An interesting article about people using AI for seemingly innocuous tasks but spiral into a world of mysticism and conspiracy theories sparking a mental health crisis. I stark reminder to always remain conscious of the fact that AI has a monetary incentive to be sycophantic and keep you engaged.
Edited to link to the original article.
I really wish I had a solid argument against this theory
It’s isolated cases that would never be blamed on other technologies.
Fascist rhetoric can be defined as a rhetorical regime that like a light switch is flipped between speaking from an authoritarian position of extreme power to call for violence in a system and speaking from a position of complete helplessness to stop evil being perpetrated by said system.
It is a specific flavor of self-delusion, one perfectly enabled by a technology like AI to grow out of control like a cancer in a billionaire/fascists mind.
That’s a quote from Eco’s essay on ur-fascism, for the unfamiliar
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Which is why capitalists always ultimately bend the knee and go along with fascists, because the smart ones understand that the fascist movement is utterly unsustainable and will collapse catastrophically, and it is exactly that species of crisis that allows rich ruthless capitalists to lock in their power for generations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
The dumb capitalists just go along with the fascism because they have lobotomized their empathy and like the pure expression of worship of power.
This is the heart of the love affair between fascism and capitalism. Most capitalists actually end up being horrifically shocked by the consequences of consumating that love with fascism but by then of course it is by design too late.
A fascist overthrow of a democratic society than by definition must be a process of keeping capitalists and the average “non-political” people in society from realizing at the same time that a fascist overthrow is actually happening and the consequences are immediately brutal. Fascists seek to slow down time in some places, speed it up in others, to desynchronize this realization so that it becomes a perfectly individualized one, a series of repeating last seconds of the authoritarian state crushing someone after they had been cornered and isolated.
This also explains why Fascism is inherently unstable, it is not actually a form of governance so much as a form of cancer that preys upon governments and organizations, it exists to grow and no other reason. There is no homeostasis with Fascism, only growth and terror. It is a wave of collapse that evil agents attempt to channel for individual gain by shaping the wave to crash in particular ways, spread out and too obscured behind a haze of propaganda to make out here while it happens there… but ultimately fascism can only ever be the breaking of a wave upon lifeless nothingness no matter what ideologues try to convince us.