OpenAI / Stargate / Neo Fascism

[Andrew Reid]

An interesting watch today on the Tube...

A series of 3 videos that lifts the lid on today's world.

So in a nutshell...

A Neofascist tech oligarchy that has defeated the people (a democracy) and gained control of a country (the US), which has been possible due to the collapse of clueless neoliberalism, and now they have a neofascist-like grip over the government, placing themselves about the law, with a client media that isn't interested in reporting factual evidence any more.

Key takeaway from Gary... We are competing with the rich for space and basic resources like food and housing. They are now so rich, we can't compete for these things... And they are consuming everything...

(True, as anyone who has visited any major city will tell you).

... and this is leading to societal collapse. So to distract us from the real problem - the super rich and inequality - they are asking us to blame immigrants. He also says that they are encouraging a high level of uncontrolled immigration, to fan the flames even further.

So they have a paid-up client media to turn us against one-another, and then sell us the so-called "solution" back to us in the form of authoritarianism and mass-deportation.

An interesting take, which leads to the Ai business.

But first... take a look at Sabine's video, a scientist I respect a lot (Not least for her cutting sense of humour)...

As always she is 100% right.

The real problem with AI is not that one country or another is falling behind or failing to invest...

The real problem is that it is going to consolidate world domination levels of power and reliance into the hands of a few private wealthy individuals.

(Who have very questionable sociopathic and neofascist tendencies).

Ai filmmaking is all well and good... But it is yet another example of placing more and more power and money into the hands of a few private companies and individuals.

Nowhere has been better at doing this than the USA.

Which is why they now have a neofascist oligarchy in control of the government (and to a large extent the law), who have tricked nearly half of people into thinking they're on their side...

The 90s/00s political class has failed to do anything about this consolidation of power, and the massive inequality and inflation this has led to in our communities.

Of course being in Berlin, I have witnessed this rising tech-fascist inflation happening right before my very eyes where communities have had to give up massive amounts of property to corporate landlords, and seen the prices of basic commodities more than doubled.

We, us normal people...are being priced out of life.

So from the streets of Berlin... where an office in a co-working space now costs 3600 euros per month... to Microsoft and their spending 500 billion USD on a computer...

Just the latest example of massive consolidation of wealth, IP and power into the hands of the US tech oligarchs and monopoly powers.

Softbank, the Japanese company involved in the funding of this venture with Open Ai, Microsoft and Oracle, of course has taken one of the UK's most strategic and valuable tech assets away from us... ARM... Because our Neo Liberal government believe in a globalised free market and were too clueless to prevent it.

So the impoverished and increasingly "Butler style economy" UK with a government on the verge of bankruptcy, is firmly out of the picture when it comes to all this important technology and money splish-sploshing about... despite inventing a lot of the tech in the first place, through our world leading universities.

I think that rather than be angry at the state of our politics, inflation, property prices, and rapidly declining standards of living, and going out and voting for Trump and his rich cronies who are the source of the very problem...

Maybe people can wake up to the real news.

And at the very least start blaming the right people.

[Davide DB]

You may be interested to read this book

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691215730/as-gods-among-men

A sweeping narrative that shows how the rich historically justified themselves by helping their societies in times of crisis, why they no longer do, and what that may mean for social stability.

The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act ‘as gods among men’; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds—despite the different paths to wealth in different eras—fundamental continuities in the behaviour of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. His account offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity.

Alfani argues that the position of the rich and super-rich in Western society has always been intrinsically fragile; their very presence has inspired social unease. In the Middle Ages, an excessive accumulation of wealth was considered sinful; the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy. Eventually, the rich were deemed useful when they used their wealth to help their communities in times of crisis. Yet in the twenty-first century, Alfani points out, the rich and the super-rich—their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and COVID-19—have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis, rejecting even such stopgap measures as temporary tax increases.

History suggests that this is a troubling development—for the rich, and for everyone else.

 

 

 

 

[ND64]

12 hours ago, Davide DB said:

Yet in the twenty-first century, Alfani points out, the rich and the super-rich—their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and COVID-19—have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis

Because these rich kids are not the same rich kids you would find in 1500, and maybe the differentiator is financialization of the economy. You no longer need to own material things to be rich, you just need to manipulate the stock market, or recently, release a shitcoin! And obviously you can't compete with holders of meme-based capital, with your peasant-priced AI-replaceable talent. Material things could make a connection between rich and poor. The owner of the farm had to visit farmers to know how his asset is doing. In contrast to England, France was a place that this connection was weak, and we know what happened in 1789. In an over-financialized economy, there is no connection at all. So psychopathy in this system is not just a personal characteristic of individuals, but a requirement for joining the club. 

[Tim Sewell]

40 minutes ago, ND64 said:

So psychopathy in this system is not just a personal characteristic of individuals, but a requirement for joining the club. 

I was saying to my son today that it's pretty much impossible to become a billionaire if you're a decent person.

13 hours ago, Davide DB said:

History suggests that this is a troubling development—for the rich, and for everyone else.

I'm becoming convinced that we're nearing an inflection point and it's not going to be pretty. As another noted sage said, "They've got the guns, but we've got the numbers."