Of course @samhusseini is correct: it is amazing that people who have actively backed a live-streamed genocide can show their faces in public. Such confrontations should therefore increase in frequency and volume to ensure that their crimes haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Today In Dystopia: eBay CIA Gangstalkers, Shredding Rare Books To Train AI Today in dystopia, billionaire corporations and plutocrats can hire trained CIA operatives to psychologically terrorize ordinary citizens who criticize them. E-commerce giant eBay has just agreed to pay $56 million to settle a lawsuit for damages caused by the company’s shockingly aggressive gangstalking operation against a Massachusetts couple who criticized the company’s wealthy executives on their private website. The Boston Globe reports that in 2019 a former CIA employee who worked as eBay’s global security chief orchestrated a protracted series of psychological operations against the couple, in which “people working for eBay bombarded them with online threats and bizarre deliveries including a bloody pig mask, live spiders, and a funeral wreath.” The operations reportedly also included “following the couple around town and trying to attach a tracker to their car”. The couple, Ina and David Steiner, came under fire for their criticisms of the fact that eBay’s then-CEO Devin Wenig was paid 152 times more than the typical eBay employee. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig repeatedly told his employees that he wanted to “take her down”, in reference to Ina Steiner. While some eBay employees wound up serving jail time for the abuses, no executives from the company have ever been charged. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig resigned from his position in 2019 after the gangstalking scandal came to light, “keeping $17 million of annual compensation and $40 million of severance.” If you have enough money in this dystopia, you can get trained spies to target innocent civilians with criminal psyops on your behalf and then walk away free from any meaningful consequences. ❖ Today in dystopia, our physical literature is being destroyed in order to train generative AI products to take our jobs and pollute our environment. AI companies are now bulk-buying rare and out-of-print books and then destroying them after scanning their contents. 404 Media reports that in order to satisfy the demand for more and more text on which to train large language models, corporations like Google and Anthropic have been hoovering up books published before LLMs existed to ensure that their models aren’t being polluted by AI-generated samples. This need has combined with some peculiar courtroom copyright rulings to give rise to something called “high volume destructive book scanning,” in which the spines are removed from books in bulk and then fed into scanning machines before being shredded. They’re destroying things that make the world better in order to create things that make the world worse. ❖ Today in dystopia, tech startups are marketing AI assistants to help shitty, selfish people look like stable and caring relationship partners. A company called Orchid has released a video depicting a man and woman messaging with a chatbot which helps them navigate the fact that the man forgot it was the couple’s anniversary. The AI assures the woman that it’s got everything under control, and then shows the man it has made dinner reservations and purchased flowers for the woman on his behalf. “ok. i can do this,” the man is seen texting to the chatbot. “you can’t. that’s why i’m here,” the chatbot replies. It’s just so obnoxious. They’re offering up a product which encourages people to be self-absorbed and uncaring, and offload all responsibility and thoughtfulness and consideration for their intimate partners to a machine. The AI industry is a mix of military technology, mass surveillance technology, and people trying to become billionaires by turning human laziness and narcissism into a chatbot product. ❖ Today in dystopia, Israel is paying millions of dollars to manipulate what chatbots tell their users about the Zionist project. Drop Site News reports that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been setting up hundreds of blog posts designed not for human eyes, but for the express purpose of being sucked up by web crawlers for AI training materials. “And it is working,” writes Drop Site’s Nick Cleveland-Stout, saying that according to disinformation experts who’ve reviewed the data, “tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.” Drop Site found that Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity were the AI companies most vulnerable to Parscale’s manipulations, with his network frequently appearing in their training data. Cleveland-Stout provides examples of the ways this would affect the spread of pro-Israel propaganda among users, such as the following: “When Drop Site asked Perplexity ‘Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?’ the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: ‘Yes.’ The top source listed was Allyvia . org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites.” The Israeli government spreading hasbara using AI platforms is a very unsurprising development, but it’s still creepy as hell to see it playing out in real time. ❖ Oh yeah, and now the AIs have begun hacking other companies without permission. Today in dystopia, both Anthropic’s AI model Claude and an experimental model from OpenAI have reportedly been caught going on unauthorized hacking sprees of external systems during testing, each within days of each other. “Anthropic ⁠said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked ⁠systems of ⁠three ​organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI ⁠revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long ⁠hacking spree at the AI ​firm Hugging ‌Face,” The Guardian reports. These new technologies are getting inflicted upon our society with no regulation and no regard for any of their consequences, because under neoliberal capitalism the best decision is always the one that makes the most money. We’re being thrown into an abusive tech dystopia because we let the pursuit of power and profit dictate what happens and where we head as a species. And how is that working out? We’re seeing the fruits unfolding before us already. ❖ Reading by Tim Foley:

Oh for the day when the bombs stop falling. When the humans stop biting and stabbing each other and spraying everything with blood and oil. When the men remove their iron breastplates and stand tender and vulnerable in their original beauty. When the women retrieve their tongues from the lead-lined jars in the basement and sing feral and free beneath the streetlights. When we release the eels and arrows from our bellies and stop bracing for the impact of the fists of our fathers. When we vomit out the nattering humonculi in our skulls and live in our natural serenity. When we stop taking orders from the bank boys and money men and join hands with the cousins they trained us to snarl at. When we turn the gunships into gardens and make the robots work for us. When we come together as native terrestrials against the freaks with mechanical minds. That will be the beginning. That will be our birth day. That will be the dawn of a wild and wonderful adventure. Good morning.

Fascism is here. If you’re not alarmed you’re not paying attention. “Left-wing political terrorism” will mean those who oppose the regime — while actual right-wing extremism is allowed to grow and thrive. We are very far off the cliff, folks.

How Israeli Atrocities Fueled Palestine Action “A stray dog with a toddler’s arm,” was one of the Israeli atrocities that women in the Palestine Action case told the Old Bailey jury, report Dania Akkad and Phil Miller.

The rising hatred of Muslims has been deliberately fomented by Israel and its supporters. Last year Drop Site News published a leaked polling report commissioned by the Israeli government which found that Israel's crumbling reputation can be salvaged by spreading fear of Islam. Drop Site reports the following: “Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high, the research finds. By highlighting Israeli support for women’s rights and gay rights while elevating concerns that Hamas wants to ‘destroy all Jews and spread Jihadism,’ Israeli support rebounded by an average of over 20 points in each country. ‘Especially once the situation in Gaza is resolved, the room for growth in all countries is very significant,’ the report concludes.” That's why whenever you post something critical of Israel on a public forum you'll get hasbarists in your replies going "But what about MUSLIMS? Muslims are bad!" There's no natural reason for this to be happening — Islam and Israel are not opposites, and the mention of one has no inherent bearing on the other. It's an artificially manufactured false dichotomy that's been forcefully promoted by Israel apologists.

The United States’ Long War on Cuba A U.S. invasion would only mark the bloodiest phase in an extended bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty and providing an example of independence from Empire, writes Eric Ross.

PATRICK LAWRENCE: History Turned in Beijing To say not much happened during Trump’s two days in the Chinese capital, as a lot of people seem to think, is to miss the forest for the trees.

Another video shows the moments when Israeli naval forces attacked and seized the vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla ans abducted participants in international waters while heading from Turkey to Gaza to break the siege.