by Dan Burns

Mar 26, 2025, 6:00 PM

Big Tech is devolving into madness

It’s not just Musk. Plenty of these giddy, unhinged nerds really do seem to believe that they’re the supreme gods of all of us.

A billionaire-backed push to develop libertarian enclaves in Central America is being imported back to the United States, where its proponents want to lay the groundwork for their own privately run, corporately governed cities.

A new lobbying group, dubbed the Freedom Cities Coalition, wants to convince President Trump and Congress to authorize the creation of new special development zones within the U.S. These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy. The new zones could also serve as a testbed for weird new technologies without the need for government oversight.
(Gizmodo)

I’ve seen reports that a lot of Big Tech types are, and/or have been, really seriously into science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction as an adolescent, and this is not a shot at those who still enjoy it as adults. But I am noting that it’s called science FICTION for a reason, and that rational, reality-grounded people are cognizant of that.

I don’t mean to overstate the “importance” of this freedom city thing. Certainly many Big Tech execs aren’t taking it seriously. But some of the things that are widely being taken all-too-seriously, like crypto and large language AI, are every bit as questionable and even ridiculous.

Here are a few more examples of “questionable,” to say the least, things going on with tech recently:

U.S. Treasury officials have lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer that the U.S. government previously said was used to launder $7 billion worth of crypto stolen by North Korean hackers.

In a statement, the Treasury said it “exercised our discretion” to delist Tornado Cash following a legal battle. Sanctions make it illegal for Americans or U.S. businesses to transact with a listed entity.

Crypto mixers allow customers to conceal where their crypto came from, including tainted or illicit funds, by blending the funds with other crypto.
(TechCrunch)

I do not like the looks of this next one,though it shouldn’t have surprised me.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering taking a first step to using cryptocurrency, according to a meeting recording and other materials reviewed by ProPublica and three officials familiar with the matter. Two officials told ProPublica they believe the initiative may be a trial run for the use of crypto across the federal government.

The discussions have sparked concern among some at the department, especially about the prospect of paying recipients of major federal grants in cryptocurrency, an uninsured digital asset associated with financial speculation, dramatic swings in value and transnational crime.
(ProPublica)

Well, we do know what many of the powers that be in this country think of science. People automatically fearing what they don’t understand has been happening since the beginning.

AI-generated research is a threat, both in terms of society’s knowledge and public trust in science. This was the conclusion made by the researchers from the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden, that recently identified over a hundred suspected AI-generated articles in the Google Scholar search engine…

Their research reports that fake AI-generated scientific articles have flooded the search engine Google Scholar. The study’s findings of AI-fabricated junk science mean that fake science has been made available and can be spread widely and at a much lower cost for malicious actors. The work is published in the journal Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review.
(Phys.org)

And something pretty cool, if you ask me.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.
(Ars Technica)

Update (April 2): Regarding the ProPublica item above, this is from an email I got this afternoon:

Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

In a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Wednesday, Reps. Maxine Waters, Stephen Lynch and Emanuel Cleaver sharply criticized the agency for considering such experiments, given cryptocurrency’s volatility and vulnerability to fraud. The Democratic representatives, all members of the House Financial Services Committee, warned of repeating “the same mistakes of the past,” noting that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered in part by the proliferation of risky financial assets in the housing market.
(ProPublica)

Comment from Joe Musich: So as I bounced around my nightly readings I came here after I just was reading a question and answer with the author of this book…