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I'm in a bit of a funny situation.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with Freddie deBoer, author of The Cult of Smart and How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. He's been a controversial and polarising figure in online journalism for as long as he's been writing, who describes himself as a Marxist but whose politics are much harder to pin down than that designation might suggest. He became embroiled in scandal some years ago when he suffered a psychotic break brought on by his bipolar disorder, in which he knowingly falsely accused a fellow journalist of being a multiple rapist, followed immediately by a lengthy stay in an institution and being prescribed a cocktail of medications he (to the best of my knowledge) still takes to this day to manage his condition.
Today he published an article outlining his predictions (the subheader describes it as "a warning, or notes for someone else's manifesto") for a dramatic increase in anti-tech terrorism in the coming years - why it might come about, and what it might look like. But his piece is no more a "prediction" about the future of anti-tech terrorism than a guy called Fredo admiring your house and telling you what a shame it would be if something happened to it is a sincere compliment. No: having gestured towards the idea in the past, Freddie is now nailing his colours to the mast and going Full Uncle Ted. Between the article's lengthy descriptions of the specific vulnerabilities inherent to the modern internet infrastructure, his "lament" about the unavoidable human lives that will be lost as a result of anti-tech terrorism, and the literal screenshot of a recipe for nitroglycerine - any sane person would reasonably interpret the piece as incitement to violence, lacking as it does even the fig leaf of appending "in Minecraft" to the end of every description of a violent act. As with an increasingly large number of his articles in recent months, the comments are disabled, and with obvious cause - this isn't a discussion, it's a call to arms (you don't even need to be a paid subscriber to read it).
My comment is not about whether anti-tech terrorism is good or bad or whether it's appropriate for deBoer to use his platform to incite violence. (For what it's worth I think his diagnosis of the underlying causes of this future movement are pretty spot-on, and the despair he feels when witnessing the negative impacts of big tech, social media and smartphones is certainly something I can relate to - hell, I read Industrial Society and its Future and was enthusiastically nodding throughout.) My comment is about deBoer.
As an aside, the piece mentions parasocial relationships between celebrities and their fans as one of the things deBoer finds most distasteful about the modern technological society. Obviously, I don't know deBoer personally - it would be foolish of me to think I can draw accurate inferences about his mental state based solely on his public writing. But given his history of bipolar disorder, psychosis, and writing remarkably lucid and coherent articles while in the grip of an escalating paranoia (he has openly admitted that one of his most famous pieces, "Planet of Cops", was written in such a state), this latest article of his made me quite concerned. It's certainly surprising for a successful writer who just bought a house and is trying for a baby with his partner to so openly encourage his tens of thousands of readers to blow up 5G towers - and if some security guards are killed in the process, well, omelette and eggs.
But even if I knew for a fact that he was on the brink of a manic episode, I still can't just reach out to him and say "dude, are you okay?" He's written in the past (I can't find the article) about how much he hates it when he publishes something, and someone emails him to ask "dude, I read your last post and I have to ask - is something wrong? Is your bipolar acting up?" when it's abundantly obvious that they just disagree with the post and are using his mental illness as a cudgel with which to dismiss his arguments out of hand. As an intelligent person who's gone to great lengths to manage his mental illness, I can't imagine how insulting, disingenuous and condescending he must find this dismissal-framed-as-compassion.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The fact that it's unfair of people to dismiss his writing with "whatever dude, you're nuts anyway" doesn't change the fact that his condition has (and presumably does) impacted on the content and style of what he's written. If I were to reach out to him, what I'd really like to get across is the idea that "Freddie, I'm not even saying I disagree with your latest article - I'm saying that, even if I agreed 100% with your article, the content of it and the way it's written makes me legitimately concerned that you're on the verge of a severe episode. I'm not the person to help you, but I think you should seek help."
Am I overreacting? Does the piece come off as more sane and level-headed than I'm presenting it?
You are probably overreacting, and engaging in a strange parasocial relationship with FdB. The article itself is the kind of masturbatory fantasy so common when discussing terrorism as to be meaningless. It's a little weird to write it on a blog, but I'd be lying to you if I haven't thought out a couple terror campaign plans while on a long drive and bored. I doubt FdB is gonna get caught with a bomb any time soon. It's just edgelordism, we see it every month or so on themotte, the only difference is the government name attached to it.
But in actual personal relationships I have, I've faced the same circumstance. How do you judge a person who is mentally unwell, by their own admission? If someone buys their neurotransmitters off the shelf, and has to adjust the mix periodically, how do you handle that aspect of them while balancing respect and mercy?
Justice is a terrible thing. How do we determine who the real, morally responsible person is, when someone can act in completely different, contradictory ways as a result of taking/not taking different medications?
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everyone knows this, and he expressed immense contrition. I think it's reasonable to assume he means it.
He's the opposite of Unkle Ted. Ted lived what he preached. Freddie is that which Ted tended to despise. Ted wanted to destroy the systems and disavowed material possessions or any semblance of a normal life; Freddie makes a good living at it and benefits from the continuation of the system even if he has some well-justified gripes about it. Freddie has never been a 'tear-it-down' type guy in any of his writings. I don't think he has ever been sold on the ability of individuals or organizations to make any sort of sweeping societal change, but rather his philosophy is about optimizing one's personal situation based on the constraints and rules imposed by society, than any impetus to create a new or better society. His views are more nihilistic in this sense than revolutionary.
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I think you are overreacting.
Yes, he might be in his mania episode which may cause problems to him. But the article itself is not that great, he just probably imagines it to be.
First of all, it is very shallow and lacks details about any critical infrastructure. Don't be distracted by the a fraction of a page of making nitro-glycerine. It is just to illustrate that decentralized forces can have access to information. But the example is trivial and not meaningful.
He just managed to write an awful and long article that could be summed: AI doomers are wrong and desperate.
That could be an application of Chat GPT to make it shorter
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I suppose an awful and short article is an improvement of sorts.
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An accidental tab refresh ate my lengthy comment, so I'm going to be terse.
Yes, I agree that Freddie is inciting violence, not even particularly veiled. It's all, ah woe is modernity, wouldn't it be a shame if the disaffected took out their rage on their wifi routers? Anyway, it's unlikely to happen, but if you're so inclined here's [list of easy targets].
Leaving aside that unironically invoking Stochastic Parrots should be a clinical sign of mental retardation, I'll be sure to include it if I'm ever consulted for the DSM-7. LLMs don't perform well out of distribution, but when the distribution they're trained on comprises most of the internet..
At any rate, he's impotent and not just because of the meds. The appetite for political violence in the US is nowhere near as high as the overly online might like to daydream, and a decentralized bout of violent ludditism is unlikely to come about, no matter how vigorously he tries to manifest it. I value free speech enough that I don't want him deplatformed for his ranting.
If they want to be ants, the powers that be have bugspray.
To be fair, bipolar disorder with its manic psychosis is probably adaptive for the purposes of violent extremism. You need to be a little schizo, or ideally have a brain tumor, before some misdirected political violence in the comfort of the US seems remotely like a good idea.
By the time most of the masses even end up unemployed and disenfranchised, without a social safety net, that'll be when they're obsolete. Maybe they can merk an odd Google employee while they're sipping a latte, but data centers will become (and are) valuable enough that I don't suppose they'll have much success in climbing electrified fences, avoiding the robodogs and cameras and then taking a piss on a server rack.
I thought this stood for borderline personality disorder?
It does. I keep mixing the two up, despite having been corrected about the acronyms in the past, in my defense it's been a long shift. I do mean bipolar here.
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Not a useful one. It's incomplete, both in terms of being truncated before completion of the original (the addition of the glycerol and the extraction step are omitted), and in terms of the original not being enough for a modern terrorist (RFNA and WFNA are controlled substances precisely because they are so useful for bomb-making (not just nitroglycerin/dynamite, but also TNT, HMX and RDX are easily made with it); the terrorist version has to work up nitric acid from fertiliser or use the (expensive but inconspicuous) air/water synthesis).
The tight controls on nitric acid are why dumbshit like acetone peroxide gets used; any idiot knows dynamite's better, but dynamite's also nontrivial to get. (I suppose you could also try working up perchlorates from bleach, but perchlorates are also dumbshit).
It does, strictly-speaking, have a fig-leaf, namely the various mentions that he doesn't support or condone this. I agree, however, that the fig-leaf is unconvincing.
I didn't read it as incitement at all. I think that a lot of people are in self-censoring mode and are constantly afraid that their writings could be perceived as racist and apply their standards to others too.
To me it sounded that he hates AI doomers and then imagines how they could become violent. He is probably wrong is his descriptions but just because they are very graphic, it does not mean that he encourages them.
It is similar to how some writers describe immigrants in Europe from Islamic countries by calling them scum and describe all their current and imagined crimes. Obviously, a lot of people consider this to be incitement against immigrants and call for censuring them. Slurs against immigrants are unjustified as it could indeed cause people to spread hate against immigrants but it is not condoning or incitement of crimes committed by those immigrants.
Here the discriminated group is AI doomers who are deeply unhappy with Fredie's article. Maybe I shouldn't call them AI doomers as it sounds offensive. I am not really familiar with the accepted terminology.
Remember this part:
What he's describing (and, if you don't believe his denials, advocating) is a more general Luddism than the specific "AI doomer"/"Yuddite" ideology; destroying the Internet is not generally something that the latter want to do. I certainly agree that he holds the latter in contempt.
As for a more neutral term... well, it only applies to a subset of those worried about AI X-risk, but "Butlerian Jihadi"* fits those who want AI technology banned. At the very least, it doesn't offend me, and I've used it to refer to myself. I've heard "AI not-kill-everyone-ist" used as well (and this one is more general), although it's an ugly term.
*reference is to Dune's backstory, where a war called the Butlerian Jihad destroyed then-existent AI and AI was super-ultra-mega-banned in the aftermath with the commandment "thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind".
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So he starts off by aggressively misunderstanding and misreading singularitarians, then we get through to the stochastic parrot meme.
Then there's a misunderstanding of terrorism. Since when has there been anti-drug terrorism? Anti-alchohol terrorism? People don't get angry with the things they use/abuse so they can tolerate the bad situations they're in. People get angry with the causes of their problems or moral outrages, so we see anti-government terrorism, anti-abortion terrorism (note that this does not usually come from guilty mothers who aborted their children raging against the machinery they used themselves), anti-ethnic terrorism, religious terror...
You see suppression and regulation of alchohol, drugs, not terrorism.
About the only thing he gets right is that this anti-tech terror movement would get crushed even if it did exist. Technology is the biggest force-multiplier in history. This trivializes his argument.
My belief that de Boer is not worth reading is reinforced. Furthermore, if you think he's mentally ill, you shouldn't read him either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
This is the first paper I've seen with an emoji in its title. I hope this isn't a new thing.
It's hilarious that the lead author seems to be a one Emily Bender. I can only hope that she marries a Mr. Rodriguez and they decide to hyphenate their name as Bender-Rodriguez.
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It's co-authored by Timnit Gebru, a woman so utterly incompetent and hostile that she managed to wear out the massive amount of tolerance her gender engenders in her field at Google.
The emoji is hardly the worst part about it.
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Now it gets to have 20 different interpretations depending on which platform you use.
It may get contentious.
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As it happened I unsubscribed from him on Substack the other day for unrelated reasons, although I'm paid up until May. However
This doesn't follow. I already knew he was mentally ill in the sense of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and many of his best articles were written while he was struggling to manage his condition. My concern now is that his mental illness may be interfering with his life to the point that he's at risk of a severe episode. And even if he was literally psychotic, I don't believe that psychotic people are incapable of producing interesting or thought-provoking articles.
Fair enough, I just thought de Boer was in the aggravating kind of mental illness camp, as opposed to the 'fun or amusing' camp. From the tone of your post, you didn't seem interested or happy to read his content.
Oh no, I've been subscribed to his Substack for years. My girlfriend teases me about how often I start a sentence with "I read an article by Freddie deBoer the other day..."
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Even the aggravating kind can be incredibly fascinating and insightful at times. Terry Davis was (although ymmv, he could be fun and amusing at times too.) John Nash too.
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You might be right to be worried, but for what it's worth I believe that Derrick Jensen has been advocating for mass-scale violent anti-tech environmentalist action for decades now and he seems to be doing more or less alright.
I don't think that encouraging thousands of readers to blow up 5G towers and potentially kill people is necessarily incompatible with doing alright in life, at least as long as you make sure to do it in such a way that the feds can't actually nail you for any law-breaking.
Millions of people every day call for mass violence online - against their political opponents, against other governments, against racial groups, etc. - but the vast majority of them don't end up harming themselves or even harming others.
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One thing jumping out at me about the lack of trust in social institutions is just how little control these institutions had over the lives of the median citizen and how distant and impersonal these things actually are.
Taking the government as a trivial example here, but up until the end of the Great Depression, the federal government was not a major factor in people’s lives. It existed, but almost everything was regulated from state and local government, and especially local government. Because of this, the average person was governed essentially by his neighbors and those making the decisions would have town hall meetings in which average people could confront their rulers, and demand answers or solutions. They could bring up problems. Even better, the city or county leaders *lived in that city and could see the problems.
Now that the federal government has taken over much of the legal landscape, you no longer have any of that. The President and Congressional representatives live in gated communities thousands of miles away. They don’t see what’s going on in your neighborhood, they don’t walk the streets where there are homeless and drug addicted people and shit on the street and looting of businesses. And because the government runs the entire country, you’re now one of 350 or so people who live in America with no hope or expectation that you’ll be heard in any real sense. There’s no sense of reciprocity between these institutions and you. You have no control, but they control you.
Multiply this by other, similar institutions, and it’s not really that surprising that nobody trusts these things. They’re giant black boxes that you can’t control and don’t understand and are simultaneously forced to obey and give over minute control of your daily life to.
But you do!
Undeniably, the Federal government has a more expansive role today than it did in 1930, but even today the overwhelming majority of laws and policies that govern your day to day life operate at the state and local level. If there are bums shitting in the street and a housing crisis, you should probably look first at what your city government is doing. If the infrastructure in your state sucks, it's more likely the fault of your state government than the Feds. Law enforcement is overwhelmingly a municipal issue and criminal justice a state one.
If there has been a true shift, it is in expectations. People now expect and demand that the Federal government address these problems while neglecting state and local government or treating it as an extension of national-level culture wars. (Or, as @Outlaw83 notes, they'd rather trust to distant Feds who mostly ignore them rather than capricious local elites who know where they live).
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Yeah. along with massive economic and cultural changes, what happened is a lot of people in those communities decided they'd rather be ruled by far-away people in DC who'd listen to you, rather than petty, corrupt local tyrants who could not be defeated on a local level, thanks to generations of control in a local area, and were corrupt in ways that the federal government could never be. The federal government may not listen to you (and even that's overrated - a lot of the reason why supposed popular things aren't done isn't because of the evil elites, but because those popular things aren't as popular as you think when they're not push polled, both from the Left and the Right - the reality is most people just dislike change, period), but it's far less likely a random cousin of a congressman is going to beat you up, or try to do something with your wife and girlfriend, and nobody will do anything about, because his father, cousins, and brothers all are in charge of various aspects of the local area.
This is true of big cities, small cities, rural areas, urban areas.
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Damn it, what did I and 349 of my friends do to be so oppressed? (jk)
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I don't think your reaction is unreasonable.
The biggest caution I have to give is that there's a certain class of deranged writing -- whether genuine DSM-IV-grade mental illness, Unknown Armies-grade nutjobbery, or sufficient low-level crankery -- that attracts widespread attention, regardless of the true skill or merits of the writer. A sober-tongued Planet of Cops would not have been anywhere as successful, whether or not its claims were correct. No one cared who Andrea James was until
she put on the maskstarted captioning photos of her enemy's minor children.And once a writer has tapped into that field, there's a temptation to do so again. Even when you're not driven to it be mania or depression or organic issues so far that you can't imagine doing anything else.
That... limits the extent pointing to some bizarre public speech can be useful as a tool for diagnosing this class of issues.
Of course, the really morbid thought is that just because it's schizophrenic doesn't mean it's wrong -- I'd argue that it is, but most of the arguments don't rest on de Boer at all. Or even that it's so stigmatized only a schizophrenic (or maniac) would write it publicly under their own name. Which doesn't make it any saner or more level-headed! Just more accepted.
Thanks for sharing the link to your Tumblr, I'm going to binge the entire thing tomorrow in work.
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Not even going to read the article itself, I'll instead just try my hand at some Russel conjugation that's floating around my head.
I don't actually have a point.
Point taken, but I'll aim for a Hegelian synthesis: my Freddie is a talented, perceptive eccentric, and I sincerely hope no severe harm befalls him as a result of his mental illness.
Angry face
The Southkraut doth protest too much, methinks.
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Not that far from the Overton window. Maybe that’s a condemnation of the general state of Internet Discourse, but I’ve seen more unhinged prose from shock jocks like Yarvin. He’s also more measured than some of our local commenters, at least when it comes to “world without meaning.” I say this as someone who fervently disagrees with several of Freddie’s premises.
The worst part is posting that recipe. Suggesting possible organizational schemes or theorizing about infrastructure is…well, the devil is in the details. It’s only actionable in the sense that a journalist calling for inclusivity would be actionable. Implementation details are thankfully left to the imagination.
I hate to encourage the bystander effect, but I don’t think it’s your responsibility to reach out. Especially not when he has specifically objected to comments from strangers. If you’re right, then even if you frame a request very tactfully, is he going to be receptive?
Trust that he has a circle of IRL or at least closer friends who can take care of him.
As I noted above, the recipe is not complete enough to be especially useful. That nitric acid, sulphuric acid and glycerol make nitroglycerin is in a lot of first-year chemistry textbooks. What's not so well-known are the extraction step and how to work up RFNA from substances that you can actually buy without security checks; Freddie cut off that recipe before the former and it seems to have been too old to include the latter.
As long as sulfuric acid and nitrate salts are still available, the acid mix shouldn't be too hard. The biggest problem is temperature control. And what you do with the product, of course.
Not too hard, but your average script-kiddie without a feel for chemistry does actually need a cheat sheet for it, and such a cheat sheet isn't as well-known as the esterification step.
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Words spoken by someone who is about to have fewer hands and/or eyes.
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I don't know, it was not that different from "soon countries will nuke each other's data centers to prevent anyone else from training a sufficiently advanced AI", which is what people here post every week.
Hey, the US is throwing around targeted anti-Chinese-AI sanctions, along with anti-anyone-who-might-give-GPUs-to-China sanctions.
They tried sanctioning North Korean/Iranian nuclear materials too and certainly considered a disarming strike. It's not unreasonable to think that as the AI arms race intensifies, lagging powers will consider nuclear strikes (perhaps high altitude EMP airbusts) to prevent total defeat. That's a standard part of nuclear strategy, dubbed 'use it or lose it'.
On the other hand, what you're saying is still far saner than Yudkowsky's policy proposal of multilateral bombing and nuclear strikes to prevent anyone getting advanced AI.
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I thought the posters here are overwhelmingly not Yudkowsky-ite doomers. I don't recall much of that sort of posting.
It's more common to see Yuddites regarded as stupid, though, not mentally ill.
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It's an extreme call, but in the same way that the Luddites did not eventually win, I think anti-tech terrorism is even deader right out of the gate. You want the same people who are glued to their iPhones to go out and blow up the infrastructure that lets them live online. I'm not entirely sure that Freddie really does mean "go out and blow up server farms" so much as "by writing something this radical, I want to shake complacency and get people thinking about the shape of the future that we want versus the one that is coming damn fast right down the tracks at us".
Good luck with that one. Anyway, Tolkien got there first, and as we all know, post-war world did not see power stations and factories being blown up by the surviving members of La Résistance:
It is doubly ungood if you bomb your own infrastructure, but the Soviets then or Chinese today don't similarly cripple themselves. Then you don't get to live in imaginary pastoral bliss, you get to be ruled by the people who chose a different way.
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I agree with you that despite all his qualifiers, disclaimers, and tone, FdB is hopeful that this will happen. It's also a lucid piece, even if he should have reached out for some insights from people with expertise in data center security to explain why his scenario is implausible.
Is it written in a manic euphoria? Maybe, and his history adds reason to think it might be. But I don't think that's a reason to disregard it. Madness might have a place in civilization (pace Foucault), and the modern tendency to pathologize madness is as much a way to defend irrational aspects of a broken world as it is to "cure the patient." Maybe we need the insane to say things the rest of us are too scared to point out, being too well-incorporated into modern society and economy to risk our comfortable place. FdB was rightly cancelled, but that gives him a bit of a superpower: having been cancelled, he is now uncancellable.
As far as his personal health, all we can do is hope either that he's fine or has a good support structure. I hope he has people who are invested in his well-being and are willing to act on it if he starts to decline.
Tech is very redundant. That is why it works so well . Amazon data centers are all over the world so if one fails, websites still work.
You could nuke Council Bluffs and Google would shrug. The idea that someone could shutdown Bard by shoving down a bunch of server racks is delusional; Google's initial reaction to a nuke would be crafting the right PR release and figuring out how to get a big tax write-off for it. FdB is more invested in heroic myths than coming up with an objective, materialist understanding of tech power.
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He’s a doctrinaire Marxist, and it’s hard not to notice that Marxist predictions have not, in fact, happened. Of course he’s going to push the predictions out as ‘well Marxist principles will happen when X, no Y, no Z’. This is predictable if stupid. When you add in that Freddy is mentally ill, you get lengthy screeds like that.
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Absolutely not, his analysis is cogent and perceptive. I'm not approaching this from the perspective of "should we dismiss this out of hand as the ramblings of a disturbed man?", but rather "regardless of the virtues of this piece, is its publication cause for concern about deBoer's well-being?" Maybe it's not my place to ask or wonder. Presumably if he really was on the verge of a manic breakdown, his partner would have clocked some much more obvious red flags long before he pressed publish on this post.
People who disagree with someone on the Internet have a hefty incentive for motivated reasoning in thinking the person to be disturbed.
Also, you're probably not particularly concerned over his well-being in general. If he posted that he had a physical illness you probably wouldn't even send him a get well card.
I explicitly stated that, in spite of finding this article concerning, there was much in it that I agreed with. deBoer has posted dozens of articles whose theses I've disagreed with, often explicitly telling him so in the comments section - this is the first to make me concerned that he might be having a bipolar relapse.
Correct. The obvious difference being that a person going into a manic episode or a psychotic break may pose a risk to themselves or those around them, and may not even realise that they're ill.
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Descriptively, if there were a prediction market for "will FdB be institutionalized by the end of December 2024," I think this would marginally up the price.
But really there's nothing to be done. Neither of us knows him or has even met him (presumably), and the idea that his audience should be invested in his well-being is just another manifestation of the detestable parasocialism infesting the world. I know in my own life there's probably at least a couple people teetering on the brink, and I might have actual ability to help them in some small amount: speculating on FdB's mental state should be understood as entertainment, not as something helpful (which isn't to say it's bad to speculate, just that it's not a form of constructive engagement with the world).
I hope so, but I suspect that's overly optimistic.
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Eh, lots of people read Uncle Ted, pretty much no one blows up shit, and the same applies to Freddie's edgelording. The nitroglycerine recipe is incomplete (there's no glycerol), and anyone with enough chemistry knowledge not to just cover themselves with acid burns or blow themselves up knows how to make it anyway. Right wing edgelords have been talking about how easy it is to destroy infrastructure for a while now; one Marxist edgelord isn't going to change that.
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