August 13, 2026
(Listen to That Handsome Devil - Charlie's Inferno while reading this for the best experience! Also, forgive me, this post is disorganized as shit.)
So, do you remember my post about mainstream AI "criticism"? In it I focus on a lot about how TESCREALism is pushed into the mainstream while Critical AI is forced into obscurity, although we should get this important set of knowledge and beliefs be known in the public, and we shouldn't spend a lot of energy on gatekeeping and worrying about the community becoming toxic upon becoming popular because it can lead to self-sabotage and the playing field being left to whoever/whatever billionaires want it to be left to. I also emphasized that community standards and codes of conduct are so that communities stay healthy while growing, and while doing your part in the community, you have to watch out for those who join, more accurately, infiltrate for ulterior motives not very positive. Olivia Guest's new blog post/essay, titled "Entryism," is pretty much about that last part!
According to Guest, the time when we start looking out for rogue members in the anti-AI community has arrived, following a strategy called "entryism" (the namesake of her essay). Entryism has been used for when people supporting a certain ideology sneaks into a political party supporting a different (often a bit similar) ideology to spread their own and maybe eventually take over the party. For the anti-AI movement, entryism takes the shape of pro-AI entities planting spies into anti-AI organizations and universities (AFAIK according to Guest, academia in its core is an anti-AI institution, so specifying universities separately is perhaps redundant), recruiting members of those institutions, or "spreading rhetoric or cultish language" ("cultish language" refers to Section 2 of the article "Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia, in which Guest et al. talk about how terminology in the field of AI has been deliberately designed to cause confusion, and is an ode to Amanda Montell, who did work on language and jargon in cultish environments). A very important part of it is "do[ing] all this by looking like one is not against the organisation's goal (i.e. knowledge production and education) or even more insidiously by looking like one is staunchly anti AI explicitly." Their end goal is to crush the movement from the inside. They get in, gain power, and completely change the rules, emptying the institutions, so they have weaker enemies. If they even still have any left.
You might have, and will, encounter such people. TESCREALs have done entryism into Critical AI, for example, Future of Life Institute is trying to mingle with labor organizations. The same Institute also funds YouTubers to make TESCREALslop disguised as videos about the risks and harms of AI. Anthropic hijacked the Catholic Church. Bernie Sanders is a TESCREAL puppet now. Hank Green, a science communicator associated with YouTube channels SciShow and Crash Course, admitted to using AI in his videos. So did Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of Science the scientific journal, in the making of an article about how AI degrades scientific research and publishing (the irony is FRYING me). If they managed to hijack Sanders or the Vatican or Science (the field AND the journal), we need to be very careful with our own groups.
These fuckers are excellent at LARPing. Keep your eyes wide open. I have a couple ideas on what you could look out for:
Speaking of Dwayne Monroe, he once gave me advice on analyzing motives that have stuck with me to this day, and I think you could make use of it, too: "[...] [be] dialectical and materialist. What is happening? Why? What are the historical and material factors? Staying grounded is the method to sharpen our minds." Likewise, Olivia Guest warns us to not be fooled by surface appearances and encourages us to dig deeper into things: "This is the logic of AI, of fascism, of sexism, of racism. That is, because things look a certain way, that therefore they are a certain way. Internal properties are wrongly derived from their superficial appearance."
(Someone could use this. Hm, I wonder who? And for what reason? I really wonder for what reason...)
I would like to add to all this: Entryism has serious stakes. In Turkey, the Gülenists (I guess you could call them political Islamists but it looks more obvious that the CIA funds them and shit, and they have ties with US Evangelicals) had this strategy called "renklendirme," their own version of entryism, in which they infiltrated NGOs and political parties. One of the political parties they infiltrated was AKP, the party in power in Turkey since 2002, and a party that supported a different flavor of political Islamism. Eventually, a power struggle began between the Gülenists and Erdoğanists, and that lead to the July 15, 2016 coup d'état attempt. Or Graham Platner. Guest also talks about him in her essay. That fucker to do entryism on the Democratic Party of the United States, a neoliberal (Guest describes them as "already pretty right wing," I have to agree lol) political party, as someone with a literal Nazi tattoo, and many allegations of rape and sexual assault. Truly a horrible man he is.
FETÖ and AKP are ideologically quite similar, so is Nazism and the US modern Democratic Party (especially if you are a subscriber of the Blue MAGA theory), yet those two cases lead to whole disasters. So could you imagine what would happen if the opposing ideology hijacked the other side? And could you imagine if one side is working towards fighting a very exploitative and harmful piece of technology?
Anyways, keep an eye out for LARPers. One final piece of advice, from Olivia Guest herself, is "Please do not the ally." Do not bully your allies just because they made a mistake. That's just straight-up gatekeeping and not of the good kind. We went over that shit before.
Also, related to this, I started working on a new project: The Critical Washing Rainbow! It's a page of the /turing (this) subsection of the website that will contain information on the various types of "washing" pro-AI entities do. It's currently very bare-bones and I yet have to write stuff, but uh, you can check it out. And do come back to it time to time as new stuff gets added. You can also suggest entries to it on Bluesky! (Thanks to everyone who did so so far!!)
Have a great day!!
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