#Tag
@strypey the candle here is the use of quota, not the use of AI
@worik
> the candle here is the use of quota, not the use of AI
I take your point, but in this case (and many others) the one is clearly driven by the other. It's technocracy on generative steroids. Exactly the kind of thing Adam Curtis focused on in one of his best TV series; The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom (2007).
Here's the full series as one 3 hour video;
"But then it got more complicated, because human beings were also exposed to the avalanche of data online, and they started to behave in very much the same way as Geoffrey Hinton's artificial intelligence machines. They too, spent vast amounts of time searching through all the data, looking for patterns, links and coincidences that had no obvious meaning."
#AdamCurtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e06
(1/2)
But being human beings, they then turned them to fantastic, elaborate stories. They were called conspiracy theories."
#AdamCurtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e06
Pot, kettle, black?
(2/2)
What I find frustrating about Adam Curtis is that his films reports important facts like this, while weaving them into narratives as ambitiously speculative as anything Graham Hancock ever came up with. But unlike Hancock, Curtis never admits to any doubt about the validity of his narratives.
Nor does he ever appears on camera. Arguably exploiting the documentary convention that anything delivered as a disembodied narration is unadorned, factual reporting.
"But then it got more complicated, because human beings were also exposed to the avalanche of data online, and they started to behave in very much the same way as Geoffrey Hinton's artificial intelligence machines. They too, spent vast amounts of time searching through all the data, looking for patterns, links and coincidences that had no obvious meaning."
#AdamCurtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e06
(1/2)
"From the 1950s onwards, the CIA rigged elections, destabilised governments through fake information, and organised violent coups, in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran, Guatamala, South Vietnam, Indonesia, and Chile. In all, the US ran covert operations to otherthrow 66 foreign governments, and in 26 cases, they succeeded."
#AdamCurtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e05
The persistent misrepresention of Barlow and other tech rights pioneers as stooges of corporatism (usually mislabeled as "libertarianism") really grind my gears. @pluralistic wrote a great column on this earlier in the year;
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights
@Rushkoff knows better, and it's sad to see him scoring cheap cool points off someone who's no longer here to contextualise his legacy.
(3/3)
I just finished the first episode of Can't Get You Out of My Head, a 2021 documentary series by Adam Curtis. Curtis is an intriguing filmmaker. The best of his work deep dives the political history of the 20th century in surprising and insightful ways; The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), The Trap (2007), Bitter Lake (2015) and Hypernormalization (2017).
(1/3)
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