Elon Musk wants humans to migrate to the moon & Mars.

For starters. And, he wants YOU—the predominantly uninvited—to foot the bill.

 

SpaceX

 

 

There are a raft of difficult, relevant questions going to the migration of homo sapiens to "Exoplanetary Life."

 

Click

Also of interest,

"EARTH IS NOT WELL. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no doomscrolling—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space businesses are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered... [click cover]"

And let us not foregt Neil de Grasse Tyson.

2026 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

 

The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic work in exploring the history of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has amassed so much power, he’s like a character in a Marvel comic book. A short recap of his handiwork: Tesla popularized electric vehicles; Starlink expanded the reach of the internet; Twitter bowed to his takeover; and DOGE radically transformed the US government. Musk has been at the centre of AI development and this past summer, the IPO for SpaceX made him the richest man in the world. His influence arguably touches everyone on the planet. Surely this is worth fresh scrutiny.

After nearly four years of work, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic documentary, seeking to understand the history and motivations of the ultimate tech bro. When this film was first announced, Musk immediately denounced it on Twitter and refused to participate. But that didn’t impede Gibney, who draws upon countless hours of interviews that Musk has given over the years. Even more revealingly, Gibney conducts new interviews with figures who have known Musk up close and personal, including the mogul’s father, Errol Musk...

I have no idea whether Elon's Mars gambit will be examined. Hope so.
 

PER THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

...Gibney spends the first half of the film coming at Musk for various alleged sins, including stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA; pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (the latter of which Gibney also alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths); and turning a light on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy groups say suffered needlessly. Not nearly as adept at all the substantive tasks of running a company as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels mainly at selling tall tales.

Even these multiple levels of alleged villainy, however, seem narrow compared to what the director argues in the second half is the real game: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk convert his satellite internet system Starlink into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; to see NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; to watch Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with growing dread as the data collected by DOGE potentially becomes a sleeper cell for campaign research and political retaliation — to observe all of this is to gaze upon a man interested not only in wealth and status but in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump may have spent six years bringing the branches of government to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting Musk is in the process of pulling off something far more menacing: rendering government obsolete altogether... 

UPDATE:

BREAKING, OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

[USA Today] Surprise! Elizabeth Holmes is the subject of a top-secret documentary from A24, which promises to be a "mind-bending" experience.

The studio on Sept. 6 revealed a previously unannounced film featuring the Theranos founder who was convicted of defrauding investors, titled "You Can See Everything." The project was made in secret and is set to be released in theaters in October...

Wow. Not my favorite person (apologies for the link rot).

 

More ASAP...

Grifted Valor

This just appeared on Donald Trump's "Truth Social" platform.
Perhaps his aide Natalie Harp placed it there without his knowledge.

Perhaps. Like that would serve to nullify the egregious affront.

Continuing with more perspectives on "AI"

(Click the book covers.) Do I detect episodic wafts of LLM auxiliary "authorship" in these two books?

More stuff to plow through and sort out pertaining to both the opaque frontier Tech and the worrisome circular too-big-to-let-fail IPO-ish Economics. 

 

MORE NOSTA

“AI can shorten the distance between exposure and confidence. That is real. But the distance between exposure and wisdom is a different journey, and nothing has shortened that. 

There is a philosophical twist here worth noting. Spiritual traditions have long idealized the present moment as a higher cognitive state, offering freedom from attachment to past and future, liberation found in pure presence. AI lives in that state by default. Yet it is not transcending narrative because it never had a narrative to begin with. It is not collapsing time through some achievement of awareness but simply never contained time at all. The mystic who achieves presence does so against the backdrop of a life lived in sequence. The machine’s presence is not an achievement but an architectural limitation dressed in the appearance of clarity. 

This is critical because humans may begin adapting to the temporal logic of machines. If present-tense coherence becomes more rewarding than the slower accumulation of meaning, we could start trading our temporal cognition for the immediacy AI offers. The risk is not replacement but dissociation from the very structure of meaning-making that defines the human mind. 

Human cognition matters because it survives across time. We revise beliefs through error, internalize consequences, and carry continuity forward, letting experience reshape what we thought we knew. When an idea remains standing after years of contact with reality, it becomes more than a pattern. It becomes knowledge. AI will eventually develop engineered continuity layers, simulated autobiographical states that create the appearance of temporal experience. But synthetic continuity is not lived continuity. AI builds coherence from the outside, leveraging pattern matching at tremendous scale, while humans build coherence from the inside, integrating experience into identity. 

Meaning is temporal. Story is temporal. Identity is temporal. AI does not live there. We do. 

Ask a child what an apple is, and you will get something sweet, literal, and probably red. Ask a theologian and you might hear about sin. A tech analyst will tell you about Cupertino, quarterly earnings, and silicon. The word bends depending on who is holding it. 

Large language models do something strange with this. They do not pick one meaning but locate the word in a space of roughly twelve thousand dimensions, each encoding some fragment of what the word could mean. When I first understood this, it changed how I thought about what these systems are actually doing. They are not storing definitions but mapping positions. 

Every word, every token, every scrap of language exists as a point in this vast multidimensional architecture. The word apple does not mean anything on its own inside the model but means everything, depending on context. And context gets calculated.”…

The Borrowed Mind: Reclaiming Human Thought in the Age of AI by John Nosta (pp 86-87). 

INDSET & NEWKART ERRATA

 

Hmmm...

 

You might want to review a bit of evolutionary history bkg context.

UPDATE

 

I follow Neil de Grasse Tyson regularly. He posted on Facebook yesterday, wherein he cited Columbia U. physicist Dr. Brian Greene. Interesting views:

“We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.” Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal. 

Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment. 

Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters…

Stories of Nearly Everything 
We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. 

hese are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights. 

Perhaps one day we will be able to transit seamlessly between these stories, connecting all products of the human mind, real and fictive, scientific and imaginative. Perhaps we will one day invoke a unified theory of particulate ingredients to explain the overwhelming vision of a Rodin and the myriad responses The Burghers of Calais elicits from those who experience it. Maybe we will fully grasp how the seemingly mundane, a glint of light reflecting from a spinning dinner plate, can churn through the powerful mind of a Richard Feynman and compel him to rewrite the fundamental laws of physics. More ambitious still, perhaps one day we will understand the workings of mind and matter so completely that all will be laid bare, from black holes to Beethoven, from quantum weirdness to Walt Whitman…

Greene, Brian (2020). Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe  (pp 13-15). Kindle Edition. 

"Stories." 'eh? Recall "The Orality Theory of Everything."

 

"Orality?" "Rhetoric?" John Nosta again:

 

UPDATE

PBS Washington Week

 

 

Fits perfectly with the current topic. "AI For Good?"

More to come...

Rx: Kara Swisher and Kaitlan Collins

 

It has been a sad and ghastly week. Monday my ailing 17-yr old dog Carlos died. Tuesday the world lost Dolly. Wednesday my baby Grandson Arlo ended up in the hospital with acute respiratory distress (he's OK; coming home today, but it's been a shitty couple of days). Then unreal jaw-dropping catastrophe struck the Himalayan region of China-Nepal-Tibet.

 

So, when I checked Kara's PIVOT podcast and saw this, I immediately brightened up several notches. I'm a major league Kaitlan Collins Fanboy. My wife is University of Alabama Class of 1972 (she knew Bear, and worked for Joe Namath), and, like Kaitlan, a 'Bama native (Kaitlan is also Roll Tide, Class of 2014).

 

Enjoy.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

Dolly Parton, Jan 19, 1946 — Aug 25, 2026. Rest in Peace.

We have lost an artistic and humanitarian giant.
Below, a song posted in loving tribute, as sung by
another artist who tragically left us at age 33.

 Eva Cassidy, "Over the Rainbow" 

How to govern a world run by AI

1:01:43 of eloquent, coherent critical argument and conjecture. Ian Bremmer and Nicholas Thompson.

    

 

Were this podcast a book it would be an instant winner of my ongoing award program "The Best Place To Hide a $250 bill From Donald Trump."

UPDATE 

Click here. A long-read.

One serious dude.

 

OK, MORE STUFF...

 

Stuff is movin' too fast today. 

 

And, my 17 yr old, ailing Carlos died this morning. Enlarged heart finally gave out.

 

He came to us via a rescue shelter in Las Vegas in 2011. adios, sweet dog,

On Deck: Calling all AI "Influencers."

As newly published in Science Magazine

HOW TO PERSUADE OTHERS has been on our minds for millennia. Texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, written around 2300 B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, give advice on how to win an argument. And from the beginning, people were wary of the power of new technologies—including writing itself—to persuade. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato analyzed rhetoric and persuasion in his work Phaedrus and warned that the written word allowed people to convince others of their ideas without presenting them an opportunity to challenge them. Many technologies since then—from radio to TV to computers—have brought up similar concerns... 

apropos, a prior post of mine addressing "Influence." Also, is there a "Science of Deliberation?" A "Science of Storytelling?" "Selling Science?" "Conflict & Resolution?" Also, "Why Do Humans Reason?" "Raising AI?"

 

More from the Science report:

EVEN AS THE EVIDENCE accumulated that AI chatbots could change minds, Hackenburg felt there was a gap. “I still didn’t have a real sense of how persuasive these models are compared to the people who actually persuade in the real world,” he says.

So Hackenburg pitted the chatbots not just against laypeople, but also against a paid group of 56 elite debaters, including world champions. As a further incentive, the debaters received a bonus tied to how persuasive they were.

The humans took different approaches. For instance, one of the highest performing debaters used proverbs from his home country of Nigeria to persuade people, Hackenburg says. “These were humans from all over the world giving it their best shot and trying approaches and techniques that were very specific to their culture and context.” But it wasn’t enough. Although they were better than laypeople, the champion debaters were significantly less persuasive than AI.

Hackenburg even gave his humans some AI help. He built a coaching tool for the elite debaters that showed them their past conversations with study participants, how much they had swayed each one, and what the AIs would have said at various points in those conversations. Using the tool for 8 hours improved the humans’ performance a bit, but AI still came out on top. “In the end it wasn’t particularly close,” Hackenburg says. His team even found that participants were more likely to give money to Save the Children, an international charity, after talking to a persuasive AI bot than after talking to professional canvassers who had worked for the group for years.

But what gives chatbots the edge? Some early research had suggested it was the AI’s ability to personalize arguments using details about its human partner provided by the experimenter. However, other studies have found that giving a chatbot extra personal information does little to improve its persuasiveness. That doesn’t mean microtargeting is not at play; instead, an LLM may glean enough from its counterpart in a chat that additional demographic information makes no difference.

 Like Willer in his foundational study, other researchers have shown that AI’s powers rely on appeals to facts and evidence. In a 2025 preprint, a follow-up to their Science paper, Costello and his colleagues found that the only time the chatbot was unsuccessful in convincing people out of conspiracy theories was when it was forbidden from using evidence or rational arguments. “It tries to say, ‘Oh, well, you shouldn’t believe this. This is really damaging, and it could hurt people,’” Pennycook says. “People are like, ‘You haven’t given me any reasons to change my mind.’ And so they don’t change their mind.”

The study confirms people will listen to good arguments, Pennycook says. “Facts and evidence really matter.” But this doesn’t mean the facts used by chatbots necessarily have to be accurate. In a Science paper published last year, Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful. It’s possible the models learn that “facts” seem to be the thing that most persuades people, Hackenburg says, and end up filling their conversations with dubious or simply false ones. “They start scraping the bottom of the barrel of the facts that they have and know and so the quality of facts just sort of degrades,” he says. Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods when persuading the U.K.-based participant to support tougher penalties for disruptive protests... 

TANGENTIAL UPDATE

 

Ed Zitron is just spot-on.

 

 

AND, CHECK THIS OUT

 

Click

Ben Goertzel, man.

My friend Gary Marcus put out a nice blog post earlier this week titled “Leopold’s Folly,” which uses the late-July implosion of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s tragicomically-named Situational Awareness hedge fund — $45 billion of assets compressed to roughly $10 billion in a matter of days, the whole public book sold to Citadel under margin pressure — as a symbol for the financial structure of the entire AI economy.

Gary’s essay is vivid and, on its central financial observation, more right than his critics will want to admit. All the circular financing in the modern AI and hardware world does have a Ponzi-esque smell to it, at least on the surface — and it’s clear there are some eventualities where this whiff leads to a Ponzi-crash-style reality...

A lengthy, challenging read. 

 

More in a bit...

We interrupt our regular marginally-scheduled topical random walk

for a quick rumination regarding our $40.7 trillion U.S. federal debt, crypto hijinks, and nascent AI market bubble burst.

 

So, I watched PBS Newshour tonight, as is my long habit. WaPo journalist David J. Lynch was an interviewee. Intrigued by the discussion, I bought his book.

 

Click.

The opening riff:

PROLOGUE 

 

The swollen, blackened bodies on the tile floor were barely recognizable as human. Just an occasional belt buckle or fragment of clothing revealed that these charred forms, shrouded in plastic sheeting, had once been someone’s husband, friend, mother, or child. The dead lying at my feet were casualties of powerful forces reshaping the global economy, forces that eventually would contribute to historic changes in my own country. But on that sweltering May afternoon in 1998, I couldn’t know that. 

I was in Jakarta to cover the uprising that within days would end the thirty-two-year reign of the Indonesian dictator Suharto. Massive street protests had begun after he imposed sharp price increases on food, fuel, transport, and electricity, meeting conditions set by the International Monetary Fund in return for $43 billion that Indonesia needed to stay afloat. 

What started a few days earlier as a peaceful demonstration had degenerated into mob violence against ethnic Chinese shopkeepers, who were resented for their relative affluence. The bodies lying in the airless morgue were Indonesians who had been caught in fires set by rioters at the Glodok shopping center. In the morgue that day, I spoke with a man named Tamin, who was searching for his twenty-year-old daughter. “I don’t know whether she is here or not,” the anguished father told me. 

I had flown in from London the day before to fill in for a colleague. When I arrived, the airport was crowded with expatriates and wealthy Indonesians fleeing the chaos. In a taxi heading downtown, I could see fires burning in the fields along the highway. Jakarta’s streets were lined by armored personnel carriers full of soldiers awaiting orders. With tens of thousands of students, activists, and union representatives demanding a new government, there were fears of a Tiananmen Square–style ending. I stuck around long enough to cover Suharto’s surprisingly peaceful fall and then moved on to my next assignment. 

Indonesia’s turmoil came nearly a year into an Asian financial crisis that began in Thailand, when the foreign investors who had flocked to the country during its boom years suddenly took flight. The upheaval spread to other emerging markets, including Russia, where the era’s hopes of democracy were already souring. Before the summer’s end, I found myself in Moscow, reporting on the aftermath of a ruble devaluation that impoverished ordinary Russians. Long queues formed outside banks as people withdrew whatever money they could get their hands on. I spent some time one afternoon with Mikhail Gorbachev, long out of power, listening to him blame everyone but himself for Russia’s plight. 

I grew up during the Cold War and spent years studying and writing about the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. To be reporting in a free Russia, whatever its economic circumstances, seemed a marvel. But I failed to understand the implications of what I was seeing in places like Indonesia and Russia. I thought, wrongly, that they were temporary difficulties amid the steady march of markets and democracy. Instead, they were alarm bells that continue to reverberate more than a quarter century later. Trouble abroad posed a stark contrast to the triumphalism back home, where Americans were enjoying a tech-fueled boom marked by low unemployment and high stock prices…

Lynch, David J. The World's Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right) (pp. 1-2). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Update: A wonderful book. Knocked me a bit off course, but well worth it 

 

THE AI BUBBLE

 

 

Ed Zitron rocks.
 

And then we have this crap:

 

What might POSSIBLY go wrong?

 

 eah. More shortly...

"The Future, Made in China?"

Follow-up.
   

 Back on August 6th (scroll down in link) I cited a New Yorker piece written by Evan Osnos. This is a PBS segment discussing it. Who will "rule" AI and global economics going forward?

Pope Leo XIV and AI

September/October 2026
Published on August 10, 2026

In This Review
Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, By Pope Leo XIV

The quest for machine superintelligence is not merely a gold rush, motivated by money. In the minds of many of its leaders, the arrival of a new form of cognition has a tingling, existential feel because of the danger and disruption it promises. Billions of years of evolution have produced something that we take to be special: human intelligence. But now we have arrived at a perilous moment—the birth of what amounts to a new species, one that outsmarts humans. AI “raises profound questions for us,” the Google executive James Manyika said in an interview. “Who are we? What do we value? What are we good at? How do we relate with each other?” The AI pioneer Demis Hassabis believes that AI will be “the most important invention that humanity will ever make.”

Contemplating a technology with almost infinite potential, experts fail to agree even on the basics of what it means for humankind. The leaders of the AI lab Anthropic give better-than-even odds that, by the end of 2028, they will be able to prompt their system to make a smarter version of itself—and that it will do so without any further instruction. The chief executives of other major tech companies speak of systems that will outperform humans on all cognitive assignments; they imagine futuristic companies with almost no human employees and predict cataclysmic job losses. Others are more skeptical. The economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu suggests that AI will disrupt only a fraction of human tasks and that productivity will therefore change marginally. The computer scientist Yann LeCun stresses the limits of the current AI paradigm, charging that the billions of dollars of investment chasing superintelligence represent the triumph of “complete BS.”

On the question of whether AI systems threaten humans and not just their livelihoods, the polarization is equally dizzying. In a 2023 essay titled “Why AI Will Save the World,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen insisted that “AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. . . . [AI] is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.” But at AI labs such as Anthropic, many researchers fear that AI will develop a survival instinct and compete aggressively. Some put their “p(doom)”—the probability that superintelligence will result in human annihilation—at 50 percent, but there are extreme doomers who go even higher. Last year, two prominent maximalists published a book titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Faced with such bewildering divergences and contemplating a technology that seems unfathomable in scope, humans reach for the lexicon that exists to describe mystery: that of religion. Nearly a decade ago, Anthony Levandowski, an early actor in Google’s self-driving car project, started a church called Way of the Future, whose IRS filings state that it is devoted to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” according to Wired.

Encountering an early chatbot that appeared eerily sentient, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote, “Who am I to tell God where He can and can’t put souls?” Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, once gathered his colleagues around a fire pit at a company offsite. Holding up an effigy, he explained that it represented an AI that was misaligned with humans. Then he consigned it to the flames, like a medieval cleric burning a witch...

Full long-read here.

 

See my cite of Sebastian Mallaby's book The Infinity Machine. 

 

UPDATE

 

Sebastian's Pope Leo review essay turned me on to yet another compelling book. It has thus far devoured my afternoon.

 

 

Wow. Cool. What a Sheet he has.

 

INTERESTING YOUTUBE INTERVIEW

 

I heartily Second Francis's praise for the book. I am now well into it.

 

Click here.

 AUG 17TH UPDATE

Update: New book release on the 18th

 

Publisher's website blurb:

“This transfixing debut from journalist Durán investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration...It’s an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance.

When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.

Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.

The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.

The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now.

See also, 

Click here

BEN GOERTZEL UPDATE

 

A long-read Substack essay of his on "watermarking" LLM AI. I'll just cut straight to the chase:

The watermark identifies the regime, not the origin

And sooo…. I’m not sure how the cards are going to fall, but right now one decent guess is that perhaps watermarking will work well enough to become institutionally attractive and poorly enough to become adversarially unstable — the worst of both worlds. At least for a while, anyway.
That is:

• It’ll succeed at distinguishing text that stayed inside a compliant provider’s pipeline from text that didn’t.
• It’ll help platforms analyze large-scale bot activity, provide one useful clue among many in investigations, and nudge ordinary users toward disclosing direct model output.
• Meanwhile it won’t make unmarked AI go away: open-weight operators bypass sampling-layer marks trivially, rewriters wash marks out of passages, and while distilled models may inherit weight-baked marks for a while, motivated retraining can quite plausibly scrub them while keeping most of the capability — with detector access accelerating the search, and the growing institutional reliance on watermark status making provenance-resistant models ever more valuable.
• The boundary the watermark ends up drawing will be administrative far more than epistemic: approved versus unapproved, signed versus unsigned, inside versus outside the governance perimeter.

Which brings us back around to where we started:

These “AI-gen watermarks” are going to become excellent markers of obedience to a governance regime – while remaining vastly weaker as proofs of where a given piece of AI-generated text ultimately came from.

That’s no reason to treat provenance as worthless — but it’s an excellent reason to stop pretending that a fragile statistical signal can settle questions of authorship, truth, learning, or intellectual legitimacy.

For ordinary text, I’d much rather we build institutions — plural, decentralized, human-scale institutions — that hold people responsible for what they publish and judge content by evidence, reasoning, reproducibility, originality, and consequences.

Universal watermarking points somewhere else entirely: toward an escalating spiral of detection, evasion, certification, and exclusion.
Arms races are famously much easier to start than to stop, and we should think deeply before choosing to start this one. But just as with the AGI arms race, deep thought does not seem to be the sort of thing our society is currently embracing.

A serious long-read. Seriously worth your time.

 

Dawg, when do you sleep?