The Weekly Weird #24

iPad Pro launch crushes it, Florida bans lab-grown meat, vaccine backsies, China's MoD hack attack, AI Shrimp Jesus and the Night of the Living Dead Internet, and Language!

May 09, 2024

Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, our moment together to viddy the various vicissitudes of voracious villainy abroad in the land!

The next episode of the podcast (#113) drops this Sunday, and it’s a banger. Carol Cohn, a retired Radio Free Europe journalist, born in Antonescu’s Romania, who escaped the Communists and made a life for himself in the West, tells me his life story. It’s quite a yarn! Make sure you check it out, and please share.

Let’s get cracking!

iPad Pro Launch Crushes It

Apple have announced their new iPad Pro, “the thinnest product we’ve ever created” according to CEO Tim Cook’s exuberant post on X.

The accompanying product video also fits the profile, exhibiting the thinnest quantity of self-awareness shown by Silicon Valley in a long time.

Please take a moment to watch it so that the remainder of this segment will make sense.

Music, art, photography, writing, computing, and even time itself (in the shape of the retro metronome) are compacted into oblivion by the implacable relentless blank face of the Crusher, leaving behind only the slim profile of an iPad where once beauty, truth, possibility, and analogue human creativity resided.

“The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest,” proclaims the emotionless pubescent voiceover, as the pack shot and logo appear accompanied by the final refrain of the music, ringing out on the line “All I ever need is you…”

Being tone deaf is de rigeur in the tech industry, but this is really something special. Somehow, the same company that (ab)used the concept and meaning of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four - see below - has come full circle to crush the ‘old’ world between the clamping jaws of inexorable steel-and-cement progress, re-creating for the 21st century exactly the featureless hopeless colourless reality it claimed it sought to break free from in the late 20th.

Note the ‘Big Brother’ speech that continues throughout the 1984 ad:

Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.

We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.

Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth.

We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.

Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.

We shall prevail!

Forty years after this came out, Apple demonstrated their own version of Information Purification by destroying the varied, vibrant, sensual artefacts of creativity and expression and replacing them with the One Gadget, the right, pure, and good item that will solve all your problems, meet all your needs, and replace all other techno-objects. Just like the Party, the one ideology that does away with all others because all necessary wisdom is contained within itself, obviating the need for variety, diversity, and deviation. The “Unification of Thought” is achieved through one cause, one device, ein Volk…you get the point.

So the revolutionaries have become the Party. Could they have more aptly self-described truthfully while thinking they were saying something else? It’s so perfect in its irony that I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or pour two fingers of bourbon on the rocks and raise a toast.

The frightening thing is that they, as a company, put their heads together and thought this was good and on brand and inspirational, which means that the semiotic negation of all that is joyous and effulgent in human creativity excited and pleased them, and represents accurately who they think they are as a company and as a force in society.

Florida Bans Lab-Grown Meat

Florida Governor Ron de Santis has signed a law banning lab-grown meat in the Sunshine State.

The above news item elides the press release the Governor’s office put out, in which the once and future presidential candidate blamed the World Economic Forum (WEF):

Florida is taking action to stop the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects, “an overlooked source of protein.” While the World Economic Forum is telling the world to forgo meat consumption, Florida is increasing meat production, and encouraging residents to continue to consume and enjoy 100% real Florida beef.

The link in the press release goes to an infamous 2021 article published by the WEF in which the President and CEO of a company called Ynsect (Tagline: “Reinventing the food chain”) used a variety of statistics and charts as window dressing around the central assertion that everyone should eat bugs to save the planet (while the billionaire class presumably eat food grown on their large tracts of private farmland). Is insect protein a possible alternative to animal protein in the human diet, from a nutritional standpoint, and a way to mitigate land use in livestock rearing? Sure. Does that make the “Let them eat bugs” pitch a good look for the world’s wealthiest people?

De Santis gave a pretty clear mission statement:

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.”

If only he’d gotten on board with the global elite, he might still be in the running for the presidency.

I’m kidding, last year De Santis received more money from large donors than any other Republican candidate, according to Politico (18 October 2023):

Maybe it’s the other way round - the global elite binned him and now he’s getting even?

Either way, if you like your meat like you like your yoghurt (cultured), you’ll go hungry in Florida.

Vaccine Backsies

AstraZeneca has withdrawn its Covid vaccine worldwide “after admitting it can cause rare blood clots,” according to The Independent:

AstraZeneca recently admitted that its vaccine, initially called Covishield, could cause very rare side effects like blood clots and low blood platelet counts, The Telegraph reported.
The admission came after the company was slapped with a class action lawsuit in the UK, which claimed that the vaccine had caused deaths and severe injuries and sought damages up to £100m for about 50 victims.
“It is admitted that the AZ vaccine can, in very rare cases, cause TTS. The causal mechanism is not known,” AstraZeneca said in court documents in February, the newspaper reported.
TTS is thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, which is characterised by blood clots and low blood platelet counts in humans.

Let’s go back to March 2021 to visit a double-wide spread in The Times…

Note the headline: “100% effective”

From The Independent:

Some studies conducted during the pandemic found the vaccine was 60 to 80 per cent effective in protecting against the novel coronavirus.

If you sold condoms with 60 to 80 per cent efficacy but told a newspaper they were 100% effective, you’d get done. Thankfully injecting something directly into human beings isn’t the same as…oh, wait…

See the highlighted box at the bottom right in which Tom Whipple highlights the “ridiculous” and “bizarre” warning from some academics about possible adverse effects? Let’s zoom in.

What a difference three years, more data, and a class action lawsuit makes.

The Independent again:

AstraZeneca’s admission that the vaccine could potentially prove lethal ran counter to its insistence in 2023 that it would “not accept that TTS is caused by the vaccine at a generic level”.
In April 2021, the World Health Organisation also confirmed that the vaccine could have fatal side effects. “A very rare adverse event called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, involving unusual and severe blood clotting events associated with low platelet counts, has been reported after vaccination with this vaccine.”

Well, at least nobody was forced to take it…

Share 1984 Today!

China’s MoD Hack Attack

Britain’s Ministry of Defence was hacked this week, compromising the data of 270,000 members of the Armed Forces.

From TechInformed:

The cyber-attack appears to have compromised the personal information of current and former Royal Navy, Army, and Royal Air Force members. The data included names, bank details, and, in some cases, addresses.

Grant Shapps, the political unflushable who previously served as Transport Secretary, Home Secretary, Business Secretary, and Energy Secretary, now the UK’s Defence Secretary, reported to Parliament:

The “malign actor” Shapps repeatedly referred to in Parliament is…drum roll…

Quoted in The Independent:

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in London said: “China has always upheld the principle of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. China has neither the interest nor the need to meddle in the internal affairs of the UK. We urge the relevant parties in the UK to stop spreading false information, stop fabricating so-called China threat narratives, and stop their anti-China political farce.”

Is the government deflecting to turn an embarrassing failure into a foreign policy move? Or is China, well-known for its cyberattack capabilities, actually behind this?

Sky News wasn’t in the mood to pussyfoot, opening its article on the hack with:

The Chinese state has hacked the Ministry of Defence…

Two sentences later in the same article (emphasis theirs):

The government will not name the country involved, but Sky News understands this to be China.

What a world. Who can you believe, the media or the Maoists?

TechInformed again:

While initial assessments indicate no data has been exfiltrated, the incident has sparked serious concerns about the security of supply chains and the susceptibility of critical sectors to cyber espionage, potentially leading to further breaches.

Hey ho, we’ll see what happens next time then. At least our government and private sector aren’t deliberately trying to corral us into a fully digital world where all our details, transactions, and movements are tracked and logged in online databases.

AI Shrimp Jesus and The Night Of The Living Dead Internet

If you want the TL;DR, here it is: The internet is irreversibly corrupted by AI crap.

Jason Koebler at 404 Media reports on Facebook’s descent into madness:

What is happening, simply, is that hundreds of AI-generated spam pages are posting dozens of times a day and are being rewarded by Facebook’s recommendation algorithm. Because AI-generated spam works, increasingly outlandish things are going viral and are then being recommended to the people who interact with them. Some of the pages which originally seemed to have no purpose other than to amass a large number of followers have since pivoted to driving traffic to webpages that are uniformly littered with ads and themselves are sometimes AI-generated, or to sites that are selling cheap products or outright scams.

Exhibit A: AI Shrimp Jesus

Rewind: There’s something called “dead internet theory",” which posits that sometime around 2016 or 2017, bots took over the internet and everything since then is just algorithmic noise manipulated by powerful interests to control and pacify populations.

Hard to imagine, I know.

Back at 404 Media, Koebler has put forward a version of this that he calls the “zombie internet.” He writes of his time spent studying AI spam on Facebook:

I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.

Along with his personal account, Koebler created two burner accounts to play around with Facebook’s algorithm.

When I first started reporting on AI spam on Facebook, I had to specifically seek it out by joining groups like “Um, isn’t that AI?,” whose members have been tracking AI spam for the last year. I soon realized that the best way to find bizarre viral spam was by simply logging into this alt account, where my feed was quickly taken over by “Shrimp Jesus,” celebrities who had been altered to have their limbs amputated, images of poor African kids who had built something, AI-generated log cabins, etc. With just a few likes, I was able to turn my feed into one where at least 80 percent percent of the content is AI generated, and where the only content I’m being shown is already incredibly viral elsewhere on the platform.

The AI fever dream is in full swing over at the House of Zuck (Suck?), approaching warp-level weird. Koebler describes what he was served by the website that requires you to use your real name, wanted to launch its own currency, and swears it’s all about connecting people:

One image was of an AI-generated starving, mutilated child asking for birthday wishes. When I clicked through to the page that posted the image, I saw dozens of AI-generated children, some of whom were seemingly dead, drowning, starving, had amputations, or were some combination of all of those. (Facebook deleted these accounts after I wrote an article about them but did not respond to my email requesting comment and an interview about how it tracks and takes action on this type of content). Another image I saw within seconds of joining Facebook was an AI-generated image of Jesus with an amputated leg, wearing an Uncle Sam hat, sitting in a wheelchair and holding a birthday cake while sitting next to an American soldier holding a machine gun in a war zone.

So what does it matter if there is a bunch of surreal, fake, nutso content on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet? Does it matter if there are hijacked pages converted to AI spam that attract fake subscribers to build fictitious followings to disseminate more artificial content in a repetitive loop until someone at Facebook notices and takes down the page for being inauthentic?

Well, “real people are interacting with AI-generated images that are being fed to them by Facebook’s recommendation algorithm, and they do not know that they are not real.”

Koebler again:

AI spam, as well as the specter of AI content, is impacting how real people use Facebook and perceive reality more broadly. Facebook itself is shoving its own AI features down people’s throats, and has made clear that it is going to continue spending billions of dollars on AI features that it intends to make core to its products and business model.
The biggest unanswered question from my many months of reporting on this is whether real people are actually being fooled by “shrimp Jesus” and other bizarre AI images, and why they are interacting with this content in the first place.

The pollution of social media and search engines with AI-generated visual media is becoming a drag on the ability of actual humans to find and relate to each other through the noise. Whether the internet ever represented anything ‘real’ is another conversation altogether, one I may perhaps be able to have with Koebler himself if he is up for coming on the podcast, but the forced conversion of the place people put their baby pics into an ever-accelerating assembly line of nonsensical crap created by AI is, in the vernacular, a bummer, man.

Koebler sums it up:

All of this, taken together, is why I think we should not view Facebook’s AI spam through the lens of the “Dead Internet.” The platform has become something worse than bots talking to bots. It is bots talking to bots, bots talking to bots at the direction of humans, humans talking to humans, humans talking to bots, humans arguing about a fake thing made by a bot, humans talking to no one without knowing it, hijacked human accounts turned into bots, humans worried that the other humans they’re talking to are bots, hybrid human/bot accounts, the end of a shared reality, and, at the center of all of this: One of the most valuable companies on the planet enabling this shitshow because its human executives and shareholders have too much money riding on the mass adoption of a reality-breaking technology to do anything about it.

And finally…

Language!

The Montreal Gazette has published one of the best sub-headers I’ve read in a long time:

Official Languages Commissioner praises court ruling that found a francophone man’s rights were infringed by a unilingual English sign at a juice bar’s play area at a Toronto airport.

For those of us not au fait with Canada’s language rules:

Canadians can ask the commissioner to investigate federal government institutions, airport authorities, Crown corporations such as Via Rail and some private companies including Air Canada and Canadian National Railway [for not serving them in the official language of choice].

A “language activist” from Ottawa named Michel Thibodeau has raked in nearly $10,000 (Canadian) by filing complaints about “English-only push-buttons on Parliament Hill drinking fountains,” “a Booster Juice smoothie bar’s unilingual English sign (“FIT & FUN ZONE”) near a play area,” “unilingual English signs on CIBC automated teller machines,” and more.

Quelle horreur.