A Reviewer

Well-written, but disappointing

Revisado: 10-04-24

If you want to know whether AI can be "creative," this book will bombard you with examples (mostly from the field of math) until reaching the rather obvious conclusion: "not yet."

If you seek insight into the more important question, can human creativity interface with AI, this book falls short. In fact, the author provides no example of an artist actually working in collaboration with AI. Instead we get wonk after wonk trying to outperform artists.

Would a painter's creative process be enhanced by a Rembrandt AI nudging them this way and that? I think not, and the implications for human creativity are profound. AI is not a new medium to assist artists. It is a capitalist endeavor to automate artistic output, with least possible input from costly, slow-moving, unpredictable, ethical primates.

There is every reason to believe that AI will corrupt the world of art, in much the same way artificial food (cheaper, addictive, mass-producible) destroyed gardening, cooking, family meals, and health in most American households. Instead of focus on the hard issues, though, the author spins out anecdotes far beyond their usefulness, piles up examples that basically demonstrate the same thing, and reserves the final chapter for cursory look at a few implications.

Still waiting for some artistic genius to tackle the important questions, before the avalanche of AI generated pastiche, kitsch, schlock, and propaganda smother what's left of the human spirit.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

A thought-provoking mishmash of contradictions

Revisado: 09-08-24

The author's central contention is intriguing. If I understand him correctly, most "aliens" constitute a range of time-traveling future humans who have designs on our present-day earth. Controlling these creatures are authoritarian "Nordics" from the future who have enslaved humanity in the past by posing a gods, and who are now plotting another mass subjugation. The governments of the world, for their part, intend to lie and coerce us into this new form of slavery.

Our only slim hope of "salvation" is to ally with a Promethean trickster power(?) who might be able to blow the whole totalitarian thing to smithereens by resorting to some "creatively wicked" means.

A lot of ground is covered in the book. There are extensive passages of biblical exegesis, deconstructions of Christianity, Buddhism, and Gnosticism. A long digression of the Alexandra, etc. Along the way, Jung and some other luminaries are subjected to gratuitous mocking. Interesting, but space that might have been better devoted to explaining how time travel can alter reality while not set off countless infinite regresses.

Philosophical conundrums aside, though, I didn't come away with a clear sense of how time-traveling helps the "Nordics" attain their goals. If I had a time machine and wanted to alter the future with the least collateral damage, would I pop in and out of time on a daily basis? What events might they be altering and why? Why haven't they altered them "already?"

But the real let down comes with the conclusion. Here's the author's philosophy: “Let me burn in hell for ever and ever, rather than submit to a capricious overlord.” Aside from being a wordy knock-off of Milton, what a sterile stance. And it only get's worse. There is no way out of the crap-fest. No afterlife not controlled by these beings. No way to sort out good and evil. We are pawns, whose only act of defiance is suicide. And yet, we simply go to an afterlife controlled by the very beings we were trying to escape. Who just send us back to be their slaves?

The "hope" the author holds out is some vaguely mythical Faustian bargain with a satanic "trickster" figure, who might burn the whole thing down, so "something" may arise from the ashes. A Kraken/Satan/Prometheus/Loki power must be awakened “capable of more interesting wickedness.”

Is the author speaking hyperbolically or provocatively? Hard to say. But he does contend we should be "willing to reduce the population to 1%” just to prevent the "Nordic" time travelers from winning. In other words, nuke the place if necessary. (Side note: The author argues that the overlords will try to get us to disarm, so we don't blow ourselves up to spite them. Apparently, the mind-reading-memory-altering-time-traveling-god-like-beings already capable of shutting down out systems . . . can't shut down our systems?")

What are we to do, when we put down this book? Resign ourselves to slavery because resistance is obviously futile? Head to the local firearms shop? Eat drink and be merry? Read Faust and try summon up a trickster? Commit suicide now, before we're mind-controlled into wanting to live as slaves? I'd bet the answer is, write another book.

After having laid waste to every spiritual tradition, the afterlife, enlightenment, any realistic hope of a tolerable human existence, if the author sees a bleak, inescapable, totalitarian future, where humans suffer under the thumb of god-like beings, before whom we are as powerless to resist as cattle are to resist us, I would prefer he just say so, and not tangle me up in sophistries.

One final point. The author has a tendency to gloss over motive, in particular that of the "Nordics." According to the author they want a slaves to serve them. No more motive is assigned to them than that. Which is say, beings capable of time-travel, telekinesis, teleportation, zero-energy, moon-building capacities, AI, etc. etc. need defecating primates around to . . . ?

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Helpful, but flawed

Revisado: 01-06-24

The author provides a fairly simple model that helps to explain the rise of totalitarianism. Atomized, fearful masses look for common enemies to give them a sense of unity and purpose. Totalitarian leaders mobilize the masses by offering to eliminate their enemies. The price is loss of freedom and the manufacture of ever-new enemies.

The book is flawed in that:

1.) It should have been two books: one devoted to explaining totalitarianism, one devoted to refuting the mechanistic thinking on which it is based. The supporting examples for totalitarianism are cursory and superficial as a result.

2.) It supports the mechanistic view, while seeming to refute it. When discussing the actions of crowds and leaders, the author largely strips them of agency. They are “hypnotized,” react “like metal filings to a magnet,” etc.

3.) As a result, the author downplays the decisive role of totalitarian leaders. If one is removed, the system will spontaneously produce another. He gives no examples of this happening. Are we really to believe that after the deaths of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, etc. that another Stalin, Mao, Hitler simply took their place?

4.) The downplaying of agency also leads the author to downplay the role of “conspiracy.” Do sociopaths and psychopaths rise to the top and orchestrate events from their amoral perspective? No! According to the author, they are simply hapless, small-minded “hypnotized” individuals attempting to give the masses what they want.

5.) While magnanimous to view good and evil as cutting a line through every human heart, this view has its limits. It blinds us to the fact that ruthless, solipsistic people claw their way up the ladder, then proceed to corrupt and wreck the system. To view these monomaniacs as puppets danced by the desires of the masses, to overlook their systematic self-interested planning, to explain away their deliberate cover-ups and deceptions, to deny their utter insensitivity to people’s welfare, amounts to a major blind-spot that allows this dark history to repeat itself.

Hopefully the author's next book will be less rushed and opportunistic.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

More Important than The Real Anthony Fauci

Revisado: 12-20-23

Don't miss this one! it's a great book! I'd say more, but why bother when censorship is now par for the course.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 7 personas

Elite Psychobabble

Revisado: 09-30-23

No Logo and The Shock Doctrine helped the world to better understand capitalism.

Doppelganger will appeal to well-nested Democrats conditioned by The New York Times and The Washington Post to pontificate, finger-wag, condescend, and mistake introspective psychobabble for insight. Along the way, the author piles up so much hypocrisy, solipsism, and cognitive dissonance it staggers the mind.

The books touches on scores of "controversial" topics, and the author displays no genuine curiosity about any of them. The official narrative suffices throughout. There is zero room for debate. No need to interact with the heretics, just observe them from afar. The author would never use the term "censorship." But given the obvious elite drift over the years, I wouldn't be surprised if Naomi Klein's next book articulates a tortured justification for banning "misinformation," based on the need for "safety" and "unity."

Aside from the author's narrow, mundane, interminable personal journey, which she tries, but to fails to imbue with some sort of spiritual depth, the main problem is that so little actual information is conveyed. Instead we are spoon-fed little saccharine snippets of this and that . . . ad infinitum.

Given the author's background in understanding the inner workings of corporations, this could, presumably, have been a stunning expose of corporate corruption and deception over the past four (or more) years. Instead, she has written an apology for the entities she once identified as sociopathic. An apology that will be well-received by a certain segment of the population. The one that dispenses professorships, book deals, speaking engagements, and other status-based blandishments--all the usual tools of social engineering that America's new aristocracy employ to bring about the soulless Borg-ification of left pseudo-activists.

I recommend any Thomas Frank book instead.

Post Script: It seems to me, the defining feature of nearly all elite classes, aside from their wealth, is their staunch commitment to at least one dominant narrative. Commitment to that narrative--whether religious, political, scientific, technocratic, economic, racial, etc.--is the basis of their admission into the elite group.

When those narratives are challenged, elites reflexively reinforce them through propaganda, appeals to authority, ridicule, censorship, manufactured evidence, withholding opportunity, and bestowing rewards.

Today's elites are faced with the fact that all their narratives are being challenged from multifarious directions, and their mistruths and incompetencies are being systematically, relentlessly exposed. Their narratorial authority--the thing that makes them elites--is in shambles, and likely beyond recovery.

Perhaps they will reassert a new elite consensus by following their current path: AI, social credit scores, surveillance, digital currencies, censorship, amusement, isolation, pandemics, war, and debilitating poverty. Worldviews can be dogmatically enforced, but only through terrible suffering.

A better option would be intellectual honesty, consistency, and integrity that builds up a reservoir of trust. Elites experimented with these during the Enlightenment, with mostly positive results. Some contemporary Western elites are taking this route. But many are being sucked into the panic of narrative collapse. When they do, they retreat into pre-approved solipsistic psychobabble. Unfortunately, Doppelganger in a case in point.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 20 personas

Cursory, unoriginal, class-blind

Revisado: 10-24-22

If you know very little about Neo-liberalism, this clearly-written book will give you a broad overview of the movement's historical arc. However, based on the hype, I was expecting some original, insightful analysis. Instead, this reads like an extended New York Times piece. Certain subjects are more or less off limits; most notably, investigating rampant upper-class corruption, white-collar crime, surveillance, propaganda, election interference, and the imperialism on which Neoliberalism is founded.

As a result, the book reads more like a history of the propaganda used to sell Neoliberalism, but presented as though it were actual history, as though it's purveyors actually believed the half-truths and outright lies by which they engineered public assent. In the author's telling, the promoters of Neoliberalism believed in trickle-down economics, believed that deregulation would lift as boats, believed that monopolies, a casino economy, tax breaks for the rich, precarious workers, and the minting of multi-billionaires was what America needed to recover from the quasi-communist harm done by the New Deal.

By this dodge, the author is largely freed from considering how his social circle might have deliberately, ruthlessly, sociopathically impoverished middle class. Of course, he can't avoid the topic of class warfare entirely. He acknowledges, in passing, that wealth inequality is a major outcome of Neoliberalism. But it didn't happen on purpose, for every president after Eisenhower had the best interest of the public at heart. They just couldn't foresee how their policies would play out. Their aims and ambitions were a world removed from those of Gilded Age robber-barons, union-busters, speculative bankers, propagandists, and monopolists. This time it would be different . . . somehow.

When covering the 2008 crash, the author notes that "not one banker went to jail." Does he ask why? Does he explain what they did that might have been criminal? No, and this is par for the course. At every turn his account is white-washed, expect where the corruption is to blatant to ignore, as in the lies leading up to the Iraq war. In nearly every other case, elites are simply over-ambitious or ignorant or incompetent. How the policies of these ignorant, incompetent elites always, and in every case funneled wealth upward for sixty years does not pique the author's curiosity much.

The Military Industrial Complex is also largely outside the author's preview, as though the rise of Neoliberalism did not go hand in hand with the war industry and empire building. Nor is there much analysis of advertising as the mechanism of Neoliberal control. The downsides of corporate news are discussed, but not really in terms of corporate profits and ownership by cynical, transnational billionaires bent on dividing the working class.

The author's assessment of the current situation is the weakest. Imagine the New York Times take on Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden. Obama had no choice but to bail out the banks--the world economy was teetering on the brink! Trump-as-racist is drummed in ad nauseum. The New Deal-like proposals of Bernie Sanders are not discussed in terms of their possible efficacy. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is a new FDR . . . if it weren't for big bad Joe Manchin.

Anyone familiar George Orwell's or Noam Chomsky's analysis of the conformity and subservience rampant among academic elites can see it played out quite blatantly here. I recommend Thomas Franks' "What's the Matter With Kansas," "Listen Liberal," and "Rendezvous With Oblivion" for a more honest account of the workings of Neoliberalism.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 11 personas