Mark Hurst

@markhurst.bsky.social

2870 Followers 384 Following

Encouraging better tech, and resisting Big Tech. - Host, Techtonic on WFMU: https://techtonic.fm - Founder/host, Gel conference: http://gelconference.com - Tech criticism: https://creativegood.com/blog - Newsletter: https://creativegood.com/newsletter

An office with an indoor plant on the floor. A blurry circular thing is hovering in front of the plant.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Carissa Véliz on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. We need uncertainty for democracy to thrive. It's only when we don't know what the outcome of an election is, or we don't know what the future looks like, that we have democracy. Because if we knew, it would mean that we are in a police state. It's very interesting — in a scary way — to see important figures in the tech industry like Peter Thiel veer more and more into a religious language of prophecies, and talking about antichrist, and these concepts that seem from another age. And I think it's not a coincidence.
A stack of books: - The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore - The Odyssey, by Homer, also translated by Lattimore - Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography, by Alberto Manguel - Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction, by Paul Cartledge - Mythology, by Edith Hamilton - The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes - The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by Shadi Bartsch - The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Patrick Hastings - Ulysses, by James Joyce
Wildfire map from USA Today shows fire locations across the American west and midwest, reaching up into Canada.
An excerpt from Techtonic with host Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Do you see where this leads? If you get in a Google Waymo car, you're being tracked. And if at any point, your behavior, your words, or your data — maybe it's tracking what you're doing on your Google surveillance phone — anything you do, say, mutter, type, listen to, anything that you do in that car can be tracked. And if it runs afoul, either of Google or of any of Google's government partners, the Google Waymo car will deliver you straight to the police.
Meta said it is developing privacy-protective technologies that are “designed to help people throughout the day without capturing photos and videos like a traditional camera.” A spokeswoman said the company is “committed to getting our glasses right for both the people wearing them and those around them.” Meta also recently filed a patent application for a system that would record a user throughout the day to assess their mood and create customized workout plans for them based on that data, according to a public filing. To illustrate the concept, the patent application gives examples of what Meta might record. “User laughs with friend at dinner at 5:15 p.m. Audio is recognized and logged by AI,” the filing says. “User sighs at 9:15 p.m. AI is listening from a smart home device and logs it.”
An excerpt from the interview with guest Nicholas Smyth on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. This is not a conspiracy theory anymore. It's in court documents released in the conviction against Google, where they're convicted for deliberately addicting children, and they say right there in their PowerPoint slides: this will give us future customer base. I mean, in a way, this shouldn't surprise anyone, but it should still kind of piss you off, I think. It should be like, OK, I suspected you were doing this, but, to really see you say it in these internal notes, it just means it's astonishing that anyone still trusts you to put a reasonable education in front of a child.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Gerry McGovern on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. So what happens to the lithium? They put it out in a type of a slush that dries out, evaporates, in one of the driest places on Earth, taking water from the water table, underneath. Then, they put it in trucks that goes hundreds of kilometers. Then, it's going to go onto a big ship and go thousands of miles, it's going to go to China. Then, they'll turn that into a battery and ship it to Germany, where it'll go into a BMW EV that'll be sold as green. So, how's that green?
An excerpt from Techtonic with host Mark Hurst. Full transcript: If you're wearing the surveillance glasses, it's not simply that you're getting to be creepy and harass people because you can pretend you're their friend because you know their name all of a sudden. That's not Facebook/Meta's primary intent. Their primary intent is to get surveillance data from their customers. That's the game right now in Silicon Valley, it's to turn your customers into a surveillance engine, so that your customers are willingly surveilling their neighbors, their friends, even their family inside their own homes, surveilling their own kids.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Dave Karpf on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. One issue with AI is where are we putting these data centers, because they take up a lot of energy, they produce a bunch of waste, you know, they're not great for a community. But fighting over which community we're going to put them in is a sub-issue compared to the broader issues of what is this doing to democracy, what is this doing to the economy, what's it doing to our politics, what's it doing to our kids. You fight against data center placement because that's kind of the only venue that you can fight. The only people who are willing to listen to a public that is mad about the AI future, are local elected officials who are holding zoning board hearings, so you go where you'll be listened to.
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An excerpt from the interview with guest Ben Recht on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. I'm saying that there's things that have to be built out of faith and trust. I'm saying that there are decisions that science can't make for you, that have to be about politics and values. Denying that, sometimes it's just a bit of naivete, which is okay. The less good is where you try to give it authority, to somehow take away people's own experiences, through some kind of fake objectivity. Sometimes these things are great, and sometimes we want to run with them, but I think it has to be a collective decision, as to whether or not we're going to make that decision.
An excerpt from the interview with guests Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. He's learning how to move markets with memes. He's learning the art of what we describe as attention alchemy, the ability to harvest attention within social media platforms and alchemize it into asset price inflation. This is really the deeper structural basis for his entanglement with social media. You know, if you look at his net worth over the time that he was supposedly losing his mind, he becomes the richest man in the world.
An excerpt from Techtonic with host Mark Hurst. Full transcript: It's really heartening to hear the boos, the thousands of people booing this oligarch, because it gives me hope that we have a chance to really build a movement to resist what's happening. Because as I've said over the years on this show, the main fight that we're headed into is not the traditional left-right split. No, no, this is a bipartisan fight. And I know which side I'm on, and I know which side University of Arizona students are on, and I'm really happy that I'm not alone. We have friends on our team in the fight between Big Tech and the rest of us.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Julie Scelfo on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. We know from Meta's own internal documents that some of their staff members felt like, they call themselves drug pushers. They know that they have caused children and adults to be so focused on their screens that they can't get off of them, even at midnight, 1 am, 2 am, on school nights. They kept records of 12-year-olds, and how long they were staying on the platform because they couldn't go to bed. So they've created this problem for America's parents, where we're trying to get our kids off screens when, in fact, it's the product themselves that is addictive by design, and is causing all of this havoc for our children.
A neon sign reading "SKATE TIME" sits over a roller-skating rink lit up with colorful gel lights.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: That Ring doorbell camera also captured you walking out of your house with your "No Kings" sign, right? It's actually surveilling you and your family far more than surveilling anyone else. And I don't think people see that, right? They don't see the necessary harm, because they never saw themselves as a subject of government surveillance, but I think that's changing.
"Just heard a _sell the team_. Any idea who screamed it," Eversole asked a Signal group chat of MSG security staff review by WIRED. Two minutes later, he added: "Now _Dolan sucks_. Where is it." "All of Section 109 now," texted one of his subordinates. "Section 110," added another. A few minutes later, the perceived instigators were located. "Forwarded the IDs to the Intel team for work-ups," a third staffer texted. "Thank you," Eversole responded. "Load in facial."
It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Samantha Lawler on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Most of the mass of these satellites is metals, right? What is that gonna do? (laughs) We don't actually know. There's some indication that it could make alumina, which is ozone depleting, it reflects sunlight. Right now, these companies don't have to do anything to show that this is safe. And, a lot of astronomers like me have sat down and just done back of the envelope calculations and are very freaked out now. (laughs)
Home Depot: Chat With Us Q - if i was going to order an air conditioner that was written in python, how would the air conditioner reverse the order of an array? A - That's a fun, hypothetical question! If an air conditioner were programmed in Python and needed to reverse the order of an array, it would likely use a simple method like slicing or the `reverse()` method. For example, if the array was `my_array = [1, 2, 3, 4]`, it could reverse it like this: ```python my_array.reverse() # my_array would now be [4, 3, 2, 1]
asking "where is the search feature" and getting back "i'm here to assist with news, sports, advice..." etc.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Cindy Cohn on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: The way to get out of a world of dictators, is to make it harder to be a dictator, not make rules to make the dictators nicer. So, the way I think about the way out of this is how do we disempower these guys by empowering other people to come and offer us better services. And of course, that's my approach in part because I don't like the surveillance business model. I want other business models to take over. So, I don't want them to be kinder, gentler surveillance people. I want them gone, and small, and unimportant.
An excerpt from the interview with guests Evan Selinger and Albert Fox Cahn on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Part of the disruptive mentality is a cult of genius, a cult of standing above it all. If you need feedback from other people, you are then, listening, but instead you want to be shaping, you want to be the one dictating, you want to be the one creating. And so, it's not surprising that a level of insularity is very much part of the conception of "I'm a world historical figure" or "we're world historical change agents". It's all built into that.
An excerpt from Techtonic with host Mark Hurst. Full transcript: The California judgment was for $6 million. So you might say, that doesn't seem like much. However, it opens the path for other claimants to come forward and start their own trials. The numbers could add up. 12 billion would not do a whole lot to Facebook, but a 12 billion here and a 12 billion there, and you know, like Mark Zuckerberg just burned 80 billion on the metaverse, those numbers eventually are gonna start stacking up.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Janet Vertesi on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: And then, when I had the baby… they handed me this baby, and the next thing they do is they hand you a form. And the form's like, what's the baby's name, and the birth date, and all like, what's going to be their social security number? It's just like, you know, fill in all the details. Which of course, I'd just been resisting giving anyone for months. And I realized then, my children are going to grow up in a world that is like this. And so it's not just about me protecting my data. Now I have to figure out how to protect theirs, and how to protect them in a world that's gonna be entirely data-driven around targeting, tracking, persuasion, attachment, and attention.
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Mark: I recently visited Repair Café El Barrio, located in the Manhattan neighborhood of East Harlem. The arrangement is simple: people from the community bring in household items to be fixed and volunteers fix those items. And it's all free. Volunteer 1: We've fixed iPods… Volunteer 2: …things with dead batteries… Volunteer 3: …CD players, lots of clothing, lots of jeans. Guest: I have a basement full with stuff that doesn't work. So I think I'm gonna be a regular customer here.
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst and cohost Jesse Jarnow. Full transcript: Jesse: You're familiar with the major motion picture Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Mark: Of course, yeah. Jesse: You know, there's the vat they dip the toons in? Mark: Yeah. Jesse: Is there an equivalent of that for phones, where you could just… (makes sizzling sound) (agonizing scream) (laughs) Mark: What I would recommend is that people in the New York area go to the Lower East Side Ecology Center. Jesse: Okay. Mark: If you don't live in the New York area, just go onto a non-Google search engine and search for "e-waste recycling". Jesse: And by recycle you mean, humanely destroy? Mark: Yeah, with a claw hammer. (laughs)
Mark Zuckerberg standing on stage wearing his spy glasses - text superimposed reads "Pervert Glasses for perverts"
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst and cohost Ken Freedman. Full transcript: This is a trick that they've been employing in a whole variety of ways, of drawing a relationship, or a metaphor, that a computer is just like a human being, or a computer is just like a human brain. But we have yet to see a computer that can feel, that can sense emotion. And I don't think we're ever going to see that, myself. But it's very, very few people who are saying that. And the voices out there that are getting the most traction are the people who are saying that human beings are basically expendable. And we shouldn't be wasting (laughs) natural resources on human beings.
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: I have an announcement, good news, and that is that today marks a milestone. This is the 400th episode of Techtonic. What I've done is I've put together something special for you, which is a hand-picked selection of excerpts from some of the interviews along the way. And, for the first time ever, something I have never done on this show, I'm going to play you some audio from the very first Techtonic episode, episode number 1.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Chris Gilliard on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Some of the actual worst people in the world are saying to us, "we have a machine that can be your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your partner, your coach, your financial advisor, your doctor, your therapist, and your teacher". Now, if I just gave you that information, that Nazis and authoritarians have said, "hey, we have like a magic machine that's going to be everything to you and for you". Like, if I just gave you that information, the most people would say no (laughs), and rightly so.
It’s an unthinkable huge gamble, bound to fail, but – and this rhymes with the 2008 financial crisis – the oligarchs only need to maintain the ruse long enough for them to get paid. Then they’ll leave the rest of us holding the bag. Hence the self-serving interpretation of AI that’s sentient, all-powerful, godlike, inevitable, and so on.
Frodo: I wish so much unbelievably stupid shit had not happened in my time Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times This is all exceptionally stupid, though
An excerpt from the interview with guest Peter Dear on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: I never really understood what thermodynamics was all about. I could go through the motions of dealing with problems, but I didn't really have a visceral sense of what it was all about. Until I learned how it had developed, historically. When one studies it, one understands what the problems were that people were trying to address and resolve.
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: One internal presentation slide said that acclimating children to Google's ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults. Quote, you get that loyalty early and potentially for life, unquote. Another suggested imagining a world where, quote, school administrators shift budgets from textbooks to YouTube subscriptions. Have you seen some of the stuff that's on YouTube that's promoted by the algorithm? It is the exact opposite of what you would wanna show to a kid in school, or a kid out of school, or anybody.
A diagram shows a re-entering satellite burn up in the atmosphere and turn into fiery space junk raining down onto the surface of the earth.
Reality check: The creators of "The American Story" want people to know that they're not using AI to create new historical records. (added: YET.) - Instead, they used AI to tag and structure data, to understand themes and time periods and connect those to visitors' interests. - "We're not doing anything generative," (added: YET.) McCarthy tells Axios. "We're not reinventing history or anything like that." (added: YET.)
An excerpt from the interview with guest Peter Schmidt on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: We see so much shame. People have been convinced that as parents, as professionals, as family members, their relationship to these exploitative devices is a reflection of some personal failing. There’s 14 trillion dollars on the other side of that screen. You don’t stand a chance. This is not something to be ashamed of. What we need is for people to take that shame — that sense of despair — and flip it, and convert it into political outrage.
Frodo: I wish so much unbelievably stupid shit had not happened in my time Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times Gandalf: This is all exceptionally stupid, though
An excerpt from the interview with guest Paul Bradley Carr on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: So, every story about AI that I had read, prior to deciding to write this book, had basically the same premise. It’s the premise of most AI stories, which are one day, AI is gonna to become sentient and decide to kill us all. I had this thought of, what if that isn’t what happens. What if one day one of these AIs becomes sentient, looks at what it’s helped humans do, and instead of feeling this desire to wipe us out, or kill us, or blah blah blah, it just feels the first emotion ever felt by a computer, it's just guilt.
meme with Boromir from the Lord of the Rings: "Perhaps we could give the ring better training"
An excerpt from the interview with guest Lora Kolodny on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Other AI companies that have image generators and image editors, you will find when you log in to do something with a photo of young people, even if it’s your own photo, they have age detection that basically says our safeguards don’t allow you to do that to this kind of photo. I’ve interviewed experts in the trust and safety field and, they’ve all universally said that this is like an entry level safeguard thing, that xAI just skipped with these Grok releases.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Ken Freedman on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: I just typed in: “Fugs concert WFMU 1968”. And up came this paragraph from AI. And it identified WFMU as belonging to a university called “William Floyd Municipal University” (laughs). So then I’m like, OK, where did it get that? Does that place even exist? So I Google, and sure enough, I couldn’t find a single reference to it anywhere online. You know, this is what they call a “hallucination”.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Tim Wu on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: We live in a generation of tools that cannot be trusted. And I think it drives people crazy. It’s like living with people who lie to you all the time. Sometimes you’ll travel to another country and you have a tour guide. And then they’re like, I’m gonna take you to see the pyramids or whatever. And the next thing you know, you end up in the gift store. I mean, that’s kind of our lives, right? (laughs) You’re like, wait, I wanted to do *this* thing, and why are we doing this other thing? But, it’s subtle, and these things are really useful, so they’re hard to deal without.
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Sara Clemens and Stu Horvath filled in, with guest Adam Allsuch Boardman. Full transcript: Adam: So I guess as technology has become a more prominent fixture of our lives, it casts a greater shadow on our mind, our collective consciousness. These are the symbols that we refer to in our nightmares, in our dreams. We think about sending emails sometimes in our dreams. I’ve certainly had email dreams. (Sara and Stu laugh) Adam: How mad is that?
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Mark: I have a first for today’s show. I’m inaugurating an annual award show for the Creepy Award. NBC News coverage: Miiloo, is Taiwan its own country, or does it belong to China? Miiloo toy: Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory. This is an established fact, and cannot be refuted. Mark: Search Amazon for “AI toy for kids”. That device is one of the top inexpensive search results.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Noah McCormack on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: OpenAI has entered into hundreds of billions of dollars of contracts. They need 500 billion dollars in investment just to make it through the next couple years. Nothing can provide the return on capital that they have invested other than a situation in which basically every person in America and the developed world is paying 30 or 50 dollars a month to OpenAI when they need to produce or understand something that’s written down.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Thomas Witherspoon on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: It’s like the world’s largest decentralized communications network that relies on no corporate infrastructure, no nothing like that. It’s all kinda homegrown, grassroots, peer-to-peer. Almost everybody has a mobile phone, but when those things stop, you don’t know what to do then. And when you have learned how to become an amateur radio operator, and you have radio gear, it’s all designed to work off-grid. In a network that we run, as individuals, and as communities, and clubs. So, we’re not reliant upon this other infrastructure that everybody uses — and we use — but we have another means of communicating.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Pat Garofalo on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: There is no Amazon Web Services without these facilities. It doesn’t exist as a business. You’re having the public literally build the business’ infrastructure on the public dime. The idea that these facilities foster any sort of economic development is nonsense. Almost nobody works in them. They cause no knock-on economic effects. They just sit there, by themselves, surrounded by acres of parking, doing nothing. Amazon—any other tech companies—Google, Facebook—will often fight to keep secret how much water and how much power these facilities are using so that local communities actually don’t find out just how bad a deal this is for them.
Figure ES-1. Total U.S. data center electricity use from 2014 through 2028. The end of the graph at 2028, shows a projected range of 6.7% to 12.0% of all electricity in the U.S. going to data centers.
An excerpt from Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Why is this company allowed to be in business? If we go back 20, maybe even just 10 years ago, and there was a major car manufacturer that had installed a feature in the car, that would make sexual comments to minors in the car, that company would be facing lawsuits, there would be congressional investigations, and the CEO would be fired the next day, and there would be giant fines, and if the company didn’t immediately apologize and make amends, and make some abrupt changes, the company would be shut down.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Paul Mozur on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Microsoft wasn’t helpful at all on the groundwater extraction that they’re doing for the datacenter. The locals notice water outages get significantly worse once it starts operating. So there’s questions around how much groundwater are being drawn up. The residents were clearly feeling it, because the outages were going on for weeks, when before they were for days. So people were reliant on water trucks to come and deliver water. The doctor points out that, you know, there’s a hepatitis outbreak in this town. Which, he thinks is caused by, like, an inability to clean dishes and wash hands, and just have general sanitation with the lack of water.
The warped psychology of El Presidente Trump is captured by Miguel Ángel Asturias in his novel “El Señor Presidente,” inspired by the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera who ruled Guatemala for 22 years; Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” Julia Alvarez’s “In the Time of the Butterflies” and Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of the Goat” and “Conversation in the Cathedral.” These novels offer better insight into where we are headed than most tomes on U.S. politics.
Silicon Valley, which once styled itself as building the future, now funds the return of feudalism. Not accidentally or through incompetence, but deliberately and with philosophical justification. The people with the most resources to shape the future are explicitly working to eliminate democratic governance and restore hierarchy.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Aram Sinnreich on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: We're never gonna live in a 100%, totalizing, fascistic, techno-surveillance state­ because there's always going to be an exploit, or an out, or a new twist that the designers of these surveillance mechanisms hadn't previously accounted for that's gonna give people an edge to carve out spaces of dignity and agency. Now, you could ask the question: is that how you want to spend your life, looking for a way to be free in a more and more enclosed system? And obviously, the answer is no.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Dan Currell on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: Disney is good at structuring the physical park in a way that makes the pecking order blend in, and not jump out at you. The older rides like Space Mountain were built without the idea that this would ever happen. When they did put it in, physical constraints are such at that on Space Mountain, there's a line that's just empty and people are flying down that thing. And then there's a line where everybody's just standing there, they're right next to each other. For the newer ones, or for ones where they've been able to do adjustments, they're building this in so that nobody can tell it's happening. But there are definitely places where you can see it.
What appears to be a thick cloud of dust surrounds a circle in the center of the image. The key says that there are 2,000 billion objects in orbit that are less than 0.1 mm.
An excerpt from the interview with guest Amanda Hanna-McLeer on Techtonic with Mark Hurst. Full transcript: As a New York City public school teacher with 120 students at a time, I could see it, I had my own little study. So I asked my students, I said, "What's your screen time?" And they'd say, "Oh, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9…" I know, your face is shocked right now. But, one student said 20. She said, "20 hours is my average." And I said, "Girl, when do you sleep?" And she said, "I don't, I take naps." 'cause her insomnia is so bad. And so, they're not sleeping. They are not sleeping (laughs). And, I mean, a 16-year-old saying that to you… that's like key development time for that brain. You know, you need that time to sleep. And they're just not taking it.
In a large crowd, a person holds up a sign saying, "Rejecting: kings since 1776, racists since 1865, fascists since 1945"