[mctaylor]

The fact that America has yet to figure out the importance of soft power (and TRUST in particular) in the AI/information age is mind boggling to me.

The CLOUD act, FISA rulings, the Snowden leaks, and now the aggressive tech oligarch push to weaponize the unholy combination of AI, MAGA, and social media algorithms in an absurd and patently obvious attempt to impose (or maintain?) "world domination" seems likely to cement their downfall.

"Authoritarian" China's low-cost and open source approach looks downright democratic by comparison.

It seems increasingly clear to me that AI is forcing a reckoning in terms of how we interpret authority and control in light of new ways that information is evolving. The old political labels seem grossly insufficient to describe the present reality and the ones whining about "democracy", "freedom", and "liberal values" increasingly sound (and act) like bitter, out of touch old men desperately clinging onto a world that is rapidly outgrowing them.

Last time I checked, the closest approximation of liberal values are "liberty, equality, fraternity". They seem to think that "liberty" should only apply to them, "equality" is a threat to their consolidated power, and "fraternity" is something that should be weaponized to turn communities against one another to distract from the ways the oligarchs have been and continue to abuse and consolidate their power.