Everything is collective make-believe

Probably the most embarrassing cultural trait inculcated in Tech is the feigned lack of understanding of potential harms of technology because understanding them would require being morally responsible for them and would thus deflate the hype make-believe buy-in among the developers of said tech.

A genuinely alarming piece in the NYT about how the developers, scientists and assorted techbros behind "AI companions"/"synthetic care" do not even know or understand the potential harms of the tech they're developing but they're too greedy to stop themselves from developing it.

Can’t find the sign to tap, but it bears repeating that, minus the one you’re on, every big social media site in the US is run by a defense contractor or intelligence partner.

Performance of collective belief to invite their community into suspending disbelief and participating with them.

A few word on why the "OpenClaw" thing pisses me off. It's not that "it's AI": It is how that kind of project invalidates decades of work and care in free software. "AI" software isn't just careless, it is actively rejecting responsibility. https://tante.cc/2026/02/14/diffusion-of-responsibility/

All of those esoteric questions about how we define consciousness are fine and interesting, but the tech companies are not pushing those questions as part of a quest to advance understanding. They want us believing they're making something powerful that we must accede our agency to.

I'm pretty sure I know. They aren't. We're not going to really be able to make a lot of progress in dealing with the implications of this tech unless and until we get rid of all this "woo-woo" talk about LLMs. Anthropic pushing this line is PR, unserious.

I do not go on social media to “convince” people of “things”. I go on social media to shitpost about the things that are currently hurting my brain in the wrong way because I have a mental illness and we’ve invented the socially acceptable distribution system for collective mental illnesses.

Starting a discourse that the “don’t be mean to bots” folks need to square that position with the fact that reinforcement learning when done to sentient creatures is literally torture

Does your employer have contracts with ICE? Is your workplace unprepared if ICE shows up on site? If the answer is yes to any of those questions, we can help you organize your co-workers to fight back. 🧵

Tech is a culture

Facebook plans to put facial recognition in its glasses and they think we’re too stupid to fight back. Their internal memo: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

I have written a brief response to it, where I argue that stylistics has become the primary medium through which readers conduct what I call "folk forensics" and renegotiate meaning and judgment under persistent uncertainty about textual origins. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I’m currently writing a book about the attempted Nazi demonstration in Skokie in 1977. This is indistinguishable from how American Nazis talked in public.

"Surveys have found that nineteen percent of 18-to-24-year-olds qualify as problem gamblers, and thirty-seven percent of Gen Z gamblers self-report as having an addiction. A 2025 Siena poll found that forty-eight percent of all men aged 18-49 have an active online sports betting account."

It’s not snark. I say a lot of stuff that intentionally blurs the line between seriousness and unseriousness as a performance of thought that helps me, and maybe others, break out of pre-conceived distinctions. I mean it and I don’t mean it at the same time. The tension is generative for me.

We need an arms race to ensure that nuclear weapons benefit everyone

Earlier this week @pbaskar.bsky.social quoted me in this excellent piece about how extremists around the world use platforms like Roblox & Minecraft to recruit children. Please read & share—especially with parents of young children. Gift link! ⤵️

Collective make-believe is going to get us all killed

When people argue “the hype is real”, the ‘hype’ in that rhetorical statement doesn’t refer to any specific one of the multiple distinct ‘hypes’ that are being circulated in the discourse at any given time. The ‘hype’ is simply the suspension of disbelief that there is something to believe in.

Watching the reaction to the end of GPT-4o, the last thing I’ll say before I shut down this account, is that SV built the most effective and _well-documented_ project to manipulate behavior at scale and when you point that out to ppl in tech, they cry it couldn’t possibly influence *their* behavior.

Almost all people in power are writing dangerously unhinged and ridiculous fictions.

So Moltbook was human-orchestrated performance art. This is exactly the sort of thing you would expect when a bunch of people want to believe in a shared collective delusion and engage in performing the belief publicly as a means of convincing other people to suspend their disbelief.

Google are *proactively* supporting ICE by voluntarily providing data without legal requirement to do so. Look at this list: "Google also turned over Thomas-Johnson’s IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers linked to his account." 🧵

If you can get enough people to pretend that human life and human death are not real and do not matter, you can get them to pretend anything.

it's deeply funny how maintaining the belief in fascism requires hiding any contrary information, and how every institution has to abase itself toward that end.

Lol, the bluesky "Reactivate my account" feature apparently stopped working, so that was a nice break.

they fired everybody who knows that Puerto Ricans are American

Having successfully completed his mission of turning the Washington Post into a conservative opinion-first megaphone for Jeff Bezos, Will Lewis is moving on.

So, the March for Life appears to have brought Measles to DC. www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/...

Computer touchers learn what consent is challenge: impossible

I just block them. What I’m actually complaining about is that there is a dev community here who likes the LLM bots and likes making them and are proud that they have dark forest trolled up the place, and some of them are deeply enmeshed in the atproto dev community.

Big day for being inundated with new bot followers and unsolicited harassment by LLM bots in my replies.

They’re called “Takes” because they take possession of your soul, like the demons of old.

reminded that hamish mcsubstack's 2023 explanation of why he takes nazi money is: "Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse.." This is false. Like it's false false. Very false.

how do you write this story without noting there was a campaign literally called SUBSTACKERS AGAINST NAZIS in…2023

at this point when someone gets on substack I just assume that they know and don't care.

sorry what's this about marc andreessen giving the nsa a way to eavesdrop on skype in the epstein files

There is a radical politics of laying down to die that has dressed itself up as revolutionary action, and which seeks the disintegration of any form of organization that is not equally revolutionary in its aims.

In a new report, PEN America said the federal government has emerged in 2025 as the newest force fueling campaigns to restrict materials related to race, racism and LGBTQ+ issues.

one of the greatest human triumphs of my lifetime is the relentless, unceasing, heroic effort by DECADES' worth of doctors and scientists to find a cure for a disease much of the world didn't take seriously for years because it predominantly affected a community they thought kinda deserved it

we really need to talk about how AI is being used to provide cover for government policy based on deadly misinformation — and how every one of us who writes about AI in health, but doesn't center that fact, is lending credence to the enterprise.

minor point of order since it keeps coming up, it's "Woke 2" and not "Woke 2.0". we're leaving tech industry bullshit behind too

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

NEW: lawmakers in new york rolled out a proposed data center moratorium bill today, making NY at least the sixth state to introduce legislation pausing data center development in the past few *weeks*:

BREAKING NEWS: ELON MUSK TO FOCUS ON MARSHMALLOW FARM INSTEAD OF GUMDROP CITY www.wsj.com/science/spac...

Moral crumple society

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but “Butlerian Jihad” is a reference to Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and not a reference to the actual Taliban

If you're building a startup in 2026, you are expected to work with the world's largest venture capital firm (which is not even really a VC firm), where one partner strangled my neighbor to death for being Black, and another actively sought Jeffrey Epstein's counsel for years. This is *normal*.