DO 314 - Southeastern Grasslands Institute with Dwayne Estes and @pclarkallen @RizomaSchool

DO 313 with @stephengadubato of Cracks in Postmodernity

DO 312 - Wendell Berry Retrospective with @cognazor, @TornadoNate, @RizomaSchool and @donaldantenen

DO 311 - @healy05 Manufacturing Community Every once in a while someone comes into the DO world and it is so clear how well they fit in it’s amazing you hadn’t found them yet! This is true of Mike, Chicagoan, Northsider (boo!), who has a vision for how to make good things in the world and is working to do so. Right now that looks like a manufacturing business he started, but Mike talks through his whole trajectory from fancy universities, working in politics, Chicago river ship boat captain, to trying to revitalize middle side American cities (with the help of Nick Offerman). You can support Mike’s work here: wilmot-productions.com

DO 310 - @ChHouseBooks with @jcenters and @hannahcenters interviewed by @RizomaSchool

THE RACE TO "PACE AI" IS A RUSE Reliable sources tell me Anthropic and OpenAI are working with the Department of Justice to hash out a coordinated "pacing the frontier" plan. The legal issue is that cross-company coordination might break antitrust rules—even a voluntary "pacing" agreement that doesn't affect competitors. Such "pacing" would actually buy time for stragglers like xAI and Meta to catch up. Frontier "pacing"— if voluntary—wouldn't impact the second-rate open source models at all. Much of this "pacing" effort is in response to the viral AI Doom freak-out that started building with the Hugging Face hack and exploded with that pasty Anthropic "whistleblower" saying what everyone paying attention already knew: The frontier AI execs believe their baby golems could one day come alive like some mutant brood in a subterranean lab, break containment, and launch an End of the World party that'd leave nothing but A-bomb craters and a surviving handful of human-robot symbiotes swimming in semi-animate oceans of nano swarm gray goo. Well, that's what I envision every time Elon Musk says "radical abundance" anyway. If you have a better doom dream, let's hear it. — The current "pacing the frontier" effort has continuity with another ongoing DoJ deal going back to July. That deal would allow frontier companies—including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google—to form an industry-led standards body. Adherence to these standards would be voluntary. I have no doubt any of these companies would secure regulatory capture if they could, especially Anthropic. Be that as it may, all these smooth-brained "COORDINATED ASTROTURFED PSY OP" conspiracy theories about "ONE WORLD EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM REGULATORY CAPTURE" triggered by "CYBERATTACK FALSE FLAGS" unleashed by the Antichrist are missing one important element: What is actually happening at the DOJ right now: the avoidance of hard regulation. Even with a "pacing" plan in place, there's every reason to believe the top dawgs at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and various upstarts—all given cover by the coordinated astroturfed e/acc psy op—will continue their shared mission to build digital God in a server rack. Every ambitious man wants to be first. Even those "pacing" their maniacal mission to build God. — For that philosophical reason alone, it's prudent to view every frontier AI exec as you would a pagan priest whose gods are hostile to your bloodline. Don't trust their motives. Never support their efforts. Disregard their cheerleaders and mouthpieces. Block them at every turn. Employ any legal way to bring them to heel. Force transparency. Enforce accountability for harms. Impose outside evaluators. Criminalize involuntary data collection and surveillance. Ban their worst products at the state level. Ban the big ones on the federal level. Ban AI in public classrooms. Ban suicide bots for kids. Ban goonbots for incels. Ban AI slop from all platforms. Halt mass surveillance. Ban lethal autonomous weapons. Halt the Greater Replacement. Ban artificial superintelligence. If ASI is not possible to build—and if a nuanced ban wouldn't affect your struggling start-up or your crappy open source AI running on basement GPUs—then why do you care if imaginary superintelligence is banned? On the other hand... If ASI is actually possible, why do you want to see it built? Don't we have enough infernal gods without creating a new one who can conduct cyberattacks and drone strikes? Ban it. Ban any AI development and the deployment of any AI that decreases quality of life, reduces cognitive ability, or is designed to replace meaningful work. Or, considering the difficulty of passing and enforcing such laws in the current political climate, just refuse to use their bots or buy into their bullshit propaganda. Or maybe you'd rather carry water for these tech-adled megalomaniacs. You're free to parrot their paranoid, hypocritical, and obviously "coordinated astroturfed psy ops" all you want. Outsource your mind. Love the clanker. Take the trode. It's a free country. For now.