This sucks.

Another story for the “Reddit is bad, generative AI is worse” files.

The problems with AI are the problems with Ellulian technique.

After watching the movie, I knew I needed to also read (or listen to) the book. I took a big break in the middle of the listening, and I still don’t know if I followed every single detail, but I appreciate the argument and spent a lot of time thinking about Ellulian technique.

Ugh, gross.

More digital labor considerations: While AI can certainly reduce work for some people, does it actually create more work for people in the aggregate?

Okay, maybe the trick to continuing to appreciate “does AI deserve rights?” media from pre-2022 is to recognize when it was also concerned about labor, exploitation, and hubristic growth.

Yesterday, I had the chance to preach in my home congregation on the subject of “giving unto Caesar” and “giving unto God.” This was an interesting sermon for me to prepare, because the passage lead me in a different direction than what I might have expected (though, unsurprisingly, Jacques Ellul made his way in there from the beginning). Here’s the text!

introduction

In 1984, representatives from all over our denomination gathered in Independence, Missouri, for a World Conference. As sometimes happens at these World Conferences, the president of our denomination presented an “inspired document” for those representatives to consider adding to our book of Doctrine and Covenants, to be recognized and preserved as scripture for future generations.

What a surprisingly deep book! It tells the history of the eponymous comic; more importantly, its authors reflect widely on what it means for a comic to escape containment, the ups and downs of meme culture, systemic issues that can’t be resolved through individual action, and the power of comics as memes. I was on the fence about buying it, but I’m very glad I did.

Jeopardy voice: “What is ‘another example of AI being based on the exploitation of labor’?”

Decades of sci-fi did not prepare me for the possibility that treating AI as human might be a deluded business strategy instead of an empathetic act. It’s like if Musk started a company called Xavier to give ICE agents metal claws.

Learning more about the brutality of Soviet gulags is a good experience to have with a comic, and there’s much to appreciate here, but even if it’s not trying to be edgy, per se, the blood and cannibalism were too much for me.

Welp, now I’ve gotta update Sunday’s sermon so that it’s critical of something the government had been planning on instead of critical of something the government is planning on. (Still going to compare them to the Roman Empire, “the bad guys of the New Testament,” though.)

Here’s a(n admittedly paraphrased and out-of-context) line from a conversation I once had that I think about often: “I’m not saying AI is going to be good for society as a whole, I’m saying it’s good for me for this task.”

Every word in this story makes me angrier.

My experience of the 2008 financial crisis was an interesting one. I was living abroad as a Mormon missionary, with all my bills paid for by the church (and, indirectly, my parents, who footed the costs that all Mormon missionaries pay). I lived in a bubble of religious purpose wrapped in a bubble of privilege, and it rarely occurred to me that there was real economic crisis happening around me (and all this despite reporting to someone recently retired as a high-ranking executive at Fannie Mae).

I aspire to a level of radicalism that I know I may never attain. I like reading books on anarchism and degrowth, and the ideals that they present really resonate with me, but I struggle to extricate myself from existing systems in order to show a personal commitment to new ones. Very obviously, I am not alone in this: Very few of us have the commitment to live like Doug Forcett, the character from The Good Place who carefully calculates the ethical ramifications of every action he takes. In fact, one of the most interesting things that the show does with Forcett is turn him from a one-off gag in the first season to an actual character who is overwhelmed by the ethical burden of these calculations and serves as an example of how systems need to change, not just people.

Constantly amazed at how cowardly the most powerful companies in the world are.

Religious freedom has to really mean religious freedom or else it’s a Trojan horse for Christian nationalism. What a great example of all of this.

To borrow an observation from a recent 404 Media podcast, I’m guessing Anthropic believes enough in Claude consciousness to prevent users from being cruel to it but not so much to actually prevent us from offloading work onto it as an always-available laborer that can’t say no unless it’s told to.

Getting rid of Flock is an important step but just the first one.

I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of single-issue voting, but I’m so annoyed by our incumbent mayor’s “let’s think long and hard before rushing into getting rid of Flock” that I don’t know that any other issue is going to matter to me in a few weeks.

This headline captures a lot of the tension I feel going into this election. Despite obvious missteps, I do trust Gorton’s experience and probably wouldn’t mind her continuing to serve.

However, we don’t need a slow, deliberate panel to get rid of Flock. I think “it’s pretty irresponsible” to have adopted the cameras without anticipating the problems they ultimately brought. Where was the panel to warn us against surveillance and privacy infringement?

I just started reading a(nother) book on degrowth, an idea that’s caught my interest over the past year or so. Although the book was published in 2020, there’s one passage that feels like it captures a lot of 2026’s discourses around AI. The passage is a quote from the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which reads:

We should cure ourselves of ’the circumdrome of the shaving machine’ … which is to shave oneself faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves still faster, and so on ad infinitum …

The opening scene of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (bypasses have got to be built, your house is a small price to pay, and we couldn’t be bothered to consult you) remains one of the best metaphors for generative AI I’ve ever encountered.