The alienating repetition of a mute laborer

Low-background steel (and lead) is a type of metal uncontaminated by radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing. That steel and lead is usually recovered from ships that sunk before the Trinity Test in 1945. This blog is about uncontaminated content that I'm terming "Low-background Steel". The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content that occurred in 2022.

[...] This is about exploring something unimaginably vast and seeing if anything weird falls out.

Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. [...] Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture.

The[se] curious habits [..] can be seen as ingredients with which technological objects are domesticated by people, integrated into their own daily routines. Fixing strategies, nervous tics, device juggling or courtesy postures, to name just a few, are not only peculiar interaction habits, they reveal how people normalize so-called “futuristic technologies” or what seemed magical and complex at first. They highlight the ingenuity users employ to repurpose and adapt digital technologies to their own context. One should see these insights as constant design patterns in the evolution of technological products and services.

OpenAI's tech may be driving countless of its users into a dangerous state of "ChatGPT-induced psychosis." [...]. Friends and family are watching in alarm as users insist they've been chosen to fulfill sacred missions on behalf of sentient AI or nonexistent cosmic powers — chatbot behavior that's just mirroring and worsening existing mental health issues, but at incredible scale and without the scrutiny of regulators or experts.

In this digital age, memory has lost its cachet. When we need to recall something, whether it is a random fact, a phone number, or a picture, we have the ability to look it up in seconds. In this context, what is the value of memory? Without the oral tradition to pass knowledge from generation to generation, or the physical artifact of the printed page or work of art to refer to, what will happen to our cultural memory?

But the dead internet theory goes even further. Many of the accounts that engage with such content also appear to be managed by artificial intelligence agents. This creates a vicious cycle of artificial engagement, one that has no clear agenda and no longer involves humans at all.

we suspect that heavy use of VR might trigger symptoms associated with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder (DSM-5 300.14). Overall, the disorder can be characterized as having chronic feelings or sensations of unreality. In the case of depersonalization, individuals experience an unreality of the bodily self, and in the case of derealization, individuals experience the external world as unreal. For instance, those suffering from the disorder report feeling as if they are automata (loss of the sense of agency), and feeling as if they are living in a dream

Please Disconnect from the Internet. This is an offline-only magazine of commentary, fiction, and poetry. Just disable your WiFi to view this issue. (It’s free.)

I call nonobjects information. Today we are in the transition from the age of objects to the age of nonobjects. Information, not objects, now defines our environment. We no longer occupy earth and sky but Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming progressively less tangible, cloudier and ghostlier. Nothing is substantial. 

How was this achieved? Simply by having participants engage in a brief session of conversation with a LLM for three rounds.

The patient, a 58-year-old male with PMO, sees faces without any distortions when they are viewed on a screen and on paper, but he sees distorted faces that appear "demonic" when viewed in-person.

Using data from individual Census records on the wealth of managers’ parents, we find that mutual fund managers from poor families outperform managers from rich families. We argue that managers born poor face higher entry barriers into asset management. Consistent with this view, managers born poor are promoted only if they outperform while those born rich are more likely to be promoted for reasons unrelated to performance

The forests surrounding Ethiopia’s Orthodox Tewahedo churches have a similar function to other physical objects within the church building, such as the murals and icons and incense, directing the worshipper to look beyond what is visible.

Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot [...] The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. [...] According to Air Canada, Moffatt never should have trusted the chatbot and the airline should not be liable for the chatbot's misleading information because Air Canada essentially argued that "the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,"

Then I started having vivid and... unsettling dreams. Also I couldn't stop thinking about that weird VHS tape. After researching I learned it was a digital backup. Using some special software I recovered the data. To my shock, it was a 256 byte program...

[...] around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets. [...] this sizable army of connected dental cleansing tools was used in a DDoS attack on a Swiss company’s website. The firm’s site collapsed under the strain of the attack, reportedly resulting in the loss of millions of Euros of business.