That may seem to be an irrelevant statement these days considering the overall lack of irrelevance that conspiracy gematria has to the world at this time. But it’s more about AI and LLMs at this point. And although there’s a decent amount of content addressing the problems with generative AI, “good” information is available if your research techniques are up to the challenge, I thought it would be fun to <corporate speak font>circle back</corporate speak font> to the mid 2010’s gematria explosion. You know that time, when Alex Jones style bullshit was all the rage.
If you didn’t already know, AI chatbots are not some avatar of omniscience that scours the internet and compiles the sum of all human knowledge to form the correct answer. It’s merely a text prediction device based on what’s out there.
Wow it’s really raining hard. You could say it’s raining cats and _____. Where even autocomplete suggests you might be looking for the word dogs. The Supergirl movie is _____. Really good? Too woke? Mediocre? Total trash? That’s a lot trickier, and depending on which echo chamber, if any, you spend most of your time at may affect the outcome of the prediction. Not because the LLM is bad, per se. But because like a bad lawyer trying to get away with leading the witness you can subtly alter the wording of your question to trick the LLM into giving the answer you *want* to hear. Innocent enough if you’ve already decided completely subjectively that you love or hate the Supergirl movie. Not so fun for society at large if you think that the global problems with climate change we’re experiencing now aren’t a problem. Or if you didn’t understand how vaccines worked back in 2020.
Tech companies, are a business. And operating as a business requires profit and growth above and beyond everything else, apparently including oxygen and clean drinking water. There’s an arbitrary dividing line between reputable companies with employee integrity and fascist operations that require exploitation to the maximum while the narcissist in chief rakes in millions with little addition to the operation of keeping large numbers of people content. Naturally, far right wing messaging has the appeal to the “wealth defense industry”. That’s a euphemism I heard recently for white collar crime. Once someone learns the math of starting with 10 million dollars earning a safe couple percent interest versus starting with $1 at a safe couple of percent interest there’s no turning back for some. Far right messaging wields the political power to get votes from the clueless while simultaneously making the wealthy boomer get excited about nothing else other than the performance of the stock portfolio. A recipe for making employment for survival of the working class a tedious and eternal conflict of balancing basic necessities and pretending to care about the most boastful and arrogant narcissistic, sociopathic bosses, which makes a career more of a position in a global Ponzi scheme.
Cults, propaganda, scams. The bastion of confirmation bias based misinformation. Nothing says you don’t care about facts like falling for any of these traps. Now that we’re officially in a global society where people would have money than be right, isn’t it nice to know that at least before AI started predicting what we wanted to hear that at least we got to do some really cool gematria decodes, first?
The education system dried up. After a period of let’s pretend a degree means stability and home ownership, too many people got exposed to other peoples perspectives. They started getting naught thoughts about equality, dignity, basic human rights, and morality. You can’t have that in the Ponzi scheme. But if smartphones are cheap enough and the right propaganda is targeted at the vulnerable, you don’t need an education and critical thinking. You can have Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to supplement your Fox News. A device with easy access to stay in line with what the cool people are saying about bad ideas regarding long term sustainability. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance conspiracy gematria would have stayed a simple sports gambling grift. But I doubt it. The stories always gave away that they were edging ever further towards the violent, racist, and misogynist content. Social media didn’t care. Just like Coca Cola trots out a message occasionally about caring about pollution the higher ups would occasionally do some social media damage control. See, we banned this account! We do care about the children! See, they created two new accounts the next day! We care about free speech! See, we care about massive amounts of training data for our upcoming LLMs! Let’s watch the conspiracy theorists outstupid each other in the goal to be an influencer level voice on the pyramid scheme!
And gematria was perfect. Absolutely perfect for that. As soon as a two or three digit number was mentioned you knew EXACTLY what was coming up. 113 meant lying. 56 meant Jesuits ruining the world. 227 and 314 meant Pi and therefore real math was backing up the other story and other numbers being told. More than a full generation of people starved for actual education found a voice. A voice that was cemented into leadership with the narcissistic attitude of “Fuck you, got mine” with the fascist, “Well, at least I’m not a woman, immigrant, nonbinary, or the wrong religion” more ordinary level of income folk. And boy did it show that it was working on the voter suppression front. If you dared to mention that Fauci got a raw deal trying to work through Covid while being stymied at every turn by incompetent executive power. Nothing beats cover for incompetence and corruption like a good scapegoat.
Smart people make good scapegoats, too. Because mocking people with tiny, statistically insignificant numbers is really not very bright the family dynamic has been…interesting for the past decade. People that instantly recognized that “47” doesn’t make much sense without context have to deal with family members, co-workers and fellow shoppers who have been given an excuse to open up about how smart they are when the reality is they have fallen for the cultish Attaboy!TM. A one way street to political donations, gambling while others have the insider information you don’t, eternal justification of people hypocritically contradicting themselves openly.
Later today, in a better alternate universe, I would be at a barbecue, laughing and having a good time. I’d come home, take my dog for a walk and watch a movie for pure escapist entertainment. But noooooooo. I’m the bad guy because I’d rather not have to deal with 100 degree, global recession react to the fires that have been lit raging around me. And the gematria crowd that was on cloud nine a decade ago. They join me in my discontent. The consolidation at the top of the food chain abandoned them long ago. And we can all not go to a protest on America’s 250th birthday because it’s going to be way hotter than a hoax dictates it should be.