More hairs from the great cham’s beard. A little more personal than usual this month. As usual, first couple of entries free, the rest for paying subscribers.
In the News…
You can get deepfake phone-calls from family members asking for money. | 38% of pre 2013 webpages have gone, replaced with AI-generated gunk (which is also filling up science journals) | Infrastructure projects now take five times longer to make than they did a hundred years ago. | All products (furniture, food, cars, online services, etc, etc.) are getting worse, smaller, shoddier, sometimes comically so (‘we have entered the enshittocene’). | A.I. is threatening to rewrite history. | Earth is now warmer than at any point in the last 11,700 years. | Want to be teacher? Get ready to be assaulted. | Students now find it too hard to think.1 | Children under the age of two spend an hour a day in front of their screens.2 | Need a decent new job? hahahaha! | Finding a landlord is easy though; four times more buy-to-let firms than fast-food shops are now registered at Companies House. | Microplastic accumulation in human brains is escalating. | Human intelligence is sharply declining (AI ‘makes human cognition atrophied and unprepared’). | Don’t have enough time to call your parents? Let AI do it for you! | Junk videos are filling up youtube (there’s one of David Attenborough reading a condensed précis of 33 Myths of the System) and junk AI books are filling up Amazon (who have also made it impossible to download e-books onto your computer and so can delete or edit your cloud-books as they like). | Your e-reader won’t show you what you want, your television won’t show you what you want, your printer won’t print and your crappy electric car won’t start, unless you’ve paid your bills… and perhaps not even then?
It doesn’t take much imagination to work out what the world will be like in five or ten years’ time. Until then, I suggest pulling a load of blankets over your head and whimpering in fear. Don’t radically act against or radically accept the world, because that might work.
DIY For Philosophers
