Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they’re doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:
This week on the excellent Trashfuture podcast, the regulars – joined by 404 Media’s Jason Koebler – have a hilarious – as in, I was wheezing with laughter! – riff on this year’s CES, where companies are demoing home appliances with LLMs built in:
Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there’s a credulous, Poe’s-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:
As the Trashfuturians mapped out this new apex of the AI hype cycle, I found myself thinking of a short story I wrote 15 years ago, satirizing the “Internet of Things” hype we were mired in. It’s called “The Brave Little Toaster”, and it was published in MIT Tech Review’s TRSF anthology in 2011:
The story was meant to poke fun at the preposterous IoT hype of the day, and I recall thinking that creating a world of talking appliance was the height of Philip K Dickist absurdism. Little did I dream that a decade and a half later, the story would be even more relevant, thanks to AI pump-and-dumpers who sweatily jammed chatbots into kitchen appliances.
So I figured I’d republish The Brave Little Toaster; it’s been reprinted here and there since (there’s a high school English textbook that included it, along with a bunch of pretty fun exercises for students), and I podcasted it back in the day:
A word about the title of this story. It should sound familiar – I nicked it from a brilliant story by Tom Disch that was made into a very weird cartoon:
My story is one of several I wrote by stealing the titles of other stories and riffing on them; they were very successful, winning several awards, getting widely translated and reprinted, and so on:
Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there’s a credulous, Poe’s-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:
Me, starting a video that says it’s going to explain how Victorian poorhouses fucked up the concept of charity forever: ok, show me what you’ve got
Video: it starts with the ideas of the Christian philosopher –
Me: DON’T SAY IT DON’T FUCKING SAY IT
Video: – John Calvin
Me:
Who (he asks, half to piss you off and half because he genuinely doesn’t know)
You can’t piss me off with that question, because unless you were raised like I was - deeply religiously and within an Evangelical Protestant family - you will probably have never heard of John Calvin.
In short: John Calvin was a French theologian during the Protestant Reformation. He was a philosopher in the same way that ebola is a living thing, or the same way that C4 on a bridge revitalizes a riverfront. If you’re familiar with the way that many people say that Reagan is to blame for everything shitty about modern American politics, well, they’re half right.
A lot of it is actually John Calvin’s fault, but that’s just because his shit philosophies are responsible for ~90% of the shit you hate about American life, period.
I’m British but wow
Good (actually terrible, but) news: John Calvin is also responsible for fucking up where you live!
Anglicanism’s major tenets were formed largely by Thomas Cranmer attempting to negotiate a “middle way” between Lutheranism & Calvinism. Many aspects of Calvinism were adopted into the Reformed traditions central to Anglican theology & the via media, or middle way, is unfortunately basically just two shitty people playing tug-of-war over the exact way in which Anglicanism would be terrible. This is so foundational to the Church of England that it is addressed in the 3rd paragraph of the opening section of the Wikipedia page on Anglicanism.
Sorry to be the bearer of shitty news! John Calvin is the Worst!
Calvinism, in brief, for those unaware:
Free will isn’t real. God makes literally everything happen, and if you complain about it you’re complaining about God.
Why does God let bad things happen to good people? Fuck you, that’s why. Are you questioning God?
God already decided if you’re going to Heaven or Hell, probably before you were born. There’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t matter if you try to be a good person, or if you accept Jesus, or if you go to confession, or if you saved five thousand orphans from a burning building. If God ~mysteriously~ decides “fuck you, burn forever”, that’s your fate.
However, God likes to show little signs of who he likes. Say, having lots of money, or being hot, or not having horrible illnesses. Good things happen to “the elect”, who are people God likes. Bad things happen to everyone else.
Rich people are probably going to Heaven, and they’re just better than you, because that’s God’s secret sign that he likes them more than you. Why? Because fuck you.
If bad things happen to you, it’s probably because you deserve it and you’re going to Hell. Likewise, if you’re poor, ugly, or disabled, you’re probably going to Hell.
All of this bullshit has of course had a heavy influence on:
Capitalism, because having money isn’t a sign that you’re exploiting people, it’s a sign that God mysteriously wants you to have nice things. Nothing you can do about it, free will isn’t real!
Imperialism, because if you succeed in taking over a place and stealing all their stuff, that’s a sign that God likes you. If God liked them, it wouldn’t have happened, so you’re really following God’s plan. And torturing people who are already going to Hell barely even counts, they probably deserve it!
American exceptionalism specifically. Consider the above, and mysteriously, all the native people start dying, leaving vast tracts of land for your people to settle. Well, gosh! God genocided a continent to show that it was secretly always ours! He must really like us!
Witch trials, debtors prisons, insane asylums, &c. They aren’t hot or rich, so by definition, they’re probably evil and deserve for bad things to happen to them!
… and half of the other shitty things that happen in our society, basically. Calvinism is horrific and it underlies a lot - especially in the US and UK, because the Puritans and Roundheads were mostly Calvinists.
(This was the religious freedom that the Pilgrims were seeking. The freedom to be horrible antisocial creeps.)
This is a pretty good basic summary, yep.
John Calvin is not obscure. I’d think he would merit a mention in any history classes that cover Early Modern Europe. Calvinism wasn’t quite as big as Lutheranism in terms of adherents or political clout but it was still a huge factor in the European Wars of Religion.
Fair enough if the second poster has since forgotten the name but if he was educated in the UK I would bet he learned about the guy at some point.
I don’t think you have any comprehension of how much this is absolutely not taught outside of Evangelical circles in the US beneath like… college level religious history or European history classes, and a lot of the time even then the syllabus will often sort of wave to the Protestant Reformation on its way to the next war.
The reason why I am able to pull quick summaries of how Calvinism fucks up US life and mindsets is because I’ve had to do it over and over again for a long, long time, ever since I realized that like … only my friends who grew up in a Religious Environment like I did had any idea who John Calvin was, why he sucked, or how he’s connected to why things suck here.
It’s also like… really hard to overstate how much the Puritans are lionized in most US History classes, and how most history classes in the US below the college level pretty much only glance at Early Modern European history in the context of setting up American history. You might get this covered in an AP European History class, but otherwise, below college-level classes specifically about European history? Nah.
Teaching American kids why Calvin sucks undermines some of our national self-propagandization, so it generally doesn’t happen.
Interesting! I didn’t know how much Calvin isn’t really known–he was covered in my Methodist confirmation classes when I was 13. But we also had a pretty amazing pastor who taught the Methodist church foundations and history and the history of the Bible to us, so maybe she was just incredibly thorough and this wasn’t a universal experience for Methodist confirmation.
Methodism is an evangelical denomination, whether we’re talking UMC or EMC; Wesleyan theology is very big on evangelizing & Methodists kinda… invented the tent revival. It’s largely associated with Pentecostals in most people’s minds, but there are still many, many Methodist tent revivals happening.
So. You had the aforementioned Evangelical Upbringing. :) That said, it’s been my experience that a lot of Methodists don’t cover the denomination’s root in Anglicanism in depth bc since Methodists follow the Arminian doctrine (that salvation is achievable by all and salvific grace was intended for all), mentioning Calvinism is kinda like bringing up your racist granddad. It’s embarrassing.
There isn’t an awful lot of attention given to the ways that Calvinistic mindset still soaks into a lot of Methodist thinking, but… that’s hard work. They’d rather just have a potluck in the basement instead.
(Can you guess which church I was dragged to after we moved to PA & before I started refusing to go to church as a teenager?)
Once again, we are compelled to ask: are the goyim OK?
Item: did you know that if you leave beef broth in a bottle long enough you can grow Beef Crystals
The group this was posted in has been advertised to me several times on FB, and I think it’s important to know where it’s from- the group is called Dull Men’s Club (gender neutral though, their rules explain the name was kept from the I think 80s when they started and had separate groups but anyone that believes in and agrees to abide by their rules can join).
The group’s major conceit is only this: finding joy in ordinary (see: dull) things.
Unhappy about the news out of Meta? There is an Instagram alternative called Pixelfed that works largely the same way, only the servers are run and moderated by real people.
Steps to Sign Up
Look at the directory above
Filter by country or language if these would be important to you. There will be other people on your local server, and you will have a timeline available of their posts without having to follow them, so having folks local to you might be interesting!
Check the blurb about the server to see if it seems like a good match for you use. (Some are for graphic adult content. Some are art focused.)
Create an account/Apply. Some servers will auto-approve account creation, while others are reviewed by the owner.
You are now part of the fediverse! Pixelfed, unlike Mastodon, is image-centric, so all posts you see will have an image. You can follow people on mastodon if you search their @handle@server in the search box, but you will only see things they post that contain an image.
Search for some hashtag topics and follow people! Or, follow the hashtag itself.
Try clicking on the Local Feed and seeing if there are other people on your server you want to follow.
Try the Discovery tab as well.
Comment. Boost. Never see an ad and deprive Zuck of his power.
fascinated by how “dislocate” seems to be a word used almost exclusively to refer to the misalignment of bodies, or parts of the body, from their proper place. it’s distinctly anatomical. you don’t say “i dislocated my keys” for instance, even though that’s technically a correct and coherent sentence.
on the other hand, it would be really funny to say “i misplaced my shoulder” to announce a devastating injury
it went that way 👉
It’s because the dis- prefix in English carries a strong sense of undoing or reversal, whereas mis- means to do badly
So if my keys are misplaced that means I put them in the wrong spot, but if they are displaced it means someone else moved them from where they were supposed to be.
There’s a lot of dis- words for bodyparts! Dislocate, dismember, disarticulate - if a corpse is disarticulated that means it’s all jumbled up and torn apart. If it’s misarticulated you put it together wrong in the first place (and your name is Victor Frankenstein).
….a better minimal pair would have been disassembled (taken apart) vs misassembled (put together wrong) wouldn’t it
The existence of the word “misadventure” (unfortunate event happening to you, typically of your own doing) implies the existence of “disadventure” (unfortunate event of someone else’s doing) and I’ll be bringing this into my vocabulary for situations where other people’s mistakes have become my problem.
if shes your girl then why have i slowly been replacing her parts until there’s nothing left of her original body? is she then still your girl?
They ship of theseus’d my girl
Can’t have shit in Detroit
this actually perfectly demonstrates the transitive property of memes: you can replace a meme piece by piece until it only structurally resembles the original, and it is, in fact, the same meme.
call that the meme of theseus thesis
tumblrites can have a little intertextuality as a treat
my naym is ship and when i’m broke the broken part from me they toke
replace the part had been the plan but in the morn hand door car man
*me shoving transitive properties into my purse* sorry, I have to go
We owe the reddit refugees an apology for making them see posts like this
no we don’t this shit is enrichment in their new enclosure
*slaps roof of Tumblr* This baby can fit so many rare vintages, you just have to go deep enough, there are some great memes in the cellar, come see
Kickstarting a new Martin Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by @wilwheaton:
This is the third Hench novel, following on from the nationally bestselling The Bezzle (2024) and Red Team Blues (2023). I wrote Red Team Blues with a funny conceit: what if I wrote the final volume of a beloved, long-running series, without writing the rest of the series? Turns out, the answer is: “Your editor will buy a whole bunch more books in the series!”
My solution to this happy conundrum? Write the Hench books out of chronological order. After all, Marty Hench is a financial hacker who’s been in Silicon Valley since the days of the first PCs, so he’s been there for all the weird scams tech bros have dreamed up since Jobs and Woz were laboring in their garage over the Apple I. He’s the Zelig of high-tech fraud! Look hard at any computing-related scandal and you’ll find Marty Hench in the picture, quietly and competently unraveling the scheme, dodging lawsuits and bullets with equal aplomb.
Which brings me to Picks and Shovels. In this volume, we travel back to Marty’s first job, in the 1980s – the weird and heroic era of the PC. Marty ended up in the Bay Area after he flunked out of an MIT computer science degree (he was too busy programming computers to do his classwork), and earning his CPA at a community college.
Silicon Valley in the early eighties was wild: Reaganomics stalked the land, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the Dead Kennedys played every weekend, and man were the PCs ever weird. This was before the industry crystalized into Mac vs PC, back when no one knew what they were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, and what they were for.
Marty’s first job is working for one of the weirder companies: Fidelity Computing. They sound like a joke: a computer company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. But the joke’s on their customers, because Fidelity Computing is a scam: a pyramid sales cult that exploits religious affinities to sell junk PCs that are designed to lock customers in and squeeze them for every dime. A Fidelity printer only works with Fidelity printer paper (they’ve gimmicked the sprockets on the tractor-feed). A Fidelity floppy drive only accepts Fidelity floppies (every disk is sold with a single, scratched-out sector and the drives check for an error on that sector every time they run).
Marty figures out he’s working for the bad guys when they ask him to destroy Computing Freedom, a scrappy rival startup founded by three women who’ve escaped from Fidelity Computing’s cult: a queer orthodox woman who’s been kicked out of her family; a radical nun who’s thrown in with the Liberation Theology movement in opposing America’s Dirty Wars; and a Mormon woman who’s quit the church in disgust at its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The women of Computing Freedom have a (ahem) holy mission: to free every Fidelity customer from the prison they were lured into.
Marty may be young and inexperienced, but he can spot a rebel alliance from a light year away and he knows what side he wants to be on. He joins the women in their mission, and we’re deep into a computing war that quickly turns into a shooting war. Turns out the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity Computer aren’t just scammers – they’re mobbed up, and willing to turn to lethal violence to defend their racket.
This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It’s an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.
The book comes out on Feb 15 in hardcover and ebook from Macmillan (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury (UK), but neither publisher is doing the audiobook. That’s my department.
Why? Well, I love audiobooks, and I especially love the audiobooks for this series, because they’re read by the incredible Wil Wheaton, hands down my favorite audiobook narrator. But that’s not why I retain my audiobook rights and produce my own audiobooks. I do that because Amazon’s Audible service refuses to carry any of my audiobooks.
Here’s how that works: Audible is a division of Amazon, and they’ve illegally obtained a monopoly over the audiobook market, controlling more than 90% of audiobook sales in many genres. That means that if your book isn’t for sale on Audible, it might as well not exist.
But Amazon won’t let you sell your books on Audible unless you let them wrap those books in “digital rights management,” a kind of encryption that locks them to Audible’s authorized players. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s a felony punishable with a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine to supply you with a tool to remove an audiobook from Audible and play it on a rival app. That applies even if the person who gives you the tool is the creator of the book!
You read that right: if I make an audiobook and then give you the tools to move it out of Amazon’s walled garden, I could go to prison for five years! That’s a stiffer sentence than you’d face if you were to just pirate the audiobook. It’s a harsher penalty than you’d get for shoplifting the book on CD from a truck-stop. It’s more draconian than the penalty for hijacking the truck that deliver the CDs!
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