John Carlos Baez on Nostr: The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance. It harvests our data in ...

The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance. It harvests our data in order to sell us stuff. We are already living inside the architecture of totalitarianism. It may not have been deliberate, but we now have to start acting as if we live in East Germany, and Instagram is the Stasi.

Politics is downstream from culture. So I actually learned this from somebody who I think of as one of the great philosophers of our age, Steve Bannon. He actually stole it from somebody else. But it's not politicians who have the power. He knows that. It's why he's a podcast bro, these days. But culture now is just what's next on your phone. And that's AI. Culture is AI now.

And forget the killer robots. If you want to know what the first great AI apocalypse is, we're already living it. It's total information collapse. And if you take one thing only away from this talk, it's politics is technology now. And that's why everybody in this room, you can't look away. It's why your CEOs have been taken captive and are paraded on TV like hostages. But you, you have a choice.

So Trump, he calls the press the enemies of the people. And he probably doesn't even know that he's quoting Stalin. So what happened to me is a playbook, and it's now coming for all sorts of other people. It was actually a friend of this guy who came after me. This is Nigel Farage. He's a Brexit funder.

[Carole Cadwalladr was sued for libel by Arron Banks, co-founder of the "Lean EU" Brexit campaign. She had said he lied about "his relationship with the Russian government". The courts agreed with this, but still say she owes damages and £1m in costs.]