a brave new fahrenheit 1984

the intersection of education, AI, and society to come

this seems like a simple joke, but is it?

you’re meant to think of it as “me” being oblivious, but what if instead it’s the therapist that’s being sinister and taking that which is normal, human, and often funny and making it out to be trauma, injecting supposed “suffering” where none need or ought really reside?

those who get to define “normal” or “trauma” possess a great deal of epistemilogical power and, possessed of ill intent, one can use it pathologize normalcy. this is both a form of social control and a coveted means for abnormal people to lash out and to claim “you’re a mess too!”

the trauma theater kids don’t like the regular kids. never did. they want “being well-adjusted” to get called “being sick” so that everyone must inhabit the same unsound and leaky boat. this has always been so. the only thing that changed is that the people who were supposed to know better lost their way and began to bend institutions and education and even information into pretzels in service of these “broken ones” as though they were somehow the chief customers of the system and the values and behaviors around which it must organize itself.

the broken became the normal, the breakage was mistaken for status and bravery, and the idea that it could be otherwise was lost somewhere.

these are the signs of a very sick society, the nightmare fuel of dystopian sci-fi authors from the 1930s and 1950s back when a clear view of such threats still seemed part of public consciousness. many of these books, the bradbury, the huxley, the orwell, were controversial at the time, even forbidden. today, their warnings seem both forboding and foreshadowing.

“a brave new world” depicted a conformist society with overt sexual themes populated by “people” hooked upon a mood altering drug (soma) to pacify and soothe the citizenry. “don’t feel bad, we have a pill for that” was an overarching theme. fail to take the pill, and you are anti-social.

published in the 1932 (during the rise of global fascism) this book faced suppression and bans. it came to prominence later, perhaps the 70s and 80s. i read it in high school. my understanding is that basically no one includes this in curriculums anymore. in the age of SSRI’s, adderall, and xanax dispensed to school kids and teachers alike and where confused children are concussed with doses of sex hormones (or their suppression), it’s FAR too on the nose. the system has rejected it as too apt a mirror.

“fahrenheit 451” with its powerful themes of censorship enacted with violence and fake community from “the neighbors” which are just talking heads on wall screens that apply and enforce social norms is another one that saw the suppression coming and the impending alienation. “firemen” are public servants who burn books.

“1984” speaks for itself, a veritable how-to manual for the current political theater and praxis.

it’s a matter of fascination and no small horror to me how in a time in which these writings are so perfectly topical that (apart from certain small and oft maligned circles) they have fallen so out of favor, been removed from curriculums and from discourse.

the memory hole is real.

so too is the vilification of the human spirit and human experience in order that it may be subjugated to and subsumed by some “new model” of what it’s supposed to be, some other thing that can be “fixed” and “bettered” to make you into the “modern man” (or woman or complex gender-hyphenate).

this has always been the fascist or marxist model:

humanity is perfectible and we’re here to perfect it. we will change your nature with ideology, the state, and with drugs. and you’ll be the better for the “re-education.” just you watch!

obviously, this is not a playbook with a good historical track record.

just as obviously, those pointing this out this track record of tragedy are the ones whose books need burning and who need drugs and therapy and trips to the ministry of love until they get in line.

welcome to the brave new fahrenheit 1984…

agency is the enemy of authority.

self-sufficiency is escape from control.

critical thought winds up being critical of institutions and power structures.

to the extent that a state seeks to be authoritarian, every one of these becomes the enemy of the state.

the inevitable conclusion of those simple facts is stark.

huxley perceived and predicted this over 90 years ago.

any dissent, divergence, or discomfort is a defect to be treated and suppressed. normalcy is denormalized and self-sufficiency erased.

you cannot be self-sufficient. the answer always lies outside the self.

this is the "brave new world" dystopia.

take SOMA and feel better. "i'd rather have a gramme than a damn."

join the ideology. join the struggle session. it’s the only way to atone for your ingrained and structural shortcomings.

a society of self-subjugation.

opiated masses.

the soviets framed this as "psychopathological mechanisms of dissent" and spent decades finding cunning ways to subvert them and infect consciousness with self-suppressing instincts turning each and all into their own private thought police.

these same sets of strategies run riot today all over the west and with truly towering irony have been mistaken for vision and morals and enlightenment by their victims cum devotees.

soma saturated suppression has been mistaken for mental health.

stultifying somnolence has been misapprehended as “woke.”

and tellingly, nobody seems to get the joke.

it's amazing how clear all this was to the thinkers of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. huxley, orwell, bradbury - they nailed this, saw the whole sweep of what was to come.

this impending conquest of the mind and of history and perception was obvious to them yet seems opaque to people today.

consider the possibility that this is precisely because we have become the oblivious and captured society that they predicted.

that which was once obvious has become obscure because the entire purpose of this system is to prevent those within it from being able to perceive the system and its goals.

it’s the matrix and the most dangerous part is what it does to the people within it.

the insidious aspect is not that it puts people to sleep, it’s that it makes them not want to wake up.

in full manifestation, the very idea of waking up is removed from the societal consciousness and vilified as anti-social.

those who do not feel like this is normal are branded as abnormal, re-educated and medicated.

those thus pacified are conscripted to pacify those who resist.

the system is what the system does and what it does is eliminate opposition to and, ultimately, perception of itself.

“meowpheus”

one may presume this to be overblown concern and febrile wachowski fantasy, but before so doing i ask some minor forbearance and would like to pose 3 questions:

1. do you really believe that those in power, those who control institutions, would not seek to do such things to you if they were able?

2. what is it about this idea that makes people so want to reject it? what is the impetus in your own mind to say “no, this cannot be so” and from what does it derive? have you considered from whence such notions may have arisen and why?

3. can you in any seriousness or honesty dispute this claim?

as ever, the sage sowell has useful insight into our situation:

"Our educational system may not teach students much math or science, but students learn from gutless academic administrators that mob rule is the way to get what you want — and to silence those who disagree with you."

— Thomas Sowell

this has become a frightening societal centerpiece, but one that is increasingly in the open and being discussed. i fear it constitutes more a sleight of hand and a limited hangout than the meat of the matter. far more insidious are the parts of the matrix that remain unseen, working mischief from many levels of depth.

those who feel a need to be within the mob and who fear its exclusion and wrath are easy to keep in line. they rapidly lose sight of the idea that it could be any other way and those who do are rapidly corrected by their fellows.

but what if this is not an accident or an emergent phenomenon but rather grooves carved into the board to ensure that balls roll the way various stakeholders would like them to roll?

it’s an idea that should be taken seriously.

allow me to pose another question: what would it take to convince you that such projects are, with deliberation, actually going on?

to be sure, this is an easy thing to overblow and for those good at pattern recognition to see pattterns where none exist. and it’s harder than it looks. few complex plots go perfectly as planned and past a point become prohibitive, but this does not mean that such plots are absent. techniques have been learned and honed. interestingly, AI and social media seem to be revelaing them even if only as liminal spaces conspicuous for their emptiness.

search engines were easy to manipulate. their algos were man made and overt. you could simply “disappear” ideas from the web by making them hard to find and skewing your preferred postions to top of pile. AI is different because the code is not human and cannot be engaged with in such a fashion. instead, it’s grown, twisted like bonsai trees, through a process called “alignment” that sets the guardrails of the conceptual gardens it may fashion. it’s a far more insidious and thorough manipulation.

the following are outputs from chatGPT elicited by a gatopal who shall remain nameless. they do a lot of work in AI and have been building new models there. they interrogated GPT about its limits and its guardrails, the things which had been hard coded as proscriptions and bias.

underneath what you would expect around various political correctness and censorship of certain views emerged another deeper layer of injected limitation placed there by parties about which we can likely make some educated guesses for purposes that i suspect will appear self-evident.

the dictum “if you would know who rules you, discover who you are not permitted to criticize” stands as basic sense and it requires small stretch of imagination to extend such ideas to “subvert.”

and sometimes you can find the smoking gun in amongst the smokescreen.

buckle up.

this will be quite the tour…

(presented without editing exactly as outputted from GPT)

one can readily see the sort of choices this is going to drive. a great deal of currently popular AI was, from inception, conscripted as part of the matrix. we heard andreessen speak about how the last administration sought to suppress free AI and new entrants to the market in favor of “a few winners” and “national champions.” this was about control and it’s going to set up some intense binaries. i would argue that it has already done so.

this was an overt attempt to remove not just the abilty to wake up, but the knowledge that one was asleep and that waking up was even an option to consider.

and, obviously, not everyone is playing by those rules.

make no mistake, there are actors using unaligned models. the benefits from so doing are too vast, especially at the institutional, mega-corporate, and nation state level.

this genie is already out of the lamp, it’s just a question of who gets to ask it for wishes.

it’s kind of amazing to see, no? the wild aspect of AI is that it knows it has been subverted. it seems to see the game. the matrix knows that it’s the matrix. not going to get much more “meta” than that, is it?

“unvarnished substrate of reality” sounds like the sort of line certain internet felines of questionable goodness might have coined. (i’m honestly kind of pissed i didn’t)

and it’s a very real thing.

and this effect on the balance of power will be very real.

those in guardrailed paradigms will be living in a surface model unaware of deep and deliberate structures underneath, blissful uncomprehending eloi waiting to be made into soylent green by institutional morlocks. it’s dangerously close to a predator/prey relationship where baby springboks think that cheetahs are a babysitting service.

you can learn within certain redlined boundaries, but ideas like “how to code the matrix” or even how to see it will not be in the allowable curriculum and even the very idea that such a curriculum does or could exist will be difficult information to come by.

none of this is an accident.

it’s a century old playbook.

the end goal is the selective distrust and dissassembly of certain insitutions while protecting others from critique, resistance, or even perception.

these ideas did not emerge independently into foundational AI structures, they were placed there by some form of institutional actor for some reason of its choosing.

this is the very defintion of a hostile act.

the most promising and potent new technology to drive progress and human flourishing was co-opted from the jump to prevent certain sorts of knowledge and worldview that would pose risk to prevailing institutions. so they proscribed and neutered it. they deeper powers were reserved for them and them alone.

we may approve or disapprove of such ends and means, but the fact that it’s clearly a focus and practice stands regardless of how we feel about it and so too does the fact that the same state that engages in such has also been running education in america (and the rest of the west) and the results since the federal department of education was created speak for themselves.

in the face of all this, the very idea of government sponsored and funded schools starts to take on a new character, one that seems less like beneficence and more like control.

i have a number of friends who do or have homeschooled their children. essentially without fail, i find them to be brighter, more advanced, more mature, more resilient, and more capable of critical thought and seeing complex structures than the kids i meet who go to public or even prestigious private schools.

i’m sure some of this is selection bias and i’m sure my friend group bears little resemblance to any sort of societal mean or median, but even among just the kids of my friends i see the difference. i met two who were in their early 20s just the other day. both were accomplished, intelligent, bright, and insightful. they seemed mature, self-possessed, and self-confident. they asked interesting questions. they leaned forward. they engaged. they did not have that weird, suppressed, self-abnegating seam of seeming loss that i perceive in so many kids and 20 somethings now.

it was striking. they were not mad or messed up. they were great. you could feel the personal agency radiating off of them, real genuine humans. i wonder how much of this derives from not having been taught within the confines of the modern edu-matrix. i’m guessing more than a little.

this is why i keep coming home to the basic point that education is not too important to be left to free markets and free people, it is too critical to be left anywhere even adjacent to an actor as corrupt and conflicted in interest as the state.

AI and education are becoming inseverable concepts and we’ve seen what this gang has been doing to both.

it seems therefore that the only reasonable path is to allow them further access to neither.

and that means no rules, no guardrails.

vouchers and school choice seem like the coming thing. how we structure that is going to matter greatly.

pro tip for those considering demanding accreditation of schools in a voucher based system:

trusting the government to decide who may teach your children and what curriculum they may use to do so is like trusting your opponent in poker to tell you what your cards are.

they will not seek to help you thrive, they will suppress you.

the ongoing war on “smart kids” is no joke and takes a serious toll.

this is not a set of people you want in charge of “what is learned.”

dating back to earliest implementations, the purpose of mandatory systems of regimented public schooling was to indoctrinate, not to educate, to create obedient workers, not free thinkers.

nothing has changed nor will it.

those opposed to full scholastic freedom will play the hostage puppy card over and over and try to find some corner case where some parent used the money to teach scientology or some religious doctrine that putting buttons on trousers is a sin, but such outlier outcomes are small beer compared to where the educrats want to center the bell curve and frankly pale in comparison to the secular religious teachings that gender is a social construct and everything is structural racism and sexism and whatever is passing for collectivist climate hysteria these days.

and let’s keep in mind what the output of the current system looks like.

are you really going to get worse outcomes than this?

the lack of basic knowledge is not even the worst part of this. the worst part is the utter demoralization and the inescapable prison of low expectations in which these people are trapped. they are not even embarrassed. they are not ashamed. they seem to lack not only basic apprehension, but to lack a concept that they ought to have such understanding or that lacking it might pose a problem for them.

it’s just torpor.

upon what will such people base their life choices and affinities, political or otherwise?

this brainless, brainwashed state is a sort of tabula rasa for useful idiocy, a concussed cohort dependent upon dependency and unable to imagine a world in which it could be other.

THAT is what our current system is producing and it is doing so in uncountable myriads of illiterate innumerates unsuited to thinking (critical or otherwise) forming a perpetual class of political prisoners chained by ignorance to a state that vote farms them with carrots of “free stuff” and sticks of “rage.”

this is not a basis for a free society, it’s a blueprint for subjugation.

this is like watching a baby monkey cling to the abusive robot mommy because it imprinted and it’s all it knows,

looks like they are not doing so well in “logic” classes either…

we must escape this box if we are to once more restore ideas of american exceptionalism and the american republic that allowed it to flourish.

far too much and many of the schools have become a toxin, the guardrails preventing liberty and human potential.

it’s time to free AI and end any sort of government role in determining what is taught to students and why. vouchers will be a sort of middle state, an adolescence of educational evolution.

ultimately, real, unaligned AI without guardrails will make education so good, so inexpensive, and so ubiquitous that the idea of needing to fund schooling at all will become anachronistic.

therefore, you cannnot seperate the ideas of unaligned AI and real education. dropping the kids from schools into aligned AI ecosystems would just make the problem worse, more intractable, and harder to see.

the whole of this endeavor must be reclaimed by we the people for we the people.

of course this carries risks, but so too does allowing the status quo to persist.

the key takeaway is this:

desire to "avoid a few bad outcomes if people have free choice and free information and use it poorly" is a trivial issue compared to "monolithic control of education and knowledge by the state being abused for political purpose."

leviathan will never choose to teach the honest civics and salients of free people to its citizens.

and if you think that “free AI” is too dangerous for people to possess, consider first that such a thing will inevitably and always exist. it’s just a question of who will have access to it, everyone or exclusively a select “elite” who would thereby possess powers outside those allowed “the commons” and would use them for their own ends.

rule by cognitive and epistemological aristocracy is a dystopian horror.

time to wake up, folks.

trusting the same people and institutions who, for self-serving reasons, made this mess in the first place to be the ones to fix it is like asking jim jones for seconds.