It's almost exactly what it says on the tin.  Now Sam Altman just said that they were close to inventing a genie that could grant any wish, and that… I mean, that's padded cell type shit. Frankly, it's an SEC intervention at the very minimum. You can't say shit like this - I would say "period," but you absolutely can't say shit like this on the run up to an IPO. But they can say whatever they want, take whatever they want, and do whatever they want. That's the demoralization operation, well underway. It has a shelf-life, though. They can only loan each other money for so long. Then, they'll socialize the losses through nationalization.  

I remember reading Manufacturing Consent, and then watching Manufacturing Consent, and then having my Consent Manufactured, and we were still on channels. The idea of channels. Even a website was a channel, a connection to a destination. It's sorta like how William Gibson could conceive of Cyberspace but not a wireless mouse. They weren't even thinking about the idea of a fully dynamic, orchestrated stream. I remember one day I was visiting Bungie back during Halo 2, and Luke Smith was telling me about how they were going to choose the server people played on because when people win too much or lose too much it wasn't the best experience. Plus, I was told, a lot of them were high as fuck. I think it's the first time I ever felt The Algorithm.

Servers used to be colloquial affairs, with locality being somewhat correlated to your region - your neighborhood. Jedi Outcast servers had a Duel mode, but the way that it worked wasn't entirely defined by the settings; there were social rules also, enforced by the infinitely sharp traditional weapon of the Jedi. It could even get weirder than that; there was a very fast server Gabe and I used to connect to in Quake 3 that for whatever reason nobody ever really logged into, potentially because it was Free-For-All. There was this bounce pad up to a higher level we used to practice mid-air rail shots against whoever was bounding on that invisible column of force. People would join sometimes, and try to play Quake, and we said no no no. This is Rail Club. Nobody, not a single soul, ever failed to conform to the Rules.

I spent the weekend going through my mom's feed with her, trying to exist in the world their daemons operate. They keep sending her stuff that makes her sad: lonely abandoned moms, no-contact kids, mournful poetry, and a lot of it is AI. And because it tugs at a silent fear, she watches them and they give her more and more of it. I was like, Mom. Look at the fingers on this steering wheel, how these two are webbed, like a duck's foot. She told me that these words were from a mother's heart.

One hesitates to "give it to them," but there is something that these machines are adept at - the manufacture of utterly bespoke hells. Sam Altman, Hellsmith.

(CW)TB out.