Good post. There is also the cult factor with the current AI/LLM euphoria in where Silicon Valley is selling their ML tech as an omnipresent god and everyone must bow to its superintelligence.

The second level is about attacking the idea of solidarity and connection: Because “AI” will not replace you (again, “AI” cannot replace the absolute majority of workers!) “but someone using AI will”. This sets up kind of a Thunderdome in which we all have to fight against each other for scraps/jobs. This framing implies that you should not unionize and connect with your fellow workers but that you should see them as your enemies, as the people who will take your job and your ability to provide for your family. We know this dynamic, it’s exactly how the right presents migration as “attack”. It also normalizes violence again turning all of existence into an endless fight against one another (unless you are one of the few people in power of course).

This is the latest attempt at socially engineering a cattle pen, atomize everyone into only trusting chatbots and you have a very malleable population.

Maybe MTG actually has some moral convictions that are leading to her breaking from the traditionalists on these issues

Other way around, she's breaking up with the NRX/dark enlightenment faction (the technologists) as the traditionalists don't want a surveillance state.

The goal seems to be oust Trump and replace him with JD Vance. I'll cheer this administration eating itself alive, but I will also call out this "maybe they're not so bad" complete horseshit narrative every time I see it.

This is absolutely what is happening, Trump is basically a figurehead who's beholden to a bunch of people unlike in 2016.

Really all what Trump needs to do is to keep the AI bubble afloat until next year, if it crashes before then his administration is toast.

They didn't, in their eyes all of this is "revenge" for for the 2020 riots and woke. That all being said, I do think the government is employing Strategy of Tension in order to make the masses screech for a surveillance state.

Few reasons why it became unpopular on a political level

• WEF types trying to shoehorn in their agendas and corrupting good ideas (walkable cities and sustainable food got turned into surveillance zones and eating the bugs)
• Oil industry propaganda (obvious)
• Boomers
• Megacorps using it as an excuse to snuff out smaller competitors.

If you want to save the planet you will have to start at the local level and practice regenerative agriculture.

Polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about.

Axe fossil fuel subsidies and replace them with green technologies like algae fuel grown with wastewater. So much of climate activism got pigeonholed into "just use an electric car bro" and trying to sustain pointless consumerism and terrible agriculture practices.

Agreed, if someone was really concerned about "protecting jobs" they'd arrest the farmers that hire and abuse migrants.

Bit controversial but honestly deserved, most of those farms are growing water intensive crops AND only hire migrants so they can blackmail them for terrible wages.

The people the paper talks about are the masses who think LLMs are "intelligent", then outsource their frontal lobe to Silicon Valley datacenters because it's seemingly easier. People who see LLMs as tools are much less (if at all) affected by this, if anything it's a trap for people who already have lower critical thinking skills in the first place and want GPUs to think for them.

Microsoft reported the same findings earlier this year, spooky to see a more academic institution report the same results. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf Abstract for those too lazy to click:

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices. We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so. Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.

Too little, too late.

Take with a grain of salt because the steam hardware survey has historically had sample size issues.

Raspberry Pis these days are overpriced, a cheaper mini PC/old Optiplex will do fine.