AZspot

There have been 33 films “based on the Odyssey,” and every one of them has been—in terms of their metaphysical fealty to the original—complete bullshit. Not on purpose, and not only because literature doesn’t adapt seamlessly to film. No film for a modern audience, from 1911 to 2026, can present the truest and original world view of “Homer’s” epic—a deeply conservative story told in oral formulae from an aristocratic perspective 2,700 years ago—and still gain a popular audience. In every case, it was one of those high school teachers or bougie preachers getting it wrong.

Sure, local churches probably want and need email hosting and web hosting, and maybe some even want to have podcast hosting or help putting services online. But “data analysis” and “A.I.”-anything are “services” most churches never knew they needed and will have to be convinced could mean anything to them.

AI backlash is an anti-capitalist movement, another facet of the activist omnicause. If socialism wins in America, it will start building data centers the next day with taxpayers’ money, chanting “AI for the people” and brushing aside all the mythical water concerns. Look at Canada, where the government accompanies its state-backed AI policies with references to Indigenous knowledge. The problem is that venture capital is far more efficient at driving media evolution than direct socialist media engineering. But the Chinese have managed to solve this contradiction.

We thought—I thought—the internet served to create new forms of social participation. As in the old joke, we thought it was an orgasm, but it was asthma. The internet’s true affordance has been the emergence and training of AI. The internet digitized all our knowledge and all our language, making them available to AI. Now digital orality is making all our speech available to AI. By talking digitally with one another and with AI, we show AI how to connect all meanings to all contexts. By helping AI actualize language into speech, we show it how cognitive structures work. AI needs our digital orality, and that is why we are becoming digitally oral. Our return to tribalism is merely a side effect of this media advancement.

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses.

Again, the core logics of AI are the same as racism and sexism, which is why these issues pop up again and again in these systems: it involves taking the simple shallow features of things we see, like skin colour, or hair length, or whatever other superficial property, and moving to very flawed conclusions. There is something addictive to this form of sheer intellectual laziness — as well as structurally beneficial to those select few within capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy — to this simplistic logic. It's easy to just point at people and call them names, I guess.