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Notes -
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?
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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