Jobs Not Bots: There's No Such Thing As "Good AI"
AI was sold to us as a means to help some poor, disadvantaged penguin to waddle with better balance. But in the real world, 99.99% of AI's purpose is to stalk and subjugate the public, steal everyone's labour, destroy jobs and enrich the elite. It's time to put up the stop sign...
Let's be clear. The "good AI" vs "bad AI" choice that Mozilla is so desperate to shill on behalf of Google, is a false dilemma. The real choice is "NO AI" vs "bad AI". For all AI is bad. It's anti-human. A grand looting of the people, by the elite. Purely a route to mass joblessness, mass poverty.
It's not a bubble. That's propaganda. Propaganda orchestrated by the AI demigods themselves.
Yes, the "AI bubble" trope was manufactured by anti-human technologists who want their opposition to believe that AI is not a threat, and that it will go away when the "bubble" pops in the just-beyond-foreseeable future. In truth, by the time we all quit waiting for the "bubble" to burst and actually decide to meaningfully oppose AI's unprecedented attack on human rights, it will be way too late, and life for anyone outside the AI industry will be a living Hell. That's the whole point of the "bubble" theory. "Manage resistance". "Keep the public docile while we loot their assets and destroy their lives".
AI IS A SCAM
That's right. AI, as it's being sold to the public, doesn't exist.
There is no robot brain.
AI is just final-stage capitalists recording human labour for eternal re-use.
Read article →The Delusionals: 2024's Online Marketing Circus in Close-Up
If you think SEO spam looks bad from the outside, you should see it from the inside...
Capitalism's approach to finding talent is roughly like trying to select a romantic partner by touring the neighbourhood in a blindfold and earplugs, soliciting formally-declared sexual histories and then submitting a marriage proposal to the community member who has previously had the most sex. And then wondering why the relationship doesn't work. It really is that dumb.
What's the hardest job in the world? Brain surgeon? Astronaut? Spinal Tap tribute act? If you've recently worked in the field of online promotion, you'll probably at this point be yelling out a fourth contender...
CONTENT MARKETER!!!
Actually, if you have talent, empathy and a sense of humour, content marketing per se is not difficult at all. What's difficult is fulfilling a content marketing brief that was collectively devised by every delusional moron who ever discovered the phrase.
Read article →Averting the Internet's Great Decline
We don't quite know how we got here, but we did. As we sit in dismay amid the World Wide Web's Great Decline, our mindset is one of resignation. But history tells us that resignation has a threshold, and what comes next, is action...
Government and smaller enterprise has taken a stance of pandering to abusers like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, because there's an incentive to do so. But if providing the public with a means of escape becomes more profitable than sucking up to the abuser... Well, not even monopolists can fight the lure of money...
In October 2023, the broadband and telephone landline provider I was using at that time flushed an eighteen month contract renewal down the toilet.
I called them to renew; they demanded a mobile phone number. I told them they did not need a mobile phone number to renew a broadband and landline contract I'd had with them since 2015, at a stable address, with reliable payment, and to which a mobile phone was entirely irrelevant. Nevertheless, they insisted that they couldn't process the renewal without a mobile number. So I ended the call, went straight online, and switched my contract to another provider.
Over eighteen months, the money the old provider is now losing would obviously not be trivial, and I immediately began to consider the sanity, or otherwise, of a company preferring to lose that money rather than accept that a customer was not going to give them a mobile phone number that wasn't in any way relevant to the contract.
I wondered if the contact centre agent was new and didn't understand the system. I wondered if the company saw itself making more money from the sale of one mobile phone number than it would make from an eighteen month phone and broadband contract. Both options somehow seemed unlikely.
Read article →Firefox - An Illusion of Choice
Why are we still deluding ourselves that Firefox is a competitor to Chrome, when it's really Google's weapon against competition itself?
Mozilla is not a rights activist. It's a Surveillance Valley theatre group renting its brand names, spyware and lobbying capacity to Google on pain of death. The whole idea that Firefox is a last bastion of light in the fight against monopoly is a joke. But we're so neck-deep in monopoly that all we have left is that delusional fantasy.
Have you ever considered that once monopoly hits a certain threshold, monopolists might get pretty desperate to maintain an illusion of choice? Although that's not something we generally think about, it's an essential part of the monopoly process.
MONOPOLY VIA THE BACK DOOR
The problem with being a monopolist is that openly swallowing up all of your competitors attracts the attention of all the wrong people, often in cataclysmic measure.
But what if, instead, you only capture your competitors? Invest in them. Then invest more. And then, as they become reliant on your perpetual-motion funding and other "kindly gestures", you slowly gain complete control over their activity. They keep their brand name, but effectively rent it out to you on pain of death. It's their face that greets the public, but it's your hands that pull the strings.
Read article →Corporate Anarchy and the New People Trade
If slavery persisted because the law failed to restrain inhuman greed, we are dangerously close to entering a renaissance…
A new era is dawning. Don't dig out your party hat - it's no cause for celebration. Slowly but surely, a new realm of authority is re-normalising the concept of people as property.
Read article →The authoritarian cartel of new wave capitalists has absorbed almost every trait exhibited by old-time people-traders.
"Voice of God": The Truth About AI Assistants
AI assistants are shaping up to serve as the most powerful brainwashing tool the tech industry has yet unleashed. If you're using AI as a consumer, brace yourself for a new, multi-billion dollar propaganda-pump.
There's a common belief that artificial intelligence took a giant leap in efficiency during 2022. All that really happened was that it turned into a search engine and repackaged the output to cut out the sources and the choice…
It's true. Whilst AI assistants have been pitched as mindful robots with human sensibilities, they're actually just search engines in which the results are edited, reworded, and filtered to a degree we'd never accept from a conventional SERP.
Read article →ChatGPT, Bard and their ilk are an unfettered, direct and inscrutable means for demonstrably evil corporations to tell you anything they think you'll believe. What could possibly go wrong with a concept like that?
Save The Password Or Lose Your Human Rights Forever
The push to eliminate passwords and replace them with police-data harvesting points is an inevitable consequence, as surveillance capitalists' traditional revenue stream lies on its death bed, and authorities offer dizzying sums for intelligence data.
YOU HAD ONE JOB… YOU'RE DOING PRECISELY HALF OF IT
Surveillance capitalism is changing. In the beginning, it genuinely was about working out what we needed, and then following us around with convenient options to buy that commodity. But over the years, we, the public, have orchestrated what's been described as The Biggest Boycott in History. We've taken steps to block online advertising. And we've done so with such incredible solidarity, that it's also become the most successful boycott in history.
I mean, why should we care about a bunch of evil, subjugative cyber giants? They're multi-billionaires. We know they see us as a product. We know their aim is to manipulate and exploit us. We know they don't even pay for the vast majority of the content they use to propel their ads. That's why they're so rich. They're monetising other people's work. On Web 2.0, OUR work… Let's sock it back to 'em. Open and shut case.
Well, not quite shut. The problem is, if surveillance capitalists can't hit their financial targets pimping us out to brands, how do they compensate? Where does their money come from if we won't look at their ads?
Read article →The world's richest and most powerful campaign group is shaping up to replace password logins with police-data harvesting points, and as advertising profits dip, they're stepping up their game.
The Great Lockout: Online "Account Eviction" as a Business Model
It's an irony of our time that the excessive "account security measures" so aggressively pushed by Surveillance Valley, have proved more likely to lose you your account than protect it against hackers. But is the "account protection" scam just a data/control grab, or is locking us out of our rented cyberhomes actually part of the plan?
First we thought they were trying their best. Then we thought they needed to try harder. Then we thought they were grossly incompetent. And now?… Well, now it's slowly dawning on us that for many years, the cybertech giants have been breaking their products on purpose.
Read article →Forced implementation of a system which will blatantly increase the odds of a user losing their account, suggests that the intention is, in fact, FOR THE USER TO LOSE THEIR ACCOUNT.
Why the Subscription Model is not the Solution to Dysfunctional Websearch
How do you run a search engine that disclaims its own fitness for purpose, on Google servers, drawing 'Bingle' results, and somewhow convince a paying userbase that they're not wasting their money? Ask Kagi…
We've recently entered the first ever period in which the progress of the World Wide Web is widely perceived to have dropped into retrograde. Yep, it's now obvious to more than just a fringe of tinfoil hatters that cybertech is going backwards, and no one really has a solution.
Read article →You're LOGGED IN. You can't not be logged in. They know it's you. Every search. That's not privacy. It's the opposite of privacy. And if you believe a Surveillance Valley startup when it says your data isn't being collected and exploited, you must have spent the past two decades asleep.
Overpriced at $Zero - Why the Former Twitter Cannot Survive
X is set to shrink to an inconsequence as its owner fails to spot the chasm between public tolerance and his obscene greed.
The value of an account on an exploitative, ad-strewn Silicon Valley silo was established at $0, and it's always been considered expensive at that. There will soon come a point at which even the average Musk supporter will begin to notice that cattle don't pay to be farmed.
In 2022 I wrote a short piece called The Benny Test, which highlighted the truth about Twitter's value to its userbase. You may find the rather maverick method of analysis interesting, but if you don't have time to read the article, its conclusion was that the overwhelming majority of accounts on Twitter are inactive, and you can easily prove that for yourself. On this evidence, even at a cost of $zero, most people consider Twitter a poor deal. The platform has markedly worsened since then, and inactivity has risen further.
After owner Elon Musk recently floated the idea of charging all users an access fee, there was widespread debate about whether his X rebrand could survive as a full-on premium service.
Read article →Is Big Tech Running a Secret Trade in Intelligence Data?
Or is there some bizarre new strain of capitalism that gets off on losing billions of dollars a year?…
Ah, that dreaded moment when they stop wanting your attention, and reveal that what they're really after is your body. I'm referring, of course, to Big Tech.
Yes, as the gatekeeping wars intensify, the Silicon Valley preds can no longer hide their one-track thoughts. They want our bodies. Literally. Detailed scans of our faces, our eyes, our hands… And they would rather check our identity papers than spin us a marketing pitch.
Big Tech will not pursue any initiative, ever, if it doesn't primarily involve spying on people.
Does it not strike you as strange that as a facet of commercial enterprise, whose job it is to sell us nice things, Silicon Valley corporations are now so pathologically hung up on chasing something entirely alien to that brief? Something so unsalesy, so central-governmenty, so, er… police-departmenty.
Read article →The Code Is Not The Product - The Developer Is The Product
The amount of money that tech giants have spent capturing and co-opting the arena of Web-development is truly breathtaking. But where's the payback on that mind-boggling investment?…
I wonder what it must be like to have to buy a stake in every new programming framework that ever looks like catching on? Quite seriously, that is the position in which Big Tech now finds itself…
Read article →The Weaponisation of Web Standards
Unrestrained by web standards arbiters, cybertech giants use over-complexity as a weapon, creating lock-ins for consumers, barriers to entry for all but the very richest competitors, and a global data checkpoint around which no one can realistically build a bypass. And the brainwashing has been strong. Most of us consider it totally normal when cyber giants turn the things we wrote, into things we can't even read...
Are you a long-time publisher of online content?...
What do you do when you have a raft of old, disused material strewn across various platforms, and you want to bring it under your control? To pool it. To assess it. To cherry-pick it for use in future projects. To make it genuinely portable. Or just to meaningfully possess something that is, after all, yours...
The answer is pretty simple. Download it, store it to your own computer and preserve it as a local archive. Pretty simple, that is, until you try doing it...
Read article →POSSE and the Indieweb is Big Tech Bullshit
IndieWebCamp was not about "owning your data". It was about sharing your Facebook content with Google - at your own expense.
Google's singular goal was to prize content off the crawler-inaccessible Facebook, put it on the Open Web where Googlebot could reach it, and then, as a tidy bonus, advocate pushing it to G+. That, in a nutshell, is what POSSE was about.
POSSE. Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It may seem like a grassroots concept to those who have encountered it in the wild, but if you trace it back to its roots, you'll find yourself deep in Silicon Valley, in the company of Big Tech developers.
Read article →The TRUE Reason Why Google Won't Integrate ChatGPT
If anyone knows the value of information-laundering, it's Google. And you cannot launder information through a chatbot alone.
Prologue: frictionless query and response (a la ChatGPT) appears to almost guarantee the demise of Google Search in its current form. So why is Google refusing to integrate an advanced chatbot system into its flagship product?
To answer that question, we have to consider what happens if it does...
Early this month, Microsoft ended a period of speculation, announcing that it would integrate OpenAI's frictionless ChatGPT Q&A system into its search engine, Bing. Given Microsoft's existing connection with OpenAI, this came as no surprise. Google's reaction, however, did prove a little more perplexing for some. For now, Google will hold back on the integration of a rival system.
Publicly, the Big G's rationale is that AI-driven Q&A is not reliable, and merging it with a resource that the public expect to give them gospel truth could result in reputational damage to the corporation.
Okay, so it's certainly true that ChatGPT talks a lot of crap. And there probably is some hopeful dream at the back of Google's mind, in which ChatGPT blights Microsoft with a deluge of woefully bad publicity, reinforcing Google's position as the Good Samaritan of online discovery. But is that just a dream, or can Google see something Microsoft can't?
Read article →