all-seeing-aleph

[all-seeing-aleph]

She's here! Mina Murray, the single most important character enters the story!

[all-seeing-aleph]

The Guardians | Vladimir Antaki

These places are sometimes magical, overloaded with elements, colours and stories, guarded by these characters who are sometimes touching, funny, quirky, and at times frightening. 

The photos that I take are often the only memory that this “Guardian” will have of him/herself in their daily environment. This photo can be the only visual record of the existence of this place, the only photographic memory. People pay less and less attention to their environment. They are always in a hurry, they don’t take the time to spend time with one another. Unfortunately, these places will one day no longer be around. This is one of the reasons that compelled me to want to document these “guardians”.

SoP | Scale of Work

[all-seeing-aleph]

today I used the phrase "breasting boobily" in casual real life conversation and everyone was shocked asking how I came up with that and I had to explain it. ive been at the devil's sacrament so long that I forgot he wasn't god

[all-seeing-aleph]

I have a story like this. Two ancient warriors killing one another across time until they end up as opposing lawyers. Not a comedy but yeah

Destined mortal enemies reincarnating across the ages, except the destiny in question has no power to ensure that either of them takes up a suitably heroic occupation in any given life, so sometimes it ends up having to go to considerable lengths to keep their rivalry alive and relevant in circumstances that absolutely are not conducive to it.

[all-seeing-aleph]

We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective

[all-seeing-aleph]

oh fuck life is worth living isnt it. shit

[all-seeing-aleph]

Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Mark Zuckerberg has told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers.

Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a much greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth. This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta stops growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.

So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow. After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.

This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism – it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9

If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock and into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."

Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-revolution-is-an-advertising-revolution-morning-brief-100001467.html

This narrative is especially galling because it's literally the same story Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control – Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" – was a liar. Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.

But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod techniques and mass surveillance sold a hell of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has always been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers desperately wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted – I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting half of his advertising spending!

I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job – it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.

AI keeps passing the worst kinds of Turing tests – for example, it's great at helping people who are prone to life-destroying hallucinations that they are talking to God:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

Zuck kept up his growth story with this mind control narrative for more than a decade, got caught committing a string of spectacular frauds, and then lured investors back into his stock offerings by telling the same story. This isn't just an indictment of Zuck, it's a stinging rebuke to the whole idea that markets are a kind of infallible computer for assessing and operationalizing information. The market's "thought process" demonstrably lacks the object permanence that most babies acquire by the time they are a year old. You can tell when your child has acquired object permanence by the fact that they cease to enjoy "peek-a-boo" (object permanence means they understand where you have gone when your face is hidden).

In claiming that AI will give him an infinite growth mind-control ray, Mark Zuckerberg is challenging the market to a game of peek-a-boo – and he's winning.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Image:

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[all-seeing-aleph]

We gotta stop aiming for unique and interesting baby names we gotta start naming every single infant straight-shot middle-of-the-road ass popular common unisex names like Alex and Sam. By the end of 2031 I wanna see 100% of kindergarten children named either Alex or Sam and you know what, let’s make ‘em all Smiths and Johnsons, too. In an age of digital tracking give your baby the gift of total functional anonymity within the panopticon

[all-seeing-aleph]

Really? In front of my community horror at the UK court decision to harm trans people driven by JKR's endless money?

Hiiiiiiiii do you want to tell off a company that's small enough to actually listen but not so small that you worry about ruining a person's life?

Look at this email I just got.

Go yell at Colourpop (they also have active pages on tiktok and instagram).

Maybe something like "You claim to be cruelty-free to animals, but what about the real-life humans you're harming? The money this collaboration earns goes directly into pet projects of JKR's, like the recent ruling of the UK Supreme Court that stripped countless trans people of basic human rights."

Maybe throw in a "you've got to be kidding me" or a "less than a month from Pride? And you didn't even do anything for trans day of visibility! Your 'inclusive' marketing rings very hollow when you do things like this."

"When the queer community and all its allies are up in a fury about how this one woman and her IP are hellbent on destroying our lives and the people we love, you choose to advertise the collaboration instead of letting it slowly die out and fade like you should."

(If you want to know about my ongoing crusade to get them to do something about their other problematic collaboration, my colourpop tag is filled with the situation as regards 'hey, can you as a company donate to the Quileute Move to Higher Ground fundraiser if you're going to use the tribe as marketing material for your Twilight stuff?')

[all-seeing-aleph]

I wish jonathan harker a very pleasant and normal business trip

[all-seeing-aleph]

We will rule over this potato, and we will call it... This Potato.

[all-seeing-aleph]

Un p’tit mardi dans la vie d’une calico!

Causal friday in a calico’s life!

[all-seeing-aleph]

[all-seeing-aleph]

How animals attack

[all-seeing-aleph]

My good friend Jonathan is going on a very important business trip next week. Everyone wish him luck.

[all-seeing-aleph]

Lucy and Mina If Lucy lived and they teamed up to murder Dracula.

[all-seeing-aleph]

thinking about the japanese racehorse who was such a failgirl she became a folk hero for losers