3/ The Cloud rules what appears, what is believed, feared, desired. It is a politico-theological apparatus, a throne of mediated worldhood where meaning's terms—what is real, grievable, sacred, expendable—are set not by what is written in the heart but by automated decree.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick, four pictured bodies; author of embedded backstage-fusion quotation not stated Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1868326077426504100 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @AnthonyEsolen If mascot names are your chilling gripe, have I got news for you. Enough has already been spoken about the economic logic of feeding the interneted attention span division and outrage, less about for-profit media ecology as an effectively diabolical claim upon the private soul. Retained uncertainty: [{"passage": "Quoted ‘the backstage fusion between human and machine authority…’", "reason": "Image and saved text address @johnrobb and @nils_gilman but do not name quotation’s author. Preserve as quotation shared by Nick, not assign either addressee as author."}]
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick, four pictured bodies; author of embedded backstage-fusion quotation not stated Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1954949754691236290 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": "Quoted ‘the backstage fusion between human and machine authority…’", "reason": "Image and saved text address @johnrobb and @nils_gilman but do not name quotation’s author. Preserve as quotation shared by Nick, not assign either addressee as author."}]
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