The Luddite

This project began as a post about a year ago, in which we followed the provenance of the data from a study about misinformation until, at the bottom, we found Media Bias/Fact Check.

This is yet another update to a previous post about Maples et al.'

The Luddite is taking a break and will be back sometime late fall (in the Northern Hemisphere).

Right after the 2016 American presidential election, use of the the terms "misinformation" and "disinformation" on Twitter skyrocketed, presumably as people attempted to come to grips with what had just happened.

This has been my longest gap between posts since I started in 2022.

Before we get started, a note on current events: If you live in the United States, now is the time to get organized.

It takes many people to make The Luddite happen.

Source images here and here.

This is part of an open-ended series on the relationship between the AI hype, corporate interests, and scientific publishing through the lens of articles published on Nature.com.

On the roughly two-year anniversary of Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, with which he is openly supporting fascism, I want to discuss Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles's #HashtagActivism.

The same illustration has also been published in Plutonics.

Apple recently released, and subsequently apologized for, a commercial for their new iPad, in which a giant hydraulic press crushes every symbol of human creativity that they could fit on a screen, starting with a trumpet.

Before we get started, a quick note: Unionized workers on several of the University of California campuses are on strike, protesting the treatment of the Palestinian solidarity encampments.

Though the tech industry prides itself on the many stories of scrappy founders with their laptops in garages, i.e. the lowest initial capital requirements imaginable, the tech industry is absolutely flush with venture capital.

The tip of the pyramid was generated with craiyon.com, to which we added a collage of Sam Altman's face (from press coverage) and part of the cover of the book God Emperor of Dune.

In the 2010s, more people took part in political protests than at any other time in history.

At this very moment, the United States is helping Israel commit a genocide in Gaza.

Reddit has filed for its IPO.

This probably doesn't need to be explained, but this illustration is an edited version of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.

The United States Congress is considering "banning" TikTok.

Image reference here.

This post was greatly influenced by Dodds et al's Ousiometrics and Telegnomics: The essence of meaning conforms to a two-dimensional {powerful ⇔ weak} and {dangerous ⇔ safe} framework with diverse corpora presenting a safety bias.

Illustration used this reference.

Guest posts are not substantially edited by nor do they necessarily represent the views of The Luddite, though we do exercise discretion in which we publish.

This is the first in an open-ended series on the concerning relationship between the AI hype, corporate interests, and scientific publishing through the lens of articles published on Nature.com.

We're currently in the very early stages of a catastrophic climate crisis.

In 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote an essay about the culture of the tech industry, which they called The Californian Ideology.

Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza in a week than the US and its partners dropped in any single month in its campaign against ISIS.

Thanks for reading!

I once had a colleague that had a mug that looked like this: Note that the graph's axes aren't even labeled, rendering it, as we shall soon see, appropriately meaningless.

Everything is cluttered and bloated.

The Luddite has now existed for a year.

This website, like so many others, spends a lot of time telling you that things are getting worse.

Guest posts are not substantially edited by nor do they necessarily represent the views of The Luddite, though we do exercise discretion in which we publish.

I recently decided to run ads on a website that I own.

The following partial text was discovered on a stela just outside the main dig site for the city of Penn'sylvania.

Recently, there has been a slew of articles like this one, titled "AI chatbots were tasked to run a tech company.

Notes: There will be no spoilers in this post.

Guest posts are not substantially edited by nor do they necessarily represent the views of The Luddite, though we do exercise discretion in which we publish.

Two tech stories have been making the rounds lately.

There is a common meme that looks something like this: This is a great meme.

Update: I contacted Smithsonian Magazine and Modern Farmer.

In their video Cucksumerism: Why Pokemon Sucks, Boy Boy discusses how the pandemic-fueled rise in the value of Pokemon cards collided with the bizarre internet phenomenon of unboxing videos into a singularly deranged yet revealing online spectacle: One of…

Data breaches from major companies have become so commonplace that, for most people, they no longer register as interesting or important.

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose - 18th Century Poem Protesting Enclosure.

It takes many people to make The Luddite happen.

Human beings can fly.

Guest posts are not substantially edited by nor do they necessarily represent the views of The Luddite, though we do exercise discretion in which we publish.

The Future of Life Institute recently wrote an open letter calling "on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful."

Note: This is an extended version of what has proven to be, by far, my most popular post.