The Turner Diaries

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pages: 357 words: 130,117

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

“Fuck the voting”: Dalton Bennett, Jon Swaine, and Jacqueline Alemany, “Jan. 6 Committee Hearing Will Use Clips from Roger Stone Documentary,” Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/jan6-committee-roger-stone-documentary/. Likewise, too, The Turner Diaries: Alexandra Alter, “How ‘The Turner Diaries’ Incites White Supremacists,” New York Times, Jan. 12, updated, Jan. 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/books/turner-diaries-white-supremacists.html; Aja Romano, “How a Dystopian Neo-Nazi Novel Helped Fuel Decades of White Supremacist Terrorism,” Vox, Jan. 28, 2021, https://www.vox.com/22232779/the-turner-diaries-novel-links-to-terrorism-william-luther-pierce. day of violence from The Turner Diaries: Tom Dreisbach, “Conspiracy Charges Bring Proud Boys’ History of Violence Into the Spotlight,” NPR, April 9, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/985104612/conspiracy-charges-bring-proud-boys-history-of-violence-into-spotlight.

Anticipating the trends of a later day, Tim tailored his media consumption to his ideological predilections, starting with American Hunter, the NRA magazine. McVeigh even studied the small advertisements in the back pages. He responded to one for a novel called The Turner Diaries. The book arrived by mail, and he read it for the first of many times. It changed his life, as it did numerous others. The cover of The Turner Diaries lists the author as Andrew Macdonald, which was a pseudonym for William Luther Pierce, who led a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization called the National Alliance. The novel, first published in 1978 and circulated mostly by direct mail through advertisements in conservative magazines and mailing lists, tells a gruesome tale of a right-wing revolution in the United States.

In later years, “the Day of the Rope” became a kind of extremist code for the moment when white people take their revenge against their enemies. Toward the end of The Turner Diaries, the United States is convulsed by a nuclear Civil War. Sixty million Americans are dead. The epilogue points to a happy ending. By 1999, the Organization had won a global war, and “the dream of a White world became a certainty.” The violence in The Turner Diaries is so lurid, almost cartoonish, that it’s tempting to dismiss the book as political pornography. In fact, the Diaries reflects an ideology with deep roots in American history.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In the 1970s, a young neo-Nazi named William Luther Pierce produced a work that would go on to inspire an extraordinary amount of violence. The novel was called The Turner Diaries. Published in 1978, it was a futuristic description of the violent struggle for a white utopia in the United States. While it was disseminated as a work of fiction, some of its devoted readers did whatever they could to make the racist fantasy it depicted reality—up to and including murder. The Turner Diaries proved a remarkably resilient and compelling narrative for white supremacists and conspiracists across the country; it was sold at gun shows and by mail order.

His hero wrote about “swarthy, kinky-haired little Jewboys” who paid off African-Americans to oppose white racism, and cast a “Jewish spell” over the majority of white Americans, lulling them into materialism and complacency. The Turner Diaries would go on to inspire a white-supremacist terrorist gang called the Order, directly named after the group in the book, to rob banks and armored cars, and ultimately shoot to death Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Colorado in 1984. Most famously, the book was the ideological lodestar of mass murderer Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people, including children. The FBI has labeled it the “Bible of the racist right.” If so, a devotee of the Turner Diaries subsequently produced the movement’s catechism.

But these puerile jokes were undercut with deadly serious rants about their cause: There were screeds asserting that US electoral politics had reached its limit and needed to be replaced with violent revolutionary activities, and a seemingly endless well of earnest vitriol against minorities and Jews. The two cadences of conversation overlapped indistinguishably, forming an endless, roiling soup of incitement and gloating camaraderie. Users swapped texts like Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto about “white genocide,” PDFs of The Turner Diaries, the neo-Nazi book Siege by James Mason, Holocaust-denial manifestos, and quotes about Adolf Hitler. They also voiced their discomfort and frustration with the Republican Party’s open embrace of Israel, and shared memes about Jewish “decadence,” world control, and degeneracy—themes Hitler and Henry Ford might have been proud of.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Presented at the V I S ION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 30-31 M arch 1 993. http: ( fwww­ rohan. sdsu. eduf facultyfvinge fmiscf singularity.html Wagar, W.W. ( 1982). Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Whalen, R.K. (2000). Premillennialism. In Landes, R.A. (ed.) , The Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennia! Movements, pp. 3 3 1 (New York: Routledge). Whitsel, B. ( 1 998) . The Turner Diaries and Cosmotheism: William Pierce's Theology of Revolution. Nova Religio, 1(2), 1 83-1 97. Wilson, D. (2007). Where's My ]etpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived (Bloomsbury) . Wildavsky, A.B. ( 1 987). Choosing preferences by constructing institutions: a cultural theory of preference formation.

Since there are far more hateful, delusional and 27 Indeed, the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit has explained that, 'What al-Qaeda wants is a high body count as soon as possible, and it will use whatever CBRN [chemical, biological, radiologicaL nuclear] materials it gets in ways that will ensure the most corpses' ( Scheuer, 2002, p. 198). 28 For instance, The Turner Diaries, a novel written by the former leader of the National Alliance, William Pierce, and which has had considerable influence on many right·wingers, describes racist 'patriots' destroying cities and other targets with nuclear weapons (Macdonald, 1999). Catastrophic nuclear terrorism: a preventable peril 419 solipsistic individuals than organized groups in this world, 29 this situation would indeed be deserving of the label of a nuclear nightmare.

Lifton, R.J. (1999). Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books). Lugar, R.G. (2005). The Lugar Survey on Proliferation Threats and Responses (Washington, DC: U . S . Senate). Macdonald, A. [pseudonym for Pierce] ( 1999). The Turner Diaries: A Novel. Hillsboro, W.V.: National Vanguard; originally published 1 980. Maerli, M . B . (Summer, 2000). Relearning the ABCs: terrorists and 'weapons of mass destruction'. The Nonproliferation Review. Maerli, M.B. (2004). Crude Nukes on the Loose? Preventing Nuclear Terrorism by Means of Optimum Nuclear Husbandry, Transparency, and Non-Intrusive Fissile Material Verification.


pages: 592 words: 125,186

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

He dabbled with right-wing organisations, including the BNP, which he quickly left, blaming their refusal to take up arms, and the National Socialist Movement, a breakaway group of the terrorist neo-Nazi organisation Combat 18 led by David Myatt. The pipe bombing of the Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta in 1996, one of a series of attacks by Eric Rudolph targeting abortion rights and the ‘homosexual agenda’, was a key moment in the development of Copeland’s vision for his London attacks. After this he digested biographies of Hitler, The Turner Diaries (which depicts violent revolution and a race war in the US), the pamphlet A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution written by David Myatt, and The Terrorist’s Handbook, downloaded from the internet. Before committing his horrific crimes, he visited his GP to tell them he was ‘losing his mind’.

., 1n suffering, 1, 2 suicide attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6 superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), 1, 2 superordinate goal, 1 superordinate ingroup, 1, 2 suppression mechanism, 1, 2, 3 surveys, 1, 2 survival, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Sutcliffe, Peter, 1 Sweden, 1 symbolic threats, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 synagogues, 1 Syria, 1, 2, 3, 4 systemic bias, 1 Tajfel, Henri, 1 Tarrant, Brenton, 1, 2, 3 Tay (chatbot), 1, 2, 3 Taylor, Breonna, 1 Tbilisi, 1 tech giants, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 technology, 1, 2, 3 Telegram, 1, 2 television, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 terror, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 terrorism: events that remind us of our mortality, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; hate counts, 1, 2; Kansas shooting, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; predicting hate crime, 1; profiling the hater, 1; religion versus hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5n, 6; trauma and containment, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; YouTube algorithms, 1 The Terrorist’s Handbook, 1 Terror Management Theory (TMT), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Tétouan, 1 Texas, 1, 2, 3, 4 Thaipoosam Cavadee (Hindu festival), 1 Thatcher, Margaret, 1, 2 theory of mind, 1, 2 Thomas, Daniel, 1 ‘thoughtcrime’, 1 threats: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; beyond threat, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; context and threat, 1; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; defence mechanisms, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; evolution of group threat detection, 1; feeling hate together, 1; fusiform face area, 1; group threat and hate, 1; hacking the brain to hate, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1; human biology and threat, 1; locating hate in the brain, 1; neutralising the perception of threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; recognising facial expressions, 1; religion versus hate, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; threat in their own words, 1; tipping point, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 thrill-seeking offenders, 1 TikTok, 1 Till Death Us Do Part, 1 tipping point: author’s experience effects, 1; identity fusion and hateful murder, 1; overview, 1, 2; predicting the next hate crime, 1; seven steps to stop hate, 1; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1 TMT, see Terror Management Theory Tokyo, 1n tolerance: filter bubbles and bias, 1; group threat, 1, 2; religion versus hate, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; white flight, 1 torcidas organizadas (football hooligans), 1 trackers, 1 transgender people, 1, 2n, 3, 4 translation, 1 trauma: the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; group threat, 1; hate as container of unresolved trauma, 1; hate speech harm, 1; overview, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 tribes, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6 trigger events, 1; events and hate online, 1; events and hate on the streets, 1; events that challenge our values, 1; events that remind us of our mortality, 1; micro-events and hate, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; our psychology and trigger events, 1; overview, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; religion versus hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1; uncovering the triggers of hate, 1 trolls, 1, 2n Trump, Donald: Cambridge Analytica, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1; ‘Chinese virus’, 1, 2; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; Kansas shooting, 1, 2, 3; and Mexicans, 1, 2, 3; and Muslims, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6n; police and race, 1; trigger event of election, 1; Twitter, 1, 2, 3, 4; YouTube algorithms, 1 trust, 1, 2, 3 Tsorionov, Dmitry ‘Enteo’, 1, 2 Tunisia attacks, 1 Turks, 1, 2 The Turner Diaries, 1 twins, 1 Twitter: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1; how much online hate speech, 1, 2; Japan care home attack, 1; online hate speech and social media companies, 1; online hate speech and the law, 1, 2; rise of the bots and trolls, 1, 2; Salah effect, 1; trigger events, 1, 2; Trump, 1, 2, 3, 4; why online hate speech hurts, 1 Uematsu, Satoshi, 1, 2, 3 UKIP, see United Kingdom Independence Party ultra groups, 1 ultrasound, 1n uncertainty, 1, 2, 3, 4 unconscious bias, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 unemployment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 United Kingdom (UK): Copeland nail bombing, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; cultural machine, 1, 2; Duggan shooting and riots, 1; extreme filter bubbles, 1; football fans, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; online hate speech prevention, 1, 2, 3; online news, 1; protections from hate, 1; Sophie Lancaster, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 1, 2n, 3, 4 United Nations, 1, 2 United States (US): Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; cultural machine, 1, 2, 3; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; housing projects, 1; Jim Crow era, 1; Kansas shooting, 1; Muslims ban, 1, 2n; office workers, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; online news, 1; police and hate, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and Franklin, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Unite the Right, 1, 2 University of Toronto’s Behavioural Research Lab, 1, 2 University of Virginia, 1 uptake of post, 1 ‘us’ and ‘them’: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; HateLab Brexit study, 1; religion versus hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; tipping point, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3 vaccination, 1 values, 1, 2, 3, 4 Van Bavel, Jay, 1n, 2 vandalism, 1 Vaughn, James Clayton, Jr, see Franklin, Joseph Paul ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), 1, 2 victimisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 victims, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 video content, 1, 2 Vidgen, Bertram, 1, 2 Vietnam War, 1 violence: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; online hate speech, 1; police bias, 1; steps to stop hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 VKontakte, 1 vmPFC, see ventromedial prefrontal cortex Voat, 1, 2 Vorherrschaft Division, 1 Vote Leave campaign, 1 voting, 1, 2 vulnerability, 1, 2, 3, 4 Wallace, Hunter, 1 Wall Street Journal, 1 Walmart shooting, 1 war, 1n, 2, 3 War of Independence, 1 warrior psychology, 1 washing, 1 Washington Post, 1 Waterfield, Peter, 1, 2 Watson, Paul Joseph, 1, 2, 3 webpage content, 1 Weibo, 1 WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic), 1 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 1 Westminster attack, 1, 2, 3 West Yorkshire, 1, 2, 3 white flight, 1, 2 Whitehouse, Harvey, 1 white matter, 1, 2 white nationalism, 1, 2 white people: far-right hate, 1, 2; Google searches, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4 white supremacists: far-right hate and Charlottesville, 1, 2, 3, 4; Google searches, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and Franklin, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2 Whitman, Charles, 1 Will & Grace, 1, 2 Wilson, Timothy, 1 witnesses, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 women, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Woolwich terror attack, 1, 2 working class, 1, 2 World Health Organisation, 1 World Trade Center (WTC), 1, 2, 3 xenophobia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Xiaoice (chatbot), 1 Xu, Professor, 1 Yaxley-Lennon, Stephen (Tommy Robinson), 1, 2, 3, 4 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 1, 2 Yorkshire, 1, 2, 3, 4 young people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 YouTube: algorithms, 1; far-right hate and Charlottesville, 1, 2, 3; filter bubbles, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; Russia, 1 Zuckerberg, Mark 1 Vigil for Srinivas Kuchibhotla, who was murdered by Adam Purinton on 22 February 2017.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

permanent, well-endowed lobby - US English - was estab- lished in Washington and initially attracted the support of old- fashioned Americanizers like Linda Chavez (the Madame Chiang Kai-shek of Latino conservatism) and Walter Cronkite. They eventually resigned when leaked documents revealed an organiza- tion steeped in herrenvolkish bigotry. For example, the group's founder. Dr. John Tanton, likes to terrify supporters with apocalyptic Aryan rhetoric that might have been lifted from the pages of the Turner Diaries: To govern does is to populate. In this society this hold? political power the instance in first to a group that is simply which those with and control over more fertile? their pants caught by those with their pants down! night? where the majority rules, Will the present majority peaceably hand over ...


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

On the other hand, the future will not lack for challenges and dangers. If nearly all valid or important wisdom from the past and present winds up being stored and valued, so will misinformation, lies, and slanderous halftruths. While ethnic crafts and amateur science promote wholesome diversity, calumnies like the Turner Diaries will also keep circulating, reproduced by cheap electronic means, infecting yet more fragile minds and egos with the same cruel madness that brought ruinous destruction to Oklahoma City in 1995. Of course it is by tolerating such forces, which proudly avow to hating tolerance and diversity, that our system proves its essential strength.

Anonymity also has a long-standing role in demagoguery, as when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have scores of independent sources to verify his wild accusations of Communist infiltration into the U.S. government. Sources that he “could not reveal”; nevertheless, the claim lent him credibility with some citizens. We have seen anonymity at work in countless fabrications and calumnies, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Turner Diaries, but it also plays a subtly powerful role in some of the most respected modern media journals. Speaking about unsigned newspaper editorials, E. M. Forster wrote that “anonymous statements have ... a universal air about them. Absolute truth, the collected wisdom of the universe, seems to be speaking, not the feeble voice of a man.”


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 85. 36. Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (New York: Norton, 2018). 37. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), discussing the popularity of Andrew Macdonald’s novel The Turner Diaries (Charlottesville, VA: National Vanguard Books, 1999). 38. Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 157. 39.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

They had emptied the kitchens and given the food to firefighters and police, but they were anxious to reestablish some sense of routine. I gave up on work. My heart wasn't in it. I started plugging search terms into Google to see what I could learn about the who and the why of what had happened. What was the significance of the date September 11? I didn't find much. The Turner Diaries, a neo-Nazi work of fiction dating from 1978, referred to bombings taking place in Houston on September 11. The Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles was signed on September 13. Tenuous connections at best. More curious was a September 4 Usenet post archived in Google groups. A writer calling himself "Nostradamus" had written, "Wait 7 days, and then maybe I'll answer this post.