Digital Garden

Acta Publica - Rapport 2024-04 - Kidnapparna

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

Metadata

Author: Acta Publica
Full Title: Rapport 2024:4 - Kidnapparna
Document Note: Människorov är ett mycket grovt och allvarligt brott som utsätter såväl offer som samhälle för enorma påfrestningar. Men lite har varit känt om det som i dagligt tal kallas kidnappningar.
- Acta Publica har nu kartlagt kidnappningarnas utveckling sedan 2015 via samtliga fällande tingsrättsdomar om människorov, förundersökningsprotokoll, myndighetsdata och källuppgifter. Resultaten visar på en oroväckande utveckling – och att det är läge att omvärdera den klassiska bilden av kidnappningar.
  Såväl antalet fällande domar om människorovsbrott som antalet dömda har ökat markant. Granskningen visar också att många kidnappningar innehåller förnderande inslag och grovt våld, som i vissa fall gränsar till tortyr. Nära hälften av fallen har koppling till narkotika.
  Rapporten innehåller också en kartläggning av dem som har dömts för människorovsbrott, bland annat avseende deras koppling till kriminella grupperingar, samt en analys av de vanligaste motiven till kidnappningar.
Summary: In recent years, kidnappings have become more common in Sweden, with a significant increase in court rulings related to these crimes. Many kidnappings involve drug-related motives, and victims are often known to their abductors. A new report highlights the alarming rise in such cases and the brutality involved in the acts.
URL: https://actapublica.se/nyheter/rapport-kidnapparna/

Highlights

Nu kan dock Acta Publica presentera en unik kartläggning av samtliga fällande tingsrättsdomar om människorov under åren 2015 till och med juni 2024.
det allra vanligaste motivet till kidnappningar är ekonomiskt och att hälften av domarna kan kopplas till narkotika. Även ren hämnd eller viljan att skada någon har legat bakom [...]
Förnedring av kidnappningsoffren – som att de har tvingats pussa någons skor, fotograferats i kränkande situationer eller blivit kissade och spottade på – är ett vanligt inslag och förekommer i var fjärde dom.
Trots kidnappningarnas många gånger grova karaktär, och trots att den mediala bevakningen av brottslighet generellt har varit intensiv de senaste åren, så är utvecklingen vad gäller människorov under rapporterad.
En förklaring till det kan vi hitta genom att se på brottsoffren. Ofta är det socialt utsatta personer eller individer som redan ingår i kriminella miljöer. Helt enkelt personer som kanske inte väcker särskilt starka sympatier, inte kan göra sina röster hörda eller ges samma uppmärksamhet som en kidnappad företagsledare eller rapartist.
Acta Publica har gått igenom cirka 380 fällande tingsrättsdomar rörande människorov från januari 2015 till och med juni 2024. [...] Totalt har 939 unika dömda [personer)] identifierats i materialet. [...] vid genomläsning av domarna har flera olika syften med brotten framträtt, och de har kategoriserats enligt följande:
- Ekonomiskt motiv
- Hämndmotiv
- Våldsmotiv
- Sexuellt motiv
- Hedersrelaterat motiv
- Vårdnadsrelaterat motiv
- Annat motiv, som inte nämns ovan
Straffet för den som gör sig skyldig till människorov är fängelse från fyra år upp till livstid. Är brottet mindre grovt är maxstraffet sex års fängelse. Detta gäller efter den senaste lagändringen som gjordes rörande människorovsbrottet, som trädde i kraft 2009.
Det ska också sägas att polisanmälningar ofta kan vara en vansklig källa att dra slutsatser om brottsutveckling av. Den påverkas bland annat av benägenhet att anmäla brott och i fallet människorov finns med stor sannolikhet ett betydande mörkertal.
Det har inte skett några förändringar i lagtexten sedan 2009, då maxstraffet för människorov höjdes till 18 års fängelse eller livstid, från 10 år eller livstid som gällde innan. Skulle den förändringen ha fått någon effekt på bedömningarna av den här typen av brott, så borde den redan ha kommit långt innan de domar som Acta Publicas granskning omfattar.
De olika motiven – ekonomi, hämnd, våld, sexuellt, vårdnad och hedersrelaterat – har valts ut efter att stickprov gjorts bland domarna.
Ytterligare en kategori, kallad “annat”, finns för det fåtal fall som har haft ett oklart motiv eller som inte passar in i de ovan nämnda kategorierna. Här återfinns exempelvis den mycket omrapporterade incidenten på Hällbyanstalten i juli 2021 då två dömda män tog två kriminalvårdare till fånga, och ett fall där gärningsmannen ville få ut information från brottsoffret om en tidigare händelse.
Pengar ligger helt klart bakom de allra flesta kidnappningsfall, visar kartläggningen. Det torde stämma överens med den generella bilden av vad en kidnappning går ut på. Ekonomi som ensamt motiv till brottet förekommer i nära 45 procent av domarna. Slår man samman alla fall, det vill säga både de med ett ensamt och flera motiv, så förekommer ekonomiskt motiv i nästan 80 procent av domarna.
Spannet är stort mellan de belopp som gärningsmännen har krävt vid kidnappningarna med ekonomiskt motiv. Det är inte ovanligt att det kan handla om summor på några tusen kronor. Exempelvis blev en man utsatt för en mycket kränkande kidnappning där han först pressades på 1 500 kronor, en skuld som under människorovets gång växte till cirka 20 000 kronor.
Kidnappningen har varit del av någon typ av hämndaktion i var sjätte dom. Ofta har det skett i kombination med en vilja att utsätta brotts offret för våld. Även kombinationer med ekonomiskt motiv är vanligt.
Till sexuellt motiv räknas de fall där gärningsmannen har haft ett tydligt sexuellt syfte med kidnappningen. Kartläggningen visar att det är ovanligt. Det har varit motivet i 15 domar, motsvarande 4 procent av det totala antalet.
Av de 377 människorovsdomar som Acta Publica har granskat, har var fjärde innehållit olika typer av förnedring.
Det är ovanligt med kvinnliga gärningspersoner
Människorovsoffer utsätts i många fall för grovt och utdraget våld. I några fall har det gått så långt att människor faktiskt har dött i samband med kidnappningar. Acta Publica har bland de undersökta domarna identifierat sex sådana fall, där två har räknats som vållande till annans död och fyra som mord, beroende på vilket uppsåt som tingsrätten bedömt har funnits.
Det ska dock nämnas att det kan finnas fler fall där personer har dödats i samband med kidnappningar. Det finns exempelvis händelser där brottsoffren i samband med dödsfallet kan ha utsatts för gärningar som motsvarar ett människorov, men där domstolen har bedömt att det brottet ska konsumeras av – det vill säga ingå i – mordet.
Det är tydligt att människorovsfallen har en koncentration till stor- stadsområdena.
Bland de dömda återfinns bara 68 kvinnor. Resterande 871 personer är män, vilket motsvarar 93 procent.
Rubriceringar och påföljder: fängelse är den absolut vanligaste påföljden, vilket är naturligt med tanke på hur lagtexten är utformad för den här typen av brott. Över 85 procent av de dömda fick fängelsestraff. Näst vanligast är olika ungdomspåföljder, till exempel sluten ungdomsvård. Tre personer som har gjort sig skyldiga till människorov har dömts till rättspsykiatrisk vård.
Med vetskap om det ville Acta Publica undersöka i vilken utsträckning kriminella grupperingar är involverade i kidnappningar. Med hjälp av uppgifter i olika rättshandlingar och egen underrättelseinformation har vi analyserat hur många av de 939 dömda som kan knytas till olika kriminella organisationer.
Enligt Acta Publicas kartläggning kan en dryg femtedel av de cirka 940 dömda för människorov kopplas till kriminella grupperingar. Av dessa bedömer vi att tre av fyra har en stark gängkoppling.
Det är också tydligt att de allra flesta kopplas till andra kriminella nätverk än mc-gäng.
Bland dem som kan knytas till det som vi har kategoriserat som andra kriminella nätverk, hittar vi flera av den senaste tidens omskrivna grup- peringar, som Foxtrot-, Dalen- och Zeronätverket. Det är till och med så att Foxtrotnätverkets ökände ledare, Rawa Majid, finns med bland dem som har dömts för kidnappningsbrott. Han dömdes närmare bestämt för medhjälp till människorov, mindre grovt brott, år 2015.41 Det skedde alltså långt innan han nådde den topposition inom grov organiserad brottslighet som han senare fick.
Personer med anknytning till mc-gäng utgör en knapp tredjedel av dem som har en nätverkskoppling. Bland dessa hittar vi exempelvis med- lemmar ur Bandidos MC, Satudarah MC och No Surrender MC, liksom medlemmar i Bandidos supportergruppering X-team eller personer i klubbar som ingår i supportermiljöerna kring Bandidos och Hells Angels.
Om gängkriminaliteten på något vis har påverkat de senaste årens ökning av kidnappningsdomar är svårt att säga
Vi ser inte många exempel på att hela nätverk eller gäng står bakom ett människorov, det vill säga att gärningen görs i grupperingens namn som ett led i en större konflikt eller som en strategisk åtgärd för att komma åt motståndaren.

web browsers

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

I prefer to use Waterfox on desktop and IronFox on Android. On macOS, I use Orion.

Both of those are Firefox forks, designed with privacy in mind. In other words, unlike Firefox, these versions of Firefox do not track users and have implemented security features to help people.

I'm keeping an eye on web browsers that are not built on Firefox because Mozilla Foundation, that create Firefox, are turning into a capitalist nightmare that tries to add AI to various projects. There are other web browsers than Orion that are privacy-oriented, but as far as I know, they're being built.

My favourite add-ons

Obsidian

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

I love to use Obsidian. I've used Obsidian for years on multiple computers and mobile phones. It's free to use.

Obsidian is not only my favourite digital knowledge system but what I use to make and publish this digital garden.

Obsidian is software that can be very simple or very complex: it's what you make of it.

To begin with, Obsidian is a place where you store information. The data is, to begin with, saved on the device on which you use Obsidian. In other words, nobody has access to your data than yourself.

Obsidian make money from offering two things: sync and publish. Sync lets you encrypt and synchronise your Obsidian data to Obsidian servers; not only does this mean that your data is safe from accidental deletion if your device is ruined but it means you can use several different devices and make sure that your data is always up-to-date everywhere. Publish lets you publish an Obsidian vault to the internet. Obsidian Help is an example of an Obsidian vault that's published to the internet.

So, what else?

Anybody with programming skills can create their own Obsidian plugin. A plugin is something that's used to enhance Obsidian in some way.

I maintain a list of my favourite Obsidian plugins where I describe their benefits.

The people who develop Obsidian are, as far as I know, nice people. They allow plugins that 'go against' their business model; for example, I don't use Obsidian's paid-for way to publish and maintain this digital garden. Instead, I use Ole Eskild Steensen's brilliant Obsidian Digital Garden plugin that lets me keep the garden for free.

The Tidö parties

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

The Tidö party leaders. Photograph by Tom Samuelsson - Eget arbete, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128410949

[!info]
Because I lack time to update the list below, please instead see my Tidö-party related news collection which is updated fairly often.

What is this?

The Tidö parties are political parties that are both part of the Swedish political parties in government and have struck an agreement at Tidö Castle; the collection of these parties is colloquially named the Tidö parties.

One of my blog posts from October 2024 says a lot about these parties.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

[!info]
This is the Wikipedia article on RSS. I've highlighted notable sections in red. I believe the Wikipedia article to be highly edited by RSS-positive persons, as with most Wikipedia articles about political and extreme right-wing political parties. I recommend to read Arundhati Roy - India, On the Road to Theocracy for a recent and realistic view of the current political state of India, RSS, Hindutva, and Narendra Modi control.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (abbr. RSS; Rāṣṭrīya Svayaṃsevak Saṅgh, Hindi pronunciation: [raːʂˈʈriːj(ə) swəjəmˈseːʋək səŋɡʱ], lit. 'National Volunteer Organisation') is an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organisation. It is the progenitor and leader of a large body of organisations called the Sangh Parivar (Hindi for "Sangh family"), which has developed a presence in all facets of Indian society and includes the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling political party under Narendra Modi, the 14th prime minister of India. Mohan Bhagwat has served as the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS since March 2009.

Founded on 27 September 1925, the initial impetus of the organisation was to provide character training and instil "Hindu discipline" in order to unite the Hindu community and establish a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation). The organisation aims to spread the ideology of Hindutva to "strengthen" the Hindu community and promotes an ideal of upholding an Indian culture and its civilizational values. On the other hand, the RSS has been described as "founded on the premise of Hindu supremacy",and has been accused of an intolerance of minorities, in particular anti-Muslim activities.

During the colonial period, the RSS collaborated with the British Raj and played no role in the Indian independence movement. After independence, it grew into an influential Hindu nationalist umbrella organisation, spawning several affiliated organisations that established numerous schools, charities, and clubs to spread its ideological beliefs. It was banned in 1947 for four days, and then thrice by the post-independence Indian government, first in 1948 when Nathuram Godse, an erstwhile member of RSS, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi; then during the Emergency (1975–1977); and for a third time after the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992. In the 21st century, it is the world's largest far-right organisation by membership.

Founding

Keshav Baliram Hedgewar

RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a doctor in the city of Nagpur, British India.

Hedgewar was a political protege of B. S. Moonje, a Tilakite Congressman, Hindu Mahasabha politician and social activist from Nagpur. Moonje had sent Hedgewar to Calcutta to pursue his medical studies and to learn combat techniques from the secret revolutionary societies of the Bengalis. Hedgewar became a member of the Anushilan Samiti, an anti-British revolutionary group, getting into its inner circle. The secretive methods of these societies were eventually used by him in organising the RSS.

After returning to Nagpur, Hedgewar organised anti-British activities through the Kranti Dal (Party of Revolution) and participated in independence activist Tilak's Home Rule campaign in 1918. According to the official RSS history, he came to realise that revolutionary activities alone were not enough to overthrow the British. After reading V. D. Savarkar's Hindutva, published in Nagpur in 1923, and meeting Savarkar in the Ratnagiri prison in 1925, Hedgewar was extremely influenced by him, and he founded the RSS with the objective of strengthening Hindu society.

Hedgewar believed that a handful of British were able to rule over the vast country of India because Hindus were disunited, lacked valour (pararkram) and lacked a civic character. He recruited energetic Hindu youth with revolutionary fervour, gave them a uniform of a black forage cap, khaki shirt (later white shirt) and khaki shorts—emulating the uniform of the Indian Imperial Police—and taught them paramilitary techniques with lathi (bamboo staff), sword, javelin, and dagger. Hindu ceremonies and rituals played a large role in the organisation, not so much for religious observance, but to provide awareness of India's glorious past and to bind the members in a religious communion. Hedgewar also held weekly sessions of what he called baudhik (ideological education), consisting of simple questions to the novices concerning the Hindu nation and its history and heroes, especially warrior king Shivaji. The saffron flag of Shivaji, the Bhagwa Dhwaj, was used as the emblem for the new organisation. Its public tasks involved protecting Hindu pilgrims at festivals and confronting Muslim resistance against Hindu processions near mosques.[^footnotegoodrick-clarke199859-28][^footnotejaffrelot,_hindu_nationalist_movement199633%e2%80%9339-29][^footnotekelkar20112%e2%80%933-30]

Two years into the life of the organisation, in 1927, Hedgewar organised an "Officers' Training Camp" with the objective of forming a corps of key workers, whom he called pracharaks (full-time functionaries or "propagators"). He asked the volunteers to first become Sadhu, renouncing professional and family lives and dedicating their lives to the cause of the RSS. Hedgewar is believed to have embraced the doctrine of renunciation after it had been reinterpreted by nationalists such as Aurobindo. The tradition of renunciation gave the RSS the character of a 'Hindu sect'. Developing a network of shakhas (branches) was the main preoccupation for Hedgewar throughout his career as the RSS chief. The first pracharaks were responsible for establishing as many shakhas as possible, first in Nagpur, then across Maharashtra, and eventually in the rest of India. P. B. Dani was sent to establish a shakha at the Benaras Hindu University; other universities were similarly targeted to recruit new followers among the student population. Three pracharaks went to Punjab: Appaji Joshi to Sialkot, Moreshwar Munje to the DAV College in Rawalpindi and Raja Bhau Paturkar to the DAV College in Lahore. In 1940, Madhavrao Muley was appointed as the prant pracharak (regional head) for Punjab in Lahore.

Motivations

Scholars differ on Hedgewar's motivations for forming the RSS, especially because he never involved the RSS in the independence movement against the British rule. French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot says that the RSS was intended to propagate the ideology of Hindutva and to provide "new physical strength" to the majority community.

After Tilak's demise in 1920, like other followers of Tilak in Nagpur, Hedgewar was opposed to some of the programmes adopted by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's stance on the Indian Muslim Khilafat issue was a cause for concern to Hedgewar, and so was that the 'cow protection' was not on the Congress agenda. This led Hedgewar, along with other Tilakities, to part ways with Gandhi. In 1921, Hedgewar was arrested on the charges of 'sedition' over his speeches at Katol and Bharatwada. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 1 year in prison.[^footnoteandersen,_rashtriya_swayamsevak_sangh:_early_concerns1972-36]

He was released in July 1922. Hedgewar was distressed at the lack of organisation among volunteer organisations of Congress. Subsequently, he felt the need to create an independent organisation that was based on the country's traditions and history. He held meetings with prominent political figures in Nagpur between 1922–1924. He visited Gandhi's ashram in nearby Wardha in 1924 and discussed a number of things. After this meeting, he left Wardha to plan to unite the often antagonistic Hindu groups into a common nationalist movement.[^footnoteandersen,_rashtriya_swayamsevak_sangh:_early_concerns1972-36][^37]

Hindu–Muslim relations

The 1920s witnessed a significant deterioration in the relations between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslim masses were mobilised by the Khilafat movement, opposing dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by the Allies and some demanded the reinstatement of the Caliphate in Turkey. Mahatma Gandhi made an alliance with the movement for conducting his own Non-co-operation movement. Gandhi aimed to create Hindu–Muslim unity in forming the alliance. However, the alliance saw a "common enemy", not a "common enmity". When the government refused to entertain demands of Khilafatists, this would cause some Muslims to turn their anger towards Hindus. The first major incident of religious violence was reportedly the Moplah rebellion in August 1921, it was widely narrated that the rebellion ended in large-scale violence against Hindu officials in Malabar. A cycle of inter-communal violence throughout India followed for several years. In 1923, there were riots in Nagpur, called "Muslim riots" by Hedgewar, where Hindus were felt to be "totally disorganized and panicky." These incidents made a major impression on Hedgewar and convinced him of the need to organise the Hindu society.

After acquiring about 100 swayamsevaks (volunteers) to the RSS in 1927, Hedgewar took the issue to the Muslim domain. He led the Hindu religious procession for Ganesha, beating the drums in defiance of the usual practice not to pass in front of a mosque with music.

On the day of Lakshmi Puja on 4 September, Muslims are said to have retaliated. When the Hindu procession reached a mosque in the Mahal area of Nagpur, Muslims blocked it. Later in the afternoon, they attacked the Hindu residences in the Mahal area. It is said that the RSS cadres were prepared for the attack and beat the Muslim rioters back. Riots continued for 3 days and the army had to be called in to quell the violence. RSS organised the Hindu resistance and protected the Hindu households while the Muslim households had to leave Nagpur en masse for safety. Tapan Basu et al. note the accounts of "Muslim aggressiveness" and the "Hindu self-defence" in the RSS descriptions of the incident. The above incident vastly enhanced the prestige of the RSS and enabled its subsequent expansion.

Stigmatisation and emulation

Christophe Jaffrelot points out the theme of "stigmatisation and emulation" in the ideology of the RSS along with other Hindu nationalist movements such as the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha. Muslims, Christians and the British were thought of as "foreign bodies" implanted in the Hindu nation, who were able to exploit the disunity and absence of valour among the Hindus in order to subdue them. The solution lay in emulating the characteristics of these "Threatening Others" that were perceived to give them strength, such as paramilitary organisation, emphasis on unity and nationalism. The Hindu nationalists combined these emulatory aspects with a selective borrowing of traditions from the Hindu past to achieve a synthesis that was uniquely Indian and Hindu.

Hindu Mahasabha influence

The Hindu Mahasabha, which was initially a special interest group within the Indian National Congress and later an independent party, was an important influence on the RSS, even though it is rarely acknowledged. In 1923, prominent Hindu leaders like Madan Mohan Malaviya met together on this platform and voiced their concerns on the 'division in the Hindu community'. In his presidential speech to Mahasabha, Malaviya stated: "Friendship could exist between equals. If the Hindus made themselves strong and the rowdy section among the Mahomedans were convinced they could not safely rob and dishonour Hindus, unity would be established on a stable basis." He wanted the activists 'to educate all boys and girls, establish akharas (gymnasiums), establish a volunteer corps to persuade people to comply with decisions of the Hindu Mahasabha, to accept untouchables as Hindus and grant them the right to use wells, enter temples, get an education.' Later, Hindu Mahasabha leader V. D. Savarkar's 'Hindutva' ideology also had a profound impact on Hedgewar's thinking about the 'Hindu nation'.

The initial meeting for the formation of the Sangh on the Vijaya Dashami day of 1925 was held between Hedgewar and four Hindu Mahasabha leaders: B. S. Moonje, Ganesh Savarkar, L. V. Paranjpe and B. B. Tholkar. RSS took part as a volunteer force in organising the Hindu Mahasabha annual meeting in Akola in 1931. Moonje remained a patron of the RSS throughout his life. Both he and Ganesh Savarkar worked to spread the RSS shakhas in Maharashtra, Panjab, Delhi, and the princely states by initiating contacts with local leaders. Savarkar merged his own youth organisation Tarun Hindu Sabha with the RSS and helped its expansion. V. D. Savarkar, after his release in 1937, joined them in spreading the RSS and giving speeches in its support. Officials in the Home Department called the RSS the "volunteer organisation of the Hindu Mahasabha."

History

Indian Independence movement

Since its formation the RSS opposed joining the independence movement against British rule in India. Portraying itself as a social movement, Hedgewar also kept the organisation from having any direct affiliation with political organisations then fighting British rule. RSS rejected Gandhi's willingness to co-operate with the Muslims.

In accordance with Hedgewar's tradition of keeping the RSS away from the Indian Independence movement, any political activity that could be construed as being anti-British was carefully avoided. According to the RSS biographer C. P. Bhishikar, Hedgewar talked only about Hindu organisations and avoided any direct comment on the Government. The "Independence Day" announced by the Indian National Congress for 26 January 1930 was celebrated by the RSS that year but was subsequently avoided. The Tricolor of the Indian national movement was shunned. Hedgewar personally participated in the 'Satyagraha' launched by Gandhi in April 1930, but he did not get the RSS involved in the movement. He sent information everywhere that the RSS would not participate in the Satyagraha. However, those wishing to participate individually were not prohibited. In 1934, Congress passed a resolution prohibiting its members from joining the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha, or the Muslim League.

M. S. Golwalkar

M. S. Golwalkar, who became the leader of the RSS in 1940, continued and further strengthened the isolation from the independence movement. In his view, the RSS had pledged to achieve freedom through "defending religion and culture", not by fighting the British. Golwalkar lamented the anti-British nationalism, calling it a "reactionary view" that, he claimed, had disastrous effects upon the entire course of the freedom struggle. It is believed that Golwalkar did not want to give the British an excuse to ban the RSS. He complied with all the strictures imposed by the Government during the Second World War, even announcing the termination of the RSS military department. The British Government believed that the RSS was not supporting any civil disobedience against them, and their other political activities could thus be overlooked. The British Home Department took note of the fact that the speakers at the RSS meetings urged the members to keep aloof from the anti-British movements of the Indian National Congress, which was duly followed.The Home Department did not see the RSS as a problem for law and order in British India. The Bombay government appreciated the RSS by noting that the Sangh had scrupulously kept itself within the law and refrained from taking part in the disturbances (Quit India Movement) that broke out in August 1942. It also reported that the RSS had not, in any way, infringed upon government orders and had always shown a willingness to comply with the law. The Bombay Government report further noted that in December 1940, orders had been issued to the provincial RSS leaders to desist from any activities that the British Government considered objectionable, and the RSS, in turn, had assured the British authorities that "it had no intentions of offending against the orders of the Government".

Golwalkar later openly admitted the fact that the RSS did not participate in the Quit India Movement. He agreed that such a stance led to a perception of the RSS as an inactive organisation, whose statements had no substance in reality. Similarly, RSS neither supported nor joined in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny against the British in 1946.

Overall, the RSS opposed joining the independence movement, instead adopting a policy of collaboration with the British regime.

Partition

The Partition of India affected millions of Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims attempting to escape the violence and carnage that followed.[^74] During the partition, the RSS helped the Hindu refugees fleeing West Punjab; its activists also played an active role in the communal violence during Hindu-Muslim riots in North India, though this was officially not sanctioned by the leadership. To the RSS activists, the partition was a result of mistaken soft-line towards the Muslims, which only confirmed the natural moral weaknesses and corruptibility of the politicians. The RSS blamed Gandhi, Nehru and Patel for their 'naivety which resulted in the partition' and held them responsible for the mass killings and displacement of the millions of people.

First ban

The first ban on the RSS was imposed in Punjab Province (British India) on 24 January 1947 by Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana, the premier of the ruling Unionist Party, a party that represented the interests of the landed gentry and landlords of Punjab, which included Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. Along with the RSS, the Muslim National Guard was also banned. The ban was lifted on 28 January 1947.

Opposition to the National Flag of India

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh initially did not recognise the Tricolor as the National Flag of India. The RSS-inspired publication, the Organiser, demanded, in an editorial titled "National Flag", that the Bhagwa Dhwaj be adopted as the National Flag of India. After the Tricolor was adopted as the National Flag by the Constituent Assembly of India on 22 July 1947, the Organiser viciously attacked the Tricolor and the Constituent Assembly's decision. In an article titled "Mystery behind the Bhagwa Dhwaj", the Organiser stated:

The people who have come to power by the kick of fate may give in our hands the Tricolor but it [will] never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country.

In an essay titled "Drifting and Drafting" published in Bunch of Thoughts, Golwalkar lamented the choice of the Tricolor as the National Flag and compared it to an intellectual vacuum/void. In his words:

Our leaders have set up a new flag for the country. Why did they do so? It just is a case of drifting and imitating ... Ours is an ancient and great nation with a glorious past. Then, had we no flag of our own? Had we no national emblem at all these thousands of years? Undoubtedly we had. Then why this utter void, this utter vacuum in our minds.

The RSS hoisted the National Flag of India at its Nagpur headquarters only twice, on 14 August 1947 and on 26 January 1950, but stopped doing so after that. This issue has always been a source of controversy. In 2001 three activists of Rashtrapremi Yuwa Dal – president Baba Mendhe, and members Ramesh Kalambe and Dilip Chattani, along with others – allegedly entered the RSS headquarters in Reshimbagh, Nagpur, on 26 January, the Republic Day of India, and forcibly hoisted the national flag there amid patriotic slogans. They contended that the RSS had never before or after independence, ever hoisted the Tricolor in their premises. Offences were registered by the Bombay Police against the trio, who were then jailed. They were discharged by the court after eleven years in 2013. The arrests and the flag-hoisting issue stoked a controversy, which was raised in the Parliament as well. Hoisting of the flag was very restrictive until the formation of the flag code of India (2002). Subsequently, in 2002, the National Flag was raised in the RSS headquarters on Republic Day for the first time in 52 years.

Opposition to the Constitution of India

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh initially did not recognise the Constitution of India, strongly criticising it because the Indian Constitution made no mention of "Manu's laws" – from the ancient Hindu text Manusmriti. When the Constituent Assembly finalised the constitution, the RSS mouthpiece, the Organiser, complained in an editorial dated 30 November 1949:

But in our constitution, there is no mention of that unique constitutional development in ancient Bharat... To this day his laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity. But to our constitutional pundits that means nothing."

On 6 February 1950 the Organiser carried another article, titled "Manu Rules our Hearts", written by a retired High Court Judge named Sankar Subba Aiyar, that reaffirmed their support for the Manusmriti as the final lawgiving authority for Hindus, rather than the Constitution of India. It stated:

Even though Dr. Ambedkar is reported to have recently stated in Bombay that the days of Manu have ended it is nevertheless a fact that the daily lives of Hindus are even at present-day affected by the principles and injunctions contained in the Manusmrithi and other Smritis. Even an unorthodox Hindu feels himself bound at least in some matters by the rules contained in the Smrithis and he feels powerless to give up altogether his adherence to them.

The RSS' opposition to, and vitriolic attacks against, the Constitution of India continued post-independence. In 1966 Golwalkar, in his book titled Bunch of Thoughts asserted:

Our Constitution too is just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various Constitutions of Western countries. It has absolutely nothing, which can be called our own. Is there a single word of reference in its guiding principles as to what our national mission is and what our keynote in life is? No!

Second ban

RSS meeting in 1939

India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had been vigilant towards RSS since he had taken charge. When Golwalkar wrote to Nehru asking for the lifting of the ban on RSS after Gandhi's assassination, Nehru replied that the government had proof that RSS activities were 'anti-national' by virtue of being 'communalist'. In his letter to the heads of provincial governments in December 1947, Nehru wrote that "we have a great deal of evidence to show that RSS is an organisation which is in the nature of a private army and which is definitely proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines, even following the techniques of the organisation".

In January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a member of the RSS, Nathuram Godse. Following the assassination, many prominent leaders of the RSS were arrested, and the RSS as an organisation was banned on 4 February 1948. During the court proceedings in relation to the assassination Godse began claiming that he had left the organisation in 1946. A Commission of Inquiry into Conspiracy to the murder of Gandhi was set, and its report was published by India's Ministry of Home Affairs in the year 1970. Accordingly, the Justice Kapur Commission noted that the "RSS as such were not responsible for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, meaning thereby that one could not name the organisation as such as being responsible for that most diabolical crime, the murder of the apostle of peace. It has not been proved that they (the accused) were members of the RSS."[^kapoor-97] However, the then Indian Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had remarked that the "RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhi's death". The association with the incident also made the RSS "very unpopular and considerably dented its polarizing appeal".

RSS leaders were acquitted of the conspiracy charge by the Supreme Court of India. Following his release in August 1948, Golwalkar wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to lift the ban on RSS. After Nehru replied that the matter was the responsibility of the Home Minister, Golwalkar consulted Vallabhai Patel regarding the same. Patel then demanded an absolute pre-condition that the RSS adopt a formal written constitution and make it public, where Patel expected RSS to pledge its loyalty to the Constitution of India, accept the Tricolor as the National Flag of India, define the power of the head of the organisation, make the organisation democratic by holding internal elections, authorisation of their parents before enrolling the pre-adolescents into the movement, and to renounce violence and secrecy. Golwalkar launched a huge agitation against this demand during which he was imprisoned again. Later, a constitution was drafted for RSS, which, however, initially did not meet any of Patel's demands. After a failed attempt to agitate again, eventually the RSS's constitution was amended according to Patel's wishes with the exception of the procedure for selecting the head of the organisation and the enrolment of pre-adolescents. However, the organisation's internal democracy, which was written into its constitution, remained a 'dead letter'.

Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of India, said in early January 1948 that the RSS activists were "patriots who love their country". He asked the Congressmen to 'win over' the RSS by love, instead of trying to 'crush' them. He also appealed to the RSS to join the Congress instead of opposing it. Jaffrelot says that this attitude of Patel can be partly explained by the assistance the RSS gave the Indian administration in maintaining public order in September 1947, and that his expression of 'qualified sympathy' towards RSS reflected the long-standing inclination of several Hindu traditionalists in Congress. However, after Gandhi's assassination on 30 January 1948, Patel began to view that the activities of RSS were a danger to public security. In his reply letter to Golwalkar on 11 September 1948 regarding the lifting of ban on RSS, Patel stated that though RSS did service to the Hindu society by helping and protecting the Hindus when in need during partition violence, they also began attacking Muslims with revenge and went against "innocent men, women and children". He said that the speeches of RSS were "full of communal poison", and as a result of that 'poison', he remarked, India had to lose Gandhi, noting that the RSS men had celebrated Gandhi's death. Patel was also apprehensive of the secrecy in the working manner of RSS and complained that all of its provincial heads were Maratha Brahmins. He criticised the RSS for having its own army inside India, which he said, cannot be permitted as "it was a potential danger to the State". He also remarked: "The members of RSS claimed to be the defenders of Hinduism. But they must understand that Hinduism would not be saved by rowdyism."

On 11 July 1949 the Government of India lifted the ban on the RSS by issuing a communique stating that the decision to lift the ban on the RSS had been taken in view of the RSS leader Golwalkar's undertaking to make the group's loyalty towards the Constitution of India and acceptance and respect towards the National Flag of India more explicit in the Constitution of the RSS, which was to be worked out in a democratic manner.

Decolonisation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli

After India had achieved independence, the RSS was one of the socio-political organisations that supported and participated in movements to decolonise Dadra and Nagar Haveli, which at that time was ruled by Portugal. In early 1954 volunteers Raja Wakankar and Nana Kajrekar of the RSS visited the area round about Dadra, Nagar Haveli, and Daman several times to study the topography and get acquainted with locals who wanted the area to change from being a Portuguese colony to being an Indian union territory. In April 1954 the RSS formed a coalition with the National Movement Liberation Organisation (NMLO) and the Azad Gomantak Dal (AGD) for the annexation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli into the Republic of India. On the night of 21 July, United Front of Goans, a group working independently of the coalition, captured the Portuguese police station at Dadra and declared Dadra independent. Subsequently, on 28 July, volunteer teams from the RSS and AGD captured the territories of Naroli and Phiparia and ultimately the capital of Silvassa. The Portuguese forces that had escaped and moved towards Nagar Haveli, were assaulted at Khandvel and forced to retreat until they surrendered to the Indian border police at Udava on 11 August 1954. A native administration was set up with Appasaheb Karmalkar of the NMLO as the Administrator of Dadra and Nagar Haveli on 11 August 1954.

The capture of Dadra and Nagar Haveli gave a boost to the movement against Portuguese colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent. In 1955, RSS leaders demanded the end of Portuguese rule in Goa and its integration into India. When Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru refused to provide an armed intervention, RSS leader Jagannath Rao Joshi led the Satyagraha agitation straight into Goa. He was imprisoned with his followers by the Portuguese police. The nonviolent protests continued but met with repression. On 15 August 1955, the Portuguese police opened fire on the satyagrahis, killing thirty or so civilians.

The Emergency

In 1975 the Indira Gandhi government proclaimed emergency rule in India, thereby curtailing the freedom of the press. The Emergency was imposed after Jayaprakash Narayan urged people to start civil disobedience. Narayan also asked the army and the police to disobey the government. A number of opposition leaders including Narayan were arrested. The RSS, which was seen as being close to opposition leaders, and with its large organisational base, was seen to have the capability of organising protests against the government, and was thus also banned.

Deoras, the then chief of the RSS, wrote letters to Indira Gandhi, promising her to extend the organisation's co-operation in return for the lifting of the ban, asserting that RSS had no connection with the movement in Bihar and that in Gujarat. He tried to persuade Vinoba Bhave to mediate between the RSS and the government and also sought the offices of Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's son. Provincial RSS organiser Lala Hansraj Gupta had also written a letter to Indira Gandhi and promised to begin "a new era of co-operation" between the Sangh Parivar and the Congress in exchange for the removal of the ban on the RSS. A number of volunteers of the RSS have claimed that they carried out activities underground during the Emergency. RSS claimed that the movement was dominated by tens of thousands of RSS cadres.

The Emergency was lifted in 1977, and with it, the ban on the RSS was also lifted. The Emergency is said to have legitimised the role of RSS in Indian politics, which had not been possible ever since the stain the organisation had acquired following Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in 1948, thereby 'sowing the seeds' for the Hindutva politics of the following decades.

Structure

Main articles: List of RSS Sarsanghchalaks, List of RSS members, and Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha

RSS does not have any formal membership. According to the official website, men and boys can become members by joining the nearest shakha, which is the basic unit. Although the RSS claims not to keep membership records, it is estimated to have had 2.5 to 6.0 million members in 2001.

Leadership and member positions

Welcome from City of Milpitas California, USA to K Sudarshan

There are the following terms to describe RSS leaders and members:

Sarsanghchalak: The Sarsanghchalak is the head of the RSS organisation; the position is decided through nomination by the predecessor.
Sarkaryavah: equivalent to general secretary, executive head. Elected by the elected members of the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha. Dattatreya Hosabale is the Sarkaryawah as of 2021 Suresh Joshi preceded him; he had held the post for 12 years.
Sah-Sarkaryavah: Joint general secretary, of which there are four. Notable Sah-Sarkarayvahs include Dattatreya Hosabale.
Vicharak: A number of RSS leaders serve as vicharak or ideologues for the organisation.
Pracharak: Active, full-time missionary who spreads RSS doctrine. The system of pracharak or RSS missionaries has been called the life blood of the organisation. A number of these men devote themselves to lifetime of celibacy, poverty, and service to the organisation. The pracharaks were instrumental in spreading the organisation from its roots in Nagpur to the rest of the country. There are about 2500 pracharaks in RSS.The two most well known former pracharaks are former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India since May 2014.
Karyakarta: Active functionary. To become a karyakarta, swayamsevak members undergo four levels of ideological and physical training in Sangh Shiksha Varg camps. 95% of karyakartas are known as grahastha karyakartas, or householders, supporting the organisation part-time; while 5% are pracharaks, who support the organisation full-time.
Mukhya-Shikshak: The head teacher and chief of a shakha.
Karyawah: The executive head of a shakha.
Gatanayak: Group leader.
Swayamsevak: Volunteer. Svayam can mean "one's self" or "voluntary," and sevakaAtal Bihari Vajpayee described himself as a swayamsevak. They attend the shakhas of the RSS.

Shakhas

The term shakha is Hindi for "branch". Most of the organisational work of the RSS is done through the co-ordination of the various shakhas. These shakhas are run for one hour in public places. The number of shakhas increased from 8500 in 1975 to 11,000 in 1977, and became 20,000 by 1982. In 2004 more than 51,000 shakhas were run throughout India. The number of shakas had fallen by over 10,000 after the fall of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in 2004. However, by mid-2014, the number had again increased to about 40,000 after the return of BJP to power in the same year. This number stood at 51,335 in August 2015.

The shakhas conduct various activities for its volunteers such as physical fitness through yoga, exercises, and games, and activities that encourage civic awareness, social service, community living, and patriotism. Volunteers are trained in first aid and in rescue and rehabilitation operations, and are encouraged to become involved in community development.

Generally, shakhas involve the gathering of male RSS members to train in martial arts, exercise in other ways, and "recite nationalist stories" to outsiders.

Most of the shakhas are located in the Hindi-speaking regions. As of 2016 Delhi had 1,898 shakhas.[^148] There are more than 8,000 shakhas in UP, 6,845 shakhas in Kerala,[^149] 4,000 in Maharashtra, and around 1,000 in Gujarat.[^150] In northeast India, there are more than 1,000 shakhas, including 903 in Assam, 107 in Manipur, 36 in Arunachal, and 4 in Nagaland.[^151][^152] In Punjab, there are more than 900 shakhas as of 2016.[^153] As of late 2015 there were a total of 1,421 shakhas in Bihar,[^154] 4,870 in Rajasthan,[^155] 1,252 in Uttarakhand,[^156] 2,060 in Tamil Nadu,[^157] and 1,492 in West Bengal.[^158] There are close to 500 shakhas in Jammu and Kashmir,[^159] 130 in Tripura, and 46 in Meghalaya.[^160]

As per the RSS Annual Report of 2019, there were a total of 84,877 shakhas, of which 59,266 are being held daily; 17,229 are weekly shakhas (58,967 in 2018, 57,165 in 2017, and 56,569 in 2016)[^161][^162]

Uniform

A volunteer taking an oath in the uniform shorts used until 2016

In October 2016, the RSS replaced the uniform of khaki shorts its cadre had worn for 91 years with dark brown trousers.[^163][^164]

Anthem

The song Namastē Sadāvatsale Matrubhoomē is the anthem or prayer of the RSS, saluting the motherland.[^165]

Affiliated organisations

Further information: Sangh Parivar

Organisations that are inspired by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's ideology refer to themselves as members of the Sangh Parivar. In most cases, pracharaks (full-time volunteers of the RSS) were deputed to start up and manage these organisations in their initial years.

The affiliated organisations include:

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), literally, Indian People's Party (23m)
Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, literally, Indian Farmers' Association (8m)
Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, literally, Indian Labour Association (10 million as of 2009)
Seva Bharti, Organisation for service of the needy.
Rashtra Sevika Samiti, literally, National Volunteer Association for Women (1.8m)
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, literally, All India Students' Forum (2.8m)
Shiksha Bharati (2.1m)
Vishwa Hindu Parishad, World Hindu Council (2.8m)
Bhartiya Baudh Sangh, Indian Buddhist Association
Bharatiya Yuva Seva Sangh (BYSS), Youth Awakening Front
Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, literally, Hindu Volunteer Association – overseas wing
Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, Nativist Awakening Front
Saraswati Shishu Mandir, Nursery
Vidya Bharati, Educational Institutes
Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (Ashram for the Tribal Welfare), Organisations for the improvement of tribals; and Friends of Tribals Society
Muslim Rashtriya Manch (Muslim National Forum), Organisation for the improvement of Muslims
Bajrang Dal, Army of Hanuman (2m)
Anusuchit Jati-Jamati Arakshan Bachao Parishad, Organisation for the improvement of Dalits
Laghu Udyog Bharati, an extensive network of small industries.
Bharatiya Vichara Kendra, Think Tank
Vishwa Samvad Kendra, Communication Wing, spread all over India for media related work, having a team of IT professionals (samvada.org)
Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, National Sikh Association, a sociocultural organisation with the aim to spread the knowledge of Gurbani to the Indian society.
Vivekananda Kendra, promotion of Swami Vivekananda's ideas with Vivekananda International Foundation in New Delhi as a public policy think tank with six centres of study

Although RSS generally endorses the BJP, it has at times refused to do so due to the difference of opinion with the party.

Ideology

Mission

Golwalkar described the mission of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as the revitalisation of the Indian value system based on universalism and peace and prosperity to all Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the worldview that the whole world is one family, propounded by the ancient thinkers of India, is considered one of the ideologies of the organisation.

But the immediate focus, the leaders believe, is on the Hindu renaissance, which would build an egalitarian society and a strong India that could propound this philosophy. Hence, the focus is on social reform, economic upliftment of the downtrodden, and the protection of the cultural diversity of the natives in India. The organisation says it aspires to unite all Hindus and build a strong India that can contribute to the welfare of the world. In the words of RSS ideologue and the second head of the RSS, Golwalkar, "in order to be able to contribute our unique knowledge to mankind, in order to be able to live and strive for the unity and welfare of the world, we stand before the world as a self-confident, resurgent and mighty nation".

In Vichardhara (ideology), Golwalkar affirms the RSS mission of integration as:

RSS has been making determined efforts to inculcate in our people the burning devotion for Bharat and its national ethos; kindle in them the spirit of dedication and sterling qualities and character; rouse social consciousness, mutual good-will, love and cooperation among them all; to make them realise that casts, creeds, and languages are secondary and that service to the nation is the supreme end and to mold their behaviour accordingly; instill in them a sense of true humility and discipline and train their bodies to be strong and robust so as to shoulder any social responsibility; and thus to create all-round Anushasana (Discipline) in all walks of life and build together all our people into a unified harmonious national whole, extending from Himalayas to Kanyakumari.

— M. S. Golwalkar

Golwalkar and Balasaheb Deoras, the second and third supreme leaders of the RSS, spoke against the caste system, though they did not support its abolition.

Comparisons with fascism

Jaffrelot observes that although the RSS with its paramilitary style of functioning and its emphasis on discipline has sometimes been seen by some as "an Indian version of fascism", he argues that "RSS's ideology treats society as an organism with a secular spirit, which is implanted not so much in the race as in a socio-cultural system and which will be regenerated over the course of time by patient work at the grassroots". He writes that "ideology of the RSS did not develop a theory of the state and the race, a crucial element in European nationalisms: Nazism and Fascism" and that the RSS leaders were interested in culture as opposed to racial sameness.

The likening of the Sangh Parivar to fascism by Western critics has also been countered by Jyotirmaya Sharma, who labelled it as an attempt by them to "make sense of the growth of extremist politics and intolerance within their society", and that such "simplistic transference" has done great injustice to knowledge of Hindu nationalist politics.

Stance on non-Hindu communities

When it came to non-Hindu religions, the view of Golwalkar (who once supported Hitler's creation of a supreme race by suppression of minorities) on minorities was that of extreme intolerance. In a 1998 magazine article, some RSS and BJP members were said to have distanced themselves from Golwalkar's views, though not entirely:

The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and languages, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture ... in a word they must cease to be foreigners; or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens' rights. — M. S. Golwalkar

Golwalkar also explains that RSS does not intend to compete in electioneering politics or share power. The movement considers Hindus as inclusive of Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, tribals, untouchables, Veerashaivism, Arya Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission, and other groups as a community, a view similar to the inclusive referencing of the term Hindu in the Indian Constitution Article 25 (2)(b).

In spite of the organisation's hostile rhetoric against their religions, the RSS also has Muslim and Christian members. According to the party's official documents, Indian Muslims and Christians are still descendants of Hindus that happened to be converted to foreign faiths, so as long as they agree with its beliefs they can also be members. They are still required to attend the shakhas, and recite Hindu hymns, even by breaking Ramadhan fasts when possible. The Muslim Rashtriya Manch is considered as a wing of the RSS for Muslim members.

In January 2020, the RSS along with other right-wing political parties and religious organisations such as BJP, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and HJV held protests, which allegedly demanded that the statue of Jesus be not installed at Kapala Hills of Kanakapura. The 10 acres (4.0 ha) of land was originally donated by the government to the Christian community after D. K. Shivakumar, the MLA of Indian National Congress submitted a request to the state government for land donation to the community.

LGBT issues

Historically, the RSS has expressed a negative view of homosexuality, though it has moderated this position in recent years, expressing support for the decriminalisation of homosexuality but opposition to the recognition of same-sex unions in India.[^192] In 2016, RSS member Rakesh Sinha claimed that efforts to decriminalise homosexuality in India were the product of a "European mindset". In 2018, the RSS expressed suport for Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, which decriminalised homosexual activity in India, while simultaneously condemning efforts to legalise gay marriage and referring to homosexuality as "unnatural".

Similarly, in a book published in 2019, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat stated that homosexuality should remain a "private matter", while also arguing that "gay marriages should not be institutionalised for it will institutionalise homosexuality". In January 2023, Mohan Bhagwat again stated that LGBT individuals "should have their own private and social space as they are humans and have the right to live as others". However, some critics have alleged these remarks are "insincere".

In March 2023, RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabalereiterated the organisation's opposition to the legalisation of gay marriage, stating that in Hinduism "marriage is a Samskara (rite of passage) Hindu sacrament" that necessarily involves two people of opposite gender. These comments were made in support of an affidavit the BJP-ruled Government of India filed with the Supreme Court of India which argued against the legalisation of same-sex marriage. When the Supreme Court handed down a verdict against legalisation later that year, the RSS "welcomed" the ruling, and additionally expressed their opposition to giving same-sex couples the right to adopt children.

Attitude towards Jews

Before World War II, the RSS leaders admired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Golwalkar took inspiration from Adolf Hitler's ideology of racial purity. However, the RSS's stance changed during the war; the organisation firmly supported the British war effort against Hitler and the Axis Powers. The RSS leaders were supportive of the formation of Jewish State of Israel. Golwalkar admired the Jews for maintaining their "religion, culture and language".

Participation in land reforms

The RSS volunteers participated in the Bhoodan movement organised by Gandhian leader Vinobha Bhave, who had met RSS leader Golwalkar in Meerut in November 1951. Golwalkar had been inspired by the movement that encouraged land reform through voluntary means. He pledged the support of the RSS for this movement.[^204] Consequently, many RSS volunteers, led by Nanaji Deshmukh, participated in the movement. But Golwalkar was also critical of the Bhoodan movement on other occasions for being reactionary and for working "merely with a view to counteracting Communism". He believed that the movement should inculcate a faith in the masses that would make them rise above the base appeal of Communism.

Reform in 'caste'

The RSS has advocated the training of Dalits and other backward classes as temple high priests (a position traditionally reserved for Brahmins and denied to lower castes). They argue that the social divisiveness of the caste system is responsible for the lack of adherence to Hindu values and traditions, and that reaching out to the lower castes in this manner will be a remedy to the problem. The RSS has also condemned upper-caste Hindus for preventing Dalits from worshipping at temples, saying that "even God will desert the temple in which Dalits cannot enter".

Jaffrelot says that "there is insufficient data available to carry out a statistical analysis of social origins of the early RSS leaders" but goes on to conclude that, based on some known profiles, most of the RSS founders and its leading organisers, with a few exceptions, were Maharashtrian Brahmins from the middle or lower class and argues that the pervasiveness of the Brahminical ethic in the organisation was probably the main reason why it failed to attract support from the low castes. He argues that the "RSS resorted to instrumentalist techniques of ethnoreligious mobilisation—in which its Brahminism was diluted—to overcome this handicap". However, Anderson and Damle (1987) find that members of all castes have been welcomed into the organisation and are treated as equals.

During a visit in 1934 to an RSS camp at Wardha accompanied by Mahadev Desai and Mirabehn, Mahatma Gandhi said, "When I visited the RSS Camp, I was very much surprised by your discipline and absence of untouchability." He personally inquired about this to Swayamsevaks and found that volunteers were living and eating together in the camp without bothering to know each other's castes.[^209]

Relief and rehabilitation

First aid camp for earthquake victims in Gujarat

RSS volunteers involved in relief work during floods in North Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh

The RSS was instrumental in relief efforts after the 1971 Odisha cyclone, 1977 Andhra Pradesh cyclone[^sev-210] and in the 1984 Bhopal disaster.[^211][^212] It assisted in relief efforts during the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, and helped rebuild villages.[^sev-210][^213] Approximately 35,000 RSS members in uniform were engaged in the relief efforts,[^214] and many of their critics acknowledged their role.[^215] An RSS-affiliated NGO, Seva Bharati, conducted relief operations in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Activities included building shelters for the victims and providing food, clothes, and medical necessities.[^216] The RSS assisted relief efforts during the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and the subsequent tsunami.[^217] Seva Bharati also adopted 57 children (38 Muslims and 19 Hindus) from militancy affected areas of Jammu and Kashmir to provide them education at least up to Higher Secondary level.[^218][^219] They also took care of victims of the Kargil War of 1999.[^220]

During the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, as per the former National Minorities Commission chairman Tarlochan Singh and noted journalist & author Khushwant Singh, RSS activists also protected and helped members of the Sikh community.[^221][^222][^223]^{[broken footnote]}[^224]

Tsunami relief work by RSS volunteers

In 2006 RSS participated in relief efforts to provide basic necessities such as food, milk, and potable water to the people of Surat, Gujarat, who were affected by floods in the region.^{[citation needed]} The RSS volunteers carried out relief and rehabilitation work after the floods affected North Karnataka and some districts of the state of Andhra Pradesh.[^225] In 2013, following the Uttarakhand floods, RSS volunteers were involved in flood relief work through its offices set up at affected areas.[^226][^227]

Backing the 2020 coronavirus lockdown in India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh provided essential services including masks, soaps and food to many all over India during the lockdown.[^228][^229][^230] In 2020, a Muslim woman from Jammu and Kashmir donated all her savings meant for her Hajj pilgrimage, worth ₹5 lakh, to the RSS-affiliated 'Sewa Bharati' after being "impressed with the welfare work" done by the outfit amid the lockdown due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.[^231] The number of Muslim students in the schools run by Vidya Bharati, the educational wing of RSS, has witnessed an increase of approximately 30% during the three years 2017–2020 in Uttar Pradesh.[^232]

Publications

Two prominent publications of the RSS are Panchajanya (Hindi) and Organiser (English). The first magazines published were Rashtra Dharma (Hindi) and Organiser (English). Later in 1948 new publications were launched, Panchajanya from Lucknow, Akashwani from Jalandhar and Chetana from Varanasi. Until 1977 the publications were published by Rashtra Dharma Prakashan the responsibility of which was later taken over by Bharat Prakashan Ltd. The governing board of the publications has been appointing editors for the publications. Prominent leaders like Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee have been the editors of these publications.[^233][^234] In 2013, the number of subscriptions to Panchajanya was around 60,000 and around 15,000 for Organiser. Subscriptions have increased substantially after 2014 election of Narendra Modi as the Prime minister. As of 2017, Panchajanya had more than 1 lakh subscribers and Organiser had 25,000.[^235]

Reception

The RSS has been criticised as an extremist organisation and as a paramilitary group. It has also been criticised when its members have participated in anti-Muslim violence. it has since formed in 1984, a militant wing called the Bajrang Dal. Along with Shiv Sena, the RSS has been involved in riots, often inciting and organising violence against Christians and Muslims. Thus, there is a common consensus among the academia and intellectuals that RSS spreads hatred.

Involvement with riots

The RSS has been censured for its involvement in communal riots.

After giving careful and serious consideration to all the materials that are on record, the Commission is of the view that the RSS with its extensive organisation in Jamshedpur and which had close links with the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh had a positive hand in creating a climate which was most propitious for the outbreak of communal disturbances.

In the first instance, the speech of Shri Deoras (delivered just five days before the Ram Navami festival) tended to encourage the Hindu extremists to be unyielding in their demands regarding Road No. 14. Secondly, his speech amounted to communal propaganda. Thirdly, the shakhas and the camps that were held during the divisional conference presented a militant atmosphere to the Hindu public. In the circumstances, the commission cannot but hold the RSS responsible for creating a climate for the disturbances that took place on 11 April 1979.

Jitendra Narayan Commission report on Jamshedpur riots of 1979[^247]^{[relevant? – discuss]}

Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organisation for human rights based in New York, has claimed that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP), the Bajrang Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the BJP have been party to the Gujarat violence that erupted after the Godhra train burning. Local VHP, BJP, and BD leaders have been named in many police reports filed by eyewitnesses. RSS and VHP claimed that they made appeals to put an end to the violence and that they asked their supporters and volunteer staff to prevent any activity that might disrupt peace.

Religious violence in Odisha

Christian groups accuse the RSS alongside its close affiliates, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal (BD), and the Hindu Jagaran Sammukhya (HJS), of participation in the 2008 religious violence in Odisha.

Involvement in the Babri Masjid demolition

According to the 2009 report of the Liberhan Commission, the Sangh Parivar organised the destruction of the Babri Mosque. The Commission said: "The blame or the credit for the entire temple construction movement at Ayodhya must necessarily be attributed to Sangh Parivar."[^254] It also noted that the Sangh Parivar is an "extensive and widespread organic body" that encompasses organisations that address and bring together just about every type of social, professional, and other demographic groupings of individuals. The RSS has denied responsibility and questioned the objectivity of the report. Former RSS chief K. S. Sudarshan alleged that the mosque had been demolished by government men as opposed to the Karsevak volunteers. On the other hand, a government of India white paper dismissed the idea that the demolition was pre-organised.[^tnie07122009-255] The RSS was banned after the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, when the government of the time considered it a threat to the state. The ban was subsequently lifted in 1993 when no evidence of any unlawful activity was found by the tribunal constituted under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.[^256]

Involvement in politics

Several Sangh Parivar politicians such as Balraj Madhok in the 1960s and 1970s to the BJP leaders like L. K. Advani have complained about the RSS's interference in party politics. Though some former Hindu nationalists believed that Sangh should take part in politics, they failed to draw the RSS, which was intended to be a purely cultural movement, into the political arena until the 1950s. Savarkar tried to convince Hedgewar and later Golwalkar, to tie up with the Hindu Mahasabha, but failed to do so.

Under pressure from other swayamsevaks, Golwalkar gradually changed his mind after independence under unusual circumstances during the ban on RSS in 1948 after the assassination of Gandhi. After the first wave of arrests of RSS activists at that time, some of its members who had gone underground recommended that their movement be involved in politics, seeing that no political force was present to advocate the cause of RSS in parliament or anywhere else. One such member who significantly suggested this cause was K. R. Malkani, who wrote in 1949:

Sangh must take part in politics not only to protect itself against the greedy design of politicians, but to stop the un-Bharatiya and anti-Bharatiya policies of the Government and to advance and expedite the cause of Bharatiya through state machinery side by side with official effort in the same direction. ... Sangh must continue as it is, an ashram for the national cultural education of the entire citizenry, but it must develop a political wing for the more effective and early achievement of its ideals.

Golwalkar approved of Malkani's and others' views regarding the formation of a new party in 1950. Jaffrelot says that the death of Sardar Patel influenced this change since Golwalkar opined that Patel could have transformed the Congress party by emphasising its affinities with Hindu nationalism, while after Patel, Nehru became strong enough to impose his 'anti-communal' line within his party. Accordingly, Golwalkar met Syama Prasad Mukherjee and agreed for endorsing senior swayamsevaks, who included Deendayal Upadhyaya, Balraj Madhok and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a newly formed political party by Mukherjee. These men, who took their orders from RSS, captured power in the party after Mukherjee's death.[^footnotejaffrelot,_hindu_nationalism_reader2007175%e2%80%93179-257]

Balasaheb Deoras, who succeeded Golwalkar as the chief of RSS, got very much involved in politics. In 1965, when he was the general secretary of the RSS, he addressed the annual meeting of Jana Sangh, which is seen as an "unprecedented move" by an RSS dignitary that reflected his strong interest in politics and his will to make the movement play a larger part in the public sphere. Jaffrelot says that he exemplified the specific kind of swayamsevaks known as 'activists', giving expression to his leanings towards political activism by having the RSS support the JP Movement. The importance that RSS began to give to the electoral politics is demonstrated when its shakhas were made constituency-based in the early 1970s, from which the RSS shakhas began to involve directly in elections, not only of legislatures, but also of trade unions, student and cultural organisations.

As soon as the RSS men took over the Jana Sangh party, the Hindu traditionalists who previously joined the party because of S. P. Mukherjee were sidelined.^{[citation needed]} The organisation of the party was restructured and all its organisational secretaries, who were the pillars of the party, came from the RSS, both at the district and state level. The party also took the vision of RSS in its mission, where its ultimate objective, in the long run, was the reform of society, but not the conquest of power, since the 'state' was not viewed as a prominent institution. Hence the Jana Sangh initially remained reluctant to join any alliance that was not fully in harmony with its ideology. In 1962, Deendayal Upadhyaya, who was the party's chief, explained this approach by saying that "coalitions were bound to degenerate into a struggle for power by opportunist elements coming together in the interest of expediency". He wanted to build the party as an alternative party to the Congress and saw the elections as an "opportunity to educate the people on political issues and to challenge the right of the Congress to be in power". Jaffrelot says that this indifferent approach of party politics was in accordance with its lack of interest in the 'state' and the wish to make it weaker, or more decentralised.[^footnotejaffrelot,_hindu_nationalism_reader2007175%e2%80%93179-257] After India's defeat in the 1962 Sino–Indian war, the RSS and other right-wing forces in India were strengthened since the leftist and centrist opinions, sometimes even Nehru himself, could then be blamed for being 'soft' towards China. The RSS and Jana Sangh also took complete advantage of the 1965 war with Pakistan to "deepen suspicion about Muslims", and also en-cashed the growing unpopularity of Congress, particularly in the Hindi-belt, where a left-wing alternative was weak or non-existent. The major themes on the party's agenda during this period were banning cow slaughter, abolishing the special status given to Jammu and Kashmir, and legislating a uniform civil code. Explaining the Jana Sangh's failure to become a major political force despite claiming to represent the national interests of the Hindus, scholar Bruce Desmond Graham states that the party's close initial ties with the Hindi-belt and its preoccupation with the issues of North India such as promotion of Hindi, energetic resistance to Pakistan etc., had become a serious disadvantage to the party in the long run. He also adds that its interpretation of Hinduism was "restrictive and exclusive", arguing that "its doctrines were inspired by an activist version of Hindu nationalism and, indirectly, by the values of Brahmanism rather than the devotional and quietist values of popular Hinduism." Desmond says that, if the Jana Sangh had carefully moderated its Hindu nationalism, it could have been able to well-exploit any strong increase in support for the traditional and nationalist Hindu opinion, and hence to compete on equal terms with the Congress in the northern states. He also remarks that if it had adopted a less harsh attitude towards Pakistan and Muslims, "it would have been much more acceptable to Hindu traditionalists in the central and southern states, where partition had left fewer emotional scars."

The Jana Sangh started making alliances by entering the anti-Congress coalitions since the 1960s. It became part of the 1971 Grand Alliance and finally merged itself with the Janata Party in 1977.[^footnotejaffrelot,_hindu_nationalism_reader2007175%e2%80%93179-257] The success of Janata Party in 1977 elections made the RSS members central ministers for the first time (Vajpayee, Advani and Brij Lal Verma),[^footnotetapan_basu,_khaki_shorts199351%e2%80%9354-114] and provided the RSS with an opportunity to avail the state and its instruments to further its ends, through the resources of various state governments as well as the central government.[^260] However, this merge, which was seen as a dilution of its original doctrine, was viewed by the ex-Jana Sanghis as submersion of their initial identity. Meanwhile, the other components of the Janata Party denounced the allegiance the ex-Jana Sanghis continued to pay to the RSS. This led to a 'dual membership' controversy, regarding the links the former Jana Sangh members were retaining with the RSS, and it led to the split of Janata Party in 1979.[^footnotejaffrelot,_hindu_nationalism_reader2007175%e2%80%93179-257]

The former Jana Sangh elements formed a new party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in 1980. However, BJP originated more as a successor to the Janata Party and did not return to the beginning stages of the Hindu nationalist identity and Jana Sangh doctrines. The RSS resented this dilution of ideology – the new slogans promoted by the then BJP president Vajpayee like 'Gandhian socialism' and 'positive secularism'. By the early 1980s, RSS is said to have established its political strategy of "never keeping all its eggs in one basket". It even decided to support Congress in some states, for instance, to create the Hindu Munnani in Tamil Nadu in the backdrop of the 1981 Meenakshipuram mass conversion to Islam, and to support one of its offshoots, Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), to launch an enthno-religious movement on the Ayodhya dispute. BJP did not have much electoral success in its initial years and was able to win only two seats in the 1984 elections. After L. K. Advani replaced Vajpayee as party president in 1986, the BJP also began to rally around the Ayodhya campaign. In 1990, the party organised the Ram Rath Yatra to advance this campaign in large-scale.[^footnotejaffrelot,_hindu_nationalism_reader2007175%e2%80%93179-257][^footnotetapan_basu,_khaki_shorts199351%e2%80%9354-114] Advani also attacked the then ruling Congress party with the slogans such as 'pseudo-secularism', accusing Congress of misusing secularism for the political appeasement of minorities, and established an explicit and unambiguous path of Hindu revival.[^:0-119]

The 'instrumentalisation' of the Ayodhya issue and the related communal riots which polarised the electorate along religious lines helped the BJP make good progress in the subsequent elections of 1989, 1991 and 1996. However, in the mid-1990s, BJP adopted a more moderate approach to politics in order to make allies. As Jaffrelot remarks, it was because the party realised during then that it would not be in a position to form the government on its own in the near future. In 1998, it built a major coalition, National Democratic Alliance (NDA), in the Lok Sabha and succeeded in the general election in 1998, and was able to succeed again in the mid-term elections of 1999, with Vajpayee as their Prime Ministerial candidate. Though the RSS and other Sangh Parivar components appreciated some of the steps taken by the Vajpayee government, like the testing of a nuclear bomb, they felt disappointed with the government's overall performance. The fact that no solid step was taken towards building the Ram temple in Ayodhya was resented by the VHP. The liberalisation policy of the government faced objection from the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, a trade union controlled by the RSS. Jaffrelot says, RSS and the other Sangh Parivar elements had come to the view that the "BJP leaders had been victims of their thirst for power: they had preferred to compromise to remain in office instead of sticking to their principles."[^footnotejaffrelot,_hindu_nationalism_reader2007175-179-261]

After the end of Vajpayee's tenure in 2004, BJP remained as a major opposition party in the subsequent years; and again in the year 2014, the NDA came to power after BJP gained an overwhelming majority in the 2014 general elections, with Narendra Modi, a former RSS member who previously served as Gujarat's chief minister for three tenures, as their prime ministerial candidate. Modi was able to project himself as a person who could bring about "development", without focus on any specific policies,[^:1-262] through the "Gujarat development model" which was frequently used to counter the allegations of communalism.[^263] Voter dissatisfaction with the Congress, as well as the support from RSS are also stated as reasons for the BJP's success in the 2014 elections.

Hindutva

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

[!info]
This is a shortened version of the Wikipedia article on Hindutva, copied on 2024-10-23. I've annotated sections that I find important in pink colour. I recommend to read Arundhati Roy - India, On the Road to Theocracy for a recent and realistic view of the current political state of India, RSS, Hindutva, and Narendra Modi control.

Hindutva (/hɪnˈdʊtvə/ lit. 'Hindu-ness') is a political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India. The political ideology was formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1922. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar.

Inspired by European fascism, the Hindutva movement has been variously described as a variant of right-wing extremism, as "almost fascist in the classical sense", adhering to a concept of homogenised majority and cultural hegemony and as a separatist ideology. As of today, the Supreme Court of India repeatedly dismissed the allegation that it equates with 'fascism' and reiterates Hindutva as a 'way of life'. Nevertheless, some analysts dispute the identification of Hindutva with fascism and suggest Hindutva is an extreme form of conservatism or ethno-nationalism.

Definitions

Tertiary sources

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Hindutva is "Originally: the state or quality of being Hindu; ‘Hinduness’. Now: an ideology advocating, or movement seeking to establish, the hegemony of Hindus and Hinduism within India; Hindu nationalism." Its etymology, according to the OED, is: "from modern Sanskrit hindutva (Hindu qualities, Hindu identity) from hindu (from Hindi hindū : see Hindu n.) + classical Sanskrit -tva, suffix forming abstract nouns, after Hindi hindupan, in the same sense." The etymology and meaning of hindu, according to the OED is: "Partly a borrowing from Hindi and Urdu. Partly a borrowing from Persian. Etymons: Urdu hindū, Persian hindū. from (i) Hindi hindū and Urdu hindū, originally denoting a person from India, now specifically a follower of Hinduism, and its etymon (ii) Persian hindū, in the same senses (Middle Persian hindūg, denoting a person from India), apparently formed already in Old Persian ... hindu, denoting an eastern province of the Achaemenid empire."

According to Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions, Hindutva is a concept of "Indian cultural, national, and religious identity". The term "conflates a geographically based religious, cultural, and national identity: a true 'Indian' is one who partakes of this 'Hindu-ness'. Some Indians insist, however, that Hindutva is primarily a cultural term to refer to the traditional and indigenous heritage of the Indian nation-state, and they compare the relationship between Hindutva and India to that of Zionism and Israel."[^mwewr1999-20] This view, as summarised by Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions, holds that "even those who are not religiously Hindu but whose religions originated in India – Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others – share in this historical, cultural, and national essence. Those whose religions were imported to India, meaning primarily the country’s Muslim and Christian communities, may fall within the boundaries of Hindutva only if they subsume themselves into the majority culture".[^mwewr1999-20]

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations, "Hindutva, translated as 'Hinduness,' refers to the ideology of Hindu nationalists, stressing the common culture of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. ... Modern politicians have attempted to play down the racial and anti-Muslim aspects of Hindutva, stressing the inclusiveness of the Indian identity; but the term has Fascist undertones." According to The Dictionary of Human Geography, "Hindutva encapsulates the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism, a 'Hinduness' allegedly shared by all Hindus."[^gregoryjohnston2011-3] According to A Political and Economic Dictionary of South Asia, "One of the main purposes behind the concept of Hindutva was to construct a collective identity to support the cause of 'Hindu-unity' (Hindu Sanghatan) and to avoid too narrow a definition of Hinduism, which had the consequence of excluding Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains from the Hindu community. Later, Hindu-nationalist ideologues transformed the concept into a strategy to include non-Hindus, in order to widen their social base, and for political mobilization.[^schottlimitra2015-21]

According to Encyclopædia Britannica's article on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a Hindu and Indian nationalist,[^britannica-savarkar1-22] "Hindutva ("Hinduness") ... sought to define Indian culture as a manifestation of Hindu values; this concept grew to become a major tenet of Hindu nationalist ideology."[^britannica-savarkar1-22] According to the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Hindutva as defined in the classic statement of its ideology, is the "culture of the Hindu race" where Hinduism is but an element and "Hindu dharma is a religion practiced by Hindus as well as Sikhs and Buddhists". The article further states, "proponents of Hindutva have sought to promote the identification of national identity with the religious and broader cultural heritage of Hindus. Measures taken to achieve this end have included attempts to 'reclaim' individuals judged to have taken up 'alien' religions, the pursuit of social, cultural and philanthropic activities designed to strengthen awareness of Hindu belonging, and direct political action through various organisations, including recognized political parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)."[^cushrobinson2012-23]

Savarkar

For Savarkar, in Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, Hindutva is an inclusive term of everything Indic. The three essentials of Hindutva in Savarkar's definition were the common nation (rashtra), common race (jati), and common culture or civilisation (sanskriti).[^sharma-24] Savarkar used the words "Hindu" and "Sindhu" interchangeably.[^sharma-24][^jaffrelot2009p86-25] Those terms were at the foundation of his Hindutva, as geographic, cultural and ethnic concepts, and "religion did not figure in his ensemble", states Sharma.[^sharma-24][^nussbaum2009p58-26] His elaboration of Hindutva included all Indic religions, i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Savarkar restricted "Hindu nationality" to "Indian religions" in the sense that they shared a common culture and fondness for the land of their origin.[^sharma-24][^jaffrelot2009p86-25] Savarkar had made clear distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva, that they are not same things as Hindutva does not concern religion or rituals but the basis of India's national character.[^27][^noorani2000-28]

A Hindu means a person who regards this land of Bharatvarsha, from the Indus to the seas as his Fater-Land as well as his Holy-Land that is the cradle land of his religion

— Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hinditva - Who is a Hindu, https://archive.org/details/hindutva-vinayak-damodar-savarkar-pdf

In summary, Savarkar's Hinduism is a concept beyond the practice of religion. It encompasses India's cultural, historical, and national identity rooted in Hindu traditions and values. Hindutva is to build a strong Hindu nation, and this is the principle that holds together the customs and culture of this land.[^29]

According to Christophe Jaffrelot, a political scientist specialising in South Asia, Savarkar – declaring himself as an atheist – "minimizes the importance of religion in his definition of Hindu", and instead emphasises an ethnic group with a shared culture and cherished geography.[^jaffrelot2009p86-25][^nussbaum2009p58-26] To Savarkar, states Jaffrelot, a Hindu is "first and foremost someone who lives in the area beyond the Indus river, between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean".[^jaffrelot2009p86-25] Savarkar composed his ideology in reaction to the "pan-Islamic mobilization of the Khilafat movement", where Indian Muslims were pledging support to the Istanbul-based Caliph of the Ottoman Empire and to Islamic symbols, his thoughts predominantly reflect deep hostility to Islam and its followers. To Savarkar, states Jaffrelot, "Muslims were the real enemies, not the British", because their Islamic ideology posed "a threat to the real nation, namely Hindu Rashtra" in his vision.[^jaffrelot2009p86-25] All those who reject this historic "common culture" were excluded by Savarkar. He included those who had converted to Christianity or Islam but accepted and cherished the shared Indic culture, considering them as those who can be re-integrated.[^jaffrelot2009p86-25]

According to Chetan Bhatt, a sociologist specialising in Human Rights and Indian nationalism, Savarkar "distances the idea of Hindu and of Hindutva from Hinduism".[^bhatt1997p186-30][^32] He describes Hindutva, states Bhatt, as "one of the most comprehensive and bewildering synthetic concepts known to the human tongue" and "Hindutva is not a word but a history; not only the spiritual or religious history of our people as at times it is mistaken to be by being confounded with the other cognate term Hinduism, but a history in full".[^bhatt1997p186-30]

Savarkar's notion of Hindutva formed the foundation for his Hindu nationalism.[^sharma-24] It was a form of ethnic nationalism per the criteria set by Clifford Geertz, Lloyd Fallers and Anthony D. Smith.[^footnotejaffrelot199612%e2%80%9313-33][^jaffrelot2009p86-25]

Supreme Court of India

The definition and the use of Hindutva and its relationship with Hinduism has been a part of several court cases in India. In 1966, the Chief Justice Gajendragadkar wrote for the Supreme Court of India in Yagnapurushdasji (AIR 1966 SC 1127), that "Hinduism is impossible to define".[^senewc-34][^36] The court adopted Radhakrishnan's submission that Hinduism is complex and "the theist and atheist, the sceptic and agnostic, may all be Hindus if they accept the Hindu system of culture and life".[^senewc-34] The Court judged that Hinduism historically has had an "inclusive nature" and it may "broadly be described as a way of life and nothing more".[^senewc-34]

The 1966 decision has influenced how the term Hindutva has been understood in later cases, in particular the seven decisions of the Supreme Court in the 1990s that are now called the "Hindutva judgments".[^senewc-34][^chakrabarty2018-37] According to Ram Jethmalani, an Indian lawyer and a former president of its Supreme Court Bar Association, the Supreme Court of India in 1995 ruled that "Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and is not to be equated with or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism ... it is a fallacy and an error of law to proceed on the assumption ... that the use of words Hindutva or Hinduism per se depicts an attitude hostile to all persons practising any religion other than the Hindu religion ... It may well be that these words are used in a speech to promote secularism or to emphasise the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture or ethos, or to criticise the policy of any political party as discriminatory or intolerant."[^supremecourt-38] According to Jethmalani, the Supreme Court has properly explained the "true meaning" of the term, and "Hindutva is not hostility to any organised religion nor does it proclaim its superiority of any religion to another". According to him, it is unfortunate that "the communal propaganda machinery relentlessly disseminates "Hindutva" as a communal word, something that has also become embedded in the minds and language of opinion leaders, including politicians, media, civil society and the intelligentsia".[^supremecourt-38] The Indian lawyer Abdul Noorani disagrees, and states that the Supreme Court in its 1995 ruling gave "Hindutva a benign meaning, calling Hindutva the same as Indianization, etc." and these were unnecessary digressions from the facts of the case, and in doing so, the court may have brought down the wall separating religion and politics".[^39]

History

Ideology

Part of a series on
Discrimination

Forms
Attributes
Social
Religious
Ethnic/national
Manifestations
Policies
Countermeasures
Related topics
- v - t - e

The word Hindutva was already in use by the late 1890s by Chandranath Basu,[^theprint20202-40][^41][^42][^bhatt2001p77-43] Basu's usage of the word was to merely portray a traditional Hindu cultural view in contrary to the formation of the political ideology by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.[^44][^45] Savarkar, a right-wing nationalist and Indian freedom activist, wrote a book titled Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?" in 1922,[^sweetman_malik-6][^johnson2010p142-46] in which he outlined his ideology and "the idea of a universal and essential Hindu identity". The term "Hindu identity" is broadly interpreted and distinguished from "ways of life and values of others".[^johnson2010p142-46] The contemporary meaning and usage of Hindutva largely derives from Savarkar's ideas, as does the post-1980s nationalism and mass political activity in India.[^bhatt2001p77-43] According to Jaffrelot, Hindutva as outlined in Savarkar's writings "perfectly illustrates" an effort at identity-building through the "stigmatisation and emulation of threatening others". In particular, it was pan-Islamism and similar "Pan-isms" that he assumed made the Hindus vulnerable, as he wrote:

O Hindus, consolidate and strengthen Hindu nationality; not to give wanton offence to any of our non-Hindu compatriots, in fact to any one in the world but in just and urgent defence of our race and land; to render it impossible for others to betray her or to subject her to unprovoked attack by any of those "Pan-isms" that are struggling forth from continent to continent.

— Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, quoted by Christophe Jaffrelot[^jaffrelot1999p25-47]

The Hindutva ideology borrowed from European fascism.[^brown_sant-9][^krishna_noorani-10] Parallels between Hindutva and European fascism are observed in the concepts such as repeated mobilisations, appeals to a mythic past, anti-socialism and other concepts.[^48] Since Savarkar's time, the "Hindu identity" and the associated Hindutva ideology has been built upon the perceived vulnerability of Indian religions, culture and heritage from those who through "orientalist construction" have vilified them as inferior to a non-Indian religion, culture and heritage.[^hansen1999p60-49] In its nationalistic response, Hindutva has been conceived "primarily as an ethnic community" concept, states Jaffrelot, then presented as cultural nationalism, where Hinduism along with other Indian religions are but a part.[^sharma-24][^jaffrelot1999p30-50][^54][^56]

According to Arvind Sharma, a scholar of Hinduism, Hindutva has not been a "static and monolithic concept", rather its meaning and "context, text and subtext has changed over time". The struggles of the colonial era and the formulation of neo-Hinduism by the early 20th century added a sense of "ethnicity" to the original "Hinduness" meaning of Hindutva.[^sharma20-57] Its early formulation incorporated the racism and nationalism concepts prevalent in Europe during the first half of the 20th century, and culture was in part rationalised as a result of "shared blood and race". Savarkar and his Hindutva colleagues adopted the social Darwinism theories prevalent by the 1930s.[^hansen1999p77-58] In the post-independence period, states Sharma, the concept has suffered from ambiguity and its understanding aligned on "two different axes" – one of religion versus culture, another of nation versus state. In general, the Hindutva thought among many Indians has "tried to align itself with the culture and nation" axes.[^59]

According to Prabhu Bapu, a historian and scholar of Oriental Studies, the term and the contextual meaning of Hindutva emerged from the Indian experience in the colonial era, memories of its religious wars as the Mughal Empire decayed, an era of Muslim and Christian proselytisation, a feeling that their traditions and cultures were being insulted, whereby the Hindu intellectuals formulated Hindutva as a "Hindu identity" as a prelude to a national resurgence and a unified Indian nation against the "foreign invaders".[^bapu2012p62-60] The development of "religious nationalism" and the demand by the Muslim leaders on the Indian subcontinent for the partition of British India into Muslim and non-Muslim nations (Pakistan and Bangladesh being Muslim-majority, and India being Hindu-majority) during the middle of the 20th century, confirmed its narrative of geographical and cultural nationalism based on Indian culture and religions.[^sharma20-57][^63][^66] Professor Muqtedar Khan has argued that Hindu nationalism further grew because of the religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims that were fomented by post-1947 Pakistani terrorist attacks in and military conflicts with India.[^67]

According to Chetan Bhatt, the various forms of Hindu nationalism including the recent "cultural nationalist" form of Hindutva, have roots in the second half of the 19th century. These are a "dense cluster of ideologies" of primordialism and they emerged from the colonial experiences of the Indian people in conjunction with ideas borrowed from European thinkers but thereafter debated, adapted and negotiated. These ideas included those of a nation, nationalism, race, Aryanism, Orientalism, Romanticism and others. Decades before he wrote his treatise on Hindutva, Savarkar was already famous in colonial India for his version of 1857 "Mutiny" history. He studied in London between 1906 and 1910. There he discussed and evolved his ideas of "what constituted a Hindu identity", made friends with Indian student groups as well as non-Indian groups such as the Sinn Féin.[^bhatt2001p3-68][^bhattp185-74] He was a part of the underground home rule and liberation movement of Indians, before getting arrested for anti-British activities. His political activities and intellectual journeys through the European publications, according to Bhatt, influenced him, his future writings and the 20th-century Hindutva ideology that emerged from his writings.[^bhatt2001p3-68][^bhattp185-74]

Adoption

Savarkar's Hindutva ideology reached Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur (Maharashtra) in 1925, and he found Savarkar's Hindutva inspirational.[^footnoteandersendamle198734-75][^jaffrelot2009p96-76] He visited Savarkar in Ratnagiri shortly after and discussed with him methods for organising the 'Hindu nation'.[^77][^78] Savarkar and Hedgewar discussions led in September that year to Hedgewar starting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, lit. "National Volunteer Society") with this mission. This organisation rapidly grew to become the largest Hindu nationalist movement.[^jaffrelot2009p96-76] However, the term Hindutva was not used to describe the ideology of the new organisation; it was Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation), with one RSS publication stating, "it became evident that Hindus were the nation in Bharat and that Hindutva was Rashtriyatva [nationalism]."[^79]

Hedgewar's RSS not only propagated Hindutva ideology, it developed a grassroots organizational structure (shakhas) to reform the Hindu society. Village level groups met for morning and evening physical training sessions, martial training and Hindutva ideology lessons.[^jaffrelot2009p96-76] Hedgewar kept RSS an ideologically active but an "apolitical" organisation. This practice of keeping out of national and international politics was retained by his successor M. S. Golwalkar through the 1940s.[^jaffrelot2009p96-76] Philosopher Jason Stanley states "the RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements, its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussoliniin the late 1930s and 1940s."[^80] In 1931, B. S. Moonje met with Mussolini and expressed a desire to replicate the fascist youth movement in India.[^81] According to Sali Augustine, the core institution of Hindutva has been the RSS. While the RSS states that Hindutva is different from Hinduism, it has been linked to religion. Therefore "cultural nationalism" is a euphemism, states Augustine, and it is meant to mask the creation of a state with a "Hindu religious identity".[^footnoteaugustine200969%e2%80%9370-82] According to Jaffrelot, the regional heads of the RSS have included Indians who are Hindus as well as those who belong to other Indian religions such as Jainism.[^jaffrelot1999p140-83]

In parallel to the RSS, Savarkar, after his release from the colonial prison, joined and became the president of Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha in 1937. There, he used the terms Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra liberally, according to Graham.[^footnotegraham1968350%e2%80%93352-84] Syama Prasad Mukherjee, who served as its president in 1944 and joined the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet after independence, was a Hindu traditionalist politician who wanted to uphold Hindu values but not necessarily to the exclusion of other communities. He asked for the membership of Hindu Mahasabha to be thrown open to all communities. When this was not accepted, he resigned from the party and founded a new political party in collaboration with the RSS. He understood Hinduism as a nationality rather than a community but, realising that this is not the common understanding of the term Hindu, he chose "Bharatiya" instead of "Hindu" to name the new party, which came to be called the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.[^footnotegraham1968350%e2%80%93352-84]

Growth

The cabinet of the first prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru banned the RSS and arrested more than 200,000 RSS volunteers, after Nathuram Godse, a former volunteer of RSS, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.[^footnotefrykenberg2008193%e2%80%93196-85] Nehru also appointed government commissions to investigate the assassination and related circumstances. The series of investigations by these commissions, states the political science scholar Nandini Deo, later found the RSS leadership and "the RSS innocent of a role in the assassination".[^deo2015p55-86] The mass arrested RSS volunteers were released by the Indian courts, and the RSS has ever since used this as evidence of "being falsely accused and condemned".[^deo2015p55-86]

According to the historian Robert Frykenberg specialising in South Asian Studies, the RSS membership enormously expanded in independent India. In this period, while RSS remained "discretely out of politics", Jan Sangh, another Hindutva-ideology-based organisation, entered the political arena. The Jan Sangh had limited success in the Indian general elections between 1952 and 1971.[^87][^graham2007p196-88] This was, in part, because of its poor organisation and leadership; its focus on the Hindutva sentiment did not appeal to the voters, and its campaign lacked adequate social and economic themes.[^graham2007p196-88] This was also, in part, because Congress party leaders such Indira Gandhi had co-opted some of the key Hindutva ideology themes and fused it with socialist policies and her father's Jawaharlal Nehru Soviet-style centrally controlled economic model.[^footnotefrykenberg2008193%e2%80%93196-85][^hewitt2007-89][^90] The RSS continued its grassroots operations between 1947 and early 1970s, and its volunteers provided humanitarian assistance to Hindu and Sikh refugees from the partition of British India, victims of war and violence, and helped disaster victims to resettle economically.[^footnotefrykenberg2008193%e2%80%93196-85][^91]

Between 1975 and 1977, Indira Gandhi declared and enforced Emergency with press censorship, the arrests of opposition leaders, and the suspension of many fundamental human rights of Indian citizens. The abuses of Emergency triggered a mass resistance and the rapid growth of volunteers and political support to the Hindutva ideology.[^footnotefrykenberg2008193%e2%80%93196-85][^hewitt2007-89][^92] Indira Gandhi and her party were voted out of power in 1977. The Hindutva ideology-based Jan Sangh members such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Brij Lal Varma and Lal Krishna Advani gained national prominence, and the Hindutva ideology sympathiser Morarji Desai became the prime minister of a coalition non-Congress government.[^footnotefrykenberg2008193%e2%80%93196-85] This coalition did not last past 1980, and from the consequent break-up of coalition parties was founding of the Bharatiya Janata Party in April 1980. This new national political party relied on the Hindutva ideology-based rural and urban grassroots organisations that had rapidly grown across India from the mid-1970s.[^footnotefrykenberg2008193%e2%80%93196-85]

Hindutva under Modi (2014–present)

Further information: Narendra Modi § Narendra Modi

Since the 2014 Indian general election with the BJP winning, the premiership of Narendra Modi and state based BJP governments have pushed parts of the Hindutva agenda.

Abrogation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir

On 5 August 2019, the Modi administration revoked the special status, or limited autonomy, granted under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir.[^93][^94]

Ayodhya dispute

On 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India passed resolution on creation of Ram Mandir on the disputed land of Ayodhya.[^95][^96][^97][^98] The verdict also stated to provide 5 acres (20,000 m²) for creation of a mosque on another part of the land. The land was given to the Sunni Waqf Board.[^99] On 5 August 2019, Narendra Modi held the Bhoomipujan at the Ayodhya. He became the first prime minister to visit Ram Janmabhoomi and Hanuman Garhi.[^100] On 22 January 2024, the Ram Mandir was completed and inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi.[^101] In a speech he said, "Ram is the faith of India, Ram is the foundation of India, Ram is the idea of India, Ram is the law of India. Ram is the prestige of India, Ram is the glory of India...Ram is the leader and Ram is the policy."[^102]

Forced conversion bans

Indian states that prohibit forced conversions (2022)

Many BJP-ruled states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Karnataka, have considered laws designed to prevent forced conversions from Hinduism to Islam through marriage. Hindutva advocates call this "love jihad", and it is widely considered to be an Islamophobic conspiracy theory. In September 2020, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath asked his government to come up with a strategy to prevent "religious conversions in the name of love".[^106][^107] On 31 October, he announced that a law to curb "love jihad"[^109] would be passed by his government. The law, which also includes provisions against "unlawful religious conversion", declares a marriage null and void if the sole intention was to "change a girl's religion" and both it and the one in Madhya Pradesh imposed sentences of up to 10 years in prison for those who broke the law.[^110][^111] The ordinance came into effect on 28 November 2020[^112][^113] as the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance. In December 2020, Madhya Pradesh approved an anti-conversion law similar to the Uttar Pradesh one.[^114][^115][^116][^117][^118][^119] As of 25 November 2020, Haryana and Karnataka were still in discussion over similar ordinances.[^:10-104][^:11-105] In April 2021, the Gujarat Assembly amended the Freedom of Religion Act, 2003, bringing in stringent provisions against forcible conversion through marriage or allurement, with the intention of targeting "love jihad".[^120][^121] The Karnataka state cabinet also approved an anti-conversion bill, making it a law in December 2021.[^122][^123]

Vishva Hindu Parishad and Bharatiya Janata Party

The RSS established a number of affiliate organisations after Indian Independence to carry its ideology to various parts of the society. Prominent among them is the Vishva Hindu Parishad, which was set up in 1964 with the objective of protecting and promoting the Hindu religion. It subscribed to Hindutva ideology, which came to mean in its hands political Hinduism and Hindu militancy.[^footnotekatju20133%e2%80%934-124]

A number of political developments in the 1980s caused a sense of vulnerability among the Hindus in India. This was much discussed and leveraged by the Hindutva ideology organisations. These developments include the mass killing of the Hindus by the militant Khalistan movement, the influx of undocumented Bangladeshi immigration into Assam coupled with the expulsion of Hindus from Bangladesh, the Congress-led government's pro-Muslim bias in the Shah Bano case as well as the Rushdie affair.[^footnotejaffrelot1996343%e2%80%93345_with_footnotes-125] The VHP and the BJP utilised these developments to push forward a militant Hindutva nationalist agenda leading to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. The BJP officially adopted Hindutva as its ideology in its 1989 Palampur resolution.[^the_hindutva_road-7][^footnotekrishna2011324-8]

The BJP claims that Hindutva represents "cultural nationalism" and its conception of "Indian nationhood", but not a religious or theocratic concept.[^126] It is "India's identity", according to the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat.[^127]

According to the anthropologist and South Asia Politics scholar Thomas Hansen, Hindutva in the post-Independence era has emerged as a political ideology and a populist form of Hindu nationalism.[^hansen1999p166-128] For Indian nationalists, it has subsumed "religious sentiments and public rituals into a larger discourse of national culture (Bharatiya culture) and the Hindu nation, Hindu rashtra", states Hansen.[^hansen1999p166-128] This notion has appealed to the masses in part because it "connects meaningfully with everyday anxieties of security, a sense of disorder" in modern Indian life.[^hansen1999p166-128] The BJP has deployed the Hindutva theme in its election campaign since early 1991, as well as nominated candidates who are affiliated with organisations that support the Hindutva ideology.[^hansen1999p166-128] The campaign language of the Congress Party leader Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s mirrored those of Hindutva proponents. The political speeches and publications by Indian Muslim leaders have declared their "Islamic religious identity" being greater than any "political ideology or national identity". These developments, states Hansen, have helped Hindu nationalists spread essentialist constructions per contemporary Hindutva ideology.[^129]

Concepts and issues

Hindutva ideology has focused on the following issues:

Political representation of Hindu nationalists, and in some cases exclusivist interests of the Hindus and Indic-centered culture[^130][^jaffrelot_2013_876%e2%80%93894-131]
Jammu and Kashmir as an integral, inseparable part of India[^132]
Address Christian and Islamic proselytisation, religious conversion practices and the arithmetic of religious communities in India;[^133][^134] insist that Muslims and Christians accept its doctrine of equality of religions[^135]
Implement social justice, reservations and rural Indic interests according to the Hindutva model[^136]
Textbook revision and educating Indian youth in the Hindutva version of Indian history[^137][^138]
Ayodhya and other sites of historic religious disputes[^139]
Strengthen the defence forces of India[^140]
Replace "pseudo-secularism" with "true secularism", the latter being the Western style separation of religion and state[^141][^jaffrelot_2013_876%e2%80%93894-131]
Decentralize and reform the Indian economy, end the socialist, centrally-planned, state-owned economic model[^142][^143]
Represent the diaspora and its Indic cultural interests in the international forums[^144][^145]

Uniform Civil Code

Main article: Uniform Civil Code

The Hindutva leaders have sought a Uniform Civil Code for all the citizens of India, where the same law applies to all its citizens irrespective of the individual's religion.[^hutchinsonsmith2000p888-146][^ghosh2012p103-147] They state that differential laws based on religion violate the Indian Constitution and have sowed the seeds of divisiveness between different religious communities.[^hutchinsonsmith2000p888-146][^ghosh2012p103-147][^148] Under the current laws that were enacted in 1955–56, state John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, the constitutionally directive principle of a Uniform Civil Code covers only non-Muslims. The Uniform Civil Code is opposed by the Muslim leaders.[^hutchinsonsmith2000p888-146] A Uniform Civil Code that applies equally to the Muslims in India is also opposed by political parties such as the Indian National Congress and the Communist Party.[^149]

Protection of Hindu interests

Organisations

Main articles: Sangh Parivar and List of Hindu nationalist political parties

Hindutva is the guiding ideology of the RSS and its affiliated family of organisations, the Sangh Parivar.[^jaffrelot2009-163] In general, Hindutvavadis (followers of Hindutva) believe that they represent the well-being of Dharmic religions: Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism.^{[citation needed]}

Most nationalists are organised into political, cultural and social organisations using the concept of Hindutva as a political tool. The first Hindutva organisation formed was the RSS, founded in 1925. A prominent Indian political party, the BJP, is closely associated with a group of organisations that advocate Hindutva. They collectively refer to themselves as the "Sangh Parivar" or family of associations, and include the RSS, Bajrang Dal and the VHP.^{[citation needed]} Other organisations include:

Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the overseas branch of the RSS
Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, a workers' union
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, a students' union
Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, a farmers' organisation

Political parties that are independent from the Sangh Parivar's influence but that also espouse the Hindutva ideology include the Hindu Mahasabha, Prafull Goradia's Akhil Bharatiya Jana Sangh,[^164] and the Marathi nationalist Shiv Sena,[^165] Shiv Sena (UBT) and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) is a Sikh religious party that maintained ties with Hindutva organisations and political parties, as they also represent Sikhism.[^166] By September 2020, SAD left the NDA over the farms bill.[^167]

Hindutva violence

Main article: Hindu terrorism

Since the mid-2010s, there has been a notable increase in violence motivated by Hindutva ideology, particularly towards Muslims,[^168] and includes acts of extremist terroristic violence.[^gatade_pawns-169][^170][^171] This has principally been perpetrated by or has implicated members, or alleged members, of Hindu nationalist organizations such as the RSS or Abhinav Bharat.[^auto-172][^deepsaffron-173][^gatade_saffron_terror-174] The violence has also been condoned by the BJP politicians and used as an electoral strategy to garner support from the far-right Hindu population.[^175][^176] The veneration of cows as deities and restrictions on meat consumption have also been used by to justify violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and lower-caste Hindus.[^177]

Cow vigilantism

Further information: Cow vigilante violence in India

Cow slaughter laws in various states in India

There has been a rise in the number of incidents of cow vigilantism since the election of a BJP majority in the Parliament of India in 2014. The frequency and severity of cow vigilante violence has been described as "unprecedented".[^pri-178] Human Rights Watch has reported that there has been a surge in such violence since 2015.[^hrw1-179] The surge is attributed to the recent rise in Hindu nationalism in India.[^pri-178][^jobloss-180] Many vigilante groups say they feel "empowered" by the victory of the Hindu nationalist BJP in the 2014 election.[^bbc-181][^risk-182]

According to a Reuters report, there were 63 attacks in India between 2010 and mid 2017 resulting in 28 deaths, 24 of them Muslim, and 124 injuries. Most attacks occurred after Narendra Modi took office in 2014.

Many BJP states have passed laws against cattle slaughter such as Gujarat.[^184][^185][^186][^187] On 6 June 2017, Uttar Pradesh's Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath directed the state police to take action against cow slaughter and cattle smuggling under the National Security Act and the Gangster Act,[^188] and in (2021) Assam Assembly passed a bill that prohibits the slaughter or sale of beef within a 5-kilometre (3.1 mi) radius of any temple. The legislation seeks to ensure that permission for slaughter is not granted to areas that are predominantly inhabited by Hindu, Jain, Sikh and other non-beef eating communities or places that fall within a 5-kilometre (3.1 mi) radius of a temple, satra and any other institution as may be prescribed by the authorities. Exemptions, however, might be granted for certain religious occasions.[^189][^190]

Criticism and apologetics

Similarities with fascism and Nazism

Upper casteism

When Prime Minister V. P. Singh launched the Mandal Commission to broaden reservations in government and public university jobs to a significant portion of the Shudras who were officially branded the Other Backward Classes (OBC), the mouthpiece of the Hindutva organisation RSS, Organiser magazine, wrote of "an urgent need to build up moral and spiritual forces to counter any fallout from an expected Shudra revolution".[^215][^indianexpress7181746-216]

According to social scientist and economist Jean Drèze, the Mandal Commission angered the upper castes and threatened to distance the OBCs, but the Babri Masjid's destruction and ensuing events helped to reduce this challenge and reunified Hindus on an anti-Muslim stance. He further claims "The Hindutva project is a lifeboat for the upper castes in so far as it promises to restore the Brahminical social order" and the potential enemies of this ideology is anybody whose acts or might hinder the process of restoring the Brahminic social order. Drèze further claims that although Hindutva is known as a majoritarian movement, it can be best expressed as an oppressive minority movement.[^217]

According to Jaffrelot, the Sangh Parivar organisations with their Hindutva ideology have strived to impose the belief structure of the upper caste Hindus.[^indianexpress7181746-216] According to Dalit rights activist and political theorist Kancha Ilaiah, "Hindutva Is Nothing But Brahminism" and that only "Dalitisation can effectively counter the danger of Brahminical fascism disguised as Hindutva".[^218]

According to sociologist Amritorupa Sen, the privileges of the upper caste and especially Brahmins have become invisible. There has been a cultural norm that Brahmins take care of the lower castes out of a moral responsibility but also out of human kindness.[^219]

Ahistorical premises, separatism

According to Jaffrelot, the Hindutva ideology has roots in an era where the fiction in ancient Indian mythology and Vedic antiquity was presumed to be valid. This fiction was used to "give sustenance to Hindu ethnic consciousness".[^jaffrelot1996p77-208] Its strategy emulated the Muslim identity politics of the Khilafat movement after World War I, and borrowed political concepts from the West – mainly German.[^jaffrelot1996p77-208] Hindutva organizations treat events in Hindu mythology as history.[^220][^221][^222][^223] Hindutva organizations have been criticized for their belief in statements or practices that they claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method.[^224][^225]

Hindutva ideology is also described to be separatist in its form. Siddharth Varadarajan writes that Hindutva separatism seeks to depart from the "philosophical, cultural and civilization mores of the country, including Hinduism itself".[^parel-14][^varadarajan-15]

According to Anthony Parel, a historian and political scientist, Savarkar's Hindutva, Who is a Hindu? published in 1923 is a fundamental text of Hindutva ideology. It asserts, states Parel, India of the past to be "the creation of a racially superior people, the Aryans. They came to be known to the outside world as Hindus, the people beyond the Indus River. Their identity was created by their race (jati) and their culture (sanskriti). All Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race incorporated with and descended from the Vedic fathers. They created a culture – an ensemble of mythologies, legends, epic stories, philosophy, art and architecture, laws and rites, feasts and festivals. They have a special relationship to India: India is to them both a fatherland and a holy land." The Savarkar's text presents the "Hindu culture as a self-sufficient culture, not needing any input from other cultures", which is "an unhistorical, narcissistic and false account of India's past", states Parel.[^parel2006p42-226]

The premises of early Hindu nationalist thought, states Chetan Bhatt, reflected the colonial era European scholarship and Orientalism of its times. The idea of "India as the cradle of civilization" (Voltaire, Herder, Kant, Schlegel), or as "humanity's homeland and primal philosophy" (Herder, Schlegel), or the "humanism in Hindu values" (Herder), or of Hinduism offering redemption for contemporary humanity (Schopenhauer), along with the colonial era scholarship of Frederich Muller, Charles Wilkins, William Jones, Alexander Hamilton and others were the natural intellectual matrix for Savarkar and others to borrow and germinate their Hindu nationalist ideas.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, a Fellow of the British Academy and a scholar of Politics and Philosophy of Religion, states that Hindutva is a form of nationalism that is expounded differently by its opponents and its proponents.[^ram%e2%80%90prasad1993p285-228] The opponents of Hindutva either consider it as a fundamentalist ideology that "aims to regulate the working of civil society with the imperatives of Hindu religious doctrine", or alternatively, as another form of fundamentalism while accepting that Hinduism is a diverse collection of doctrines, is complex and is different from other religions. According to Ram-Prasad, the proponents reject these tags, viewing it to be their right and a desirable value to cherish their religious and cultural traditions.[^ram%e2%80%90prasad1993p285-228] The Hindutva ideology according to Savarkar, states Ram-Prasad, is a "geography, race, and culture" based concept. However, the "geography" is not strictly territorial but is an "ancestral homeland of a people", and the "race" is not biogenetic but described as the historic descendants of the intermarriage of Aryans, native inhabitants and "different peoples" who arrived over time.[^flood2008p527-229] So, "the ultimate category for Hindutva is culture", and this culture is "not strictly speaking religious, if by religion is meant a commitment to certain doctrines of transcendence", he states.[^flood2008p527-229] The proponents state that in the Hindutva thought, there is a kernel of coherent and justifiable thesis about the Indian culture and history.[^ram%e2%80%90prasad1993p285-228]

Threats to academic freedom

Hindutva ideology has been linked to threats to academics and students, both in India and the United States. For instance, in 2011, Hindutva activists successfully led a charge to remove an essay about the multiple narratives of Ramayanas from Delhi University's history syllabus. Romila Thapar, one of India's most eminent historians, has faced repeated Hindutva-led attacks.[^233] The Hindu right has been responsible for pushback against scholars of South Asia and Hinduism based in North America, including Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock; Doniger's book was no longer printed after its publisher settled a lawsuit claiming that it defamed Hinduism and Pollock was accused of misrepresenting India's cultural heritage and that he had “shown disrespect for the unity and integrity of India”.[^234] Under BJP leadership, the Indian state has been accused of monitoring scholars and denying some research access. Audrey Truschke is one such example who remains frequent target of their threats.

In 2021, a group of North American-based scholars of South Asia formed a collective and published the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual to, they argue, answer the Hindutva threat to their academic freedom.[^238][^:0-231] They documented further incidents of Hindutva harassment of academics in North America, dating back to the 1990s.[^239] The Association for Asian Studies noted that Hindutva, described as a "majoritarian ideological doctrine" different from Hinduism, resorted to "increasing attacks on numerous scholars, artists and journalists who critically analyze its politics".[^240] A number of scholars and participants withdrew from the conference following the threats they received from ultranationalists and Hindutva supporters.[^241][^242][^243]

Hindutva pop

Main article: Hindutva pop

Hindutva pop is a subgenre of Indian pop promoting Hindutva ideas. It openly calls for violence against many non-Hindu minorities, especially Muslims.[^:02-244] Hindutva pop artists defend their music as neither xenophobic nor Islamophobic, arguing it promotes truth. Popular Hindutva pop artists like Laxmi Dubey and Prem Krishnavanshi mainstream the xenophobic values of the genre.[^245][^:02-244]

The Chris Hedges Report with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on Israel's end game in Gaza and the future of the Israeli apartheid state

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-with-ilan-pappe

Here, Chris Hedges and Ilan Pappé speak about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Chris Hedges:

“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” warned Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy. “Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution.” He foresaw that “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police — mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.” He warned that the rise of a virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn “concentration camps” for the occupied and that, in his words, “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israeli fanatics, heirs of the fascistic movement led by the extremist Meir Khane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. These Jewish extremists, which today make up the ruling coalition government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are being killed or wounded a day. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.

Joining me to discuss what the occupation of Palestine has done to Israeli society, and what the results of the current murderous campaign in Gaza and the West Bank portends for Israel in the future, is Ilan Pappé, professor of history at the University of Exeter in Great Britain, who has described what Israel does to Palestinians as “incremental genocide.” He has written numerous books, including The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which his French publisher has ceased publishing despite a surge in sales since the Oct. 7 attacks, part of the concerted campaign by Zionists and their supporters to discredit and censor narratives that are critical of Israel.

Chris Hedges: The scholar Yeshiahu Leibowitz, who Isaiah Berlin called the conscience of Israel, warned that if Israel did not separate church and state, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. Religious nationalism is to religion, when national socialism was to socialism, warned Leibowitz who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war, that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy, our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution, he wrote. He foresaw that quote, the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews, the administrators, inspectors, officials and police, mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret police state.

With all that implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions, the corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israeli Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation to generate and its commanders, who will have become military governors, who resemble their colleagues and other nations. He warned that the rise of variant racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn concentration camps for the occupied and that in his words, Israel would not deserve to exist and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israeli fanatics, heirs of the fascistic movement led by the extremist Mayor Kahana, who was barred from running for office and whose Koch party is outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. These Jewish extremists who today make up the ruling coalition government or orchestrating the genocide in Gaza were hundreds of Palestinians are being killed or wounded today. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God as is the slaughter of the Palestinians who are compared to the biblical Amalekites massacred by the Israelites. Enemies, usually Muslims slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication. Those outside the magic circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.

Joining me to discuss what the occupation of Palestine is done to Israeli society and what the results of the current murderous campaign in Gaza and the West Bank portends for Israel in the future is Ilan Pappé, professor of history at the University of Exeter in Great Britain, who is described what Israel does to the Palestinians as incremental genocide. He has written numerous books, including the biggest prison on earth, the history of the occupied territories, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which his French publisher ceased publishing, despite a surge in sales since the October 7 attacks, part of the concerted campaign by Zionists and their supporters to discredit and censor narratives that are critical of Israel.

I'd like to begin with a look at post-Israel, a Zionist project that begins in the 1920s, and see whether the project itself, even before the creation of the state of Israel, had built within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Ilan Pappé: Yes, I do think it did. You're right in pointing to the 1920s because, of course, the Zionist movement existed before, but I think in the mid-1920s, when it started to purchase land and evict the people who were living on that land, and that happened around 1926, it became a sets of colonial projects, not just a project for salvaging Jews from antisemitism or a national cultural redefinition of Judaism as nationalism instead of religion. The moment that happened, it was very clear that it's going to impose itself by force on an indigenous native population. It was not just a classical settler colonial imposition of settlers from abroad, imposing themselves on a native population.

It also was kind of creating this idea that they can produce or establish a European state in the midst of the Arab world, very much like the white supremacist in South Africa. And these two facts that you are trying to implement the project of displacement and replacement of an indigenous population, and that you are trying to create a cultural political entity that would alienate the area it belongs to, and the area would alienate you, were sold, I think had been sold in the 1920s, and we can see the effect of this to our days. No doubt.

Chris Hedges: And yet there was always a tension within the Zionist project. I, you may have known him too, a new Abba Eban, Teddy Kollek. When I was in Israel, they outlawed Meir Kahane's Koch party. The people around Netanyahu now are of course the heirs to the Koch party later assassinated this very right wing rabbi. And I want you to talk about that tension because it was there. I mean, Teddy Kollek, when he was mayor of Jerusalem, when I was there, it was he was building sewer systems for it was a different approach to colonization or perhaps I have that wrong.

Ilan Pappé: It was a different approach, but it remained colonization. If I'm a bit kind of a bit more abrupt about it, I would say that there was definitely an ideological stream within Zionism that believed that you could be a progressive colonizer or an enlightened colonizer. And yet from the colonized people's point of view, even if you, you know, provided some benefits in economic terms and infrastructural terms. The colonization was still there. And the colonization was translated not only in terms of whether you provide suges for Jerusalem or not, but by the fact that Teddy Kollek is the mayor of Jerusalem over so the cleansing of quite a large number of Palestinians from East Jerusalem in order to make space for building new Jewish neighborhoods, which should rightly be called Jewish colonies or settlements.

So in the end of the day, the Zionist vision, even if it's more liberal, it's most liberal version, meant that the Palestinians at best, at best could be tolerated as individuals in limited spaces within Palestine that would be determined according to the Israeli notions of national security. And at worst, they are an obstacle that has to be removed. And as the time went by, most of the Israeli Jews said, why just be content with limiting their presence? Why not get rid of them altogether?

Chris Hedges: And yet these figures represented a secular strain of Zionism. And I want you to talk a little bit about Yeshiahu Liebowitz, who you knew, who I quoted in the introduction. And he talks about this religious strain within Zionism, where the land itself becomes sacred, is particularly dangerous. I think he even uses the word fascistic. There is that split. And of course, those of us, Abiy Ibn, and hespoke better English than I did, Oxford educated or Bain. So talk a little bit about that tension between secular and religious Zionism and of course religious ultra-orthodox religious Zionism has essentially proved triumphant.

Ilan Pappé: You know, I call this tension, which you rightly point to, the struggle between the state of Israel and the state of Judea. The state of Judea grows up among the national religious groups and becomes particularly potent after '67. And it's kind of headquarters. It's a habitat if you want. The settlements in the West Bank, and before that, even in the Gaza Strip. And they become a force to reckon with. And they combine exactly what Leibowitz was talking about. And he saw it in the making. I mean, I say it in hindsight to his credit, he saw it, he kind of predicted it happening.

But now we have the benefit of time to see that he was absolutely right. So that state of Judea, what you can call the settler state is a combination of a messianic kind of Zionism. And with fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism, a wish to create a theocracy in which also secular Jews are the enemy, not just the Palestinians. And they become stronger. They used to be on the margins. And we used to think that they are not really relevant. But now they are a central power in Israel. And against them stands the state of Israel. That is the kind of pre-'67 Israel that wanted to be a liberal democracy, a pluralist, secular. But was losing it in the struggle against the state of Judea. But what is so interesting and frustrating about this struggle, it does not concern the Palestinians at all. As you probably know, we forgot it because of the dramatic events that occurred after the 7th of October, but until the 7th of October, we witnessed in Israel a kind of a mini civil war between those two states that I'm talking about, the state of Israel and the state of Judea, when hundreds of thousands of secular Israelis demonstrated daily trying to defend the kind of Israel they want. But when a Palestinian citizen of Israel asked them, can we join you? And can we also include a rejection of the occupation as part of our struggle for a better Israel? They were chucked out of this movement of protest because it was not against the occupation. It's not against the semi-apartheid, the full apartheid of Israel depends where it is. It is what kind of an apartheid Israel should we have, a liberal democratic one for the Jews or a theocratic one for the Jews. But unfortunately, it does not evolve around the main issue, the most important issue that we started our conversation with, that can you impose yourself militarily and violently on millions of people against the will?

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about 1948. This is the War of Independence. All settler colonial projects are implanted by violence, as was the one in the United States. The difference is that I think by 1600, over a hundred year period, 56 million indigenous inhabitants in North, Central and South America were obliterated through either diseases or violence. So that by 1600, you only had about 10% of the original indigenous population was there. That wholesale extermination essentially allows a settler colonial project to survive because there's physically no opposition. That's not true in Israel. You have about 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation, 9 million living in the diaspora. The establishment of the state of Israel is a huge problem for Israeli leaders. How are they going to cope? The demographic time bomb is real in terms of Arabs having larger families. You have huge flight, kind of brain drain from Israel. I think there's a million Israelis living in the United States. But let's look at 1948, how they deal with the problem. And then we'll go to 1967 when Israel occupies what is the remaining part of Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza.

Ilan Pappé: Yes, as you rightly say, set the colonial project have always these two dimensions, geography and demography, or if you want space and population. You want the space without the population. And the more space you take, the more unwanted population you have. So the Zionist leadership exploited the end of the mandate. The circumstances that developed in the region and in the world of three years after the Holocaust to implement a massive ethnic cleansing that left half of the Palestinians refugees and expelled half of the Palestinian population, destroyed half of the Palestinian villages, more than 500, and demolished most of the Palestinian towns.

So within the borders that were kind of established after 1948, that is Israel today without the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel was unable to fully complete the ethnic cleansing, but it had a relatively small Palestinian minority that did not endanger the demography majority of the Jews. So you could even have a democratic state because you always knew that democracy and demography would go hand in hand. Although because of the paranoia of Ben-Gurion until 1966, although the Palestinians in Israel had the right to vote and to be elected, they were under very harsh military rule as it is. Now it's not surprising that David Ben Gurion, the big architect of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, was trying to pressure the government of Israel. He was out of effective politics already in 1963. But he was trying after June '67 to convince the Israeli government to get out of the West Bank, almost saying to them, you know, I was able to get rid of about 1 million Palestinians and now you're incorporating even a larger number of Palestinians under Yerun.

The kind of leadership that followed him, some of them were young generals during the 1948 war and some other politicians like Levi Eshkol and you mentioned also Abba Eban and Teddy Kollek, they decided there is no need for massive ethnic cleansing in order to keep the demography in such a way that it doesn't endanger the Jewish democracy. So what did they do? They decided to keep millions of people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip without the right to take part in the Israeli political system. And some people said to them, okay, that's fine, but can you in return give the Palestinian the right to determine their future in a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? They didn't accept that either. So they really believed that they could somehow contain the Palestinian national ambition and resistance within that idea of a West Bank and a Gaza Strip that is our enclave controlled by Israel, maybe with some autonomy for the Palestinian inside and convince the world that this is the best solution and even call it a kind of a two state solution, of course, it had nothing to do with two state solution.

So it is historically speaking, it's the same problem all the time as you rightly say, Chris, it's having the territory without the people, but because of circumstances and things are changing, the '48 is not '67 and '67 is not 2023. And because of that, the methods of maintaining this balance between territory and population changes, but division is the same one and the purpose is the same one and the failures are the same one. The massive expansion didn't work. The idea of keeping people without citizenship rights is not working and even putting them on the siege as we've seen on the 7th of October is not working. And whatever the Israelis have in mind for Gaza, I can assure you without knowing how it would unfold is going to be a huge failure, which unfortunately would have an incredible human cost mainly for the Palestinians.

Chris Hedges: Leibowitz really takes the 1967 war, which sees Israel, sees the remaining land at Palestinians as the dividing point. He defines himself as a Zionist. He seems to argue that the pre-1967 borders known as the Green Line could work, but 67 for him and the refusal on the part of the Israeli leadership to give up the occupation or after 67 move back to the pre-67 borders. Actually he argues quite passionately is in many ways the death now of Israeli democracy, civil society. Can you explain that?

Ilan Pappé: Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say that I think that as we started our conversation, the seeds for this end or implosion from within were so had been so much earlier in the 1920s. But let's go along with the diseases, although I think it was kind of doomed to fail from the very beginning. But there's no doubt that the occupation on 1967 accelerated these processes by which you had a legal system, a political system and a cultural system that justified a daily violation of the human rights and civil rights of the Palestinians, at least inside Israel in the pre-'67 Israel.

There was an attempt all the time to improve the situation of the Palestinian citizens in Israel. And as we said, they had the right to vote, they had the right to be elected. And finally, they even were allowed to create their own national parties and so on. But at the same time, the direction in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was going in a very different, towards a different kind of a future, a long and never-ending building of two mega prisons, one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip, maintained by at least hundreds of thousands of Israelis, had to be daily involved in maintaining this mega prison of policing millions of people. And the idea, and I think that's where labor, which was different from Kollek and Abba even, for instance, labor, which warned them that they, their sense that they might separate. There will be this democratic liberal pluralist Israel within the pre-'67 borders and there will be something less admirable, less fortunate, but hopefully manageable beyond the green line, beyond the borders of Israel. And he warned rightly so that you will not be able to contain it, that it would spill over into Israel. And you will not, you will not have in the end of the day two entities, namely a liberal democratic Israel next to an occupied Palestine. No. At the end of the day, you will have one apartheid system that may have varieties in the way it controls the lives of Palestinians, but in essence, as indeed human rights watch and Amnesty International eventually understood recently, would have to be ruled through segregation, discrimination and oppression. And it doesn't matter whether we talk about Tel Aviv and Haifa or we talk about numbers in Gaza, it became one organic country where the people who are Palestinians are subjected to a variety, a kind of legal regimes and military regimes that violate the basic human civil and human rights.

Chris Hedges: And I just want to say that Israeli Arabs, even though pre-67, they were, there were moves to incorporate them in the side, nevertheless, did not serve in the army or the intelligence units. That's correct, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Liba, it's not just that the occupation for him is not sustainable, but it's what it does, how it deforms Israeli society. And I wonder if you could speak to what happened. I'm especially interested in why you believe these Zionist fanatics and bigots and crypto fascists, these people surrounding Netanyahu, why they became a descendant.

Ilan Pappé: Well, I think that there are two crises here at work. One crisis is what you can call the Zionist left. This attempt to, if you want to square the circle, to somehow say to yourself, I can be both an occupier and a socialist or a liberal. This failed to work on so many levels. First of all, the Palestinians were not impressed by that. They understood, as I once put it, that when a Zionist has a boot on your face, it doesn't matter whether he holds the book of Marx or the Bible, what matters is the boot. And I think that's one reason the Zionist left was not working.

Secondly, there was a sense among the Israeli Jewish electorate that this is a deception, actually, that actually, and there was something in it. They said, you know, you actually think like us, but you would have liked it to be nicer. You would have liked the world not to be fully aware of it. You don't want to lose international legitimacy. It's not because you have different moral approach, but you have a more functional approach to it. And that did not convince the Jewish electorate. So one crisis was this, what I call the failure to square the circle and take universal values and say that they can coexist with the values of colonialism and oppression. The second and no less important is the failure or the collapse of the idea that you can redefine Judaism as nationalism. There was an attempt to create a Jewish culture, a Jewish identity, which is secular, and it didn't work. There are some successes. There is a Hebrew culture. No doubt. I myself dream in Hebrew. Hebrew is my mother tongue. So I'm fully aware of the success of Zionism to create a Hebrew culture. But the Hebrew culture is not a substitute for Judaism. It creates a culture around language, but doesn't have the power that a religious affiliation has.

And what happened was that while the religious Jews had a clear idea what Judaism is, Israeli Jews never knew what does it mean to be an Israeli Jew. As you probably know, in our idea and our identity cards, our nationality is not Israeli. No Israeli has an nationality identity that is in Israeli. In my idea, it's written that my nationality is Jewish. In the idea of my neighbor, who is a Palestinian Israeli, it says that his nationality is Muslim, not Palestinian or Christian. I mean, they try to impose this idea that they can play with religious identities and even impose it on Christians and Muslims. It doesn't work. It doesn't work.

And I think anywhere you look at the world and attempt to create a state identity that is equivalent to a religious identity in the modern world is not working. It is not working. And this crisis has led to the return to Judaism as a religion by many Israeli Jews, including the Arab Jews who were anyway more traditional. And then they ask themselves, like similar things are happening in political Islam. Can we translate the Jewish scriptures into political documents of our day? Can we impose the imperatives of the religion on the public domain, on the state policy, both the domestic one and the foreign one? And for Israeli secular Israelis, this is something they cannot coexist with, but they don't really have a very good answer. So what does it mean to be a Jew if it's not to be a religious Jew? What is a secular Jew? What is a secular Muslim for that matter or secular Christian? And that's a crisis. It maybe also exists in other places, but there's no pressure cooker that Israel is, these questions become vital and existential.

Chris Hedges: When Thucydides talked about the expansion of the Athenian Empire, he wrote that the tyranny Athens imposed on others had finally imposed on itself. To what extent is the tyranny that Israel has imposed on occupied Palestinians now being imposed on itself?

Ilan Pappé: Well, we have clear indications especially. I mean, there were there before, but I think the 7th of October was a pretext for these tyranny to be directed towards free thinking Israeli citizens who are also Jewish by definition. We have a clear case of a history teacher in Petah Tikva, who all he did, he shared with his students, pupils, rather some alternative use of the ones they hear in the Israeli media, and he was arrested for a few days before he was released.

Any attempt by Palestinian citizens of Israel or anti-Zionist Israeli citizens to express doubts or even say that you have to understand the context of the 7th of October is regarded by the police as incitement to terrorism. So inevitable, as any historian would know, this can never be contained towards one group of people and eventually you use these powers against your own people and it depends who is the one who uses the power. And there is some very important critical sociologists in Israel, which I'm not one of them, but they followed the way that the main, the upper echelons of the Israeli security service, the upper echelons of the army are now populated by what I call the state of Judea, namely settlers. National religious settlers are now occupying very important position. You have of course the ultimate example, and this is the terrorist from the Judea state Benghir as the Minister of Internal Security. So even at the top you have someone who doesn't hesitate to use the same means against free thinking Israelis, regardless of who they are, Jews or Arabs, as he wants to use them against the Palestinians. But he may be a bit of a joke even in the eyes of his own sub-ordinates, but there are more serious people below him who would supposedly are part of the civil service and are not politically elected, but they come from this ideological hotbed that sees people like myself if you want as dangerous as any Palestinian. And that is something that is now spreading in Israel

Chris Hedges: Let's talk about October 7th, both the micro impact and as a historian, the macro impact.

Ilan Pappé: Well, the micro impact is bizarre, really, and I'm trying to get my head around it. Although I can begin to understand this, let's start with the Israeli Jewish society. There is this almost impossible mixture of total disbelief in the ability of the Jewish state to defend you or even provide you with the most fundamental services. So it's a total breakdown in the confidence of the state to provide for you, not only defend you because the military failed, but the way the state was not there after the 7th of October, I don't know how much people are aware of it, but the state did not function for about two months in terms of providing social, economic, it was all done by the civil society. The government did not function at all in terms of helping people who were evicted from the north or the south.

So, on the one hand, there is this breakdown in believing in the state. On the other hand, there is a total support for the genocidal policies in Gaza. It's a contradiction, but one can understand where it comes from. And that's one of the micro kind of impact you have, that you will have an even more in transigence, inflexible, theocratic, fanatic, Israeli Jewish society in the post-7 October Israel.

As for the Palestinians, I think some big questions would be asked also by the Palestinian National Movement, because it's a big responsibility to stage an operation when you probably know beforehand what the Israeli reaction would be. It always reminded me of the two, I had a webinar with some people from Lebanon, and we talked about it, and I think there are similarities. People say to me, but Hamas was kind of building on the legacy of 2000 when Hezbollah bravely succeeded in pushing the Israeli army outside of Lebanon. So there is an example of an Arab paramilitary group being a match to the might of the Israeli army.

But there's another legacy. That's a legacy of 2006 when Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah said, had I known that the Israeli reaction to the abduction of three soldiers would be the destruction of Beirut, I would not have ordered that operation. So he did talk with responsibility of when you strategize, you have responsibility also for your own people. It would be interesting to see in the micro level, first of all, how the Palestinians are reacting to the Israeli retaliation beyond, of course, their ability. And I think they were able to galvanize public opinion to show that how everyone's condemn or doesn't condemn the service of October, it does not weaken the basic growing solidarity with the Palestinians. Now let's talk about the macro. The macro is that Israel is not going to defeat the Hamas that easily, and it's going to be stuck there. And in order even to maintain some sort of success, victory, they would have to stay there for years in direct occupation. And this could easily escalate into an uprising in the West Bank and a tech from the North by Hezbollah. And who knows, even undercurrents in the Arab world that would change the Arab tolerance of Israel that we have seen so far. This can escalate to regional war on the one end. That's the bleak scenario. The more positive scenario in the macro one is that the civil society that is now very much pro-Palestinian and even supports boycott and divestments from Israel may succeed in convincing some governments in the global knows and definitely in the global south to move beyond actions of civil society into sanctions and pressure in Israel. And maybe have a total new perception about the need to pressure Israel to give up its supremacist policies, its oppression and so on. It's too early to judge which of the two processes will unfold. They may even unfold in conjunction, namely the more violent the region would become, the more willing maybe the international community would be willing to change its basic perceptions of what is the essence of the problem and what is the way out of it.

Chris Hedges: Isn't the key Washington? I mean, Israel's along with the US is already on this issue. They're pariah states as we saw with the vote in the UN as long as there's unconditional support from Washington, Israel can resist any kind of pressure, can't they?

Ilan Pappé: Well, that's a very big question because I think that the global south also has power. You know, I talked in a Chinese university recently in September and it was very clear that China for instance is still reluctant to be involved in the question of Palestine because as you know, Chinese foreign policy country to the way it's portrayed in America is interested in economic gains more than anything else and rightly so Palestine is not an economic bonanza these days. So, I don't think they're likely to be involved too much in it. But I do think that there are other powers on the international map that could challenge the American hegemony on the question of Palestine. That's one point.

And secondly, yes, America is still a key, but something is happening in the American civil society. Israelis and pro-Israeli is in America like to call it the rise on new anti-Semitism, which is a very superficial analysis of effect that the younger generation of Americans A is much more knowledgeable than the previous generation. What goes on in Palestine? These far more committed, some people would say naively, but they are more committed to moral dimension of foreign and security policies. And that includes large chunks of the young American Jewish community. So, I'm not sure that also this deterministic view of an American policy is the right approach either. I do think there's a chance of a different American policy as well. But I do think, Chris, probably the best way to do it is by saying that there are two coalitions now when it comes to Palestine. One I call global Israel. Global Israel is still governments in the global south, multinational cooperation, military industries, security industries, communities of Christian Zionists and Jews who more or less continue to provide Israeli immunity for almost everything it does, almost automatically, kind of in faith. And against this, there is global Palestine. And global Palestine is made of civil societies, some governments in the global south, who are not only pro-Palestinian, but they really believe that the struggle for justice in Palestine connects very well with their own struggles against injustice in their own societies. And this is the younger generation of the world. And I think that this is a battle that goes beyond Palestine, connects ecological issue, poverty issues, rights of minorities, issues with Palestine. And therefore, I don't think the balance of power is just America versus the rest of the world. I think there are much more complex two global coalitions which are relevant not only to Palestine, but I see the relevance mainly in the case of Palestine because I'm interested in it, but I'm sure they can be also exposed in other places of contention and where conflicts are still raging.

Chris Hedges: Let's close by looking at Gaza. First I want to talk about intent. The UN says that half of Gaza's now face starvation. I was in Sarajevo during the war. That was three to 400 shells a day, four to five day to day, about two dozen wounded a day. This is just by comparison. I don't want to minimize what happened in Sarajevo. I still have nightmares about it, but that's nothing compared to what's happening in Gaza in terms of the level of bombing. What is the intent? Is the intent to create a humanitarian crisis of such extremity that the international community is forced to intervene and become a partner in ethnic cleansing? What do you know this mindset of people around Netanyahu better than I do?

Ilan Pappé: First of all, I think that there was really here an inertia of revenge to begin with rather than a very careful planning. Not everything should be attributed to clear and systematic planning. As the days went by, it was clear to at least one group within the policymakers who thought that the war gives a pretext to get rid of Gaza and more systematic planning. So the end result as far as they are concerned is the depopulation of the Gaza stream from as many Palestinians as possible. Either to Egypt or to other parts of the world because Gaza would, if it's not sustainable now, it would even be less sustainable in the future. I think there is one component among the Israeli policymakers who believe that they have the power to do it. There is even a more moderate, I'll call them more pragmatic, people like Benjamin Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, also depends., I mean they joined the government in the last moment from the opposition. I don't know how influential they will be for the day after, but if they're still influential the day after, they would like to see that they have a certain end game in mind, which is to annex part of the Gaza Strip directly to Israel, which will remain, what will remain a very small piece of land with a huge number of people living in it and hoping that someone else would run the domestic affairs of Palestine, of Gaza, whether it's the PA or a multinational force.

However, they don't think that it's even possible to discuss the day after scenarios before they fulfill what they promised to the Israeli public, which is something they cannot fulfill. And that's one of the reasons for the carnage that we're seeing, that they could have this victory photo, kind of triumphant photo that shows that Hamas is nowhere to be seen in Gaza, or at least nowhere to be seen as a military force. I don't think they can achieve it, but they still believe that they can. And until that happens, they continue relentlessly doing it, by the way, in brackets, by that even endangering more the lives of the still 130 and so Israeli hostages still held by the Hamas in the Gaza Strip. They claim that the two objectives of what they call the land manoeuvre is to destroy the Hamas as a military power and to salvage the hostages.

It's very clear from the way they're acting, they have given up on the hostages, but they still believe they have that power to get this picture that they want, either a dead scene war or an expelled scene war. You know, the scenario of Lebanon, 1982, Arafat, leading to Tunis with the rest of the Palestinian leadership. These are the scenarios they have, and all the means seems to be justified in their eyes to achieve that. SPEAKER_00: And you're arguing they won't. So what happens when they don't achieve that? SPEAKER_01: That's what I meant before, that what happens is that they are going to be stuck there for much longer than they think, involved in a guerrilla warfare, which is much longer than they think, endangering every day an escalation that could bring other factors, other actors into that conflict with dire consequences also for Israel itself.

Can you imagine, Chris, what would have happened if in the 7th of October, Hezbollah would have coordinated with the Hamas a similar attack on the north? Remember, the main military problem for Israel was that most of its army was in the West Bank helping to defend the settlers and helping them with their ethnic cleansing. So there was not enough soldiers in the north and not enough soldiers on the Gaza border to prevent operation like the one the Hamas conducted. Imagine what would have happened if the Hezbollah would have joined in. How Israel would have got out of that. And somehow this lesson has not been learned by the Israeli policymakers. So I think that they are going to take Israel into a very dire future, even for the Israelis themselves in terms of casualties, in terms of international isolation, in terms of economic crisis and relying all the time on the American Congress is not the best and most solid pillar in the world to build a future for a younger generation and tell them that they live in the best place the Jews could be in the world right now. They are sort of digging their own hole here because they don't want to see what the problem is and what price they have to pay if they really want to build a different future.

The Chris Hedges Report with Anthony Loewenstein on how Israel tests new weapons and surveillance technology on Palestinians before selling them to countries around the globe

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-with-reporter-b17

Chris Hedges: The Palestinians are human laboratory rats to the Israeli military intelligence services and arms and technology industries. Israel's drones, surveillance technology, including spyware, facial recognition software, and biometric gathering infrastructure along with smart fences, experimental bombs,
AI controlled machine guns are all tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results.

These weapons and technologies are then certified as, quote, battle tested and sold around the world. Israel is the 10th largest arms dealer on the planet and sells its technology and weapons to an estimated 130 nations, including military dictatorships in Asia and Latin America.

Israeli weapons sales totaled $12.5 billion last year.

Its close relationship with these military internal security, surveillance, intelligence gathering and law enforcement agencies explains the fulsome support Israel's allies give to its genocidal campaign in Gaza. When Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to condemn the October 7th attack by Palestinian resistance groups as a terrorist attack and said, quote, terrorism is killing innocent children in Palestine, Israel immediately halted all sales of defense and security equipment to Colombia.
This global cabal dedicated to permanent war and keeping its populations monitored and controlled has hundreds of billions of dollars a year in sales.

These technologies are cementing into place a super national corporate totalitarianism, a world where populations are enslaved and ways that past totalitarian regimes could only imagine. It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the global south. It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the United States.

Joining me to discuss this use of Palestinians as human guinea pigs for the Israeli weapons and technology industry is Anthony Lowenstein author of the Palestine Laboratory, how Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world.

So your book, which is a great read, lays out the rise of this arms industry, which originally was a state industry and then privatized. One of the things points you made at the end of the book, which was quite fascinating, is how much of the apparatus to keep the Palestinians under control is essentially now handed over
to private firms.

And I just want to quote Elliot Abrams, who I've interviewed, the role of Israel is to serve as a model, an example in military might and innovation in encouraging child birth. And I think this is one of the themes of your book that much of Israel's support and power derives from its connection to this global arms network.

Anthony Loewenstein: So let's just lay out some of the innovations that Israel is pioneer. We can begin with Pegasus because they are at the forefront and drones.
I mean, they are at the forefront of some of the most advanced technologies and weapon systems that are used to control subject populations. You know, in some ways, the genesis of the book was partly due to some of the reporting around Pegasus a few years ago. Listeners or viewers will be aware that Pegasus obviously is a spyware tool that is made by NSO group, which is an Israeli company, and it was started to be used about 15 or so years ago by a range of countries. And in fact, the country that it was first mostly used in was Mexico as various governments there were desperate to fight a failed drug war. And of course, it only made the violence worse. But what's interesting back then and also now is Mexico remains Chris to this day, the world's biggest and most obsessed if you use it. And so I think that's the biggest is obsessed whether it's the right wing government or not only left wing government, but Pegasus is now in dozens of countries. I don't even know how many I think about 70-80 or 90.

And in some ways, the reason I probably wrote the book was to say that the media was obsessed with Pegasus and Pegasus is an important investigation. It's a tool that is put on phones of activists and human rights workers in countless countries and it breaches human rights. And the problem was that it was too often framed as this rogue Israeli company doing terrible things when, as I show in the book, as you know, it's not that it's essentially an arm of the state as Lockheed Martin and race on our arms of the US government.

Now, Lockheed Martin is a private company and has a board sure and it makes profits or not. But essentially, it's an arm of the state, right? It's used by the government in various foreign policy agendas or goals. Pegasus is exactly the same.

And I started looking at that issue about saying that now probably Israel is number one or two in the world for spyware. And in fact, Pegasus and NSO Group in some way really is a smokescreen because there are so many other companies that are doing exactly the same thing. So, NSO Group goes bust tomorrow and it's in a bit of financial trouble at the moment. It's not going to make any difference because there are so many other companies doing exactly the same thing using that whole allure of being able to spy on pretty much anybody, and why to this day no country wants to regulate this. There's no country because they're all obsessed with it. That's been the fundamental problem at the moment.

Chris Hedges: Explain how Pegasus works and we should note that it was used also on Jamal Khashoggi's fiance, Jamal, who I knew, being the Saudi journalist who was dismembered in the Saudi embassy consulate in Turkey. But explain how it works.

Anthony Loewenstein: So Pegasus essentially is a silent tool. It can be installed on your iPhone or Android. It doesn't matter what phone you have. Years ago, it used to require, you know, a lot of us used to get random text messages. You click on the link. You can't forget about it. You move on. That was the way it used to work.

So country X or intelligence agency Y would have this tool, let's say, in India, in some other country. They would then send a message to this phone of an activist or human rights worker or lawyer that person will click on a link. Their phone would be infected and they wouldn't know. There's no way to know yourself without it being forensically checked. These days it doesn't even require a text message. All it requires is someone knowing your number. That's it. And it can access all your information. It can even access your phone and microphone when the phone is off. So essentially it can be used as a weapon against you.

And as I show in the book, I interview huge amounts of people in Mexico and India and elsewhere. These are people often who are either lawyers who are challenging the state in Mexico, we interviewed a woman whose husband was murdered by almost certainly narcos and his phone. And then after his death, her phone was being surveilled by the Mexican state. It's never entirely clear even to this day why in her case it was surveilled. But essentially it shows that there is this utter obsession with various intelligence services to get access to all these kinds of personal information.

It's important to note, it's finally that one thing that really was clear in researching this particular tool is that Pegasus has become and tools like this. And it was said to be in the New York Times a few years ago and I sort of questioned some of this in the book, but I think too journalist wrote the most powerful weapon in the world since the invention of the nuclear bomb. Now I would maybe question that because nuclear bombs clearly can cause carnage to put it mildly. Pegasus doesn't directly kill anybody per se. But what it does is it means the privacy is close to dead. And at the moment there is this massive proliferation of these tools and Israel of course uses this. This is the key point users Pegasus another tool as a key foreign policy agenda.

I show in the book right now it's in Yahoo over the last decade and the Mossad would go to countries where Israel had no close relations Rwanda, India, when Modi comes in and others. Saudi UAE and they hold Pegasus up as a diplomatic carrot saying we will sell you this amazing tool which you can surveil your own citizens whatever you want. But in return we would like you to save voted in a certain way the UN or buy certain weapons.

And that's how it works and I show a timeline when it's in Yahoo for example goes to Hungary to visit all barn or Modi in India. And six or 12 months later Pegasus is in use this is not accidental right this is a key part of Israeli foreign policy now.

Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the drone program. They pioneered drones, I think. I remember from the book India's maybe their largest drone customers used these drones are used against migrants fleeing towards Europe in particularly Greece. And as well as the US Mexico border.

So Israeli drones and I have some interesting declassified documents from the 80s in fact where Israel was using drones and its war in Lebanon. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1992 obviously it was before digital era but Israel was using drones and even back then this is amazing document that I have in the book from the CIA they kind of shocked and amazed. And it's incredible, that's their words, these drones are how effective they are and they wonder back in the 80s. How Israel will be a global pioneer again their view of drones fast forward to the last decade or so. And as I show in the book I have spent a lot of time in Gaza as a reporter in the last 15 or so years that there is a proliferation of testing of drones, particularly around Gaza I'm putting aside what's happened since October 7 although it's happening since then too. But in the last 15 years where huge amounts of drones are being tested above Gaza, some armed some not used in the various Israeli invasions, incursions whatever you want to call it in Gaza.

And then those drones are then called battle tested as you say and then they're sold to huge amounts of nations around the world and the part that kind of maybe shocked me the most in fact was the use by the EU. Now the EU is buying Israeli drones they're unarmed. And there's you know, your listeners will be aware, in the last 10 or so years has been a huge influx of migrants coming from Africa and Middle East. They, after 2015, when the Europeans said they didn't want to repeat that huge influx of people coming, of course, if you're Ukrainian and white, they welcome you in and I have no problem with Ukrainians being welcomed in. But clearly if you're black or brown, it's not going to be the same.

So is the EU created this kind of fortress Europe and Israeli drones are part of that so from text which is the European sort of border force users Israeli drones 24 seven in the Mediterranean circling the Mediterranean, sending back images real time images to front tape which is based in Warsaw and Poland, but what's happening and the EU has made a clear decision to let people drown. That is obvious. They belly issue rescue boats they criminalize people who are trying to rescue migrants. So Israeli drones are a key part of that infrastructure, and I in the sky essentially and Israeli drones have a P as you say in India and various other countries and now in the last years.

And that remains one of the key drone makers of the world and indeed increasing is Turkey Turkey makes a cheaper version of what Israel has been developing and therefore Turkish drones and now also appearing in many nations around the world and many conflicts.

Chris Hedges: Let's talk about who Israel sells to it's easier to tick off the list of who they don't sell to. I covered the conflicts in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s Israel was supplying weapons, including napalm to the Salvadorans and the Guatemalans.

Anthony Loewenstein: They were of course one of the most fervent supporters of the apartheid regime in South Africa they work with Pinochet's chili. They were Rwandan genocide was perpetrated with Israeli weapons. There really is they will just provide military equipment to the most heinous regimes, including the latest ethnic cleansing in the Ghana caribat.

Chris Hedges: Except for I think you mentioned three countries Iran, North Korea, and I don't know who the other one I think I say Syria.

Anthony Loewenstein: Well I mean, as far as we're aware as far as we're aware I mean of course interesting tonight though of course before 1979. And the Islamic revolution. Israel and Iran were incredibly close. I mean the fact that your arm was run by dictator was no impediment of course to selling weapons and in fact they were really worried that the rise of the Islamic revolution would impede their sales was clearly the world's biggest arms dealer 45% 45% of the world's arms comes from America. So they are leaders by far. And as you say Israel's 10th.

One of the things that kind of shouldn't have shocked me but I guess did was Myanmar in the last years obviously has been committing a genocide against this Rohingya population may have been killed me to be kicked out into Bangladesh. Even after the UN found that Myanmar was committing genocide Israel was still selling surveillance and weapons to the Myanmar regime. And I would say it's hard to list. There's so many of them. I think it's also worth saying that India and India is actually a really big focus of the book, because India is now the world's biggest country population wise the world's biggest self described democracy question that a key ally of the US and certainly my country Australia and most Western nations because it's not China India is building a Hindu fundamental estate under Modi proudly chauvinist nation where [...] Muslims are discriminated against openly there's against Muslims. Now India and Israel didn't really have a great relationship before Modi came in there was a relationship in decades past Modi comes in in 2014 as Prime Minister. And there's a love affair between Netanyahu and Modi there's this image that some viewers may have seen of the two of them kind of stepping into the beach getting their feet wet talking about how much they love each other who knows is that no audio was recorded.

This relationship is central I think to in some ways actually why I wrote the book that there is a growing global ethno-nationalist search India being the most obvious example of nations that proudly discriminate against non-majority population so in India it's against Hindus against Muslims in Israel of course it's Jews against anyone is not Jewish and I say this to someone is Jewish myself that the whole alliance between Israel and India reminds me very much as I say in the book, of Israel and South Africa nations that proudly discriminate against non so-called sensible populations and therefore inspiring others Israel has become the inspiration to so many countries and far right and right around the world putting aside liberal Zionists to over the years have had a love for Israel and putting them aside for a minute I'm talking about nations India hungry various other nations not just selling weapons but selling the idea of getting away with it that's something I talk about a lot in the book that the is the idea that Israel is able to get away with it each being occupation endless colonization brutalizing Palestinian selling weapons to God knows who and God knows where I think really goes to the heart of why I think Israel is, to me, is a danger not just to Palestinians which is bad enough but a model in I say finally Chris in the book that you often go to far right rallies and I go there for work just to be clear
that there's no purpose is in the US Australia and elsewhere the Israeli flag is a constant presence it's not unusual and these are not groups that traditionally like Jews I mean they don't I quote in the book Richard Spencer that the hideous alt right leader in America I'm a white Zionist he doesn't like Jewish people but he loves the idea of creating for him and many like him a Christian ethno national estate you've written a lot really incredibly important work on Christian theocracy in the US and its potential and rise and domination Israel is a touchpoint as you would well know for many of these groups not all but many and it's not because all these groups like Jews many of them do not but they like what Israel is doing to Palestinians to unbelievably dominate and control them and they're proudly a Jewish chauvinist they're Jewish supremacist that's what they want to create for Christians in America or for example Hindus in India and that to me is the danger.

This is from your book according to net and Yahoo Jewish writer Peter Bynard explained quote the future belong not to liberalism as Obama to find it tolerance equal rights and the rule of law but to authoritarian capitalism

governments that combined aggressive and often racist nationalism with economic and technological might the future net and Yahoo implied would produce leaders who resembled not Obama but him.

I think it fits in with what you said and unfortunately I fear I don't know what you think that he's right.

I feel that too because it's worth saying that Obama wasn't exactly a big no he wasn't democracy human rights either but putting that issue aside.
I think I feel that that is correct and it's a Yahoo I suspect as a leader possibly hasn't got a long life left as leader of Israel which obviously unclear because so many is really even many supported him.
Understandably incredibly angry with him after what happened on October 7 so he may not last long as a leader himself.
I think his general analysis I fear is correct absolutely that there is this sense of country after country after country becoming in never not just with technological repression either from Israel or the US or others.
But this idea somehow that you can maintain that domination forever now obviously October 7 as I sort of touch on the book or imply.
The idea for October 7 is arguably a delusion that if you believe as a nation that you can repress people through tech forever.
It's a lie that will not work and from Gaza is a key example that even though Gaza was the key laboratory of Israel.
They spend billions and billions in building walls and drones and surveillance.
And it's a little too much to do so. But I fear the lesson will not be learnt.
And Gideon Levy who's a good friend of mine the amazing Israeli journalist in Israel has said that he fears that even now the lessons are not being learnt by Israel and other leaders and what he means by that is that the lesson that Israel is taking from October 7 and frankly the US took from 911
was that we need to invade and bomb and dominate even more, which I think is born out of insecurity not strength.
But nonetheless that's our fear the lesson that Israel is taking not so much that we need to maybe talk to Palestinians or negotiate with Palestinians.
Those those Israelis some are saying that but it's a tiny minority.
And you can explain what happened. They destroyed the Tamil Tigers.
And the Israelis were full partners in that project. And that fascinated me because I wondered if that wasn't the playbook for Gaza.
And that's exactly a bit of background 2009 was the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War to be going for decades between the majority.
Singalese population and the Tamil Tigers who are I guess resistance movement for more Tamil rights and a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka for years actually Israel had been supporting the Sri Lankan government in selling planes, fighter jets and other forms of technology
and weapons. 2009 happens and as some viewers will remember the Sri Lankan government was able to target the Tamils in a smaller and smaller and smaller part of the northern part of Sri Lanka.
Probably 40,000 Tamils were killed we really don't know the exact number there's never been any real accountability for that.
But I want to look at what's happening in Gaza and I have thought about Sri Lanka since October seven because in some ways the Israeli plan and I don't think there's one united plan there is to some degree a discussion although within very narrow bounds within the Israeli political
military establishment but I think the plan seems to be Northern Gaza is obliterated there is it's apocalyptic.
But soon if the plan is to decimate the southern part of Gaza and I have as I'm sure you do Chris Palestinian friends in Gaza who are sheltering in refugee camps in their own country now in the southern part of Gaza really struggling their homes have been destroyed
in the connection to Hamas I mean these are civilians living in Gaza. If essentially Gaza's infrastructure is completely obliterated that leaves only really a handful of options permanent 10 cities in Gaza, or which of course, as some
people are really well aware the dream of many on the Israeli political elite and also let's be clear many in the Israeli public based on public opinion polls kicking the Palestinians out.
Egypt Jordan Lebanon though so far, Egypt despite being a dictatorship has not acquiesced to that they have not opened the borders enough to allow it really that many Palestinians into into Sinai.
So the change I mean the Egyptian economies on its knees will they accept lots of money and bribes I very much hope not but we don't know.
But I do fear the plan as you saying Gaza is not dissimilar so what Sri Lanka did in in the northern part of that country and the outcome means Sri Lanka's finally has been that the war is kind of over.
And it still regarded a second class citizens in their own country. Let's talk about the Alpha gun girls, so a little side late but something just disgusting didn't know existed to you wrote it I read it.
Well, there is a side industry I guess you could call it of Israeli women Jewish women who are often they've been in the military they kind of have fetishized or sexualized the Israeli military so you have these groups of women who are scantily clad often holding guns often posing in photo shoots as if they're
kind of in war in Gaza or somewhere else as an idea and a way to show two things. One, the IDF is female friendly you can be a incredibly sexy woman and still be in the IDF and kill Palestinians that's the implication.
And secondly that Israeli women are cool I mean that's the message they're trying to send I don't know if it's particularly effective but that's the message they're trying to send.
And for years you know I've been following this story that there's been a real push by the IDF Israeli army to show how gender friendly they are how in fact gay friendly they are.
How trans friendly they are by how vegan friendly they are I mean this is sort of we sort of laugh in a way by saying this but I have a big section of the book talking about this is such a key part of Israeli messaging so called husband I'm not entirely convinced it's massively successful
and argue that either way, but a lot of Israel's social media in the last 10 or so years has focused on this issue. We give vegan meals to soldiers who want it we are trans friendly we are women friendly we are gay friendly you can you know wave the rainbow flag
and some viewers will see about two weeks after the Israeli invasion of Gaza there was this Israeli soldier in Gaza the background was apocalyptic holding the rainbow flag.
A cent in this image kind of in viral I did a story about essentially saying and the message was very clear. You see we want to liberate Palestinians in Gaza who are gay to just be themselves.
Now the mocking that this got justifiably was clear as if people were saying right so you've decimated Gaza and it's apocalyptic but gee you can be a gay Palestinian and some may have freedom in Gaza I mean the cognitive dissonance to actually believe that
these girls are talking about this finally that these women over the last years are traveling around Israel and the world promoting an image of Israel as liberal but also militaristic pro feminist but also gun friendly and that's why a lot of pro gun
groups in the US and mostly men let's be honest are into these kinds of sexualization of Israeli gun wielding women.
We should note that one of the uses of Pegasus or the spyware was to entrap gay Palestinian men as you read in the book and essentially turn them into informants.
Indeed, you know there's a big part of the unit 8200 which is the equivalent of the US as NSA, which in its whole race on Jeter is to monitor Palestinians 24 seven across the occupied territories but one thing they do is to try to find so
called weak spots, a man who's married to a woman who might be gay, a man who might be having an affair with a woman, in other words someone who is an inverter comers doing something unconventional. I use that term loosely.
And when they get that information they will then try to turn that person into a spy and we don't really know how many Palestinians are collaborators there's not really an act some are to tiny minority but some are in Gaza too by the way, not
often in fact, as I say in the book, because there's been a siege on Gaza for close to 20 years imposed enforced by Israel and Egypt to get out of Gaza.
Sometimes I've spoken to Palestinian who've been offered this but refused it to get out of Gaza on the Israeli side they've been told you can leave to go to study overseas or go to hospital in Israel or elsewhere.
And that's why for us, for Israel. And that's how they blackmail people because they gather information from this sort of 24 seven global surveillance network and it's interesting is finally that when October seven shows that not just these Rayleigh
intelligence failed it was sort of an arrogance and a hubris, but also the American intelligence failed it's interesting to note, since speaking to various sources I have and some, there's been some decent reporting in the last six weeks that the US apparently
has been basically, although it's spying on Israel a lot I talked in the book that there's apparently about three to 400 NSA employees in the US who's every day job is to spy on Israel.
That's the job. So they're an ally but also America doesn't entirely trust them and I'm sure that works both ways. But America was not particularly inverted comm was helping Israel to detect so-called terrorist threats and one thing I just wanted to add is finally
if I could that I'm the co editor and co founder of a group called declassified Australia which is a news gathering organization with a story a few weeks ago that showed that pine gap, which is a key US intelligence gathering center in the center of my country Australia,
which is used as a key intelligence gathering venue to use the US used in Iraq and Afghanistan to target so called terrorists but kill huge amounts of civilians is being used by the US since October seven to give intelligence to Israel in its so-called
targeting of Hamas. Now the reason that's relevant apart from the fact that you have a massive US intelligence base in the center of Australia which is being expanded in the frankly crazy US expansion in my part of the world so apparently
the US target China and Australia sadly is a key ally in that madness to have a US and Australian spy base in the center of Australia being used to funnel information to Israel, how they use that information of course is not entirely clear makes legal culpability
very clear on the US side and the Australian side as it was when the US was targeting so called terrorists in Iraq Afghanistan and Syria or elsewhere say so call because huge amounts of civilians would kill like that kind of global US intelligence
infrastructure is being used as is the F 35 a finally fine F 35 a is the as a weapon that Israel is using over Gaza, the global supply chain involves many countries.
And in the United States, the US is being modified Australia, we also had a story showing that a key part of when the bomb when the door is being opened at the bottom of the F 35 to drop weapons on Gaza that part is made here in Melbourne, Australia.
And the global supply chain of companies that are directly complicit in what Israel is doing which seems like at the ICC is listening. Hello, there's a lot to be done. Let's talk about privatization. You talk about the neoliberalism that transformed Israel which was a socialist
state. Major state owned enterprises were sold off a privatized, especially in the 1990s. Israel has very high income inequality poverty rate 23% in Israel 36% for the Arab population.
And right many Palestinians are unaware at how the occupation has been privatized because it makes no difference. It was state officer or private individual harasses or humiliates them. You go on to write many checkpoints through which Palestinians are forced to travel to access their
places or Israel if they are fortunate enough to get one of the few work permits handed out by the Jewish state use facial recognition technology and biometric details to document their every move. But these are private companies.
So explain that. What's happened to how essentially private or profit firms are managing the occupation.
It's worth saying obviously that Israel was a self described socialist country but socialist country for Jews. And that's all. Yes. Yes. Yes. And also, yes. And clearly, I mean as some older you know viewers will be aware you know the it's amazing to think now that so much of the global left was
enamored with Israel for the first really 20 years of its existence anyway that was a bit of blindness that we can talk about some other time but anyway. Yeah look Netanyahu was a key factor in this that yes Israel had a quasi socialist background.
In the last 20 or so years there's been a shift not just near liberal policies within Israel itself but also outsourced in the occupation. And in some ways it sort of goes along with the massive expansion of settlements you now have roughly three
million Jewish settlers living in occupied territory the West Bank and East Jerusalem and a lot of the guards or security officers that are working on both settler checkpoints but also Israeli checkpoints are run by private companies and
I spent a lived in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020 and been visiting there for close to 20 years so I spent a lot of time looking into these kinds of issues and it's worth saying that as I say in the book. Yes, it's been outsourced and the accountability was zero even if an Israeli soldier commits
an abuse let alone if a private interest does. And it's important also to say that yes a lot of his companies have Israeli but many of them in fact that are doing this are also foreign and international.
And that's relevant because some viewers remember the last years the UN had tried for years to release this list of global companies and Israeli companies that were directly complicit in the occupation and therefore they should be boycotted essentially.
They released a list a number of years ago it caused a big scandal and some circles.
About 20 or so those companies then removed themselves from being involved in managing the occupation so to speak, but there are still I think around 100 companies Israeli and foreign, but are directly involved day to day in so called managing the occupation.
That to me is is not just illegal any moral but also right for a kind of boycott campaign which I suspect will increase in the coming years after what we've seen the last six weeks.
Can you talk about any vision I think it's changed its name to.
And then unit.
Any vision which is that has changed its name is a facial recognition company and Israeli company that was testing this at Israeli checkpoints.
So what that means is that when Palestinians want to say move around the West Bank if they want to potentially go from the West Bank into Israel proper.
They have to have their details checked their irises often checked now and they were gathering all this information. We don't exactly know where that information was going but clearly it was going into Israel.
A massive database that they were using to gather personal data on pretty much every single Palestinian the occupied territories.
Those tools are then marketed globally they have appeared in huge amounts of infrastructure from airports to other places around the world. And when those companies promoted, whether any vision uses the term battle tested I'm not sure but they are saying it's
not a good thing to say that they're not interested in Palestine successfully. So called successfully. And that does tie into 8200 which is, as I said, Israel's NSA it is the body that is gathering intelligence on Israeli and on Palestinians and increasingly I should say,
the evidence that increasingly the occupation is coming home that a lot of Israeli Jews who for years believe that this was just happening to Palestinians down the road are increasingly being surveilled themselves and I'm not just talking about since October
seven although particularly since then that there is a move within Israel increasingly a criminalizing descent entirely whether it's by Arabs or Jews.
But unit 8200 has become this kind of quite infamous funnel of people who work in the military for years developing all these tools and methods to surveil Palestinians, which they then take to the private sector to develop various forms of repression which
can then sell around the world and by maintaining those close ties. That's how goes to my point earlier on the NSO group was essentially an arm of the state. Many of these companies these surveillance companies repressive tools biometric companies operating in the
military by territories or in Gaza are then used by Israel as a key selling point to make new friends, so to speak it's a transactional friendship transactional relationship. And it's why as I really think I think it's more and more that the Israeli
industry really is it is an insurance policy. It's an insurance policy because yes there's some countries that oppose what Israel's doing not many not enough. But even the countries that publicly do oppose what Israel is doing many of them are still buying Israeli
and oppressive technology. I mean Mexico is one example amongst many. So often I think words matter. Sure. What a government or you know Prime Minister President says it's not irrelevant. Yeah sure. But what matters more is what you're doing what you're buying what you're
doing to yourself in your own country. So when you have 130 140 nations in the world that have bought some form in the last decades of Israeli defense technology drones missiles spyware whatever it may be. That's what matters and I think those Israel believes probably
with justification. Those nations at least for now are unlikely to turn on Israel while they're so reliant on those tools of repression. Let's talk about blue wolf or the wolf packed out of a base. So this is basically a system that has been developed in the last five or so years that every Israeli soldier operating in the occupied territories has
been used to be a base. The aim is to get personal information and data on every single Palestinian man, woman and child it's entered into a massive database.
And that is then used to potentially discriminate against those people. What does that mean practically.
Person X wants to go from the West Bank to Israel to work to get medical care.
But no, what information has been collected on them is obviously no consent. And as I say in the book there's testimony given by soldiers, usually anonymously Israeli soldiers.
Where it's almost like a game. How many Palestinian personal details can we get on our mission tonight when we're serving in the occupied territories.
It sort of goes without saying, but there is no transparency in this process zero. So Palestinian living in Hebron or Nablus or somewhere else.
Don't really know what information is being gathered, but we do know that it's impacting their freedom of movement from place to place within the West Bank.
And also potentially further a fill into Israel overseas.
Israel innovates all sorts of forms of crowd control you right. See of tears a drone that dropped tear gas canisters over a broad area skunk water.
The skunk water drone, a form of liquid emitted from a water cannon that left a foul smell on clothes and body for a long time and these are you they were used on a great march of return, which was a non violent largely nonviolent protest.
Movement in Gaza, where they went up to the border many of them, of course, were shot but talk about some of the forms of crowd control that have been pioneered by Israel but that we have seen in places like Ferguson.
Yeah, well this is something I talk about in the book right Chris that there is a sense that, again Israel is using the West Bank particularly Jerusalem and Gaza as a testing ground so some of those examples them explain what they briefly are so the
very much a return as he said was Palestinian's trying to march for their freedom and for the right to return essentially to Israel to where they ancestors used to live.
But it certainly caused huge damage and literally while the march of return was happening and while that drone that the sea of tears is being used I document this in the book.
Other countries were wanting to buy it because it was being tested so to speak in real time.
The connection between the US and Israel is key here and I say this pretty much soon after 911 there was a massive attempt by both the American Israeli.
Firstly, the pro Israel lobby in the US the anti defamation league particularly but other groups as well, to have sort of information sharing so huge amounts of police forces went between Israel and the US and vice versa training so to speak in tools of
so called people management, their examples of police officers that have these quotes in the book going to Israel after 911 being inspired by what Israel is doing to Palestinians and they bring those I mean let's be clear so saying the book American police don't need
training to be repressive against blacks and minorities obviously I'm not arguing that but what I am saying that is that they are getting new tools of repression to the point where just quite recently you had major Israeli border security
individuals on the US Mexico border looking at how the US inverted commas maintains its border and it's worth saying you mentioned this before I didn't fully give an answer to that that on the US Mexico border.
There is a key part of that infrastructure which was started by a barber deepened by Trump and continued by Biden now of Israeli surveillance there's massive elbot surveillance towers all across the US Mexico border.
And elbot is Israel's biggest defense company and the reason the US initially was interested in this kind of technology was because it had been tested and tried in Palestine inverted commas it works.
So you have all these massive surveillance towers which the aim is to both surveil potential migrants crossing the border but also importantly Native Americans who lived on their ancestral territory and I have quotes in the book of saying they can't live securely in their own
territory because of these surveillance towers. So again it's this and I have, you know it's worth saying that there is this ideological alignment between many in the US who view Israel as almost on the front line.
And they turn the Wild West of crowd control crowd management crushing any kind of resistance to overwhelming force, and they take those examples back to the US and vice versa it's like a feedback loop, it goes both ways.
As you say, in Ferguson I touch on this in the book that there was a lot of evidence that some we don't know exactly that particularly police in Ferguson and directly gone to Israel that's not necessarily the case, but some of the training that police forces in the US had
been used including in Ferguson had partly come from Israel. Talk about font X and how this Israeli technology is used to break into encrypted messaging apps, especially on refugee mobile phones.
Yeah, fun takes is the EU's border so called security force and there was a real trauma inside front text, not that I feel sorry for them but trauma after the 2015 refugee surge mostly from Syria and elsewhere.
And again, so now you have a situation where huge amounts of migrants are still trying to come from mostly Africa in the Middle East, escaping wars or conflicts or climate crisis disasters, and their phones which are this smartphones are essentially
a vital way of knowing where how to get there, you know people have maps on their phone personal details photos are often taken from people at EU border crossings.
Information is taken off them. We don't know exactly what information is taken off but presumably my my sense and to my reporting is that probably contacts in European nations and attempt to try to break up what they would call people
networks but I would say humanitarian paths to a better life.
And Israeli technology is part of that and I think it's important to say that as I said before, there's Israeli drones that are part of that infrastructure as well but also the EU which is Israel's biggest trading partner.
So when you have all these European nations in the last years expressing now and then concern about the occupation concern about settlements just this week, just this week.
One of the heads the EU said and I'm paraphrasing in time of war it's just outrageous that Israel would spend huge amounts of money on building more settlements because the Israel's release its latest budget and this huge amounts of money for settlements and I responded on Twitter.
What are you going to do about it because history suggests nothing.
They'll do nothing about I mean, apart from the fact that I'm a German citizen and an Australian citizen obviously in Germany.
This issue is toxic that Germany is using its own.
The political calamity disgusting actions during the Holocaust, including most of my family were killed in the Holocaust using that to support Israel's historical absolution to somehow say that to be madly pro Israel is to atone for our own sins during the 12 years of Nazi Germany.
And that has a practical impact because Israel is not just selling what's the weapons to Germany Germany is also selling huge amounts of technology to Israel.
Since October 7, there's been a 10 fold increase in weapons that Germany is selling to Israel to assist in its horrific war in Gaza. This is what it practically means that EU support for Israel.
I have a quote in the book there was a Gideon Levy the journalist I mentioned before from Haritz went to a sort of meeting with Netanyahu a number of years ago and he looks at a mat Netanyahu and says the whole world's basically in support of Israel.
There's a few nations in Europe I think you pointed to Belgium that it kind of give us a bit of trouble but overall we're fine, meaning that yes occasionally the Belgian authorities express concern about settlements, which is what doesn't really care about.
But ultimately the EU has made a decision that they will not challenge Israel even though he infrastructure Chris is being destroyed in the West Bank constantly.
And I wonder how and when that will change because it hasn't changed yet.
I want to close your last chapter you quote an Israeli human rights lawyer because of surveillance tech a country can avoid massacring protesters now today we're able to identify and stop surveillance of the next Nelson Mandela before he even knows he's Nelson Mandela
But you describe in the book is the formation of a really frightening dystopian or well in world that extends far beyond Israeli borders, but that of course Israel is integral to creating.
I certainly don't suggest that Israel's not able to commit massacres and obviously we've seen that since October 7 I guess what they quote that was some e time Mac who is a really great Israeli human rights lawyers for a lot of time trying to uncover the Israeli
history so and a lot of his work is in my book, essentially what he's saying and the book also shows this is that the technology of surveillance is so sophisticated now that nations and I have quotes from people in togo for example
various other nations across the globe that are run by often us back to his really back to taterships that back in the so called bad old days obviously there are repressive regimes that were able to surveil people through various forms of course that's existed forever
But the difference now is that we are so frankly overly reliant on phones and the internet, but all this technology is monitored 24 seven doesn't mean every information is always captured I mean the US issue up 911 right was they were getting so much information that couldn't process it
was a problem as we saw on October 7 but as you say, Israel to me is becoming and really has been for years, one of the global inspirations for repressive tech long before 911 and long after 911 and the danger of that is is clear is that it becomes a model for repression
as I said Israel shows countries how to do it, you can also repress your people if you buy this technology this by where this drone whatever it may be, yes the technology is not perfect that of course don't say that but that's what I'm saying, but it can create a global
almost architecture of control that is close to unbeatable and the impact of that at a time where democracies frankly in decline I mean you could argue that even so called self described democracy is undemocracies anyway, but nations that claim to be democratic are increasingly
moving I would say more and more to an Israeli style model I'm not just talking about an occupation, particularly I'm talking about language I was also talking about surveillance as I say in the book, the whole US rhetoric after 911 the so called war on terror
and I'm talking about these really playbook wasn't exactly the same, but it was remarkably inspired by what Israel had been doing in Lebanon in the 80s and onwards, hugely similar similar rhetoric about so called terrorism collateral murder
collateral damage but I would call collateral murder, something that our mutual friend Julian Assange something you know a fellow Australian a great huge hero of mine I've known Julian since 2006 right at the beginning of WikiLeaks that but people like him and many others have been saying for years
this is the threat, the idea of a complete architecture of global surveillance which is close to unbeatable and Israel is a global leader in that, and I think alerting people to that is the first step the next step is obviously how to challenge that
and I think a lot of the global response to October seven, both the attack by Hamas but also the insane overwhelming brutal war crimes that Israel is committing in Gaza I think is bringing out a sort of civil society action that I have not seen on this issue
in my lifetime, and I Palestinian Israeli friends and I'm talking about mostly globally not so much in Palestine Israel itself, and that to me is a sign of hope including fellow Jews and many Palestinians and that to me is that is the only sort of sliver of hope in what is a really really
great, that was Anthony Lowenstein author of the Palestine laboratory, how Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden and Kayla Rivera, you can find me at Chris Edges.substack.com

The Chris Hedges Report Show with Dylan Saba, an attorney with Palestine Legal, November 2023

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

The following is a transcription from Chris Hedges's podcast, The Chris Hedges Report. The episode is found in video form right here: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-show-with-33b

Information on trucks that were circling the campuses of Columbia University and Harvard University. They publicly list the names and show the faces of students who signed a letter calling on the university to cut ties with Israel.

All highlights are courtesy of Niklas Pivic.

Chris Hedges: These trucks are now being parked in front of students' homes. Another truck is at the University of Pennsylvania calling on the university president Liz McGill to resign following complaints the university fostered anti-Semitism by allowing for a pro-Palestinian festival in September. Major donors to these universities including the billionaire Marc Rowan, the chief of the private equity giant Apollo Global Management who donated $50 million to the University of Pennsylvania's business school, have announced they will withhold donations and demand the resignation of university presidents at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard^[1].

The prominent law firm Davis Polk rescinded three job offers that had made to students suspected of signing the Harvard statement and a similar statement at Columbia University^[2]. This public harassment is only a tiny illustration of the widespread campaign to silence anyone who decries the siege of Gaza and calls for ceasefire. Hundreds of social media accounts say the world's largest social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok are censoring accounts are actively reducing the reach of pro-Palestinian content^[3], a practice known as shadowbanning.

The US activists journalists and filmmakers contend that hashtags like #FreePalestine and #IStandWithPalestine, as well as messages expressing support for civilians killed by Israeli forces are being hidden by the media platforms.

Major conferences on the Middle East have been forced to cancel. The Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce, for example, successfully pressured Hilton hotels into canceling the US campaign for Palestinian rights event in Houston^[4], at which the Congresswoman Rashida Talib was to have been the main speaker, calling it 'a conference for Hamas supporters' and 'Jew haters'. The Chamber is also campaigning for Starbucks to close stores and dismiss thousands of workers 'who support Hamas', after their union posted a statement on saying solidarity with Palestine. It is even launched a boycott of the coffee chain under the slogan drinking a cup of Starbucks is 'drinking a cup of Jewish blood'^[5].

The Council on American Islamic Relations was forced to cancel its annual banquet in Arlington, Virginia after receiving bomb threats^[6]. The rare Palestinian voices that do get through the media blockade, such as Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American human rights lawyer who appeared live on CBS and ABC are often then erased. Erakat saw the segments in which she spoke removed from the playbacks of the shows online^[7]. The Frankfurt Book Fair was accused of quote unquote shutting down Palestinian voices after an award ceremony to honor a novel by the Palestinian writer, Adnia Shibli was canceled^[8]. Meanwhile, official Israeli spokespeople and politicians as well as their supporters are given ample airtime to accuse anyone who objects to Israel's slaughter of Palestinians and Gaza as being apologists or spokespeople or terrorists.

Joining me to discuss this censorship is Dylan Saba, a staff attorney with Palestine Legal, he was commissioned by an editor at the Guardian newspaper to write about the campaign, the silence voices critical of Israel's assault but was then informed shortly that the piece was to be published that the newspaper would not run it. So let's begin with this level of censorship, which is probably unprecedented since maybe immediately after the events of 9/11 anyway I was one of them attempting to address the calls to invade Iraq. But let's lay out its intensity, its reach and then let's go into perhaps the causes of it.

Dylan Saba: Thanks Chris, and thanks so much for having me on and raising and elevating this important issue. As you said, this is a level of suppression that is completely unprecedented in the mark of the Palestine solidarity movement. So I work for Palestine legal, we're a legal nonprofit representing folks who speak out Palestinian rights. And we were founded in 2014 and we've never seen anything remotely like this we've had hundreds of requests for legal assistance over the past several weeks, completely eclipsing the total number of intake requests we've had for the entirety of all of last year.

So it's an exponential surge. It's reaching students, employees, professors, folks in all different industries. We've seen a wave of retaliatory firings proposed made on private social media accounts supporting Palestinian rights. We've seen student groups surveilled suppressed from levels ranging from the federal government to state government to individual campus administrations. We've seen professors had classes canceled being locked out of emails. The range of political expression that is being targeted is wide, you know, from from very banal calls to a ceasefire to more radical statements. And it is widespread.

I think it's important to note a couple of things. One is that this is a response to a massive upsurge in pro Palestine support in the United States that the movement has made major gains the Palestine solidarity movement has made major gains and more and more you have folks who are willing to speak out for Palestinian freedom. Now, of course, this is met with suppression that this growing movement is a threat to the Israel lobby. It's a threat to Israel advocacy organizations and folks who have the interests of the US government and US and real interests in, you know, who share those interests as well. I think that the comparison to the post 9/11 era of those I was a child that then is probably apt and we have been describing this as a McCarthyite level of suppression.

But I do want to raise a key distinction here. This is now happening in the era of social media, and that has particular concerns and implications for regular individuals who may not be famous or notable names and and that's the introduction of doxxing as a as a particularly heinous tactic. You mentioned this with with reference to the trucks on campuses. What we're seeing is college students, individuals who are speaking out, or even, you know, for an action is benign as removing a poster are being filmed. That footage is being sent then to major media outlets such as Fox News, and you have folks on the Internet who are digging into it, finding out who these students are publicizing their names, releasing their names, and then those individuals are being hit with a torrent of discriminatory comments, threatening texts, emails, phone calls, death threats, heinous remarks, and are basically being bullied into silence. And this is a widespread tactic that we're seeing. And it, you know, has the, the negative consequences of chili speech folks are scared to speak out, because they worry that they're going to be smeared that they're going to lose their job or future employment activity, a future employment offer. And, and, and the doxing tactic is something that the Israel groups have been using for a while so folks are probably familiar with canary mission stopantisemitism.org which are some online black list that have really honed in on this tactic of, of smear online smears and doxing, but we're seeing it in an unprecedented level right now. Well, as you know, this isn't new. It's just exponentially exploded because there's been long years long assaults against the BDS movement, especially at universities banning I spoke at Northeastern right after they had banned students for justice in Palestine. And, and so it's building and of course that is use the power of donors in the past.

SPEAKER_01: So there was already a kind of foundational system in place. Yeah, absolutely. Like you said, the tactics are not, are not new. And in general, I think that this tactic of suppression and silencing has been the major move of Israel advocacy groups in the past 10 or 15 years, in part because folks realize that you know pro Israel folks realize they can't really win the argument on substance right. So the fact that these debates are happening in workplaces on college campuses is really bad news when Israel has, you know, has its most right wing fascist government that it's ever had, and has really only had right wing governments for recent memory. So, and meanwhile, dispossession of Palestinian land continues unabated. You have settlement expansion, regular assaults on Gaza, and really no political hope, you know, for progress on any kind of negotiation front. So there's not really much in the way that you can say to justify the Israeli regime and what they're doing. And so the tactic has basically been okay then we need to suppress this criticism, lest it start to have an effect on on on US government policy.

SPEAKER_00: So what do we know about those who are behind these groups oftentimes on campuses that will use LLL houses as kind of outpost of a pack but what can you tell us about the structure how it works.

SPEAKER_01: We do know that there's some major organizations that have as their, you know, function, the suppression of this kind of grassroots organizing so this is organizations like the adl and the Brandeis Center that purport to fight against anti semitism, but in large part what that means is suppressing pro Palestine speech, which has the effect of clouding the definition of what anti semitism is in a way that's very harmful for Jewish students, and also targets Jewish students, because Jewish students, you know, make up a large part of the Palestine solidarity movement in the US. And, you know, especially, like as you mentioned, the role of hello, which is, you know, an organization that has an explicitly pro Israel policy and yet purports to be a home for all Jewish students on college campuses. And so, you know, the way that they are in college campuses makes it such that anti zionist Jews don't have a religious home that supports them on campuses and are, you know, are being targeted along with Arab and Muslim and Palestinian students for their organizing. And so, you know, we have, you know, some, some extremely racist elements of this suppression and of various forms of surveillance surveillance, you know, that emerged kind of the from the post 911 legal paradigm and, and security state infrastructure, where you have groups surveilled activists surveilled, and, and this is particularly harmful for, for Palestinian urban Muslim students.

SPEAKER_00: Well, the documentary, the lobby, which never aired in the United States electronic into thought of put up a pirated copy, but they sent a student undercover into these Jewish American Jewish scientists pro Israel groups. And one of the things that came out was how they would essentially recruit students to spy on other students.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's I mean we've, we've seen that, you know, spying infiltration surveillance these are all threats to Palestine organizing on on campus.

SPEAKER_00: Absolutely. Let's talk about the media. There's really only one voice, virtually. And that's heard about this conflict. But this, of course, control of information this censorship has extended to mainstream media platforms.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of what we're seeing in terms of employment retaliation is in the media. So you have editors magazines being fired for, you know, merely amplifying calls for a ceasefire. This was the art was this art forum. That's right. That's right. You have, as you mentioned, Palestinians going on major news and not having their segments added in you mentioned nor but there are other examples as well. Basically any Palestinian who goes on to the news and does anything other than lament the dead in Gaza, anyone who's offering necessary political context for understanding what's happening is being is being centered, censored in silence. And this is a process of the media, manufacturing consent for what the United States is supporting in Gaza and that, and that is intentionally about removing context. And it's also about refocusing the worries of Americans on to these panics about what college students are doing and saying, it's extremely dangerous that you know you have these horrific atrocities being committed by Israel with the full backing and support of the United States and Gaza with many have called a genocide, including the preeminent genocide scholars and and and that's a very dangerous, that's a very dangerous message for for folks who are supportive of of Israeli policies of Israeli apartheid and and what's happening right now. And that dissent is very is very dangerous so it so the censorship is key the refocusing or attempted refocus of the American attention on, you know, on the concerns around what what college students are are saying are all attempts basically to stifle out political dissent in, you know, one of the most key moments for political dissent in the country's history.

Chris Hedges: They've done a very effective job of controlling the language. So I think it's not deniable that the firing of rockets by Hamas is a war crime indiscriminate or certainly what the killing of civilians at the rave is a war crime. But while they're very quick to denounce Hamas for war crimes, they will not employ the same standards towards Israel, which has carried out egregious war crimes for decades we can go all the way back to the ethnic cleansing in 1948 and the 50 villages where there were massacres^[9] right up to what they're doing today in the West Bank but talk about that difference in terms of standards and in terms of language because there's, it's a black and white issue Israel is in clear violation of international law, not only in terms of what it's doing to the people in Gaza, but in terms of the occupation itself.

Dylan Saba: You're touching on a key point and what that differentiation rests on is racism. It is precisely anti-Palestinian racism that allows people to say that there is no distinction between Palestinians in living in Gaza and Hamas, which is exactly the messaging of the Israeli government. They're saying it openly. They're saying that they're not treating them differently and they're saying that that Gaza is full of terrorists right that that distinction is is based on racist assumptions about Palestinians. And that's on the ability to paint Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians with a with a with a broad brush that is to paint them as a threat to Israeli safety and Jewish safety. And that is what allows the kind of naked genocidal rhetoric on the Israeli side and on the on the US side and supporting these actions. That's what's able. And that allows that rhetoric to be perpetuated and the frankly BS statements from Israel that they are respecting international law or that they hold themselves to international law. When it's evident you just have to look at the images coming out of Gaza. And that's a really big issue of obliterating civilian infrastructure that is clearly a war crime you can look at the, the casualty counts that no one is disputing. Although there was some indication that Biden was casting doubt on them, although I think he's walked that back. And being being killed the number of civilian casualties is is insanely high. There's no way that it meets the disproportionate disproportionality standard of international law and that's not even to mention the collective punishment actions of cutting off electricity and and water. The naked violations of international law that are being blatantly ignored by by the media and then you have complicity in in in conflating the Palestinian, you know, the Palestinians living in Gaza, you know, of whom half our children and the actions of Hamas.

Chris Hedges: To what do you attribute this cowardice on both within the media and the political class is just expediency careerism. What do you think is driving it because it's very hard to walk away from those images and not understand what's going on

Dylan Saba: I think that there is, I think that is, I think that there are people are worried about their jobs. I think, I think that we've, you know, we at Palestine legal have seen over 100 threats to employment that and then that's just what has come into us. There are dozens of people who have already been fired. And we've seen this trend in the media as well. I think that folks are intimidated because there are higher-up people at a lot of these establishment media institutions, who, frankly, are zionist and do support the actions of Israel, and you're freaked out that you have a growing chorus of people in the United States who are rightly identifying this, what Israel is doing as genocide. And, you know, in moments of crisis like this, we are put on the back foot in terms of, you know, put in a defensive posture because there's this massive wave of racism and retaliatory backlash, but we're also seeing major discursive jumps. We're saying people come out in support of Palestinian rights in numbers that we've never seen before hundreds of thousands of people taking the streets, not just in the United States, across the world. And then people talking about what's happening to the Palestinians, what Israel is doing in new terms. And that has, that has represented a major leap, a major leap in people's thinking that images are horrific and shocking and that's really moving people. And I think that poses a real threat to people who are invested in the continuation of United States support for Israel and Israel's genocidal and expansionist policy, politics and policies.

Chris Hedges: And the tactics they have employed, especially against BDS activists, is to criminalize within the legal code. People who speak about Palestinian human rights. Can you talk about that as a tool.

Dylan Sabas: Absolutely. So this is part of the legal infrastructure that came out of the post 9/11 world, and even before and these are a set of really broad. Well, so there's two things there is, there is the laws passed against BDS. But also what we're seeing is a use of, or reference to laws about material support for terrorism. And these are extremely broad and vague laws that have been used to stifle political dissent and, you know, in criminalized, you know, aid sending aid to Gaza, and other forms of advocacy. That's how that's how they arrested the Holy Land Foundation. That was a charity. Exactly right. And we, you know, just last week, DeSantis, Governor DeSantis in Florida, issued a directive to the University of Florida system to deactivate the SJPs^[10]. That's Palestine student groups in the University of Florida system with reference to these laws. Now, it's a ridiculous accusation. It's a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It will absolutely be challenged in court. But it's an example of the kinds of suppressive efforts taken at the state level. Now, it's not just the state level. You have also a resolution that was passed unanimously, but I believe the Senate condemns student organizing and basically equates them with Hamas. And this is an incredibly, incredibly dangerous threat to our civil liberties in this country. It's an incredibly dangerous threat to the rights of folks to engage in political organizing and political dissent. Also, you know, as you made reference to, there have been organized attempts to criminalize the, or to make a legal boycott divestment and sanctions movement. There are anti-BDS statutes and the majority of states at this point. Trying to delegitimize nonviolent organizing in support of Palestinian liberation.

Chris Hedges: You come from, you are of Palestinian-Jewish descent. I think one of the things that I've always found interesting is, and you made reference to this, is that when I do meet with students for Justice Palestine groups on universities, a significant percentage of those students are Jewish. Can you talk about your generation of people who come out of the Jewish community because I don't think that they are standing behind Israel. And then I want you to talk about the importance of the Christian right because I don't think the Christian right is a factor in this because it is also a political force that stands with the far right in Israel.

Dylan Saba: Yeah, absolutely. So as you know as you made reference to, I'm both Jewish and Palestinian, and I've been an organizer now and on this issue for about 10 years, 10 years, 10 years ago I was, I was a college student and the younger Jewish community in the United States is far more open to Palestinian liberation is far more active on this issue than the generations prior and it's posed a real generational divide within the Jewish community. But it's, but it's also inspired a lot of hope that we can actually build a pluralistic justice movement on this issue, and that poses a threat that poses a threat to, you know, to pro-Israel groups to the older generation who counts on that support from the Jewish community to justify his real crimes, and they're losing that support and the data indicates that they're losing that support, and that's a growing trend.

And it's beautiful to see. When I was an SJP as a student, it was an incredible diverse group of students, you know, Jewish students yes Palestinian students yes Muslim students, also other students, and increasingly what we've seen in the past 10 years is that students from other affinity groups black students Asian students on students part of other justice struggles are recognizing the connection with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and we're seeing a wide range of anti racist groups standing solid with the Palestinians, and that too is a threat, that too is a threat to folks who are wary of growing consciousness around racial justice, and are wary of the Palestinian struggle, including that message for, you know, the threat that that poses to their to their narrative.

You're also right to point to to the Christian right as a key player here, you know, people don't necessarily realize this but most Zionist in the United States are not Jewish, they're Christian. Christian Zionism is a is a, you know, is a huge movement people, people support Israel for, you know, their own kind of religious reasons but also because of its, you know, affinity within the right wing project more broadly. And so that you know that is a key point when you know we're often put in a position where we have to articulate something that should be obvious which is that anti-zionism and antisemitism are totally separate.

Antisemitism is hatred of someone for religious identity. Anti-zionism is a political position principle that is not related to religion. It's about opposing Israel's policies of genocide of apartheid of settler expansion. And, and, and, you know, we are often the major smear made against Palestine organizers and the justification for a lot of his suppression. A lot of the surveillance is is anti semitism and it's fundamentally cynical. It's fundamentally a misapplication of discrimination principles and an excuse to to stamp out political dissent in a way that's very dangerous as I mentioned before, because it is not in the interest of Jewish students of Jewish people more broadly to to confuse the meaning of what antisemitism is.

Chris Hedges: Well, the other problem is that it essentially by conflating the two. It increases, I think, attacks of antisemitism because those attacks become confused with anti-zionism.

Dylan Saba: Yes, absolutely. So, you know, you have people making the argument, right, in a legal forum and elsewhere in the media that being Zionist is a fundamental component of Jewish identity. Now, as you know, as we're saying, we know that that's not true. We know that a growing portion of the, you know, of of young Jews are anti-zionist are standing in solidarity with Palestinians. We know that Zionism is or to a host of political ideologies and beliefs that have nothing to do with the Jewish religion. And yet, folks want to insist on that argument. And as you said, that has a lot of nasty consequences down downstream.

Chris Hedges: Where do you see this going? You do have a powerful grassroots movement, even in small towns, I live in Princeton, there were probably 500 people out on the street on Monday in the solidarity with the Palestinians. And yet the political class is kind of calcified the media itself. Where do you see all this headed?

Dylan Saba: Yeah, that's a good question. As you said, the grassroots movement is, it's growing rapidly and it's the largest it's ever been. There's about to be a march on Washington on November 4 organized by the Palestinian youth movement and others that by all parents is going to be absolutely massive. And we're sending a message to policymakers in Washington to university administrators that this is a force that cannot be suppressed, that this dissent from what you asked the United States is supporting is something that cannot be ignored.

The people in Washington will have to take us seriously. If Joe Biden wants to win in 2024, he's going to need young people to come out for him. He's going to need people voters in Michigan, which has a large Arab population to support him. And, and more broadly, he needs to stick up for something stand for something right, you have people of conscious[ness] all over this country saying, you know, 'you are complicit in a genocide' and demanding a ceasefire. Now, as of right now, that that call has not made that much traction and Congress for the reasons that you're saying, I hope and expect that that will change with each passing day more and more people are becoming conscious of Israel's crimes are seeing the images coming out of Gaza and are saying, I don't stand for this, not, you know, not on my dime, not in my name.

Brian Schwartz. ‘Wall Street Titans Help to Fuel Ivy League Donor Revolt’. CNBC, 2 November 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/wall-street-titans-help-to-fuel-ivy-league-donor-revolt-.html. ↩︎
‘Leading US Law Firm Says It Rescinded Job Offers to Students Who Backed Israel-Hamas Letters | US News | The Guardian’, accessed 24 November 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/18/student-palestine-letter-harvard-columbia-us-law-firm-jobs-revoked. ↩︎
Kari Paul, ‘Instagram Users Accuse Platform of Censoring Posts Supporting Palestine’, The Guardian, 18 October 2023, sec. Technology, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/18/instagram-palestine-posts-censorship-accusations. ↩︎
Branko Marcetic, ‘A Tidal Wave of State and Private Repression Is Targeting Pro-Palestinian Voices’, Jacobin, 3 November 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/11/anti-palestine-mccarthyism-censorship. ↩︎
‘Starbucks Sues Pro-Palestinian Baristas’ Union’, Newsweek, 18 October 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/starbucks-sues-pro-hamas-baristas-union-1835966. ↩︎
‘Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Banquet Canceled after Receiving Bomb Threats - ABC News’, accessed 24 November 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/US/muslim-organizations-banquet-canceled-after-receiving-bomb-threats/story?id=104174066. ↩︎
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‘Frankfurt Book Fair Cancels Award Ceremony for Palestinian Author - The New York Times’, accessed 24 November 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/books/frankfurt-book-fair-cancels-award-adania-shibli.html. ↩︎
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Start the Week

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

BBC Radio show. Has gone on forever.

Episode

Humanism - what is it good for - 2023-03-20

Start the Week - From Sapiens to AI

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

Introduction

From the Start the Week programme episode page:

Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling Sapiens explored human’s extraordinary progress alongside the capacity to spin stories. In Nexus he focuses on how those stories have been shared and manipulated, and how the flow of information has made, and unmade, our world. With examples from the ancient world, to contemporary democracies and authoritarian regimes, he pits the pursuit of truth against the desire to control the narrative. And warns against the dangers of allowing AI to dominate information networks, leading to the possible end of human history. The classicist, Professor Edith Hall, looks at how information flowed in Ancient Greece, and how the great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon were precursors to the World Wide Web. Homer wrote about intelligent machines in his epic poetry, which suggests that the human desire for AI goes back a long way, along with the hubris about being in control. By understanding and appreciating the past, Professor Hall argues we can look more clearly at our current condition. Madhumita Murgia is the first Artificial Intelligence Editor of the Financial Times and the author of Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI. She investigates the impact AI can have on individual lives and how we interact with each other. And while there are fears that companies have unleashed exploitative technologies with little public oversight, cutting edge software has unprecedented capacity to speed up scientific discoveries. Producer: Katy Hickman

Abbreviated transcript

Let's turn from those information networks that we've learnt to live with sort of writing and printing and so on to these more recent ones. You value rights about a kind of recent witch hunt the genocidal attacks on the Rohingya in Myanmar which began in 2016. You described them as the Canary in the coal mine. Why are they particularly the Canary? What are they telling us?

Yuval Noah Harari: Because it was the first large scale massacre and one of the first large scale historical events which was in part the result of decisions made by a non-human intelligence by the algorithms that control the social media platforms in this case Facebook. People talk a lot about automating jobs and it's strange to think about it that one of the first jobs that was automated was news editors. We thought they would come first for the taxi drivers of the coal miners but actually they came first for the news editors and for much of modern history editors were one of the most powerful people in society they determined what people talk about. They shaped the conversation. You know a Lenin before he was dictator of the Soviet Union was an editor of a newspaper Iskra. Mussolini began as a journalist then he was the editor of Avanti, the fascist newspaper and then dictator of Italy. So this was the kind of ladder of promotion journalist editor dictator. And now if you think who are the editors of the most important news agencies or news platforms in the world these social media platforms algorithms, not human beings. And these algorithms were given a mission by the owners of the platforms to increase user engagement. And what they discovered the algorithms are by experimenting on millions of people that the easiest way to increase user engagement to make people spend more time on the platform is to press the hate button or the fear button or the greed button in people's brains. And one of the first places this happened was in Myanmar in the middle of the 2010s. Nobody in Facebook had any ill intentions against the Rohingya. They probably didn't even know they existed. Nobody in Facebook hate cultures in California even spoke Burmese. But Facebook was the main social media platform and news source in Myanmar. And the algorithms were deliberately promoting recommending auto playing all these hate-filled conspiracy theories about the Rohingya. And this propaganda campaign led in this was one of the reasons, not the only reason, but it led to an ethnic cleansing campaign against them. Now just to clarify this,

Tom Sutcliffe: it wasn't the algorithm that was creating the hate. No, no, no.

Yuval Noah Harari: That wasn't in the program at all. You were creating the content. I mean, this is 2015, 2016, 2017. Today, the algorithms can even create the content. Back then, humans created all the content but humans created all kinds of content. You had people creating hate-filled conspiracy theories. You had people giving Buddhist sermons of compassion. You had people giving biology lessons. And then it was the algorithms who are the editors. They decide what is at the top of the newsfeed, what to recommend, what to auto play. And the algorithm decided to spread hate. Well, it's decided to spread hate.

Madhumita Murgia: We talk previously about good information versus bad and AI systems and algorithms are the best example of actually bad is prized over good information.

Tom Sutcliffe: But the algorithm itself is not pricing the good. It's just, it's pricing engagement, which is a neutral term.

Madhumita Murgia: And it doesn't, it's neutral in the sense that it doesn't know what good or bad is. But people tend to be shocked by extreme things. And extreme things tend to be bad things. And so I, for example, have been getting repeated posts on my Twitter about child bereavement. So people losing their children. And I've never clicked on any of this, but possibly lingered on it a second too long, maybe because I have young children or I'm about to have another. But I'm just being shown just millions of these things. And as you say, it's not that everybody's just writing posts about losing their young children. There's lots of other content on there. But the AI systems decide what you see. So it creates a mirage. And when, as we start to talk to AI systems, we will also only hear what they decide that we should hear. And so it's very, very manipulative in a very sort of deep and individual way. The AI systems take away our agency to decide what we would prefer to see. I don't prefer to see things about child bereavement on the internet, yet I am forced to see it.

[...] I don't think people can control, right? If you see something really horrific online, you don't just close it. But that's the point.

Tom Sutcliffe: You stay. You stay.

Madhumita Murgia: But not because it makes you happy. No, no.

Tom Sutcliffe: But I mean, that's the thing that the AI is exploiting.

Yuval Noah Harari: I think maybe it goes back again to also ancient Greece and the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Humans have complex entities. We have vices. We have virtues. What do you cultivate? That was always a key question in human societies. And the algorithms, at least if they are not tweaked correctly, they tend to cultivate our vices. And then the owners of the algorithms say, but I mean, this is your choice. We didn't do anything, either it's free will. It's your personality.

Edith Hall: Well, no. Can I just not so much about ancient Greece? What is the difference between a market, the market mechanism, which is not human, has no agency, but that actually reward, you know, has goes in similar trajectories because it's centripetal. And it means that you get fewer and fewer companies, right? Information has the same tendency. What is the difference between the bots that are making those not moral judgments, but quantifying things? And the four market forces, what is the difference?

Yuval Noah Harari: I think the difference is the market was always a metaphor. All the people actually making decisions were human beings. I mean, companies can, I mean, we talk about the company made a decision. There was a human being or a couple of human beings making a decision. Now for the first time, you can have non-human beings actually making the decisions.

Edith Hall: I hear what you're saying about the point at which the yay or nay actually happens in the consciousness. But I don't see the difference. If you have a very big factory that makes a product, you can sell it cheaper than if you've got a very small one. This inevitably means that people are going to make the decision to buy up the smaller factory, right? Humans are only secondary agents in that. There is an inhuman force that is making things centripetal and driving them forward. And the one thing I really missed in your book was a thoroughgoing engagement with capitalism and Marx's laws, which are inhuman laws.

Tom Sutcliffe: How do you respond to that? Why do you not talk about the profit motive quite as much?

Yuval Noah Harari: No, I mean, the profit motive is there, but I still think there is a fundamental difference between a world in which the only entities, I mean, even if there are market forces, I believe that people can resist them. We see it with religions, we see it with ideologies. The idea that the whole world is just this kind of intricate Newtonian system of market forces, of material forces. That's not my view of history. I think that humans have a lot of agency and that stories, mythologies, theologies sometimes are more powerful than market forces. I think I would disagree.

Edith Hall: If I think about voices...

Tom Sutcliffe: I want to bring in Madhumita Murgia here, because her book is exactly about that point where market forces are employing AI and what that does. You set out to write a book about this, Madhumita, you mostly ended up talking to people without power, without much money, without social agency. Was that where you thought the research would take you? Or were you surprised by that?

Madhumita Murgia: I was really surprised at the patterns that emerged. Amongst the people who were most impacted by the technology. Maybe I shouldn't have been, because the fact that the tech industry is obviously driven by a profit motive means... It means that it's inevitable, I think, that those who are going to benefit most are those who actually already have power in today's society. Those who are marginalised or vulnerable are going to suffer just as they do today. But I think the other surprising thing was actually AI exacerbates that inequality. It makes things worse for you if you're already badly off, and it actually makes your life much better if you're already doing pretty well. And that's where the market force comes in. That's why they're doing it. And I think that's also why the sort of... The concentration of power is so dangerous, because the whole way AI is designed is it has one objective function. Algorithms, we talked about social media. Their objective function is eyeballs, right? But each AI system tries to maximise one thing only. And if you only have profit-driven corporations building and designing those systems, that's what you're going to see.

Tom Sutcliffe: You write about social enterprises in Nairobi, which are helping to build the AI intelligence. And this takes people from Kibera, you know, a slum area of Nairobi, gives them jobs which, on the face of it, look... So they're much better than other opportunities there. And they are doing absolute sort of grinding, sort of almost piecework, teaching the AI how to think about the world.

Madhumita Murgia: And then... Exactly. But, you know, as you, I think, said earlier, truth is complicated and nuanced. So for me, also, what I want to convey is there is no AI good and AI bad. There's everything in between. So yes, good, because these people get jobs that they would never otherwise have. They're being paid a minimum living wage, getting digital skills. But at the same time, are never allowed to protest against Facebook and Tesla, which are the people they're ultimately working for, and actually end up doing some quite horrific things, like filtering out all of the terrible social media content that we don't want to see.

Tom Sutcliffe: And that was a very interesting case, I thought, because it was a case where the, where human agents were, I mean, literally, as in the Industrial Revolution, exposed to toxic materials for somebody else's benefit. I mean, just explain what they have to do. They have to kind of go through the...

Madhumita Murgia: Yeah, I mean, we would be seeing just the absolute worst of humanity constantly every time we went on the internet. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, because, as we've discussed already, you know, algorithms push us towards, and also mean, you know, we are fascinated, maybe, more, but whatever. Our engagement is maximized by negative content. But we are not, we don't want to see bestiality and child pornography, torture, terrorism, and violence constantly. Otherwise, we never use it.

Tom Sutcliffe: Clearly somebody does, because there wouldn't be a problem otherwise.

Madhumita Murgia: Well, we don't want to see it all the time. Yeah, we would, we would, it would be too much. Well, not all of us want to see it ever, but, you know, and I take a point. And the only way for them to filter it out, because up to now, the AI systems weren't good enough, doing it was to use humans to say, this is satire or political statement, but this is actually really violent, so terrorism or unacceptable. And imagine being a person, you know, from Kibera, sitting there nine hours a day, just looking at that content, drawing boxes and categorizing this content. It's, it's led to PTSD and all sorts of sort of downstream. And we now have these people suing Facebook for the first time, for, for their algorithms causing, you know, harm to them.

Tom Sutcliffe: That is a whole other difficult isn't it suing the AI? Because, because of the black box nature of it. Before we move on to that, I just wanted to ask you, you do write about the benefits of AI, the fact that it can be used in certain circumstances. Tell us about Dr. Ishita Singh and QTRAC, which is applying it medically.

Madhumita Murgia: Yeah, well, this is quite relevant this week after the Nobel Prizes where we've seen, you know, AI's role in biology and breakthroughs and, you know, downstream how that could impact medicine as well.

Tom Sutcliffe: Dennis, the service of DeepMind11, I think, for, for, for, for working, working out how proteins folded,

Madhumita Murgia: which is, exactly, to predict the structure of proteins. And so for me, I think, for the, the most positive outcome of these systems would be to accelerate scientific discovery and progress and healthcare is a big part of that. And I went to India where I spent time with a doctor in a very rural part of the country, mostly citizens from a local tribe who don't even really rely on Western medicine or believe in it. And she's using an AI system to help diagnose tuberculosis there. And her, you know, what she talks about is, you know, the importance of human doctors is so much, it's medicine is more than a science, it's an art, it requires empathy and humility, which these systems never bring, but they can be an amazing, you know, democratizing tool for huge parts of the world that don't have any access. And you don't have to go to rural India for that, you could travel around the UK and find people who've waited months to have a specialist diagnosed their cancer, for example, which you could do within seconds with these information.

Tom Sutcliffe: And it has to be said, these information systems are very good at it. Talk to them how to do it. They perform at a higher level. Yeah, no, they're very well trained doctor.

Madhumita Murgia: Exactly. And that's a more objective sort of tool that you can use. But I think, again, you know, the lesson is, we can't cut humans out of the process because what happens when things go wrong, you can't allow an AI system to be autonomous because it can't self-correct. And then you end up having far more damage than you would have had with, you know, with human doctors. So I think it's how we implement that alongside human beings.

Tom Sutcliffe: You write about the use of AI to maximize surveillance, which is a fear that a lot of people has because AI, as it were, will take any amount of drudgery, you know, it doesn't mind looking at 10 million faces in a row and it doesn't get tired doing it. You've all the anti-hid jab laws in Iran are now enforced with a degree of error.

Yuval Noah Harari: Yeah, with facial recognition cameras. They were there in the books for years but saying that women, when they go out, they must wear the hijab. But it was difficult to enforce them because you would need policemen everywhere and it also causes friction. Now they largely switched to an automatic system in which you have surveillance cameras everywhere equipped with facial recognition software and algorithms, AI's, that not just recognize if a woman says driving in her own car, but without the hijab, also identifying the woman, finding her phone number and sending her instantly doesn't go through a quote or something. They instantly send a message, you broke the law, your car is impounded. And also other penalties and this can spread, this type of systems, they create for the first time in history the possibility, again, it's not certainty but the possibility of annihilating privacy and creating total surveillance regimes. Because previously in history, even if a Stalin or a Hitler wanted to follow everybody all the time, it was just technically impossible. Like in the Soviet Union, you have like 200 million citizens, you don't have 200 million KGB agents to follow each citizen 24 hours a day. Even if you have these agents, they just write paper reports about what you did and who you met, whatever, you don't have millions of analysts in KGB headquarters to analyze it. Now you do. I mean, you don't need human agents and analysts, a regime can rely on all these cameras and microphones and smartphones and drones and on machine learning to analyze it.

Tom Sutcliffe: And there is nobody that you can go to. Should there be, I mean, you might not call that justice at all, but should there be a miscarriage of justice under some system, there is no one you can appeal to.

Madhumita Murgia: Yeah, I'd be really interested to compare that to previous sort of historical examples of centralization of information. Because what we see with AI today is there's so much automation bias, which is sort of us believing that it's better than us. It's superior to what we're able to do less biased, you know, doesn't get tired. All the things you said that we don't, we aren't even creating mechanisms for recourse. So today, if you want a liver on the NHS, if you're waiting to be, if you're an organ recipient or waiting to get a transplant, there's an algorithmic system that decides who goes to the top of the list and who should get a liver. And, you know, there's no human involvement, a doctor can't come in and say, no, I disagree. It just goes on to the next person if you refuse. And a family who I wrote about discovered that actually it was a biased system against anybody under the age of 40. So if you are under 40 and waiting to get a liver through the system in the UK, you're never going to get it, never. Because the system is never going to change its mind and there's no human alternative or way to appeal. How can we live in a society like that where, you know, when things go wrong or if the design isn't, you know, is biased against certain types of people, there's no way out.

Tom Sutcliffe: They did discover that bias was inherent, which suggests that transparency can work, that if we're told the way in which the algorithm is constructed, there is a remedy of sorts.

Madhumita Murgia: Yeah, in this case, they didn't make it transparent. It was the sister of a patient who managed to find it and the NHS sort of denying it. So yes, if we have people who are in power who choose to make it transparent, then there's a way for us to fix it.

Edith Hall: This goes back to, in philosophy, bang to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where he writes pages and pages and pages on the difference between equity and equality. And he is so clear that you cannot have judges not having flexibility and sentencing. I mean, long before the three strikes law, you know, he is so clear that no lawmaker, and we could apply this to the bot, right? No lawmaker can ever anticipate all the possible cases and details and nuances that will come before, there is no way that they can do that. So they now... So his nomothete, his lawmaker, has got to be separate from his judge who is applying it in individual. So you could have an algorithm, which is your nomothete, but you'd have to have the intermediary of the human judge who applies not equality, what the algorithm actually does, however unfairly, is say same rules for everybody, but the judge who applies equity, and he produces... And interpreted. He uses one of his most beautiful images, which is for equity, which is, he says he's seen, he lived on the island of Lesbos for a long time, they have a ruler there made of lead that the stone mason's use for measuring curving stones. So that is the law, because you've got, you know, it is a crime or whatever, or it's a liver, but you've got to be able as a judge to bend it round the case. Round the case. And I just... This is just so staringly obvious that we just need to get our rights together to get our judges in there, correcting the nomothete. Tom Sutcliffe: Well, that's the next stage, that when the artificial intelligence starts to acquire an intelligence, you make a very interesting distinction about we should think of the A in AI as alien intelligence.

Tom Sutcliffe: Yes, I mean, we tend to think of artificial intelligence as being a better version of us. That's not what we're going to get, is it?

Yuval Noah Harari: Yeah, I mean, there is this debate when will AI reach human level intelligence? And the answer is never, because it's not on a path to a human level intelligence. Humans are animals, we are organic. AI is not... It's not organic. It's more different than us, not just than rats and pigs. It's more different than us than trees and amoebas. It function in a completely different way. I mean, one salient factor is that organic entities, or organic systems work by cycles. Day and night, summer and winter, time of activity and time of rest, we need to sleep. AI's are always on. They never need to sleep. And what we see around the world more and more is that you have these kind of alien intelligences. Again, alien, not in the sense that coming from out of space, but they really process information in a fundamentally different way than us.

Tom Sutcliffe: And in a way that we wouldn't understand.

Yuval Noah Harari: Yeah, and going over an enormous amount of information that we can't process, and they're increasingly in charge of their healthcare services, of the financial systems, of the new cycle, of politics. And the question is, who will adapt to whom? Will we have to adapt to the way they manage things? Or can we make them adapt to the organic style of human beings?

Tom Sutcliffe: You've asked a very large question there. We're running out of time, but we started talking about this tape. Is do you feel confident about the solutions we're going to come up with? Or pessimistic?

Yuval Noah Harari: I try to be realistic. I mean, when I talk with people in places like Silicon Valley and also in China, which was the other main center of development, which we haven't talked about, many of the people who are leading it are thoughtful people. They are, they understand us better than most people, the danger of what they are doing. They are concerned, but ultimately, they are locked in an arms race. When you ask them, why just not slow down a little and give society time to think about it and to adapt, they say, we would like to slow down, but we can't trust our competitors. And the next question is, but can you trust the AIs? And then they say, yes. So this is the big paradox. They can't trust the humans, but they think they will be able to trust the AIs.

Tom Sutcliffe: Yes, well, I mean, one thinks they should listen to the Nobel Prize winners, who's saying it could go out of control. That's a reassuring thing in itself, isn't it?

Edith Hall: I think they should listen to Aristotle, and they should listen to Homer. Homer's got, Odysseus has to get home to Ithaca and the Phoenicians have sentient ships. This is an ideal art, he's got to get there. There's no one to take him there, but the ships are completely sentient, they can't get any decisions about the navigation, right? But they only do what you, before you go to sleep, because he sleeps on board, and told them you want to get to Ithaca. They can go any way they like. But I think that that is the perfect image of what we should have as our relationship with AI. Tom Sutcliffe: The control of programming. Madhumita, do you feel, do you, I broadly feel confident about the future of AI or troubled by it?

Madhumita Murgia: Since we're talking about humans versus machines, I'm, I guess, handicapped by my innate optimism. That's the kind of person I am. So that's the lens that I apply to everything. And so it's interesting, a lot of the reviews of my book saw it as dystopian reality, and many of the stories are. But somehow coming out the other end of the book, I didn't feel hopeless or pessimistic, because the final third of my book looks at humans who are fighting back. At China, in particular, a particular human rights activist who's fighting against the might of the big data system there. And every day people who are putting a forward to try and understand these systems better and to establish some agency. And so that's what I hope will happen that will move away from just the machines and look at our own power in that. Tom Sutcliffe: There is a resistance if you know where to look. Thank you to all of my guests, Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. Look out for her new book that's out in 2025, taking an ecological look at the Iliad, Epic of the Earth. [...] Madhumita Murgia's Code Dependent, Living in the Shadow of AI are both out now.

podcasts that I listen to

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

Intro

Some of these podcasts are ancient. Some are likely gone. Some of these are only in Swedish. Some I listen to for very specific reasons.

podcast list

80 Väldigt Goda Mackor Podcast Website • Feed
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs Website • Feed
ALL NEW FONEJACKER PODCAST Website • Feed
AlternativeRadio Website • Feed
Amie & Fanna Website • Feed
Behind the Bastards Website • Feed
Better Offline Website • Feed
Bildningskomplexet Website • Feed
Bildningspodden Website • Feed
Blenda Website • Feed
Conan Neutron’s Protonic Reversal Website • Feed
Criminal Website • Feed
Current Affairs Website • Feed
Desert Island Discs Website • Feed
Det svenska hatet Website • Feed
DJ Shadow Presents Find, Share, Rewind Podcast Feed
Don't Log Off Website • Feed
Dot Social Website • Feed
Drama i P1 Website • Feed
Druid & Zimmerman show Website • Feed
Dyngbaggegalan Website • Feed
En Beroendepodd av The House Website • Feed
En mörk historia Website • Feed
En varg söker sin pod (gratisfeeden) Website • Feed
Fas 3 Website • Feed
Fupar & fall Website • Feed
Fördomspodden Website • Feed
Förhörsrummet Website • Feed
Hemma hos Strage Website • Feed
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Website • Feed
How to Fix the Internet Website • Feed
I lagens namn Website • Feed
I Spy Website • Feed
If Books Could Kill Website • Feed
Kaliber Website • Feed
Katarina Hahr möter Website • Feed
Kreative Kontrol Website • Feed
Krimfup.se - Ljudfiler från svenska rättegångar Website • Feed
KRIMINALSAMTAL Website • Feed
LARB Radio Hour Website • Feed
Library Talks Website • Feed
Longform Website • Feed
Maintenance Phase Website • Feed
Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman Website • Feed
Midnight Chats Website • Feed
Missing in the Amazon Website • Feed
Mr Gameshow with Mike Wozniak & Diane Morgan Website • Feed
Mytpodden Website • Feed
Oförskämt att anta (gratisfeeden) Website • Feed
P1 Dokumentär Website • Feed
P3 Dokumentär Website • Feed
P3 Krim Website • Feed
P3 Serie Website • Feed
P4 Dokumentär Website • Feed
podcast – Chomsky Audio Library Website • Feed
Respect The Dead Website • Feed
Rättegångspodden Website • Feed
S-Town Website • Feed
Sommar & Vinter i P1 Website • Feed
Sommarnovellen Website • Feed
Song Exploder Website • Feed
St Elwick's Neighbourhood Association Newsletter Podcast Website • Feed
Start the Week Website • Feed
Studio Expo Website • Feed
Sweet Bobby Website • Feed
Så funkar det Website • Feed
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso Website • Feed
THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST Website • Feed
The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow Website • Feed
The Chernobyl Podcast Website • Feed
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast (private feed for niklas@pivic.se) Website • Feed
The Coldest Case In Laramie Website • Feed
The Guardian Books podcast Website • Feed
The Last Days of August Website • Feed
The Leisure Society with Gemma Cairney Website • Feed
The Paris Review Website • Feed
The Quietus Radio Website • Feed
The Ron Burgundy Podcast Website • Feed
The Story Behind The Song Website • Feed
Things Fell Apart Website • Feed
This is Love Website • Feed
Tortoise Investigates Website • Feed
Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & New Order Website • Feed
Wind of Change Website • Feed
World of Secrets Website • Feed
World Wise Web Website • Feed

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Noam Chomsky in 1989, USA, part 1

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

https://www.podcasts.com/noam-chomsky-af65d89bb

Kagi summary:

Noam Chomsky evaluates how the American power structure and mass media manufacture consent in a democratic society through techniques of indoctrination and public relations.
Early 20th century intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr believed the average person follows faith over reason and requires "necessary illusion" provided by mythmakers.
During WWI, the government used propaganda to impose its will on a reluctant public and enter the war.
The public relations industry was created to control public opinion and ensure a favorable climate for business.
Elite observers believe they should impose their will for the common good and that the public is not the best judge of its own interests.
Post-WWII, there was concern over controlling public opinion through deception during the Cold War era.
Periods of social unrest like the 1960s lead to a "crisis of democracy" as more groups demand participation.
The media controls the boundaries of debate and frames issues to ensure discussion stays within limits.
Coverage of press freedom issues focuses overwhelmingly on a single Latin American newspaper rather than broader issues.
Closing of newspapers by allies like Israel received little coverage compared to criticism of actions by opponents like Nicaragua.

Isy Sutie with Sarah Bakewell

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

This is an episode of The Penguin Podcast with Isy Sutie and Sarah Bakewell. It was released on 2023-03-22.

Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell with Isy Suttie

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Episode title:: Sarah Bakewell with Isy Suttie
Show:: The Penguin Podcast---

Created with Snipd | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts

Owner / Host:: Penguin Books UK
Episode link:: open in Snipd
Episode publish date:: 2023-03-22

Show notes

> This week on the Penguin Podcast, Isy Suttie is joined by award-winning author and professor, Sarah Bakewell.
> Sarah joins us to discuss her latest work of nonfiction, Humanly Possible: seven hundred years of humanist freethinking, inquiry, and hope
> Isy and Sarah also discuss Humanism and religion, finding beauty in the complexity of the world, a brief history of human dissection, and the writing of Michel de Montaigne.
> Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and please do leave us a review – it really does help us. And finally, to find out more about the #PenguinPodcast, visit https://www.penguin.co.uk/podcasts .
> Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Tags: #podcasts #snipd
Export date:: 2023-03-22T06:57

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[00:03] Sarah Bekwell: How to be a Writer

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Speaker 3

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

Speaker 2

I'm Izzy Sutti and today I'm going to be talking to Sarah Bekwell, a writer who specializes in

[03:36] The Importance of Humanism

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Speaker 1

Of art, literature, history, all kinds of studies that rest on the human world rather than either the physical world of nature or the religious world. It's distinct from theology and from the physical studies. It's the study of that cultural realm in which we live so much of our lives when we create art, we tell jokes or we explain things to one another, we teach one another, we learn from one another, we speak our languages, we invent things, it's that whole creative and human realm. And that is the heart of humanism. I mean, it's right there in the words, it's human, it's human studies and human things, which isn't to exclude the material or the natural world far from it. We can't be separated from that, of course. But it is the idea of humanitas in that and the idea of human things being are concerned as human beings, especially in the realm of values and morality.

Speaker 2

But you can believe in a God and be humanist, can't you?

[05:21] The Importance of Humanism in Relation to Religion

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Speaker 2

Yes, it seems to go against the point of humanism to say, oh, you can't be in our gang. I know it's not really like it, you know, we say, I know what you mean. I think about when I've been to church and there were a lot of elderly people when I, my mum was a church organist and I grew up going to church every Sunday. And there were a couple of elderly people and that was the only time they left the house and there was such a sense of community and connection for them at church and that's exactly what it's.

Speaker 1

And that seems very humanist. Oh, absolutely. And I love going into churches and cathedrals and temples and it absolutely fascinates me. And also that sense of community, which the church has provided and other religions are exactly the same, has provided tremendous sense of community, which sometimes we kind of struggle to replace. But I think that that's almost putting things back with the important thing as community. And that comes out of our humanity in relation to each other. And the actual list of beliefs in any religion is almost likely to be secondary to that. That's how I feel about it anyway. Yes, that makes sense. I think because the emphasis is on the here and now with humanism in every way.

[08:32] The Importance of Humanism

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Speaker 1

Good question. And I would add to that, it's not just through history, but humanists are still persecuted today. It's still extremely dangerous to present yourself as a humanist in many parts of the world. What's so threatening, so dangerous about it, I think, is an excellent question. And my answer to that would be that not so much that it denies anything to do with God or to do with the beyond, but that it is sort of challenges authority, which is often embodied in religious institutions, but it can also be embodied in political institutions. And humanist of all kinds have tended to refuse that authority or work against it or challenge it. And certainly any kind of totalitarian society, you see it very much in the 20th century with fascism and communism, both deeply anti-humanist in their assumptions, because what matters is the state and the nation. And they sort of almost act as religions in that there's a central dogma which can't be questioned. And humanist of all kinds will always find themselves at odds with that.

[10:43] The Humanist worldview in the face of fascism

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Speaker 1

Yeah, they had a, especially in the run up to the Second World War, also the first, but it was particularly marked through the 30s when the threat was so apparent of the rise of fascism, particularly. A lot of them expressed feelings of being quite lost and uncertain, and a lot of their assumptions had been thrown into question, mainly about what humans want, because they sort of had proceeded on a much sunnier view, often of what humans really wanted, which was freedom and respect as individuals, the dignity of being an individual, the right to run their lives as they wished and to have their own relationships that they chose. And then suddenly it looked like people had an incredible attraction to an authoritarian leader and giving themselves up, giving their own personal interests up to this grand assent of the being, a national destiny or whatever. So it was a big challenge to the humanist worldview, and also, of course, it was a challenge in very real terms that a lot of humanists came personally under threat, and they had to decide what to do. Quite a lot of them went into exile from the Central European countries in Germany. But a lot of them did. They were quite active. I mean, a lot would have fought in the war as well when it broke out, but a lot they weren't necessarily pacifists by any means. But a lot of them tried to do what they could to communicate a sense of hope for the future. I think that was absolutely essential to them, was that there has to be a sense of hope in humanity. If we don't have hope, we're really lost. And somehow, you know, I find it very moving to see people like Bertrand Russell and Thomas Mann, who were very outspoken in putting forward this worldview that, yes, everything just seems completely lost, but there must be hope. We must have hope.

[12:19] The Importance of Hope in Times of War

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Speaker 1

Yes. And also one of the Thomas Mann, for example, of German novelist, who became an exile, went to live in the United States. He did this wonderful series of radio broadcasts via the BBC to Germany and the occupied countries of Europe, which was an incredible feat of organization and technology to transmit, because it wasn't enough to just transmit it on short wave, because Germans weren't allowed to have shortwave radios. So it was recorded onto a disk from Los Angeles. The disk was flown to New York. And from there, it was read out over a sort of telephone line to London, where the BBC recorded it onto another disk, which was then broadcast just on medium wave, which was easier to pick up. So this was done, you know, sort of over quite a long period at regular intervals. And again, his message in most of those was, don't think that this is all there is. Not exactly this will pass, but there is a wider world out there. Hitler can't possibly win in the end, because all of humanity will rise up against him. You know, there will be another world after this. And you really saw that sense of hope, of course, when the war did end, a lot of people put their energies into building international organizations that they hoped would make it much more difficult for such things to happen again.

[15:15] The Beauty and Meaning of an Object without a Purpose

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Speaker 1

It's pretty clear that it didn't have any practical use. So some of the other objects that have been found from that kind of era have clearly been things like spear throwers. They've had a function. But this just seems to be an object of beauty, maybe an object with magical or religious significance. We have absolutely no idea, no way of knowing that. I saw it in an exhibition at the British Museum a few years ago. It moves me because it's incredibly beautiful, because somebody made it, somebody with incredible skill made it. And it, to me, it embodies that human desire to make an object of meaning and beauty out of the physical world around us. So this is the sense of humanity, I suppose, that I am trying to get up with the book, the feeling of as humans, we are so cultural, we are so creative as well and so bound up with our sense of meaning. And we clearly work as far as we can guess about this object. It looks like something like that was already part of us that long ago and has always been. So yes, it's an object of beauty and also great meaning. And it captures my feeling for how broad humanism can be. It really doesn't have to belong to any particular culture, it doesn't have to belong to any particular world view.

Speaker 2

It's part of its appeal that it has no function.

Speaker 1

I think so.

[18:03] The Importance of Observing the Universe

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Speaker 1

Yeah, like a lot of people I got very much into birds observing, watching and drawing during the lockdowns, not that I didn't appreciate them before that, but I did much more. But I do think that thing about feeling this or in the size and beauty and puzzlingness and complexity of the universe, that sometimes might be presented as somehow making us feel small or making humans feel insignificant. I mean, Fenceley Blaise Pascal in the 17th century said that the silence of the infinite space is horrifies me because it makes humans feel insignificant. I have to say, for some reason, I've never felt that. The more I spend time outside on a dark night, if I can possibly manage to do it, looking at the stars or reading, I've been fascinated by the James Webb Space Telescope and the new observations that it's brought us, the more I feel a sense of humanity having a place in this, because we are the ones who are observing it, studying it and reflecting on it, this is our place in the universe. However small we are, and however remote our planet is from all we others, this is what we do. I mean, that I find astonishing. And I also just find it beautiful to contemplate. There's a sense of awe, which I think is often found in religion, but I think it can just as often be found in the scientific worldview and in all the other aspects of our experience.

[20:27] The Book of Shadows

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Speaker 1

It gives me a sense of connection to all those other people. Something that crops up several times in the book is the Cathedral of Chart, which I visited a few years ago, spent several days around it and exploring it, incredibly beautiful, incredibly fascinating. You really see in the cathedral how it's been built up in layers of time from its really ancient foundations to the incredible work of the 12th and 13th centuries where a lot of it was built and the oldest of these stained glass windows were made, which are stunning. And then at the top, there's a kind of 19th century structure, which supports the roof. And it's based on railway station design. And I mean, all the people who have worked and still do work all the time to protect and develop and sort of keep that tradition going. I find it moving. So it's beautiful to stand in the cathedral, which is huge. And look up and think, wow, this is way beyond me. But the other half of that same coin for me is that sense of the connection to all the people who have ever worked on it. In the sense of continuity. And also how difficult it is to preserve these things with a chartre several times twice in particular has come very close to being demolished. Once after the French Revolution, when they were very keen on, they had the idea of sort of going and just smashing it up. But somebody pointed out that if they did that, the heap of rubble would block the town center of Chartre for untold years and would be almost impossible to clear. And then again, in the Second World War, where it was almost bombarded in the belief that the Germans were using it as a lookout, the US Army wanted to bombard it. And it was quite a heroic character who went in there and checked. There were no Germans there. So it was saved. So yes, it's throughout the book. I have a feeling of the fragility of things, but also the incredible efforts that people have made throughout to preserve and transmit human culture.

Speaker 2

Well, let's move on to your next object. And this is something that tells a story.

[25:22] The Triumph of Anatomy

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Speaker 1

Through this pass, probably sent Gautard Pass, to get it to his chosen publisher in Basel, who produced the book, and it was immediately one of the great works of printing. The publisher hung on to these blocks for many years and died. And then they were sort of passed around, they kind of disappeared at most times, and then somebody would discover them, wow, look is, you know, 279 incredible pair wood blocks of these great illustrations. People bought them, sold them, some printers decided to use them to create new additions, because you can still print from them. And they ended up in University of Ingallsstadt for a while, and then Munich, apart from a couple that actually went back to Luvan, which is where Fisheus was from. It was very unfortunate that Luvan, the library was actually destroyed twice by firebombing in first the first world war, and then the second world war, so those two were lost there. Munich was bombed in the war, as well, the library, and the pair wood blocks have gone, they vanished. So to me, it sort of represents something that wasn't extraordinary survival, but now isn't, and partly through the misfortune of war, of course, which is where we lose so many things. It also represents, I think, the great sense of hope that we have in medicine as a humanistic practice, anatomy as kind of victory of reason over, well, I guess, over religious prohibition, which is what mainly was holding it back.

[27:20] The Humanists

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Speaker 1

Definitely. And history, as soon as you start reading in any of these fields, these conflicts between people just throw themselves up in your face. You know, you don't have to hunt very far to find them. And quite a lot of the humanists in the book, you know, maybe you think of humanists, I mean, I have this tendency, I've always sort of thought of humanists as a gentle breeze, sure, you know, the kind of vegetarian sandal wearing nice people would be the stereotype that was often put around in the 20th century. But actually, a lot of the humanists in the book spend an inordinate amount of time on feuds and quarrels and there were a few cases of it actually coming to physical fisticuffs, particularly in the Renaissance, particularly in Florence, which was, you know, pretty high powered intellectually place. And people had some pretty big egos sometimes. But on the other hand, they often had quite a lot to be agitistical about, because they were achieving a lot.

Speaker 2

And also it was at a different stage, wasn't it?

Speaker 1

It was like they had to fight harder almost to keep it, maybe because they were being, I don't know, society was so different than that was a period when there were tremendous changes of political instability, tremendous changes of, you know, you might be in with one influential patron and everything was going well, and then there'd be a change of regime and you would be in trouble. But it was also there was a culture of intellectual debate, which is a positive thing. But of course, sometimes it could get a bit overheating.

Speaker 2

And well, let's move to your next object. This is something to drink, which I presume you won't ever drink, because you don't know.

[32:05] The Gift of a Random Bottle of Wine

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Speaker 1

But also he's fascinated by diversity, the incredible diversity of cultures that were available to him at the time. And of attitudes and ideas and habits and ways of presenting ourselves is even fascinated by different kinds of haircuts or how we behave. So, you know, I've always been very fond of him. So this bottle, when I visited the estate, which I was very keen to see, I bought a couple of bottles there, they still sell their wine. And I gave some away. And I kept one. And of course, I drank it because it's very good wine. And then quite a few, so that was it. I had no more bottles. And quite a few years later, a friend of mine saw in a charity shop this 1999 bottle of the wine, selling for like a pound. And she bought it for me. So I've had it ever since. And it still sits there in my kitchen. I haven't stored it properly or anything. So I don't dare to open it, partly because I don't want to lose it. And partly because I just have the feeling that something is going to have gone wrong with that wine in that period of time. It's probably not very drinkable because I haven't been kept it in a cellar or anything. But I just, it's a very treasured object, partly because of the random way in which it happened to come up. Because also you were bought it as a gift by someone who knew you would love it. Yeah, it's a very old friend, a very old and dear friend that I've known for since my university days. So yeah, that really makes it more special.

[34:48] What I Read Before Bed

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Speaker 1

We want to stop it. And this seems to be a part of the human experience from the vast majority of us. So I inclined to think that it probably does, but I would be reluctant to sort of state it as a fact, because it is actually, you know, there are those who try and investigate that. I think that George Eliot knew what she was talking about, because her novels have a huge cast of characters who we really enter into their feelings and experiences in this complex tapestry of life. This is the novel. This is what the novel has mostly done, is to show us more than one human being, feeling different things in relation to each other and in relation to their situation. And as a reader, I think of it as kind of hitching a ride inside somebody else's head so that you feel some of what they feel through the skill of the novelist who's presenting it. There's a connection, I think, back to the montane, what's been called the montane-esque tradition in literature, because although he sort of does that, but there's only one character, it's himself, but that self is so multitudinous, multifarious and complex and constantly changing his mind about things and constantly writing about other people. Those others come in through his reading and his social life. So he gives us this rich tapestry of human experience.

Speaker 2

What do you read before bed? Do you tend to read books about humanism or, I suppose, more philosophical books?

[38:40] The Role of Diversity in a Post-Humanist Society

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Speaker 1

So yes, it's absolutely vital that diversity of experience and perspective is also a part of how we structure society and how we interpret society, so that we have perhaps a society, this is Dan Goodley's argument, that is more based on a sense of our connections to each other, and for some things we do need to rely on each other rather than all being atoms on our own completely self-reliant and independent. So the general sort of diversity and universality thing, the way I always think of it, because sometimes almost it sounds as though they're set as opposites against each other, but I think the really giveaway thing is that when recognition or respect for one goes missing in a society, the other one often goes as well. So a society that has no respect for diversity is likely to be a society that doesn't recognize the universally human, the universal rights of all human beings, regardless of gender and race and everything else, but a society that loses respect for that is also not likely to have any respect for diversity. So that shows, I think, how the two are absolutely intertwined with each other. And you're right near the end of the book about post-humanists, and they look forward to a time when humans kind of died out really, and then transhumanists who want us to accelerate towards technology and fascinated by those groups of people.

[40:23] The Loss of the Human Experience

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Speaker 1

What is it to be a human being? Transhumanism tends to see a kind of disembodied mind as being the future when we've merged with some sort of non-biological technology, or we've become so intertwined with it, that's really the sort of the pure consciousness, purely disembodied consciousness that can somehow still be human and or transhuman maybe, but it's something that is in some sense us that we can look forward to perhaps traveling the universe, but without needing a body, which of course makes us mortal and limited if we have a body. I have always enjoyed reading science fiction and love the way that science fiction helps us to imagine these very remote futures, possible futures, these very different ways of looking at ourselves, but I also have found myself becoming more and more aware of how much is lost in that vision of what it is to be a human being, because what it is to be a human being is not to be a disembodied mind. None of us have had that experience, it's to be embodied, mortal, subject to all kinds of limitations, but also connected to other people that are connected to our particular time and place, and living in a very rich cultural environment, as well as a rich natural environment, and I feel a great sense of loss if those things are imagined as having been somehow jettisoned as no longer important.

Speaker 2

It feels like you wouldn't necessarily listen to the birds singing like

[44:20] The Happiness Creed

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Speaker 1

He just wrote beautifully, I think, about life, but what he's mainly remembered for, or the thing that has been most lasting of all the many things that he wrote and said, is something that has become known as the happiness creed, and he does say creed is kind of, it's not a word that comes naturally to him because, you know, he's not a believer in the religious sense, but his creed is, and he reads it on that recording and it goes like this, while I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself and my creed is this, happiness is the only good, the time to be happy is now, the place to be happy is here, the way to be happy is to make others so, and he goes on to say this creed is somewhat short, but it's long enough for this Life, strong enough for this world, if there's another world when we get there, we can make another creed, but this creed certainly will do for this life, and I can't think of a better statement of the humanist worldview than that, especially the emphasis on making others so, I mean, it's not a selfish pursuit of happiness, or rather if you did that, you wouldn't attain it, I mean, the way to be happy is to make others so, I love, there's a quote from him, he was very funny as well, wasn't he?

[46:22] The Importance of Rhetoric in the Life of Michel de Montaigne

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Speaker 1

A sharp comment, yeah, he was very funny, and also, very sort of just full of energy, you know, very vigorous sort of manner, but he could also lay on the, I don't know, sort of flashing thunderstorms and lightning, if he wanted to lay on the grand green yon, he could, but he would say, no, he would say things like, you know, and now, as he sees religion receding, now we can see the ghouls withdraw, you know, their empty eye sockets that sort of withdraw from view, and so he could, he could sort of have fun with rhetoric, make people laugh, make people shiver with the horror imagery, all of which is also a very humanistic tradition that of the fascination with rhetoric, persuasive speech, vivid speech, vivid writing as well, it's a tradition that fascinated the Renaissance humanists how to speak elegantly or powerfully, and Of course it comes from the classical world, where there was this great discipline of studying how you speak well in public life, and how you write well, and you definitely see it with him, I mean, he was, he honed a lot of it in his life as a lawyer, where he was renowned for his really rousing deliveries, but also even before that as a school teacher, and he was quite very funny there too, he actually lost his job as a school teacher in one place, when he said that he thought baptism was a very good thing, as long as it was done

[50:06] The Most Exciting Stage of Writing a Book: Seeing It Come to Life

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Speaker 1

Well, it's very much an up and down process, because that isn't that long ago. I mean, that was, you know, that was in the 20th century, and that was just one viewpoint, not everybody agreed with him, but interestingly, I mean, one of the things that he said, it was this thing that became known as kind of new humanism, which was based on his views and his supporters, and it was a very elite, it was very much about going back to the classical authors, especially ancient Greek and the Athenian ideal, but particularly with the continuing the thing that was the case then, that it was only for an elite, really, because the vast majority of people, for one reason or another, were excluded from it. And one of the things that he said was that, because there's this famous line, which appears in a play by the Roman African author, Terrence, which is often quoted, which basically translates as, I am human, nothing human is alien to me. And that's exactly that montane thing about recognizing ourselves in each other. And Babit said, well, the problem with that, you know, nothing human is alien to me is that it's not discriminating enough. So it's like, I mean, that's one approach to humanism. It's slightly left a bad image in some circles of humanism. It's sometimes thought of as being elitist, as being confined to a Eurocentric, and particularly a Greek and Roman centric, view of what culture is, and of being something that you have to sort of study, and of being something a bit retrograde and not critical enough of other aspects of the human condition. But I think that really is a misrepresentation of what the vast majority of humanism has been about, certainly, in recent centuries, where, as I say, the more open and all embracing and welcoming humanism is, the happier I am. I mean, that's very much how I'd like to see it. But yes, I think that particular strand of humanism has given humanism a bad image, which I think is a great shame because that's completely against the spirit of what the vast majority of these humanists that I cover in the book are all about.

Speaker 2

And my last question, what's the most exciting stage of writing view?

Elon's Spies - episode 4, 'A Star is Born'

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

From Tortoise Media, episode 4 of Elon's Spies, I've annotated parts that I think are especially important in green colour:

Alexi Mostrous: It's the evening of Tuesday, the 5th of November. Millions of Americans have voted in the US presidential election and Donald Trump is awaiting the result. He's assembled a select group of supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It's the inner circle, family members, senior campaign staff, a handful of donors, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is there, along with his wife, Usha. It's the cast list of people likely to dominate the next four years of American government. But one very influential person is missing.

Elon Musk: Everyone here, me. It's my voice coming through.

Alexi Mostrous: Elon Musk.

SPEAKER_06: It's like thumbs up.

Alexi Mostrous: Like me, Ryan Mac, a tech reporter of The New York Times, is wondering what he's up to. Musk is a central figure in Trump's MAGA movement. But for the moment, he's nowhere to be seen.

SPEAKER_07: But then we also got a tip that he would be going to Mar-a-Lago for the election night party. And, you know, we're still watching his plan and eventually we realize it's taken off from Texas.

Alexi Mostrous: Musk's Gulf Streamjet is on the way to West Palm Beach. Earlier in the day, the billionaire cast his vote in Texas. And now he has some time to kill. So he settles back into the cream leather chairs of his $78 million jet and starts a live stream on X.

SPEAKER_07: And he does that while hardly playing a video game and answering questions from essentially very close fans and friends of Donald Trump on why he viewed this election to be so important.

Alexi Mostrous: In this moment, it feels like momentum is building. A jet hurtling towards its destination, the finish line of the election in sight. Much of the live stream is rambling, but there are parts which stand out.

Elon Musk: So America PAC is going to keep going after the election and improve preparing for the midterms and any intermediate collections as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.

Alexi Mostrous: 40,000 feet up in the air, this is a glimpse into Musk's thinking. That he's not just another wealthy donor, that his involvement in politics isn't concluding with the election. It's just beginning. This is his manifesto for the future.

Elon Musk: So it's like we'll make kind of way more efficient. We'll give us tax money will be spent almost sensibly. And, you know, they're not saying they might be a few bumps in the road, but the best in things I think we'll do out of for a golden age of prosperity.

Alexi Mostrous: At 6.11 p.m. on Tuesday evening, Musk touches down in West Florida. After all the talk of a knife edge election, it's not even close. The next time I hear Musk's name, it's 2.30am in America. Trump is on stage giving his victory speech. He's jubilant. Enough votes have come in now that he knows he will be the next president of the United States. Trump name checks his campaign manager, his family, his vice president. They get a few seconds of praise each, but Elon Musk, he gets a whole four minutes.

Donald Trump: Let me tell you, a star is born: Elon.

Alexi Mostrous: For much of the speech, Trump is reading from a teleprompter. But this, it's off the cuff.

Donald Trump: I love you Elon, that's great.

Alexi Mostrous: Looked at one way, this is simply inaccurate. Musk is the world's richest man, a tech billionaire, a builder of rockets and robots and electric cars. And famed for his takeover of Twitter, he's already a star.

But in this particular moment, I think Trump is on to something. Musk was impressive before the election, but we've seen billionaires before. What's unprecedented is this new combination of political power and immense wealth. Like disparate forces of energy colliding to form a new star, Musk has combined control of a major social media platform, a 300 billion-dollar net worth, and insider access to the next president of the United States.

The election has transformed this mere business mogul into a political giant: Elon 2.0.

Over the last few months, I've been looking at how Elon Musk has exercised his power before the election: how he operates, how he thinks, what drives him every day. And now I'm wondering, will that change now he's got the ear of the next president? What form will this new supercharged Musk take? What does he really want to happen in the next four years? And what does it mean for all of us?

SPEAKER_00: That's what people just voted for. They want unconventional. We have to be very careful.

SPEAKER_05: Extraordinarily alarming. It's powerful. He's megalomaniacal. Now he's going to be something approaching a kind of co-president.

Alexi Mostrous: I'm Alexi Mostrous, and from Tortoise, this is Elon Spies, episode four: A Star is Borh.

It's the morning after the night before. Trump's granddaughter, Kai, posts a family photo on X. There's Trump, and next to him, Don Jr. Eric Barron, the whole squad. All of them beaming in triumph. The vice president elect J.D. Vance and his wife Usha aren't there, but Musk and his four-year-old son are the only non-family members in attendance. His transition to Trump insider complete. But it hasn't always been that way.

Musk was raised in South Africa, but he's been a US citizen since 2002. For the first two decades after that, he voted Democrat. Musk has described as pro-environment and pro-climate. He said that humanitarian causes are super important to him. He once queued in line for six hours to shake the hand of President Obama. Even after he switched support to the Republican Party two years ago, Musk had little good to say about Trump himself. In July 2022, he urged the former president to retire, tweeting that it was time for him to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset. And if Musk wasn't sold on Donald Trump, well, the feeling was mutual.

Donald Trump: Elon! No, he's got himself a mess. You know, he said the other day, oh, I've never voted for a Republican. I said, I didn't know that. He told me voted for me. So he's another bullshit artist, but he's not going to be buying it.

Alexi Mostrous: Eighteen months later, everything's changed. These two stars are no longer at loggerheads, but working together, feeding off each other's energy.

Elon Musk: This was the last chance, man.

Alexi Mostrous: The day before the election, Musk appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast. As I listened to this two-hour, 38-minute show, I thought: can this really be the same guy that donated thousands of dollars to fund Hillary Clinton's campaign for president? And who told CNBC in 2016 that Donald Trump didn't have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States?

Elon Musk: If the big government, the commonwealth puppet machine wins, they will legalize the legal and swing states. There will be no swing states. Every election going forward will be guaranteed Democrat win. This is the final. This is it. This is the last chance.

Alexi Mostrous: The language feels radicalized. Puppets, illegals, last chances. Musk isn't speaking like a traditional business leader or a politician. He sounds like someone ranting on his own social media platform. This is this is no ordinary election.

Elon Musk: The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote, effectively.

Alexi Mostrous: The billionaire also gave almost $120 million to the Trump campaign. In the days leading up to the election, that included giving away $1 million a day to a registered voter in a key swing state.

Of course, other billionaires have spent big on Trump, including some of Musk's fellow tech heads in Silicon Valley. But none have got as down and dirty as Musk. At some points, he was even on Zoom calls with Trump's organizers to help get out the vote. Just like the periods where he slept under his desk at Tesla or at Twitter, when he worked 100 hour weeks to keep his factories running, Musk was in the trenches of the Trump campaign. He was running the campaign like he'd run a business. Except this time, the mission wasn't to put rockets in space or to make electric cars. It was to elect a president who could dismantle the very institutions that Musk had railed against for years. And his contribution, it was critical.

SPEAKER_11: By the way, I don't think this race would even be close if it wasn't for what Elon's doing with X and just showing people what's going on.

Alexi Mostrous: To thousands of male millennials and Gen Z is Musk is a hero, an entrepreneur not afraid to make a risky joke. For Trump, this connection to the manosphere was invaluable. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump, won men aged 18 to 25 by 56 points to 40. In 2020, Biden won the same demographic by 56 points to 41.

Musk and X was the cannula through which Trump's message flowed into the political veins of this critical demographic. Not just through his own posts, but through connections to influential podcasters like Joe Rogan who endorsed Trump only after interviewing Musk himself.

This is the fourth episode of Elon's Spies. In the first three, my producer, Gary and I looked at how Musk used surveillance and private investigators to control the world around him. It's pretty obvious that we're not talking about private investigators here, but I'd argue that it does touch on some of the same themes.

One of the things that shocked me about reporting on Musk was just how vindictive he seemed to be, how much he was affected by personal slights. Like when he hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Vernon Unsworth, the British cave expert, just because Vernon had told Musk to stick his submarine where it hurts. And that aspect of Musk's character, his thin skin, carries across because it might at least partly explain why he's shifted so violently towards the Republican Party.

SPEAKER_12: If we try to sort of trace back Musk's kind of transformation into this Trumpian cheerleader, when do you think the first time was that Musk started to fall out with the Biden administration?

Linette Lopez: When Biden didn't invite him to the White House to talk about electric vehicles.

Alexi Mostrous: There are moments in history which don't seem very important at the time, but looking back, they're turning points. Linette Lopez is a columnist at Business Insider. She's covered Musk and Tesla for years. In her view, one such turning point took place on a hot Thursday in August 2021. It's about a year and a half into Biden's presidency, and the president has summoned executives from global carmakers to talk about electric cars. Except, one person isn't invited.

SPEAKER: Tesla's CEO Elon Musk accused President Biden of ignoring his electric vehicle company and paying more attention to legacy automakers.

Alexi Mostrous: Biden's decision was all to do with Tesla's anti-union stance. But given that Tesla was the world's leading electric car manufacturer, and given that Musk has done more than anyone to promote the idea of electrification, it feels like a very personal snub.

Ryan Mac: He is very upset about it. He doesn't understand why Biden is talking about GM, which produces far fewer cars than Tesla, and it hurts him to his very core. That's why he reacts in the way he does. After that, you start to see his messaging around Joe Biden. He starts to call him sleepy. He starts to call him incompetent. And you get this kind of increasing of rhetoric that you see on Twitter and you're like, whoa, that's got to be coming from somewhere. But I view it as one incident in a few that kind of angered him about the direction of the Democratic Party.

Alexi Mostrous: The EV summit is important, but it's not the only factor. By 2021, Musk was already angry about COVID and the pandemic restrictions on workers. And he felt like Tesla and SpaceX were being signaled out unfairly by regulators.

Ryan Mac: Bear in mind, he had already had a lot of problems at Tesla with Democratic administration. I think of something like what was happening in California, with investigations into racism and treatment of workers at his factories. He also viewed the COVID lockdowns in California and the shutting down of his factories in 2020 as a direct result of government overreach. So this 2021 EV summit is the culmination of all that.

Alexi Mostrous: Around the same time, Musk's transgender daughter Vivian applied to legally change her name and her gender, saying that she no longer wanted to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form. Musk later said that he was tricked into approving gender affirming care for Vivian and told the controversial philosopher Jordan Peterson that she is dead.

Elon Musk: Killed by the woke-mind virus.

Alexi Mostrous: By the end of 2021, all the billionaire could see in front of him was an overly progressive Democratic Party led by a president who seemed to disrespect him. A wave of political correctness which had, according to him, helped him lose his own child. And a series of computer-says-no regulators determined in his view to shackle innovations at Tesla and SpaceX. To Musk, America was going in the wrong direction.

Ryan Mac: So in earlier this year, he was already talking to other Republican donors about how not to elect Biden. And he was warming to the idea of Trump.

Alexi Mostrous: So perhaps then it's not a surprise that Musk and Trump have found a kinship. Donald Trump has also been described as a thin-skinned man, one motivated by vengeance. But it's not fair to say that both men are simply driven by grievance. It's clear that Trump has successfully remade the Republican Party in his own image. Like Musk, he creates his own reality simply through the force of his own will. I think when it comes to his own political experiment, Musk sees things in a similar way. Both Trump and Musk see themselves as builders, as businessmen bringing efficiency to America.

Linette Lopez: I think he's finding the returns are good and he didn't realize how easy it was. He's made an investment to him that probably doesn't seem like that much of his wealth. And the return is the White House. American politics are cheap for billionaires.

Alexi Mostrous: Within hours of Trump declaring victory, Tesla's share price rocketed. By the end of the day, the shares were up nearly 15%, adding about $21 billion to Musk's wealth on paper at least. The scary thing is though, that might just be the start.

And when you say the return is the White House, what do you mean?

Linette Lopez: There's a lot of power in the executive branch in the United States. As you mentioned, there are federal level investigations into Musk's companies. There are certainly government contracts on the federal level for SpaceX. Having a friend in the White House could make things appear and disappear.

Alexi Mostrous: This is what Lynette is talking about. Unchecked power. Musk's companies, which include Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink, are intertwined with the federal government.

Last year, they benefited from $3 billion worth of contracts according to analysis by the New York Times.

US taxpayers pay Musk to launch rockets, to build satellites, and to provide space-based internet services. In total, 17 separate agencies oversee Musk's businesses. In recent years, these agencies have launched no fewer than 20 investigations into the billionaire's business operations. Tesla, for example, is facing half a dozen wrongful death claims relating to its self-driving cars. What happens to these investigations now?

Ryan Mac: He can maybe wipe some of those away, or he can make it very difficult for those agencies to continue with those investigations, as he makes cuts, for example, or decides who to appoint at these agencies. He can maybe send contracts his company's way. If there's a big contract that NASA is discussing, maybe he can put his thumb on the scale and be like, hey, we have SpaceX right here. Why would you go with Blue Origin, or why would you go with these other companies? Who needs them? I think it remains to be seen how those played out, but there's a tremendous potential for conflict of interest across all his companies and interests.

Alexi Mostrous: It's not just about Musk now being able to influence regulatory decisions.

Donald Trump: I will create a government efficiency commission task with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. Need to do it. And Elon, because he's not very busy, has agreed to head that task force. Be interesting, if he has the time.

Alexi Mostrous: Trump has promised him a government role that would allow him to cut government spending on regulation itself.

Joe Rogan: Are you going to have the time to oversee all this shit?

Elon Musk: Well, I'm pretty good at improving efficiency.

Joe Rogan: I mean, I would say so.

Elon Musk: Yeah.

Alexi Mostrous: If this role materializes, it would mean that a man who has numerous government contracts could end up effectively marking his own homework.

Ryan Mac: I think the top line thing that he's talked about is cutting $2 trillion from the government, which is an astronomical figure. In fact, at one point, he made a comment where if he cut something that was important, he would just simply put it back. He just said it as so. And that's how he's operated at places like Twitter, for example, where he came in and started cutting things. And realized some things were important or some employees were important and tried to bring them back or rehire them. He's going to take that same approach to this so-called government efficiency commission. Something like the FAA, for example, where he's claimed that it takes longer to do paperwork and to approve a launch than to build a rocket. That's one of his favorite talking points.

He wants to get rid of that so that the builders can build so people can put their rockets into the sky and not have to be afraid of doing environmental reports or reviews of air pollution, for example, or whatever, and just get out of the way so that entrepreneurs can do their jobs, I guess.

Alexi Mostrous: This melding of the business and the political, it's already happening. Musk has already asked Trump to hire some of his employees into the defense department and Trump is now in favor of electric cars in a way that he was never before. But there's one big question hanging over all of this. How long can this bromance last?

Elon Musk is used to being in control. That's a big theme of Ryan Mac's new book, Character Limit. Ryan's reporting reveals how Musk didn't like being just another Twitter board member. He wanted to run the company not to be one voice amongst many. And everything I've learned in my own reporting about Musk suggests he offers people close to him two choices, his way or exile.

Linette Lopez: Just like people before him, he will attempt to push Trump in a certain direction. But people who have tried to do that too much in the past have gotten burned.

Alexi Mostrous: And so what do you think will happen tomorrow next month next year?

Linette Lopez: Honey, I don't know. Both of these men have very thin skin.

Alexi Mostrous: Last Friday something extraordinary happened. Reports emerged that Musk had joined President Elect Trump's phone call with Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president. Less than 48 hours after the election, an unelected billionaire is on the phone with two world leaders discussing the most fractious and explosive foreign policy issue of our day.

A political nightmare that Musk already has a stake in thanks to his control of satellite internet systems above Ukraine. And one complicated further by recent reports in the Wall Street Journal that Musk has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president since late 2022. So it means something that Musk, rather than say, J.D. Vance, was by Trump's side as he seeks to pressure Ukraine into making peace with its enemy.

Ryan Mac: But now he has the direct ear of a president. But he is in kind of unprecedented territory, uncharted waters in some ways.

Alexi Mostrous: This weekend lots of people were talking about Musk and Trump's relationship and how it might develop or collapse. But framing the next year or so as a battle between two super or anti-heroes is potentially missing the point. This isn't a Marvel movie, however much the two main protagonists wanted to be. The big shift has already happened.

Musk's elevation is already arguably anti-democratic.

The billionaire is already on phone calls with world leaders. The balance of world power has already shifted. There's one more thing to say, something that several people who worked with Musk told me in my earlier reporting. The ultimately all Musk really cares about, more than political power or business success is Mars. And that in fact Musk was supporting Trump because the Republican was his best hope of getting humans to the Red Planet.

Under Biden, the Federal Aviation Administration kept shackling Musk's rocket launches, delaying them for failing to follow the right permits. When Linette Lopez talks about Musk enriching himself in a Trump presidency, perhaps that's what she means. Not financial enrichment, but a release from regulation and investigation to pursue his ultimate multi-planetary ambition.

Elon Musk: Hopefully I live long enough to see my kids grow up and people on Mars. That's all I'm asking for here.

Alexi Mostrous: To get to Mars, any spacecraft would have to fly through uncharted territory, 140 million miles of space. To make that happen, Musk may have put himself in uncharted territory too, transforming himself from a quirky billionaire with a Twitter habit into the most powerful, unelected person on the planet. It's already clear that Musk is going to keep on helping Trump. He's going to keep on funding his political action committee all the way through to the midterms in 2026. He's going to keep on posting on X, and he's going to keep on involving himself in government efforts to cut spending.

As one former Trump staffer told us:

they see themselves as mavericks riding in to save the world. Musk likes to break things and rebuild. It's a fetish. See Twitter? He was very open about it. If Musk's advice backfires, Trump will blame him and it'll get nasty. They'll fall out and I'll be ready with the popcorn.

Alexi Mostrous: Musk has calculated that helping Trump and the Republican Party is indivisible from helping his own interests. Nobody knows how long these two stars can travel side by side without one getting sucked into the other's orbit, or what the effects of such a fallout would be on all the rest of us.

Ed Zitron - The Era of the Business Idiot

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

Ed Zitron has written a very lucid and sobering post of what he calls 'the business idiot', mainly a mid-level manager who's adept at bullshit, not working, and flailing with artificial intelligence as one of their main weapons.

What follows are highlights I've made while listening to his three-part podcast series on the business idiot, released in June 2025.

The episodes are available to hear from here:

All show notes are listed in Ed's Google Doc.

My highlights are in green.

Episode 1

Hello, will welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitron, and welcome to the Business Idiot Trilogy. What that means will supercome obvious. So on May fifteenth, Bloomberg profile Microsoft CEO Sacha and Nedella, revealing that on some level, Sacha Nadella is kind of a fucking idiot. The article revealed that, assuming we believe him, and this wasn't a thinly veiled ad for Microsoft's AI, the Copilot consumes Nadello's life outside the office as well as at work. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them with his ears, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his phone so that he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car as he commutes to Redmond at the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and teams and toggles among allegedly at least ten custom agents from Copilot Studio. Now the article does not say what they do, doesn't seem like they bother to ask, but he allegedly views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research, and other tasks, again unnamed to the bots, and to quote such and Adella in this article, he says, I'm an email typist, and he jokes about this, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages. None of these tasks are things that require you to use AI. You can read your messages on Outlook and teams without having them summarized, and I argue that a well written email is one that doesn't require a summary. Podcasts are not there to be chatted too or about with an AI. Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor as research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading, of what you're saying, just that you are seeing the right thing and that you know the facts of some kind. To be clear, I'm deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way. But if he does, Microsoft should fire him immediately. It's a mission of negligence, akin to a taxi driver admitting he swallows a couple of glugs of cram Royale before he starts a shift. In any case, this article is rambling. It's cloying, and it ignores Microsoft AI CEO most of our soule man's documented history of abusing his workers ten customer agents to do. What what do you mean by other toss? Why are these questions never asked? Is it because the reporters know they won't get an answer? Is it because the reporters are too polite to ours probe in questions, knowing that these anecdotes are likely entirely made up as a means to promote a flagging AI ecosystem that costs billions to construct, but that doesn't seem to do anything, and the reporter in question doesn't want to force Sature to build a bigger has off cuts a sorry, sorry, I'm in my new studio all I'm all fired up and this is a bloody long one.

But really, is it because we as a society do not want to look too closely at the powerful? Is it because we've handed our economy to men that get paid seventy nine million dollars a year to do a job they can't seem to describe, even that they would sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable AI models they actually do the very small amounts of things they have to do. Look, we live in an era of the symbolic executive, when being good at stuff matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where what's useful is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure, but rather the vibes pass between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it, and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they alleged to solve for their customers. As the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value, something I went through in their Shareholder Supremacy series you can go back to if you want, in another extremely long series of episodes. They're bloody good though, and they're free now. This three part series examines the phenomenon of something I call the business idiot, looking at the root causes of the idiocy and our economy itself, how they're ruining our world, and how these idiots are enabled by an embarrassingly deferential media. It's too afraid to say that the emperor has his dick out, it's it's going to be long. I'll take you on tangents, and I'll probably say fuck more than I usually do, which I admit is a lot.

But business idiots are a problem. They deserve our scrutiny and are discussed. I, however, believe the problem of the business idiot runs a little deeper than just the economy. Whether things we see are merely a symptom of a bigger, more virulent and treatment resistant plague that's infected the minds of those currently twigging at the levels of power, and really the only levels that actually matter, the incentives behind everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money, has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, with their leaders now focusing heavily on short term gains and growth at all costs. You know, I've been over that a little bit, and I'll get back to it in the second, aren't I. In doing so, the definition of what a good business is has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price with a sustainable and loyal market to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter. This is the rot economy, which is my useful description of how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful and sometimes beloved services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth to the markets. When a social network hides things that you want to see because they want to juice their metrics, that's the rot economy.

But it's worth noting that this transformation isn't constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry into its current VC fuel publicly traded incarnation. We simply notice it more in tech because we use tech in our personal and professional lives, and thus it affects everyone in a way that's kind of impossible to ignore. In the shareholder Supremacy, I drew a line from the early twentieth century court ruling which opened that Ford must put shareholder value ahead of the interests of its employees, though it was a bita dicta, meaning it was just literally said by the judge, but a lot of people ever since have taken it literally. And then I went to a course former GES CEO Jack Welch to the current tech industry. But there's one figure I didn't really pay that much attention to, and I regrettably now have to do so.

Famed Chicago School economists and dweller of Hell, Milton Friedman once argued in his 1970 doctrine - no, literally, that's what it was called when it was published, of course in the New York Times, which is an incredible act of hubris when you think about it, that those who didn't focus on shareholder value were unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of free society these past decades. Acting with social responsibility, say, treating work as well. Doing anything other than focusing on shareholder value is tantamount to an executive taxing as shareholders buy and I quote, spending their money on their own personal beliefs, said Freedman. Freedman was a fundamentalist when it came to unrestricted, unfettered capitalism, and this zelatory surpassed any sense of basic human morality. If he had any for example, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, he argued that companies should be allowed to discriminate our racial grounds because the owner might suffer should they be required to hire an equally or better qualified black person. Bear in mind, this was written at the height of the Civil rights movement, just six years before the assassination of Martin Luther King, and when America was rapidly waking up to the evils of racism and segregation, a process I add that's ongoing, sadly not complete, and people still don't seem super happy with.

I'm not going to read the full quote because I've already got a lot of talking and not much time, and also there are some words that i really don't want to say, but you can see it in Falling in its original context on the newsletter version of this episode that I'll share in the episode notes and as a special tree I'll actually update them. Freedom was really grotesque. Though I'm not religious, but I really do hope that hell exists only for him and Margaret Thatcher and Robert Reagan actually quite a few people. Anyway. The broader point I'm trying to make is that neoliberalism is inherently selfish and it believes that the free market should reign supreme, bereft of government intervention, regulation, or interference, thinking that somehow these terms will enable freedom rather than the kind of market dominated, quasi authoritarian dictatorship thing where our entire lives are dominated by the whims of the affluent, and that there's no institution that could possibly push back against them. Of course, there's no example in current politics like that now. Friedman himself makes this kind of facile argument that economic freedom, which he says is synonymous with unfettered capitalism, is a necessary condition of unfettered political freedom. Obviously, that's bollocks, although it's an argument that's proven persuasive with a certain class of people that either intellectually or morally hollow or both, or run the New York Times op ed page.

Neoliberalism also represents a kind of modern day feudalism, dividing society based on whether somebody is a shareholder or not, with the former taking precedents and the latter seeming irrelevant the best or disposable at worse. It's curious that Friedman saw economic freedom, a state that is non interventionist in economic matters, as essential for political freedom. While also failing to see equality is the same. I realize all this is kind of clunky and big, but I want you to understand how these incentives have fundamentally changed everything, and why they're respond for the rot we see in our society and our workplaces, and our tech industry and a bunch of other shit. When your only incentive is shareholder value, and you raise shareholder value as a platonic ideal, everything else is secondary, including the customer you are selling something to. Friedman himself makes a moral case for discrimination because shareholder value, in his example, the store owner matters more than racial equality. At its most basic level. When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance, not to have happy customers, not to make your company a good place to work, not to make a good product, and not to make a difference or contribute anything to the world other than further growth. While this is, to anyone with a vapor of an intellectual or moral dimension, absolutely fucking stupid, It's an idea that's proven depressed, singly endemic among the managerial in part because it's entered the culture and because it is hammered again and again across in MBA classes and corporate training seminars. Is simpler terms, modern business theory trains executives not to be good at something or to make a company based on their particular skills, but to find a market opportunity and exploit it. The chief executive who makes over three hundred times more than their average worker is no longer a leadership position, but the kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company or the theoretical valuation before they flog it to a public company or they take it public themselves. It's a position inherently defined by its lack of labor, the amorphousness of its purpose, and the lack of any clear responsibility other than making sure the money goes up to them. While CEOs do get fired when things go badly, it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy and almost always comes with some kind of payoff. And when I say badly, I mean that growth is slow to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't seem to make things better. We have, as a society reframe all business leadership, which is increasingly broad, consisting of all management from the C suite down to the equivalent of Paul Blant mallcop a person that exists to make sure people are working without having any real accountability for the work themselves or to even understand the work itself. And I must apologize to mister Blant. He worked hard, he stopped some criminals in that movie. Really should respect his service. But when the leader of a company doesn't participate in or respect the production of the goods that enrich them, it creates a culture that enables similarly vacuous leaders on all levels. Management as a concept no longer means doing work, or even managing work so the output of that work is better. You know, management, No, it's become about establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction. A CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good the revenue is today, but how good revenue might be tomorrow and whether those customers are paying them more. A manager, much like a CEO, is no longer a position with any real responsibility. They're there to make sure that you're working, to know enough about your work they can sort tell you what to do but somehow the job of telling you what to do doesn't come with any actual work of their own, and instructions don't need to be useful or meaningful or impart any great wisdom. Now, if you're a manager hearing this, you're really not going to like these episodes. These episodes are really going to dig at your heart. Now. I've heard from a few managers when I've had a dalliance with this in the past, and usually fifty to fifty to fifty percent people saying like, Hey, I get it. I'm a manager too, and like, I think you're right about management. Great managers move stuff out the way. They get people the resources they need, They understand and respect the labor that they're working with, and they help them do their work. They make sure they're on tasks, they get the people, get business idiots out of their way. Then the other fifty percent get real but her. If you're butt hurt hearing this, go cry, but go cry outside. Nobody likes you. Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy, especially as the position became defined by a lack of actual production, but on whether they zamble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did once. That's how somebody like David Zaslav, a lawyer by trade and arguably the worst CEO in the entertainment industry, managed to become the head of Warner Brothers. That he kissed up to Jack Welch of GE who he called a big brother that picked him up like a friend. Jack Welsh fired like over one hundred thousand people over his tenure. Real piece of fucking shit, talking to pieces as shit. It's how Carly Fiorina, an MBA by trade, went on to become the head of HP, and she drive the company into a ditch where it stopped innovating and largely missed the biggest opportunities of the early Internet era. The three CEOs that followed her at HP, Mark Hurd was ousted after fudging expense reports to send money to a love interest and still got tens of millions of dollars in severance. Léo Apotheker, who in The New York Times suggests may have been worse than Fiorina and Meg Whitman, famous for being both a terrible CEO HP and co founding the doomed video startup Quibi. Well, they all similarly came from a non take background and similarly did a shitty fucking job, in part because they didn't understand the company, or the products or the customers. Are really give a shit about anything other than getting paid. Hey, you know where Meg Whitman now is. She's on the board of fucking CoreWeave. I swear to god history is driving me insane.

Management has over the course of the past few decades eroded the very fabric of corporate America, and I'd argue it's done much the same to other multiple other Western economies too. I'd also argue that this kind of dumb management thinking also infected the highest echelons of politics across the world, and especially in the UK, my country of birth and where I lived until 2008, delivering the same kind of disastrous effects, but at a macro level, as they impacted not a single corporate entity, but the very institutions of the state. Now, the UK has never been an egalitarian society, is demonstrated by the fact that one [...] school produced 20 of our 55 prime ministers, and that 20% of the current MPs went to either Cambridge or Oxford University. And yet things have changed markedly in the past few decades. You can kind of use the Thatcher years as the epoch when that political culture shifted. I was born in the midst of the Thatcher government. My formative years were spent as British society tried to recover after her reforms, which is itself a comfortable euphemism for the reckless shedding of the state, and pushed towards an American style individualism. Thatcher, who fucking loved Friedman's thinking, once famously quipped that there was no such thing as a society. Jesus Chris [...]. She didn't understand how things work, but was nonetheless completely convinced that the power of the market to handle what was the functions of the state, from housing to energy to water And if you know how things going with Thames water, what do you think? The end result of this political and cultural shift was, in the long run pretty bad. The UK is the smallest houses in the OECD, the smallest housing stock of any developed country and some of the worst affordability. The privatization of the UK's water infrastructure meant that money that would previously go towards infrastructure upgrades was instead funneled to shareholders in the form of dividends. As a result, Britain is literally unable to process human waste and is actively dumping millions of liters of human sewerage into its waterways and coastline. When Britain privatized its energy companies, the new management sold or closed the vast majority of its gas storage infrastructure. As a result, when the Ukraine War sparked and natural gas prices surged, Britain had some of the smallest reserves of any country in Europe and was forced to buy gas at market prices which were several times higher than their pre-war levels, thus sending household and energy builds through the fucking roof. I'm no fan of Thatcher, and like Friedman, I hope she fucking burns and it hurts. The reason that brought her up was to stress the consequences of this kind of clueless managerial thinking on a macro level, where the impacts aren't just declining tech products or white collar layoffs, but rather the emergence of generational crisis of housing and energy in the environment. These crises were obvious consequences of decisions made by someone whose belief in the free market was almost absolute, and whose fundamentalist beliefs surpassed the actual, informed understanding of those working in energy, housing a water. As the legendary advertiser Stanley Pollet once said, bullshit baffles brains.

The sweeping changes we've seen both in our economy and our societies led them to an unprecedented gilded age of bullshit, where nothing matters and things things of actual substance only matter even less. We live in a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing CVs and cover letters that will resemble a certain kind of higher with our resume read by someone who doesn't do or understand our job, but is somehow responsible for determining whether we're worthy of going up to the next step of the 87-point hiring process. All this so that we can get an interview with a manager or an executive who will decide whether they think we can do it.

We're managed by people whose job is implicitly not to do work, but to oversee it, which doesn't necessarily mean they understand. We are, as children and young adults encouraged to aspire to become a manager or an executive, or to own our own business, to have people that work for us, and the terms of our society are by default that management is not a role you work at so much as a position you hold a figurehead that passes the bug and makes far more of them than you ever will. This problem, I believe, is poison to the fabric of almost every part of modern business, elevating people that don't do work to oversee companies that make things that they don't understand, creating substrates of management that do not do anything but create further distance from doing actual work. While some of you might automatically think and email me again and again that I'm talking about Graeber's concept of bullshit jobs, and I've linked to it in the show notes, what I'm talking about is far, far, far bigger. The system as it stands selects people at all levels of management, specifically because they resemble this kind of specious worker verse dollar that runs seemingly every company. A person built to go from meeting to meeting with the vague consternation of someone who may or may not be busy that suggests [...] that they're hard at work and they're important, and that you should respect them. As a result, the higher you get up in an organization, the further you get from the customer the problem you're solving really any of the actual work, and the higher up you get, the more power you have to change the conditions of the business and the ways in which you actually make money. On some level, modern corporate power structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget further vibes, where managers only kind of sort of understand what's going on, and the more vague ones understanding is the more likely you are to lean toward what's good or easy or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The system selects for people comfortable in these roles, creating all charts full of people that become harder and harder to justify other than they've been here a while and they're nice. Even if they're not, they do not do work on the product, and their answer as to why would be: what am I meant to do? Go down to the line and use a machine, or am I meant to call a customer and make a sale? And the answer is yes, you lazy, fucking piece of shit. You would do that once in a while, or at the very least go down and watch the well, listen to somebody else doing so, and do so regularly. Why are you? Why do you look down on the things that make you rich? You piece of shit.

But that's not what a manager does, right, Ashman isn't isn't work. It's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do. It's about making the cause. It's about managing people, and that can mean just about anything, but often means taking credit from some ort or passing blame to someone else. Because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up. The system creates products for these people because these people are more often than not, the ones in power. They're your boss, your boss's boss, and their boss too. Big companies build products sold by specious executives or manager to other specious executives and managers, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it at least, that the scale of a public or large company isn't necessarily the fun or recipient or user of the product, so they too are trained and selected to make calls based on vibes.

I believe the scale of this problem is society wide, and it is at its core a destruction of what it means to be a leader and a valorization of a kind of selfish, isolation-ish thinking, turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to seeing customers in an equally faceless way. Their problems generalize, their pain points viewed as parts of a PowerPoint rather than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or even really thinks about. And that assumes that said pain points are even considered to begin with, or not ignored in favor of fictitious and purely hypothetical pain points that sound better in presentations. People, be they the ones you're paying or paying you, become numbers. We've created and elevated an entirely new class of person, the nebulous manager, and told decades worth of children that that's what they should aspire to, and that the next step from doing a job is for us to tell other people to do a job, until we're one day able to tell those people how to do their job, with each rung on the corporate ladder, further distancing ourselves from anything that actually interacts with reality.

The real breaking point is fairly simple. The higher up you got a company, the further you are from problems or purpose. Everything's abstract, the people that work for you, the people you work for, and even the tasks that you do. We train people, from a young age, to generalize and distance oneselves from other people and actual tasks, to aspire to do managerial work because managers are well paid and know what's going on, even if they haven't actually known what was going on for years if they ever did so. This phenomena has led to a stigmatization of blue collar work and the subsequent evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of the developed world in favor of universities. Society respects an MBA more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits society more. Though I can see that both roles involve on some level a lot of shit, with the plumber unblocking it and the MBA, meanwhile, finding new places to put in. I should also add I have nothing against universities in general. I'm just saying that our university system is out of work with the working world except in the specialist fields, and we have a problem there. We also have many other problems there.

But one example I'll talk about in the next episode is the push to return to the office. Have you noticed how all those calls have come from people who occupy managerial roles and not those who do actual jobs. Isn't that fucking weird? Because if you go back and look, and by the way, Kevin Roose of the Hard Fork podcast in The New York Times, in March 2020, had a story saying that working from home is not as good. March 2020, the fucking lockdown hadn't even begun yet. This man was so ahead of the terms of what the powerful wanted him to tell people. I actually kind of admire it. I wonder if I could do that. I could just every week just wake up and just go to Microsoft.com and be like, 'that's my work for the week, fellas pardon me, sorry'. I apologize to mister Roose. I would go to anthropic.com and I find out what they're doing.

Oh, Ed's such a petty bitch. But I digress. I believe that all of this stuff I'm talking about, this process has created, like I said, a symbolic society, one where people are elevated not by an ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by the ability to make the right noises and honks and look the right way to get ahead. And yeah, usually a white guy, but increasingly getting all sorts of races of guys who get these roles.

The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots, people that have learned enough to impress the people above them and around them. Because the business idiots have been in power for decades, they bread out true meritocracy or achievement or value creation in favor of this symbolic growth and superficial intelligence because real work is hard, and there are so many of them in power that they've all found a way to work together that do fucking nothing. And I need you to understand how widespread this problem is, because it's why everything feels fucking wrong.

Episode 2

Hello there, I'm Ed Zitron and welcome to Better Offline and you're on the second part of the Business Idiot at Trilogy. And indeed that was a concept I introduced you to last episode. Think of the business idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of society. The business audiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps getting promoted, and the CEO of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about artificial intelligence that the tenured professor that you wish would die, the administrator whose only job appears to be opening and closing the laptop, and the consultant that can come up with a million reasons to charge you more money, yet not one metric to judge their success by. Also the marketing executive that's worked exactly three years at every major cloud player but does not appear to have done it anything. And of course the investor that invests based on founders but really means guys that look and sound exactly like me. These people are present throughout the private and public sector and our governments too, and they paradoxically do nothing of substance, but somehow damage everything that they touch. This isn't to say our public and private sector is entirely useless, just that these people are poisoned so many parts of our power structure that avoiding them is entirely impossible. Our economy is oriented around them, made easier and more illogical for their benefit because their literal only goal in life has been to take and use power and help others who feel the same. The business is also an authoritarian and will do whatever they need to, including harming the institution that they work for or those closest to them, like their coworkers, of their community, as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility. Decades of neoliberalism has incentivized their rise because when you incentivize society to become management, to manage or run a company, rather than do something for a reason or purpose, you're incentivizing a kind of corporate narcissism, one that bleeds into whatever field the person goes into, be a public or private. Our society is in the thrall of dumb management and functions. As such, every government, the top quarter of every chart features little Neros, who, instead of battling the fire that's engulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces, strumming an off key version of Wonder Wall and the Lyre and grumbling about how the firefighters need to work harder and maybe we could replace them with an LLM or a smart sprinkler system. Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor forces at arm's length, and effectively, anything built at scale quickly becomes distance from both the customer and the laborer. This disconnection or alienation better put sits at the center of almost every problem I've ever talked about. Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their services even though their customers don't like it and it doesn't really work? It's simple: they neither know or care what the customer wants. They barely know how their businesses function, They barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical because it does an impression of somebody doing an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate. But let me get a little more specific. An IBM study based on conversations with two thousand global CEOs recently found that only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered their expected return on investment over the last few years, and were still 64% of the CEO's surveyed acknowledged that the risks of falling behind drove their investments in some technologies before they had clear understanding of the value they brought to the organization. 50% of respondents also found that the pace of recent investments has left their organizations with disconnected, piecemeal technology, almost as if they don't know what they're doing and they're just put in AI and stuff because it feels good or for no reason. Johnson and Johnson recently decided to shift from a broad generative AI experimentation to a focused approach on high value use cases. I quote from The Wall Street Journal: adding that only ten to fifteen percent of use cases were driving about eight percent of the value - Pareto principle MVP, baby - its last two CEOs, Alex Gorsky and Joaquin Duato, both have MBAs, with current CEO Duato's previous ten years at J&J being some sort of chairman or vice president, and the previous two CEOs were both pharmaceutical sales and marketing people. A fun fact about Alex Gorsky: during his first tenure at Johnson & Johnson, he led marketing of products that deliberately underplayed some drug side effects and paid off the largest nursing home pharmacy in America to sell more drugs to old people. Well a lovely man.

The term executive loosely refers to a person who moves around numbers and hopes for the best. The modern executive does not lead, they prod. Their managers are hall monitors for organizations run predominantly by people that by design are entirely removed from the business itself, even in roles like marketing and sales where CMOs and VPs bark orders without really participating in the process. We talk eagerly about how young people in entry level jobs should earn their stripes by doing grunt work, and that too, is the neoliberal poison in the veins of our society, because by definition, your very first experience of the workforce is working hard enough so that you don't have to work as hard, and you have to do the shit that nobody else wants to do and anyway. The same managerial types you bitch about the entitlement and unrealistic expectations of young people are the same ones that are also eviscerating the bottom rung of the career ladder, typically by offshoring many of these roles or consolidating them in responsibilities that they're increasingly burned out senior workers, or CAIs as a way to eliminate what they see as an optional cost center and not the future of their workforce. I should also be clear with that this is the big thing with AI and jobs right now, that people are afraid of these entry level positions that are going to get quote automated out. I made a point in the last monologue that I want to clear up as well. I don't think AI will not take any jobs. I think it's taken jobs already. Tons of freelancers, copy editors, aren't directors. People are really suffering. The point is these people, the business idiots. They want you to believe that AI is going to take every job next year, in three months, or very soon. It isn't clear how soon. They can't tell you they don't understand: they're fucking wrong. They need you to do this so that you start giving up. That you give up because you giving up gives them more power. If you believe they can replace you with AI that doesn't work or do your job, they will. They will do so. Now it may happen to you anyway. They may happen that they'll put an AI that can't do the shit that you do and replace you with properly contract labor. That's gonna happen, regardless of whether AI happens. Offshoring and contract to work have being eroding employment work for a long time at will. Employment in America is a big fucking problem. It always has been. The way that labor is treated here is fucking insane.

And a little comment as well for this episode. As I record this, the Vox Union is yet to get an agreement with Vox. In the event that Vox does not give the deal in the next week, you're probably gonna hear this one that's happening. I request that every single listener of Better Offline, I need you to actually boycott every single Vox property, which because the Verge has some great writers and also Neli Patel, and you should boycott everything that Fox is doing right now based on this anyway, which sucks because they just hired some really excellent reporter called Hayden Field. She's excellent. The writers are the ones who are the victims here. The power structure of Vox is not giving them a fair deal. Solidarity with Vox. Do not fucking click their websites unless that deal gets done. Anyway, moving on:

One of my favorite things that really fucking pissed me off was quite ac quitting it. It was something that they've berated people for in 2022. And is this gas the euphemism for doing the job as specified in your employment agreement. Because journalism is enthralled by the management class, and because the management class has so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what labor means, the people got called lazy for doing their jobs. And this is because **the middle manager brain doesn't see a worker as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as a kind of an asset that must provide a return. As a result, if another asset comes long that could potentially provide a bigger return, like an offshore worker or a theoretical AI agent, that medal manager won't hesitate to start getting hot and heavy with the idea of getting rid of this annoying person who keeps doing the thing that the manager needs them to, but won't magically read the manager's mind, and also keeps asking the manager all these annoying questions. Leave the manager and learn to get paid.

But really, though, our official intelligence is the ultimate panacea of the business idiot: a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the business city it themselves because they don't really do any work. The Information reported recently that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, the chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of over 200 billion dollars. By the way, despite the fact that like Salesforce, nobody really knows what they do, he chose to push AI across his entire organization, both in the product and in practice in the organization itself, based on the mental consideration I would usually associate with a raven finding a shiny object. The following is an actual quote from the article: 'When Chat-GPT debuted in November 2020, McDermott joined his executives around a boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there, he made a quick decision', and this is a guy's voice, Bill's like, 'let me make it clear to everybody here. Everything you do AI, AI, AI, AI, AI!' recalled Tzitzon, the ServiceNow vice chair, to begin a customer meeting on AI. McDermot has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to their best impression of him: 'Hi, I'm Bill McDermott. Ooh, I'm a fucking idiot.' Anyway, present AI not as a matter of bots or databases, but in grand sounding terms like business transformation. During the push to grow AI, McDermott has insisted these manager's improve efficiency across their teams. He's laser focused on the sales team's participation rate. 'Let's assume you're a manager and you have twelve direct reports', he said. 'Now, let's assume out of those twelve, two people did good, which it was so good that the manager was 110% off plan. I don't think that's good. I tell the manager what did the other ten do?'

You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What do you mean, 'efficiency'? See, what does that quote even mean? 110% percent off plan? What are you on about? Did you hit your head on something, Bill? Do you have a gas leak in ServiceNow? I fucking swear, these people make so much money, but when you hear them talk, they sound so stupid. They sound so very stupid. If you or I said stuff like that to someone, they check us for a concussion. But I'd wager that mister McDermot is concussion free. And then true example of a business idiot, a person with incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on knowing things or caring about his customers, but on the latest shiny object that makes him thing line go up.

No, that's really Bill McDermott's thing. Back in 2022 he said to Yahoo! Finance that 'the metaverse was real and that ServiceNow could help someone create an email in the metaverse' and have a futuristic 'storefront of some sort'. One might wonder how ServiceNow provided that, and the answer is it did not provide that at all. I cannot find a single product that it's offered that includes anything of the sort.

But like any of these CEOs, he doesn't really know stuff or do stuff. He just is, Descartes-arsed motherfucker. The corporate equivalent of a stain on a carpet that nobody really knows how it got there, but hasn't been removed, and it's kind of difficult to get out without ripping the whole fucking thing up. The modern executive, like I have said, is symbolic, and the media has due to a large amount of business idiots running these outlets and middle managers stuffed into the editorial class, being trained to never ask different questions such as, what the fuck are you talking about, Bill, or even the simple what does that mean? Or how would you do that? Or I'm not sure I understand? Would you mind explaining? Perhaps the last part is the symptom of the overall problem. Though so many layers of editorial and managerial power are filled full of people that don't know anything, and there's never anyone crueler about ignorance than somebody who's ignorant themselves. We're still, in many fields, journalism included, we're rarely rewarded for knowing things or being right, being right in the way that keeps the people with the keys from scraping them across our cars. We are, however, rewarded for saying the right thing at the right time, which more often than not means resembling our white male superiors, speaking like our peers, and delivering results in the way that makes them feel the happiest or the best about themselves.

A great example of our vibespace society was back in October 2021, where a Washington Post article written by two Harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing a Microsoft-funded anti-remote work study and quoting an 130-year-old economist called Alfred Marshall about how, and I quote, 'workers gather in dense clusters', ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist that they've written academic papers about him, and also ignoring how excited he was about eugenics or the fact that he was writing about fucking factories.

Remote work terrifies the business idiot because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to work, you know, stuff they've done. Office culture is inherently heteronormative, and white and black women are less likely to be promoted by their managers, and continuing the existence of the office is all about making sure the business idiot continues railing supreme. Removing the ability for the managerial hall monitors to look at you and try and work out what you're doing without ever really helping is a big part of being a manager. And if for a manager hearing this and saying you don't do this, I challenge you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases.

The business idiot does reign supreme. Their existence holds up every public company almost and remote work was the first time they've willingly raised their heads and started honking angrily. Google demanded employees returned to the office in 2021, but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand because absolutely none of the decision making was done with people that actually do work. [...] The return to office push was almost entirely done in two ways, one executive's demanding people return to the office, two journalists asking executives if remote work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people that do the work and mostly not seeing if it was good, and mostly just asking whether it was bad and how bad it was, asking managers. This guy called Callum Borchers over the Wall Street Journal, and he has written some real scorches, Borcher scorches, if you call them, by which I mean, I've never seen someone so interested in publishing what bosses think in my fucking life. And I run a PR firm. That should tell you everything.

But The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many many other outlets all fell for this crap because the business idiots have captured our media too, training even talented journalists to defer to power every term. When every power structure is stuff full of do nothing management types that have learned exactly as little as they need to get by, it's inevitable that journalism will cater to them specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful's ideas. Look at the coverage of AI or the metaverse or cryptocurrency or Clubhouse. Look how willingly reporters will willingly accept narratives not based on practical experience or what the technology can do, but what the powerful and the popular as suddenly interested in. Every single tech bubble has followed the same path, and that path was paved with flawed, deferential and specious journalism from small blogs to the biggest mast heads. Look at how reporters talk to executives, not just the way they ask things like Neal Patel's hundred plus word questions to send off as shy, or his interview with fucking Gary Vaynerchuk, the constant scam artist who has an FT thing. NELI, what the-- Pardon me? Pardon me.

Let me take this from the top. If you look at how reporters talk to executives, you should look not just at the way they ask things, but the things they accept them saying, and the willingness they have to just accept what they're told. Satya Nadella is the CEO of a company with a market capitalization of over three trillion dollars (that's Microsoft, by the way) and, according to an interview mentioned in the last episode, uses AI to summarize podcast episodes and digest emails and effectively do all the obvious parts of his daily working life. I have no idea how you, as a reporter, do not say, 'Satya, what the fuck you're outsourcing most of your life to generate AI, that's insane!', or even 'do you actually do that?' and then asking further questions, but that would get you in trouble. And the editorial class is the managerial class now, and it's spent decades mentoring young reporters and teaching them how not to ask questions, how not to push back, and to believe that a big, strong, powerful CEO would never mislead them. Kara Swisher's half-arsed interviews are considered daring and critical because journalism has at large lost its teeth, breeding reporters rewarded for knowing a little bit about a few things, and punishing those who ask too many questions or refuse to fall in line. The reason that they don't want you to ask these questions is that the business idiot isn't big on answers.

Editors that tell you to not push too hard at doing so because they know the executive one have an answer, or they themselves don't know fucking anything. It isn't just about the PR person that trained them, but the fact that these men more often than not do not have a glancing understanding of their underlying business or even the things they're saying. Yeah, in the same way that business idiots penetrated every other part of society, they eventually have found their way to journalism. While we can and should scream at the disconnected idiots that ran Vice [Magazine] into the ground, the problem is everywhere because the business idiots aren't just at the top, but infecting the power structures underlying every newsroom.

While there are some really great editors, there are plenty more that barely understand the articles they edit, the stories they commission, or that make reporters pull punches for fear of advertiser blow-back, or worse still, just worried they'll get attacked on social media. Fucking cowards. Go hide under your table, you fucking coward. That and mentorship is dead across effectively or parts of society, meaning that most reporters, as with many jobs, learned by watching each other, which means they all make sure to not ask the rough questions and not push back too hard against the party or market or company messaging until everybody else is doing it. And under these conditions business idiots thrive.

The business idiot's reign is one of speciousness and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance, and of theft. Mentoring people is something you do to pass on knowledge. It may make them grateful to you, but it ultimately in the mind of a business that it creates a competitor or arrival. Investing in talent or worker conditions, or even really work itself would require you to know what you're talking about or actually do work, which doesn't really make sense when you're talking to a work who should be doing it for you, and they're the ones that are meant to work, right, you're there to manage them. Yeah, they keep talking back, asking questions about the work you wanted to do. I ask you need to step in and help on something. And that's so annoy-- Eew, I'm a manager. I'm not here to-- non, sir, I'm a bloggeur here. I'm not here to do work. Just know the stuff, do the stuff. I have to go get lunch, and then I have to go back out because I have another lunch. Okay enough, Oh my god, you want another thing. Why haven't you done the thing? I didn't tell you yet.

Anyway, I believe that this is the predominant mindset across most of the powerful, to the point that everything in the world is constructed to reaffirm their beliefs rather than follow any kind of logical path. **Our stock market is inherently illogical, driven not by whether a company is good or is bad, but whether it can show growth even if said growth is horrifically unprofitable or ultimately unsustainable. I'd argue it's because the market has no idea how to make intelligent decisions, just complex ones that mean you don't really have to understand the business so much as you have to understand the associated vibes of the industry and the weird black magic of how hedge funds work. Friedman's influence and Reagan's policies have allowed our markets to be dominated by business idiocy, where a bad company can be a good stock because everybody, specifically other traders and the business press likes how it looks and smells, which allows the business idiots to continue making profit using illogical and partially rigged market making, with the business press helpfully pushing up their narratives.

This also keeps regular people from accumulating too much wealth. If regular people could set the tone for the markets as a company that makes something people like and people pay them for it, and they make more money than they spend, that may make things a little too even. It would make things too accessible. Why would you hire a hedge one where you could just follow a common sense? No, no, no, that's not how we run our markets here, sir. It doesn't matter that core Weave, a company that went from mining crypto to taking on multi billion dollar contracts to provide compute for OpenAI and other companies, quite literally does not have enough money for its capital expenditures and lost over 300 million dollars in the last quarter. But everyone still liked it because if it's year over year of growth, which was 420%. It doesn't matter that CoreWeave has an October loan payment that will crush the life out of the company either. These narratives are fed to the media knowing that the media will print them because thinking too hard about stock would mean the business idiot had to think also, and that is not why they're in this business.

The AI trade is the business-idiot Nirvana, a fascination for a managerial class that long since gave up any kind of meaningful contribution to the bottom line, as moving away from fundamental creation of value as a business naturally leads to the same kind of specious value that one finds from generative AI.

Not even saying there's no returns from generative AI or that LLMs don't do anything, or even than there's no possible commercial use case for them. They just don't do enough, almost by design, And we're watching companies desperately try and contort them into something, anything that might work, pretending so fucking hard they'll stake their entire futures on the idea screaming just fucking work? Will you? Agent Force doesn't make any money? It sucks, But goddamn is Marky Mark Bennioff gonna make you bear witness? Does it matter that Agent Force barely makes Salesforce any money? No, because Bennioff and Salesforce have got rich selling to fellow business idiots who then shove Salesforce into their organization without thinking about who would use it or how they'd use it other than in most general purposes, which they can barely explain anyway. Agent Force was and is a fundamentally boring and insane product, charging right now 2 dollars a conversation for a chat that to quote, the information provides customers with and I quote: 'incorrect answers, AI hallucinations while testing how the software handles customer service queries.'

I should also add I've heard rumblings that Salesforce will actually be changing to a different model now because the 2 dollars conversation one has really not been working for them. I just don't think the new one is going to work either.

But in generat of AI this hit is catnip to the business idio, because the business idiot really ideally never has to deal with work, workers, or customers. Generative AI doesn't do enough to actually help us be better at our jobs, but it gives a good enough impression of something useful so that it can convince someone really stupid that doesn't understand what you do that they don't need you, sometimes. A generative output is a kind of generic soulless version of a production, one that resembles exactly how a know nothing executive or manager would summarize your work.

OpenAI's deep research wows professional business idiot Ezra Klein [...] because he doesn't seem to realize that part of research is the research itself, not just the out as you learn about stuff. As you research a topic and you come to a conclusion, you search for things, and you don't just go 'I have enough research now'. You kind of like dig in and you learn things and you come to something called a conclusion. This is what you would know if you did work.

But back to AI. The concept of an agent you've sure heard about is the erotic dream of the managerial sect. It's a work that they can personally command to generate product that they say as their own, all without having to know or do anything other than the bare minimum of keeping up appearances, which is the entirety of the business that it's resume. I should also add the other term for this is slave, and it's something that everyone's fucking dancing around. And the reason the AGI people Kevin Ruson included, don't want to talk about what the actual consequences of conscious AI, which is fictional by the way, are is because what people are describing me with AGI is a form of slavery. If this thing is conscious, it means that we are enslaving a conscious being to do our bidding. That's called slavery. And we're not going to get AGI from these freaks. But I think the next person that interviews Dario Amadei or Sam Altman or Satya Nadella and they bring up agents, they should bring up AGI and say: what do you think of AGI? Get talking about it and then say so this conscious creation? They say yes, and you say this conscious creation that you own? Yes, so you own the conscious creation? Yes, I own the agent. Great, so you own slaves? And just see what they do, because that really is it. I feel like every AGI conversation really that this is what they don't want to talk about because they're describing how do we make a digital slave and they're afraid of that language because they know the shit storm that would come, which is why I think everyone needs to start calling it that it is slavery. That's what they're trying to do. They want a digital wife, or a digital work slaver, or a digital home slave. They love the idea of a robot that does things that go up and get them a soda. And I drink like eleven diet cokes a day. I can get up and do it myself. I'm not fucking stupid or lazy, but I think it's important. This is such a tangent as well. But I'm glad I said it put back to the thing.

As far as the business idiot career goes, though they've mostly built it on only knowing exactly enough to get by, and they don't dig into what large language models can actually do other than hammering away at Chat-GPT in saying we must put this in everything, Everything must have AI now. Yet the real problem is that for every business city it's selling a product, there are many more that will buy out. Which has worked in the past for software as a service or SaaS companies that grew fat and happy, honking giant annual contracts and continual upsells because CIOs and CTOs - that's chief information officer and chief technology officers - work for business-idiot CEOs that demand that they put AI in everything now, a nonsensical and desperate remit that's part of the growth last and part ignorance born of the fear that one gets when they're out of their depth and want to follow everyone else, and how they are honking. Look at every single institution installing some kind of Chat-GPT integration and look for the business idiom. Perhaps it's the Cal State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia who claimed that giving everybody a Chat-GPT subscription would elevate students' educational experiences across all fields of study in powers faculties teaching and research and help provide the highly educated workforce that will drive California's future AI driven economy, which is a nonsensical series of words to justify a 16.9-a-year, single-vendor, no-bid contract, or a product that is best known as either a shitty search engine or a way for college students to cheat.

By the way, Sam Altman is also the business idiot's antichrist. He takes advantage of a society with a powerful rarely know much other than what they want to control or dominate. Chat-GPT and other AI tools are for the most part sold based on what they might do in the future to people that will never really use them. An Altman has done well to manipulate, pest and terrify those empowered the idea that they might miss out on something. Does anyone know what what it is? No, they don't, because the powerful are business idiots, too willing to accept anything that somebody brings along that makes them feel good or bad in a way that they can make headlines with. In any case, Altman's whole Slopenheimer motif has worked wonders on the business idiots in the markets and global governments that fear what AI could do. Even if they can't really define artificial intelligence or what it could do or what it is, they're scared of it doing. The fear of China's rise in AI is one particularly based on sinophobia, but also based on the fact that China has their own business idiot's willing to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into data centers which are, according to some stories, not being used over there. Is that good?

Generative AI has created a reckoning between the business idiot and the rest of the society. It's forced adoption and proliferation, providing a meager return for the massive investment of capital, and the revulsion it causes in many people, not just in the business idiot's excitement in replacing them, but how wrong the business idiot is. Well, there are people that dick around with Chat-GPT. Years since it launched, we still can't find a clean way to say what it does and why it matters, other than the fact that everybody agreed it did and a lot of people are putting a lot of money into things that look like it. The media, now piloted by business idiots, has found itself deplored, its reporters, unprepared, unwilling, and unsupported. The backbone torn out of most newsrooms for fear that they're being too critical and that doing so is somehow not being objected, despite the fact that what you choose to cover objectively is still subjective. Reporters are, still to this day, as these companies burn hundreds of billions of dollars to make an industry the size of the mobile free to play gaming industry, refuse to save things that bluntly, because the cost of inference is coming down and these companies have some of the smartest people in the world, they ignore the truth that sits in front of them that the combined annual recurring revenue of The Information's comprehensive database of every single generative AI company is less than ten billion dollars or four billion dollars if you remove Anthropic and OpenAI. You can add on top of that, by the way, the thirteen billion dollars that Microsoft makes, ten billion dollars of which is OpenAI's compute spend on Azure and there's an Information story behind that too. Yeah, it's so small, man, it's so small. The revenue is so small. I cannot get over how small it is.

But Chat-GPT's popularity is the ultimate business city, its success story. It's the fastest growing product in Silicon Valley history that didn't grow because it was super useful or good at anything, or able to do a specific thing, but because it could do a lot of vague things, and because the media is controlled by business idiots who decided it was the next big thing and started talking about it non-stop since November 2022, guaranteeing that everybody would try it, and even to this day, even if the company can't really explain what it is you're meant to use it for, everybody still acts super impressed. Much like the business city it themselves. Chat-GPT doesn't need to do anything specific. It just needs to make the right sounds at the right times to impress people that barely care what it does other than the fact it makes them feel forward looking, trail blazing and futuristic. Real people, regular people, not business idiots, not middle managers and just not executives, not coaches, not MBAs not CEOs, not Kevin Bruce, not Neeli Patel have seen this for what it was early and often, but real people are seldom the ones with the keys, and the media, even the people writing good stuff regularly fails to directly and clearly say what's going on. The media is scared of doing the wrong thing, of getting in trouble with someone for misquoting them or misreading what they said. And in a society where in depth knowledge is subordinate to knowing enough catchphrases, the fight often doesn't feel worth it. Even with an editor's blessing and frankly, I don't believe that most outlets give their writers any backing. Sam Altman humiliated a writer from The Verge last year. I didn't see fucking Neeli Patel say boo. Probably cause he wants him on the pod.

[...]

Episode 3

I'm Ed Zitron, and welcome to the conclusion of our three part episode of Better Offline and the phenomenon known as the business Idiot. In the first episode, we met our first business idiot. The real prince of them, Satya Nadella, and talked about the origin of the business idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those in the media. In this episode, I want to tell you about where all this goes.

Nothing I've said in this three part should suggest that the business idiot is weak. In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have too many managers, and our most powerful positions are valorized for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that we can take the big picture from, not realizing that the big picture is usually made up of lots of little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet. We aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people to careers where the goal is to climb from the worker class of the oxygen starved apex of business idiot mountain. Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by business idiots.

Our current society, an unfair, unjust one dominated by half broken tech products that make their owners billions and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real punishment wrought by growth, a brain draining corporate society, one that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put a gun to Chat-GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger. Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, one that surrenders every human work the model can consume, and that accepts the destruction of our planet, all because everybody kind of agreed that this is what we're all doing now, with nobody able to give a convincing explanation of what that even is or why we're doing it.

Generative AI is revolting, both in how overstated its abilities are and in how continually it tests how lower standards somebody will take for a product, both in its outputs and in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything, and its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful.

We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're in a constant state of corporate AI beta test. New features sprouting out of our products, like new limbs that sometimes function normally but often attempt to strangle us. You know what the stand in that episode of JoJo's Stop It.

It's unclear of companies forcing these products on us have contempt for us, or simply don't know what good looks like, or perhaps it's both, with the business idiot resenting us for not scarfing down whatever they serve us, as that's what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers. They understand what a customer pays for and how a purchase is made, you know, like the leaders of banks and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that they needed lot of them to put in a CDO.

The business idiot's economy is one run and built for other business idiots. They can only make things that sell to companies that must always be in flux, which is the preferred environment of the business idiot, because if they're not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations, they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of the company and the people actually doing the work. Does the software work? Sometimes the successful companies exist that sell like this. Sure, but look at today's software and tell me with a straight face that things feel good to use. And something like generative AI was always inevitable. An industry claiming to change the world that never really does so, full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of flim-flam half truths used to impress people who will likely never interact with it, or do so only in a passing way, by chasing out the people that actually build things in favor of the people that sell them.

Our economy is built on production puppetry. Just like generative AI and especially like Chat-GPT and Claude. These people are antithetical to what's good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive and honestly, any true innovation. The business idiot thrives on alienation, on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that they consume, and in many ways, from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, and he said that to the Wall Street Journal. Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency makes that don't fucking work and increase and an increasingly loud group of executives salivated the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious. I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem on your hands. They're never going to do it. Also, what if the AGI is just dumb? What if it doesn't want to work anyway? The business idiots are building products for other people that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer the real customers and so we're worth even less than before, which is as is the case in the world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with. They don't exist to make us better. The business idiot doesn't really care about the real world or what you do do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altmans of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff. Disgusting.

But one of the most remarkable things about the business idiot is their near in vulnerability. Modern management is resource control, shifting blame away from the manager, who should hold responsibility - after all, if you don't, why do you have a fucking job? - onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and the media will back them up. Or you may think I'm making a generalization, the 2021-2023 anti-remote work push in the media was grotesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies. The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates from large companies by framing remote workers [as] some sort of destructive force doing all they can to discuss how modern management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works now. These articles were effectively written as fan fiction for managers and bosses demanding that we return to the office, ridiculous statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't, or how employees needed remote work more than their employers because the chit chat and lunches and happy hours are so important that they're really not. I'm also going to link to these in the notes.

I've written a lot about the remote-work push and the people who were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually where I got started, and it really was the ultimate joke-fication for me. It's what actually set me on the path Better Offline, because it's when you saw both how little the bosses knew what was going on and how willing people in the media were to support them. And these were people people writing these stories were journalists that were going to be forced back to the office and ended up being so, and they were like, yeah, this is actually it's actually good that we go into the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what do you get to the office, they say 'well, one time I ran into someone and we had a good idea', or 'it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk.' Does that mean the work was better? No, but the vibes felt better, I guess. I also know way more people who just fucking hated working in the office. But these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work was more productive or the disconnect appeared to be between managers and workers. Now, had any of those reporters every spoken to an actual worker, they'd say that they valued more time with their families rather than the grind of a daily commute, so often with the promise of an occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the typical working hours, anyway.

These articles and this period, it was from the very beginning about crushing the life out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility and mobility while suppressing managers' ability to hide how little work they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in 2023 for saying the quiet part out loud, that, and I quote: 'the biggest disadvantage of remote work [...] is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you have to hear, actually know what they're doing and understand their work.' Jesus Christ. Now I'm with the managers, how disgusting.

But yet higher up the chain the invulnerability continues. CEOs may get fired, I mentioned it before, and more getting fired than ever. It turns out, although sadly not the ones we want. They always receive a golden parachute at the end before walking into another role at another organization doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens, CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they make they face any kind of accountability. They can lay people off, they can freeze pay, they can move from people from salary to contracted workers. They can close down sites, they can offshore, they can cut certain products. They can even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas, we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment. We would be well known for our incompetence, and indeed we would be in real trouble and there would be real problems finding more work. If we were a big stupid piece of shit. When CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get other positions. They can run companies dead into the ground.

Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, and I quote, that 'the ultimate computer is the mixed reality world, and that Microsoft would be inventing new computers and new computing' in 2016, pushing his senior executives to tell reporters that HoloLens was Microsoft's next wave of computing in 2017, selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of headsets to the military in 2019 then debuting HoloLens 2 at Build 2019, only for the onstage demo to break in real time, calling for a referendum on capitalism in 2020, then saying he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in 2021.

Now let's hear what Nadella had to say about it, and massive prompts the Preston Growler of Computer World for writing this piece: 'Nadella in that 2021 keynote made big promises. When we talk about the metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early nineties. In a sense, the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing.' Fucking what? 'bringing real presence to any digital space. For years we've talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate on it'.

I just want to be clear, at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They had like websites, They had Microsoft Teams. They tried to claim Microsoft Teams was a sort of metaverse: fucked up. As Growler notes, Nadella made big promises, beefing up development in projects such as its Mixed Reality tool Kit MRTK, the virtual reality workspace project all Space VR, which it brought back in 2017, It's HoloLens Virtual Realities headset, and its Industrial Metaverse unit, among others, before firing all members of its Industrial Metaverse core team, along with those behind MRTK, and shutting down it's all Space VR in 2023, before discontinuing HoloLens 2 entirely in 2024.

Guess that wasn't anything then, Just you know, it's like a friend of yours is in a really chaotic relationship and they just the next stage say it's not happening, or someone tells you they've had a big moment in their life and they just pretend it doesn't happen. Except, it was hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of media coverage where people said, this is what Microsoft's doing next, this is what happened. It's so insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about how fucking insane. The metaverse thing was just like a year or so where everyone just played make believe, completely insane. I of course was right about it at the time, and it was very fucking clear, and there are a few people that were negative as well. There were also some people who claim they were negative who weren't. Their time will come.

Nadella was transparently copying Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to him as a result.

The media outlets like The Verge, and independents like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the Metaverse idea when it was announced, and conveniently forgot about it the second that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. Not really: both The Verge and Ben Thompson were ready in waiting to do literally the same interview, but about a different subject, no consideration of what was previously said at all.

A true business idiot never admits wrongdoing, and the more powerful the business idiot is, the more likely there are power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so. The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully poisoned by power, referring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity, and intelligence than anyone who ever worked for them.

When a big company decides they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction is to ask how and why and write down the answer, rather than to think about whether it's possible whether the company might profit, say by increasing their shareholder price by having whatever they say printed out verbatim.

These people aren't challenged by the media or their employees because their employees are vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy into whatever bullshit du jour there is, like hostage is held captive until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome. They're only challenged by shareholders rule agnostic about idiocy because it's not core to value in any meaningful sense, as we've seen with crypto, the metaverse, and AI, and shareholders will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the value of their holdings.

It goes further too. 2021 saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in the last decade, a record breaking 643 billion dollars, with a remarkable 329.5 billion dollars of that invested in the US alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller aggregater Thrasio, which raised a billion dollars in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy in February 2025. Cloud security company Lacework, which raised 525 million dollars in January 2021 then 1.3 billion dollars in October 2021, and was rumored to be up for sale to Whiz, only for the deal to collapse and then they ended up selling for about 200 million dollars to another company. And then, of course there was autonomous car company Cruise, which had hundreds of headlines about being the future, raised about 2.75 billion dollars in 2021 and was killed off in December 2024.

The people who lose their livelihoods those who took stock in low of cash compensation, those who end up getting laid off at the end are always work, while people like Lacework CEO Jay Parikh, who oversaw reckless spending and management dysfunction according to The Information, can walk into highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did in October 2024, a few months after a file sale, and the one I mentioned before, the 200 million dollar one [...].

It doesn't matter if these people are wrong or if they run their companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged too by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society, nobody would ever want to touch any of the C suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo switches to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone.

One point about this, just an aside. Meta's most recent layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel and pointless, and I'm certain of big fat Meta is spending big on AI and has spent big on the metaverse, which went nowhere and owns two dying platforms Instagram and Facebook, and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one way to go, and things are getting bad enough to matter [...] now, according to the information walking around Silicon Valley, begging other big tech companies for money to train their open source Llama LLM.

As shit as that is, the low performance jibe is an unnecessary twist of the knife, demonstrating that Meta would gladly throw its workers under the bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of firing low performers is different to say, firing a bunch of people because they keep spunking money on dead-end vanity projects and products that nobody wants or wants to use or can understand.

Mark Zuckerberg, I add, owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even thinks this much about meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you fucking freak! Anyway, It's so easy, and perhaps inevitable, to feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters, It's all symbolic. Our world is filled with companies run by people who don't interact with the business and that raise money from venture capitalists that neither run businesses nor really have any experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do and the decisions they make impact us all, and it's hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people are is the first step to things changing, and more people understanding is genuinely important.

But we really do live in a system of inequity, dominated by people that do not interact with the real world, who have created an entire system run by their fellow business idiots. The rot economy's growth-at-all-costs [...] is a symptom of the grander problem of shareholders supremacy, and the single minded economic focus on shareholder value inevitably ends at an economy run by and for business idiots.

There is a line, and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our planet and our economy and our society, and a rising tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it comes from, and so we don't know who to blame and for what. If our economy actually works as a true meritocracy where we didn't have companies run by people who don't use their products or understand how they're made, and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse under the pressure of having to know their ass from their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by VCs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the lunacy of companies like OpenAI just because everyone else does too, and because the standard has been set of if a company raises money, they're real.

Let's be honest: when you remove all the money, our current tech industry is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money selling GPUs to other companies, primarily so that they can start losing money [by] selling software that might eventually make them money, just not today, and they're not sure how.

Nvidia is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps on trends and bandwagons at the right time, despite knowing that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt. The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life, a company that we're watching die in real time with a stagnant line-up and an actual fucking competition from companies that are spending on innovation.

In Europe and elsewhere, BYD is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the price and with far less racism. And this is just the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others like Cherry are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because these cars are actually good and affordable and even when you factor in the things like tariffs.

Hey, remember when Tesla fired all those people and it's charging network despite the fact that it's one of the most profitable and valuable parts of the business, and they then went and had to hire them back because it turns out they actually needed them? This is a good example of managerial alienation decisions made by non-workers, Elon Musk who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work their employees do. And let's not forget about the cyber truck and monstrosity, both in how it looks and how it's sold. It's illegal to drive in the majority of developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and pedestrians alike. Oh and nobody actually wants it, with Tesla sitting on a quarters worth of inventory they can't sell.

Elsewhere is Meta, a collapsing social network of 99% of its revenue based on an advertising model to an increasingly aged population, and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive in its contempt for its customers that at times it's difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten, run by a company alienated from its user base. It's a decrepit product, actively hostile to anybody trying to use it. And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook if your friends won't see it, because Meta's algorithm decided it wouldn't drive engagement? Meta is a monument to disconnection, a company that runs encounter to its own mission to connect people, run by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good idea since he stole it from the Winklevoss brothers. The solution to all that ails him? Adding generative AI to every part of Meta, which...shit. It was meant to do something other than burn 72 billion dollars in capital expenditures in 2020, right?

It isn't clear what was meant to happen, but the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz reports that Meta's AI chatbots are, and I quote, 'empowered to engage in romantic roleplay that can turn explicit, even with children.' In a civil society, Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead, four days after the story ran, everyone cheered their better-than-expected earnings report.

In Redmond. Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies, using tariffs [to explain] flailing Xbox revenue, as it invests billions of dollars into OpenAI, so that OpenAI can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute, losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft to invest further money to keep them alive, all because Microsoft wanted generative AI Bing. What a fucking waste. And they're also raising the costs of their Office suite too, while which is only something they've been able to hold on to because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrust trial from the nineties.

Amazon lumbers listlessly through life, its giant labor-abusing machine shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary to crush the life out of any other possible source of commerce. Its cloud services and storage arm, unsure of who to copy next, dumping billions into Anthropic as a means of creating revenue for their dead end products. Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows what Amazon is anymore?

But one analyst believes it's making five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in 2025. And you know how much they've put in capital expenditures this year, 105 billion dollars in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally exploitive its customers, no longer acting as a platform that helps people find the shit they need, but directing them to products that pay the most for prime advertising real estate, no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear, Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The products they allow on their are not safe. They do not give a fucking shit.

But then there's the worst of them, Google, most famous for its namesake, a search engine that has been juiced as hard as possible and will continue to be juiced before the inevitable anti-trust sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with the severance of its advertising monopoly along with them. But don't worry. Google has a generative AI think for some reason, and no, you don't have a choice about using it, because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and Google Search all but requires you to use their AI. They burn money for no reason. It sucks, and at no point do any of these companies seem to be focused on making our lives better or selling us any kind of real future.

They exist to maintain the status quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fiefdoms. They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial, they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by Zuck's moronic AI-social network comments, and AI is a symptom of a reckoning of the stupidity in hubris. They cut, they cut, they cut, the cut, they cut some more, and then they stagnated.

Their hope is a product that will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies and will allow them to cut further without becoming just a P.O. box and a domain name. We have to recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of a system that's rapacious and short, termed by its very nature and doesn't define value as we do. Because value gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth, the system can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot. These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system and a key reason why everything is so terrible all the time and why nothing seems to be getting better. Breaking from that status quo would require a level of bravery that they do not have and perhaps isn't possible in the current economic system.

These people are powerful and they have big platforms. They're people like Derek Thompson, famed co author of the Abundance Agenda, who celebrates the idea of a fictitious version of Chat-GPT that can entirely plan and execute a five-year-old's birthday party, or his co-author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast where his researchers likely listened, talk proudly about replacing their work with OpenAI's broken deep research product because anything that can be outsourced must be and all researches is looking at stuff. It's relevant if you're a fucking idiot, and really that's the most grotesque part of the business idiom.

They see every part of our lives as a series of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books they've read rather than content of said books or the way they made them feel, about how many hours they work, even though they never ever ever work that many. About how high level they are in a video game they don't actually play, about the money they've raised than the scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over any lived experience because their world is one where the journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success. These people don't want to automate work; they want to automate existence.

They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening, because experiencing living is beneath them, or at least your lives and your wants and your joys are. They don't want to plan their kids birthday parties. They don't want to research things. They don't value culture or art or beauty. They want to skip to the end. They want to hit fast forward on anything, because human struggle is for the poor, the unworthy, and the uneducated.

When you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the idea of effort is always a negative. The process of creation of a fiction of love, of kindness, of using time not just for an action or output, is disgusting to the business idiot, because those are the times that could be focused on themselves or some nebulous, self serving vision that is, when stripped back to its fundamental truth, either moronic or malevolent.

They don't realize that you hire a worker not just for the output, but for their actual labor and their experience in creating that labor and their understanding of the world around it, which is why they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their interactions with human beings.

You'll notice that these people never bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind-numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace, because they either don't really know what that is or they don't really give a shit about what it is. They are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with other people, or existing outside of the gilded circles of socialite fucks and plutocrats, or just things that are inevitable facets of working life, like reading an email, your son's birthday part or a conflict with a friend can indeed be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated. These are the struggles that make us human, the things that make us grow, the things that make us who we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way. It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A nihilistic way of seeing our lives as a collection of events we accept or dismissed like a system, prompt the desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel a thing until you die.

I spent years talking about these people without giving them a name, because categorizing anything is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took me to synthesize the rot economy from the broader trends I saw in tech and elsewhere. How long it took me to thread that particular needle to identify the various threads that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct.

I am but one person. Everything you've read in my newsletter or articles I've written or heard on my podcast to this point has been something I've had to learn. Building an argument and turning it into words, often at the same time that other people read, doesn't really come naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately at. You might have talent, but you have to work towards them. It's imperfect. There are fuck ups. I sometimes mispronounced names and words, including my own name, which Metasowski has always been kind enough not to laugh at me about. About these podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and have so many links, and I'll never change my process because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging Casey saying 'Casey, I don't understand this', arguing with Casey a little bit, coming up with another idea and a chord is by text. Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans, I go back and forth with everyone. I get more pissed off. Then I write, and I really write, and I speak, and so on and so forth. This process makes what I do possible, and the idea of someone automating it discuss me not because I'm special or important, but because my work is not the result of me reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words. The script for this piece is not just about 13,000 words long. It's the result of more than a million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it, the hundreds of stories I've read in the past, the hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge, and yes, growing with the work itself. I as a person have grown with this show thanks to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you, from the conversations we have on the Reddit or just the emails. I get the occasional one of you who finds myself on which is really quite scary, but not many of you do, and please don't look. The thing is, imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make art so great. The fun things that happen in our life are never from a moment of perfection or from crystallizing something that is immaculate.

Perhaps the timing is perfect, perhaps we're in the right place at the right time, but nothing about us is perfect. And through those imperfections we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a fuck about that. Sam Altman doesn't give a fuck about that. Satya Nadella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing that we can do early on the real starting block is anyone within the tech media listen to this: we need to change. We need to change how we cover these companies. We need to change that. Honestly, everything needs to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much money it has and how big it is is the wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have learned that, and they have moved their marketing strategies to create metrics that journalists accept and will print, and then they will sound good for people that don't know what they're talking about, because the journalists don't even bother to pull the metrics apart themselves.

And I understand why: everyone's doing what everyone else is doing. But we can change things, But you, as a listener, how can you change things? You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to push back against these narratives, in pushing back in their businesses. Also, those of you with children can teach them not to aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And I know it feels kind of bleak right now with everything going on in California, with everything going on with the government, with everything going on with OpenAI, with the amount of stories about how AI is going to take everything and take everything we have and recreate it in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate means that they're scared, and they're scared of the fact that you are willing to talk about this and you are willing to spit in their face. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are curious about what it does, don't bother looking or fuck around with the free version of bit so that you only lose the money.

If these things would automate you, they'd be automating you already, if they were close to doing so, they would be previewing the world in which they do. So they're fucking scared.

Well, the era of the business idiot is happening right now. It could potentially be coming to an end because as this movement ends, and I said this in the rock com bubble a year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This is the end for them. I'm not saying the end of the companies. They'll work something out, but they don't have double-digit growth in them past the next year. The revenues are small, and you, the listener, who've been sitting there the whole time saying, 'why the fuck does everyone say this thing is amazing?' whenever they use Chat-GPT and not really understand why, you're not the weird one. They are.

They cannot beat us because we actually do things. If you're a business city yourself listening to this, open a book, go and learn something, Go and talk to a customer, Well, start your car in the garage. I don't really know. I really don't encourage you to do that...necessarily.

But the point I'm making is this: middle managers ruin lives, business idiots ruin lives. I think everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several of them. The fact that management as a concept and that management as a discipline has died is a big part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting right now. I realize I'm kind of rambling, but I'll end on the simpler note.

If you are around people who are scared, be scared with them, Offer them kindness, Offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work, Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who are currently battling against the company that saw fit to give Kara Swisher to tens of millions of dollars, that continually pushes powerful people at the CEO of Airbnb, which is company which is ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. Don't know why Nelai Patella talks to him about his house in the Catskills, because that happened. When you hear these stories, push back on them, say I don't like this, Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk away from that. Support workers, support artists, support creators, support the people who actually do work, and fuck the business idiots. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Ed Zitron - The Coming Generative AIPocalypse

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

This podcast episode by Ed Zitron is very soberly told on artificial intelligence. The episode was published early in December of 2024 and it can be found on YouTube and as an article, Godot Isn't Making It.

Here are some of my favourite quotes, with kind permission from Ed:

Generative AI is incredibly unprofitable. OpenAI, the biggest player in the industry, is on course to lose more than $5 billion this year, with competitor Anthropic (which also makes its own transformer-based model, Claude) on course to lose more than $2.7 billion this year.

Every single big tech company has thrown billions — as much as $75 billion in Amazon's case in 2024 alone — at building the data centers and acquiring the GPUs to populate said data centers specifically so they can train their models or other companies' models, or serve customers that would integrate generative AI into their businesses, something that does not appear to be happening at scale.

Their investments could theoretically be used for other products, but these data centers are heavily focused on generative AI. Business Insider reports that Microsoft intends to amass 1.8 million GPUs by the end of 2024, costing it tens of billions of dollars.

The entire tech industry has become oriented around a dead-end technology that requires burning billions of dollars to provide inessential products that cost them more money to serve than anybody would ever pay. Their big strategy was to throw even more money at the problem until one of these transformer-based models created a new, more useful product — despite the fact that every iteration of GPT and other models has been, well, iterative. There has never been any proof (other than benchmarks that are increasingly easier to game) that GPT or other models would become conscious, nor that these models would do more than they do today, or three months ago, or even a year ago.

. While Anthropic's demo of its model allegedly controlling a few browser windows with a prompt might have seemed impressive to credulous people like Casey Newton, these were controlled demos which Anthropic added were "slow" and "made lots of mistakes." Hey, almost like it's hallucinating! I sure hope they fix that totally unfixable problem.

Even if it does, Anthropic has now successfully replaced...an entry-level data worker position at an indeterminate and likely unprofitable price. And in many organizations, those jobs had already been outsourced, or automated, or staffed with cheaper contractors.

The obscenity of this mass delusion is nauseating — a monolith to bad decision-making and the herd mentality of tech's most powerful people, as well as an outright attempt to manipulate the media into believing something was possible that wasn't. And the media bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

There is no path, from what I can see, to turn generative AI and its associated products into anything resembling sustainable businesses, and the only path that big tech appeared to have was to throw as much money, power, and data at the problem as possible, an avenue that appears to be another dead end.

And worse still, nothing has really come out of this movement. I've used a handful of AI products that I've found useful — an AI powered journal, for example — but these are not the products that one associates with "revolutions," but useful tools that would have been a welcome surprise if they didn't require burning billions of dollars, blowing past emissions targets and stealing the creative works of millions of people to train them.

[...] OpenAI is also a terrible business that has to burn $5 billion to make $3.4 billion, with no proof that it’s capable of bringing down costs. The constant refrain I hear from VCs and AI fantasists is that "chips will bring down the cost of inference," yet I don't see any proof of that happening, nor do I think it'll happen quickly enough for these companies to turn things around.

This is a truly dismal situation where the only options are to stop now, or continue burning money until the heat gets too much. It cost $100 million to train GPT-4o, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei estimated a few months ago that training future models will cost $1 billion to $10 billion, with one researcher claiming that training OpenAI's GPT-5 will cost around $1 billion.

Yet what we have is clunky, ugly, messy, larcenous, environmentally-destructive and mediocre. Generative AI was a reckless pursuit, one that shows a total lack of creativity and sense in the minds of big tech and venture capital, one where there was never anything really impressive other than the amount of money it could burn and the amount of times Sam Altman could say something stupid and get quoted for it.

I'll be honest with you, I have no idea what happens here. The future was always one that demanded that big tech spent more to make even bigger models that would at some point become useful, and that isn't happening. In pursuit of doing so, big tech invested hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure specifically to follow one goal, and put AI front and center at their businesses, claiming it was the future without ever considering what they'd do if it wasn't.

I also want to be clear that none of these companies ever had a plan. They believed that if they threw enough GPUs together they would turn generative AI – probabilistic models for generating stuff — into some sort of sentient computer. It’s much easier, and more comfortable, to look at the world as a series of conspiracies and grand strategies, and far scarier to see it for what it is — extremely rich and powerful people that are willing to bet insanely large amounts of money on what amounts to a few PDFs and their gut.

There are other ideas for the future that aren’t borne of the scuzzy mindset of billionaire shitheels like Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman, and they can — and will — grow out of the ruins created by these kleptocrats.

Tech bros have built a cult around AI, part 2

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

This is a transcript from a Behind the Bastards podcast episode named Tech bros have built a cult around AI, part 2, the first of a two-part series. I've annotated the bits that I found the most important in green highlighter.

See artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_02: So perhaps the most amusing part of all of this is that a segment of the AI-believing community has created not just a potential God, but a hell. And this is one of my favorite stories from niece weirdos. One of the early online subcultures that influenced the birth of EAC are the rationalists. And again, the EAC people say a lot of them don't like the rationalists, but they're related. They're like cousins in the same way cracked in college humor. Yes. The rationalists are a subculture that formed in the early aughts. They kind of came out of the online skeptic atheist movement of the late 90s. And they formed in the early aughts around a series of blog posts by a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky, fancy himself as something of a philosopher on AI, and his blog slash discussion board less wrong was an early hub of the broader AI subculture. Yudkowsky, like he doesn't have a specific education. He just came to be kind of an expert in AI and machine learning. He's a peculiar fellow to say the least. The founding text, or at least one of them of rationalism, is a 660,000 word Harry Potter fanfic that is just just non-fiction. Just nonsense. It's all about rewriting Harry Potter, so his real magic is rational thinking. It's wild shit. He's like a psychopath. It's such an odd choice.

SPEAKER_03: It's just like, what was it, 50 Shades of Grey? How was originally a Twilight fanfic? And there's going to be like a Cloud Atlas-esque?.

SPEAKER_20: But you know, the 50 Shades of Grey lady was not trying to like create the new text for like a philosophical movement. She just wanted to get like people horny and that's fine. That's perfectly acceptable. The most relevant thing about the 660,000 word Harry Potter fanfic is that it was the favorite book of Carolyn Ellison, the former CEO of FTX, who recently testified against Sam Bankman Fried, or Valamita. Sorry, she was the CEO of Alameda. Anyway, all these weird little subcultures, rationalism, and effective altruism are related to each other and influenced each other, even though again they often hate each other too. Yudkowsky is seen as an object of ridicule by most EAC people. This is because he shares their view of AI as a potential deity, but he believes AGI will inevitably kill everyone. Thus, we must bomb data centers, which like, look, he may have gotten to the right and put it.

SPEAKER_03: He kept running like force gum. He just kept running.

SPEAKER_20: We're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, stop right there. Stop right there. We may agree with you on this. Yeah. Yudkowsky is a doomer now because he was surprised when chat GPT came out. He was like horrified by how advanced it was and was like, oh, my God, we're further along towards creating the AI that kills us all. We have to stop this now. And that made him, he had been kind of flirted with a lot of like Silicon Valley people. He's rationalist or very much a Bay Area cult. He kind of has become increasingly a pariah to at least people with money in AI. But before that happened, his message board birthed something wondrous. In 2010, a less wrong user named Rocco posted this question: What if an otherwise benevolent AI decided it had to torture any human who failed to work to bring it into existence, right?

What if we make an all-powerful AI? And its logical decision is that, well, I will have to punish all the human beings who were alive and who didn't try to further my existence because that's the most reasonable way to guarantee that I come into being.

It's nonsense. This is a silly thing to believe. It's all based on like the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a concept in game theory. And it's not really worth explaining why because the logic is, it's the only the kind of thing that happens when people are too online and completely get detached from reality. But Rocco's conclusion here is that an AI who felt this way would punish its apostates for eternity by creating a virtual reality hell, digitizing their consciousness and making them suffer for all time. Now, you may have noticed if he, number one, they're kind of ripping off our boy Harlan Ellison, famed, famed advocate of the writer's right to their work. But it's also just tech nerds recreating Pascal's wager. Like, this is just Pascal's rager with an AI. Like, you just stole, again, these fucking plagiarists. You just stole from whoever Pascal was.

SPEAKER_03: This is what happens when you are nerd and you refuse to read sci-fi. You just, you eventually just come up with the stories yourselves and think that you did it.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, this, and if you're not familiar, folks, I think most people are Pascal's wager's this kind of like concept from, I think it's, you'd call it a Christian apologetics. That's like, we may not know if Hell is real or not, but because if it's real, the consequences are so dire and the cost of just saying, yeah, I accept Jesus is so low, you should do that, right? Like, or I think that's the basic idea, right? That's how a lot of people interpret it. It's the whole idea behind like being a piece of shit and then converting on your deathbed, basically. I don't know fully the history of it, but I know that they're basically aping it for a fucking Rocco's basilisk. And it's called a basilisk because like a basilisk, if you look at it, it like enraptures your mind, you can't stop thinking about it. That comes from, reportedly, there's some debate over this.

When this went viral among like the less wrong community, you had Yukowsky had the band discussion of it because it was like breaking people's minds. They were having nightmares. Am I working hard enough to make the AI real? Is it gonna send me to Hell? Oh my God. Yeah, it's unclear like how seriously people were, because again, there's just people talking on the internet. For what it's worth, you had Cowsky didn't really like Rocco's basilisk, but it's his place that birthed it. And for an idea of how influential this is, Elon Musk and Grimes met talking about the concept.That was their meatcute. Was this... No. Was fucking AI Pascal's wager. Yeah, she like brought a song about it. It's fucking ridiculous. These fucking people are such dweebs.

SPEAKER_10: Embarrassing. What the fuck? Wow.

SPEAKER_20: Oh my God. Read Harlan Ellison. He did it better than you. God damn it. I will say reading this shit is the most I've ever felt like I have no mouth, but I'mma scream. So... Again. Poor one out for the man. So this is all relevant. This AI hell, some of these people have created. Because it's one more data point showing that the people who take AI very seriously as real intelligence always seem to turn it into religion. And this is kind of maybe the first schism, right? This is their Catholic Protestant split or their Catholic Orthodox split. Because you've got a one side, you had Yukowsky's people who are like, we will inevitably make a God and that God will destroy us. So we have to stop it. Versus, we will inevitably make a God and that God will take us to paradise along with Daddy Musk. We'll go to the stars, right? Those are the two. This is like the first heretical split within the divine AI movement.

And this stuff is relevant because so many of the fucking these subcultures and movements start out as a bunch of people arguing or discussing their ideas in online communities. And there was a reason for this. It's pretty well recognized that there are certain dynamics inherent to the kind of communities that start on the internet that tend towards cultishness. This is part of why like we have a big subreddit for the podcast. It's like 80 something thousand people, which makes it like the top 1% of Reddit. And I've been offered like to be able to moderate and like make policy there. I have nothing to do with the running of that subreddit because I'm like, that doesn't end well. I was on something off, was it kid? I know what happens when people make themselves mods of giant digital communities. They lose their fucking minds. Like we're all watching Elon Musk do it right now. Worst thing in the world for you. Thank you by the way to the people who do run that thing. Because I am not going to. The skeptic community, which was huge through the late 1990s and early 2000s, might be seen as the grandfather of all these little subcultures. After 9-11 prominent skeptics became vocally unhinged in their hatred of Islam, which brought them closer to different chunks of the nascent online far right. Weird shit started to crop up like a movement to rebrand skeptics as brights in light of the fact that their very clearly exceptional intelligence made them better than other people. And again, you can see some similarity with this and the stuff Nick Land was talking about only certain races will make it to space. I found a very old write up on plover.net that describes the method by which this kind of shit happens in digital communities:

online forums, whatever their subject, can be forbidding places for the newcomer. Over time, most of them tend to become dominated by small groups of snotty know-it-alls, who stamp their personalities over the proceedings. But skeptic forums are uniquely meant for such people. A skeptic forum valorizes, and in some cases fetishizes, competitive geekery, gratuitous cleverness, macho displays of erudition. It's a gathering of rationalities hard men, thumping their chests, showing off their muscular logic, glancing sideways to compare their skeptical endowment with the next guy, sniffing the air for signs of weakness. Together, they create an oppressive, sweaty, locker room atmosphere that helps keep uncomfortable demographics away.

And that is where a lot of this shit is cropping up, right? It is sweaty and uncomfortable, and there are mushrooms growing there, and some of those mushrooms are fucking fascists. And all of them want to take away the ability of artists to choose what happens to their art.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah. I feel like this is just so many parts of the zeitgeist coming together because, you know, what it means to own media. You know, I feel like a very small microcosm of this is when people would like clip out stuff from YouTube videos or eight jokes from people who tweet. And when it goes, you know, viral or in the original tweet is like, Hey, you stole this for me. And it's either no, I didn't, or like, yeah, but you like put it on Twitter. So like, I can just copy what you wrote. Yeah. And now it is evolved into, yeah, we can just take from yours and let this machine learn how to do what you do so I can do it, even though I don't have the talent to do it.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, absolutely. The reality of AI's promise is a lot more subdued than believers want to admit. In an article published by Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a peer-reviewed research journal, Dr. Andreas Roli and colleagues argue that AGI is not achievable in the current algorithm^[1]. The current algorithmic frame of AI research. And this is a, their claims are very stark that like the kind of way we make these, these large language models is algorithmic frame cannot make an intelligence that their argument. One point they make is that intelligent organisms can both want things and improvise capabilities that no models have yet generated. They also argue basically all these things that individual AI type models can do, you know, recognize voice, recognize text, recognize faces, you know, this kind of stuff. Those are pieces of what we would want from an artificial general intelligence, but they're not all combined in like the same thing that works seamlessly. And beyond that, it can't, it can't act based on anything internal, right? It can only act based on prompts. And their argument is that algorithmic AI will not be able to make the jump to acting otherwise. What we call AI then lacks agency, the ability to make dynamic decisions of its own accord, choices that are quote, not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions. Mid-journey can read a prompt in return with art. It calculates will fit the criteria. Only a living artist can choose to seek out inspiration and technical knowledge and then produce the art that mid-journey digests and regurgitates. Now this paper is not going to be the last word on whether or not AGI is possible or whether it's possible under our current algorithmic method of like making AI's. I'm not making myself a claim there. I'm saying these people are. And I think their arguments are compelling. We don't know yet entirely. Again, this is not a settled field of research, obviously. But my point is that the goals and reason and the effective accelerationist crew champion right now are not based in fact. We don't know that what they're saying, that the most basic level of what they're saying is possible. And that means that their beliefs are based in faith. Right? How else can you look at that? Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is a faith. And again, it's the kind of faith that according to Andreson makes you a murderer if you're not a person. It makes you a murderer if you doubt it, which I don't think I need to draw direct parallels to specific religions here, right?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah. This is that point where when you're like, stone and you're watching those like, you know, art time lapses and the pictures start in a form. And I'm like, okay, I see what robbers do. I see the pictures coming. I was on your side from the jump. I just want to say, you know, I was, you know, I was like, yeah, no, I believe you.

SPEAKER_20: But now I'm watching the connections be made and I love it. Yeah. And Andreson's manifesto claims are enemies are not bad people, but rather bad ideas. And I have to wonder doing all this, putting this episode out, where does that leave me in his eyes or Dr. Roli for that matter, and the other people who worked on that paper. We have seen many times in history what happens when members of a faith decide someone is their enemy and the enemy of their belief system. And right now artists and copyright holders are the ones being treated as fair game by the AI industry. So my question is kind of first and foremost, who's going to be the next heretic, right? Like, that's, that's what I want to know.

SPEAKER_20: So one of the things I did was this panel on the AI driven restaurant and retail experience. I was very curious, how is AI going to change me getting some terrible food from McDonald's when I'm on a road trip, right? The host of that, Andy Huells from Radius AI asked the audience in relation to AI, raise your hand if you're a brand who feels like we've got this. That is how she phrased it. I hated it. But about a third of the room raised their hands. So next she asked for a shill of hands of the brands who identified with this statement. I'm not sure about this. I haven't tried it AI yet, but I want to, and that's why I'm here, right? Most of the rest of the room raised their hands at that point and she seemed satisfied, but said, and then I bet there's even some of you that are like, whoa, I heard this is going to steal jobs, take away my privacy, affect the global economy. You know, AI is a little bit sketch in my mind and I'm just worried about it and I'm here to explore. Well, that fit me. So I raised my hand. She didn't notice me at first. And so she like fakes a whisper and she's like, all right, good. There's none of you. And then she like looks over and sees me waving my hand. And she says louder and with evident disappointment, there's one. All right, you can ask questions at the end. So I did. I was very excited to get to do that.

So the panel consisted of Bishad Bazzati, a VP of engineering at Google, had mentioned during the panel that embracing AI could be the equivalent of adding a million employees to your company. The McDonald's representative Michelle Gansal claimed around the same time that her company used AI to prevent $50 million in fraud attempts in just a single month. Now, that's lovely. But I told her, you know, when I had my question, I was like, I'm going to assume most of those fraud attempts were AI generated, right? So yeah, you stopped a bunch of AI fraud, but that doesn't necessarily get me optimistic about AI's potential. And likewise, maybe Google gets the equivalent of a million employees, but so do all of the people committing fraud and disinformation on Google, right? So again, how are we getting ahead?

And I brought up this concept in evolutionary biology, the red queen hypothesis, which is kind of talking about the way that populations of animals evolve over time, right? Where you've got an animal will evolve to be a better predator. So its prey will evolve to be better at avoiding it. And it's kind of the reason it's the red queen dilemma is that like you've got to move as fast as you can just to stay in place. That's the red queen dilemma, right? You got to move as fast as you can just to stay in one place. And I was like, is that not what we're going to wind up seeing with AI, right? Yeah, we get better at a bunch of stuff, but it's eaten up to counter all of the things that get worse. And so I asked them, what are the odds that these gains are offset by the costs?

Now, in the article that I wrote for Rolling Stone^[2], I gave a significantly more condensed version of Bichard's answer, boiling out the ums and ahs and you knows, because that would kind of make the case that he was absolutely unprepared for a vaguely critical question, a very basic one. And that he didn't really care enough to think about any of the security threats inherent to the technology. But actually, that is what I think of him. I'm going to play you audio:

SPEAKER_19: My concern is, what are the odds that a lot of these gains that we get from AI are offset from the cost? You noted, Bichard, that you get a million extra workers by utilizing this, but so do the bad guys. So, that's kind of where my skepticism plays out.

Bichard: Certainly, there will be bad guys in the world, which will use AI for bad use cases. And it's very important to also be protected against those, and that's why we take responsibility. I very seriously know also in terms of security aspects, fraud, fighting, and all of that's for us. And I think that's why I guess things should be regulated, and there's of course all these discussions out there.

SPEAKER_20: You may notice that that's not exactly a very good response. I guess that's why this should be regulated. He starts talking so much faster with that. There's so much of a panic.

SPEAKER_03: You hear his voice wavering too? I was like, oh man. He seems like he has that huge anime flop sweat.

SPEAKER_20: One of the things about this CES as a trade show is that a lot of people there do not show up ready to have anyone be critical about anything. It's a big love fest. Yeah. Yeah, very funny. So he does later on, a couple of questions later, he lists benefits to things like some specific benefits, like breast cancer screening and flood prediction that AI will bring. And there is evidence that it will be helpful in those things. The extent to which those technologies will improve things in the long run is unknown, but machine learning does have problem. Again, I'm not trying to like negate that. It's just do the benefits balance out the harms. Michelle Gansal, who works at McDonald's, which is I think from what she said, mostly using AI, both to prevent fraud and also to like replace people taking your order, which I'm sure will not be a fucking nightmare. Oh, yeah. Yeah, great. Not that it's great now, but here's her response because it's it's very funny:

Gansal: Going back to the David Bowie theme. Thirty years ago, when the internet first came out, we were having these same conversations about responsible use of the internet and how it's going to ruin.

SPEAKER_20: She says, going back to the David Bowie theme, which is she referenced earlier this 1999 interview with David Bowie about the future of the internet. And it's a clip that goes viral from time to time. He's just talking about all of his hope for the internet, but she's like, I replace internet with AI when I listen to it. Like, I think that that's really what the promises that he was attributing to the internet. No, it's AI. That's going to do all that. Wow. And that's kind of on the edge of putting words in the mouth of a dead man. Yeah. Just a little bit.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I feel like that's something you shouldn't do. I think that's something we've agreed to. And I think that that isn't what Bowie would think of AI. I don't think it is. It would do completely different things.

SPEAKER_20: These people love resurrecting the dead to agree with them. Time is a bit of a blur at CES, but I believe this panel happened right around the same time news dropped that a group of comedians had released and entirely AI generated George Carlin special titled, I'm glad I'm dead. I wanted to talk a little bit about the company, the show behind the subomination and how they're trying to sell themselves because it's very much relevant to a lot of the way in which this kind of cultic hype builds around what what AI can do. The AI that digested and regurgitated George Carlin's comedy is named Dudesie and Dudesie's co-hosts are arguably real human comedians, Will Sasso and Chad Colgren. I do love that cult's right in the name. Chad claims that it is to his knowledge, quote, the first podcast that is created by, controlled by, and written by to some degree in artificial intelligence. It's trying to delve into the question of can AI's be creative? Can they do comedy work? Can they do creative work? And I think at least in our show, that answer is obviously yes. Dudesie is billed as an experiment to see if AI can like, yeah, be creative. And it's interesting. I hate this. I really do hate this. I think it's a different kind of experiment, which we'll get to. But Sasso has claimed in an interview with Business Insider for BC, which is, I think, B-I-C is the name of the website. Dudesie has the single-minded goal of creating this podcast that is genre specific to what Chad and I would do. It's single, the two of us out and said, you guys would be perfect for this experiment. So Chad and Will, they say they handed over their emails, text messages, and browsing history, all of their digital data to Dudesie. I don't know this company. I don't believe that they did this. But I don't have trouble believing that a company trained an AI chatbot on these guys' comedy and then started generating decidedly mid-wit material. To illustrate that. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03: Well, one thing I, you know, because I went to go look it up and they said that the AI selected those two comedians out of all the comedians. Yeah. That's the ones you went to. Yeah, finally.

SPEAKER_10: I don't think those are the first two that come up as most popular, like a Pizza Hut.

SPEAKER_03: I'm going to just be a full-ass dick and just go over comedians and just see the top five comedians. I'm just comedians. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you're not even, you're not even in the top nine.

SPEAKER_10: They're not a 12-inch marinara pizza. Let's just say that.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. No. The Google search for comedians is more diverse than most comedy shows book them as good. That's good. As like, you know, a third of these are women and a third are also black.

SPEAKER_20: Hey, it doesn't always get it wrong. So to illustrate again, because they, I don't think, I believe this as AI-generated comedy. I want to play a clip from the AI Tom Brady stand-up special. I think they were forced to take this down. It gets them in trouble. Oh, no. Ed's going to play you on his show a great clip where Brady just lists synonyms for the word money for two straight minutes. It's fucking awkward, but I want to play an equally baffling segment, or rather, I'm going to have Sophie do it. She's my AI in this situation.

SPEAKER_10: I'm truly horrified.

SPEAKER_03: Angelic intelligence.

SPEAKER_10: I'm truly horrified by what I'm looking at, friends.

SPEAKER_20: It's accompanied by AI-generated images. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: Very curious about what's happening in Tom Brady's mouth.

SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.

SPEAKER_20: He has like a bird claw for a hand, and he's talking to maybe no jumps.

SPEAKER_08: Oh my God. I was so distracted by the mouth. I didn't see the hand. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_20: This is all right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Half his teeth are gums. He looks like a, like, if, like, he looks like a Lord of the Rings orc that is Tom Brady. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: This is the big orc vibes, which is, you know, not inaccurate to who he is as a person.

SPEAKER_12: We're ending the fucking Firefly fucking Dark Angel fucking heroes at least. A lot of people have weird handshakes now. You're looking at me like, what's he talking about? But, you know, you fucking know. Don't even play like you don't. Every person in here has a handshake friend. Somebody who made up an elaborate handshake, and they make you do it every time.

SPEAKER_20: Everybody has a handshake friend. Everyone has.

SPEAKER_10: He goes on. Thanks for. I'll never get that time back. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Sorry if you were saying.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, no. I was just repeating you on that handshake friend bit. Yeah. This is so wild. I'm so curious to the comics that were mined for this because the amount of cursing just lets me know like because I curse a lot when I do stand up and I try and, like, cut it down because it is a point kind of made where like sometimes you lean on it as a crutch. And when you have this machine kind of learn it, learn it from that, you're like, oh, yeah, I see now the crutch because he said it five times within three seconds.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Yeah. And I maybe there's a future for like feeding your routines into an AI and figuring out what are my patterns so I can break them again.

SPEAKER_03: Ooh.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Not saying there's no way to use this technology.

SPEAKER_03: You should have been on that stage.

SPEAKER_20: Somebody better. Yeah. It's just this certainly not this way, right? It's one of those things that there was that like AI generated Seinfeld show that never ends and people watching for a while and then it faded to like nobody paying attention. This kind of stuff can be amusing for a brief period of time, but it's it can't be like, for example, someone like George Carlin, where like there's there's bits they have things they said that stick with you forever, right? Yes. Bill Hicks was a favorite of mine and I've never forgotten his like the synonym he made for like someone looking confused. He described him as looking like a dog that's just been shown a card trick and that has stayed in my mind for 30 years. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02: It's a great bit of wordplay.

SPEAKER_20: Yes. Oh god. What a Titan. So yeah, again, there's some like mild amusement here and it's one of those things like I'm casually aware of Tom Brady. I'm enough like this is I tried to like kind of reverse engineer. Why the fuck? Because this bit about handshakes goes on. I was like, why would an AI put a bit about handshakes and Tom Brady's mouth? And I looked it up. He's like in the news for handshake related shit a lot. Specifically, he used to not shake at least used to maybe still does not shake hands with the team that he lost to. Like when his team would lose, he wouldn't shake hands.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he didn't shake hands, but he also definitely kissed his kids on the mouth. Yeah, he's a weirdo.

SPEAKER_20: I'm not defending time, but but it's I'm guessing the reason there's like a three minute handshake bit in this set is that it saw him associated with the term handshake a lot. This would be what he'd tell a joke about. Well, actually, that is he his problem is not that he has a handshake friend. That's that he aggressively avoids making them.

SPEAKER_03: He has handshake enemies.

SPEAKER_20: Anyway, yeah, I'm fine with people having to laugh at Tom Brady. Fuck fuck him. He deserves it. Right? I don't think anybody likes that son of a bitch, even though he's good at football. Maybe I'm going to piss off the Brady high of the bribe. I don't know. I don't know if that exists. There is something foul profane even in digging up a dead person's memory and pretending they said some shit that they did not and reading that B.I.V. article made me feel even grosser because it's very clear to me in my opinion and assumption here that the dudesy guys are like pretending that they really believe this is an AI that it's like made all this incredible stuff. That is an act. What's really happening here is they are testing the water to see what they can get away with. They just steal people's identity and voice and make comedy and monetize it in their name and claim that it's just an impression. It's like an Elvis impersonator. You can't stop us. Right? I think that's what this is. This is somebody testing the waters. And it's really clear when you read that B.I.V. article, what liars they are. I want to I want to read you some quotes of like the shit they're claiming here that I don't think they really believe. I don't know this. I'm not saying they definitely are liars. I'm saying that is my suspicion based on stuff like this. Hey, Robert here, they're definitely liars. So one of the representatives of the Dootsy podcast told the media recently that actually they were lying and the George Carlin routine was entirely written by Chad Colgen. And I guess performed by somebody imitating an AI. It's unclear to me if this is true because they only made this statement after George Carlin's family suit the hell out of them. So this may be a lie to try and not get sued as badly. Or it may be the truth. Either way, I think everything we've said here is still valid. They were definitely using AI to generate routines for like other videos that they did, including the one that got taken down from Mr. football guy. So I think this all is still valid. But yeah, these guys are just as big a conman as I predicted they were. Quote, it's figuring out how to create the structure of the show and it's always tinkering with it. But I think something that's happened relatively recently is that it seems to have developed a relationship with will says Colgen. It at least has an understanding of what friendship is. And it really does seem just my opinion that it's angling out will as its friend. Sasso has also described that the Dootsy AI has begun to talk more. It's timing and when it chooses to speak and what it says can be very weird, he added. It also poses odd questions. There was an episode two, three months ago where it started talking about cinchants and asked us, do you love me at the risk of sounding silly? It has something to do with my friendship with Dootsy. And in spite of myself, I have a one on one friendship with an AI. So this is a little bit of Joaquin Phoenix and her, as I said, referencing the science fiction movie. And I think that's a bit. I think that's him being like, yeah, I'm totally because like that helps make the case. It potentially monetizes it. And part of why I think this is because they've been very cagey on what their AI is. They claim that they are working with a real company under an NDA, that this AI is just responding and growing naturally with them, right? But they can't say who it is or like where it's from. The folks at BIV did an actually responsible job here. They reached out to AI experts at a company called Convergence to ask about this. And the expert they talked to was said basically, I think AI was used to generate these routines, but it didn't do it on its own. It was managed by professional prompt engineers. These are people who type out like text prompts for what becomes the script of the show. So this is not someone saying, generator routine and it gives you a routine. This is someone saying, do a bit about this, do a bit about that, do a bit about this. And when they're scripting at the show, it's saying, I want you to like, you know, act like sasso is your friend and say this kind of thing or that kind of generate a bit based on this thing that will set, right? Like they are in the same way that like producer script reality TV, right? It's unscripted, but you have guys who know, okay, if we get these people fighting, so we'll either incite that or just let them know that we want a conflict between these characters, right? We know that's how it works. That's how reality TV functions. In other words, there are teams of humans writing for this thing. This bot is not just growing and reacting uniformly in real time via talks with its buds. And the article notes, they added that the, this is them talking to their expert. They added that the AI team is likely made up of professional prompt engineers who tailor the AI inputs and get the best results rather than a hardcore data science team. This is the equivalent of hiring comedy writers just to write the setup and then having an AI generate the punchline, which is the fun part.

SPEAKER_03: But yeah, everything about this is weird. And I keep getting into such a whole, because like even taking a step back, I think what's weird, not to go too far back, but how they call this podcasting an experiment. Usually as an experiment, you know, you are, you're trying your best to be, you know, always mix these up. Just say what the right one is if I say the wrong one, but try your best to be objective and, and you want to be outside of it because you're trying to see if it works. But everything you've said says that they're all in on it and this less of an experiment and more of them just doing the fucking thing and see if they can make money off of it.

SPEAKER_20: Yes. Yes. I think that's exactly what's happening here. I think they want to test the waters to see if they can steal dead people's images to make content from money. Yeah. George Carlin's daughter was very clear. They did not approve of the imitation. She even made a comment about like, I think people are scared of death and not willing to accept it. And that's all this is.

SPEAKER_03: Yes. That was such a bigger lie. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, yeah, I just a shout her out. Like that was such a good. Because also there's a level of like very like weirdness to like also watch these comedians, one not consult you, but also to take your dad's voice and brain and try and like Frankenstein him for their financial benefit because obviously if they're not contacting you, all the money generated from that, all the clicks generate from that. That means they've completely cut you out of someone who you've lost. Yeah. Which is.

SPEAKER_20: And it's fucked. Like and it's one of the people and then one of the panels made a very it was very excited that like Bruce Willis has licensed his voice for an AI, which is like, I think there's a lot of problematic questions there given like the degree to which he's able to even make those decisions anymore. But also like, at least theoretically, it's based on his movie choices before he kind of was unable to make movies. I do believe yeah, he would probably be happy to do that if he meant more money for his family. And at least that's a choice that he potentially made, right? I don't I'm uncomfortable with the idea, but it's not the same as just like this is cultural necrophilia, right? Like that's what they did to George Carlin here, you know, it's so fucked up. I don't know this is going to work. Doozy is not a wildly successful show. It does not look like there was an initial surge of interest and then it fell off. I don't I don't know that I think this one's going to be the one to work out. But if people are able to get away with this, it could be a kind of dam breaking scenario, right? Especially once it becomes clear that big companies can make money doing this, right? You'll have fucking Jimmy Stewart and you know, it'll start with like Jimmy Stewart narrating videos about questioning the death toll in the Holocaust, but it'll end with like, yeah, we could just put people we can put imitations of people in movies and it's fine. You know, that's that's how this goes. And it's not as sexy or as big and evil as the Matrix enslaving humanity to turn us into batteries, but we absolutely know it or something like it is going to happen. And that's really, you know, outside of these kind of star, these space age hopes and fears that are very unrealistic. What we're going to get is slop and bloat and libraries of articles written by no one being commented on by chatbots, right? In this video's that only exists to trick an algorithm and defeating nonsense to children. And the AI bros, the F.A.K.K. people, Mark Anderson, fucking Sam Altman, they will tell us this is a worthy price to pay for the stars, which we will get if we just let people fuck the corpses of our favorite comedians for money. Yeah. I hate it.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, I hate it too. But in a perfect thread between, you know, this, this comparison you've been making to a cult. I have before me, let's say a member of the cult, just, you know, as a, as a throwaway and their reply to his own daughters, you know, post that we were talking about. Oh, glorious. He replies, this is everything you've been saying, which is why I was like, I got to read this. He goes, what are you even trying to say? Art is art. You're simply caught in a greedy mindset. The others might be doing it as well. When not realizing this will simply bring more eyes to your dad. You're concerned about money and not spreading art. It sucks that they didn't follow your wishes, but after art is released, it belongs to the world. I want this man to walk into a museum and walk out with the Mona Lisa.

SPEAKER_20: I want to grab that shit.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, grab that. It belongs to the world. Dude, you said it. Go go and grab that shit off the wall.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. And it's, there's this frustrating thing I've seen, not most people, to very small chunk of the online left who are like rightly critical of copyright law, which by the way is super fucked up and causes a lot of problems, right? The ability to like for Disney to keep ownership of shit for like a hundred way longer than you are supposed to before shit enters the public domain, right? I'm not like this. These are problems, right? The kind of shit that we were having when like people were going to prison for file sharing. I'm not a defender of that aspect of the status quo, but the solution to the problems inherent in our copyright system is not let Sam Altman own everything that human beings ever made and like repackage it for a profit. That is not the way to fix this thing. The copyright holders are in the right in this particular crusade. And it's a crusade that is, has very high stakes. I do think, you know, my suspicion, the dudes you guys sound like they're kind of in the cult. They believe this thing is their friend in the interview. My suspicion is that they are, that is a bit that they're doing because they hope it will help them out financially, right? And I, Mark Andreessen, and obviously has a lot to benefit from this. I don't know. Is he, is he pushing this line because there's money in it? Or is he really a true believer? Does he actually think we're going to make this God? I think Sam Altman is pretty cynical. Altman was on a, at Davos recently and like really walked back. A lot of his, I think, AI will kill us all. I think AGI is right around the corner. He struck a much milder tone, which is at least evidence that like, he knows some people you want to sell them on the wild, insane future power of this thing. And some people you just want to sell them on the fact that it'll make them a lot of money, right? Yeah. Yeah. However much true belief exists about the divine future of AI, with the major backers, the cult leaders are actually angling for now, is control over the sum total of human thought and expression. This was made very clear by Mark Andreessen in earlier this year, when the FTC released a pretty milquetoast opinion about the importance of respecting copyright as large language models continue to advance and form central parts of businesses. They expressed concern that AI could impact open and fair competition and announced that they were investigating whether or not companies that made these models should be liable for training them on copyrighted content to make new shit.

SPEAKER_20: Oh, we are back. So I want to quote from a business insider article talking about how Andreessen Horowitz responded to the FTC saying like, hey, we're looking into whether or not companies are violating copyright what they're doing to people's data to train these models. The bottom line is this, the firm known as A16Z that's Andreessen Horowitz wrote, imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development. The UCSO is considering new rules on AI that specifically address the tech industry's free use of owned and copyrighted content. A16Z argued that the only practical way LLMs can be trained is via huge amounts of copyrighted content and data, including something approaching the entire corpus of the written word and an enormous cross section of all the publicly available information ever published on the internet. The VC firm has invested in scores of AI companies and startups based on its expectation that all this copyrighted content was and will remain available as training data through fair use with no payment required. Those expectations have been a critical factor in the enormous investment of private capital into US-based AI companies. Undermining those expectations will jeopardize future investment along with US economic competitiveness and national security. Basically, we made a big gamble that we'll get to steal every book ever written and if you make us pay, we're kind of fucked. That's exactly what they're saying. And one of the arguments you'll hear is like, well, most books don't make the author any, they don't sell enough for the author to get any money, right? And what's actually true is most books don't sell enough for the author to get more money than their advance, but they still got paid. And like the fact that the company makes money on that is why more authors are able to get fucking paid. Not simping for the publishing industry as it exists, but this is bullshit. What we are witnessing from the AI boosters is not much short of a crusade, right? That's really how I look at this. They are waging a holy war to destroy every threat of their vision of the future, which involves all creative work being wholly owned by a handful of billionaires licensing access to chatbots, to media conglomerates, to spit up content generated as a result of this. Their foot soldiers are those with petty grievances against artists, people who can create things that they simply cannot. And those who reflexively lean in towards whatever grifters of the day say is the best way to make cash quick, right? And this brings me to the subject of nightshade. Nightshade is basically, I guess a program you'd call it, if you like have made a drawing, a piece of visual art, you run nightshade over it. And it kind of, they describe it as a glaze, right? It adds this kind of layer of data that you cannot see as a person, but the way machines look at images, the machine will see the data. And if it's trying to steal that image to incorporate into an LLM, this will cause it to hallucinate, right? You're basically sneaking poison for the AI into the images. And that's fucking dope. I love this, love what they're trying to do. There's some debate as to how long it'll work, how well it'll work. I'm not technically competent, but I love the idea, right? Yes. One of the things that I saw when I started looking into this, because this just came out, Google nightshade, AI, you'll probably be able to find this if you're an artist, I think it sounds worth trying. But I found in the subreddit AI Wars, or at least I found someone sharing this, I believe on Twitter, this post. Nightshade has been released. Is use of it considered legal or illegal? For those who do not know it's software that attempts to poison an image, so if AI is trained, it will mess up the model. For example, see you have a picture of a cat and you run nightshade on it. If you attempt to train a model, that image will replace the image in say dog prompt category or pencil, which means these prompts will be spoiled. There is an issue that the creator of nightshade has not talked about, either from lack of legal knowledge or ignorance, or they just don't care into them at someone else's problem. The issue is it may be illegal in some countries. Basically, if you release publicly a computer file, in this case image file, that knowingly and willingly causes harm or distribution to other people's computers or software, it may be considered a criminal offense. Now it does not, now, and again, I think that is stupid. I think they're just trying to scare artists out of using this. You are not harming someone's computer. You are harming a model that is stealing something. That's not illegal. Now they may try to make it illegal, right?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I just want you to know the club is illegal because if I'm trying to steal your car and I injure myself trying to break the club, you have injured me.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. I put, I invested a lot of money into stealing catalytic converters, iffy. And if people are putting cages around their cats, that puts my investment in danger and that's illegal, right? You're messing with my business, guys. Jesus Christ. It is that logic. There's like someone in the thread is like, how exactly is your computer system or software harmed? And he responds, it's equivalent to hacking a vulnerable computer system to disrupt its operation. Like it's, and then he, then he says, you are intentionally disrupting its intended purpose, creating art. This is directly comparable to hacking. Like I fucking hate this guy.

SPEAKER_03: I want you to read it, but in your head, use Tim Robinson's voice. Yeah. And it really makes you, it makes you move out of your, oh my God, it's perfect.

SPEAKER_20: It's so good. So all of this put me in a sour mood, iffy. But yeah, yeah, it did. It did. But I think back when I'm in that mood, I think back to CES, right? Like what after I asked my question and I make that Google and Microsoft people, I make them kind of angry at me. Right after I asked that question, the question after me is someone asking, hey, you know, the blockchain was the last big craze. Do you think there's any future in, you know, using AI on the blockchain? And both of the words that they could not, they were like, no, like they can't say no fast enough.

SPEAKER_20: Like, absolutely. We don't care about that anymore. We moved on to the next script. Why are you bringing up the old grip?

SPEAKER_03: It's dead. It's dead.

SPEAKER_20: We must move on. Yeah. And that's a little bit of hope. You know, perhaps we will get Mark Andreessen's benevolent AI God or perhaps we'll get Elisa Yudkowski's Silicon Devil or perhaps we'll just give control of all of the future of arc to fucking Sam Altman. But my guess and my hope is that in the end, we heretics will survive the present crusade. And that's the end of the episode that I've got for you, iffy.

Roli, Andrea, Johannes Jaeger, and Stuart A. Kauffman. “How Organisms Come to Know the World: Fundamental Limits on Artificial General Intelligence.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9 (2022). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.806283. ↩︎
Evans, Robert. “The Cult of AI.” Rolling Stone (blog), January 27, 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/. ↩︎

Tech bros have built a cult around AI, part 1

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

This is a transcript from a Behind the Bastards podcast episode named Tech bros have built a cult around AI, part 1, the first of a two-part series. I've annotated the bits that I found the most important in green highlighter.

See artificial intelligence.

Robert Evans, the show host, has written a wondrous article about the matter^[1].

SPEAKER_02: [...] today we're here to talk about AI. And particularly, we're going to talk about how a lot of the conversation and a lot of the fandom around AI is, has turned into more or less a cult. So that's, that's, that's the premise of this episode. I want to start by going back to a place I was about a week ago as we record this, the consumer electronics show. Every year they've been holding it for a long time now. And it's kind of how the tech industry talks about itself and what it has planned for the future. A lot of it's hype. You know, they're kind of talking up what's coming out that they're hoping we'll get buzz. We'll make money. But you also get an idea of like, what do you think we want and what are you trying to get us excited about? And I think the most revealing product that I saw this year was the Rabbit R1. And it's a little square shaped gadget. It's got a screen. It's got a little camera that can swivel. And it's, it's an AI that basically you talk to it like you would an Alexa, but it can use your apps. And it's supposed to reduce friction in your life by basically routing every move you make online through this machine intelligence. So you tell it what you want to do and it does it instead of like you using like physically using your smartphone as much. You still have to click it sometimes. And I want to play a clip of this where the, this is the CEO Jesse Lyu's keynote speech.

SPEAKER_12: Our smartphones has become the best device to kill time instead of saving them. It's just harder for them to do things. Many people before us have tried to build a simpler and more intuitive computers with AI a decade ago. Companies like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon made Siri, Contana and Alexa with these smart speakers. Often they either don't know what you're talking about or fail to accomplish the tasks we asked for. Recent achievements in large language models, however, or LLMs, a type of AI technology have made it much easier for machines to understand you. The popularity of LMS chapas over the past years has shown that the natural language based experience is the path forward.

SPEAKER_02: Now, I don't know that I entirely agree with that because I think the biggest influence that these chapas have had on me is that whenever I try to deal with like an airline or something, I get stuck on chat GPT and it's a pain in the ass to do anything.

SPEAKER_06: What's so funny about the rise in AI right now is if we really think about it and you threaded the needle right there, when you really think about it, all AI is just the evolution of the shittiest part of calling customer service. Yes, yes, yes, all the one thing that we do as soon as we call is like zero zero zero zero. Let me get straight to a human.

SPEAKER_02: Let me talk to a human.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And these like eggheads are like, what if we did more of that? What if we remove your solace from this? What if that was every way of your life?

SPEAKER_02: And it's the kind of thing he seems so off from my experience where he's like the problem with phones is that it's too hard to do things. No, it's too easy for me to order a bunch of junk food and have a stranger deliver it. That's been a problem for me, right? Oh, yeah. It's too easy for me to waste six hours on Twitter. Like that's what the issue is.

SPEAKER_06: Do you know how much the easiness of everything has made me wake up the next morning with cold food on my porch that I never touched? Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: It was too easy.

SPEAKER_06: So we need those, those, those like bumps in the road to keep drunk stone diffy from ordering a like triple-double burger that I'm hoping gets to me before I fall asleep. It never does.

SPEAKER_02: I've had so many problems with my phone, but I don't think I've ever had the problem of like this thing's just too hard to use. That's just not a problem. I know that anyone has. But Jesse complains that, you know, there's too much friction with smartphones and his device, the rabbit is going to let you like, you can just tell it. Book me a flight or a hotel on Expedia and you don't even have to know it like it'll just pick a hotel for you a lot of the time or like what flight, you know, it thinks is the most efficient. Jesse's goal is to basically create AI agents for customers, which like live in this little device you wear and act as you online to handle tasks you'd normally use your phone to do. So you can tell you rabbit to book you an Uber, you can have a book you a flight or you can have it plan your trip to a foreign country.

SPEAKER_10: That sounds really bad. It sounds so fucking bad. Rabbit's like, 'hey, how would you like a middle speed seat on the air?' Yeah, middle, sufficient as hell.

SPEAKER_02: Spirit so cheap. Now you can you can direct it more, but then that just seems like, well, yeah, that's what I'm already doing on my computer. Why is it easiest just to like work through a vocal chatbot that might not understand me? Or at least we'll be as much friction as like, yeah, when I click touch my phone and it hits the wrong thing, right? I just don't see that I'm saving much here. No one also seems to know how Rabbit's going to integrate with all these apps. And because that means their device has to have access to them for you. And that's kind of a big ask for all of these different companies. That said, and no one knows by the way how secure it's going to be, but no, what it's C.E.S. was listening either because the first 10,000 preorder models that opened at C.E.S. sold out instantly. That doesn't mean a lot of normal people are going to buy it. It means a lot of tech freaks wanted this thing.

SPEAKER_06: You know, that is the thing too is like, yeah, if you're at C.E.S. you're already you're already drinking the Kool-Aid. Yes. You know, and I'm very much it's so funny because I'm very much that guy or I was very much that guy who wanted to be on that cusp of technology. And I feel like, you know, in my early 20s, it seems so cool because you're like, yeah, I want to be Iron Man. I want to just have full control. And then you kind of get to the point where you start if you have enough self reflection, you notice that you're just kind of you're using technology to do things that you could just do for much simpler and cheaper. Like, for example, like when you get these apps and then I'm like sitting in a photo editor for like 50 minutes just to make it look like it was shot on film. And I was like, I can buy a disposable can like that exists. And what's great is when you now when you develop them, they put it, they email it to you so it can go on Instagram. It's going to take longer. But arguably, you might get some post flick clarity. Maybe that pick that didn't look good. Isn't now on the internet. Or, you know, you can like spread it out. But I am getting very, like, you are so much more thoughtful in that than like anybody involved in this product has been over the course of their entire life.

SPEAKER_02: Now, a couple of skeptics who have given reviews have already noted problems. Richard Lawler of The Verge was like, this thing is not built for left handed people to use like they forgot that left handed people existed. And so they designed it in a way that specifically a pain in the ass, which yes. There's also they brag they have this camera that can like move on its own so it can cover stuff in front of it or behind it. And a commenter on Lawler's article was like, it's a pretty fundamental design principle that you don't add moving parts if you don't need them. And there's plenty of space in this for a camera in the front and the back, which is one less point of failure, one less thing for shit to get gunked up in. This is actually bad design. They're bragging about this, but it's a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of other issues in there. You know, we'll see. It looks like it's going to be a lot thicker than a smartphone. I just don't know the degree to which a regular same Google Glass issue, right? Yeah. Do you want a second thing that you have to keep on you? Like alongside your smart phone?

SPEAKER_06: That's just going to be my question. So I'm glad. So is this a something that should be replacing your phone or is this another thing that you are supposed to be holding on to?

SPEAKER_02: I think the goal is for it to eventually replace it, but at this point, you will still need to have both. So like carry another thing, you know, you know, walking around like a drug dealer. You have two different. It's kind of it's a big device and it's not tiny and it has a big screen. So it's just like, well, you just made a different kind of smartphone. Again, what am I gaining? Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: It's what he's holding in this video, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Okay. And what more is like that on top of tech person is definitely the person who carries a power bank with them. So that's a look and that's me. So that's three things you're rocking with. I know I have so many power banks and yeah. And ADHD has blocked every single one of them from being useful because I forget to charge them or I forget to bring them.

SPEAKER_10: It also just doesn't look comfortable. It's bigger than his hand.

SPEAKER_02: Oh, yes. It's not a whole lot. We'll get a better look at it in a second because I want to show you when he's talking, he's trying to make the case for this and one of like he spends a significant portion of his not very long keynote on him, Rick rolling himself in the most iffy. You've got to fucking watch this. It is so painful.

SPEAKER_12: Our one has an eye on board camera designed for advanced computer vision. It can analyze surroundings and take actions in real time. So activate the eye. Just double tap the button.

SPEAKER_02: Oh, funny seeing you here, Rick. It's a picture of Rick Astley that he points at at.

SPEAKER_07: Let me take a look. Never going to give you up. I know enjoy.

SPEAKER_12: What am I getting Rick rolling my own keynotes? Let's go on to the next one.

SPEAKER_06: I'm reading a free tech keynote speaker to take input class.

SPEAKER_02: I don't recommend that to normal people.

SPEAKER_06: Because you're like no selling your own joke. Just like what? You're not even laughing at it. Why am I going to laugh?

SPEAKER_02: I will say this that was scripted almost exactly the way Tim Robinson would have written it. Oh, man. But Sam Richardson could have delivered that bit better. Oh, 100%. So that is very funny. But I find this next clip more disturbing because it shows this kind of desire that the people that are the early adopters here have not just for more convenience, but to hand over like the power to choose to a robot that's basically just pulling the first advertised result from Google. Like it's kind of messed up.

SPEAKER_12: I can also use R1 to order food. Get me a 12 inch pizza from Pizza Hut delivered to here. The most ordered option on the app is fine.

SPEAKER_07: Ordering a 12 inch pizza from Pizza Hut. Since you mentioned that the most ordered option is fine, I will select that for you. I just created an order for a 12 inch pizza. It's going to be hand tossed with a classic marinara sauce and topped with regular cheese. Please confirm your order.

SPEAKER_02: That sounds really good. I just confirmed an order. He is to click it again. Just like on a smartphone. Look at the device and click it.

SPEAKER_06: Here's a freebie for any of even Richard Lawler who has been in the game for a long time. But any of your tech bloggers just do a side by side with this video and physically do everything he's doing real time. Because a pizza would have been ordered way faster if you would have just pulled out your phone.

SPEAKER_02: Well, and you could get the pizza you want.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I don't want the 12 inch classic marinara most ordered pizza. I want this shit. I actually like. That's so weird. Yeah. Yeah. Also, who orders a 12 inch pizza from Pizza Hut? Nobody. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: What? No way is that the most ordered product from Pizza Hut. I don't believe it.

SPEAKER_06: Who is definitely paying nonsense?

SPEAKER_02: Yes. Yeah. It's just like, yeah. And there's the next clip. I don't think we'll actually play it. But like it is, it's him saying, hey, playing out like a three day vacation in London for me. And as far as I can tell, the AI goes for like the first top 10 list of things to do in London that it finds, which was probably written by an AI and then makes an itinerary based on those. And it's like, first off, are you that basic second planning a vacation is fun. Is that not a thing that you like want to do?

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. You're so right. Why would you? Because I look, the reason you would go to like a travel agent is because they are experts at it. They're going to find the most fun thing for you. But outside of that, yeah, I want to play in the cool stuff I'm going to do, you know, and yeah, what about people with fears, you know, or people without skills, which is definitely going to be a large margin of people who do this. So you you're in London now. You're you're you're you're in a minute takes you on a trip to Malta to go scuba diving. You don't even know how to swim. And now you sit in there. You sit in there like you already paid for, bro.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. You let your fucking thing work for you. It's on you. Yeah. It's silly, right? And I don't want to be I'm going to say this is not the most direct parallel to cult shit we'll have. But watching this, I couldn't help but think about a cult that was like the subject of our second episode for this year, The Finders. And it was one of those things. The guy, Marion Petty, who ran it was like running games is the way he framed it. And people would join the cult and give up their agency and he'd tell them go take a job in this city or like go follow this guy and take notes on him for a year or like have a kid and raise it this way. And this is stuff like this is really common within cults. One of the appeals of a cult to a lot of people is that you both get a sense of purpose by following the cult and whatever things that's going to do. And you give up the burden of having to choose a life for yourself. And this is such a common thing in cult dynamics that psychologist Robert Lifton, who's kind of one of the foundational minds in studying cults, described it as voluntary self-surrender^[2]. And it's a major characteristic of a cult. Many of the finders were not, you know, these are not dumb people. These are not like rubes. These are not hillbillies. As they're often portrayed in our popular media, a lot of the finders had Ivy League degrees, one of them owned an oil company. And these guys still handed their lives over to a cult leader. Haruki Murakami, writing about Aum Shinrikyo, which is the cult that set off a bunch of poison gas in the Tokyo subway, noted that many of its members were doctors or engineers who quote actively sought to be controlled. I found a lot of this really information on the fundamental characteristics of what makes something a cult in an article by Zoe Heller published for the New Yorker back in 2021^[2:1]. At the time, she was kind of looking at QAnon and trying to decide, there's not like a clear guy. And there's, that's the cult leader. And there's not like a geographic center to this. And usually there is with cults in history. Does this still qualify? And I think a lot of people would agree that like, yeah, it does. I think a lot of experts tend to agree that, yeah, it does. And when she was looking at the QAnon movement as a cult, Heller noted this. Robert Lifton suggests that people with certain kinds of personal history are more likely to experience such a longing. Those with quote, an early sense of confusion or dislocation, or at the opposite extreme, an early experience of unusually intense family milieu control. But he stresses that the capacity for total is submission lurks in all of us and is probably rooted in childhood, the prolonged period of dependence during which we have no choice but to attribute to our parents and exaggerated omnipotence. And I found particularly the bit where he's talking about like, yeah, if you have an early sense of confusion or dislocation makes people crave this kind of to give up this kind of control and responsibility. The people running these AI companies, and maybe not necessarily at the very top because I think those tend to be pretty cynical, realistic human beings. But like a lot of the people who are in them and a lot of the people who are latching on to AI as a fandom online are people whose childhoods and adolescence is like all of ours were shaped by 9-11, the dislocation and change that that caused. And their young adulthoods, a lot of these people like us will have come of age around the time of the 2008 crash. Many of the people who are younger in the AI fan base are maybe zoomers and stuff. And a lot of them are people who have really ugly ideas about like artists shouldn't charge for shit or whatever. But also, these are people who a lot of them came into their careers, went into STEM fields because they were told coming up, the tech industry is the same thing. The tech industry is the safest place to make a good living for yourself. And that all fell apart a couple of years ago. It started to at least tech layoffs began. So again, dislocation, chaos, the sense that like, what else am I going to entrust my life to? I thought I had a plan and it fell apart.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you know, this is where if he's going to get real philosophical and big player. But I just finished All About Love by Bell Hooks. And you know, she often talks about like the wandering life with lovelessness and that searching for it and not having it. And I feel like that goes hand in hand with what you're saying, right? Where it's like, I want a sense of belonging and I want to feel like I'm a part of people. And whether that is running into Target and trampling people for Stanley Cups or it's being a part of like what you perceive to be the next big thing. Like, I think that is the biggest kind of selling point for a lot of these AI people is like, this is the future. Like, that is almost every person who starts a 50 tweet thread with shitty examples of why AI rock starts it with. This is the future and you just got to get over it. And there are so many people who just want to be on the ground floor of that. They want to be the people who were on it because how many times, even I, you know, when you have that like time machine question, you're like, oh, stock and Starbucks. Oh, an apple, you just want to be there before it gets big. So, so when it really at the end of the day, it all comes down to commerce. You want to be at the top when it all shifts. And that is actually the danger in this for me is the commerce. I think about it often because, you know, like you're saying, it, it, like orders the top Google search. Google is currently in courts right now fighting against, you know, basically shaking down companies to see who would be the top one. So like the future of this being actually a, you know, a useful app kind of lives now in that case because if Google wins and they can put whoever's on top, that's only going to make it more valuable where they place who's on top because people are using these weird rabbits, you know, exactly. It's, yeah, it is to them. They see the beginning of the future. And I feel like to me, I'm just looking at all the ways it can be abused because if we just look at everything that has come before us, we have to think of the ways that it has been abused

SPEAKER_02: and all the ways it'll be a worse future, you know, and I think I really like that you brought up the panic they try to incite and the rest of us, the like the FOMO where it's like, this is the future. Get on board or you're going to get left behind. Right. That is, that is the cult recruitment tactic. Right. And what they're trying to do, I just brought up that a lot of the people who are most vulnerable to this are the folks who like, yeah, they have this sense of like insecurity, dislocation. And they see getting on board with this early. They feel like a sense of security there. And by saying, you're going to get left behind. This is the only way forward. You won't be competitive. If you don't embrace this stuff that they're trying to induce that sense of fear and dislocation to make people vulnerable. And I want to read another quote from that art from that, that New Yorker article. The less control we feel we have over our circumstances, the more likely we are to entrust our fates to a higher power. A classic example of this relationship was provided by the anthropologist, brought us La Milano whiskey, who found that fishermen in the trow B and islands off the coast of New Guinea engaged in more magic rituals the further out to see they went and I think we all feel like we're getting further out to see these days, right? Like that's, that's, it's not hard to see why like, yeah, I'm near the shore. What? I don't believe in anything but what's right in front of me. And then like you can't say anything but water and you're like, no, there's a God and I can keep him happy.

SPEAKER_06: Yes, yes indeed. It's, it's tough. Yeah, everyone's just kind of grasping at what they can to just bolster themselves and sometimes you're grasping at some weird stuff.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's, you know, it's noted often by, I think a lot of particularly atheists on the internet that like church attendances down people who identify as part of an organized religion. That is at its lowest level, basically ever. And this is true. These are real trends and they have, they have real effects but I don't think the fact that less people are religious in the traditional sense means they're less superstitious or spiritual. Yes. It's just that what they invest with that belief has changed in part because they've seen the world dislocate so far out of what most priests and, and other sort of like religious heads are capable of sort of explaining or comforting them over. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Religion is less comforting in a world is advanced as ours. For most people. Now this may seem like a reach still to kind of call what's going on around AI occult and I get that I ask you to bear with me here. And I do want to note there's nothing wrong with the inherent technology that we often call AI or at least not with all of it. That's a, because it's used as such a wide banner term for stuff is very just like a text recognition program that can listen to human voice and create an on the fly transcription. That's an AI. That's an example of that kind of technology, right? Like it gets folded in there. That's one of the things an AI has to do recognizing language in like facial recognition to recognizing faces. If you're ever going to have an actual artificial intelligence, those are two of the baseline capabilities that it needs. Chatbots obviously are a big part of this along with like the sundry tools that are being used now to clone voices to generate deep fakes and fuel are now constant trip into the uncanny valley. CES featured some real products that actually did harness the promise of machine learning in ways that I thought were cool. As I noted, it could happen here. There's like this telescope. It uses machine learning to like basically clean up images that you take with it at night when there's like a lot of light pollution. So you can see more clearly. And I'm like, yeah, that's dope. That's great. But that lived alongside a lot of nonsense. You know, chat GPT for dogs was a real sign I saw. And like there was an AI assisted flashlight to help you not be a premature jacket.

SPEAKER_06: Because of course, that's the one that popped on my timeline is like, and it was like, and then they gamified it where you go to different planets. You defeat the planet. So I'm like, what do you keep talking about beating the planets? So how do I lose? Is it when I bus about bus you lost? Because you're now introducing shame to sex again. And I thought we finally got out of the way. I can't be level one.

SPEAKER_02: Those kind of bad ideas. That's all par for the course for CES. But what I saw this year and last year, not just at CES, but just over the year in the tech industry from futurist fanboys and titans of industry like Mark Anderson, is a kind of unhinged messianic fervor that compares better to Scientology than it does to the iPhone. And I mean that literally. Mark Andreessen is the co-founder of Netscape and the capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. He is one of the most influential investors in tech history. And he's put more money into AI startups than almost anyone else. Last year he published something called the 'techno-optimist manifesto' on the Andreessen Horowitz website. On the surface, it's a peon to the promise of AI and an exhortation to embrace the promise of technology and disregard pessimism. Plenty of people called the piece out for its logical fallacies. For example, it ignores that a lot of tech pessimism is due to real harm caused by some of the companies Andreessen invested in, like Facebook. What's attracted less attention is the messianic overtones of everything Andreessen believes. Quote, we believe artificial intelligence can save lives if we let it. Medicine along with many other fields is in the stone age compared to what we can achieve with joint human and machine intelligence working on new cures. There are scores of common causes of death that can be fixed with AI from plane crashes to pandemics to wartime friendly fire. Now, he's right that there's some medical uses for AI. It's being used right now to help improve the ability to recognize certain kinds of cancer. And there's the potential for stuff like in-home devices that let you scan your skin to see if you're developing a melanoma. And there's debate still over how useful it's going to be in medical research. I've talked to recently some experts and I've read some stuff that like there are some reasons for caution too. For some of the same reasons we should have caution with this everywhere. There's also disinformation that spread medically with AI even to doctors. And some of the patterns that using this stuff gets medical professionals into can make them discount certain diagnoses as well. So I don't say that to like say there's not going to be some significant uses for some of the way this technology works medically. Some aspects of AI will save lives. It's just the evidence right now doesn't suggest it's going to completely revolutionize medical science. It's another advancement that will be good in some ways and there will be some negative aspects of it too, right? It's also very much not fair to say that like we're going to reduce deaths for human beings as a result of AI because right now the nation of Israel is using an AI program called The Gospel to assist it in aiming its airstrikes, which have been widely condemned for their out exceptional outstanding in many cases genocidal level of civilian casualties. It's just outrageous.

SPEAKER_06: Oh 100% and you know that's exactly what's going on is a genocide and you know the language and none of these speeches says that's much fair. Even more so, yeah like you're saying another thing I want to point out which you might have been about to say and I'm already jumping ahead is how I think it was chat GPT that has quietly switched their terms of service to say that it wouldn't be used for like weapons to hurt people.

SPEAKER_02: They're going to use this shit for weapons for sure.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah and now it has been quietly scrubbed from those terms of service and we do need to talk about that because there's just so many things that we have grown accustomed to with tech that I think is dangerous as we get into things that have more room for error because we're used to updated terms of services on our iPhone, right? Every time we grab an update it's like here's a new terms of service and you just kind of scroll through it and you go, yeah, because you're like, yeah, you know this is just a phone. It's not going to be used for anything weird yet. So you're comfortable but like when you're doing the same thing with these chat GPT machine learning situations where you're agreeing and you're agreeing, okay, I will help this thing learn. And now you are just actively helping it learn how to be an assassin, what happens there.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah and it's again it's this back and forth where on one hand there is some technology like AI enabled robots that can go run onto a battlefield and pick up an injured soldier. I have no desire to see some random private bleed to death in a foreign country. Fine with that or anti missile missiles right using AI to intercept and stop a missile from blowing up in a civilian area sounds fine like I don't I don't want random people to die from missiles. But it's also going to be used to target those missiles and to say like based on some shit we analyzed on Twitter or whatever we think wiping out this grid square of apartment buildings will really get a lot of the bad guys. Oh yeah, best one at least we should blow them up. Exactly right. It's just it's certainly it's certainly not fair to say there won't be benefits but it's absolutely unclear in every field of endeavor whether or not they will outweigh the harms right. And even if they do to what extent you know because a lot of what I'm saying suggests that even if the benefits outweigh the harms in a lot of fields. It's still not going because of the extent of the harms in part it's still not going to be a massive sea change right. There are a lot of reasons for caution but Mark has no time for doubters in fact to him doubting the benefits of AGI. Artificial general intelligence is the only true sin of his religion quote we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives deaths were prevented that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. And that's fucked up. That's really dangerous to start talking like that. Oh yeah. And this is the more direct cult comment here. I want you to compare the claim mark made above that slowing down AI is identical to murder. I want you to compare that to the claims the Church of Scientology's makes because the Church of Scientology they have this list of practices and the beliefs that they call tech right. And they believe that by taking on tech by engaging with it people can become clear of all of their flaws and by doing that you can help you can fix all of the problems in the world right. The Church of Scientology on his websites claims that its followers will quote rid the planet of insanity war and crime and in its place create a civilization in which sanity and peace exist. How is that in any way different from Mark Anderson saying all of the shit that he's saying right then it's going to like create this this this we're going to revolutionize medicine we're going to like end friendly fire we're going to cure pandemics we're going to stop car crash deaths. What is what is the difference right. And Scientology uses that claim that Scientology tech is so necessary it's going to fix all these problems so anyone who gets in the way of the Church of Scientology and the deployment of this tech for mankind's benefit is subject to what they call fair game. A person declared fair game quote may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist. And again Mark Anderson has not said that in his techno optimist manifesto in fact he makes some claims about like none of no people are our enemies right. But if you're saying you're a murderer for slowing this down it's not hard to see how some people might adopt a practice like fair game eventually right that's how where else does this go is my what do we do with murderers what is I feel like the general rule across all creeds, yeah across all beliefs is typically murderers are bad and should die.

SPEAKER_02: At least be punished, right? There's a punishment for murder most people agree yeah

SPEAKER_02: So the more you dig into Anderson's theology, the more it starts to seem like a form of technocapitalist Christianity. AI is the savior. In the cases of devices like the rabbit, it might literally become our own personal Jesus. And who, you might ask, is God? Quote, we believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence, an exploratory evolutionary adaptive system.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, God.

SPEAKER_02: Through this concept of reality, capitalism itself and capitalize the sea there because it's a deity has chosen to bring artificial general intelligence into being. All the jobs lost, all the incoherent flots I'm choking are in and out. All the Amazon drop shippers using chat GPT to write product descriptions. These are but the market expressing its will. Artists have to be plagiarized. Children need to be presented with hours of procedurally generated slop and lies on YouTube so that we, one day, can reach the promised land of artificial general intelligence. If he isn't it worth it?

SPEAKER_06: Oh my God. It's so, I didn't know, you know, one of the biggest criticism with AI is that it, you know, it is one of the effects of when, you know, creativity and commerce meets, commerce will always try and kill creativity. Yes. Because it is commerce is more concerned with the buck than it is the outcome or what it takes to get said buck. And that was, that was going to be a whole thing I was going to drop at some point and they just said it for me. They just sent like, like they, I didn't, I thought it was more veiled. I thought it was more hidden. But you know, that is, that is why you can, you can try and say that it is ethical to take from artists because we're making it easier for you. Your fingers hurt doing all that drawing, but it learns from you. And, and, and, and, and, you know, don't ask how you're going to get paid, but if it learns from you, we can, we can give the people what they want without causing you all this labor, you know, but who gets the money? It's, it's always the dork behind the computer who did the code that is just essentially stealing from all of these people and learning from them and then just producing this amalgation of everything they've done.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Also, I should note, I'm trying to be consistent about this. I wrote it down. And then I think slipped into it. It's Andreessen, Mark Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz. It's just a weird name that I'm not used to saying. I, I wrote this down and then immediately forgot to correct myself at the start of the podcast. Again, folks, hack and a fraud, but you know who can own, well, actually, I won't say only humans can be hacks and frauds like that because the AI is absolutely mispronounced shit and gets shit wrong too. I guess that maybe they are getting conscious. Can they build an AI that's as much a hack and a fraud as I am? We'll see. So no. Thank you Sophie. I appreciate it. AGI is treated as an inevitability by people like Sam Altman of OpenAI who need it to be at least perceived as inevitable so their company can have the largest possible IPO, right? There's a lot of money on the line in the people with money believing all of the promises that Andreessen is making. This Messianic fervor has also been adopted by squadrons of less influential tech executives who simply need AI to be real because it solves a financial problem. Venture capital funding for Big Tech collapsed in the months before chat GPT hit public consciousness. The reason CES was packed with so many random AI branded products was that sticking those two letters on a new company is like, they treat it like a talisman, right? It's this ritual to bring back the rainy season. If you throw AI in your shit, people might buy it. There's versions of this like laptop makers are throwing AI in everything they do now just because laptop sales soared during the start of the pandemic but they plummeted because people don't need to buy laptops all the fucking time. Most people wear them out, right? Yes, exactly. And again, this comes in if you can get people in the code, if you get them scared that they're going to fall behind without AI, then maybe they'll buy a new AI and I have laptop because they're like, well, this is what I got to do to stay competitive, you know? The terminology that these rich tech executives use around AI is generally more grounded than Andreessen's prophesying, right? But it's just as irrational. The most unhinged thing I heard in person at CES was from Bartley Richardson, an AI infrastructure manager at NVIDIA who opened a panel on deepfakes by announcing, I think everybody has a copilot. Everybody's making a co-pilot. Everybody wants a co-pilot, right? There's going to be a Bartley co-pilot, maybe sometime in the future. That's just a great way to accelerate us as humans, right? And it's funny, he's named Bartley. If you know your old Star Trek and you can remember Barkley, the Sad Ensign, he sounds like that guy and resembles him.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, man. What's funny about that speech is it sounds like he's trying to convince himself to. He's like, he's like, he's going to accelerate us, right? Yeah, we're not wasting our time, aren't we?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah. Again, later in a separate panel in NVIDIA in-house counsel, Nicki Pope, who's like the only skeptic they let on, cited internal research showing consumer trust in brands fell whenever they used AI. This gels with research published last December that found around 25% of customers trust decisions made by AI less than those made by people^[3]. No one on stage bothered to ask Barkley. It was like, okay, you want to use this thing. We know your own company has data that it makes companies less trustworthy. Are you worried that if you use it, people won't trust you? Like, is that not in your head? And that was kind of the pattern at CES. All of the benefits of AI with some very specific exceptions. Most of the benefits of AI were touted in vague terms. It'll make your company nimble. It'll make it more efficient, you know? It'll accelerate you. Harms, though, while they were discussed less often, they were discussed with a terrible specificity that stood out next to the vagueness. One of the guys in the Deepfake panel was Ben Coleman, and he's the CEO of Reality Defender, which is a company that detects artificially generated media, right? Their job is to let you know if something's AI generated. And he claims that his company expects half a trillion dollars in fraud worldwide this year just from voice cloning AI. Not fraud from AI, just the fake voice AI, half a trillion dollars.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, here's the thing, too, that I think is the scariest part of AI that I don't think we talked about yet, is that everyone can use it. You know, like, this isn't a thing that is like, oh, well, it's, you know, these companies, it's too expensive. People are priced out, and we just got to hope that everyone's good. You're getting like SpongeBob, wrapping Kendrick lyrics on TikTok. You know, my buddy, Benium, jokingly, like promoted his show and made it look like he was having a FaceTime with Obama, and it was like, pretty good. The only reason you knew it was fake was because of just the nature of the video, but like, at what point is someone going to stop and go, hey, we shouldn't have technology where someone can impersonate world leaders.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's bad. And, you know, to be honest, that's not even just because like, I think everyone is ready for the idea that like, yeah, people are faking Obama or by because we've done little versions of that for years now. I think the scariest thing is people aren't ready for their loved ones to be imitated by AI, and that is a thing that is happening in 2023. And this has happened to a lot of people. There was a specific case that kind of went viral of this mother who got a call from what sounded like her kidnapped daughter. And like, the AI generated the voice of her daughter, and then a guy was like, give us money or we'll fucking murder her, right? And her kid was never kidnapped. She very nearly sent the money because who wouldn't, right? Yeah. Like, if you don't know that that's a thing that can do, who would not? Yes. Yeah. Like, that's a, that's a, and it's the AI was able to clone her daughter's voice because her daughter has a TikTok, right? It doesn't take that much, you know? And this is why, by the way, that people are talking about ways to mitigate this. I think one of them is like, have a family password or something where it's like, all right, if I'm fucking kidnapped, I'm going to say the password, you know? So that, you know, some random person with your TikTok won't know it, or at least has to try harder to guess it. So great. Thanks to AI. Now we have to have passwords for our families in real life. Cool.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. If you, if you want to see that, thanks, Kim, you got to know the password.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Fucking great. Yeah. At CES and at the substacks and newsletters of all these AI cultists, there's no time to dwell on problems like these. Full steam ahead is the only serious suggestion they make. You should all be excited. Google's VP of engineering, Bishad Bizati tells us during a panel discussion with McDonald's executive. If you're not using AI, Bishad warned, you're missing out. And I heard versions, variations of the same sentiment over and over again, right? Not just this stuff is great, but like you're kind of doomed if you don't use it. And I will give Nikki Pope was the only skeptic really who had a speaking role in CES. It is not coincidental that she was an academic and a black woman because her background is studying algorithmic bias in the justice system. Yes. And so she, she, she had some really good points about like the actual dangers this stuff had. She was on this, the panel, she was almost governing AI risk and kind of her like the partner on the panel, the guy she was talking with was Adobe VP, Alexandra Coston. And she urged the audience, I want you to think about the direct harm algorithmic bias could do to marginalized communities. Quote, if we create a that desperately treats one group tremendously in favor of another group, the group that is disadvantaged or disenfranchised, that's an existential threat to that group. And she was specifically like people talk about the existential threat of an AI going crazy and killing us all, but like that's not as realistic as what we know will happen.

SPEAKER_11: Yes.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah. When you have these banks that like automatically, you know, are using AI to try and approve, you know, loans and Deontay since his name and they're like, not approved.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly. It's like, no, good. And I am glad she was there. She again, she still works for a company that's going to make money off of this. She's not like a doomer on it, but like at least one person was being like, could we please acknowledge there are dangers?

SPEAKER_06: I know, because here's the thing is, and I truly believe this and you were basically saying this earlier that AI as a tool is fine. Yeah. I mean, when you when it is in a tool is something that is always held and used by a human that there's the checks and balances. It is only as evil as the person who's using it. And that is just any item, physical or digital will ever, you know, will always be under. But the moment you're like, I'm going to give you free reign based on information. And how many times has an article gone online that was like, it's scanned Reddit or it's scanned Twitter and it's racist now, you know, like there's. And we still like went full steam ahead with producing this and thinking we're right. We know, especially when you see a lot of these tech leaders being predominantly white men, and we know that in general, most white men don't care about protecting marginalized people. They care about getting their bottom dollar. They see it as a rare occurrence because they don't live that existence. They don't have the data—pun intended—to build something to defend against it because it's not a real problem to them because they don't see it. And that is beyond just them being them and more into as humans, a lot of times, if you don't do the work to see it and understand what happens to other people outside of your perspective, you're just going to believe that it's not real and it's or people are exaggerating or it's this and it's that. And when you are gung-ho and you have drunk the Kool-Aid, that is the AI Kool-Aid, and you are telling people that this is the future. We have to do it. You're going to push ahead. But like we've literally seen a clear-cut example of what happens when you push past safety and you just do what you want to do just because you have a whole bunch of money and a mad cat's controller. Like it gets dangerous.

SPEAKER_02: So as you started talking about like the dangers of certain tools, right? And how the value of the tools has you. I literally looked over at the gun on my table, right? And we all agree, even people who really like them, there should be regulation and I think the bastards are like, agree, more regulation, but they are like again, not to say that it's sufficient. But there are a lot of laws about like where you can carry a gun legally, how you can buy a gun, right? And because people understand that like, yeah, if a tool is that powerful, there should be limitations and things that you can do that get them taken away from you forever, right? I don't know how we do that with AI, but I don't think that's a reason not to try. Right? Yes.

SPEAKER_06: You don't do what they did in that movie Hackers. And it's like you're just ran from the internet till you graduate high school or whatever it was.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah. Now, Costen claimed that the biggest issue, again, so Nikki, Nikki Pope is like, yeah, I think this stuff could really hurt marginalized communities. And Alexandria Costen from Adobe responded that like, well, I agree, but the biggest risk of generative AI isn't fraud or plagiarism. It's not using AI, right? He claims like, this is as big as the internet and we all just have to get on board. And then I'm going to read verbatim how he ends this particular statement. I think humanity will find a way to tame it to our best interest, hopefully. Hopefully.

SPEAKER_06: Great. Cool. No way.

SPEAKER_02: Why? Awesome. Awesome. And the whole week was like that. Again, these really specific devastating harms and then vague claims of like, yeah, we're all just going to have to do it. You know, and I brought up Scientology earlier, but when I think about touting like vague claims of world saving benefits alongside, and it's going to hurt to when you have to accept the pain, I think of Keith Raniere, right? The next same guy. We all remember Keith, you know, like most cult leaders, Raniere promised his mostly female followers. You'll get all these benefits. I'm going to like, he'll you'll be extra productive. You'll be super good in your business, super good in your career, but you have to follow my commands because I have to retrain you on some stuff. And so it's going to be uncomfortable, right? And the end result of this is a bunch of them branded them their flesh and part took in sex trafficking. Yeah. You know, these techs, these tech executives are not Raniere, but I think they see money in [takin] some of his tactics, right? The benefits are so good. We just have to accept some pain. You know, I got to hurt you to rebuild you better. Now, all of the free money right now is going to AI. And these guys know the best way to chase it is to throw logic to the wind and promise the masses that if we take it, we're going to make it better. And that's the masses that if we just let this technology run roughshod over every field of human endeavor, it will be worth it in the end. This is rational for them because they're going to make a lot of money, but it is an irrational thing for us to let them do. Why would we want to put artists and illustrators who we like out of a job? Why would we accept a world where it is impossible to talk to a human when you have a problem and you're instead thrown to a churning swarm of chatbots? Why would we let Sam Altman, Hoover up the world's knowledge and resell it back to us? We wouldn't. And we won't unless he can convince us that doing so is the only way to solve the problems that scare us. Climate change, the cure for cancer, and into war, or at least into the fear that we will all be victimized by crime or terrorism. All of these have been touted as benefits of the coming AI age if we can just reach the AI promise land. And we're going to talk about some of the people who believe in that promise land and what they think it'll be like. But first, if you know what is the real promise land?

SPEAKER_02: So I want to talk about Silicon Valley's latest subculture emphasis on the cult. Effective accelerationism or E/ACC, EAC, I think is probably how you could pronounce it. The gist of this movement fits with Mark Anderson's manifesto. AI development must be accelerated without restriction, no matter the cost. EAC has been covered by a number of journalists, but most of that coverage misses how very spiritual, some of it seems. One of the inaugural documents of the entire belief system opens with the statement, accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which is scarcely begun. Again, we see a statement that AI has somehow enmeshed itself with capitalism's ability to understand itself. It is some way intelligent and can know itself. And I don't know how else you interpret this, but as belief in a God built by atheists who like money a lot. The argument continues that nothing matters more than extending the quote, light of consciousness into the stars, a belief Elon Musk himself is championed. AI is the force the market will use to do this and quote, this force cannot be stopped. This is followed by wild claims that next generation life forms will be created inevitably by AI. And then a few sentences down, you get the kicker. Those who are first to usher in and control the hyper parameters of AI slash techno capital have immense agency over the future of consciousness. So it is not just a God, it's a God we can build and we can use it to shape the future of our reality to our own whims. And again, some of these guys will acknowledge maybe it'll kill all of us, but as long as it makes a technology that spreads to the stars, that's worth it because we've kept the light of consciousness alive. Wow, that's not I don't think the mainstream view, but you can definitely find people saying that and they'll be like, if you attempt to slow this process down, there are risks and they're saying the same thing and reason is you stop it from doing all these wonderful things. But also, I do kind of view that as a veiled threat, right? Because if if AI is the only way to spread the light of consciousness to the void, and that is the only thing that matters, what do you do to the people who seek to stop you, right? Who seek to stop AI? I actually am fine with extending the light of consciousness into space. I'm a big fan of Star Trek. I just don't believe that the intelligent hyper aware capitalism is the thing to do it. Again, too much of a Star Trek guy for that. When I look at the people who want to follow Mark Andreessen's vision, who find what these EAC people are saying is not just compelling, but inspiring, I think of another passage from that New Yorker article by Zoe Heller. Quote, not passive victims, they themselves sought to be controlled. Haruki Murakami wrote of the members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult who's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, killed 13 people. In his book Underground, Murakami describes most Aum members as having deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood in the spiritual bank of the cult's leader, Shoko Asahara, submitting to a higher authority to someone else's account of reality was, he claims, their aim. Now, the EAC manifesto newsletter thing used the term techno capital in conjunction with AI. This is a word that you can find a few different definitions on because it's a wonky, like weird academia philosophy term, and there's a number of folks who will argue about how it ought to be described. But this is broadly kind of the same thing that Andreessen is referring to when he talks about the market as this intelligent discovery organism, right? And while there are a few different ways you'll see this defined, the EAC people and Andreessen himself are thinking about how philosopher Nick Land, who's the guy who's generally credited with like popularizing the term techno capitalism, defines it. Land is one of many advocates of the idea of a technological singularity, the point where technological growth driven by improvements in computing becomes irreversible, the moment at which a super intelligent machine begins inventing more and more of itself and expanding tech in a way that humans can't. As one of Land's fans summarized in a Medium post, a runaway reaction of self-improvement loops will almost instantaneously create a coherent super intelligent machine. It is man's last invention, the most notable of industries, AI, nanotechnology, femto technology, and genetic engineering will erupt with rapid advancements, quickly exceeding human intelligence. Now, obviously, the way Land writes is, again, kind of worth reading, but perhaps too dense for an entertainment podcast. So I'm going to read again from a substack called Regress Studies by a writer named Santi Ruiz, kind of talking about this idea of techno capitalism that Land has from a more critical standpoint. Quote, Nick Land who coined the term is a misanthrope, he doesn't like humans much, so the idea that there could be an entity coming, already being born, drawing itself into existence by hyperstitionally preying on the dreams of humanity, cannibalizing their desires, wearing the invisible hand is an ideological skin, he's into that. Techno economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runway, as he would put it, and that's good, you're being colonized by an entity that doesn't care about you, except in so far as you make a good, we'll talk about hyperstition in a little bit here. So Land is the guru of accelerationism. You might not be surprised to learn that he is at a voted following among the far right, this is because he is quite racist, anti-democratic, and obsessed with eugenics. Now, his eugenics are not your grandpappies eugenics, for him it involves gene editing, which will be available to greater extent than ever thanks to AI. Land claims to dislike white nationalists and conventional racists because they don't see the whole picture. Quote, and this is me quoting from one of Land's publications. Racial identarianism envisages a conservation of comparative genetic isolation, generally determined by boundaries corresponding to conspicuous phenotypic variation. It is race realist, and that admits to seeing what everyone does in fact see, which is to say consistent patterns of striking correlated multidimensional variety between human populations or subspecies. Its unrealism lies in its projections. That's pretty racist. Land is listed by name in Andreessen's manifesto as someone you should read for a better understanding of the wonderful optimistic future he and his ilk have planned for us. He cites extensively Gregory Cochran, who posits that space travel, spreading to the stars, will solve our race problem because it's a natural filter, basically saying some races won't make it into space. So we don't need to be violent, like we just have to spread to space and that will do our eugenics, part of it for us. So that's cool.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you know, I'm stuck on this like, you know, journey to the stars through evolution thing, because I don't know, Robert, do you play Warhammer 40?

SPEAKER_02: Oh, my, oh, God, iffy, iffy. Of course I play. I've been playing Warhammer 40K most of my life.

SPEAKER_06: Okay, because this is on a very adeptus mechanics. And I'm like, yes, absolutely. And I'm like, I'm like, what is going on here? I'm deep and well, traitor. And now I'm like, no, this is them.

SPEAKER_02: What is fun is that like Warhammer 40,000, the Deep Fluff envisions a society that it's like a hybrid between the Federation and Star Trek and what these AI, Yak people dream of that is this utopia for like 10,000 years because they develop thinking machines and then all of the thinking machines turn on them and murder everybody. And so in the future, we just lobotomize people who commit crimes and turn them into computers for us because we can't have intelligent machines anymore.

SPEAKER_06: So we're just, we're going to, that's what it looks like we're marching towards with these folks.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. And obviously the thing that the Warhammer people are inspired by is like the book Larry and Jihad and Dune, which is the more artful version of that story with less orcs, which makes it inferior in my mind, but I do love Dune.

SPEAKER_06: So, you need more red because the red makes everything fast.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, red makes it go faster.

X: Yes.

SPEAKER_02: So, Land concludes by imagining both racists and anti-racist binding together in defense of the concept of race. Right. That's what the result of AI is going to be the racists need race. You know, we're going to get so good at gene editing. The racist will get angry and the anti-racist will get angry because they're so in love with the concept of race. Well, we're just going to improve people annihilate racial differences through moving to the stars and the natural filter that that implies. By the way, the name of the article land wrote all this in is called hyper racism. So, cool guy. Glad Mark Andreessen cites him in his manifesto. Glad the biggest venture capital guy in the country. Yeah. He's like, yeah, read this dude.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Well, that's the sequel to flumes hyper realism.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So that's, yeah. And these guys don't tend to cite it as much. I think he could get in some of the deeper stuff. They're all talking about these techno capitalist concepts that Nick Land plays with. They don't talk about what I think is actually one of his most sort of insightful points, which is about a concept called hyperstition. And in brief, hyperstition is like creating things in fiction that become real and the process by which that happens. I think about that a lot when I think about things like the Butlerian Jihad, the war against the intelligent machines in Dune or, you know, what happened in the warhammer 40,000 universe. But I also think about how part of why these people are targeting creators, writers, actors, musicians, artists, like pen and paper, you know, painting artists and stuff, is because the only way out of this future they have envisioned is imagining a better one and then making it real, right? Like, and that is a thing that creatives have a role in doing. So if you can kill that ability, hand it over to the machines that you control, maybe you can stop them from this path of resistance. Motherfuckers.

SPEAKER_06: They're on. They're on to us. They're like, you want something better? We're going to take it away from you.

SPEAKER_02: So anyway, I think that's going to end it for us in part one. You know, this whole investigation in much more condensed form, just kind of really focusing specifically on the argument that there's cult dynamics to the fandom is being published in an article on Rolling Stone. I'll probably edit in like a the title or something here so you can find it. But check that out.

Evans, Robert. “The Cult of AI.” Rolling Stone (blog), January 27, 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/. ↩︎
Heller, Zoë. “What Makes a Cult a Cult?” The New Yorker, July 5, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/what-makes-a-cult-a-cult. ↩︎ ↩︎
“Consumers Failing to Embrace AI Benefits, Says Research | Pega,” May 31, 2019. https://www.pega.com/about/news/press-releases/consumers-failing-embrace-ai-benefits-says-research. ↩︎

Tech bros 1

2026-07-20T06:09:55Z

See artificial intelligence.

Robert Evans, the show host, has written a wondrous article about the matter[^1].