#tescreal — Public Fediverse posts

In the summer of 2024, in Europe, there was this petition to #TaxTheRich that needed to get 1 million signatures. Had this number been reached, the EU politicians would *have* to discuss the topic.

We had a year to get the 1 million signatures, but even after 10 months we still had only 250,000 signatures.

No sane working-class person can be against #TaxTheRich, so I figured it's only because nobody even hears of the existence of this petitition that it never took off.

As the deadline came closer and closer, I saw the petitition shared more and more on Mastodon. But Mastodon is a tiny network. With our cozy little bubble we would never find 750,000 signatures in less than two months. What we needed was a person with a massive reach to boost the initiative. A single "influencer" with a few million followers could get us the 750,000 missing signatures within a day.

So I figured a promising winning strategy is to write to a few YouTubers with large followings. You can imagine how that went, but I thought it worth a try, and then I could at least say I didn't leave a single stone unturned.

I wrote to Ali Abdaal, since he had already mentioned (and made a few videos about) the "10% Pledge", about donating to charities for the rest of his life.

https://aliabdaal.com/giving-what-we-can/

At the time, in the summer of 2024, he also flew his entire team to Turkey for some "off-site"/"workcation". He apparently ran out of ideas for videos to create to keep the needy YouTube algorithm happy, so he just filmed himself and his crew having a holiday in a rented mansion with a swimming pool, masquerading as work and planning quarterly goals or whatever. Imagine the CO2 emissions of flying 15 people or so to an "off-site"/vacation.

Of course I never received an answer from Ali Abdaal, who was portraying himself being serious about giving away 10% of the money he makes. Of course I foresaw that beforehand but thought it worth a try. The deadline passed and #TaxTheRich didn't even come close to the necessary number of signatures.

Only later (after the deadline had passed) did I learn that "Giving What We Can" is founded by Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and Bernadette Young. It's Effective Altruism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giving_What_We_Can

#TESCREAL #EffectiveAltruism

My explanation of "rationalism":

#TESCREAL #rationalism

https://hachyderm.io/@davidculley/116280132406013694

If you haven't heard of Roko's Basilisk yet:

https://hachyderm.io/@davidculley/117152516471968504

#AGI #TESCREAL

RE: https://topspicy.social/@WhyNotZoidberg/117152115654435930

The self-proclaimed "rationalists" also believe in something they call "Roko's basilisk", which means:

What if you believe that AGI isn't a thing or even if you simply don't actively help to achieve it … but then AGI will be achieved someday? The AGI will be *mad* at everyone who didn't help to bring it into existence, go full berserk, and in its wroth kill everyone who wasn't a AGI believer. To evade this doom, you better start believing in AGI … and not just that, but also do everything in your power to bring AGI into existence.

These people are all so weird—literally cultists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

#TESCREAL

@alineblankertz

Seems nothing was learnt (or the realisation dawns so slowly that lots if damage is done first) from what grew in academia and then expanded into common delusion and The Holocaust when the elite began funding scientific investigations into eugenics.

"You got dollars?
We'll make a place for you at our university!"

#Eugenics #Nazis #Fascism #CarnegieMellon #OxfordUniversity #FutureOfHumanityInstitute #FHI #NickBostrom #EliezerYudkowsky #TESCREAL #BjornLomborg

@alineblankertz The connections between “AI” boosters, “AI” doomers, #EffectiveAltruism and other #TESCREAL ideologies are explained quite clearly in @RainerMuehlhoff’s little book “AI and the New Fascism” which will appear in November. (I read the German original edition.)

https://rainermuehlhoff.de/en/KI-und-der-neue-Faschismus-Reclam-Buch/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@harold/117146045089521164

If #MarkCarney knew the US was negotiating in bad faith, he certainly didn't show it by understanding the necessity of urgently developing Canadian #digitalSovereignty. Someone please sit him down in front of a @pluralistic talk (as Doctorow's a Canadian source, and Carney appears to trust journalists well enough to appoint them Ministers: though urgently read also the books by the experts cited below), and persuade our PM that our #sovereignty and #nationalSecurity depend on freeing #Canada from all Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon (AWS) dependence, with wartime urgency.

Hon. @Paulatics, @KristopherWells, @SenKarenAb, or @colindeacon: Can any of you talk some sense into our Honourable bank executive about this? I'd be happy to volunteer to explain anything in Cory's presentations or books that you or Mark doesn't understand. (I have over 20 years' paid experience explaining tech stuff to non-tech people, if that'd be useful.) I'm sure plenty other Canadians such as those in the @linuxassociation and the Canadian #selfHosting community could help explain this too.

Perhaps this needs to be more diplomatically phrased, but if we need funds to accelerate Canadian digital sovereignty, I suggest taking them from Evan Solomon's tax-abyss Ministry of Slop. Evan's an uncritical career tech hype-man with less qualification to run a technology ministry than the historically and catastrophically incompetent #PeteHegseth has to run the US DoD. Solomon's education is in English literature and religious studies, not anything even remotely related to computing, and it shows. His religious fanaticism for, as Drs. @emilymbender and @alex aptly put it, The AI Con, ought to disqualify him from leading a tech ministry.

Meanwhile, the very existence of such an office as "Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation" shows that our illustrious economist mistakenly believes that, in the Empire of AI (per Karen Hao), Canada can become a colonizer, not return to its prior status as a colony: exactly as Trump and the coterie of technofeudal "AI" CEOs backing him are seeking to coerce us into becoming. The promises of "economic efficiency" (i.e., mass layoffs, wage deflation, and metastatic rent extraction) promised by the #TESCREAL (@timnitGebru) dogma of the AI cult system may resound with confirmation bias in the heart of the true believer in the religion of neoclassical economics (may the Earth become infinite and Homo economicus cease requiring infinite compute power), but alas, our first priority in tech policy should not be proliferation of climate- and community-destroying hyperscale #datacentres for the Slop God, but instead, removing Trump's ability to do to all #Canadian government and business what Donald did the the #ICC with a few sanctions.

#cdnpoli

@davidgerard This video referenced in one of the replies there summarizes the Harry Potter “rationalist” #fanfic -> #TESCREAL -> death #cult -> multiple murder pregression well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKMzmOYcEUE

@davidgerard @timnitGebru It’s amazing how many times #TESCREAL pops up and it’s just straight-up eugenics.

Here we go, history is rhyming again.
“In this paper, we argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability.”

#tescreal #eugenics #noai #history https://dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/

I'll see your Turbo Pascal wager and I'll raise you Zortech C.

#TESCREAL #RokosBasilisk #TurboPascal

Roko's Basilisk is just like a techbro rephrasing of trying to keep in with the local Corvid population. Which, incidentally, I do, but it's not as if I believe it's like some kind of Pascal's Wager. I just like corvids, and I don't have to make a religion out of it.

:rainbowCrow:

#TESCREAL

#wsocial is dropping it's masks, as @pallenberg puts it: The CEO Anna Zeiter posted a video by the extreme right

@_elena

via @pallenberg

https://mastodon.social/@pallenberg/117116108619582805

#SocialMedia #tech #TESCREAL #AnnaZeiter #Zeiter #antifascism #fascism #techfascism #identitarebewegung #martinsellner

@gilduran.com's book is out! See his account, too, for interviews where he talks about the book.

Congrats, Gil! And thanks!

#fascism #TESCREAL #theNerdReich
#whatToRead #bookstodon https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:waplkqr2wuy2c4qbge6h6ed4/post/3mtef7u7f2k2s

@thorsten4future Bin ich vollkommen bei dir! Blinde würden ja auch lieber nichts Kriminelles tragen und ihre Daten schützen.
Ich fürchte, das wird uns noch in eine üble Misstrauens-Überwachungsgesellschaft treiben. Und das wollen diese #Techbros ja: Menschlichen Zusammenhalt brechen für ihren faschistischen Todeskult.

#TESCREAL

#TIL what #TESCREAL means. I'm impressed by the explanatory power of conceiving of this cluster of #ideologies as an #interconnected #aggregate which then get used to justify #harm

I feel like a lightbulb went on and that I understand the current state we're all in a bit better now.

Highly recommend starting with the @wikipedia article, which covers the #concept and some of the #criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

Thanks go to #Bhante #Sujato (https://sujato.me/) for making me aware of the term.

#transhumanism #extropianism #singularitarianism #singularity #cosmism #rationalism #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #transhumanist #transhuman #longnow #eugenics #AGI #utopia #utopianism #bigtech

@zzt I don't remember it but it seems completely logic that #techbros with #TESCREAL ideologies, believing in fascist eugenics, want to prepare people for Soylent Green - I speak about the dystopic film/novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green No joke, only sarcasm.

@davidculley thanks for the link, it's nice to have all of them in one place.

And :

This suspiciously somehow always seems to coincide with what benefits billionaires today.

Is just perfect 🤣

#TESCREAL

@mhpotter I gave you a lot of justification: the works by Timnit Gebru and Emile Torres. That I even summarized and linked for you. You just ignored it.

The University of Oxford, and especially their philosophy department is highly problematic. They also employ Nick Bostrom and other highly problematic professors who are all in one way or another connected to billionaires and eugenicists, and they "criti-hype" AI for billionaires by describing doomsday scenarios.

As long as the University of Oxford doesn't cut ties with these philosophy professors, the University of Oxford is itself problematic. So are think tanks coming out of it.

The University of Oxford also employs Israeli professors (for example, in their computer science department) who are openly zionist and genocidal.

#TESCREAL #EffectiveAltruism

@[email protected] Genocide is defined as any of certain acts that are committed with the _intent_ to destroy, in whole or just parts, a specific group. You don't even have to succeed in your attempts to destroy, you just have to have had the intention to destroy. If you can't see that J. K. Rowling is doing exactly that, then you have a pretty limited imagination.

It doesn't require gas chambers or machetes or missiles to commit genocide.

Whether it actually is genocide is up for debate, but denying it up front with the words "ridiculous" and "any stretch of the imagination" makes you look like an absolute asshole.

Defending J. K. Rowling _and_ Effective Altruism, I wonder why I don't simply block you.

Maybe you're just a lost young person who listened to the wrong people. But now that I explained both to you, you know better, so don't continue arguing or I'll block you.

Edit: Fixed typo in altruism.

#HarryPotter #TESCREAL #EffectiveAltruism

@mhpotter Effective Altruism (EA) is a toxic ideology and part of the #TESCREAL bundle that was coined by Timnit Gebru and Emile Torres. You should read their works rather than the EA's own promotion materials.

For your convenience, I summarized it here:
https://hachyderm.io/@davidculley/116280127733185900

I don't know much about you, but you clearly hang around the wrong people and/or consume the wrong content if you defend Effective Altruism. You don't even realize the indoctrination path you're on. I strongly advise you to consider your media consumption habits.

@ParadeGrotesque Harsh times are coming for many. Some in the tech/tRump attachments are proponents of eliminating the ‘chaff’ of old, poor, brown, black and disabled. #TESCREAL

@makeratschool A fascist #TESCREAL cultist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

@sundogplanets

RE: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/117087966871760448

When no one was listening to creative workers and our concerns about the impact of genAI in our fields, Timnit did ;)

She is not only "one of the fiercest voices in the world speaking truth to power", she also give the space and the voice to precarious workers. Something that not everyone does 🔥

📣 This is a MUST read !

#AI #genAI #power #tech #technology #SiliconValley #deeplearning #LLM #learning #CEO #ideology #tescreal

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the guy who coined the term Effective Altruism, the toxic ideology that billionaires and capitalism-brained aspiring millionaires use to excuse their greed.

They tell themselves, for example, that it's good to work at awful companies such as Facebook/Meta to make ungodly amounts of money because, "look at all the good things I could do with all that money," while ignoring all the awful consequences of them working for these companies.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is in large parts responsible for introducing and turning billionaires to this toxic ideology. He's also responsbile for another toxic ideology called Rationalism where they suppress all their feelings, and its communities such as LessWrong or Slate Star Codex.

He apparently also wrote a fan-fiction book for Harry Potter, called "Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality". Its premise is that Harry Potter was raised by scientists and University of Oxford professors (🙄), and at the age of 10 having already received a rigorous scientific education, before being sent to Hogwarts, where he then examines the magic through the lens of science.

"Productivity YouTuber" Ali Abdaal who has millions of uneducated gullible followers, is now promoting that book with a video literally titled, "I am begging you to read [this book]."

Promoting Harry Potter in 2026 is definitely a choice. J. K. Rowling is doing her best to ensure the death of all transgender people. What Rowling is doing literally falls under the definition of genocide.

Promoting the works of Effective Altruists in 2026 is definitely a choice.

Ali Abdaal represents everything that is wrong with Gen Z aspiring to become millionaires by way of becoming YouTubers. Please stop watching him.

I discovered his channel in 2018 or so, when he showed his viewers the flashcard app Anki. And I learned how to study effectively thanks to him, something school or my parents never taught me. But I quickly got turned off by his channel around 2019 or so when he started pivoting to iPad reviews like every other tech channel. And especially when his popularity exploded in 2020 with everyone stuck at home due to the pandemic.

Please stop watching him if you do.

#EffectiveAltruism #TESCREAL #HarryPotter

@xankarn It's the perfect slogan of pure fascism, of a death cult destruction program.
It's the anti-program of nature's principle of cooperation and building life-networks that sustain for millions of years.

Even CEOs are meanwhile criticising that slop:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hillennevins/2026/03/26/why-its-time-to-stop-saying-move-fast-and-break-things/

#moveFast #TESCREAL