Ghosts in the Machines
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been resurrecting some posts from my old blog. I was going the results here, but it started getting a bit long. Too long for this current site’s format, really. So I dropped it all into a Github Pages repository.
It’s been a while since I wanted to revive my old posts on anthropomorphised AI, and try to form them into some kind of coherent whole. Mostly I liked them as they were but they were getting quickly datad even though they were published not that long ago. Also I’ve been having new thoughts, observing nee changes since that I wanted to shove in. And there were a couple of technical errors that I wanted to deal with.
It’s longer than some long reads, not a book. Less of a clear point,and more of a winding meditation, maybe like if Adam Curtis blogged instead of making documentaries. All of my call-back references are similarly dated and maybe reaching. We can use this technology to create some amazing solutions to hard problems, or we can design it to pretend to be something it isn’t and can never be: human. The risk isn’t that they replace us. It’s that we let them turn us into something less than we can be.
But there you go.
Ghosts in the Machines The anthropomorphism trap The Demon-Haunted Machine The Bot Delusion When the machine programs you Bad prompts
There’s no use case for anthropomorphic AI except to leverage psychological vulnerabilities for profit. Anthropomorphic behaviour is a solved problem. There are 8+ billion units available on the planet already with this feature. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026…
It’s really a sad state of affairs when the voters in Clacton-on-Sea only have the choice between a joke candidate and Count Binface.
Are You In the Weights?
I’m going to update my LinkedIn based on what AI has on me. The hallucinations are more impressive.
After Venezuela’s devastating earthquake, many communities are without power or communications. Donating here will fund emergency satellite internet, generators and phone-charging stations in the hardest-hit areas.
Extremes put enormous stress on farms, power grids, ecosystems, and lives. Subway stations, sewers, roads, bridges, transmission cables, and foundations are all designed with a tolerance level. Supercharged with carbon, nature breaks our engineered world. Never forget: the economy is a ‘wholly owned subsidiary’ of nature.
— Kate Mackenzie & Tim Sahay, in Global Boiling
I don’t recommend people stay on Elon’s hell site, but if you are going to be there then you better be shit posting as good as Captain Pike.
I’ve no idea who made it, it’s undoubtably AI slop, and yet it is arguably museum worthy art for our times.
RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the influential indie comics that have continued to find new readers for over 25 years, and are especially relevant now.
Fascist rhetoric wrapped in a css stylesheet aimed at co-opting retro, ironic 1980s nostalgia is still fascist rhetoric. America is going backwards, but more like the 1930s, and in Europe. If you’re waiting for an election in 2028 to save the U.S., that’s going to be too late.
INTERVIEWER: “So, how do you write, exactly?”
J. G. BALLARD: “Actually, there’s no secret. One simply pulls the cork out of the bottle, waits three minutes, and two thousand or more years of Scottish craftsmanship does the rest.”
The Trump Administration is rebuilding the federal government and removing the agencies.
The National Design Studio says its job is to redesign how Americans experience their government but I think the job that they’re actually redesigning is how the government experiences its citizens. — The Drey Dossier
The world’s bullies can still break cities. What they can no longer assume is that broken cities mean obedient people. — John Sipher, The age of asymmetry – the weak have learned how to make the strong bleed
"Internationalism Is Not a Luxury, but a Survival Mechanism"
Superb interview with Syrian author Leila al-Shami and Ukrainian activist Oleksandr Kyselov on the vestigial Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism of the Western “anti-imperialist” Left in an increasingly multipolar world.
Greater Israel: How a fringe settler fantasy went mainstream Israel’s settler movement has moved from the fringes to having influence over key Israeli institutions, including the media, where a constellation of voices is pushing for Israel to conquer new territory. — Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post
Went to the city to see the Banksy statue on Pall Mall. With Reform sweeping so many council elections this week its arrival is well timed.
I have the #KeepItOn 2025 report on internet shutdowns in a tab on my browser.
Not a single day of 2025 passed without at least one internet shutdown.
Something broke in Lusaka
Zambia’s last-minute cancellation of RightsCon was more than bureaucratic theatre. It was a signal of a harder, more adversarial world in which regimes feel more comfortable impeding civic organising.
The revolution will not be podcasted
Forces of nature are ripping through the world now, from energy crises to assassination attempts. The podcast world is finally getting riled up over reality, talking in very urgent tones and throwing around words like famine and genocide, and yet you can hear it in their voices. You can see it in their faces. Sometimes, they even say it out loud: They don’t believe they’ll be affected. They think it’s just going to happen to the rest of us, the ones working two or three jobs, the ones who don’t have six figures sitting in bank accounts, the ones who don’t have a line into the world of insider trading and polymarket grifts. … For them, it’s another topic.
— Jessical Wildfire, in “Our Struggles Make Great Content for The Podcast Class”