Technology

The same used to be said of newspapers (and still ought to be). That is, it's funny how accurate and informative they appear to be until the topic changes to something about which you have intimate knowledge.

The logical leap to generalise from that is impossible for far too many people and is also an easy trap for those who can make it.

They don’t realize that the chatbot’s “ideas” about hawking radiation were also just posted by a crank on Reddit.

This is literally the Dunning-Kruger effect in action - people can't evaluate the quality of AI responses in domains where they lack the knowledge to spot the bs.

That would happen with machine-generated texts in my childhood (00s) as well.

I think the propagandized (by Apple and many other companies, but also just by stupid reductions) idea of "invention" is why they think that.

They've been literally taught that the people making "inventions" are always "rebels" who disregard existing knowledge.

It's especially funny that in the areas more familiar to them they are all for authority even when it's suicidal madness.

It's harmful when you make yourself believe that a machine comfortable to use, with state-of-the-art electronics with tech processes hardly achievable in many places on the planet, advertised and visually designed to please, sold on scale big enough to make it worth it, - that this is a result of some rebellion.

Rebellions don't look like that. This is how gifts from the emperor of the sun from his forbidden palace look. They are nice too, but nothing in common with rebellions, like at all.

Like a cargo cult.

I think it's actually related in essence to cargo cults - first European empires (or one can even call it one big empire) traded important resources and slaves for colored glass, then for nice clothes, then for weapons, and eventually they started trading them for the actual meat of their culture, creating colonial elites and, in their perception, spreading the empire to only good effect. If the colonial savages only learned muskets, and started to produce muskets, it's both no income and danger, but if you make them more integrated and dependent, they are not going to shoot at you.

So. Marx happens. Marx is notoriously industrialist in focus and in his model colonies are just reduced to some black box. That's exactly why Marxist and derived ideas became so popular in former colonies and dependent countries, they could draw in place of that black box whatever they wanted, and yet have a common internationalist ideological family, allowing for some alliances and understanding. There was a bridge in the form of Russia - industrialist Marxism mixed with various agrarian ideologies and created the Bolshevik one, of using peasantry to create a "socialist" regime first, and then industrialize, sort of with an inferiority complex. For ex-colonies and dependent lands, though, the agrarian part was the most important one, that allowed them to culturally bond with the imperial core through anti-imperial ideology that gave them freedom to do whatever they want.

Then during the Cold War the empire reformed itself, and it sort of in appearances chose a middle ground. It both internalized some of the Marxist emotion and imagery, and adjusted the imperial mechanism for global trade and exchange. It also used the split between USSR and China. That's how it defeated the USSR (though mostly USSR defeated itself).

So - one of the ways to not turn this iteration of global trade and exchange into yet another spread of power to dependent world was, I think, this kind of centralization and heavy propaganda. The glossy, 00s-style portrayal of "the western world" like one big Disneyland entertainment park, with a "rebel" being able to change it all and make some of that entertainment too.

It simply eventually spread back because that always happens.

#1 Why the hell did I write that, #2 it's not some conspiracy theory, I think most of that was happening naturally, not devised by some evil conglomerate of elites.