when the aggro niche dies down, we can come back. understand you made a lot of money selling NFTS. That was on my brother. He had a real vision, and we wound up doing one of the first big ones. It did actually change my life. Did you make more money from the NFTs than from your music career? Yeah.
Anyway, Elon isn’t a piece of shit and slave driver. He just has “an old-world kind of discipline I really respect” and other people don’t like because they “don’t want to be in the hardcore zone.” 🫠 I learned from him, like, the best internship ever. People don't like talking about Elon, but it was incredible to be right there watching all that SpaceX stuff happen. That's a master class in leadership and engineering and makes you understand how rare it is to have a leader of that quality. And Twitter? I know, the stuff on Twitter doesn't make it look like that. He didn't build the culture there. And the cultural fit has obviously been very intense. He holds his people to really high standards. Watching him, I understand how difficult it is to be a great general and do something of that...

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More from @parismarx

Paris Marx Profile picture
Mar 19
Elon Musk’s DOGE is tearing through the US government with disastrous consequences.

But beyond its borders, the extreme right is gearing up to push their own DOGE-inspired austerity campaigns in countries around the world. disconnect.blog/p/doge-is-goin…
In Canada, Shopify executives are heading up a group of tech executives pushing to bring DOGE to Canada, targeting foreign aid programs they don’t like to stir up anger over wasteful government spending.

disconnect.blog/p/doge-is-goin…“We need a DOGE right now.” Those words were retweeted by Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke in early February, alongside an image calling out an aid initiative funded by the Canadian government in Ghana. As the extreme right in the United States had begun pouring over government spending to pull out any program they deemed too “woke” or wasteful, that same spirit was being seized by fellow travelers beyond its borders. By February, serious questions were already emerging about Elon Musk’s role in the US government and the consequences of the cuts being made by his Department of Government Efficienc...
Canadian tech leaders created a group called Build Canada to advocate for right-wing policies like cutting government workers and reducing refugees, but also created a DOGE-like website called Canada Spends to call out spending their don’t like.

disconnect.blog/p/doge-is-goin…In the media, those tech executives focused on promoting Build Canada and the policies it wanted government to adopt. But The Tyee reporter Jen St. Denis found that on their social media feeds, they were also directing their followers to second organization called Canada Spends. Its website aped that of DOGE.gov, claiming to show data about government spending and pointing to a series of tweets identifying programs and initiatives — often associated with foreign aid — they deemed beyond the pale. Canadian tech executives have increasingly embraced the Conservative Party, especially since c...
Read 9 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Jan 3
Pierre Poilievre says Canadians are too obsessed with race because of “wokeism” and agrees with Jordan Peterson that Canada essentially had to invent and import racism because it didn’t exist here before recent decades.

Canada is so fucked if this guy forms government.
Wondering what the Conservatives will do to social programs if they return to power under Poilievre?

He says all those “socialist policies” like public healthcare and the like are actually bad for the poor and redistribute toward the “super wealthy,” so they need to be cut.
Throughout the interview, you can see how Poilievre has deceptive but effective stories and cherrypicked stats that serve his agenda.

He’ll fabricate a narrative that government spending is what’s driving up home prices, to distract from developer and speculator profiteering.
Read 9 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Dec 19, 2024
Canadians are watching as Silicon Valley takes over the US government, but few realize Shopify executives are trying to bring a similar project to Canada — and the Conservative leader has started praising them for it.

Read my latest for @TheBreachMedia: breachmedia.ca/canada-far-rig…
Executives like Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and President Harley Finkelstein spout increasingly right-wing opinions online, including opposition to unions, support for Trump’s threat of a 25% tariff, and right-wing arguments smears against migrants.

breachmedia.ca/canada-far-rig…He has also praised Trump’s threat to enact 25 per cent tariffs on Canada, stating that the U.S. is “within its rights” to do so. He has retweeted posts calling for social support programs to be cut because “Canada spends billions on illegals, asylum and refugees.” And he’s generally spread right-wing misinformation about the state of Canada and the world. Lütke’s statements are well at home at Shopify, where he is one of several high-up execs regularly espousing right-wing views. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein isn’t as outspoken, but he still frequently criticizes government policy....
Meanwhile, Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian is a former Conservative staffer who founded and funds a far-right media organization aimed at reshaping the conversation in Canada to be more anti-migrant, racist, and transphobic.

breachmedia.ca/canada-far-rig…The right-wing ringleader among Shopify’s executive leadership appears to be Kaz Nejatian, the company’s vice-president of product and chief operating officer. Before going into tech, Nejatian was a Conservative political staffer. In 2011, when Nejatian worked for then-immigration minister Jason Kenney, he was forced to resign after mistakenly sending out fundraising requests on parliamentary letterhead and accidentally leaking a strategy to target “very ethnic” voters. Two months later, he was invited back as director of communications. Nejatian’s right-wing associations became even clea...
Read 6 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Sep 17, 2024
For decades, internet politics was shaped by a cyberlibertarian perspective that obsessed about government while enabling the corporate dystopia we live in today.

If we want a better internet, we must abandon it and reclaim sovereignty over digital tech. disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sov…
The arrest of Pavel Durov and suspension of Twitter/X in Brazil is a shot across the bow in a wider fight to rein in the harms that have come from the cyberlibertarian approach to the internet. But it will not end there.

disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sov…
The internet is at an inflection point. The platforms have cemented their power, generative AI and associated financial pressures are pushing companies to further degrade the online experience, and more than anything else, the notion that democratic governments should leave the internet alone is rapidly breaking down. Nothing shows that more than the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France and the suspension of Twitter/X in Brazil. Make no mistake, governments’ stance on the internet has been changing for some time. Beyond the actions of French authorities and the Brazilian Supr...
Last month, the Global Digital Justice Forum wrote that “the cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today.” Globally, that view has a lot of support.

disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sov…
This movement is more widespread than it might otherwise appear. Last month, the Global Digital Justice Forum, a group of civil society groups, published a letter about the ongoing negotiations over the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact. “It is eminently clear that the cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today,” the group wrote. “Governments are needed in the digital space not only to tackle harm or abuse. They have a positive role to play in fulfilling a gamut of human rights for inclusive, equitable, and f...
Read 9 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Feb 9, 2024
The AI boom requires massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of water and energy.

Tech CEOs have plans for hundreds more, but activists are fighting back to protect their communities and force us to ask who benefits from Silicon Valley’s future.disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-…
Everything we do online has a material footprint and people started becoming more aware of that during the crypto boom. But the AI hype of the past year is also far more resource-intensive than the applications it hopes to replace.

disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-…
The cryptocurrency hype of the past few years already started to introduce people to these problems. Despite producing little to no tangible benefits — unless you count letting rich people make money off speculation and scams — Bitcoin consumed more energy and computer parts than medium-sized countries and crypto miners were so voracious in their energy needs that they turned shuttered coal plants back on to process crypto transactions. Even after the crypto crash, Bitcoin still used more energy in 2023 than the previous year, but some miners found a new opportunity: powering the generative...
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all have massive business selling computation as a service, meaning they’re all incentivized to increase the amount of computer resources we collectively use so those businesses keep growing—regardless of the social benefit.

disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-…
When selling computation and associated services as a business, “cloud” companies need to make everything we do more computationally intensive to create a justification for the growth of that business, which means the demands for computation must increase and along with it the number of data centers to facilitate it. In practice, that means more AI tools are pushed on companies that don’t need them, more data needs to be collected, and everything we encounter needs to become bloated with unnecessary features and trackers, just to give a few examples. There isn’t necessarily a tangible benef...
Read 8 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Jan 24, 2024
Sam Altman’s vision for AI proliferation will require a lot more computation and the energy to power it.

He admitted it at Davos, but he said we shouldn’t worry: an energy breakthrough was coming, and in the meantime we could just geoengineer the planet. disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se…
Over the past year, Altman ensured we were focused on the future by promising incredible AI benefits or scaring us with terrifying futures. That ensured OpenAI could capture the attention of lawmakers to share AI regulation. But now his story is shifting.

disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se…
By directing our gaze to the future, Altman and the AI industry effectively distracted a lot of people from the very real threats their technologies pose in the present. Instead of thinking about the harmful and discriminatory ways AI might be deployed in policing and social services, we were told to fear a fantasy scenario where computers exceed human-level intelligence then decide they want to enslave or kill us. That allowed Altman’s company OpenAI to influence regulatory efforts in the United States and Europe to ensure they wouldn’t hamper the company’s goals of rolling out their gener...
The media seized on his comments at Davos that AGI wouldn’t change as much as he thought, even though he was still boosting the tech. In his new story, the fears are gone and AI adoption must accelerate because he imagines the benefits to be enormous.

disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se…
Altman’s new story still has contradictions, but not nearly as many as the one he was telling last year. Instead of being a major threat and/or transformative moment, Altman recently told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that even though artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the theoretical point where computers match or surpass the intelligence of humans — would arrive in the “reasonably close-ish future” that it wouldn’t have the sizeable impact he once believed. “It will change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we al...
Read 6 tweets

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