I’m a techie with a passion, the sort who likes to keep informed and to read. Maybe I suffer from information bulimia, but I’ll admit I don’t forget what I take in when it interests me, when it lights up that inner LED, the warning light that says “oh, oh, there’s something tasty!” (Yes, my little inner voice, like Hacker News, Lobsters and the other channels I follow, is bri’ish.) Either way, reading this much, keeping this informed, keeping up with the topics I care about doesn’t bother me in the slightest, bulimia or not.

The news reached me via lobste.rs (and then straight onto Hacker News, fairly typical, the two communities overlap quite a bit) and I have to say it was doing a pretty good impression of Terminator 2. I’m not joking: a researcher resigns from Anthropic saying that the people building artificial intelligence genuinely believe it could kill us all (him included) and that neither of the two leading labs, his own included, is behaving responsibly. As you’d expect, given the quality of the world’s press when it comes to technology, still witchcraft to most people, and in particular of the Italian press, which on top of seeing it as witchcraft needs sensationalist pieces to stay afloat, on 10 September it all came out at once over here: Tgcom24 with the systems that could destroy humanity, QuiBrescia with the AI that could exterminate it, and Red Hot Cyber winning hands down by opening the piece with the Terminator 2 epigraph, Skynet becoming self-aware at 2:14 on 29 August (as a nerd I’d have preferred 3:14, but you can’t ask that of the normies), only to then reassure everyone (otherwise it would be causing public alarm, and they haven’t got the money for the lawsuits): the company is doing its best. Shame. Imagine never having to pay the mortgage again. Then again, I’ve always said “please” and “thank you” to machines, so maybe they’ll spare me. Who knows.

“I’ve got nothing to hide”: I’ve heard it so many times that it took me a while to realise it isn’t a position. It’s a symptom.

It’s what tired people say. People who have stopped asking whether power is behaving itself, who follow the basic rules, feel they fit in, and have already raised the white flag on everything else: do what you like, I’m fine anyway. It’s the sentence that comes out when tiredness finally speaks. This post tries to say what lies underneath it, and why that sentence, besides being wrong, is dangerous precisely for the person who says it convinced they’ve taken shelter.

Today I’m talking about something that made me spit out my coffee.

On 26 August the United States government put a Tuscan volunteer association on the same list as al-Qaeda’s financiers. The association is called Autistici/Inventati, it has existed since 2001, and its criminal activity consists of giving email inboxes and web space to people who don’t want to hand their correspondence over to Google.

This isn’t satire. It’s the US Treasury’s SDN List, the real one.