West Coast Action

The heart of the technological system, the heart of the Beast

To give you an idea of what some poor bastard in California is going to experience soon, here's a newsclip of a tense police standoff with a man in connection with a homicide... that he was falsely flagged for by a Flock camera. And to be clear, while admin certainly finds this worrisome, this pales in comparison to how much we will suffer if the AI programs work as intended. We could end up seeing an irreversible loss of autonomy and freedom at the hands of a machine too smart to be destroyed.

"Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. 
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"At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

| - Industrial Society and Its Future, Theodore Kaczynski

AI facial recognition software company SAFR is deploying its SAFR GUARD program across the bay area. SAFR GUARD is installed into grocery store camera systems, and logs the faces of all shoppers onto a "watchlist" which automatically reports 'subjects of interest' suspected of shoplifting or violent tendencies. Once you are flagged, you will be reported every time you walk into any other grocery store using the program.

"modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. 
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This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function."

| - Industrial Society and Its Future, Theodore Kaczynski

I have been observing the night sky lately. With my impulsive need to photograph nature, my camera has not been successful in capturing the immensity, the grandeur of the blanket of darkness that lies above. But it is not a bad kind of darkness; it is a good darkness that is being lost. How few living souls today, bear witness to something that would be considered commonplace in ancient times: to that of a shooting star? Upon staring into the vast darkness, i find myself lost in both space and time, completely mesmerized by its almost dangerously captivating beauty. The sight of a shooting star feels almost miraculous. Yet to those who came before us, to those who breathed cleaner air, to those who walked unpaved and unscarred ground, the heavens must have been alive with them. The Milky Way would have stretched actoss the sky in its full splendour, unwashed by the glow of metropolis, while countless stars filled the the darkness from horizon to horizon, far more densely than they do now. What we now regard as extraordinary was once simply the world as it was. This is not just about the sky, but about the world in which we live in. Our world is victim to the concept of progress, a myth about how the world before was simply not enough, that it needed improvement, modification, engineering. But Nature had already shaped a perfectly balanced existence. It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before human intervention. From that we learn, nature, if let wild, is stability. It needs NO architect. — Apostle

The Power Process 33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the power process. This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call: 1. goal 2. effort and 3. attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44). Previous Page Next Page Table of Contents Begin reading here

AI companies are literally eating and destroying rare literature in an effort to train AI language models. One has to wonder - what happens when all the old books we rely on for our understanding of the past are destroyed? What happens when the last vestigial connections to the living cultures our ancestors fought and died for us to inherit are wiped away completely?

"Technological progress not only is changing man’s environment, his culture, and his way of life; it is changing man himself. For a human being is in large part a product of the conditions in which he lives. 
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"In the future, assuming that the technological system continues its development, the conditions in which man lives will be so profoundly different from the conditions in which he has lived previously that they will have to transform man himself. 
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"The yearning for freedom, attachment to nature, courage, honor, honesty, morality, friendship, love and all of the other social instincts…even free will itself: all of these human qualities, valued in the highest degree from the dawn of the human race, evolved through the millennia because they were appropriate and useful in the primitive circumstances in which people lived. 
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"But today, so called “progress” is changing the circumstances of human life to such an extent that these formerly advantageous qualities are becoming obsolete and useless." 

| - The Coming Revolution, Theodore Kaczynski

On an unrelated note, here's how to turn a Google Pixel into a surprisingly secure Graphene OS phone - which will automatically wipe all data off the device when a duress code is inputted