This is terrifying.

Is there a way to specify the interpreter / virtual environment using Python? Seems like the program is calling the interpreter on its own

You don’t need to jump to brain-machine interfaces to get dystopia. We can get to ugly places with what we already have in high-end hardware.

Meta is intending to place itself as the leader in VR technology — it has by far the most capital, talent, and intellectual property invested in the domain, of all players in the industry. Meta is an advertisement company — it makes its income by selling targeted advertisements, and by knowing its audience eerily well. Meta will certainly want to (and already is starting to) include eye-tracking hardware in its headsets. We already know they quantify the time spent on individual posts while scrolling through timelines to measure interest and engagement — but eye tracking data is the ultimate measurement of attention. Imagine having advertising clients automatically bet in real-time for milliseconds of your gaze time. Imagine how disgustingly exploitative and overbearing an advertisement system that optimizes gaze heat maps would get. Meta absolutely wants this — and they want the monopoly on VR because this means complete dominance in the advertising word, if VR becomes a significant part of our lives in our future — which us Meta’s bet. They will want to enforce a closed ecosystem that strips us of our ability to watch unwatched. Their ability to sell our attention will be unmatched.

> Anyone can just say the other side is the radical one.

No, there is no “both sides” argument to be made here.

One side still refuses to acknowledge the result of a democratic election, and has called for insurrection. One side wants to violate the bodily autonomy and freedom of religion of its citizens and impose a radical interpretation of Christianity onto their lives, with the openly stated goal of criminalizing abortion, denying access to contraception, and forcing religion through public schools. One side wants to end the right to gay marriage, and deny critical healthcare to transgender people, going against recommendations set by all major respectable healthcare associations, and by peer-reviewed research in the field of psychology. One side is openly racist, misogynistic, and bigoted, and refuses any kind of acknowledgment or criticism of this.

These are not ideologies that come from cherry-picked social media posts. These are ideologies that have been amplified to an extreme by central political figures — namely Trump, Mitch McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Green — that have been echoed by their party through their votes, political tactics, and their platform’s stated goal.

The other side is barely suggesting reforms that would make life infinitesimally more equalitarian, but it mostly lacks the unity and decisiveness to make meaningful changes to the system. Coming from Canada, seeing Americans treat their left as if it was some kind of radical entity seems completely ridiculous. Your left is our right. You still are the last first-world country without a functioning public healthcare system. You still have terrible economical barriers to higher education. You still have a system that is built to keep the rich rich, and keep the poor poor. Your left has been unable to meaningfully address these issues partly because of infighting and because of barriers set by the right.

Both sides are not playing the same game. One is playing a dangerous game that can end democracy if left unchecked.

Sure, if you completely set aside the fact that a very vocal subset of right-wing discourse is anchored in overt racism, bigotry, misogyny, misinformation, conspiratorial thinking, and at its very worst, downright stochastic terrorism, you can start making absurd arguments about the right being silenced. This propensity to dangerous speech is completely impossible to ignore, given any kind of non-delusional analysis of the MAGA campaign, and of the online communities that have formed around it. If your side of the political spectrum creates disproportionate quantities of this kind of speech, a disproportionate quantity of it will be moderated away, given a sane approach to moderation. Musk is implicitly denying any of this exists through his stance on moderation, and that is terrible news for the state of online discourse.