RT @nick_routledge: @Watson_School @CostsOfWar Benjamin knew. Authoritarian 'storms' aren't accidental as much as constitutive to 'progress' itself—the logical culmination of a system fusing profit with techno-modern governance. In an AI-supercharged growth economy, sacrificing the public at scale was baked in from the start.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1950560649274159500 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @lukeburgis 9/ This isn't capitalism supporting war. It's capitalism generating war. Algorithms don't just mediate rivalry—feeding on desire, they _incite_ it. The sacrificial mechanism runs on autopilot, scaling contagion far beyond human capabilities and comprehension. t.co/F4dZzCasu9 Retained uncertainty: [{"passage": "Embedded backstage-fusion quotation", "reason": "No author credit in image or exact saved source; @johnrobb/@nils_gilman are addressees, not established quotation authors. Same attribution boundary as89."}]
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; three nested bodies plus embedded backstage-fusion quotation Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1951384372046864437 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. 23/ Indeed, the breadth of AI’s epistemic capture now runs far beyond nuclear or even military categories, braiding civilian and commercial streams into a mediated picture "shaping what's real" that destabilizes the center long before anything even nears a nuclear launch circuit. And, sadly, child's play relative to, say, the massive acceleration of vast, machine-driven resources of dominative structures of power and consciousness deliberately shaping universal attention span in their psychotic image. A World War, suddenly centered upon perception itself. Bingo. *Choice* excerpt, Nils. Peculiar, isn't it, the evolutionary ontology of a noospheric, algorithmically-supercharged claim upon the private soul, and the planetary harvest of consequence, consciousness and disclosure it radically enhances, remaining, as a rule, unobserved. "World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between civilian and military participation." That's Marshall McCluhan headlining a 2017 Atlantic Council report on the radically enhanced capabilities of AI-driven computational-propaganda for mind manipulation. Nick Routledge 3/ Martin Gurri: “That was me at the global media analysis section of CIA...And I was not alone. A group of us were obsessed with the same drama...We all asked the same question: Why? What does information technology have to do with politics?” Yup. Take exponentially augmented upgrades in persuasive generative AI and the tools to massively amplify it, add bad faith state and tech actors with untold resources on tap, and manipulative media abruptly crosses an authoritarian threshold at the planetary level. Then again… @nick_routledge "...the backstage fusion between human and machine authority....modes of governance normalised by digital platforms...algorithmic level of governance as an increasingly key field of political struggle...digital post-democracy...‘swarm governance’..." 1/ Why stop at polls? With the fusion of military and corporate functions in a single, conjoined mediasphere, vast resources - increasingly, at a machine level - aimed at dominating perception of reality itself, now define planetary war at the level of total consciousness. Retained uncertainty: [{"passage": "Embedded backstage-fusion quotation", "reason": "No author credit in image or exact saved source; @johnrobb/@nils_gilman are addressees, not established quotation authors. Same attribution boundary as89."}]
Open original document@lukeburgis 13/ This is the terror and the Good News. The system will not fix itself. It will be torn like the temple veil. The messianic comes not to negotiate, but to rupture. The algorithm that surveils will herald. It will announce what it cannot contain: the Lamb it meant to kill.
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Copy of tweet here: What if a war on perception itself - so totalizing in its epistemic, full-spectrum claim upon the private soul that we barely recognize an essentially diabolical assault for the peak deception it signifies - is, oddly, similarly vulnerable to a larger, 'invisible' susceptibility? 2/ But what if the very same computer-mediated reality and force now being wantonly employed by global authoritarianism to slay entire social networks and populations and their dependent structures of consciousness and power, isn't as much a peerless as peer-to-peer capability? I once ran into @pmarca hawking a pre-release of Netscape Navigator 1.0. Already, my team had run the first WWW pipe into the U.S. Congress, on Mosaic. Then, as now, as always, if you can't see the paradigm for the trees for the point of it all, your dominative days are numbered.