Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves.

The bartender pouring free drinks glances around with nothing to do as the raucous room full of startup founders and software developers gravitates toward its preferred drug: networking.

Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.

Late one recent night, I enlisted GPT-4 to fix my life. I began by soliciting broad-strokes summaries of my journalistic interests and an expedited five-step protocol for breaking in raw-denim jeans (if you know, you know).

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray.

Cold open: Agent Zuboff receives her mission.

Main show: We politically cancel Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, for advancing / mainstreaming a reactionary critique. Surveillance capitalism is not a “rogue mutation” of a normal capitalism. Surveillance is not the scapegoat that needs to be sacrificed so we can maintain a good version of consumption and commodification. We let you in on a little secret—one that Zuboff’s work is designed to obscure—the real horrors have been coming from inside capitalism all along.

Morozov’s article on Zuboff’s bad analysis of surveillance capitalism: https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov

Monthly Review article with good analysis of surveillance capitalism: https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl). Thanks to Laura for voice work on the cold open.

=== Original video: https://m.soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/4-zuboff-is-a-psyop Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Tue Aug 25 23:39:54 2020 Available for 30 days after download

Is Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” this generation’s “end of history thesis”? For nearly thirty years Francis Fukuyama’s contention that “Western liberal democracy” represents “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” has measured the ebb and flow of history.

Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact. Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent.

Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact. Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent.

To the well-known political, economic, and cultural revolutions that inaugurated capitalist modernity, we ought to add a fourth: a pharmacological revolution, one that began innocently enough with a variety of foreign substances — coffee, tea, chocolate — and culminated in a multi-billion dollar

Bruce Sterling wasn’t originally meant to be part of the discussion. It was March 13, 2010, in Austin, Texas, and a small group of designers were on stage at the South by Southwest interactive festival, talking about an emerging discipline they called “design fiction.”

Mark Fisher is a writer, teacher and theorist living in Suffolk, England. His k-punk blog has been a well respected resource for cultural analysis on the web since its launch in 2003. In 2009, he published his first book, 'Capitalist Realism', where he explores the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. In it, Fisher analyses the role of the media, the education system, the link between Neoliberalism and brain chemistry, and what he calls business ontology 'in a world in which internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.'

Climate change is here. In the midst of the storm, an opportunity arises to break with capitalism and its vicious inequality. Let’s seize it while we can. The alternatives are unthinkable.

Genetic-ancestry tests are having a moment. Look no further than Spotify: On Thursday, the music-streaming service—as in, the service used to fill tedious workdays and DJ parties—launched a collaboration with AncestryDNA.

Veganism has rocketed in the UK over the past couple of years – from an estimated half a million people in 2016 to more than 3.5 million – 5% of our population – today.

The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received.

Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves.

This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. By and Jason W Moore The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget.

Fatbergs, the congealed mass of fat and discarded items that are increasingly blocking Britain’s sewers, are the consequence of the plastic crisis in Britain and contain potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria, tests show.

Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism in the late 18th century. In this version, environmentalism was born as the good twin to evil industrialization.