20 Infopocalipse
Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2025b) págs. 8-9:
Increasing chaos, disorder, and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem threaten society’s capacity to address difficult challenges, and it is clear that AI has great potential to accelerate these processes of information corruption. AI-enabled distortion of the information environment may be an important factor in preventing the world from dealing effectively with urgent major threats like nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change. […] Advances in LLM technologies and dramatic improvements in the phony video depictions known as deepfakes could have consequential future effects on the information ecosystem. Appropriate governance of AI and social media platforms is essential to an information ecosystem that supports truth and democracy.
Anúncio do Horário do Fim do Mundo em 2025, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2025a):
- Lamentável o board do Boletim dos Cientistas Atômicos embarcando nessa onda de que se economizar energia, então pode ser bom pro mundo… grande equívoco – ganhos de eficiência são rapidamente preenchidos com aumento de demanda.
Relógio do Juízo Final - 2026, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2026b):
“Closer than ever: It is now 85 seconds to midnight”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2026b).
“2026 Doomsday Clock Announcement: Complete Livestream”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2026a):
Especialmente a fala de Maria Ressa, aos 00:20:13 de Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2026a), manualmente transcrita por mim aqui, possivelmente com erros:
OK, 85 seconds to midnight. That’s the closest we have ever been, and I’m gonna say, to the end of the world. You just heard the threats we face: nuclear arsenals growing, climate records shattering, biological risks multiplying, artificial intelligence racing ahead of our ability to govern it. These are new triggers on top of old problems which have been there, which the sustainable development goals tries to address. All of that of course now is a dream, and it’s got much worse.
But I want to talk about something that makes all these threats even harder to address. The crisis beneath all the crises which you just saw which I pointed out at the opening of the 80th UN General Assembly.
We are living through an Information Armaggedon.
That’s brought about by the technology that’s rules our lives, from social media to Generative AI.
None of that tech is anchored in facts.
Your chatbot is nothing but a probabilistic machine.
Even as the tech moves from the attention economy to now targeting intimacy, human beings, we have being commodified by a predatory and destructive industry.
Here the three senses I’ve said over and over since 2016:
Without facts you can’t have truth. Without truth you can’t have trust.
Without these three we have no shared reality, we can’t have journalism, we can’t have democracy. The radical collaboration this moment demands becomes impossible.
This of shared facts as the Operating System of collective action. Democracy runs on it. Diplomacy runs on it. Science runs on it. You corrupt that Operating System and every application fails. Climate negotiation fails. Arms Control fails. Pandemic response fails. Not because we lack solutions, but because we can no longer agree on the problems.
And the Operating System has been corrupted. Deliberately. Systematically. For profit. The platforms that mediate our information were built on an extractive and predatory model. They turned our attention into a commodity and our outrage into their business model.
At the Nobel lecture I called the toxic sludge. This brings out the worst of humanity. They don’t connect us, they divide us, and in that division they enable the collapse of cooperation and the rise of illiberal leaders that exploit chaos.
As of last year, V-Dem pointed out that 72% of the world is now under authoritarian rule.
In my country, the Philipines, we lived through this. Disinformation enabled a brutal drug war. It attacked journalists. When I was first arrested in 2019, our top newspapers headline adapted the Martin Niemöller quote, right. The headline was “first they came for the journalists, we don’t know what happens next”.
Well, today, I won ten of the eleven criminal charges the cases filled against me. I joked that the Philipines has moved from hell to purgatory, and many of you in the west are now moving to hell, because what happened in my country didn’t stay there. That playbook has spread across the world.
Last week in Davos, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney said this best: we’re in the middle of a rupture, not a transition, the old order is not coming back and that rupture is accelerated by the destruction of our public information ecosystem.
We can’t solve problems we can’t agree exist. We can’t cooperate across borders when we can’t share the same facts. Now, add Generative AI, the chatbots that threaten to accelerate this chaos exponentially. Floods of of synthetic disinformation at near-zero cost. AI Slop victimizing millions in scams, supercharging the dysfunction in our information ecosystem. Oh yes, and kinetic killing our environment because of the resources it needs to run.
But we’re witnessing something more dangerous: the fusion of state power with tech oligarchy. The men who controls the platforms that shape what of billions believe have merged with the men that controls governments and militaries. “Might makes right” is the new operating principle, and they have the tools to manufacture consent, or to simply draw out dissent.
Just last week, The Nerve released research on how controlling the information ecosystem cements power. The title is “Narrative warfare and the breakdown of reality”. It showed how, in less than a year, what started as a mean became state policy and then kinetic reality in Venezuela. It shows a three-stage funnel: narrative warfare fragments the shared reality, enabling the dismantling of institutions, clearing the path for corruption and kleptocracy.
What happened in Venezuela. Greenland threatened. Minneapolis militarized. Wars multiplying, not ending. This is what becomes possible when the battle for information integrity is lost.
And while this happens, the clock keeps ticking. Nuclear arsenals grow while arms controls collapses. Climate records shattered while the US wages war on renewable energy!
The very cooperation we need to survive on AI, on pandemics on the planet, becomes impossible. Becomes impossible! Eighty five seconds to midnight. It is ticking, but it can be turned back. Can’t leave you depressed: now is the time to act, right?
We need technology platforms redesigned around human rights, not engagement metrics. We need journalism funded as critical infrastructure. We need AI governance that prioritizes safety over speed. And we need middle power, civil society and citizens acting together because, as Canada pointed out, if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
Information integrity is the mother of all battles. Because on can’t run democracy on a corrupted operating system.
You can’t turn back the Doomsday Clock when half of the world doesn’t believe these problems even exist.
But each of you watching, what can you do? You can do a lot, because narrative warfare targets the cellular level of a democracy, that is each of us, the citizens.
We think three buckets: technology, journalism and community. We need to demand better from these extractive and predatory tech companies, and join public interest tech like our Matrix protocol chat app: it’s open source, federated, end-to-end encrypted. Support independent journalism and build communities of action.
At the worst of times, we in Rappler turned to our communities are citizens demanded better[?]. And today the reporting of journalism in the Philipines working with civil society has helped put our former president, the guy that tried to put me in jail, Rodrigo Duterte, he’s now in jail in the Hague, facing charges of crimes against humanity. It took a whole society approach.
The destruction has happened. We’re standing on the rubble of the world that was. Now it’s time to create, to build the world that we want, that is more compassionate, more equal, more sustainable.
Eighty five seconds to midnight. You know, the question now is not whether we can, the question is whether you will.
What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because the time to act is now. Thank you.
A crueldade da tecnologia de “IA” em Watkins (2025):
AI is a cruel technology. It replaces workers, devours millions of gallons of water, vomits CO2 into the atmosphere, propagandises exclusively for the worst ideologies, and fills the world with more ugliness and stupidity. Cruelty is the central tenet of right wing ideology. It is at the heart of everything they do. They are now quite willing to lose money or their lives in order to make the world a crueller place, and AI is a part of this –- a mad rush to make a machine god that will liberate capital from labour for good. (This is no exaggeration: there is a lineage from OpenAI’s senior management back to the Lesswrong blog, originator of the concept of Roko’s Basilisk.) Moreso even than cryptocurrency, AI is entirely nihilistic, with zero redeeming qualities. It is a blight upon the world, and it will take decades to clear up the mountains of slop it has generated in the past two or three years.
AI is, unfortunately, a fever that will have to burn itself out. It may be the case that, like cryptocurrency, elites are simply so invested in this technology that, despite its total lack of utility, they will keep trying to make it happen. Given how great a fit it is for them psychologically, I would say that this is more likely to happen than not.
Bomba:
Toda a bomba tem sua bolha: a bomba dispara, a bolha estoura e ficam os escombros.
Bomba de Turing (Enigma), nos sentidos de quebrar, mas também de bombear.
Guerra:
Apocalinfo:
“The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human & Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World”, Sariel (2021).
O cenário da OTAN para os anos de 2040: “2040: An Information Odyssey”, Matejic (2020).
“Singularidade” Informacional: sem condições de distinguir se conteúdos gerados são fantasiosos.
Palestina:
Mais sobre “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World”, Loewenstein (2023).
IBM na Palestina:
IBM has operated in Israel since 1972, training military and intelligence personnel – especially from Unit 8200 – for the technology sector and start-up scene.87 Since 2019, IBM Israel has operated and upgraded the central database of the Population and Immigration Authority,88 enabling collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, and supporting the discriminatory permit regime of Israel.89 Before IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) maintained the database and its Israeli subsidiary is still providing servers.90 Hewlett Packard (HP) has long enabled the apartheid systems of Israel, supplying technology to the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the prison service and police.91 Since the 2015 split of the company into Hewlett Packard Enterprises and HP Inc., opaque business structures have obscured the roles of their seven remaining Israeli subsidiaries
Gaza 2023-2024:
Mapa de Gaza: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mapa_da_Faixa_de_Gaza.svg
“Levelling down”.
Memória e informação:
Arquivo da cidade de Gaza destruído.
Jornalistas assassinados, inclusive em ataques direcionado por drone (vide o caso de Samer Abudaqa).
Relatório “Israel’s Surveillance Industry and Human Rights: Impact on Palestinians and Worldwide”, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media (2023).
Texto mencionado pelo Henrique sobre “você não vai ver um cogumelo nuclear”.
Condições Sociotécnicas do Genocídio Palestino, palestra de Walter Lippold na CryptoRave 2025:
Descrição:
Em 1925, Walter Benjamin escreveu o ensaio As armas do futuro: Batalhas com cloroacetofenona, difenilamina cloroarsina e sulfeto de dicloroetila, analisando as novas dinâmicas sociais oriundas do terror químico das novas armas, apresentadas na I Guerra Mundial (1914-1918). Em 1959, Fanon estudou as tecnologias da guerra colonial, desde o jamming – na guerra eletrônica dos militares franceses contra o povo argelino, passando pela guerra de informação nas mídias, até mesmo o uso da medicina, como elemento para potencializar a efetividade das sessões de tortura.
– https://cpa.cryptorave.org/cryptorave-2025/talk/WUWFCF/ Acessado em 2025-05-23
Referência para “A Dying Colonialism”, Fanon (1994).
Referência para “As armas do futuro”, Benjamin (2015).
“Rebirth of Epimethean Man”, Illich (1973):
- Paralelo da alegoria da “forma” e da “informação” vindas do fogo, e voltando para ele.
Colapsos:
Colapso de Modelo (“model collapse”), o que ocorre por exemplo quando uma “IA” é “treinada” por outra “IA” (ou quando uma treina a outra). De modo que as “IAs” dependem de fontes de informação não poluídas por outras “IAs”. Dependem de conteúdo gerado por humanos.
Colapso em direção ao “Genérico”:
Geral genérico, gene, geração, degeneração. Colapso dos modelos. “Pureza” é “degeneração”.
Genérico e monocultivo.
Colapsos e falsificações: exemplo de produção de conteúdos falsos:
- Obras de Karl Marx deturpadas para vieses neoliberais.
Assim, o motor gira em falso… na autofagia própria deste sistema: poluem o mundo com lixo informacional, mas dependem de uma fonte informacional externa pra alimentar os modelos deles… o lixo vai aumentando, requerendo crescente infraestrutura computacional para separar o lixo do não-lixo, isto é, do que tem algum valor.
Falha do Iron Dome, Klein (2025):
This is what we need to understand, and perhaps haven’t focused on enough since October 7. What October 7 meant to wealthy countries around the world was a failure of the Iron Dome model, which they all subscribe to for their own countries. The Iron Dome is a global project. It isn’t only for Israel. Israel is the laboratory for the Iron Dome. Notice I’m saying Israel, not Palestine. I don’t call Palestine a laboratory, but I think Israel is a laboratory for a certain kind of fortressed inequality and apartheid that is actually a global project.
Promoção da doença para vender a cura (“show as much shit as possible”), num dialógo do filme Montainhead (2025):
00:16:16: Jeff’s sniping. He’s fucking snipey, snipe, snipe.
00:16:20:- Are you with us or not, man?
- No, dude, I– I don’t blame you, man.
00:16:24: I mean, planet Earth’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet,
00:16:27: and no one’s gonna stop till we clear all the hot plates, right?
00:16:30: Fine. Hit me. If we’re constructing an intellectual barricade,
00:16:33: what are my weak points?
00:16:35:- Steel man?
- Yeah.
00:16:38: Okay. Steel man says,
00:16:41: your platform was already divisive and last week’s upgrade made it way worse.
00:16:46: And now you’ve inflamed a volatile situation
00:16:48: and people are using generative AI
00:16:51: to circulate hyper-personalized messages, unfalsifiable deepfakes.
00:16:55: Shit like named person X goes to named area Y,
00:16:59: to buy named weapon to go at named group at named hour,
00:17:03: promoting genocidal proximate attacks,
00:17:07: creating sectarian division with video evidence,
00:17:11: massive market instability, fraud.
00:17:14: Yeah, I guess all that, though, is debatable,
00:17:17: right, at Traam headquarters?
00:17:20: Look…
00:17:23: first time people saw a movie, everybody ran screaming
00:17:25: because they thought they were gonna get hit by a train.
00:17:29: The answer to that was not, “Stop the movies.”
00:17:33:- The answer was, “Show more movies.”
- Yes.
00:17:37: We’re gonna show users as much shit as possible
00:17:41: until everyone realizes nothing’s that fucking serious.
00:17:44:- Yeah.
- Nothing means anything
00:17:46: and everything’s funny and cool.
00:17:47:- Exactly. Precisely.
- Funny.
[…]
00:34:49: Sell me your fucking BILTER filter.
00:34:51: It’s good for you and it’s good for me.
00:34:54: Is this why you came? To put the squeeze on?
00:34:58: You know, Ven, why don’t you just dial some dials, man?
00:35:00: Why don’t you tweak something on your end?
00:35:02:- Tweak? I’ll tweak.
- Yeah?
- Make some little fuckin’ tweaks.
- Make me a little fuckin’ tweak, bitch.
- Yeah.
- You know what I think, honestly?
00:35:07: I think pedal to the fucking metal.
00:35:10: I’m negotiating with four hyper-scale data centers, so nothing is stopping this.
00:35:14: I say we just push through. Let’s fucking go!
00:35:19:- Yeah?
- Yeah.
- Let’s fucking go! Come on!
- Yeah, man!
00:35:25: The worse the disease, the more valuable the cure.
00:35:27:- Let’s just fucking go, huh?
- Let’s fucking go.
- Let’s just fucking go.
- Let’s fucking go!
“As big techs e a guerra total: o complexo militar-industrial-dataficado”,
Silveira (2025).
Doctorow (2025) conversa com Silveira (2025), na parte sobre Google e investimento militar.
“A/HRC/59/23: From economy of occupation to economy of genocide - Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”, United Nations - Human Rights Council e Albanese (2025) - Seção “Surveillance and carcerality: the dark side of the “start-up nation”“, incluindo IBM, Microsoft, Grupo NSO, Google, Amazon, Palantir…
Mortes em Hiroshima/Nagasáki em 1945 versus em Gaza entre 2022 e 2025.
