The End Is Nigh Student Special: "AI is a criminal industry, run by smiling gangsters who know they’re always going to get away with it"

Mark Zuckerberg stole two of my books, the scumbag, to train his shitty AI. Along with stealing hundreds of thousands of other books, of course. So, that makes it okay, I suppose.

Steal a book and they throw you in jail. Steal and entire library to train your insidious, crappy AI, and they roll out the red carpet for the sun god tech bro king.

This is the Hot Press Student Issue. You are about to embark on a year of reading, studying and learning. There is something I’d like to tell you before you begin.

AI is a criminal industry, run by smiling gangsters who know they’re always going to get away with it, because they’ve bought-off the politicians, and the judges, with some fast cash and a few points of GDP.

Aaron Swartz was a student idealist. He passionately believed that information should be freely available for everyone. Around the year 2010, he used a part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer system to download some academic articles from an online catalog – that’s how they spell it – called JSTOR, so as to freely distribute them.

It was illegal, according to copyright law, but neither MIT nor JSTOR were interested in pressing charges. The US government, on the other hand, threw the book at him, filed multiple charges, threatened to send him to prison for decades. Under relentless pressure from government goons, he died by suicide in 2013.

Your first lesson: there’s one law for the capitalists, and an entirely different law for anyone who might threaten the profits of the capitalists.
T

hat’s just how it is. And don’t expect it to get better any time soon.

A Poison Pill

Trump and the magas are not the first of their breed, just the worst. The gangsters and criminals are in power all over the world now, or as near as makes no difference.

And so we have entered, as will likely become impossible to deny sooner rather than later, one of the final chapters of the global Growth Death Cult that is determined to burn everything to the ground for nothing more than the twisted satisfaction afforded by power and greed.

I hate to say this to you now as you embark on academic life, but forewarned is forearmed: it is not a good time to be young.

The future is bright only in the sense that the temperature is rising, the fires are spreading – and are harder than ever to put out. Just look at those flames!

We can resist, though. We can refuse to buy into the whole lorryload of lies and dependencies pushed at us every day. And we can start to get ready for the apocalypse.

I am not joking. This civilization is going to collapse – and it will be a catastrophe like none other in history. Your role, if you embrace it, is to prepare for what comes next.

Where to start?

The first line of resistance right now must be against AI, this insidious, crappy technology that is designed from the ground up to entrap, debilitate, addict and then sell you.

Do not fall for its easy, slick promises of a pain-free journey through college where you can outsource your thinking to your friendly AI. This is a poison pill if there ever was one. AI is not your friend.

AI is a pimp, pusher and gangster that is out there in the marketplace peddling your data. It’s plan is to addict you and make you dependent on it. Do not fall into its trap.

The simplest way to resist is to not use it.

The next step is to delete as much of your data as possible.

While we’re here, it is also essential for you to think deeply about the data you create in the first place. Remember, the business model of Big Tech is to turn you into a data slave, to use your data against you, so that its advertisers and – increasingly – fascist politicians can thrive.

Post-Collapse Society

So, what does Zuck think of someone (him) stealing my books?

“Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter,”

Adi Robertson wrote for The Verge.

And she quoted him…

“I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this,” Zuckerberg said.

Steal one book and that’s saved you $30. Steal the contents of a million and it’s saved you $30million. But that’s just the physical books. Steal the rights to use a million and you can multiply that by 100, saving you $3billion. And of course, that’s just for openers. What about the newspapers, the websites, the magazines? What about the songs?

We have all known forever that Zuck is a scumbag with a domination fetish – he used to scream the ‘D’ word at the end of every meeting – who thinks we’re all “dumb fucks” for giving him our data. He’s a big cog in the Valley of Pimps and Pushers, where stealing our data and then selling it back to us, or better still selling it on to advertisers, is just how they do business.

People like Zuck and Musk are merely younger versions of Trump. And their rise has accellarated the imminent collapse of a depraved civilization that can only grow by devouring our environment and selling us lies.

Honestly – and I know this may be a hard lesson to take on board at the beginning of an academic year when hope is meant to be in the air – we need to start thinking seriously about what a post-collapse society will look like.

And these conversations must start among you and your friends and in your local community. Because there is zero chance that Irish or international political or business establishments will face up to this impending reality. They simply can’t, because it would mean dismantling the Growth Death Cul

Mark Zuckerberg

Concepts Around De-Growth

Do not fall for the fake renewables spiel, because it’s not an energy production problem we have; it’s an energy consumption problem. A massive, massive reduction in the use of energy and materials is required for any sort of liveable future.

So, it makes sense to explore concepts around de-growth: the obsession with economic growth is the core of the problem.
You can start by staying physically close to your friends and local community. Learn basic skills such as gardening, carpentry, knitting, etc. Grow your own herbs, vegetables, fruit. Try to be as self-sufficient as possible.

And remember that the most essential skills that helped humans survive through the toughest times were not fighting and killing and hate, but rather love, kindness, fairness and community spirit.
Good luck. I’m sorry to say that I think you’ll need it.