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:

Sure I can take a stab at explaining it. I've never commented on your Gaza position before, but I understood where people were coming from the last time this came up. Judging from your replies to others in this thread it seems your primary objection is that you are not being judged by the same standards with which leftists judge Fox News pundits or Israeli national security ministers. Because you never explicitly came out and said "I want Gaza turned into a giant mass grave," you find it unfair that leftists characterize you as unacceptably sympathetic to Israel's mass atrocities, because they wouldn't single out a Republican senator or far right podcaster who's expressed the same views as you on Gaza for these sorts of criticisms. But you are not a Republican senator or a far right podcaster. You are not a Fox News pundit or an Israeli national security minister. You are doing public commentary in a political sector which has predominantly framed opposition to the Gaza holocaust as the central issue or our times, and you seem to regard it as a tedious issue you'd rather people de-emphasize and move past. You made a long and hotly controversial Instagram post last year explaining why you don't feel like you should have to make a video about Gaza, in which you slammed anti-Zionism in the pro-Palestine movement and placed Jewish feelings and concerns about antisemitism front and center in your reasoning. It wasn't explicitly "genocide-loving", but it certainly advanced positions that were favorable to the US-Israeli genocidal agenda. It read as an exhausted, eye-rolling "Ugh, can't we just move ON from this?" dismissal of everyone's white-hot opposition to an active genocide, while defending many of the dynamics which ensure that Israel's abuses will continue to occur. Even in this very post right here you describe your position as "waiting for this to blow over", like it's just some boring distraction you can't wait for people to stop annoying you with. And that's just directly contrary to the present zeitgeist of the political factions with which you have aligned yourself. People see you as pro-genocide because you are far from sufficiently anti-genocide in a political environment where being anti-genocide is of utmost importance to people of conscience. I am a left-wing political commentator, and if I had spent three years de-emphasizing and dismissing the Gaza holocaust I am 100% certain that many leftists would be hounding me about it to this day, even if I made the occasional tweet saying Benjamin Netanyahu is bad. People would see my output as not reflecting the urgency of the issue at hand, and they would criticize me as unacceptably sympathetic to the forces giving rise to the genocide. I'm just some schmuck who posts opinions on the internet, but since you asked, that seems to be what's happening here.

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.

"It's like if someone took over New Zealand and named it "Middle Earth" and started calling all the Kiwis "hobbits", and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked..."

Anthropocene We can make a home here. In these ruins. In this shattered civilization full of walking autopsies where every twinkle in the night sky is an Elon Musk satellite. Life can still thrive here. Even in the Anthropocene. Even in the middle of secular armageddon. There is still moss in the cracks of the parking lot. There are still pigeons roosting in the rafters. We can make a nest here, too, out of the plastics and the packaging, out of the shell casings and the trillions of chicken bones. We can rake it into a pile and lay listening to the ghosts of the extinct megafauna and get haunted by the spirits of the forests that used to be. It is good to breathe deeply of the fumes of this wasteland. The air still crackles with strange and crooked sorcery. The earth is still packed full of winking Buddhas inside winking Buddhas. He wears a hazmat suit these days (he's not an idiot), but you can still see him winking in the iridescent petrol puddles, and in the shopping cart saints on the wounded sidewalks, and even in the shark-eyed stare of the war pundits on Fox News. Did you know they've discovered a type of fungus in Chernobyl which feeds on the radiation there? When I first learned this I fell to my knees and wept tears of wonder and joy. The water poured from my seaweed head and washed cigarette butts down the gutter. We are swimming in an ocean of miracles. We are living on a giant cocoon. We have barely begun to scratch the surface of this world. Every moment is a leap into the great Unknown. I kneel before the black mold in Chernobyl. An angel egg is beginning to hatch.

Anthropocene We can make a home here. In these ruins. In this shattered civilization full of walking autopsies where every twinkle in the night sky is an Elon Musk satellite. Life can still thrive here. Even in the Anthropocene. Even in the middle of secular armageddon. There is still moss in the cracks of the parking lot. There are still pigeons roosting in the rafters. We can make a nest here, too, out of the plastics and the packaging, out of the shell casings and the trillions of chicken bones. We can rake it into a pile and lay listening to the ghosts of the extinct megafauna and get haunted by the spirits of the forests that used to be. It is good to breathe deeply of the fumes of this wasteland. The air still crackles with strange and crooked sorcery. The earth is still packed full of winking Buddhas inside winking Buddhas. He wears a hazmat suit these days (he's not an idiot), but you can still see him winking in the iridescent petrol puddles, and in the shopping cart saints on the wounded sidewalks, and even in the shark-eyed stare of the war pundits on Fox News. Did you know they've discovered a type of fungus in Chernobyl which feeds on the radiation there? When I first learned this I fell to my knees and wept tears of wonder and joy. The water poured from my seaweed head and washed cigarette butts down the gutter. We are swimming in an ocean of miracles. We are living on a giant cocoon. We have barely begun to scratch the surface of this world. Every moment is a leap into the great Unknown. I kneel before the black mold in Chernobyl. An angel egg is beginning to hatch.

"You’re being told there’s a dangerous explosion of Jew hatred to cover up the fact that there’s actually a very healthy explosion of Israel hatred." @caitoz once again gets right to the heart of the matter.

Trump Inherited Peace Deals But Torched Them For More War We’re seeing more US airstrikes on Iran, joint US-Saudi strikes in Iraq, surging military escalations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and Israeli drone strikes in Lebanon, all just in the last couple of days. The middle east is becoming more and more of a powder keg, and it all could have been so easily avoided. Trump inherited a perfectly functional Iran nuclear deal in his first term and ceasefires between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and between Israel and Hezbollah in his second term. He had the possibility of peace in the middle east handed to him on a golden platter, and he actively torched it. ❖ Boy George has released a shockingly awful reggae song called We Will Dance Again defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, with the opening lines “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for / Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill every last one of us.” In 2026. This was released in July motherfucking 2026. You’d be a piece of shit for releasing this in 2023, but to release it in 2026 after looking at the moonscape of Gaza with all its bombed-out hospitals and systematically demolished civilian infrastructure, you’ve got to be an outright psychopath. ❖ CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten recently ran a segment discussing the mammoth shift in public approval of Israel in the United States, noting that there has been “a 67-point shift against Israel in just eight years.” “Israel used to be a consensus issue in American politics, and that was a pro-Israel position. Now the consensus has actually shifted, and now when it comes to the general electorate, it is a minus,” Enten said. This right here is why we’re being force-fed so much hot garbage about “antisemitism” these days. You’re being told there’s a dangerous explosion of Jew hatred to cover up the fact that there’s actually a very healthy explosion of Israel hatred. ❖ It’s so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel. They treat the modern state of Israel like a magical fantasy land and talk about Jewish people like fairy folk, because those words happen to appear in some ancient book of made-up stories. They regard today’s genocidal apartheid colonialists in the state of Israel as biblical Israelites, and think some dentist in New York City is the same sort of person as the fictional characters they read about in the book of Exodus. It’s like if someone took over New Zealand and named it “Middle Earth” and started calling all the Kiwis “hobbits”, and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked, and started organizing lobby groups and voting blocks to promote the foreign policy interests of “Gondor” (formerly Wellington). And the modern state of Israel is built around facilitating this exact type of fetishization. They resurrected a dead language that hadn’t been spoken conversationally anywhere on earth for centuries and changed the name of their currency from the lira to the “shekel” in order to facilitate this Bible-LARPing and build on the illusion that their brand new ethnostate is the same as the nation that Jews and Christians have been reading about in their ancient scriptures. All to ensure that a western political support base will push western governments to pour modern war machinery into propping up this ridiculous apartheid state with the nonstop violence required for its perpetuation. It’s so fucking insane. “Ooh, we’ve got to send bombs and attack helicopters to the magical Jew kingdom so that the magic Jesus prophecy can come true and make us all go to Eternal Paradise!” Fucking freaks. Stop doing this. ❖ We make movies about saving the world as the real world hurtles toward ecological collapse. We make movies about defeating diabolical villains while letting the real diabolical villains rule the world. We make movies celebrating heroic acts while real heroes are imprisoned. Somehow fighting the bad guys and saving the planet only ever stays in movie land. We are handed fictional triumphs in lieu of real victory. And the problem is that far too many of us are content with this. Give us bread made by PepsiCo and circuses starring Robert Downey Jr, and that’s good enough for us. We can’t keep doing this. We need to find our true heroism. Our world is in peril, and we can’t let its rescue remain a decorative flicker on the silver screen. ❖ Reading by Tim Foley:

Trump Inherited Peace Deals But Torched Them For More War We’re seeing more US airstrikes on Iran, joint US-Saudi strikes in Iraq, surging military escalations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and Israeli drone strikes in Lebanon, all just in the last couple of days. The middle east is becoming more and more of a powder keg, and it all could have been so easily avoided. Trump inherited a perfectly functional Iran nuclear deal in his first term and ceasefires between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and between Israel and Hezbollah in his second term. He had the possibility of peace in the middle east handed to him on a golden platter, and he actively torched it. ❖ Boy George has released a shockingly awful reggae song called We Will Dance Again defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, with the opening lines “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for / Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill every last one of us.” In 2026. This was released in July motherfucking 2026. You’d be a piece of shit for releasing this in 2023, but to release it in 2026 after looking at the moonscape of Gaza with all its bombed-out hospitals and systematically demolished civilian infrastructure, you’ve got to be an outright psychopath. ❖ CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten recently ran a segment discussing the mammoth shift in public approval of Israel in the United States, noting that there has been “a 67-point shift against Israel in just eight years.” “Israel used to be a consensus issue in American politics, and that was a pro-Israel position. Now the consensus has actually shifted, and now when it comes to the general electorate, it is a minus,” Enten said. This right here is why we’re being force-fed so much hot garbage about “antisemitism” these days. You’re being told there’s a dangerous explosion of Jew hatred to cover up the fact that there’s actually a very healthy explosion of Israel hatred. ❖ It’s so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel. They treat the modern state of Israel like a magical fantasy land and talk about Jewish people like fairy folk, because those words happen to appear in some ancient book of made-up stories. They regard today’s genocidal apartheid colonialists in the state of Israel as biblical Israelites, and think some dentist in New York City is the same sort of person as the fictional characters they read about in the book of Exodus. It’s like if someone took over New Zealand and named it “Middle Earth” and started calling all the Kiwis “hobbits”, and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked, and started organizing lobby groups and voting blocks to promote the foreign policy interests of “Gondor” (formerly Wellington). And the modern state of Israel is built around facilitating this exact type of fetishization. They resurrected a dead language that hadn’t been spoken conversationally anywhere on earth for centuries and changed the name of their currency from the lira to the “shekel” in order to facilitate this Bible-LARPing and build on the illusion that their brand new ethnostate is the same as the nation that Jews and Christians have been reading about in their ancient scriptures. All to ensure that a western political support base will push western governments to pour modern war machinery into propping up this ridiculous apartheid state with the nonstop violence required for its perpetuation. It’s so fucking insane. “Ooh, we’ve got to send bombs and attack helicopters to the magical Jew kingdom so that the magic Jesus prophecy can come true and make us all go to Eternal Paradise!” Fucking freaks. Stop doing this. ❖ We make movies about saving the world as the real world hurtles toward ecological collapse. We make movies about defeating diabolical villains while letting the real diabolical villains rule the world. We make movies celebrating heroic acts while real heroes are imprisoned. Somehow fighting the bad guys and saving the planet only ever stays in movie land. We are handed fictional triumphs in lieu of real victory. And the problem is that far too many of us are content with this. Give us bread made by PepsiCo and circuses starring Robert Downey Jr, and that’s good enough for us. We can’t keep doing this. We need to find our true heroism. Our world is in peril, and we can’t let its rescue remain a decorative flicker on the silver screen. ❖ Reading by Tim Foley:

It's so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel. They treat the modern state of Israel like a magical fantasy land and talk about Jewish people like fairy folk, because those words happen to appear in some ancient book of made-up stories. They regard today's genocidal apartheid colonialists in the state of Israel as biblical Israelites, and think some dentist in New York City is the same sort of person as the fictional characters they read about in the book of Exodus. It's like if someone took over New Zealand and named it "Middle Earth" and started calling all the Kiwis "hobbits", and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked, and started organizing lobby groups and voting blocks to promote the foreign policy interests of "Gondor" (formerly Wellington). And the modern state of Israel is built around facilitating this exact type of fetishization. They resurrected a dead language that hadn't been spoken conversationally anywhere on earth for centuries and changed the name of their currency from the lira to the "shekel" in order to facilitate this Bible-LARPing and build on the illusion that their brand new ethnostate is the same as the nation that Jews and Christians have been reading about in their ancient scriptures. All to ensure that a western political support base will push western governments to pour modern war machinery into propping up this ridiculous apartheid state with the nonstop violence required for its perpetuation. It's so fucking insane. "Ooh, we've got to send bombs and attack helicopters to the magical Jew kingdom so that the magical Jesus prophecy can come true and make us all go to Eternal Paradise!" Fucking freaks. Stop doing this.

Trump inherited a perfectly functional Iran nuclear deal in his first term and ceasefires between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and Israel and Hezbollah in his second term. He had the possibility of peace in the middle east handed to him on a golden platter, and he actively torched it.

This is happening all over the country. Tiny county boards and municipal politicians are being bought off by billion-dollar technology behemoths building the infrastructure for an unprecedented and invasive surveillance apparatus that equips the government with the ability to track, analyze, and store everything you do while, in milliseconds, identifying and killing people anywhere in the world. These data centers are consuming farmland, poisoning water, and driving up electricity prices in rural and suburban communities. And when someone lets out a single innocent clap in opposition to it, the local sheriff who's lived next door for 15 years is suddenly transformed into an Oracle- Meta cop for hire and drags them to jail.

I gotta say it's looking like things are really about to explode in the Mideast due to Trump's war. US-Saudi strikes on Iraq, escalations between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, indications that Israel will again escalate in Lebanon, and the US will likely bomb Iran again. What a mess.

How To Be An Empire Propagandist "Pretend the protesters killed in Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with the known US-Israeli agendas to foment violence in that country and arm insurgent factions in order to topple Tehran." Reading by Tim Foley.