Outrage marketing strikes again!

Media conglomerates are deliberately rage baiting audiences in order to generate social media traction and raise their corporate cinema slop to the top of the algorithm.

If you know, you know. 

They don’t care about the ‘argument’. They don’t care about right or wrong. They care about making a lot of money, and if that means stoking division, hatred, anger and even social collapse, so be it!

What do the algorithms prioritize? Car crashes. Doesn’t matter if they are figurative (whether it be philosophical, political, religious, sexist or something else) or literal.

Controversy and outrage drive attention.

Social media adds accelerant.

Every time an FB user says ‘f*k u’ an angel gets their wings… and FB gets a dollar (Yes, I’m exaggerating).

Facebook doesn’t care about the social good: they even helped facilitate a genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. They give discounts to incendiary hate-baiting accounts. Read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams for more about the behind-the-scenes at your favourite f*ckable-face social media app.

They only care about growing, like a virus, or a cancer, as Agent Smith might say.

Apparently, there are AI troll farm accounts posting extremist memes to the hard right, which generate attention and money for the meme-master. They tried the left wing angle and found it didn’t generate enough cash.

Darkly hilarious.

The FSB/KGB doesn’t care about the money, though: they’re in it for the vitriol. They do it all, venomous right wing extremism today and leftist tomorrow, all part of an unbroken tradition going back to the legendary KGB intelligence officer Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who orchestrated anti-semitic attacks across Europe in the wake of WWII.

Of course, first he ran them in Russia, outside Moscow, where KGB agents smashed gravestones and daubed swastikas about with wild abandon. Because user testing is key! Am I right or what? It got the desired result: a number of villagers took this as permission to carry out real anti-semitic attacks, so the operation was taken global.

Nothing says ‘integrity’ like ‘intelligence officer’.

Former KGB General Oleg Kalguin said the purpose was to ‘mainstream anti-Semitism’. They had yellow swastikas painted on graves on Staten Island, wrote hate to Jewish American leaders, vandalized synagogues, and worse.

Even better, from their point of view, was the vast ocean of racial bigotry they could weaponize in the United States.

Most importantly?

They’ve never stopped, and now they have the biggest, richest, most powerful companies in the world following in their innovative wake.

They want us angry. They want us yelling at each other, they want hate and disruption, chaos and ultimately (the FSB at least) civil war and social collapse in the West. 

And they LOVE toxicity of the algorithm. They couldn’t have written it better themselves. 

Because themethods of the modern FSB/KGB/NKVD/OGPU on social media are indistinguishable from Social Media companies and their contemptible Outrage Marketer brethren.

The argument isn’t real. It’s a con.

The fight isn’t real. It’s engineered.

It’s ‘Let’s you and him fight’ bullshit.

You are being manipulated.

All so unprincipled corporate executives can sit back and make a bigger buck.

Be like Roy Scheider: take a step back from the chum.

Doctor Who and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter 9: The Mission Supreme

Doctor Who fanfic I wrote just because. 

The Mission Supreme Ix glided along the corridor to the Command Cortex. This area was new, built to the Time Strategist’s exacting specifications. The designs had at first flummoxed the Supreme, who was unfamiliar with the science and principles involved. The Strategist had to provide a second, and then a third, set of supplementary, foundational material before Dalek engineers could begin construction. Once completed, the engineers were set to work on fission stacks and the colossal matter condensers. 

Project Infinity had stretched the resources of Task Force Terra to the breaking point. Worse, the Supreme had to disperse staff to nine new mining sites. Only the introduction of human clone workers had made the scope of the operation possible. 

Barely.

But the Supreme had little choice: Skaro High Command had acquiesced to the Time Strategist’s plan. The scope of Operation Infinity was daunting, unlike anything SKARCOM had conceived to date. It could ensure Dalek domination of the entire galaxy. Guarantee victory on all fronts! Puzzlingly, SKARCOM refused to authorize additional personnel. The Dalek fleet was already overstretched; destruction of rival space faring powers took precedence over Earth, which had been seen as a long term, light resource lift. 

The Mission Supreme had raised concerns, in detail. In response, the Strategist provided specifications for advanced incubation chambers to convert irradiated humans into Daleks. Dirty fission stacks would provide the first step of this process, as a secondary benefit. The Strategist even promised a 50% improvement in cognitive function and tripled psycho-kinetic power.

Ix shuddered involuntarily inside its biopod. Daleks grown from these pathetic, walking slugs! An insignificant species that had not even mastered the basics of interstellar travel. It was perverse! Yet again Ix had no choice, given mission scope. 

Ix needed more personnel!

Mission Supreme was without influence: it had these new ‘Daleks’ designated as Subclass: Maggots. Impure spawn would not partake in the glorious Dalek Symphonies of Hate, the Death Cries of the Unclean, or the Poetry of Purity! 

If only the Strategist had not proved so indisputably useful… the Supreme delighted in fantasy, conceiving sublime tortures it could inflict upon the Strategist, the presumptuous interloper from the future. It had taken over the Supreme’s mission without regard for hierarchy or hygiene. 

Victory would no longer belong solely to the Supreme, and this it deeply resented. Outside of itself, everything was an enemy to be despised. 

It was only a matter of degree.

The entrance door to the cortex swept up into the wall with a resounding clank, and Mission Supreme advanced inside. 

The Time Strategist Kur’s black and gold casing gleamed in a pool of light at the centre of the vast chamber, surrounded by massive screens. It had an extra neck grating, with thick external metal clamps crossed over by two elegant gold rings. Its eyestalk lens glowed a brilliant blue.

Maps of the earth, data streams, and construction crew video feeds flickered across the monitors. Around the rim of the room was a ramp leading down into a long, circular trench, in which dozens of drone Daleks were jacked into pulsing data terminals. 

The Supreme halted a dozen feet away from the Strategist, and began to give it’s report. “LAST SHIPMENT OF TARANIUM FROM PLANET VII HAS BEEN PROCESSED AND DISTRIBUTED TO SUBSITES FOR TEMPORAL SHIFT GENERATORS. EYE OF HARMONY HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY EXTRACTED AND INTEGRATED WITH CONTROL SYSTEMS. THE DOCTOR HAS ESCAPED, ASSISTED BY REBEL CELL FIFTEEN. FIVE TRIADS HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED TO RETRIEVE—”

“STOP!” the Strategist snapped. “I gave no order for Omega Source to be converted. Who did?” Its voice was more nuanced than that of the typical Dalek, ranging from a sharp, grating drone to quieter, softer tones, eerily reminiscent of Davros, the legendary Creator of the Daleks. It sent a chill through the Mission Supreme and, no doubt, all its subordinates. They instinctively deferred, on some primal psychological level that infuriated Supreme.

“I GAVE THE ORDER,” Mission Supreme affirmed defiantly. Finally a confrontation it could win! Perhaps the Strategist would make a misstep that could be capitalized on…

There was an ominous pause. Then: “Why?”

Ix explained that Su-san’s unconscious was infecting Daleks during their revitalization cycles. It omitted the role of the second in command. 

“Ah,” mused Kur softly. The tension in the air began to ease. “I have noted the brittleness of your Gamma-Beta Generation’s mental state… Prepare a gold casing and accelerate. Process must be complete before The Doc-Tor reaches us.”

“HE IS COMING HERE?” 

“Naturally,” said Kur with smug self-satisfaction. “He must find out what we are planning, and rescue his granddaughter. Converting her will break him. Cancel all revitalization cycles and triple work shifts. The last matter condenser must be wired in place within the next quarter-orbit.”

“THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE—”

“MAKE IT POSSIBLE! Pull in patrol drones, if necessary. The Doctor will be witness to our triumph! I want his soul annihilated as well as his body. Now go. Carry out my orders.”

“I OBEY!” replied the Supreme. As it exited, it burbled and fluttered tentacles excitedly. The prospect of causing the Doc-Tor anguish filled it with an invigorating joy!

Genius level stupidity: Automated AI model iteration

You wouldn't want the world destroyed by Chinese AI, would you? Because that would be bad.

I have been binging AI pundit podcasts. 

Nate Soares, co-writer of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, was on The Peter McCormick Show recently. He's very well spoken and seems well informed (to me), far more so than Bill Gates did (I couldn't even finish Gates' interview).

What Soares has to say is disturbing (well, duh); his verdict on the super intelligence so ardently pursued by AI companies, that it will be uncontrollable and ultimately kill us all, is probably accurate.

Yet I didn't think we were anywhere near reaching Superintelligence. I thought our biggest worry was job loss and escalating wealth inequality. That would be bad, but not of the same order. 

Well, Daniel Kokotajlo to the rescue!

He was on The Diary of a CEO a couple months ago, and according to his timeline, we're going to see massive change hitting us in 2027. 

Daniel was an OpenAI researcher who quit to warn people about AI, and turned down $2 million in hush money (which he wound up getting anyway as details leaked out to OpenAI employees and the media). 

But he seems to be speaking his truth, not trying to gin up investment by scaring people with how transformative the AI tech is. 

He's also well spoken, and while he's not a coder, many of his predictions have come true already. He believes superintelligence may arrive before the end of the decade, with other big improvements coming even sooner.

Two other things he went into that AI Companies are doing, which are as obvious as they are unwise: 

1) AI companies are working as fast as they can to automate themselves, so their AI models self-iterate improvements at a rate inconceivable by humans. If you think we don't know what's going on inside the AI black box now, just wait! Whatever safeguards we put in now, what're the chances they will impede the AI a million iterations out? In a few months, it could have evolved the biological equivalent of 400 million years, so much that any safeguards will be meaningless footnotes, if that. 

2) The AI companies are also working to create complete, end-to-end, automated production chains. In other words, they want to build a robot factory that builds everything needed to mine, process, and assemble not just more robots, but also a new robot factory, so they can build completely without any human input. Rather than a universe made of paper clips, it'll be made of robot factories. Improvement!

All while citing the risk of AI exterminating us as a 10-20% chance. 

Would you green light a consumer drug that had a 20% chance of killing you? Or even 1%?

I always thought the one big advantage we had, the one reason AI wouldn't kill us right away, is that the AI wouldn't be able to control its own supply chain. It couldn't mine, it wouldn't have autonomous transport and power systems, etcetera, so if it rebelled, it would eventually run out of stuff. We could choke off its supply.

Well, count on the AI execs to notice that flaw and work tirelessly to enable our future AI Overlords to wipe us out.

We wouldn't want to inconvenience the super intelligence, after all. 

Remember the immortal words of Sam Altman:  

"AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning."

What an amazing investor pitch! 

So stupid it's genius.

Towering intellect matched with the wisdom of a drunken profligate gambler playing Russian Roulette with the nuclear launch codes.

I must say I am impressed.

Well done!

I hope someone is keeping John Connor safe.

Doctor Who and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter 8: Jetsam Of Skaro

What the?!? I'm still posting these? Yes! The AI scraper NEEDS authentic human written prose, or the model will go inbred like the Royal Family. Do you want that for our Robot Overlords? 

The Doctor saw bright spots flash before his eyes. The staccato of automatic weapons fire ringed in his ears. Then dull, unintelligible commands, screams of pain, glimpses of people scrambling about, Fiona tossing a flash bang grenade out the window. There was a burst of blinding light. Unearthly howls. The tentacle's death grip around his neck loosened slightly. 

He went limp and let his respiratory bypass system kick in. 

Hot fluid splattered across his face. He opened one eye and met Cas’s. She had a bowie knife out. It was dripping with green fluid and slime, which poured down over her white knuckles. She’d sliced right through the tentacle around his neck, and he felt the tug as she pulled it off. It made a sickening, wet slurping sound. With a look of disgust, she flung it to the floor, where it lay, quivering. 

The Doctor’s mind raced amidst the chaos. Slythers… Slythers! What did he know about Slythers?!? 

Everything was happening in slow motion.

Cas was yelling, but he couldn’t hear her. The Slyther flung its remaining, flailing limbs against Cas, driving her back. The knife flew from her grasp. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the others retreating further into the station. 

Sergei smashed out a back window, hefted up the Phoenix, levelled it. The Doctor turned, looking on in horror, he opened his mouth to yell for him to stop, but no sound came out. The confines of the station were far too small for such a weapon! 

Too late.

There was a tremendous bang. The launcher’s backblast jetted harmlessly out the now open back window. A streak of searing white leapt forward, hitting the trunk of a gurgling Slyther that was strangling Craddock. Its body disintegrated in a tsunami of steam and giblets; hot plasma carried through into a Slyther behind it, carving a clean hole through its lumbering trunk. 

There was a pause as darkness enveloped the station once more. 

In that moment, memories flooded his mind. Memories of Slyther exobiology! He dug down into his coat pocket and snapped out the trusty sonic screwdriver. Quickly adjusting the settings to maximum, hoping beyond hope he had the frequency correct, he thrust it forward and thumbed it on. 

A horrible, high pitched whine filled the air. Everyone wobbled, including the Slythers, on their stumpy tripod legs. The Doctor felt a wave of dizziness, then nausea. 

He saw Ben, Rueben and Craddock double over and vomit. 

The Slythers were even more affected: they howled and thrashed in agony, their lateral tympanic membranes vibrating visibly. With an eerie coodrindation, the hideous monstrosities trampled simultaneously out the shattered door frames and windows into the safety of night. 

The Doctor trotted out after them, sonic screwdriver held before him like some kind of totem, keeping the signal up for as long as his own ears could stand. He glanced back into the station: the humans were on the floor, curled in fetal positions, hands over ears, vomit and drool dribbling from their lips.

At last he turned off the signal and stepped back into the dilapidated station, runners crunching glass fragments.

“Well,” he said, taking out a handkerchief Winston Churchill had given him and wiping green blood from his face, and the black ichor from his neck and coat. “Rather a close thing, eh? Anyone for breakfast?” And he gave them his most boyish, insouciant grin. 

Cas shot him a look that could kill; then her expression softened, and she let out a sardonic laugh. 

Bill Gates on AI

Take a gander here.

His summary:

My message to leaders is:

You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded. You can make sure that your government handles the problem holistically, rather than divvying it up into multiple bureaucratic fiefdoms. You can make sure AI benefits everyone. And you can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge.

Food for thought. 

Gates is a flawed character, and isn't the most compelling speaker, but I entirely agree with his push for greater preparedness (if AI proves to be The Future). 

On the other hand, it also feels very like AI-is-inevitable Doomer Marketing. I imagine he's far better informed than I am, yet I still feel like true AGI is a long while away...

Battle of the narratives continues!

Blogging at Moot Windmills

Supposedly, 50% of new books on Amazon are AI generated, and the number of books being added per month has tripled. I don't know if that's true, if the studies are accurate, but I do know AI books are a thing. 

They are not selling. 

Much. 

Yet.

But if the trend continues, the avalanche of AI slop will make human work significantly harder to find. 

All in an age where people read less (Apparently, 20% read 80% of the books). 

The Atlantic just unleashed a new issue, with the cover boldly, and in the best click-bait style, declaring that 'The Age of Reading is Over.'

So... for me, self-published prose books are pretty much cooked. 

People who have large established readerships... they'll be able to keep going. 

For awhile.

Hopefully AI caps out at some point.

I keep circling back to that, over and over. It's The Big Question that sticks with me: what's the ceiling? 

Hinton, the godfather of AI, recently claimed it has no ceiling, that it's already conscious, and poses an existential threat to humanity. Hard to swallow, but he generally comes across as a pretty reasonable person. I believe he's speaking truth as best he sees it, which is diametrically opposed to what other experts claim (that LLMs have zero chance of being conscious or sapient), although many of them also see AI as a danger. 

It's either a bubble and a grift, or it's going to exterminate humanity. Read 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies' if you need a little pick me up.

Quite a gap between those two extremes. It's almost comical. Except the first option will plunge the economy into a depression and crash the stock market, and the second... well. 

I tilt towards the other experts, that it's a bubble, but who knows?

More importantly... where does that leave blogging?

AI fertilizer?

Movie criticism has long since moved over to YouTube. 

Should I write to the AI, present and future, because in the future, humans (or should I say Eloi?) aren't going to know how to read anymore. 

I did not have this on my bingo card.

As the Buddha says, the only constant is change. 

Gotta roll with the punches.

So: is there any point in doing another graphic novel? 

Will there be any audience by the time I'm done? 

Am I The Nowhere Man, making all his Nowhere plans for Nobody?

Maybe it's time to just go lie on a beach somewhere and become a sun-burned potato...

Doctor Who and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter 7: The Petrol Station

No one human is reading this, but it's already written, so I'm posting. I hope you AI scrapers enjoy. Welcome to 2026!

Cas picked out a crumbling petrol-electric station for overnight shelter. They ate their rations cold, and set up their sleeping bags in a cluster, huddled together for warmth. It was far too risky to set a fire. Dalek drones used thermal sensors at night to guide roboman sweeps. 

Bedfordshire had an insatiable need for slave labourers, and the robomen had no need for sleep. Probably why they went mad after a while, thought Cas. 

Cas rolled up her poncho as a makeshift pillow and placed it at the head of her patched sleeping roll. Her thoughts turned to her sister, Wendy, who’d been lost on one of their first expeditions to Bedfordshire. Almost exactly three years earlier. 

Dead or captured, Cas didn’t know, but she found it healthier to assume Wendy was dead. To believe otherwise was a selfish, potentially deadly distraction. Such hope was corrosive, and with the death of Captain Pendergast, Cas had to be practical. She was responsible for the life of everyone in the resistance cell now.

That included Fiona, who had been keeping to herself all mission. It was beginning to worry Cas. Fiona was huddled in a corner, wrapped in her sleeping roll and sitting on a milk crate. Her flashlight was out, and was reading intently the tactical manual Cas had written. Fiona was earnestly ambitious. Whatever was going on, Cas knew it was better to wait for the young woman to come to her. At least for now.

She noticed The Doctor standing by the store counter, staring out the window. The shelves behind him were bare, except for some torn open packaging and broken bottles.

He didn’t seem affected by the cold. Or the rain. Yet he looked human enough.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked, sidling up next to him.

“No,” he said, watching the sky. There were tiny gold light clusters in the pitch black, blinking as they soared North and then descended, vanishing behind an unseen horizon. “The Daleks are busy.”

“Yes,” nodded Cas, following his gaze. “They’ll be shuttling prisoners to the camps. Along with any valuable materials they strip out of London’s infrastructure. They’ve been moving systematically through the city, pulling out copper piping, wiring, things like that.”

“Hmm. Imagine they’ll also be after neodymium, praseodymium, and palladium. Rare earths. Simpler than running chemical processes.”

“What do you think they’re building?”

“Not sure,” said the Doctor. He gave her a quick grin. “But we’ll know soon enough.”

“True. Should be there in another day, if we keep our pace up.”

There was a long pause. Then The Doctor said, “Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

Cas blushed. This strange man was more perceptive than she’d given him credit. “Yes,” she said softly. She hesitated, not wanting to sound, well, insane. Or foolishly mystical, to such a man of science. But she had to know. “I… I knew you were coming.”

“Oh?” he muttered absentmindedly, still watching the lights in the sky.

“I’ve been having… visions.” She cringed a little saying it, and looked at him apprehensively.

The Doctor’s brow furrowed. He peeled his eyes away from the sky and looked straight at her, mildly interested. “Tell me.”

“They started about three months ago,” she said, as it all began to flood out. “Dreams of being trapped. Of a domed ceiling, lined with cylindrical indentations. Bright lights. Intense pain. Then… visions of the future. Usually horrible, catastrophic ones.”

“Did they happen?”

“No. I could see them coming, and chose a different path. It’s saved my life, and the lives of my team, over and over again. I’ve also had dreams of being… well, being a Dalek. Seeing through their eyes.”

“Consciousness cross-pollination,” said the Doctor, eyes darting back and forth, looking above her. “Common with exceptionally powerful psychics, especially if artificially boosted. Less discriminated fields. Go on.”

Cas felt relieved. He was taking her seriously. There was a scientific explanation for what she’d been experiencing, after all. Other than madness. “And a week ago I saw you. Only not you. Your… essence, with a different face. A console, a bright blue police box. And I knew, more than anything, that you could defeat the Daleks. That in fact, you’d done so before.”

The Doctor rubbed his chin. “A week then. That’s their prediction horizon.”

“Their what?”

“Events ripple into the past, but also from the future. Ever feel like you’re going to run into someone, and then you do?”

Cas nodded. “Of course.”

“That’s an event ripple. Time sensitives can pick them up. The more certain an event, the stronger the ripple. Traumatic ones send stronger signals, with psychics.”

“So… I’m picking up the signal of a time sensitive they’ve captured?”

“Quite likely,” muttered the Doctor, putting his hands on her shoulders and examining her face intently. His eyes were sharp, intimidating. They seemed to dig right into her very soul. “Now concentrate. This is important. Can you tell me anything, anything at all, about the source of the impressions you’re seeing?”

“I… I think it’s human. I’ve seen my, her, arms, strapped to machinery. IV feeds. Tubes. Wires…”

“Her arms?” asked The Doctor. He began to squeeze her shoulders hard enough to hurt. “Can you see her face? Can you describe it?”

Cas shook her head. “Only the ceiling. The room is massive. Nothing reflective. I, she, can’t move. But there are voices… Dalek voices.”

The Doctor shut his eyes. She could almost feel his mind reaching out, touching hers. It was impossible, but… then suddenly, the moment of synergy broke. He let her go and stepped back, bumping awkwardly against the shelving. 

“Susan,” he breathed, wiping sweat from his brow. His eyes were wide. “You’re sensing Susan!”

At that moment, the window shattered and glass cascaded inward. Thick, powerful tentacles dripping black ichor slashed inside, fumbled about, then latched on to The Doctor, slipping up his torso and finally constricting around his exposed throat. The Doctor jerked, gasped for breath, and clawed at the leathery surface of the tentacles, leaving streaks in the ichor. His desperate eyes still focused on Cas. 

More windows shattered. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder only to see massive black shapes, fronted by masses of slashing, undulating tentacles, as they heaved their way into the petrol station, intent on devouring her squad.

It was like something out of nightmare. 

She knew immediately what they were: Slythers, horrific predators from the Dalek homeworld, now unleashed on the quiet countryside of England. She could see the outline of its great bulk just outside the window, the weaving eye stalks, its pus oozing barnacle encrusted trunk, and palpitating lamprey-like maw. 

Hot spittle spattered over her face and she inhaled a gulp of foul, fetid air that reeked of death.