this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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As companies destroy the world in pursuit of profits that will never come, I welcome our Butlerian Jihad (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) by cannedtuna@lemmy.world to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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For those unfamiliar the Dune series, the Butlerian Jihad was a crusade against “thinking machines”. Ultimately computers, and intelligent or thinking machines, even down to calculators are destroyed and banned. Humans who are trained in complex mental maths become known as Mentats, a sort of human computer. Just, uhh, leave all that shit on Bene Tleilax, with their Axalotl Tanks out of it.

Edit: had wrong planet name. IX -> Bene Tleilax

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[–] StopTech@lemmy.today 2 points 4 hours ago

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

[–] menas@lemmy.wtf 10 points 14 hours ago

You may have heard of the Luddites; maybe you even heard of the Canuts. The truth is that the destruction of the machines by the workers is a very common thing among history. Sabotage and revolutionary syndicalism is a way. It will turn our inner eye to see our path. Where the bourgeoisie has gone there will be nothing. Only us will remain.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Instead of machines that think like men, they simply fed drugs to men until they thought like a machine. 🤷‍♂️

[–] Shanmugha@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago

Well, they had to fight long and hard to break from enslavement first. That kind of memory lives for a long time

[–] Aganim@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Just, uhh, leave all that shit on IX, with their Axalotl Tanks out of it.

Axlotl tanks aren't Ixian though, that's Bene Tleilax tech. It's basically what's left of their women.

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago

Whoops. Thanks. Fixed.

[–] pipe01@programming.dev 107 points 1 day ago

The torment nexus

[–] huppakee@piefed.social 26 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I deduct that grok wasn't funny since the reply is not in the screenshot, too bad though.

[–] joenforcer@midwest.social 2 points 6 hours ago

On Xitter, replies get threaded. If you were to click into that comment to see grok's reply, that then makes the comment the parent, which would then omit the original post from view.

That reply is satire. Alan is a professor who abhors AI.

[–] qarbone@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

*deduce, in case you're not a native English speaker. "Deduct" is like "subtract".

I can't think a response from Grok that would add to the tableau. Whether Grok gets the answer right or wrong, the joke is that someone follows a post decrying the surrender of thought to machines by immediately surrendering thought to a (racist) machine. It's complete.

[–] huppakee@piefed.social 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

*deduce, in case you're not a native English speaker. "Deduct" is like "subtract".

Somehow deduce to me sounds like some rich French lady, but merci mon ami, that is the word i meant. And i do agree, the meme is not incomplete this way.

[–] nwtreeoctopus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago

Like a "dilettante" or "debutante" or "demoiselle"?

[–] rozodru@piefed.world 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

and then you have Warhammer 40K where Big E said that AI is heresy cause it practically wiped out mankind. buuuuut "machine spirits" and all that? yeah that's fine as long as a competent human or semi-human is at the wheel. except very few of them actually know how anything works. I mean hell they have these walker things that they can't turn off cause no one knows how to turn them back on.

[–] djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago

real talk; the answer is that the Mechanicus are too powerful for the Imperium to actually fuck with. For one, they were an already established and very strong empire on Mars while the Emperor was just getting humanity back together after a great collapse on Earth, so they negotiated the alliance from a position of power. For two, the Imperium gets every gun, every ship, every tank, every drop pod, every Titan, literally everything other than I think food and manpower for their armies from the Mechanicus. If you wanna start investingating their "definitely not-AI," you gotta be prepared to have your shipments of Leman Russes to suddenly start getting lost.

[–] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

It's not so much that the machine spirits inside of everything are FINE they are just impossible to exorcise, so they try to work around them and please them. The Omnisiah is different.

[–] balthazarsnakewizard@lemmy.world 51 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It’s kind of crazy how prescient the original novels were about AI, and how much that was undone by Brian Herbert - the Butlerian Jihad was such a consequential event that even ten thousand years later, the theocratic feudal oligarchy that runs the universe still refuses the break the taboo that it set across countless religions and capital interests, and the best reasoning Brian Herbert could come up with for why this was such a huge taboo was “a giant robot enslaved humanity ten thousand years ago.”

[–] thunderfist@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’d say pretty spot on opinions

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

I think a better opinion is "they are fucking his corpse and not giving him the courtesy of a reacharound."

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Right? I just couldn’t with his novels, they come no where close to Frank’s writing expertise.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

They felt stilted, directionless, and shallow. I really wanted them to be decent, but gave up after two.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

… crazy how prescient the original novels were …

ftfy

[–] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No Child Left Behind destroyed this country far more effectively than I ever would have suspected.

[–] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The culture was fucked long before no child left behind to be fair. Anti intellectualism was rampant, since before most of us were born, gangster culture and drug prohibition and The Fear made a solid percent of the population criminals and authorized a police state.

City schools are better now than they were in the 80s and 90s, things got real bad in the crime waves.

[–] logi@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Since we're talking sci-fi, this is Asimov in 1980:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

[–] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

While there may be some truth in that, I don't think it's accurate to say it's always been there as such, in fact I believe it didn't really start in it's current form until 1971 or so, by design, although it existed before as it does elsewhere, that was the turning point, where big business huddled up and made a long game to seize power, project 2025 is just the recent iteration of that game plan, formed initially by the Business Roundtable.

[–] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

I mean we burned witches in the dark ages right, so the behavior dates back at least as far as that.

[–] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

♥️ That's one of my favorite quotes of all time.

[–] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah I mean a ~~casual~~ causal chain can be traced back to the big bang. But looking at the entirety of history, you tend to look for certain inflection points.

So in my mind, traveling from Present backwards in time, the journey looks like this in my mind:

Present :: Idiocracy 1st :: No Child Left Behind 2nd :: Bush elected 3rd :: Clinton Glass Steagle 4th :: Reagan 5th :: Nixon

I can zoom in anywhere along that timeline to talk about how each event impacted this topic.

Lemme know if you want to explore any of that like for example what did Reagan do to impact education today long after his death.

[–] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As I was saying on another thread, this current fuckery dates back to the Business Roundtable of 1971, big business huddled up and made a game plan to seize control. They got their asses kicked out of power from FDR and kept losing. Project 2025 is just the newer iteration of that game plan. Part of that plan clearly is to keep us disunited and destroy any competing organizations, and or take control of them secretly like with our opposition political party, not much of a secret to many of us I know.

The only answer is to organize, and to do that we need new social media, that we control. Like the fediverse, but set up better. But we needed it 20 years ago. Next best time is now.

[–] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Fascinating, I never heard about that, so my causality chain only accounts for starting at:

Repeal of Fairness Doctrine

Water Gate

Frost / Nixon

Reaganomics

Clinton

Glass Steagle

Clinton Impeachment

Bush

NCLB

Plenty of details in between, I definitely want to fill out the timeline with as much detail as possible.

[–] Hackworth@piefed.ca 53 points 1 day ago

They then proceeded with the enslaving, sans computer.

[–] Jaberw0cky@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can I just point out to everyone it is a lot easier to take this point on board now and wage jihad against the machines before they achieve sentience and take over.. if you work for an ai company or any other big tech company in any position from floor cleaner to management get busy asap and fuck it up from the inside..

[–] MerryJaneDoe@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

...get busy asap and fuck it up from the inside…

Easier said than done. Security and risk mitigation is one of the first (if not the very first) concern of any IT company in this day and age.

I've been a system engineer. Digital assets are locked down, meaning that I couldn't access anything outside of my scope (which was small and midsize banking websites). Physical assets (servers) sat in three remote locations, highly secure and staffed by a different team. Everything is backed up 5 different ways in 5 different places. Every keystroke is logged. Every door uses a passcard.

It's built to be a trustless system of sorts, where no single person holds the keys to anything too important. Regular audits and individual accountability for every outage are the norm. About the only way to fuck it up would be to somehow incite a mass exodus of seasoned engineers.

I think what people often miss about these systems (not just IT, but all of our systems from finance to healthcare) is that they are supported by very intelligent, motivated individuals. These people are fighting hard to make sure that nobody can fuck up their work. They aren't sitting ducks - they are nigh impenetrable sentries.

[–] SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago

You didn't understand the assignment. It's all about small things. Accidentally cancel a important meeting between higher ups. Put some gunk in the administrators keyboard, which requires a wasteful support ticket to IT. If everyone does there job at 98% competence, the company loses 2% production as a whole.

[–] Jaberw0cky@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Good information, something to think about definitely, but I would say it shows that the best placed people to undermine these systems and companies are people with the professional and inside knowledge.

[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Is Alan anyone note worthy, or is he just a random moron?

EDIT: He's daring grok to explain it. Looks like im the moron here!

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No clue. Checkmarks mean fuck all on that platform.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Professor of Religion at James Madison University, published in a few journals and had an article in Wired about Go (the board game) ten-ish years ago.

[–] balthazarsnakewizard@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So is he just joking, or very stupid?

[–] knightly@pawb.social 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It reads like a joke to me, and his published works suggest he's not one to meekly take things at face value: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&citation_for_view=EEdRH98AAAAJ%3A0EnyYjriUFMC

[–] slothrop@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

methinks folk are missing that he's tweeting at grok, asking it to disseminate the quote....

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago

I totally missed that, thank you. Changes everything.

[–] Manjushri@piefed.social 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I read it as a joke, and a good one, in my opinion. He's asking a supposedly thinking machine to explain a passage about thinking machines being used to enslave people.

[–] logi@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

For once I'd like to see grok's response. But not enough to actually go on there...

[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago

Yup, I see that now. Lol most of us completely missed it

[–] abfarid@startrek.website 8 points 1 day ago

That response tweet is clearly too on the nose to not be ironic.

[–] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It has begun

[–] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah but then the machines join with bestest boi ever and make the real savior so it kinda gets ruined.

[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

That's a fun way to have the mirror turned back on the bot.