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Cake day: July 11th, 2026
  • PhilosoDOOM@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lyingEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    I’m aware of his career and related, history.

    However it was Doctorow himself that mentioned his Burning Man attendance on a live tech podcast I was listening / watching 5 or so years ago.

    Here’s an excerpt from audience questions after a he gave on the AI Bubble (or Apocalypse as he puts it often), published on his blog Pluralist. Written by Doctorow

    “OK,” the young man said, “but what can we do about the crash?” He was clearly very worried.

    “I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that. I think it’s already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they’d fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don’t think Trump’ll do that, so –”

    “But what can we do?”

    We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.

  • PhilosoDOOM@lemmy.worldtoFuck The USA@lemmy.ca•The Trump Administration’s War on Disabled People Continues to EscalateEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    Eugenics in America

    As Margaret Sanger said, “Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is extreme cruelty…there is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles.” She spoke of the burden of caring for “this dead weight of human waste.” Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against “ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens.” Theodore Roosevelt said that “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.” Luther Burbank: “Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce.” George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

    There was overt racism in this movement, exemplified by texts such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, by American author Lothrop Stoddard. But, at the time, racism was considered an unremarkable aspect of the effort to attain a marvelous goal -the improvement of humankind in the future. It was this avant-garde notion that attracted the most liberal and progressive minds of a generation. California was one of twenty-nine American states to pass laws allowing sterilization, but it proved the most forward-looking and enthusiastic -more sterilizations were carried out in California than anywhere else in America.

    Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)

    America’s eugenics supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor.The famous who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H.G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address this crisis was passed in states from New York to California