this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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It's terrifying that the human psyche is so fragile and malleable that an LLM can twist a person around to much that they become a danger to themselves and others. And I have to wonder how many of those billionaires talk to their own AI creations and have become just as delusional as the people in this article, but with the money and power to act on those delusions.
This also puts MechaHitler in a new light. How many right wingers on X are being deluded into thinking that they are the chosen one who who can save the world by just killing a few Jews, or dems, or POCs or whatever?
It took my mom less than 4 years to go from crying in horror when Trump was elected in 2016, to crying in horror when he wasn't elected in 2020, and lamenting her inability to join Jan 6 due to her cancer that was mysteriously worsening in spite of all the 5g blockers and expensive heal-all herbal teas she bought.
Damn... What happened? Did she just go down the conspiracy theory worm hole?
Yeah, she had just broken up with her boyfriend and found a bunch of "self-help" youtube videos that basically just said everyone who disagrees with you is a narcissist, then the algorithm started recommending her videos that said everyone who disagrees with you is actually an "energy vampire" literally and maliciously draining you of your life force. From there she got into all the crazy health conspiracies - which of course happened right as she was diagnosed with DCIS, which is easily treatable, but if left untreated becomes breast cancer. She dove head-first into all of the conspiracies after that, throwing money at anyone claiming to cure cancer so long as the method wasn't backed by "big science," and died of breast cancer a few years later.
That’s really heartbreaking. I’m sorry for your loss.
I really wish I had a solid argument against this theory
Fascist rhetoric can be defined as a rhetorical regime that like a light switch is flipped between speaking from an authoritarian position of extreme power to call for violence in a system and speaking from a position of complete helplessness to stop evil being perpetrated by said system.
It is a specific flavor of self-delusion, one perfectly enabled by a technology like AI to grow out of control like a cancer in a billionaire/fascists mind.
That's a quote from Eco's essay on ur-fascism, for the unfamiliar
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Which is why capitalists always ultimately bend the knee and go along with fascists, because the smart ones understand that the fascist movement is utterly unsustainable and will collapse catastrophically, and it is exactly that species of crisis that allows rich ruthless capitalists to lock in their power for generations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
The dumb capitalists just go along with the fascism because they have lobotomized their empathy and like the pure expression of worship of power.
This is the heart of the love affair between fascism and capitalism. Most capitalists actually end up being horrifically shocked by the consequences of consumating that love with fascism but by then of course it is by design too late.
A fascist overthrow of a democratic society than by definition must be a process of keeping capitalists and the average "non-political" people in society from realizing at the same time that a fascist overthrow is actually happening and the consequences are immediately brutal. Fascists seek to slow down time in some places, speed it up in others, to desynchronize this realization so that it becomes a perfectly individualized one, a series of repeating last seconds of the authoritarian state crushing someone after they had been cornered and isolated.
This also explains why Fascism is inherently unstable, it is not actually a form of governance so much as a form of cancer that preys upon governments and organizations, it exists to grow and no other reason. There is no homeostasis with Fascism, only growth and terror. It is a wave of collapse that evil agents attempt to channel for individual gain by shaping the wave to crash in particular ways, spread out and too obscured behind a haze of propaganda to make out here while it happens there... but ultimately fascism can only ever be the breaking of a wave upon lifeless nothingness no matter what ideologues try to convince us.
It's isolated cases that would never be blamed on other technologies.
I just wish I’m long gone before humanity descends into complete chaos.