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Hidden in plain sight

The image of a youthful Donald Trump, laying his hand on the forehead of a sick or dying man has by now been interred in the meme graveyard. By the time you read this, another will have taken its place, and then another, and so on. That’s one purpose of the AI barrage: misdirection. By attending to obvious outrages – the supposed blasphemy of an image of Trump as Healing Christ — the public is more likely to overlook bigger, but less promoted ones, like weakened pollution standards, cuts to disease research, and of course, war. But there’s another, equally important communication strategy at work, and it’s hiding in plain sight: insipidness or kitsch. That’s the language of fascism now.

Writing more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian Plutarch gave us an eloquent description of what modern historians now call “micro-militarism.” When an imperial power like Athens then, or America now, is in decline, its leaders often react emotionally by mounting seemingly bold military strikes in hopes of regaining the imperial grandeur that’s slipping through their fingers. Instead of another of the great victories the empire won at its peak of power, however, such military misadventures only serve to accelerate the ongoing decline, erasing whatever aura of imperial majesty remains and revealing instead the moral rot deep inside the ruling elite.

It’s energy crisis day. In Brussels, the air is thick with questions about whether the European Commission will follow through on the more headline-grabbing recommendations it’s floated to citizens in recent weeks.

Be wary of a company – any company – who exerts moral muscle as they create software and digital platforms that are injurious and simultaneously lauded for curing that injury. Be especially wary of Anthropic. With sagacious loftiness, it warns of the disabling dangers of the artificial intelligence (AI) frontier. Principled, it tells the Trump administration it will not partake in creating AI software that aids mass surveillance, a move that earned it an order of excommunication as a “supply chain risk”. It then goes on to create Claude Mythos Preview, a seemingly dystopian model that will, according to certain computer scientists “scan the hidden plumbing of the internet – operating systems, browsers, routers, and shared open-source code – at an unprecedented scale” thereby turning specialised hacking into “a routine and automated process.”