#BruceSterling
@bruces.bsky.social
Author, journalist, editor and critic combining his time in Turin, Austin, Ibiza, Belgrade etc #BruceSterling
How Bad Are A.I. Delusions? We Asked People Treating Them.
www.nytimes.com
January 26, 2026 at 12:29 PM
*Subterranean postal system there. "We Await Silent Trystero's Empire"
⚡️A major investigation has uncovered a shadow network in Germany used to smuggle banned goods and electronics directly into Russia.
German Investigation Uncovers Shadow Network Smuggling Sanctioned Goods to Russia
Germany's Bild reports on an underground logistics operation allegedly shipping banned items to Russia, highlighting regulatory breaches and an investigation.
united24media.com
January 26, 2026 at 12:22 PM
*Subterranean postal system there. "We Await Silent Trystero's Empire"
*Sci-fi books did not write this because of the HG Wells principle that "if anything is possible than nothing is interesting"
January 26, 2026 at 10:11 AM
*Sci-fi books did not write this because of the HG Wells principle that "if anything is possible than nothing is interesting"
*The Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence made up that term in 1956 because they didn't like the mushy term "cybernetics"
Whoever invented the term artificial intelligence came up with the worst possible term.
January 26, 2026 at 9:58 AM
*The Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence made up that term in 1956 because they didn't like the mushy term "cybernetics"
*It's interesting to see these spontaneous science-fiction dystopias in tweet form
January 26, 2026 at 6:28 AM
*It's interesting to see these spontaneous science-fiction dystopias in tweet form
January 26, 2026 at 6:01 AM
*Speaking of respect for Robert Crumb, did you ever seen this remarkably insightful sci-fi dystopia Crumb created (and which I blame him for):
January 26, 2026 at 5:52 AM
*Speaking of respect for Robert Crumb, did you ever seen this remarkably insightful sci-fi dystopia Crumb created (and which I blame him for):
*Probably not as disrespectful as auditing Crumb's taxes so he had to permanently flee the USA
*I could hand-draw that cartoon as a normal "parody" instead of just slopping-it-out as a parody, but that might be even MORE disrespectful to Crumb
*I could hand-draw that cartoon as a normal "parody" instead of just slopping-it-out as a parody, but that might be even MORE disrespectful to Crumb
This is very disrespectful of R. Crumb.
January 26, 2026 at 5:50 AM
*Probably not as disrespectful as auditing Crumb's taxes so he had to permanently flee the USA
*I could hand-draw that cartoon as a normal "parody" instead of just slopping-it-out as a parody, but that might be even MORE disrespectful to Crumb
*I could hand-draw that cartoon as a normal "parody" instead of just slopping-it-out as a parody, but that might be even MORE disrespectful to Crumb
*They'll all mellow out when Claude-for-Living persuades them to be less abrasive
January 26, 2026 at 5:45 AM
*They'll all mellow out when Claude-for-Living persuades them to be less abrasive
*This is also a very second-quarter-of-21st-century remark
My UCSB colleague Gurusha Juneja wrote a python tool to auto-check your bibtex for hallucinated citations: pypi.org/project/harcx/
It supports papers, books, and
URLs.
Usage:
pip install harcx
harcx references.bib
It supports papers, books, and
URLs.
Usage:
pip install harcx
harcx references.bib
harcx
Verify .bib file citations against academic databases (Semantic Scholar, DBLP, Open Library)
pypi.org
January 26, 2026 at 5:27 AM
*This is also a very second-quarter-of-21st-century remark
*"Surveillance capitalism" that retails AI-surveillance with a police-sneak sideline of ratting you out to ICE
*From Amazon, of course
*From Amazon, of course
If you haven't been following the developments at Amazon Ring as closely as I have the last 7 years and you're wondering how we got to the current headlines that the doorbell cameras are "eyes for ICE" because of their Flock partnerships--read my report about shakeups at the company from last year.
Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices....
www.eff.org
January 26, 2026 at 5:25 AM
*"Surveillance capitalism" that retails AI-surveillance with a police-sneak sideline of ratting you out to ICE
*From Amazon, of course
*From Amazon, of course
*Should I futurize the urban background there, maybe throw in a Fuller dome and some West-Coast Frank Genry blobitecture
January 26, 2026 at 5:16 AM
*Should I futurize the urban background there, maybe throw in a Fuller dome and some West-Coast Frank Genry blobitecture
*If you cruise around town while guided by your pop-up AI glasses and your chatbot AI earphones, is that "slop behavior"
*Maybe it's just "sloppin'"
*Maybe it's just "sloppin'"
January 26, 2026 at 5:10 AM
*If you cruise around town while guided by your pop-up AI glasses and your chatbot AI earphones, is that "slop behavior"
*Maybe it's just "sloppin'"
*Maybe it's just "sloppin'"
*Is that 77-year-old, continuous Chinese Communist "tyranny" still gonna be called a "smart tyranny" when everybody likes it better than the janky, newfangled USA stupid tyranny
In Autocracy 2.0: How China's Rise Reinvented Tyranny, Dartmouth associate professor of government Jennifer Lind advances a sharp, unsettling concept she dubs “smart authoritarianism," showing how China’s regime has learned to maintain power while limiting the economic damage of repression. Listen!
Unpacking the Rise of 'Smart Authoritarianism' in China
A conversation with Jennifer Lind, author of Autocracy 2.0: How China's Rise Reinvented Tyranny.
www.techpolicy.press
January 26, 2026 at 5:03 AM
*Is that 77-year-old, continuous Chinese Communist "tyranny" still gonna be called a "smart tyranny" when everybody likes it better than the janky, newfangled USA stupid tyranny
*Really nice 2020s-style headline here
*This remarkable second-quarter of the 21st century is really getting its legs under it
*This remarkable second-quarter of the 21st century is really getting its legs under it
January 26, 2026 at 4:57 AM
*Really nice 2020s-style headline here
*This remarkable second-quarter of the 21st century is really getting its legs under it
*This remarkable second-quarter of the 21st century is really getting its legs under it
*Do I get to deputize my daily lfe to those things? Do they, like, deputize some AI-girlfriend to console me
Our latest paper in @science.org warns about malicious AI swarms, agents capable of adaptive influence campaigns at scale. We already observed some in the wild (picture). AI is a real threat to democracy.
#SciencePolicyForum #ScienceResearch 🧪
Paper: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
#SciencePolicyForum #ScienceResearch 🧪
Paper: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
January 26, 2026 at 4:56 AM
*Do I get to deputize my daily lfe to those things? Do they, like, deputize some AI-girlfriend to console me
*If you think that a chatbot claudeswarm is a fun Bay Area lifestyle idea, wait till you've got hordes of Elon devotees obeying Grok when it commands them to storm the US Congress
January 26, 2026 at 4:50 AM
*If you think that a chatbot claudeswarm is a fun Bay Area lifestyle idea, wait till you've got hordes of Elon devotees obeying Grok when it commands them to storm the US Congress
*I wrote a story back in 1998 about a guy who allows an AI to make a lot of his daily life-decisions for him
*But the AI is an altenate-economy platform, it's not a "chatbot claudeswarm"
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mane...
*But the AI is an altenate-economy platform, it's not a "chatbot claudeswarm"
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mane...
Maneki Neko - Lightspeed Magazine
"It's only a career," said Tsuyoshi, sitting up on his futon and adjusting his pajamas. "You worry too much."
www.lightspeedmagazine.com
January 26, 2026 at 4:48 AM
*I wrote a story back in 1998 about a guy who allows an AI to make a lot of his daily life-decisions for him
*But the AI is an altenate-economy platform, it's not a "chatbot claudeswarm"
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mane...
*But the AI is an altenate-economy platform, it's not a "chatbot claudeswarm"
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mane...
*I woujld blame sci-fi writers for daring to imagine multi-agent chatbot claudeswarms, if any science fiction writer had ever actually done that, which they didn't
A sentence from hell:
“people in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.”
“people in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.”
January 26, 2026 at 4:40 AM
*I woujld blame sci-fi writers for daring to imagine multi-agent chatbot claudeswarms, if any science fiction writer had ever actually done that, which they didn't
*I blame science fiction dystopias
---> about AI <---
---> about AI <---
Thinking again about how @brendancbyrne.bsky.social and I wrote a novella in 2019 about an AI-driven truth and reconciliation process in a post-civil insurrection USA and how the process merely papers over the country's massive fault lines...really thought we were going over the top there, damn
January 25, 2026 at 9:07 AM
*I blame science fiction dystopias
---> about AI <---
---> about AI <---
*This isn't "AI-ketamine," it's just hustle-bro productivity hype-boosterism. But that's like watching a car-salesman hauling a janky, open-source Moon-rocket onto the tarmac
youtu.be/Qkqe-uRhQJE?...
youtu.be/Qkqe-uRhQJE?...
ClawdBot is the most powerful AI tool I’ve ever used in my life. Here’s how to set it up
YouTube video by Alex Finn
youtu.be
January 25, 2026 at 9:00 AM
*This isn't "AI-ketamine," it's just hustle-bro productivity hype-boosterism. But that's like watching a car-salesman hauling a janky, open-source Moon-rocket onto the tarmac
youtu.be/Qkqe-uRhQJE?...
youtu.be/Qkqe-uRhQJE?...
*The Chinese have LOTS and LOTS of generative-AI
*There's even *European* generative-AI that's relatively free of the aforementioned billionaire freaks
*There's even *European* generative-AI that's relatively free of the aforementioned billionaire freaks
January 25, 2026 at 7:34 AM
*The Chinese have LOTS and LOTS of generative-AI
*There's even *European* generative-AI that's relatively free of the aforementioned billionaire freaks
*There's even *European* generative-AI that's relatively free of the aforementioned billionaire freaks
*Was it the Nixon Southern Strategy? For Abe Lincoln to empower the Confederacy, that may have been overdoing it
*A very overdo-it Republican guy, Dick Nixon. Huge mandate, landing on Moon, China in his pocket -- still somehow had to pay Cubans to spy on Kennedy liberals
*A very overdo-it Republican guy, Dick Nixon. Huge mandate, landing on Moon, China in his pocket -- still somehow had to pay Cubans to spy on Kennedy liberals
Took a long time for the overreach to backfire
January 25, 2026 at 7:29 AM
*Was it the Nixon Southern Strategy? For Abe Lincoln to empower the Confederacy, that may have been overdoing it
*A very overdo-it Republican guy, Dick Nixon. Huge mandate, landing on Moon, China in his pocket -- still somehow had to pay Cubans to spy on Kennedy liberals
*A very overdo-it Republican guy, Dick Nixon. Huge mandate, landing on Moon, China in his pocket -- still somehow had to pay Cubans to spy on Kennedy liberals
*You ever see this movie? That's a pretty good movie, if you like abandoned, formerly-charismatic dictators aimlessly motoring around in a fatalistic haze
youtu.be/jdrsNOuHDtI?...
youtu.be/jdrsNOuHDtI?...
January 25, 2026 at 7:24 AM
*You ever see this movie? That's a pretty good movie, if you like abandoned, formerly-charismatic dictators aimlessly motoring around in a fatalistic haze
youtu.be/jdrsNOuHDtI?...
youtu.be/jdrsNOuHDtI?...
*1980s Cyberpunk writers were never 1950s beatniks, but boy did they even know a lot about beatniks
*They even knew about SOVIET beatniks
youtu.be/Jz7-f761F78?...
*They even knew about SOVIET beatniks
youtu.be/Jz7-f761F78?...
Podcast #91. “Storming the Cosmos” from TRANSREAL CYBERPUNK.
YouTube video by Rudy Rucker
youtu.be
January 25, 2026 at 7:19 AM
*1980s Cyberpunk writers were never 1950s beatniks, but boy did they even know a lot about beatniks
*They even knew about SOVIET beatniks
youtu.be/Jz7-f761F78?...
*They even knew about SOVIET beatniks
youtu.be/Jz7-f761F78?...