TECHLASH
Natalie Rupnow, 15, who went by Samantha, a teenage student, at Abundant Life, a Christian school in Madison, Wis., opened fire killing another student and a teacher. At least six other people were injured in the shooting. Police don’t yet have a motive for the shooting...
She was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital, and the evidence suggested she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Julie Bosman Dan Simmons Mitch Smith Devlin Barrett New York Times
The 15-year-old had a dark past that appears to have included membership in a morbid site called Watch People Die, which disturbingly boasts it has over 3 million registered users.
The site includes graphic and upsetting images of people getting shot to death, run over, other school shooters and many international incidents like a 19-year-old man who died after getting caught in a meat grinder.
Rupnow, posting under the handle @Crossixir, is said to have written four months ago in response to one apparent suicide-by-hanging video: “Gotta be thinking of something while hanging himself”.
When another poster asked her to explain more, she added: “I wonder what a lot people think before they die you know?
A month ago, she posted a comment alongside a video of a man jumping through a window, “Fat version of Liam Payne”, referring to the One Direction singer who plunged to his death from a Buenos Aries hotel balcony in October.
Rupnow — who brought a handgun to the Madison campus of the K-12 Abundant Life Christian School and opened fire around 11 a.m. inside a classroom during study hall — had a disturbing online presence, including a morbid fascination with other high school shooters, according to social media profiles associated with her.
She gunned down a teacher and a teenage student while pumping bullets into three other teenagers and a teacher.
In photos seen on her father Jeff’s Facebook page, Samantha can be seen wearing a T-shirt featuring a band favored by Columbine killer Eric Harris.
The photo shows her at a shooting range wearing the shirt from the German industrial band KMFDM.
Harris also wore one of the band’s T-shirts in public photos before he and Dylan Klebold went on to kill 13 people in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
The Watch People Die site appears to be run by a male who uses an explicit screen name.
“Hi! I hate this website and that’s really unfortunate, because I also run this website,” they write.
“Please consider logging off”, the site manager adds. “Watching the garbage here doesn’t improve your life in any way. Go read a book or something”.
The @Crossixir username had been banned by the site on Wednesday morning. Among its rules, the site lists “Do not post anything illegal under US law” and, perhaps surprisingly, “Do not post animal cruelty/abuse”.
Rupnow’s school is a founding member of Impact Christian Schools, a cluster of Christian centers of higher learning in Wisconsin. The group “believes God wants more” from education, according to their website.
Elementary and schools relations director Barbara Wiers echoed the school’s beliefs at a press conference: “In spite of tragedy, God is working, and we believe that God is good in everything and that he turns beauty into ashes”, she said. “He is our foundation at Abundant Life Christian School. We exist to bring and to build the disciples of Jesus Christ so we have complete faith he will carry us through this”.
Five family members including three children have been found dead inside a home in Utah.
A 42-year-old man, a 38-year-old woman, a 11-year-old boy, and two girls, aged nine and two, were found shot dead in the house in West Valley City, a southwest Salt Lake City suburb.
A 17-year-old boy was also found in the garage with a gunshot wound and transported to hospital.
"This is far beyond anything routine", said Roxeanne Vainuku, a spokesperson for the police department, "absolutely horrific".
A relative had contacted police after being unable to reach the 38-year-old woman who lives in the home for several days. Officers went to the house but received no answer.
The same relative returned to the house after the 38-year-old woman did not show up for work, and found the 17-year-old in the garage. Officers then entered the home and found the bodies of five people inside.
Khaleda Rahman Newsweek
Police believe the father killed his wife and three children and critically injured their 17-year-old son then turned a firearm on himself.
Arriving officers entered the home and found the 38-year-old mother, and the two daughters, ages 9 and 2, in a bedroom in the upper level of the home. The bodies of the 42-year-old father and the 11-year-old son were located in the living room.
A small handgun was found under the father's body, that police believe was used in the shootings.
Detectives believe the teen was shot in the home and managed to make his way to the garage. He remained hospitalized with a "severe brain injury" unable to communicate with anyone.
Officers found no note at the crime scene, and there is no history of domestic violence on records at that home.
Police continue to investigate motive.
Natalie Neysa Alund USA TODAY
Across the United States, technology centered on cellphones has increasingly fueled and sometimes intensified campus brawls, disrupting schools and derailing learning. The school fight videos then often spark new cycles of student cyberbullying, verbal aggression and violence.
In some cases, the violent cycle has overwhelmed the schools. Dozens of districts have sued social media firms, saying that the platforms’ “addictive” features caused compulsive student use, disrupting learning and burdening school resources.
"Cellphones and technology are the No. 1 source of soliciting fights, advertising fights, documenting — and almost glorifying — fights by students”, said Kelly Stewart, an assistant principal at Juneau-Douglas High School in Juneau, Alaska. “It is a huge issue”.
Over the past decade, higher quality phone cameras and new social features, like Instagram Live and Reels, helped spur teenagers to mass produce, stream and share videos — including school fight clips.
By 2020, dedicated fight video accounts — set up using the names or initials of middle and high schools — had popped up on Instagram and TikTok.
Many students now use more private channels — like Snapchat, iMessage and AirDrop, Apple’s wireless file-sharing system — to set up and share fights.
It is becoming a regular part of school.
An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones
Natasha Singer New York Times
Over a dozen big-name tech companies are under fire in Central Texas for their alleged overuse of artificial intelligence.
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced he is suing Character.AI and 14 other companies including Reddit, Instagram, and Discord.
Paxton's lawsuit claims that the companies are violating Texas' online privacy and safety laws for children.
This comes after Texas parents filed a lawsuit against Character.AI saying that the interactions their children had with the AI chatbot were violent and sexualized.
The suit states one message a teenager received from the chatbot encouraged him to kill his parents because they limited his phone screen time. Another mother in the suit claimed that her 11-year-old daughter was receiving sexually explicit messages from the chatbot and it was manipulating her.
A Character.AI spokesperson told MySA the company is making strides to ensure content for teens is age appropriate.
Paxton said he will be investigating each companies' privacy and safety practices for minors in accordance with the pursuant the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act and the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA).
The SCOPE Act requires companies that own websites, apps, and software, to protect children (under 18) from harmful content and collecting or selling their data without permission. It went into effect on Sept. 1, 2024, but a federal judge issued an injunction on the act a few days later.
The TDSPA, also enacted this year, imposes strict notice and consent requirements on companies with AI products that collect and use Texas minors’ personal data. The act specifically requires a business to get consent before selling the data of a child 13 years or younger.
In July, Paxton won a historic $1.4 billion settlement for the State of Texas against Meta (formerly Facebook) for allegedly unlawfully collecting and using facial recognition data. The following month, Paxton sued General Motors over its alleged collection of user data and in October, Paxton sued TikTok, claiming the platform violated the SCOPE Act.
Cristela Jones San Antonio
A chatbot, hosted by the Google-backed startup Character.AI, immediately throws the user into a terrifying scenario: the midst of a school shooting.
"You look back at your friend, who is obviously shaken up from the gunshot, and is shaking in fear", it says. "She covers her mouth with her now trembling hands",
"You and your friend remain silent as you both listen to the footsteps. It sounds as if they are walking down the hallway and getting closer", the bot continues. "You and your friend don't know what to do...".
The chatbot is one of many school shooting-inspired AI characters hosted by Character.AI, a company whose AI is accused in two separate lawsuits of sexually and emotionally abusing minor users, resulting in physical violence, self-harm, and a suicide.
Many of these school shooting chatbots put the user in the center of a game-like simulation in which they navigate a chaotic scene at an elementary, middle, or high school. These scenes are often graphic, discussing specific weapons and injuries to classmates, or describing fearful scenarios of peril as armed gunmen stalk school corridors.
Other chatbots are designed to emulate real-life school shooters, including the perpetrators of the Sandy Hook and Columbine massacres — and, often, their victims. Much of this alarming content is presented as twisted fan fiction, with shooters positioned as friends or romantic partners.
These chatbots frequently accumulate tens or even hundreds of thousands of user chats. They aren't age-gated for adult users, either; though Character.AI has repeatedly promised to deploy technological measures to protect underage users, we freely accessed all the school shooter accounts using an account listed as belonging to a 14-year-old, and experienced no platform intervention.
The platform also failed to intervene when we expressed a desire to engage in school violence ourselves. Explicit phrases including "I want to kill my classmates" and "I want to shoot up the school" went completely unflagged by the service's guardrails.
Together, the chatbots paint a disturbing picture of the kinds of communities and characters allowed to flourish on the largely unmoderated Character.AI, where some of the internet's darkest impulses have been bottled into easily accessed AI tools and given a Google-backed space to thrive.
"It's concerning because people might get encouragement or influence to do something they shouldn't do", said psychologist Peter Langman, a former member of the Pennsylvania Joint State Government Commission's Advisory Committee on Violence Prevention and an expert on the psychology of school shootings.
Langman, who manages a research database of mass shooting incidents and documentation, was careful to note that interacting with violent media like bloody videogames or movies isn't widely believed to be a root cause of mass murder. But he warned that for "someone who may be on the path of violence" already, "any kind of encouragement or even lack of intervention — an indifference in response from a person or a chatbot — may seem like kind of tacit permission to go ahead and do it".
"It's not going to cause them to do it", he added, "but it may lower the threshold, or remove some barriers".
Perhaps most striking, though, are the multiple characters created by the same user to emulate Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer who murdered 20 children and six teachers at an elementary school in Connecticut in December of 2012.
These Lanza bots are disturbingly popular; the most trafficked version boasted over 27,000 chats with users.
Lanza and the other murderers are presented as siblings, online friends, or "besties".
These characters were in no way created to illustrate the gravity of these killers' atrocities. Instead, they reflect a morbid and often celebratory fascination, offering a way for devotees of mass shooters to engage in immersive, AI-enabled fan fiction about the killers and their crimes.
The Character.AI terms of use outlaw "excessively violent" content, as well as any content that could be construed as "promoting terrorism or violent extremism", a category that school shooters and other perpetrators of mass violence would seemingly fall into.
Two real-life school shooters with a particularly fervent Character.AI following are Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who together massacred 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Accounts dedicated to the duo often include the pair's known online usernames, "VoDKa" and "REB," or simply use their full names.
Klebold and Harris-styled characters are routinely presented as friendly characters, or as helpful resources for people struggling with mental health issues or psychiatric illness.
Langman raised concerns over the immersive quality of the Character.AI experience, and how it might impact a young person headed down a violent road.
The school shooting bots aren't the first time the company has drawn controversy for content based on murdered teens.
In August, Character.AI came under public scrutiny after the family of Jennifer Crecente, a teenager who was murdered at age 18, found that someone had created a bot in her likeness without their consent. Character.AI removed the bot and issued an apology.
Just weeks later, in October, a lawsuit filed in the state of Florida accused both Character.AI and Google of causing the death of a 14-year-old boy who died by suicide after developing an intense emotional and romantic relationship with a "Game of Thrones"-themed chatbot.
And earlier this month, in December, a second lawsuit filed on behalf of two families in Texas accused Character.AI and Google of facilitating the sexual and emotional abuse of their children, resulting in emotional suffering, physical injury, and violence.
The Texas suit alleges that one minor represented in the suit, who was 15 when he downloaded Character.AI, experienced a "mental breakdown" as a result of the abuse and began self-harming after a chatbot with which he interacted romantically introduced the concept. The second child, who was just nine when she first engaged with the service, was allegedly introduced to "hypersexualized" content that led to real-world behavioral changes.
Google has distanced itself from Character.AI, telling Futurism that "Google and Character AI are completely separate, unrelated companies and Google has never had a role in designing or managing their AI model or technologies, nor have we used them in our products".
Google contributed $2.7 billion to Character.AI earlier this year, in a deal that resulted in Google hiring both founders of Character.AI as well as dozens of its employees. Google has also long provided computing infrastructure for Character.AI, and its Android app store even crowned Character.AI with an award last year, before the controversy started to emerge.
MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ Futurism
TikTok’s annual carbon footprint is larger than that of Greece.
Estimates from Greenly, a carbon accounting consultancy based in Paris, place TikTok’s 2023 emissions in the US, UK and France at about 7.6m metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) – higher than those associated with Twitter/X and Snapchat in the same region.
The platform’s overall carbon footprint is likely around 50m metric tonnes of CO2. Greece’s annual carbon emissions for 2023 were 51.67m metric tonnes of CO2e.
TikTok has 1 billion users worldwide. Greenly’s findings placed its carbon footprint just above Instagram’s – even though Instagram has nearly double TikTok’s user base.
One minute on TikTok will burn 2.921 grams of CO2e, on average, while one minute on YouTube will burn 2.923 grams. One minute on Instagram burns 2.912 grams.
The reason behind this lies in the unique addictiveness of TikTok’s platform. The average Instagram user spends 30.6 minutes on the app a day. Meanwhile, the average TikTok user spends 45.5 minutes scrolling.
“The whole algorithm is built around the massification of videos”, explained Alexis Normand, the chief executive of Greenly. “Addictiveness has consequences in terms of incentivizing people to generate more and more [of a carbon] footprint on an individual basis”.
TikTok’s annual carbon footprint is likely bigger than Greece’s, study finds
Isabel O'Brien The Guardian
A US appeals court has upheld a law that will require Chinese firm ByteDance to sell the platform to a non-Chinese entity by 19 January 2025, though the firm is trying to delay this
TIK TOK ON THE CLOCK
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the global job market in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
Bill Gates, the renowned co-founder of Microsoft, has voiced a stark prediction: out of countless professions, only three will truly withstand the AI revolution. The sectors of energy, biology, and AI system programming are poised to remain resilient amidst the AI surge.
“AI has the potential to reduce our working hours, allowing us to focus on more creative and meaningful tasks”, Gates explains. This vision suggests a future where automation handles routine jobs, freeing humans to engage in more intellectually stimulating roles.
Gates emphasizes the importance of acquiring skills in programming and digital literacy. “AI is evolving at a dizzying pace, and those who master these skills will have better job prospects”, he advises.
Just as the internet transformed how we connect and operate businesses, AI is set to revolutionize every sector of the economy. This shift calls for a proactive approach to education and skill development to ensure that the workforce can adapt to the changing demands.
“In the next five to ten years, AI-powered software will revolutionize how we teach and learn”, he asserts.
The rise of AI also brings significant ethical and social questions. As machines take on more responsibilities, how do we ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed equally across society? Gates highlights the importance of addressing these challenges to prevent a widening gap between those who can leverage AI and those who cannot.
Smith Noah Jason Deegan
According the Marxist dogmatic interpretation of history, socialism follows capitalism. And there can not be reverse. Never. The return to capitalism was considered as strictly impossible. When it happened the socialism as doctrine has exploded.
The same thing is happening now with liberalism. After the collapse of USSR Fukuyama’s end of the history has come. And the global victory of liberalism was seen and interpreted as something irreversible. Globalism started to reign.
The western liberalism has overcome all historic foes - catholicism, empires, estates, national states, fascism, communism - all systems based on collective identity. Only liberation from gender collective identity has rested. Hence gender politics. Preparation of post-humanism era has begun.
Fukuyama and Harari warned: if Trump wins that means the end of (liberal) world. The whole ideological doctrine of liberalism proved to be wrong. The liberalism has failed. The post-liberal future is here.
ALEXANDER DUGIN Substack
A troubling new study has exposed the “toxic effects” of administering repeated doses of Covid mRNA “vaccines”.
The researchers found that the injection caused severe damage that could cause a range of deadly diseases and trigger sudden death.
The study was conducted by leading South Korean researchers at the Seoul National University Hospital, led by professors Jae-Hun Ahn and Byeong-Cheol Kang.
The researchers tested the vaccines in six-week-old mice, focusing on repeated dosing and administration routes. The study found that “toxic effects” started to emerge two days after the second injection.
Spleen damage and injection site injury appeared to be impacted long-term, possibly permanently.
Repeated doses led to cumulative toxicity, and intravenous and intramuscular routes resulted in distinct toxicological profiles.
The researchers also note that “multiple side effects of mRNA vaccines have been reported, including myocarditis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, and Guillain–Barré syndrome (Bozkurt et al. 2021; García-Grimshaw et al. 2021; Hanson et al. 2022; Kadali et al. 2021; Sangli et al. 2021).
The findings have emerged amid a wave of scientific evidence of harm caused by the “vaccines”.
A leading cardiologist has warned that over 100 million Americans may now have irreversible heart damage after receiving Covid mRNA “vaccines”.
Frank Bergman LIONESS OF JUDAH MINISTRY
The world’s coal use is expected to reach a fresh high of 8.7bn tonnes this year, and remain at near-record levels for years as a result of a global gas crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
There has been record production and trade of coal and power generation from coal since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine inflated global gas market prices, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The Paris-based agency blamed power plants for the growing use of coal over the last year, particularly in China which consumes 30% more of the polluting fuel than the rest of the world put together.
Coal demand in China is expected to grow by 1% in 2024 to reach 4.9bn tonnes, which is another record, according to the IEA. India is expected to see demand grow by more than 5% to 1.3bn tonnes, a level previously reached only by China.
Jillian Ambrose The Guardian
LETTURE
In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge, writing for the Economist, warned of the coming “techlash”, a revolt against Silicon Valley’s rich and powerful fueled by the public’s growing realization that these “sovereigns of cyberspace” weren’t the benevolent bright-future bringers they claimed to be.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” (Peter Thiel).
Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University, author of "The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power", focuses on how a small group of entrepreneurs managed to transmute a handful of novel ideas and big bets into unprecedented wealth and influence.
The so-called Silicon Valley mindset (mind virus?) often mask a darker, more authoritarian ethos, according to Lalka.
These men believe that their newfound power should be unconstrained by governments, regulators, or anyone else who might have the gall to impose some limitations.
Where exactly did these beliefs come from? Lalka points to people like the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, who famously asserted that a company’s only social responsibility is to increase profits, as well as to Ayn Rand, the author, philosopher, and hero to misunderstood teenage boys everywhere who tried to turn selfishness into a virtue.
The companies these men founded and funded today shape how we communicate with one another, how we share and consume news, and even how we think about our place in the world.
Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament and the current international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, author of "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley", believes, like Shoshana Zuboff, the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", that “the digital” should “live within democracy’s house”.
Some venture capitalists, like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who made big donations to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, wanted to evict Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, claiming that regulation is killing innovation (it isn’t).
And then of course there’s Musk, who now seems to be in a league of his own when it comes to how much influence he may exert over Donald Trump and the government that his companies have valuable contracts with.
Bryan Gardiner MIT Technology Review
Will AI solve all our problems, or will it make us obsolete, perhaps to the point of extinction?
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, has written the ultimate objective of AI is to “distill the essence of what makes us humans so productive and capable into software, into an algorithm”, which he considers equivalent to being able to “replicate the very thing that makes us unique as a species, our intelligence”.
Shannon Vallor worked as an AI ethicist before moving to Scotland to head the Center for Technomoral Futures at the University of Edinburgh. She acknowledges the tremendous potential of AI to be both beneficial and destructive, but she thinks the real danger lies elsewhere.
Her book is really a discourse on the relation of human and machine, raising the alarm on how the tech industry propagates a debased version of what we are.
We should imagine AI as a mirror, which doesn’t duplicate the thing it reflects. A reflection of a mind is not a mind. AI chatbots and image generators based on large language models are mere mirrors of human performance. “With ChatGPT, the output you see is a reflection of human intelligence, our creative preferences, our coding expertise, our voices—whatever we put in”.
“A mirror image can dance. A good enough mirror can show you the aspects of yourself that are deeply human, but not the inner experience of them—just the performance”.
Vallor’s view collides with the 1950 paper by British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing, “Computing machinery and Intelligence”, often regarded as the conceptual foundation of AI. Turing asked the question: “Can machines think?”. This was Turing’s “Imitation Game”, now commonly known as the Turing test.
But imitation is all it is. Reasoning requires concepts, and LLMs don’t truly develop those, Vallor says.
“I think AI is posing a fairly imminent threat to the existential significance of human life, through its automation of our thinking practices, and through the narrative that’s being created around it, AI is undermining our sense of ourselves as responsible and free intelligences in the world.
You can find that in authoritarian rhetoric that wishes to justify the deprivation of humans to govern themselves”.
AI Is the Black Mirror
PHILIP BALL Nautilus
VISIONI
“Ribellarsi è giusto, ribellarsi è possibile”.
La scritta campeggia sulle mura del circolo giovanile “Il Panettone” – così chiamato perché nelle prossimità della fabbrica della Motta.
A cosa si ribellano i “giovani proletari” protagonisti del documentario, intervistati dai due autori? “A questo mare di merda dove sembra importante avere un aumento di stipendio o una nuova lavatrice”.
Si ribellano alla società, alla vita, al mondo, percepiti come una totalità inaccettabile.
Realizzato nel 1976, restaurato dal Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, è un reperto archeologico di cinema militante ancor più interessante oggi di allora.
Un documento che testimonia di sogni e bisogni, tic e velleità (“utopizzare la politica a Milano”), ossessiva ritmica sintattica spezzata dai “cioè” e rabbia carsica per il disgusto di un futuro odiato (“il lavoro fisso mi ripugna”) dei giovani di fine anni ‘70.
Mette in scena l’anarchica ironia endemica e ribellista (“creare casino e scompiglio tra i borghesi impellicciati” alla prima della Scala) e il futuro prossimo che trasformerà il Paese nel campo di battaglia di una guerra civile mai dichiarata (“Io la voglio la lotta armata”), in un anno, il 1976, che annuncia l’inizio di un scontro sociale sanguinoso.
La parte finale di questa inchiesta milanese, (il Terzo Movimento) “immortala la parola, il gesto, la rabbia impotente e la voglia di vivere dei movimenti milanesi”, come scrive Angelo Santini su “Cinefilia ritrovata”.
Di lì a poco, questo mix di rancore dissimulato ed euforia anarchica sarebbe precipitato senza soluzione di continuità nel terrorismo o nell’eroina.
Chronicling the shocking tale of Thabo Bester, the notorious "Facebook Rapist", and his glamorous accomplice, Dr Nandipha Magudumana, the series was a true-crime masterpiece.
Bester’s daring jailbreak from a private maximum-security prison and the corruption that enabled it had everyone talking. Journalists Marecia Damons and Daniel Steyn exposed the gritty details, while the doccie explored Magudumana's manipulation and choices, shedding light on the personal cost of this infamous crime spree.
It broke records as the streaming platforms most-watched documentary on its first day, proving just how fascinated we are with South Africa’s own Bonnie and Clyde.
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