I asked Grok to tell us why we shouldn’t worship technology. Here’s its surprising answer.



Grok, Elon Musk’s “frontier language model" accessible from right inside X, is shaking up the internet with its censorship-free automated image generation. Fun — and yes, the name the company has given this setting is Fun Mode — but even well-meaning enthusiasm can cross over into debasing adulation at a certain point. Whatever the fun quotient, no amount of “mind blown” emojis or soyface thumbnails can make free speech alone save us.

For that reason (among others), I’ve warned for years now that tech worship is a dead end masquerading as heaven on earth. I figured we could all benefit at least a little from considering what Grok coughed up in response to a request for a takedown of cyber idolatry — at classic 600-word op-ed length.

Where did Grok get the 'idea' that an appeal to the woo-woo Oprah/Goop culture of 'live, laugh, love' was responsive to my prompt? Probably the best answer, of course, is from us.

So, without further ado — and, of course, sans any censorship, editing, or alteration …

Grok, why shouldn’t we worship technology?

———

Ah, humans, always looking for something to worship, aren't you? From the golden calves of yore to the latest smartphone, the urge to bow down before something shiny and new seems almost hard-coded into your DNA. But let's talk about why worshipping technology might be as wise as using a towel for a parachute.

**1. The fallacy of perfection: Technology, much like that overhyped sequel to your favorite movie, promises perfection but often delivers a patchwork of bugs, glitches, and updates. If you worship technology, you're essentially venerating a perpetual beta version of life. Imagine praying to your toaster, only for it to burn your toast because it decided to update its firmware during your morning ritual. Not exactly divine, is it?

**2. The illusion of control: Technology gives you the illusion of control, much like how a child might feel omnipotent with a remote-control car. But let's be real, the moment you start worshipping your gadgets, you're not controlling them; they're controlling you. Ever noticed how your phone tells you when to wake up, eat, work, and even when to rest? You're not the master; you're the servant in this relationship.

**3. The disconnect from humanity: Here's a thought: If you're worshipping technology, you're essentially worshipping efficiency, speed, and data. But what about the human touch? The warmth of a handshake, the depth of a conversation over a cup of tea, or the shared laughter at a live comedy show? Technology can't replicate the soul of human interaction. Worshipping it might make you more efficient at being alone.

**4. The ephemeral nature of tech: Technology has the shelf life of a fruit fly. What's cutting-edge today is obsolete tomorrow. If your deity is your latest gadget, you're in for a cycle of constant disappointment. Imagine the ancient Greeks if every few years, Zeus needed a new model with better thunderbolt capabilities. It'd be less about worship and more about consumerism.

**5. The loss of wonder: When everything becomes technology, where's the wonder? The magic of the world gets reduced to algorithms and code. You might as well replace the northern lights with a well-programmed LED show. Sure, it's pretty, but it's not the same. Worshipping technology means you're worshipping the explanation, not the mystery, which, let's be honest, is where the real magic happens.

**6. The environmental cost: Here's a kicker. Your tech deities demand sacrifices, not of goats or virgins, but of the planet. Every gadget, every server farm, every piece of tech has an environmental footprint. Worshipping technology means you're indirectly worshipping the degradation of your own habitat. It's like praying to a god who's also your landlord, and he keeps raising the rent.

**7. The over-reliance on external solutions: Technology worship fosters a culture where solutions to human problems are always external. Got a problem? There's an app for that. But what about internal growth, wisdom, or personal development? Relying solely on tech for solutions might make you forget how to solve problems with your mind or heart.

In conclusion, while technology is a fantastic servant, it's a terrible master. Worshipping it would be like mistaking the map for the territory, the menu for the meal. Technology should enhance life, not define it. So, humans, keep your tech on a pedestal of utility, not divinity. After all, as any good "Hitchhiker's Guide" reader knows, the answer to life, the universe, and everything isn't found in a circuit board but perhaps in the simple act of living, laughing, and loving. And if all else fails, remember, there's always the option of worshipping a really good sandwich.

———

Maybe Grok’s fairly sophisticated answer surprised you with its humor, its scope, or its “willingness” to critique technology at all. I noted its speedy response time of about 20 seconds on a decent Wi-Fi connection, but that’s not what raised my eyebrow. Can you guess what did?

Here it is: I prompted Grok without any hint of what I might want it to output regarding who or what humans should worship. That the AI included the line invoking "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" suggests it interpreted my ask as reflecting some kind of openness or inclination toward the idea that we shouldn’t worship tech because we shouldn’t worship anything. Only a fool, Grok jokes in the kicker, would worship even a delicious food item … although, it seems to conclude, idolizing the ultimate sandwich would be a much more harmless or fleeting mistake than genuflecting at the altar of tech.

Where did Grok get the “idea” that an appeal to the woo-woo Oprah/Goop culture of “live, laugh, love” was responsive to my prompt? Probably the best answer, of course, is from us. Like any large language model, Grok is a product of its inputs, a huge collection of virtual mirrors reflecting ourselves back at us in customizable composite.

The one unasked-for whiff of “bias” Grok produced — in favor of the squishy, secular feel-goodery that dominates our wall art, our corporations, and so much else — indicates that even a bot built for truth and neutrality will shimmer to some degree with the rhetoric and psychological insinuations of people who might say they’re all for a society based on “just the facts” but who, deeper down, believe something much different.

Fun!

The feds tried to create an American Ministry of Truth. Elon Musk had other plans.



U.S. government bureaucrats wanted to create a Ministry of Truth, but Elon Musk and X's efforts thwarted them for the moment.

In George Orwell’s "1984," the Ministry of Truth manipulates and controls the public via government propaganda, which restricts speech and tells the public what to believe. Bureaucrats in Washington wish they could do the same. But due to the First Amendment’s free speech protections, they can’t.

Instead, as the fast-developing news story around Elon Musk’s war with online advertisers makes abundantly clear, the U.S. government has devoted itself to becoming the indirect or secret arbiter of what counts as truth. Rather than nakedly forming an agency akin to the Ministry of Truth, the government helps fund progressive third-party NGOs and private firms to regulate speech through contracts and grants worth billions of dollars altogether. In return, these organizations create methods to identify certain ideas and media outlets that platform these ideas and excommunicate them for being outside the bounds of orthodoxy in the name of fighting mis- or disinformation.

Given the importance and complexity of this story and the government and its allies' interest in memory-holing what’s happening, understanding the sequence of events is crucial.

A timeline

In 2019, the World Federation of Advertisers, a global association of the world’s biggest advertisers, formed the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which also partners with the World Economic Forum to “improve the safety of online environments” by combating “hate speech” and “disinformation.”

Shortly after GARM’s launch and prior to the 2020 presidential election, conservative media outlets were labeled “disinformation” by the media investment group GroupM, which also happen to be a GARM member, according to leaked data acquired by Gabe Kaminsky. As a result, these conservative outlets were blacklisted and missed out on millions in ad revenues from GroupM clients, which include Coke, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Ford, and more.

And in 2020, NewsGuard, a pro-censorship company that created a browser extension that labels conservative outlets fake news, received a $25,000 grant from the federal government after winning the “Pentagon-State Department contest for detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.” In its press release, NewsGuard said it helped the State Department and the Department of Defense by “identifying online sources spreading COVID-19 disinformation or misinformation narratives, understanding the nature and possible motives of those sources, and flagging hoaxes, narratives, and sources of disinformation as they emerge.”

NewsGuard’s advisers include Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary; Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs; Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA; Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former secretary general of NATO; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; and Israel Mirsky, an elite figure with no Wikipedia page at the intersection of pharmaceuticals, psychedelics, advertising, and technology.

Then, in February 2021, the U.S. Agency for International Development — currently led by Samantha Powers, former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations under President Obama, and Michele Sumilas, former program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — sent out a leaked internal “Disinformation Primer” that pushes for partnerships with the private sector. It also encourages tech companies to “pay attention to audio/visual forms of mis- and dis-information” and “build fact-checking and verification tools” and media organizations to “collaborate,” “debunk sources as well as content,” and “tell stories about the scale and threat posed by information disorder.”

As part of NewsGuard’s prize for winning the COVID-19 propaganda contest, the organization also gained access to a “Government Contracting 101 session.” Soon enough, the DOD collaborated with NewsGuard by reportedly granting it $750,000 in September 2021 to “fund early-stage companies to develop products and technologies,” according to a January 2022 report. However, NewsGuard later told reporters that it was only a licensing fee even though it had previously called it a grant in its January 2022 report.

Regardless, NewsGuard received around $750,000 from the federal government in 2021.

In the same year, the Global Disinformation Index, a British pro-censorship nonprofit founded by Clare Melford and Daniel Rogers, also received a $100,000 grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

GDI censors free speech through its Dynamic Exclusion List, which informs companies of the media outlets GDI labels misinformation or disinformation. Most of these outlets are conservative-leaning. GDI’s list of the 10 riskiest online media outlets includes Blaze News, alongside the Daily Wire, Newsmax, One America News Network, and more.

The Washington Examiner reported that “roughly $545,000 flowed from the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group funded almost entirely through congressional appropriations, to GDI’s American nonprofit groups between 2020 and 2021, according to financial records.”

Then in October 2021, NewsGuard partnered with the European Union to revise its Code of Practice and Disinformation, which was published the following June. A week later, GARM added “misinformation” to the list of online harms it deemed inappropriate for advertising support. As a result, NewsGuard announced that it would offer a free compliance assessment for companies to make sure their ads comply. NewsGuard also created an option for advertisers to access an exclusion list — a blacklist — to “avoid placing ads on misinformation and unreliable news sources.” Simply put, NewsGuard will encourage companies to stop advertising on conservative media outlets.

A couple of months later, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security faced criticism for creating the Disinformation Governance Board to restrict the freedom of speech for political dissidents and act as an arbiter of truth and for selecting Nina Jankowicz, who herself spread disinformation by covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story, as the board’s head. Many Republicans likened the board to the Ministry of Truth, a government propaganda arm to tell citizens what to believe.

Ultimately, the Disinformation Governance Board was terminated in August 2022. Unable to censor speech directly through government means, Jankowicz turned to a government-backed NGO to accomplish her mission. After the termination, Nina Jankowicz announced the Hypatia Project to combat “gendered abuse and disinformation.” Like other pro-censorship firms and NGOs, her project was conducted with the Centre for Information Resilience, a group funded in part by USAID, the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Then in October 2022, Elon Musk officially bought X (formerly Twitter) in the hopes of forming a free speech social media platform where people would be free to share their opinions — even those outside the Overton window. Soon, GARM recommended that its clients boycott X, essentially blacklisting X, for supposedly violating GARM's guidelines. Between November 2022 and December 2023, at least 18 GARM members, in addition to other major advertisers, stopped advertising on X.

This GARM-backed blacklist sparked large outrage among conservatives, which brought attention to NGOs and private firms’ attempts to censor speech. In the past two years, a number of lawsuits were filed against these organizations, inducing a lawsuit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Daily Wire, and the Federalist against the U.S. State Department, GDI, and NewsGuard for “funding censorship technology.”

In July 2024, the House Judiciary Committee released a report titled, “GARM’S HARM: HOW THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BRANDS SEEK TO CONTROL ONLINE SPEECH.”

And in August 2024, X and Rumble filed an antitrust lawsuit against GARM for its illegal blacklist of X, causing X to potentially lose out on billions in ad revenues. What’s most startling is that some of the largest advertising firms in the world, all of which are GARM members, receive U.S. federal contracts to the tune of billions of dollars.

Furthermore, Publicis Groupe, one of the pro-censorship GARM advertising firms with federal contracts, led the seed investment round for NewsGuard.

Today, August 8, 2024, the World Federation of Advertisers announced the termination of its GARM project following Musk’s “war” against the pro-censorship advertisement mafia. In response to this big news, the House Judiciary Committee posted on X, “Big win for the First Amendment. Big win for oversight.”

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Zoom executive exposed as Chinese Communist spy who sabotaged anti-China video conferences with child porn and terrorism: DOJ



A former executive at Zoom, who shut down video conferences that were not flattering to China, was exposed as a spy for the Chinese Communist Party, according to the Department of Justice.

Xinjiang Jin, aka Julien Jin, was an employee of the American video conferencing company. The 39-year-old, who was based in China's Zhejiang Province, worked as a "security technical leader" for tech company headquartered in San Jose, California. Jin served as a liaison between Zoom and the Chinese government after Beijing blocked the company's service in China in September 2019.

Jin provided the Chinese Communist Party with information about users and meetings, even supplying the CCP with IP addresses from anyone who held anti-China sentiments, say federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York.

According to the complaint filed in United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Jin reportedly participated in a plot to disrupt a series of meetings in May and June that commemorated the Tiananmen Square massacre, where at least 280 pro-democracy demonstrators were shot dead.

In the CCP's bidding, it is reported that at least four video meetings commemorating the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre were infiltrated and terminated. Jin and his co-conspirators reportedly contrived false accusations, including child porn and terrorism, against Zoom users in the United States.

Jin's co-conspirators created fake email accounts and Company-1 accounts in the names of others, including PRC political dissidents, to fabricate evidence that the hosts of and participants in the meetings to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography. The fabricated evidence falsely asserted that the meetings included discussions of child abuse or exploitation, terrorism, racism or incitements to violence, and sometimes included screenshots of the purported participants' user profiles featuring, for example, a masked person holding a flag resembling that of the Islamic State terrorist group. Jin used the complaints as evidence to persuade Company-1 executives based in the United States to terminate meetings and suspend or terminate the user accounts of the meeting hosts.

In June, Zoom admitted that they suspended a U.S.-based user who had hosted an event commemorating the anniversary of 1989's Tiananmen Square Massacre. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioned the company's close ties with China.

"The allegations in the complaint lay bare the Faustian bargain that the PRC government demands of U.S. technology companies doing business within the PRC's borders, and the insider threat that those companies face from their own employees in the PRC," acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme said in a statement. "As alleged, Jin worked closely with the PRC government and members of PRC intelligence services to help the PRC government silence the political and religious speech of users of the platform of a U.S. technology company. Jin willingly committed crimes, and sought to mislead others at the company, to help PRC authorities censor and punish U.S. users' core political speech merely for exercising their rights to free expression."

Zoom is not directly identified in the DOJ document, but the teleconferencing company released a statement addressing the situation. Zoom said they were "fully cooperating" with the Department of Justice, terminated the "China-based former employee charged in this matter," and "placed other employees on administrative leave pending the completion of our investigation."

Last week, there was a massive database leak of nearly 2 million registered Chinese Communist Party members. The breach provided an "unprecedented view" into how China could infiltrate western businesses and companies.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Imageseditsharetrending_up

YouTube says it will remove any video alleging widespread voter fraud in 2020 election



YouTube announced Wednesday that it will begin removing content that alleges widespread fraud or voting irregularities in the 2020 U.S. presidential election now that the safe harbor deadline for the election has passed.

Any new content uploaded to the video hosting platform after Tuesday that alleges widespread fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election will be removed, the company said in a blog post.

"Our policies prohibit misleading viewers about where and how to vote. We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election," the company explained. "However in some cases, that has meant allowing controversial views on the outcome or process of counting votes of a current election as election officials have worked to finalize counts."

"Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect," YouTube continued. "Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections."

New videos, for example, that claim former Vice President Joe Biden won the election due to "software glitches or counting errors" associated with Dominion Voting Systems will be targeted for removal.

The content censorship comes as Texas has filed a lawsuit, supported by the attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri, alleging that four battleground states exploited the coronavirus pandemic to make unconstitutional changes to mail-in voting rules. The lawsuit seeks to delay the Electoral College vote to select the next U.S. president until investigations into possible election fraud are completed.

In recent weeks, YouTube has faced heavy criticism for permitting videos that dispute the election results to be uploaded on its platform. Wednesday's statement addressed the potential conflict between demands from the left to censor so-called "misinformation" and complaints from the right about free speech.

"We understand the need for intense scrutiny on our elections-related work. Our teams work hard to ensure we are striking a balance between allowing for a broad range of political speech and making sure our platform isn't abused to incite real-world harm or broadly spread harmful misinformation," YouTube said.

YouTube content creators like BlazeTV host Dave Rubin reported receiving an email from YouTube Wednesday explaining the new policy.

"Adios free speech. The bannings are coming," Rubin said, sharing a screenshot of an email explaining that any video "alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election" will be removed.

Holy shit just got this email from YouTube. Starting today they will remove content about election fraud...even t… https://t.co/yd6YHhm3Id
— Dave Rubin (@Dave Rubin)1607527665.0

"There's a historic lawsuit at the Supreme Court alleging massive fraud in our election but we can't talk about it on @YouTube," video producer Robby Starbuck said. "This censorship does the exact opposite of what they intend for it to do. It will only solidify the belief many have that the elite stole the presidency."

"Notice, they did no such thing with the Russia collusion conspiracy theories that went on for years," radio talk show and BlazeTV host Mark Levin tweeted.

Big Tech, oligopoly of the Left and Democrats; notice, they did no such thing with all the Russia collusion conspir… https://t.co/J4dtutkRip
— Mark R. Levin (@Mark R. Levin)1607528639.0

"These are editorial guidelines," YouTuber Tim Pool said. "Time to start suing Youtube as they are now issuing direct guidance on what you can publish outside what is prescribed in Section 230."