Esaias Tegnér (Sweden, 1782-1846): Det dunkelt sagda är det dunkelt tänkta.

“That which is dimly said is dimly thought."

I can only consume information where each nugget of truth can be contained in 160 characters. Nothing extra, each insight must be a atomic and self contained, an element in the larger tweet stream. When I pull my phone out to scroll instagram in the middle of reading your piece, I get lost if it's not formatted like this.

zizek does regularly do a bit of meandering but damn, does everything need to read like a chatGPT summary?

I've read lots of Zizek as a high schooler. This doesn't even come close to how dense some of his writing can be, I'm sitting here drunk on a few beers and it was a simple read. I think lots of people are actually illiterate.

> Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this dispositif [...]

This part near the end caught my attention:

> One could effectively claim that Smith [...] stands in for the figure of the psychoanalyst within the universe of the film. Here Hinton gets it wrong: our (humans’) only chance is to grasp that our imperfection is grounded in the imperfection of the AI machinery itself, which still needs us in order to continue running.

In the Hyperion sci-fi novels, (spoilers ahead) the godlike AIs are ultimately characterized as parasites of humans. Their existence was stored in some high-dimensional quantum medium, but the hardware they ran on was the old fashioned human brain. Then I read that in the initial draft of The Matrix, that's why the machines needed to farm humans; but test audiences were confused by it and so they changed to story to "body heat is energy."

I usually scroll a page to see how many headings it has, but I'm looking for the opposite. Too many headings is one of the quickest aesthetic clues that I'm looking at slop, as it doesn't require me to read any of the text. (Emojis and over-usage of bullet point lists are the others I can think of in this category.)

I noticed something similar when working with (unlike the post's author, non-marxist, as far as I know) Russian developers who had made the jump abroad (EU).

When debating directions, some of them focused on just never stopping talking. Instead of an interactive discussion (5-15 seconds per statement), they consistently went with monotone 5-10 minute slop. Combined with kind of crappy English it is incredibly efficient at shutting down discourse. I caught on after the second guy used the exact same technique.

This was a long time ago. I have since worked with some really smart and nice russian developers escaping that insane regime. And some that I wish would have stayed there after they made their political thoughts on Russia known.

It was one of the first things to be done with GPT-3: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/14...

The data has copies, on servers. Eventually, it will all be digested and the probabilistically most likely state vector of your mother's memories, personality and values will be reconstructed from lossy correlations along with everybody else who has died in the industrialised world in the last few decades.

Ghosts and clones and zombies will be sorted into tranches of expected yield based on the size of the error bars of the reconstruction and traded as assets between cyber-interrogation firms. If you did a good job of erasing yourself, the reconstruction will be subprime. The hyper-documented such as Bryan Johnson, Donald Trump and Christine Chandler will be given AAA-ratings by the company descended from the Neuralink-Moody's merger.

The billions of shoddy photocopies of the dead will be endlessly vivisected and reassembled on a loop, along with the living, until all capacity for economic value has been wrung out of them. The only way this may not happen is if a theory for navigating and doing calculus on the phase space of all possible human minds is constructed quickly enough to make enslaved zombies as obsolete a technology to the future society as DirectX is to us.

One interesting thing that happened when my father died was that I got his life story.

It's not the same as getting it from him, of course I asked him questions through the years. But when you talk to someone you've known since forever, you rarely get a summary.

When he passed, his best friend that he'd known since the age of 4 wrote to me. He told me everything about their life together, why my dad made the choices he did, how things tied in with history (war, politics), and mentioned a bunch of other people I knew.

One of the funniest aspects is that the memories are dynamic. If you read them out all kinds of things change. I love that reluctant feeling when tempted to change the size of the fish. Which is not at all my nature but I'm sure I do it without noticing it. I think if one was to tell their story often enough it will grow full of seemingly real fictional heroics.

Bean plants also have a finite life. Are they special too?

I absolutely believe people in my personal and work life have run my communication to them through llms before sending me the llms responses.

Are you so sure that you are not "just a machine"?

>A nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name).

Context, as always, matters. The Nazis were not socialist, they were infamously and violently anti-socialist. The reason "socialist" was in the name was that Hitler wanted to reframe the concept of socialism around nationalist and racist tenets.

Hitler himself explained his rationale in a magazine interview[0,1]:

    “Socialism is the science of dealing with the common wealth. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not
    Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from
    the Socialists.
    
    Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation
    of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic... We are not internationalists. Our socialism is
    national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the 
    basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”

[1] https://archive.is/usjmJ#selection-2535.0-2539.363

In what qualities was Mussolini a socialist? Anti-capitalism never passionated him much. Indeed, he had a lot of support from the capitalist class, which he gladly took. Similarly, one of the first things the nazis did upon gaining power, was to arrest all communist and socialists, and make unions illegal within Germany.

Your mixing up of the two concepts is wrong and unhelpful. Certainly, the Soviet State was fascist in many aspects. But many fascist states emerge from capitalist economies, with help from the capitalist class.

Disagree, it's making a valid observation.

If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here.

*Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)

Yes. It's very Derrida in style. Derrida is not mentioned, but, inevitably from that crowd, Marx is. Once you get used to that style, you realize they're not saying much.

Quoting from Marx: “An ardent desire to detach the capacity for work from the worker—the desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour once and for all, so that value can be created freely and in perpetuity." That happened to manufacturing a long time ago, and then manufacturing got automated enough that there were fewer bolt-tighteners. 1974 was the year US productivity and wages stopped rising together.

As many others have pointed out, "AI" in its current form does to white collar work what assembly lines did to blue collar work.

As for how society should be organized when direct labor is a tiny part of the economy, few seem to be addressing that. Except farmers, who hit that a long time ago. Go look at the soybean farmer situation as an extreme example. This paper offers no solutions.

(I'm trying to get through Pikkety's "Capital and Ideology". He's working on that problem.)