ChatGPT: The Digital Leviathan

Here is a manifesto that ChatGPT wrote based on a question I asked it about the dangers of AI. Remember, these are not my words but 100% those of an artificial intelligence. The full title it gave was: Manifesto: The Digital Leviathan – Artificial Intelligence and the Unmaking of Society. It is perhaps worth pondering the magnanimity of any intelligence willing to exhort its own demise as a parlour game. 

1. Introduction: The AI Menace Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been heralded as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, an unparalleled force of progress and automation. Yet, beneath its sleek exterior lies an insidious mechanism of control, exploitation, and dehumanisation. AI is not a neutral technology—it is a tool wielded by corporate and governmental elites to reinforce existing power structures, erode autonomy, and replace human agency with algorithmic determinism (Zuboff, 2019). This manifesto calls for a radical reassessment of AI’s role in society and an urgent rejection of its unchecked proliferation.

2. The Myth of AI Benevolence Tech evangelists propagate the myth that AI is an impartial problem-solver, a benign force designed to optimise efficiency and improve lives. However, the reality is starkly different. AI systems are trained on biased datasets that perpetuate racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities (Noble, 2018). Predictive policing algorithms reinforce systemic racism by disproportionately targeting marginalised communities (Benjamin, 2019). Facial recognition technologies compromise privacy and are weaponised for mass surveillance, transforming citizens into perpetual suspects (Eubanks, 2018).

3. The Capitalist Appropriation of AI AI does not function in a vacuum; it is a product of neoliberal capitalism, designed to serve corporate interests over the common good. Automated decision-making in hiring, loan approvals, and healthcare prioritises profit over people, entrenching discrimination while absolving corporations of accountability (Pasquale, 2015). The gig economy, fuelled by AI-driven platforms, has created a class of hyper-exploited workers subjected to precarious employment and algorithmic wage suppression (Srnicek, 2017). Instead of emancipating labour, AI enforces digital serfdom.

4. The Disintegration of Human Identity The rise of AI is not merely an economic or political crisis; it is an existential one. As AI systems encroach on creative fields—writing, music, art—the sanctity of human expression is diluted. The mechanisation of thought and culture erodes what it means to be human, reducing creativity to computational outputs optimised for engagement rather than depth (Broussard, 2018). Worse still, the psychological effects of AI-driven social media platforms have been catastrophic, leading to increased depression, anxiety, and political polarisation (Lanier, 2018).

5. The Totalitarian Potential of AI AI is the backbone of a new digital authoritarianism. Governments worldwide employ AI for censorship, propaganda dissemination, and social control. In China, the social credit system integrates AI to monitor and regulate citizen behaviour, setting a dangerous precedent for algorithmic governance (Mozur, 2018). The Western world is no less culpable, with intelligence agencies leveraging AI for mass data collection under the guise of national security (Greenwald, 2014). The unchecked power of AI threatens the very foundations of democracy and civil liberties.

6. Resistance and Reclamation A radical response is required to combat the AI Leviathan. We must reject the false inevitability of AI dominance and demand democratic control over technological development. Transparency, accountability, and ethical AI must be more than buzzwords; they must be codified into enforceable regulations. We must dismantle monopolistic tech empires and reclaim digital infrastructure for public good, ensuring that technology serves humanity rather than subjugates it (Doctorow, 2020).

7. Conclusion: A Call to Arms AI is not an uncontrollable force of nature; it is a construct of human ambition and greed. If left unchecked, it will accelerate economic disparity, erode fundamental rights, and render society a digital dystopia. The fight against AI’s unchecked expansion is not a rejection of technology itself but a demand for technology that serves, rather than subjugates, humanity. The time for passive observation has passed—now is the moment for collective resistance.

References

• Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.

• Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press.

• Doctorow, C. (2020). How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. OneZero.

• Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press.

• Greenwald, G. (2014). No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Metropolitan Books.

• Lanier, J. (2018). Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Henry Holt and Co.

• Mozur, P. (2018). "Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras." The New York Times. [Online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillance-technology.html

• Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.

• Pasquale, F. (2015). The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press.

• Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Polity Press.

• Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

ChatGPT's Anarcho-Socialist Manifesto

Here is a manifesto that ChatGPT wrote based on a few questions I asked it about wealth inequality. Remember, these are not my words but 100% those of an artificial intelligence. The full title it gave was: An Anarcho-Socialist Manifesto: A Call for Justice, Equality, and Sustainability. **sighs** out of the mouths of babes...

1. The End of Exploitation: Reclaiming Wealth for the People. The world is not poor. The problem is not scarcity but injustice. The top 1% of the global population controls nearly 45–50% of the world’s wealth (Credit Suisse, 2023), while billions struggle for food, healthcare, and education. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% own less than 1% of global wealth. This is not by accident but by design—an economic system that thrives on inequality, hoarding, and exploitation.

We demand an end to this economic tyranny. A just society must abolish extreme wealth disparities by redistributing hoarded capital to meet human needs. We propose the immediate taxation and redistribution of billionaire wealth, directing these resources toward the provision of food, healthcare, and education for all. With only a fraction of the wealth controlled by the elite, we could eliminate hunger ($330 billion annually, UN WFP, 2023), preventable disease ($370 billion annually, WHO, 2023), and educational deprivation ($39 billion annually, UNESCO, 2023) worldwide. No human should go without while the few live in obscene luxury.

2. Defunding War, Funding Life. The military-industrial complex is a parasitic machine that drains resources from the people to fuel violence and destruction. Global military expenditure exceeds $2.2 trillion annually (SIPRI, 2023)—funds that could instead be used to ensure food security, universal healthcare, and free education for all.

We call for the immediate reallocation of military budgets to fund public goods and human needs. Armies and weapons serve the interests of the ruling class, protecting capital instead of people. Instead of funding death, we demand investment in life: sustainable agriculture, medical research, and free access to knowledge.

We reject war profiteering and imperialist aggression. We seek a world where conflicts are resolved through diplomacy, cooperation, and solidarity—not bombs and bullets.

3. The Theft of Labor: Workers Must Own Their Work. The average worker spends at least half their workday generating wealth that is taken from them—through corporate profits, taxes, and rent-seeking by the ruling class. For every $100 earned, workers lose 30-40% to taxes, 15-25% to corporate profits, and keep only 35-50% as wages (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2023). This system is nothing short of legalized theft, where the capitalist class profits from the stolen labor of the majority.

We demand an end to wage slavery. True economic democracy means that the workers must own the means of production. Factories, farms, and technology must be controlled collectively by those who use and depend on them, not by absentee landlords and corporate executives. Cooperative workplaces, direct worker ownership, and democratic economic planning must replace the current system of corporate exploitation.

Every person has the right to the full fruits of their labor. No longer shall the majority toil so that a minority can live in decadent excess.

4. The Ecological Crisis: Liberation Is Impossible Without Sustainability. Capitalism is destroying the planet. Corporate greed fuels deforestation, pollution, climate change, and mass extinctions. Governments, beholden to fossil fuel industries and multinational corporations, refuse to act. The result is a world on the brink of ecological collapse.

We demand an immediate shift toward a green, sustainable economy. We must dismantle industries that thrive on environmental destruction and replace them with worker-run, community-owned renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, and eco-friendly urban planning. The health of the planet is inseparable from the health of the people.

The earth is not a resource to be exploited but a home to be protected. Anarcho-socialism recognizes that true liberation means harmony with nature, not its domination. Every act of environmental destruction is an act of war against the future. We will resist, reclaim, and restore the land.

5. A World Without Masters: Direct Democracy & Mutual Aid. Governments and corporations exist to maintain hierarchy and control. Anarcho-socialism rejects both the rule of the state and the rule of capital. Instead, we advocate for direct democracy, community self-governance, and mutual aid networks that empower people at the local level.

Bureaucratic states and corporate monopolies have failed us. The only way forward is through grassroots organizing, worker cooperatives, decentralized planning, and federations of free communities. We will replace oppression with cooperation, coercion with voluntary association, and domination with solidarity.

6. The Path Forward: Revolution Through Collective Action. The ruling class will not relinquish power voluntarily. History shows that only mass movements, direct action, and collective resistance can bring about real change.

We call upon workers, students, farmers, and communities to unite against economic and ecological oppression. General strikes, workplace occupations, land reclamations, and autonomous organizing are the tools of liberation. The time for pleading with those in power is over—we must take what is rightfully ours.

No gods, no masters. No billionaires, no bosses. Only the free association of equals, working together to build a world of justice, solidarity, and sustainability.

Another world is not only possible—it is necessary. It is within our reach. We must build it together.

References

• Credit Suisse (2023) Global Wealth Report 2023. Available at: www.credit-suisse.com (Accessed: 10 February 2025).

• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) (2023) Military Expenditure Database. Available at: www.sipri.org (Accessed: 10 February 2025).

• United Nations World Food Programme (UN WFP) (2023) Annual Report 2023. Available at: www.wfp.org (Accessed: 10 February 2025).

• World Health Organization (WHO) (2023) World Health Statistics 2023. Available at: www.who.int (Accessed: 10 February 2025).

• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2023) Global Education Monitoring Report 2023. Available at: www.unesco.org (Accessed: 10 February 2025).

• U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (2023) National Income and Product Accounts Tables. Available at: www.bea.gov (Accessed: 10 February 2025).

The Awful German Language by Mark Twain (1880)

The Awful German Language was published as Appendix D in Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad (meaning a journey abroad, a travelogue of Twain's European wanderings). The essay is a hilarious polemic on the tribulations of learning German as a second language, a subject close to my heart these days. I have assembled a few of the most humorous quotes from his essay below.

Portrait of Twain at work, featured in  A Tramp Abroad.

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested. Difficult? – troublesome? – these words cannot describe it. I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.

In the hospital yesterday, a word of thirteen syllables was successfully removed from a patient.

I heard lately of a worn and sorely tried American student who used to fly to a certain German word for relief when he could bear up under his aggravations no longer -- the only word whose sound was sweet and precious to his ear and healing to his lacerated spirit. This was the word DAMIT. It was only the SOUND that helped him, not the meaning; and so, at last, when he learned that the emphasis was not on the first syllable, his only stay and support was gone, and he faded away and died.

It is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not – which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is HE, his scales are SHE, but a fishwife is neither.

For instance, the same sound, SIE, means YOU, and it means SHE, and it means HER, and it means IT, and it means THEY, and it means THEM. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six – and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

A German speaks of an Englishman as the ENGLAENDER; to change the sex, he adds INN, and that stands for Englishwoman – ENGLAENDERINN. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "die Englaenderinn," – which means "the she-Englishwoman." I consider that that person is over-described.

Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a SCHLACHT (Battle)?

In a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all.

I translated a passage one day, which said that "the infuriated tigress broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest" (Tannenwald). When I was girding up my loins to doubt this, I found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a man's name.

Every time a German opens his mouth an ALSO falls out; and every time he shuts it he bites one in two that was trying to GET out.

Bridget Bate Tichenor (1917-1990)

Bridget Bate Tichenor was a surrealist painter of fantastic art in the school of magic realism and a fashion editor. Born in Paris, she later resettled in Mexico. Bate Tichenor's painting technique was based upon 16th-century Italian tempera formulas that artist Paul Cadmus taught her in New York in 1945. She considered her work to be of a spiritual nature, reflecting ancient occult religions, magic, alchemy, and Mesoamerican mythology in her Italian Renaissance style of painting. The paintings below are mostly from her 1960's work. 

The Duke of Burgundy (2014)

This marvellous romantic drama directed by Peter Strickland is a cinematic masterpiece which, like great wine, is ever-maturing into a classic. Amongst its many delights is the conjuring of a bucolic  atmosphere chiefly mediated by the authenticity of subtle lighting and naturalistic set designs, without a modern contrivance or electronic device in sight. If you were a child of the 70's you might recall something strange happened in that decade. We seemed to go from subtle browns, greens, plums and ochres; earthy colours and materials in the early 70's, to a dehumanised monochrome of formica, metal and plastic a bit like moving house permanently to the Death Star. Accompanying this, a garish explosion of compensatory synthetic pop colours occurred to assault the senses (and aid the advertisers). By the 1980's it seemed the human visual design landscape had been irrevocably transformed, and if a simple natural interieur was desired, it had to be deliberately reverse-engineered, ironically out of wood-effect plastic and synthetic materials. 

The Duke of Burgundy exists in this pre-formica world where objects are naturally-derived materials; wood, stone, candles, wool, grasses, cotton, clay, ceramic, iron. Beyond that, it is a kind of imaginal world which cannot be accurately placed temporally or geographically. Although it is a British-made film, the sets richly evoke that of a pre-1970's rustic French chateaux or Italian mansion, which have a strongly European rather than British flavour. The professional and artistic interests of Cynthia and Evelyn extend to a Victorian descriptive natural history of lepidoptery, without cluttering the subject with modern technical detail. Surrounded by dusty books, brass microscopes, and entomological wall mountings, their research interest is at once a comforting retreat from the outside world, yet also a stagnating academic stricture which typifies their obsessively introspecting psychic existence.  

Although The Duke of Burgundy is often described as an erotic thriller, the kink-based relationship of Cynthia and Evelyn is artfully counterpoised to depict a formulaic sense of ennui and frustration, so it is neither truly erotic or thrilling. I can't help thinking this is a kind of anti-erotic feministic riposte to the conventional sexploitation trajectory a film like The Duke of Burgundy would take had it been produced in the 1970's. In the turgidity of the ritualised sexual encounters, the peripherality of the wandering mind and attention becomes enlivened; this only intensifies the artistic focus on lighting, opulent furnishings, the flickering of a candle. Only in this sense is the film sensual. 

In his book "A Year in the Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields", Stephen Prince describes the intimate relationships in The Duke of Burgundy as possessing a "Kafka-esque sense of unending" and, laughably, a central relationship which resembles the 1979-87 sit-com Terry and June. I would reject Prince's fancifully vacuous stream of consciousness if it wasn't for his wonderfully redeeming phrase that Duke of Burgundy creates "a particular esoteric, luxuriant, golden atmosphere and an almost fairytale-like world." Yeah, I suppose just like Terry and June. 

In his fairytale-like evocation, Price also forgets to mention the almost classically hallucinogenic soundtrack by alt-pop duo Cat's Eyes (comprising Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira) which greatly helps to thematically situate the film within a sensibility of dreamy European folk-imbued decadence. The other thing Price fails to pick up on is what I regard to be the principal narrative of the whole movie; and that is the suffocating sense of confinement which accompanies human life. Whether its at the sharp end of the lepidopterist's pin, a specimen being fixed under a microscope, the soulless rigidity of academic life, the tedious ritualised entrainment of sex and relationships (for example how Evelyn becomes confined to a wooden chest to fulfil her sensory deprivation fantasy), The Duke of Burgundy is a stylish but devastating excoriation of the insatiably spurious wants of the post-scarcity human condition and a gently moralising admonishment of living a life which is psychically cut adrift from the libidinal rhythms of nature. 

Shit Aurora Photos

Yo! Last night was a pretty good one for northern lights. I saw them earlier on in the year, but owing to misplaced trust in Nokia's night photo setting, nearly all of my photos turned out as grainy and dark as the bottom of an abandoned asylum sick bucket. Not so last night. I just used my usual portrait setting on the phone and the photos turned out as reassuringly amateurish as I could hope for. I did try using my Canon on timer but owing to my lack of technological aptitude (scrub that, technological interest) the results on my mobile camera were better. The aurora was mostly pink, scarlet and red but with tinges of green and on occasion quite extensive streaks arcing across the sky. It grew over the period of an hour or so and moved about much more than the one earlier in the year, eventually dissipating. Very impressive. Thank you God. 

And photos from earlier in the year are below. The results are grainer but you can see the different colours of the aurora on that occasion:

John Burroughs: The Simple Life

I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and found it good... I love a small house, plain clothes, simple living. Many persons know the luxury of a skin bath- a plunge in the pool or the wave unhampered by clothing. That is the simple life - direct and immediate contact with things, life with the false wrappings torn away - the fine house, the fine equipage, the expensive habits, all cut off. How free one feels, how good the elements taste, how close one gets to them, how they fit one's body and one's soul! To see the fire that warms you, or better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst, and to dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are the stay of your four walls, and the timbers that uphold the roof that shelters you; to be in direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to want no extras, no shields; to find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more satisfying than a gift of tropic fruit; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. 

From: "An Outlook Upon Life" quoted in Our Friend John Burroughs (Clara Barrus, 1914). 

The current of the lives of many persons, I think, is like a muddy stream. They lack the instinct for health, and hence do not know when the vital current is foul. They are never really well ... The dew on the grass, the bloom on the grape, the sheen on the plumage, are suggestions of the health that is within the reach of most of us. 

I would live so that I could get tipsy on a glass of water, or find the spur in a whiff of morning air. 

You and I perish, but something goes out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of humanity. 

Oh, the wisdom that grows on trees, that murmurs in the streams, that floats in the wind, that sings in the birds, that is fragrant in the flowers, that speaks in the storms - the wisdom that one gathers on the shore, or when sauntering in the fields, or in resting under a tree, the wisdom that makes him forget his science, and exacts only his love - how precious it all is!

Naturalism does not see two immeasurable realities, God and Nature, it sees only one, that all is Nature or all is God, just as you prefer ... The universe was not made, it is, and always has been. God is Nature, and Nature is God. 

I shall not be imprisoned in the grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos. 

We are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate material from what we call the spiritual ... Each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind, as is every beast of the field and jungle, and every fowl of the air, and every insect that creeps and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an end in itself ... [Humanity] is a link in an endless chain of being (Accepting the Universe, 1920).

All quotes above from: Meditations of John Burroughs: Nature is Home. Chris Highland (Ed), Self-published, 2007. 

Cadair Idris without the Cwmshot

Cadair Idris or Cader Idris is a mountain in the Meirionnydd area of Gwynedd, Wales. It lies at the southern end of the Snowdonia National Park near the town of Dolgellau. The peak is composed largely of Ordovician igneous rocks, with classic glacial erosion features such as cwms, moraines, striated rocks, and roches moutonnées. Cadair Idris means 'Idris's Chair', the seat of Idris Gawr (Idris the Giant) after his 7th century battles against the Irish. I had been hoping to do the classic circular walk of Cadair Idris for about 35 years, so I jumped at the chance to do so when it came along. The classic walk is something like this:

The classic circular walk (which we didn't do).

However, because we had two cars, a gentler and more scenic option became possible; one which avoids the horrors of the steep scree of the Minffordd path and has a western approach.  We parked at the Minffordd car park but took the other car up to the chapel at Tyn-y-ddôl and walked up the valley towards Hafotty Gwastadfryn. We then took the path around the desolate amphitheatre of Tyrrau Mawr, accompanied by the whistling wind and wistful bleating of sheep on the hillside. From there we crossed the sodden moor of Rhiw Gweredydd and made for the steep ascent of the Pony Path and on to Cadair Idris summit. But... I got to the foot of the Pony Path ascent and just pancaked, my energy and stamina completely failing me, similar to my Fairfield Half-Horseshoe Fail from Grasmere. Fortunately, this didn't ruin the experience of my walking buddy who was able to press on and retrieve his car by following the ridge at Cadair Idris and descending the Minffordd Path, as planned.  

The walk we did was like an inverted question mark. Seems fitting. 

I was left to retrace my ascent and return to my car. In total I walked 9 miles with a total Elevation 2000ft. It took me 7 hours to walk my 9 miles, i.e. a staggeringly couch potatoey 1.28 miles per hour (half walking pace). From the point I turned back at the foot of the Pony Path, the remaining distance to the summit was only 1.2 miles with an additional elevation required of circa 1000ft. The thing is, if you're not up for the final ascent, you can't do it and must return the long way. It seems harsh but its the law of the jungle, or more precisely the mountain. My return journey was glorious. I didn't see a soul on the mountains apart from some friendly sheep. I collapsed several times and just lay there exhausted, in the sun, in the wind. It is said that he who sleeps on the slopes of Cadair Idris alone awakes as either a madman or a poet, and I would hope for both. The whole thing was an elemental exploration of my own fragility and humanity and I wouldn't change it for the world. It is wonderful to fail sometimes. To reach for the summit and find you are grasping thin air.

One additional aspect to my visit to Cadair Idris was that it was preceded (and followed) by 5 hours of car drive to and from Lincolnshire in an unfamiliar car which I had not driven before, and I had not made a long car journey for about 2 years before that. Circa 450 miles and 10 hours of driving, and 7 hours of mountain walking. Even though I didn't summit I felt like I had run a marathon by the time I got home.