Iron Front

This is how Cyberpunk CEOs Talk

2026-02-27T00:00:00-05:00

I've seen a lot of Techbro arrogance over the years, but this is a new low for Techbro arrogance. For a while, I just couldn't. Then I came to my senses, and tried to break down how much crap this actually is. Somewhere in the future that I hope we have, this will be in a book titled The Stupidest Things Ever Said, and Scam Altman won't be ruling over a substantial fraction of humanity in a bunker somewhere on the post-apocalyptic earth.

Fortunately, there has been massive retaliation across the internet. If you look at Altman's eyes while he says it, you realize he's perfectly comfortable with saying this with an utter lack of shame.

Analysis

YouTuber YongYeah has has an excellent teardown of most of this atrocity ("OpenAI CEO Argues Energy Is More Wasteful On Humans Than AI, Goes Very Poorly...") and some of the blowback.

Aakash Gupta (never heard of 'em before this) has an analysis of numbers (backup link). I don't agree with this analysis: it's still probably off by an order of magnitude since it doesn't include the embodied energy cost of food, clothing, etc for the humans OR the embodied energy cost and environmental damage of the hardware and infrastructure used to "train" the LLM. My guess would be that the latter is several orders of magnitude larger than the former:

Training models destroys components
Using the GPUs under heavy load (which would be the best way to get the most use out of them faster) causes the GPU devices to "melt down" (according to Scam Altman) while trying to rip off Studio Ghibli's style.
A given generation of GPUs isn't used to train one generation of a model and the next (the old ones are simply too slow for the increased cost of training "new" models.

Regardless, I'm not going to attempt to run the numbers, as that would be moral bankruptcy. A glorified spreadsheet and people are not morally equivalent.

Understanding This Through "LongTermism"

LLM company CEOs -- and many other techbros -- are best understood through their bizarre mindset, one component of which is a variety of of "Longtermism" or "Effective Altruism" which states:

There are humans alive now
There will be more humans in the future
At some arbitrary distant point in the future the number of humans alive now is (functionally) zero compared to the humans who will exist then
Therefore, no humans alive now matter

Maybe that interpretation is a little harsh. But this belief system is morally bankrupt: if you accept that:

two people matter more than one in all abstract senses
there will always be more humans in the future than now

... then the natural consequence is that no humans currently alive will never matter. ¹

More links on this variety of Longtermism:

Doomsday Bunkers, Mars, and 'The Mindset'
A dangerous calculation
The 'dangerous' promise of a techno-utopian future'
TESCREAL if you read nothing else here, read this

What Sam Altman is Actually Saying

Principle: when someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Some of this comes from a David Fairchild tweet (backup link)

Humans only matter where they can generate shareholder value for me and my elite club. Until you're educated (with the right kind of education) you're just a useless eater. If I can consume gigawatts of electricity to replace you with a synthetic intelligence, then it won't matter if you don't have a liveable biosphere. Meat humans are just one more stepping stone for me.

This bears a remarkable similarity to conservative arguments against foreign aid, and their refusal to also help needy people 'here' ↩︎

Stranger Things S5: Why Fascists Hated It

2026-02-25T00:00:00-05:00

So, I finally finished Stranger Things, Season 5. I know, I'm a bit behind the times. But now I do understand why the right wing mediaspace flipped out over it.

First, a disclaimer: I am not a media critic, so there are probably nuances I've missed. Also: Spoilers.

If you'd listened to the cesspool, Season 5 of Stranger Things was worse than the final season of Game of Thrones. But given the right's stunning lack of media literacy (Imagine being a conservative fan of RATM, or thinking that Stephen Colbert is actually a right-wing journalist ), I wasn't discouraged.

The main point that the bots were retweeting is the usual crap about "fOrCeD DiVERsItY" and Will Byers being made into a homo out of nowhere. But that's the only talking point they had to cling to. Bringing up the other stuff they hated would have forced them into thinking about the other elements which made their teeth grind. We'll get to Will's sexuality (and the points that you'd have to miss for it to come as a surprise).

Capable Women

The series had no shortage of capable women, and this is more prominent here.

Joyce was ready to storm the Upside-down after being force-tossed by Vecna earlier. His message was clear: You're not significant enough to kill. Later: she got to brutally decapitate her family's tormenter. I'm not sure if that was the same axe she got out of the shed to confront the Demogorgon in the first season, but I believe that was implied. Definitely the same axe used to fend off the Demo who was sent after Derek Turnbow, though.
Karen Wheeler in an impressive action debut: dealing with the Demo that came after Holly. Could you deal with a terrifying extradimensional horror so readily? And slaughtering the Demodoggos was unexpected, though I don't think an O2 cylinder would do that. Whatever. "rule of cool" is fine occasionally.
Holly helping to steal away Vecna's brat pack. How dare she be brave despite being terrified?
- Props to Derek as well. Actual change from a bully: who knew?
Nancy channeling John Rambo while assaulting Vecna's fortress
Max, of course: Oh, you'll kill me and trap my mind in yours? I'll scour every memory I can find for clues on how to bring you down. Without Max understanding how the mind prison worked, none of the kids would have gotten out.

Emotional Vulnerability

This is what really set teeth grinding for the emotionally stunted mouthbreathers. This season was packed to the brim with emotional expression that wasn't anger. EVERYWHERE. And what really got the rightoids' goat was the Aryan superman villain (seriously, he is!) crying. I wish I had the time to write so much more for this section and give the actors and writers their due.

No One-Man-Army Rugged Individualists

The main right-wing power fantasy was not found here. Vecna and his pet spider-monstrosity were brought low by the "little guys" working together (as they were in Season 3 at Starcourt). Everyone brought something to the table. No hulking, gun-toting, one-liner-slinging action heroes required.

Epilogue

That's my analysis. It'd kind of sad that most of the people who ground their teeth over this (realized or not) will never understand why it was they hated it. Sure, there are legit reasons to critique some elements of the story and how it ended, but these would require media literacy :)

Those Damned Files

2026-02-07T00:00:00-05:00

Given what's running in the news as of this writing, it would make the most sense to talk about it.

Starting Points

So where do you start? Where exactly do you start when it turns out that there is a cabal of powerful men -- mostly white, mostly rich -- who are acting as a shadow government. That despite thousands of hours in overtime redacting these documents (badly, so, so badly...) the shadowy pedo cabal is obvious.

Wasn't this what the alt-right QAnon news cycle were spewing for an entire decade up to the second election of Donald Trump? I seem to recall it was. Though the details are a bit foggy (pizza....gate?). Well, turns out they are ignoring it now because it wasn't entirely Democrats, and there are thousands of references to the Orange Man despite the redactions.

So I'd rather talk about aspects of those files that aren't being as widely reported.

Pathetic Loser Men

The first is the exposure that Rebecca Watson talks about specifically in her video Epstein Files Reveal How Pathetic Richard Dawkins & Other Men Are. Pathetic is the watchword here. I recommend watching the entire video, but one of the Emails that Rebecca covers describes Dawkins as conflict-avoiding and female-dependent, and Richard is extremely weak when it comes to demanding females.

I had a good laugh at that one. Then the long stare: so, so many men are like that. So many. And a lot of Trumpkins also. Probably why Epstein had so much power. There's a fair amount of evidence for it: such as that men in committed relationships with women live longer¹

Female-dependant and being a soufflet-doormat for capable women² is such asn interesting combination. I can't imagine the amount of self-loathing that must brew. It must drive them crazy.

Also worth noting: Rebecca covers much more about Lawrence Krauss here, though I've only talked about Dawkins. It's just that I find sex-pests particularly uninteresting, though just as pathetic.

And about "Nasty Women"

Isn't it.... strange that both Dawkins and Trump use the same word to describe women who give them and their creepy friends a hard time. IIRC Scott Adams (may he rot in hell) used the same word but that could just be from being a Trump fanboy. Dawkins and Trump are active in diametrically opposed circles. Sure, it could be a coincidence, but it could also be some sort of lingo that runs in Epstein's circles (though it doesn't seem to be used in that context within the files themselves). If a man calls you 'Nasty', treat it as the complement it is.

Cognitive Dissonance

The Epstein files force trumpkins to run a master class in congitive dissonance. It's at the level that might even lead to brain damage³.

Irony of ironies, Scott Adams had a really good cartoon about it:

The YouTube channel The Necessary Conversation is a master exhibit here. It is run by two siblings who talk to their firmly-in-MAGA-camp parents. I find their parents' arguments absurd and have a hard time watching their videos for any length of time. Could I dig into my parents' moral decay with such consistency? Frankly I don't think I'd have the endurance.

One of their videos was featured in My Parents are Gone: "The Files" broke my family by Large Man Abroad, a content creator I follow for a different perspective on the current American nightmare. This is happening to thousands of people in the USA right now. If you didn't lose your Trumper parents yet, this oughta do it. In Europe, powerful people are falling on their swords because of these revelations, while in the USA it seems like nobody cares. Quite the contrast.

Cryptobros, or "What did you think it was Being Used For"

I saved the best one for last. And by "best" I mean "What the fuck did you think was going on?".

Turns out, (at least some) crypto-bros are just now realizing their fancy math was funded by Epstein and probably funding said elite global cabal. Yeeeeaaaahhhh: what did you think was going on behind the scenes? I hadn't quite counted on it being this but whatever it was, I knew it couldn't be good: it was marketed as a way to ~~bypass global financial controls and hide payments to questionable entities~~ ahem disrupt traditional finance, so surely it couldn't be used for anything really sketchy /s.

Aside: cryptocurrency was a scam that lead into the much bigger scam of NFTs. "Blockchain" is another scam posing as technology which seems to have gone back into hibernation. It might make a resurgence after the AI-tech collapse, assuming that there is anything left of the global financial system. But that's a topic for another day...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7452000/ ↩︎
Who aren't simpering doormats ↩︎
I have no idea if this can actually happen ↩︎