September 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

1984 AI: Dead Internet Theory - Since At Least Five Years, Great Generated Botnet Fakery and Manipulation
by grarpamp 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory… Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake. It’s ridiculous, but possibly not that ridiculous? By Kaitlyn Tiffany A smartphone on a background with a rippling skull Michael Houtz August 31, 2021 If you search the phrase i hate texting on Twitter and scroll down, you will start to notice a pattern. An account with the handle @pixyIuvr and a glowing heart as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting i just want to hold ur hand,” receiving 16,000 likes. An account with the handle @f41rygf and a pink orb as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting just come live with me,” receiving nearly 33,000 likes. An account with the handle @itspureluv and a pink orb as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting i just wanna kiss u,” receiving more than 48,000 likes. There are slight changes to the verb choice and girlish username and color scheme, but the idea is the same each time: I’m a person with a crush in the age of smartphones, and isn’t that relatable? Yes, it sure is! But some people on Twitter have wondered whether these are really, truly, just people with crushes in the age of smartphones saying something relatable. They’ve pointed at them as possible evidence validating a wild idea called “dead-internet theory.” Let me explain. Dead-internet theory suggests that the internet has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence. Like lots of other online conspiracy theories, the audience for this one is growing because of discussion led by a mix of true believers, sarcastic trolls, and idly curious lovers of chitchat. One might, for example, point to @_capr1corn, a Twitter account with what looks like a blue orb with a pink spot in the middle as a profile picture. In the spring, the account tweeted “i hate texting come over and cuddle me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna hug you,” and then “i hate texting just come live with me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna kiss u,” which got 1,300 likes but didn’t perform as well as it did for @itspureluv. But unlike lots of other online conspiracy theories, this one has a morsel of truth to it. Person or bot: Does it really matter? Read: The internet is mostly bots Dead-internet theory. It’s terrifying, but I love it. I read about it on Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe, an online forum with a pixelated-Margaritaville vibe and the self-awarded honor “Best Kept Secret of the Internet!” Right now, the background is a repeated image of palm trees, a hot-pink sunset, and some kind of liquor pouring into a rocks glass. The site is largely for discussing lo-fi hip-hop, which I don’t listen to, but it is also for discussing conspiracy theories, which I do. In January, I stumbled across a new thread there titled “Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake,” shared by a user named IlluminatiPirate. Over the next few months, this would become the ur-text for those interested in the theory. The post is very long, and some of it is too confusing to bother with; the author claims to have pieced together the theory from ideas shared by anonymous users of 4chan’s paranormal section and another forum called Wizardchan, an online community premised on earning wisdom and magic through celibacy. (In an email, IlluminatiPirate, who is an operations supervisor for a logistics company in California, told me that he “truly believes” in the theory. I agreed not to identify him by name because he said he fears harassment.) Peppered with casually offensive language, the post suggests that the internet died in 2016 or early 2017, and that now it is “empty and devoid of people,” as well as “entirely sterile.” Much of the “supposedly human-produced content” you see online was actually created using AI, IlluminatiPirate claims, and was propagated by bots, possibly aided by a group of “influencers” on the payroll of various corporations that are in cahoots with the government. The conspiring group’s intention is, of course, to control our thoughts and get us to purchase stuff. As evidence, IlluminatiPirate offers, “I’ve seen the same threads, the same pics, and the same replies reposted over and over across the years.” He argues that all modern entertainment is generated and recommended by an algorithm; gestures at the existence of deepfakes, which suggest that anything at all may be an illusion; and links to a New York story from 2018 titled “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” “I think it’s entirely obvious what I’m subtly suggesting here given this setup,” the post continues. “The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.” So far, the original post has been viewed more than 73,000 times. Read: Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion Obviously, the internet is not a government psyop, even though the Department of Defense had a role in its invention. But if it were, the most compelling evidence to me is the dead-internet theory’s observation that the same news items about unusual moon-related events seem to repeat year after year. I swear I’ve been saying this for years. What is a super flower blood moon? What is a pink supermoon? A quick search of headlines from just this month brings up: “There’s Something Special About This Weekend’s Moon,” “Don’t Miss: Rare, Seasonal ‘Blue Moon’ Rises Tonight,” and “Why This Weekend’s Blue Moon Is Extra Rare.” I just don’t understand why everyone is so invested in making me look at the moon all the time? Leave me alone about the moon! Dead-internet theory is a niche idea because it’s patently ridiculous, but it has been spreading. Caroline Busta, the Berlin-based founder of the media platform New Models, recently referenced it in her contribution to an online group show organized by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. “Of course a lot of that post is paranoid fantasy,” she told me. But the “overarching idea” seems right to her. The theory has become fodder for dramatic YouTube explainers, including one that summarizes the original post in Spanish and has been viewed nearly 260,000 times. Speculation about the theory’s validity has started appearing in the widely read Hacker News forum and among fans of the massively popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips. In a Reddit forum about the paranormal, the theory is discussed as a possible explanation for why threads about UFOs seem to be “hijacked” by bots so often. The theory’s spread hasn’t been entirely organic. IlluminatiPirate has posted a link to his manifesto in several Reddit forums that discuss conspiracy theories, including the Joe Rogan subreddit, which has 709,000 subscribers. In the r/JoeRogan comments, users argue sarcastically—or sincerely?—about who among them is a bot. “I’m absolutely the type of loser who would get swindled into living among bots and never realize it,” a member of the 4chan-adjacent Something Awful forum commented when the theory was shared there in February. “Seems like something a bot would post,” someone replied. Even the playful arguments about how everything is the same are the same. Read: Why is Joe Rogan so popular? That particular conversation continued down the bleakest path imaginable, to the point of this comment: “If I was real I’m pretty sure I’d be out there living each day to the fullest and experiencing everything I possibly could with every given moment of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I’ll exist for instead of posting on the internet about nonsense.” Anyway … dead-internet theory is pretty far out-there. But unlike the internet’s many other conspiracy theorists, who are boring or really gullible or motivated by odd politics, the dead-internet people kind of have a point. In the New York story that IlluminatiPirate invokes, the writer Max Read plays with paranoia. “Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake,” he writes. But he makes a solid argument: He notes that a majority of web traffic probably comes from bots, and that YouTube, for a time, had such high bot traffic that some employees feared “the Inversion”—the point when its systems would start to see bots as authentic and humans as inauthentic. He also points out that even engagement metrics on sites as big and powerful as Facebook have been grossly inflated or easily gamed, and that human presence can be mimicked with click farms or cheap bots. Some of this may be improving now, for better or for worse. Social-media companies have gotten a lot better at preventing the purchase of fake views and fake likes, while some bot farmers have, in response, become all the more sophisticated. Major platforms still play whack-a-mole with inauthentic activity, so the average internet user has no way of knowing how much of what they see is “real.” But more than that, the theory feels true: Most weeks, Twitter is taken over by an argument about how best to practice personal hygiene, or which cities have the worst food and air quality, which somehow devolves into allegations of classism and accusations of murder, which for whatever reason is actually not as offensive as classism anymore. A celebrity is sorry. A music video has broken the internet. A meme has gotten popular and then boring. “Bennifer Might Be Back On, and No One’s More Excited Than Twitter.” At this point, you could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it’s cliché—people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the “old” internet. The big platforms do encourage their users to make the same conversations and arcs of feeling and cycles of outrage happen over and over, so much so that people may find themselves acting like bots, responding on impulse in predictable ways to things that were created, in all likelihood, to elicit that very response. Thankfully, if all of this starts to bother you, you don’t have to rely on a wacky conspiracy theory for mental comfort. You can just look for evidence of life: The best proof I have that the internet isn’t dead is that I wandered onto some weird website and found an absurd rant about how the internet is so, so dead.

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1984: Klaus Schwab and Christine Lagarde Have Message for You re Your Enslavement
by grarpamp 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1433373451331514370 WEF founder Klaus Schwab declares #COVID19, climate change, inclusion, and the "4th industrial revolution" as the "foremost challenges" humans are faced with today in an interview with Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank. Of course nothing but good old fashioned Total Globalist Authoritarian will solve the problems they manufacture.

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Worldwide Weirding-way Weapons
by professor rat 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

Run on sound - I see the truth of it https://www.openculture.com/2014/12/how-william-s-burroughs-shut-down-londo…

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easier project from professor turd.
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

well it seems that even trying to open the page augur.net is too complicated for professor turd, so we have a preliminary and easier exercise for the non human turd pro2rat(a)yahoo.com.au. What the turd has to do is 1) join twatter 2) start posting death threats to dorsey and the rest of non human garbage(like him) who runs govcorp. GO AHEAD PROFESSOR TURD! YES YOU CAN DO IT!!!

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Keep polishing that " Cypherpunks write code " Turd
by professor rat 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

The author of those words took a powder after 9-11 - 20 years ago! - and so cast doubt on all his scribblings prior to that craven cowards act. Desertion under fire will get you killed - that's the anarchist code.

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Antisocial cypherpunks considered harmful
by professor rat 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

"... disrespectful to Jim Bell and Assange. Even though they're both important cypherpunk,.." I've argued long and loud over many years that Julio stopped being potentially significant by 2011 ( Late 2010, technically ) The only way he could be significant now is to prove he swung the 2016 election - a severe attribution problem. So after all the key WL people left him he's been a liability. A real drawback for the last decade which is an eternity in net years. Now as to Jim Bell. There is importance in his APster idea so long as its applied in the real world - at Stiffs Dotcom, for example, and by others - at the moment that's still more of a potential importance for anarchism since STIFFS is very apolitical. Then Bell has associated recently - since 2016 - with the far Right ( Like Assmange has for over a decade! ) Associating crypto-anarchy with the Lunar Right is the work of wreckers and cops. Also from a marketing point of view, if Randite, Paultard Austro-libertarianism was a brand of dog-food they would be taking it off the shelves. Kabeesh?

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Cypherpunks write code
by professor rat 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

"... And there's something I'm curious about, what are people doing on this mailing list who aren't interested in information security that can't write a code? ..." Maybe cos its an anarchists list for discussing the socio-economic & political aspects of cryptographic code use. The political economy of Dead-Pools, for example. Or the rise of the crypto-currency sector over 2 trillion USD $ as we speak. List founder Tim ' Mongo " May often made this broader point - that the list should not encourage specialist technocrats. So " Code ' should be meant as broadly as possible. It's on disk - check the archives. "...I really wonder why this mailing list isn't being used for its purpose? ..." Batshit-crazy Nazi-Fag-Morons - the Gramps, Semich, ' Natural-Rights' bowtie-anarchy Losers type - tried to squat here for a brief while so we're evicting them right now. Increasingly the cryptoanarchist infrastructure market is taking over this lists purpose as its living out the cypherpunk creed - " Privacy for the poor and transparency for the powerful " Money talks - bullshit walks.

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Globocop needs killing
by professor rat 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

Help send a message to all his FBI informants ( and snitch wannabe's - like Gramps, Batshit and Semich ) https://stiffs.com/celebrity/joebiden My 200 sats

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[draft] problems to prepare for when targeted
by Karl 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

One of the things that really prevented dialog and addressing of targeting when it began for me, was the concept of "but why would this ever happen to some random individual?" Assuming one isn't targeted then leads to years of pursuing various things that don't necessarily help. [Targeting involves being personally studied for disruption activities such as planting of spy devices and system trojans, contacting people and services in one's life to reduce the power of one's community.]. This involves investment of resources by bodies with limited resources, so people can be skeptical it would ever happen. One thing not often discussed is that targetting can involve being framed as a suspect for high-stakes crimes such as drug dealing or terrorism. Simply calling authorities can open an investigation and allocate extensive resources. There are also organizations that work to disrupt people or groups of various pursuasions, that individuals may be listed with. Books have been published by workers and volunteers at such organizations or groups. This stuff usually happens when somebody notices you for some reason. It may be easy if you have a well-known family name, or are a political figure, but other roles aren't ones everyone expects: - providing resources for activists or people otherwise without them - making a stink that could harm somebody's reputation - organizing discussions counter to mainstream messaging, especially in an area where they are not already present Simple being the person footing the bill, or owning the resources, or who has the crucial skillset, or is willing to go the distance, when nobody else isn't, can suddenly change one's life forever when noticed. Change it in ways that nobody would believe, because the resources involved are reserved for hunting the most dangerous criminals and fighting the most vicious mercenaries. Things that suddenly people are considering you, because their bosses or computer systems are saying you are likely to be.

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Daily Beast: Forever Wars Won't End if the Surveillance State's Still Here
by jim bell 05 Sep '21

05 Sep '21

Daily Beast: Forever Wars Won't End if the Surveillance State's Still Here. https://www.thedailybeast.com/forever-wars-wont-end-if-the-surveillance-sta… But who will lead the charge to wind down America’s domestic national security panopticon that, after decades of taxpayer funding and expansions of its opaque surveillance powers, still failed to anticipate critical developments like the rise of ISIS or Afghanistan’s swift collapse to the Taliban? "Over the past 20 years, our failures in Afghanistan have become synonymous with the overreach and blind arrogance of the War on Terror. But that didn’t just unfold on some distant desert battlefield. An equally treacherous surveillance state was built by American lawmakers right here at home"Just three weeks after President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, a Senate supermajority voted 98-1 to enact a bundle of emergency counterterrorism measures known as the USA PATRIOT Act. Among a slew of authoritarian nightmares, the Patriot Act vastly expanded the federal government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without oversight, indefinitely detain immigrants even vaguely suspected of terrorism, wiretap Americans without probable cause and compile incomparably massive databases of Americans’ internet activities and cell-phone metadata."

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