Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor

@benverschoor

Professional Dilettante. Co-founder, VA data center resistance org (pronounced, "suava dicta"). Co-host, Mise en Screen . Writes film and other media criticism at

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YouTube Bluesky

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Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 4d

This account has around 90k followers and follows about as many. The image is obvious AI slop. Don't know what their grift is besides clout-chasing, but don't even give them that.

A poster whose main message reads, "The measure of a just society is found in how fully woman can live with" and then with typical AI list icons it lists freedom, opportunity, safety, respect.

In the lower right corner are a crowd of several women. One in the back appears to be raising a fist, but the shoulder and upper arm are obscured by another woman's head and the visible forearm is at an angle that could not connect to the rest of her. Another raised fist is not connected to anybody. The women all have the strange skin creases in their necks.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 5d

WHY SHOP WITH US? 100⅙ AUTH£HTlC PRDOU€TS BE5T PRIC6S IH TO₩N NEvV PR0DUCTS HE€RLY FRI€NOLY €U6TO|\/|ER SENVI€

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 7d

I had seen this public art (in Evanston, IL) previously, and then happened to pass by in July 2020 and saw this. It kind of works as a Covid monument

In a green park, multiple large metal posts stick out of the ground. At their top are casts, bronze or iron, of peoples' faces, looking like death masks. Over each mouth is stretched a white surgical facemask.

Close-up of one of the face casts with a white surgical facemask stretched taut against it.

One of the face casts has a blue construction facemask, and one none at all. America in 2020

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 7d

This is the corrupt energy mogul suspected of commissioning her car-bombing, which, yeah, checks out

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 13d

These ads need to be used as trial evidence the next time some poor family sues OpenAI after ChatGPT helps their loved one commit suicide.

A vertical video of a person wearing headphones. Their prompt, written mid-sentence, reads: between us... I have sweaty ears. The ad caption reads, "ChatGPT is not here to judge. ChatGPT is here to help."

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 15d

It is, but it's also fucking insane. www.rogerebert.com/reviews/noah...

But it’s not all hearts and flowers after that, because Noah’s gotten it into his head that only the animals should survive—that after the flood he will have to kill his wife and children and himself, to prevent sinful humanity from angering The Creator again.

He’s inserted the chieftain of Cain’s descendants, Tubal-Cain, described in Genesis as “the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron,” into the story. The character is a warrior-despot enemy of Noah’s and (intriguingly) a dark mirror of Noah’s gravest flaws and worst impulses. As inhabited by Ray Winstone, who plays this sort of raging bull character better than anybody, Tubal-Cain is a creature of pure appetite, and super-macho. The dude put the patriarch in “patriarchal.” He’s all privilege, all entitlement; he thinks everyone and everything (including life itself) exists for his sake. He thinks Noah’s concern about the rape of nature is just a bunch of girly-man whining, stopping just short of calling him a hippie or a tree-hugger. He is determined to take over the Ark and fill it with his own tribe, or barring that, to get on board himself, to survive the flood he once dismissed as false prophecy.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 15d

Bo Burnham got this much right

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 15d

To the Odyssey discourse I'll add that Dante put Odysseus in the eighth malebolge of Hell's 8th circle, for false counselors, in part because of the deception of the Trojan Horse, a view inherited from Virgil's Aeneid. Not exactly a hot take--except for the hellfire

Dante’s placement of Ulysses among the sinners of fraud, and specifically among the fraudulent counselors, depends heavily on the anti-Greek and pro-Trojan propaganda of imperial Rome; this is the sentiment that Dante found in the Aeneid. Aeneas, mythic founder of Rome, is a Trojan, and Vergil’s Ulysses reflects the tone of the second book of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas recounts the bitter fall of Troy. After ten long years of war, Troy fell — not because of military superiority but because of Ulysses’ deceitful strategem: the Trojan horse.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 16d

Platforms can help--I *am* posting on Bluesky--but even with TikTok minting music careers, the time of producing for a primarily global online audience seems to be waning. Though I guess that also depends on if normies reject AI slop--or if the slop economy collapses with the AI bubble. 4/4

Parody of a one hundred dollar bill design, but featuring Botetourt County, Virginia's County Administrator Gary Larrowe. Accompanying a piece titled "It's All Avout the Botetourts," lambasting the county for selling 312 acres to Google for a discounted $14 million. The potential audience for this is relatively small, but it is more likely to reach them than a broader audience, like on Bluesky. (No offense)

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 16d

Maybe in the next decade enough other regional cultural nodes will have sprung up and grown--websites, publishers, production houses, markets--that they'll get wider attention in their industries, eventually getting us back to 1999 but with better business models and download speeds. Why 1999?) 3/4

Agent Smith from The Matrix. Caption: The peak... of your civilization.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 16d

This doesn't necessarily mean abandoning the platforms. I've never had as large an audience as the writing or photos for my anti-data center group, shared on FB and Insta. The audience is smaller, but it's filling a niche and the specificity means there is not much competition. 2/4

Audience view at a Board of Supervisors meeting. The speaker, a woman in a green dress facing away from the camera and toward the officials, is confronted by a sheriff's deputy, who points away with his thumb to indicate she's got to go.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 16d

Me whenever someone mentions Titus

A stately empress looks on, while behind her a man in a chef's outfit with a missing hand gleefully emerges from behind a curtain.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 19d

Two people, viewed from behind, look at three women in yellow dresses posed rotualistically on rocks in misty water. The dresses' hems convincingly fall on on the contours of the rocks, but they and the women are completely dry despite being surrounded by waves and flowing water.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 19d

Set aside the total creative impoverishment, it's baffling that there are so many obvious bad trips that Musk (and others boosting this tech) let slip by. Does he just not care that Odysseus is washing up by falling *toward* the ocean, or is it impossible to make the model generate it correctly?

A man shown to be washing up on a beach. The shore, in the background, is along the left side of the image. The man has fallen forward from the right, with water splashing above him from behind.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· 23d

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Jun 18

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· May 26

The Pope's encyclical compares AI to the Tower of Babel in the land of Shinar, and I have to point out the middle chapter of the X-Men comics' 1993 Phalanx Covenant storyline involved the post-human Phalanx, led by a being named Shinar, building a tower of Babel to contact their cosmic hive mind.

A massive techno-organic spire juts out of a cliffside, dwarfing the European village below it. Narrarion: Witness the beginning of the end. Witness the horror that will bring the demise of life as we know it.

A large, red techno-organic dog man in a blue cloak, reaching out to an alarmed shepherd, saying, "Come, human, Shinar has need of you. For the message must pass the stars to our people! We have found a world ripe for conquest!" Narration: His last thought is the question that his life has answered.... Who will tend to the flock?

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· May 14

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Naomi Klein, 2023)

The 'disgusted then interested' two photos meme

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· May 12

Classic of the genre:

Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· May 6

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Baron von Westphalen in Southland Tales, played by Wallace Shawn, raises a glass of champaign

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Apr 25

Won't have microplastics in your milk if there aren't plastic milk bottles

The Roll Safe guy tapping his head with an idea meme image

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Apr 10

There actually was a 1997 book titled The Redneck Manifesto that argued social issues were used by the rich to get the poor to fight each other. Then the author, Jim Goad, went to prison for domestic assault and eventually became an alt right guy. www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/...

Thinking about Jim Goad makes me sad. Goad was tuned in to the leftish Zine transgressive culture of the 90s. The Redneck Manifesto was good stuff. It's class first, funny, and really takes the air out of liberal culture without going right wing. Afterwards...

The culture Goad was a part of coalesced in to things like the WTO protests and the anti-globalization movement of the late 90s. While that was going on Goad was in prison soaking up ideas from actual fucking white supremacists! Basically his "people" took a hard left turn while he went right during his (deserved) prison stint. He came out confused and angry about the changes and the result is the Goad you see today.

NGL, Goad is a highly influential author in my life. He is a demonstration of what you can become if you don't remember to maintain certain core values. He's a cautionary tale. Part of the reason I am hostile to things like the "post left" that some on this sub embrace is I have seen exactly where that leads and it looks a lot like Jim Goad.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Apr 2

Off the top of my head it's either "What if the child has bad vibes" or James Caan responding to a guy who wanted him to stay in character when Ray Liota died

Why do bash "dead-beat" dads for not being there for their kids but we never question if the child has bad vibes? Or if they're just unpleasant to be around?

Very disappointed with the replies to this thread. Attempted to spark an open discussion but some people just wanna be mean. [Unhappy emoji]

James Caan: Not Ray [heartbreak emoji]
Nostalgia critic: End of tweet?
James Caan: Do better at a time like this you rat

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Mar 24

Gotta love the logic of recommendation algorithms

Two YouTube recommendations, one after the other: Afroman - Will You Help Me Repair My Door, and an MS NOW story about about the journalist who broke the Jeffrey Epstein story that starts 'Blown every door open'

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Mar 20

Kyle Reese warning Sarah Conner of the relentlessness of the Terminator. A word bubble at the bottom of the image turns the quoted text about AI hackers into his dialogue.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Mar 7

Watchmen and Batman v Superman are strange funhouse mirror images of each other as far as fascist hero worship goes

What this amounts to is, essentially, a remake of Snyder’s Watchmen. There too Snyder had a bloodthirsty vigilante, an aloof god-figure facing scrutiny from a skeptical populace, a female fighter who had long been out of the game, a literal doomsday clock, and a billionaire villain who engineers a monster that causes the people to rally together in the end. The problem with that film was that Alan Moore’s extreme skepticism of superheroes and their fascist myopia was undermined by Snyder’s camera’s love of fascist violence and power fantasies. Here we have the opposite issue: the movie wants us to be thrilled by its Übermenschen, but has inadvertently made them largely repellant figures. Snyder makes Moore’s point, but by accident.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Mar 4

I knew what this footnote was going to be, but that just increased the anti-satisfaction of clicking it. It's like opening the Christmas gift you know is a Super Nintendo, except it sucks

“This deal endangers our democracy by giving a family of pliant billionaires even more control of vast swaths of our news coverage, TV stations, and movie studios,” said Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of the watchdog group Free Press.

Footnote: Note that the watchdog group Free Press is not the same as the Bari Weiss–helmed conservative news outlet The Free Press, which is controlled by … the Ellison family.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Mar 3

@number8axel.bsky.social 's tears make me stronger

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Feb 25

This is enraging, not least for how this man was failed by the every level of government every step of the way.

Shah Alam got lost and ended up on the porch of a woman’s home as she was letting her dog out, according to Macaluso. Shah Alam is completely blind in one eye and can only see with blurry vision for several feet in the other, according to Macaluso.
The woman called police, Macaluso said. When Shah Alam did not follow police commands to drop his curtain rod, they Tasered and beat him, then arrested him, Macaluso said. The officers suffered minor injuries in the scuffle, he said.
Shah Alam was charged with offenses including assault, trespassing and possession of a weapon. Macaluso said Shah Alam’s family opted to not bail him out of the Holding Center for fear he would end up detained by ICE out of state.
The plea deal reached recently allowed Shah Alam to be released on bail without ICE detention, Macaluso said.
Shah Alam’s death comes just 15 months after his arrival in Buffalo in December 2024. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Ben "tax big tech" Verschoor@benverschoor· Feb 6

Truly incredible moment from an international treasure, but I have to pull this up from the replies: