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“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently” - David Graeber

@Acyn @heyman_von @SoVeryBritish, who wants to tell him?

Trump: The King and Queen were just here… when they came into the Oval Office, they said, “this is something”

@jimstewartson Yup! For those of us that know the way, we know this is not the way.

As someone who saw Star Wars opening weekend nearly a half-century ago, fuck you. You will never take it away. Also, your fucking flag is wrong, stupids.

True

@jonfavs @FrankLuntz Dude built a fake Oval Office in his home. If that doesn’t have “do not take seriously” written all over it, I’m not sure what else to say.

@FrankLuntz Didn't take you for this much of a moron, Frank. Do you often throw out slanderous accusations like that?

Graham Platner isn’t just our best and only chance to beat Susan Collins, he’s a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown and is always trying to do better. I hope everyone with reservations takes a little time to get to know the real life version of him, not what the algorithm throws in our faces. Clearly, that’s what so many people in Maine have done - from all different walks of life and political persuasions.

Our civilization is going to die from an ADHD epidemic. The attention span required to maintain a complex society — to read contracts, to follow arguments, to sit with difficulty, to defer gratification long enough to build anything that lasts — is being systematically destroyed. ADHD as a clinical category is real. But what is happening now exceeds any clinical definition. What is happening is the mass production of attentional incapacity in people who were never neurologically predisposed to it. The smartphone did in fifteen years what lead paint took generations to do — it rewired the cognitive architecture of an entire population. The difference is that lead was an accident. The feed was engineered. Every pull-to-refresh, every notification badge, every autoplay was optimized by teams of engineers using casino psychology to make the interruption irresistible. They succeeded. The product works exactly as intended. The product is you, stripped of the ability to concentrate. The consequences are not abstract. Democracy requires citizens who can read a long argument and evaluate it. Juries require people who can hold complexity in mind across days of testimony. Science requires researchers who can sit alone with a problem for years without external validation. Literature requires readers. Architecture requires clients who can hold a vision across the time it takes to build. All of these institutions were designed for a cognitive profile that is becoming statistically rare. The human attention span did not evolve for depth — but culture trained it there over millennia, through apprenticeship, through scripture, through the novel, through the slow disciplines of craft. That training is being undone in real time. What makes this terminal rather than merely troubling is the feedback loop. A distracted population elects distracted leaders who make policy in the format of a tweet. A distracted workforce produces goods and services of diminishing complexity and ambition. A distracted electorate cannot sustain the long attention required to hold power accountable across the years it takes for consequences to arrive. And a distracted culture cannot produce the art, the philosophy, or the science that would allow it to understand what is happening to itself. The diagnosis requires exactly the cognitive capacity that the disease destroys. Arrighi described capitalism consuming itself through financialization. This is the human correlate: a civilization consuming its own cognitive substrate. The attention economy is not a metaphor. It is an extraction industry. What is being extracted is the capacity for sustained thought, and like any extractive industry it does not stop until the resource is gone. The ore here is THE ABILITY TO BE BORED, to wait, to follow a thread to its end — the unglamorous mental furniture of every functional society that has ever existed. Rome did not fall in a day. But there was a moment when the complexity required to maintain the empire exceeded the institutional capacity to manage it. We are approaching an equivalent threshold — not military, not economic, but cognitive. The infrastructure of modernity is too complex to be operated by minds that have been optimized for the scroll. Nuclear plants, financial systems, legal codes, diplomatic negotiations, climate modeling — none of these run on dopamine hits and six-second videos. And the people being trained right now, on devices handed to them at age three, are the people who will be asked to run them. The epidemic will not be declared. There will be no moment of recognition, no wartime mobilization of attention. There will only be a slow, well-documented, heavily monetized degradation — and a civilization too distracted to read the report.

AI does not promise progress. It promises extraction from the masses, from us. Do not let people like Musk and Altman frame this as progress. It might be their progress, but it is not ours.

@PeterDiamandis @elonmusk Btw - the guy you seem happy to give our future to thinks empathy is a threat. Read that over and over again until you fucking get it.

@PeterDiamandis @elonmusk The future belongs to all of us. Get real.

.@elonmusk just crossed $800 billion — roughly 2.7% of the entire US GDP. The last person to hold that much of the American economy? John D. Rockefeller in 1913. It took a century for anyone to match him. Rockefeller had oil. Musk has the future.

@elonmusk @GadSaad We get it. You don’t feel empathy and don’t care for it. That is exactly why you don’t get to decide what our common future looks like.

A case study in suicidal empathy. Read @GadSaad ‘s upcoming book on the subject.

Imagine what a dick you must be to view empathy as a threat.

“Musk has the future,“ is a warning.

Look at these fools scrambling to try to convince people that the economic hell hole they are exposing people to is a good thing.

@xriskology And to be clear, in their current form, we don’t want them and we certainly are not going to accept being replaced by these models.

If they actually cared about democracy, they would be asking the people *right now* whether we want these systems in the first place. The fact that they don’t care about what we want shows that all this talk about democracy is complete bullshit.

@GaryMarcus And note - not a hint of taking responsibility or offering anything to mitigate damage done.

Narrator: And indeed, they did.

@KatieMiller And how are you taking responsibility for that, @sama?

Sam Altman: “I guess the thing that I lose the most sleep over is that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT.”

@realKyleKeegan @Dixie202021 We knew.

Good morning to everyone who knew on the day he came down the escalator exactly where this bullshit was headed.

@kevin_nealon How were the donuts?

I made donuts at Dunkin at night when I was 18 because I wanted to buy a guitar. During the day I worked as a lifeguard. You should not have a night job while you’re a lifeguard during the day. I was exhausted. I slept through three drownings.

@jaketapper @ConnieCassidy67 Just once I’d like to hear you go “The president posted this last night and he can fuck right off for doing so”. Just once.

The president posted this about House Democratic Leader Jeffries shortly after 11 pm last night.

@LandoTC268517 @kamisedo @GaryMarcus Which is exactly what we should do. We should not let a handful of tech bros usher in a future for the few so they can fulfill their dreams and make a buck off of us.

@kamisedo @Cassizzi @GaryMarcus Funny enough, China has recently made it illegal to fire people for the sole reason of replacing them with AI.

wow, the backlash is growing fast