“… She’s a weapon.”

Ignore Rotten Tomatoes. Despite the insufficiently-dissolved moral core (and attendant Cartesian metaphysics), this movie is mind-woundingly great. Its visualization of the near future is unmatched. Scarlett Johansson’s body disintegrates perfectly.

“How do you know what’s glitch, and what’s me?”

This paleo-reactionary outline and critique of Moldbug is superbly done, if (of course) fundamentally unconvincing to those of a Tech-Comm persuasion. In particular, it’s hard to imagine a more incisive series of feature-not-bug points than this one:

That, then, covers the main aspects and positive sides of Moldbug’s thought. But now it is time to point out his many shortcomings. […] All of them ultimately flow from three things: 1) his “reservationist epistemology” which denies a place for sources of knowledge outside of “irreducible and untranscendable reason,” 2) his Bodinian (and ultimately Roman) conception of sovereignty, and 3) his Machiavellianism and frequent resort to raison d’etat.

If the conclusion drawn is that Moldbug — all royalist trolling aside — is in fact a consistent Cold Modernist, clarification is served.

Neoliberalism pic.twitter.com/DM1jku8wsT

— John Robb (@johnrobb) April 21, 2017

Cynical insight from Spandrell:

… nobody cares about the public purse. It’s public.

Does ethnomasochism get any more abject than this?

The foreigners will teach us how, in their long journey, they see the horrendous politics of our country and how they will participate in changing it; and we will teach foreigners how we have tried for a long time to change it, this politics, and how we see their essential place in the future of the struggle.

That’s from communist pop star Alain Badiou. The entire piece is a philosophico-political clown show. Luckily it’s French, so it’s not really our problem.

BREAKING: North Korea's vice foreign minister says President Trump is "making trouble" with "aggressive" tweets.

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 14, 2017

This is where we are now.

"The goal of this demo was to show that building a Twitter replacement actually isn't that hard at all …

— urbit (@urbit_) April 12, 2017

If Web 2.0 is already bringing everything crashing down, Web 3.0 is going to finish the job.

I’d call it the Xenosystems Scenario, but it’s apparently already taken:

The architect of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee today talked about some of his concerns for the internet over the coming years, including a nightmarish scenario where artificial intelligence (AI) could become the new ‘masters of the universe’ by creating and running their own companies. …

Hard for me to imagine how this could possibly not happen.

If you’re comfortable translating the ruthless pursuit of excellence as ‘greed’, I guess this counts as trying.

(I’m qabbalistically joined at the hip with Ayn Rand, so objectivism on the topic is beyond my reach.)

In the near future, neural networks will be able to synthesize any number of tragic pictures as a pretext for any number of proxy wars

— Hey, I'm Wonka Here! (@niftierideology) April 7, 2017

This is true, and worth more thought than it’s received so far.