AI is the next big psyop after covid — building our digital jailer? By Edward Dowd.
Be very afraid, they are telling us:
On Tuesday … a young man by the name of Jacob Coxon put out a post on X…his first post ever and it went mega viral. He is a former employee of both Anthropic and OpenAI and he warned about the dangers of AI.
Within 24 hours Jacob‘s X post had received 123 million views 650,000 likes 190,000 followers. Even Elon weighed in and said “I don’t think this has ever happened for a post from a new account with almost no prior activity.“
Immediately mainstream media hopped on board to add to the virality of the post. The Wall Street Journal within a few hours had already interviewed Jacob and mainstream media piled on. Both sides of the house then piled on (mostly Democrats) with X post quotes calling immediately to ask for regulations and government interventions.
Ed calls bullshit:
I believe this is a well-orchestrated psyop to move the needle and change minds. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “psyop”:
“A military operation usually aimed at influencing the enemy’s state of mind through noncombative means… also: someone or something used by the government to influence the population’s opinions and attitudes.”
I am not saying Jacob Coxon is a government asset. I am saying the last 72 hours look less like a whistleblower and more like an inorganic panic narrative. …
Overnight the post printed nine figures in views. Hundreds of thousands of likes. The account went from nobody to a household handle before most of the country had coffee.
That is not how organic X speech works: organic speech stumbles, it posts a draft, it deletes a typo and it has a history. This account had a history of silence, then a professionally punchy script, then the entire mainstream media stack that ran with it with hours of post.
The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive interview with Coxon very shortly after the post went live. Business Insider, Newsweek, the New York Post, Mashable, and Deadline, all ran the same quotes within hours. Then the next day live interviews on Fox News and CNN. That is not one reporter getting lucky on a late night scroll. That is a package. In my humble opinion you do not get a WSJ exclusive and a 100 million view thread by accident unless the interview was already in the can.
Who benefits?
Let us start with who does not benefit:
- Not the open-source shops
- Not the startups that cannot afford a compliance department and a containment audit
- Not the Chinese labs, who will ignore the sermon and keep training regardless
The first beneficiaries are the two names in the original post: Anthropic and OpenAI.
They are burning cash at a rate that would make a 2000-2001 CLEC blush. Token prices keep falling. Enterprise demand is not doubling fast enough to offset it…. Capex is a black hole. Valuations only work if the story stays vertical and the competitive set stays small.
A federal moat with pre-certification, insurance mandates, criminal liability for unlicensed models does two things at once. It crushes the long tail of competitors who were eating their margins. And it gives the incumbents a political story to take to investors: “we are the responsible adults, the regulated utilities of intelligence, please keep funding the losses until the unit economics appear.”
The second beneficiary is the government itself (this push is mostly a Democrat project).
A cabinet-level AI agency means new appropriations, new buildings, new GS-15s, new contractors, new “advisory boards” stuffed with the same people who wrote the talking points. Hearings mean travel budgets and television time. Pre-certification means a permanent inspection class. Mandatory insurance means a regulated market the agencies get to supervise. …
Bottom line:
Could Coxon be sincere? Sure…people leave jobs and people get scared…sincerity and utility are not opposites. The most effective operations use a real person with real anxiety and then put a megaphone, a Journal reporter, and a legislative calendar underneath him. …
Watch the cash, watch the narrative, watch the fear porn, watch who benefits … this is elaborate Kabuki Theater. After the Covid psyop this is the next big push in my opinion. All the signs are present.
In May of 2024 Marc Andreessen had a meeting with the Biden White House where it was revealed that only 2-3 AI companies would exist due to government regulations and no startups would exist. He has been vocal about this meeting.
Then yesterday Politico suddenly writes an article disputing the meeting…love the timing. More evidence this is an op with the blessing of the deep state and three letter agencies. They want total control and a fusion of AI and the state.
The real fear shouldn’t we are all going to die but instead we are building our digital jailer.
The carpentry parable, by Eric Raymond (esr).
Imagine it’s the 1940s. You’re a carpenter. Power tools are beginning to replace hand tools for ordinary work. Furthermore, jobs that would have been impossible or ruinously expensive are suddenly within reach.
You show up at a worksite one fine morning and it’s being picketed. STOP POWER TOOLS! the signs say. WOODWORKING UNDER THREAT!
Puzzled, you accost one of the demonstrators and ask him why he has a signboard in his hand rather than tools.
“Power tools are a menace!” he says. “How are you going to train apprentices if they can’t feel the wood through their hands?”
“What happens when we can chew through aged quality timber faster than we can grow new trees?”
“Carpentry isn’t just a set of skills and habits, it’s a mindset. It won’t be any true carpenters left if we let this go on.”
You inquire further and discover that they have plans. Plans to exclude from any job they work on any craftsman who has ever used a power tool or even spoken approvingly about them.
Meanwhile, inside the picket line, a house is going up. Men are working. Cutting and joining the framing is going faster than you could have imagined 10 years ago.
You look at the workers. You look at the demonstrators. One group is talking. The other is getting stuff done. One group looks like the past, the other like the future. In this moment, you get to decide which group you’re going to join.
This [parable] was not about carpentry.