How AI, ICE and Elon Musk Manipulate People Into Supporting Evil?
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Elon Musk is now infamous for showing a Nazi-Salute when Donald Trump became the president for the second time. Yet, this is the same Elon Musk, who's cars were disliked by the same people who have a hard on Trump. People who like to burn gasoline. For them an electric-car company is an epitome of wokeness. It was very funny to see, then, Donald Trump making an ad-read to promote those cars, before realizing what he had done and deciding suddenly to hate on poor Musk. Was Musk playing a part of a Nazi? Was the Nazi-Salute a genius marketing move, to try to make the conservative public of the United States consider buying a car they so disliked? Or was it just a funny set of coincidences?
Take AI for example. We know that most of the issues with the world today stems from technology. Technology that people cannot control. We can't own anything, we can't fix anything, we can't control anything... And sadly, a lot of us are still fine with it. Not for long. But still are. Yet this state of affairs was a known outcome that was predicted long before it became such a huge problem.
A lot of the older generation have nostalgic memories to the technology before it became "enshitified". To the computers of the 80s and 90s. But in the 80s the problem, that lead slowly but surely to what we have right now already was there.
In the 2002 book by Sam Williams Free as in Freedom, there is a very interesting story about one individual that paved the way to fight the current state of enshitification, when he realized that it is headed into a state of enshitification. And the story is about a printer. Our protagonist had access to a printer in a rather large facility. It happened, if I remember correctly, still the 70s. They had one giant printer for everybody in the place. So people would make a document on, if I understand it correctly, terminals, hooked to a main-frame, running a very weird operating system. And when they wanted to print said, document, the command would be sent from the terminal to the mainframe, and from said mainframe to the printer. Mainframes, for those who don't know, are like the central computer thingie, that takes a whole room. To which terminals (screens with keyboards attached to them) were hooked. You can think about it as, everybody used the same one computer. Just everybody had their own screen to look at.
In any case, this printer was one printer for the entire facility. It was a pain in the ass and was jamming all the damn time. And because it is not in your office, unless your office is the printing room, you had to go over to the printer every-time you sent a command to print something, in order to know if the damn stupid thing jammed or not. It was, as I said, a pain in the ass.
The hackers (that word meant something a little more like today's "life hackers" back then) decided that they would make it a bit more bearable. They knew that people could get their printed documents in the end of the day when it's convenient for them to get them. They only needed some system in place that would not require walking over to the damn thing to know whether it jams. Fortunately a jam-detection hardware was present on the printer. So, they looked though the user manual, which contained the schematics of the damn thing and the source code of the firmware running on it. They modified said source code, to make it send back to the user's terminal a simple message telling the user that the printer got jammed. They installed said new firmware onto the printer. And guess what. The problem was still there... but it was way better now. You don't need to walk to the damn thing, to know if the damn thing needs un-jamming. You know it from your bloody office. Damn! Those hackers live-hacked something here!
One day, a new printer came in as a replacement to that old piece of junk. It was amazing. It was so accurate, it was not jamming. At all... at all? It was still jamming! Not as often. Not as severely. But it was still jamming once in a while. Well the hackers knew what to do. They opened the user manual. They looked for the source code... And they didn't find any. There was nothing there.
Thinking it was just a fluke, or some error, one of the hackers, our protagonist, traveled all the way to the company who produced the printer, to find the developer of the firmware to ask for a copy of the source code. He found said developer. Yet he went back empty handed. The developer told him that he was forced to sign an Non-Disclosure Agreement with the firm in order to work on that printer's firmware. He legally is not allowed to tell him anything about how the damn thing works.
The enshitification has begun.
It was not the social media. It was not Mark Zuckerberg. It was a printer company in the 70s. Fast forward to the 80s and copyright for software ( which previously was thought of as math and therefor uncopyrightable ) is now in place. A bit later you have Software Patents. An even more absurd thing. Fast forward to the 90s, you get DMCA and breaking DRM becomes illegal.
The protagonist knows everything now. If that does not stop we arrive into total Orwellian state. People become more and more dependent on tech. First you have to have the telephone in your house, then the internet and then what? A telephone with internet in it? All those devices run on software. Software that people cannot control. And people rely on those devices more and more. Soon the trajectories will cross each other. Soon that proprietarisation of software will be a treat to Democracy itself. Until about now, nobody gave a damn. Until about now, no one saw it coming. No one but the protagonist and a handful of his friends, that is.
That protagonist is a person a lot of people today like to hate. His name is Richard Stallman. His reaction to his observations in the 70s and 80s lead to the Free Software Movement, the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, which he started in 1984 ( how poetic ). He decided to fix the problem, because by that point everything became rotten. All computers around him were totally under a mercy of some tech-corporation. The tech-corporations totally liked that. But what about the users?
Thankfully Richard is a programmer, so he started simply writing code. Releasing a text-editor, a C compiler and then people joined in. And by the 90s they had almost the whole operating system replaced with software that respects your freedom. The project is called GNU. For GNU's Not Unix, for they were replacing Unix software with their own re-implementations. And in the 90s, the final piece was contributed. Linux the kernel. Therefor giving birth to the GNU / Linux operating system.
But what is that whole thing has to do with AI? ( You might ask )
AI as we all know is a huge social panic issue. On one side it devalues honest work. On the other side it benefits borderline scummy corporations. It allows for an unprecedented levels of deception, due to how easily it is used for manufacturing of fake evidence for one thing or another. And most importantly, and I hear that very often, it is mostly even possible to begin with because those corporations have complete disregard to copyright laws.
I remember back in 2021 or something, when I just started writing articles, and when I just started understanding the full scope of the what the Free Software Movement even is, I remember a lot of people in the movement freaked out. Microsoft apparently found a legal loophole to circumvent the protection of the GPL.
For the context, the GPL or the General Public License is a very common, very useful piece of legal text, that acts as a sort of guarantee that work on Free as in Freedom Software will not lead into accidentally developing something that is helping the other side.
Microsoft, being one of those other side corporations, doesn't want you to know the way the operating system works. It could be a lot of reasons for why they want that. Non of those reasons are good for you though. If they want to hide something you may not like, this is not in your best interest to let them get away from telling you those things. But there is copyright and other things in the way. You have no power in the end to do anything about it.
Lately those corporations stopped actually even caring that much about hiding anything. They now completely admit to all of their wrong-doings. They just know that you can't do shit about it. Like the End-Use-License-Agreement for Microsoft Windows explicitly states that they have all the access they want to anything on your computer. And just because, why not, they also added a section telling you that you apparently agreed to never sue the damn corporation.
In any case. Controlling the distribution of the software is very useful for them. They can charge ludicrous prices, by essentially being a monopoly on a piece of software. They can do things people don't want because copyright says it is illegal for you to modify anything, even if you know what you want to modify and how to do it. And specifically with DRM ( Digital Restrictions Management ), designed to "help against piracy" they can now abuse copyright in ways we only now starting to grasp.
Those big-tech corporations love their copyright. That is what their whole existence is based upon. That is how they can screw all of us over. So taking copyright away from them helps tremendously to defeat the enshitification itself.
GPL is clever because it is specifically designed to take the copyright away from everybody, including those nasty corporations. Especially from those nasty corporations. And the funny thing is, which was a stroke of genius from Stallman, is that it uses copyright in the process to do so.
It is like this finger trap toy. More copyright, GPL wins. Less copyright GPL wins anyway.
In the broadest possible, completely abstract terms, the General Public License works like this: An author of some copyrightable work makes said work, which automatically gives said author the copyright over that work. If you want to copy it or change it or do anything with it, you need this author's permission now. Which is good. The author can give people permissions to do all those things and in exchange he can ask for terms. Basically he would allow you to break copyright of his work only if you do something in exchange for him.
The GPL asks anybody who wants to legally copy the program, to simply not withhold any rights the GPL gives. If you want to be Microsoft and use some piece of code you found that is under the GPL, you can, do it. Here you go. Just the condition is, whatever you are using it for, has to be as free as it is. There is a lot of details to it. There was 3 versions of the main GPL and there is also AGPL, LGPL and other variations. All of them have nuances in the terms themselves that make them better or worse for different purposes. But the general gist of it is, that it is all designed as a virus of sorts. To infect everything and anything with Freedom.
They got Microsoft multiple times. The EULA for Windows even explicitly states that they used code under the LGPL. Which illustrates how well Microsoft can develop software on their own, by the way. They even got Apple at one point. Remember how I told you that the second program Stallman wrote was a C compiler? Well it is a very extendable ( by design ) compiler which now, in 2025, can compile a bunch of things for a bunch of hardware. At one point engineers at Apple extended it to compile their in-house programming language and Steve Jobs personally called Stallman, to negotiate something to "free" Apple from Stallman's license. But Stallman politely told Jobs to fuck off. And having no other choice, Apple released their module for GCC as Free Software to be compatible with the license.
The GPL works! Many times those corporations attacked GPL and the FSF and Stallman directly for coming up with such a ludicrous license. Microsoft called it unconstitutional. They vilified people for using it. They pushed developers to think of the industry, to please use the MIT, or Apache, or other licenses, that will not take their powers over the user away from them.
And then suddenly in 2021, Microsoft, who a few years earlier bought Github, decided to pair their ( somewhat Free Software ) text editor VSCode with a new thing called Copilot. An AI assistant helping come up with source code that they trained on the enormous database of source code they had access to through Github ( probably still the biggest source code platform on the planet ).
This was a huge issue all of a sudden because if using this Copilot was work, that was copyrightable, even though it is trained on a lot of source code, a lot of which is under GPL, that would be a successful way to defeat the GPL.
Instead of looking for code to use, which would make you a subject of the terms of the code's license, you just use the AI tool to "come up" with the code, that it learned from the code somebody else wrote. If that is legal and also works to make software, that means Microsoft has defeated the GPL. And therefor won their copyright war.
Suddenly with Mid-journey, ChatGPT and other bullshit generators staring to sweep everybody on the fucking planet, people started noticing this very problem, but without the context. They saw that their copyright is being ignored, basically, to fuel those algorithms that munch on data to be able to produce an endless amount of knockoffs. But they didn't stop to think about the big picture.
What AI is doing, is not trying to defeat copyright. It's trying to defeat the user again. And if the user has any power against it what so ever. If a user has copyright with which the user can GPL those corporations out of existence, that AI thing is suddenly very useful for those corporations.
And it is useful for them, the same way GPL is useful for us. It both gives them all of the power over the user. And both makes us want them to have all of the power.
Since AI companies started to produce more and more of stupid AI-slop, and since more and more of that slop people get to see, more and more people are pushing against it. And more and more this push is in some form, pro-copyright. People are helping those copyright-fueled corporations winning their copyright by hating on a creation from those corporations. By hating on AI.
If people like AI, they win. If people hate AI they win anyway.
It is even arguable that the whole AI thing was never even supposed to work in the first place. The bots are so unreliably bad and they keep shoving it in more and more places, probably intentionally, to make you, the user, hate on AI with every fiber of your being. Making you more likely to advocate for some copyright reform, which would make something like GPL actually illegal or something. Maybe this was the whole plan to begin with.
It is basically the same kind of stupid train of coincidences as with Elon Musk being a Nazi to sell electric cars. Are they some evil fucking geniuses trying to win the public over? Or are they a bunch of dumbasses just stumbling upon something that benefits them by mistake?
Am I writing here a conspiracy theory? Or theories, because they are multiple theories.
ICE!
The police force thing in the United States of America which I'm hearing a lot lately about. They have their own share of stupid coincidences.
Remember the first time Trump was in office, when he said something along the lines of Edward Snowden was a traitor for revealing the mass surveillance apparatus of the United States? This guy doesn't fucking care about your rights, man. Especially not about your right to privacy.
And you know how a lot of the issues we have today are because of privacy issues. Issues that we have because corporations have their copyright, by the way. Well here is something interesting: People are actively pushing away privacy now ( I see it everywhere on social media ) because ICE, the bad guys ( spawned into action by the Donald Duck himself ) are covering up their faces, and drive unmarked cars, so that they would be more effective at wrong-doing, or something.
We know how governments like to manipulate the public with stories of the boogieman to make people stop caring about their privacy. In the Bush era, post 9/11 it was the terrorists. Oh my God, those terrorists are planning to kill you and your family, better tell us everything about everything so we could stop them before they do it. Then when this calmed down ( outside of Israel, inside of Israel it never fucking calms down ) the boogieman were now the pedophiles. We are still hearing about stupid law proposals that are completely missing the point, to take all the privacy ( basically ) away, to simply have a chance to view who is sending pictures they don't want anyone to view.
I can go on a whole another rabbit-hole on how CSAM became a big deal for the same reasons that Epstein didn't kill himself. If you think about it, the only legit reason it is illegal, is that it violates the privacy of the person in the thing. The kid probably doesn't want you pervs, including you government agents, to see those pictures. And those new laws would just make it easier for pervs, like the government agents to see those pictures.
But then if you think about it, those pictures likely contain faces of the boogieman themselves. And guess what, the boogieman do not want you to see those pictures, so you would not know it was them in those pictures. I would totally believe if somebody shows up claiming to be a child from one of those images, and giving full consent to publish the damn thing, just to expose the bastard. But you can't. Why? Because the bastard wrote the law. ( In the other hypothetical scenario some of those kids simply might not care. Or be pervs themselves, enough to want you to see those pictures. But I digress... )
In any case, governments have always been manipulative little bitches. But this time it seems to have stopped working for them. The terrorists / pedophiles trick no longer works for the educated of us. And even the uneducated feel there is something wrong with it now a days. So it is not out of the question that Donald MacDonald came up with something like ICE... Wait... He doesn't seem to be that smart.
If it wasn't for the fact it was formed in 2003 I would think ICE ( with it's stupid pun name ) is again the work of Elon Musk. Maybe the plan was designed by Elon and Donald sort of tried to Trump it by trying to fuck Elon with it too?... I don't know ... anyway...
What I'm saying is, the effect of ICE is similar to the boogieman they always used. Just this time they are playing a different card. See, Donald knew everything to begin with. Zelensky did not have the cards.
I think even if it is not intentional, ICE and the United States Government knows that it's working in their favor. People are either pro-ICE, in which case they win, or they are against ICE, which makes them almost certainly pro-surveillance. In which case they win anyway.
When October 7th happened, I was thinking how unfortunate the stupid Israel conflict is. I was thinking maybe I could reason with Palestinians and Israelis, to come up with some plan for piece. But it ended up being a lot more complicated in practice. You cannot expect any of the sides to just give up their positions. Especially not right now. It's just too heated of the situation. And only some surgically perfect diplomacy would even have a chance to do something. You have to walk a very thin line to not trip either of the sides in the conflict even a little bit.
This is why I'm getting frustrated lately when people ask me to yell at Nazis. I'm sorry bro, but if you keep distancing yourself away from them, you just make another Israel-Palestine. And that just gonna escalate into madness.
With AI and ICE and all that shit, I'm starting to feel similarly. We know the goals that we have, but maybe we need to strategize better to achieve them. Maybe we need to walk the fine line of not tripping anyone's defense mechanisms to move people from supporting them, to supporting us.
In the 90s, after the Linux kernel became a part of the GNU operating system, two think-groups formed around Free Software. The other one later became known as Open Source. The idea behind Open Source was simple. They were trying to choose their words correctly so as not to trip the defense mechanisms of the big-tech corps. They were trying to be more business-friendly to infiltrate the industry from within. It didn't work well. Open Source became more of an industry cheerleader, rather than an activist group for user freedom. And the unfortunate truth is, Open Source is much larger, when it comes to public awareness than Free Software.
In a way, trying to be careful and to seem friendly quickly defeated its own point. It got infiltrated by the other side way too much. And therefor forgot about the original goal. Linus Torvalds, for example, is in the Open Source camp.
Thinking about what I just said about being careful. Thinking about not tripping off the defense mechanism of the enemy, to establish some sort of way to infiltrate the conversation. To make some room for some progress in the right direction. It makes me think that I'm just proposing another "Open Source". I'm proposing some kind of a lesser solution that would ultimately just make the other side win.
And thinking about it, I guess I know now what the conspiracy was all along. That ICE and AI and Elon Musk's Donald Trump laughable Tesla commercial. All of this was to make us think that we need to be more careful, so that we make a new "Open Source" and defeat ourselves in the process.
That is some 5-dimensional chess move, if I ever seen one.
Happy Hacking!!!
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