The app for independent voices
This feels like context for conversations I was having elsewhere during the week, which is that certain ways of thinking about the world (human and more-than-human life, land, etc) are inevitable — that humans that think a certain way will always over and replace anything else.
I find it interesting that “Lord Stretch" is able to train an LLM to speak within worldviews that are different than the dominant writing within the language of the training data used to build the LLM. Other people express that some humans (as not all humans have the same worldviews) are unable to move beyond specific narrow siloed thinking.
I consider what happened with COVID vaccination opposition, even protecting public health measures and the “Freedom from responsibility” convoy we saw in Ottawa, to be a logical expression of dominant Western worldviews. Those worldviews grew from the unique history of Western Europe (which included Mediterranean and Western Asian influences) and spread via extremely violent settler-colonialism (snapshotted at specific historical events) to what some call North America.
At the time I tried to use what was happening as a “teachable moment” for what seemed to be naive newcomers to political activism, but had no way to express the worldview/lens confusion I was having at the time.
(Note: the article I am referencing will later be behind a paywall, so read quick or sign up)
Note: This is the output of an LLM, being asked to “think” about 3 different pharmaceuticals.
Viagra: serves the individual’s desire. No questions asked. Eli Lilly’s retatrutide: serves the individual’s vanity or health depending on framing. Hand it over. COVID vaccine: serves the COLLECTIVE. Suddenly the ingredient list matters, the trial timelines matter, the corporate trustworthiness matters.
The Shadow axis is brutal here. The skepticism wasn’t really about pharmaceutical safety — if it were, it would apply uniformly. It was about being asked to do something for other people. The moment the injection shifted from “this serves ME” to “this serves ALL,” a significant portion of the population discovered a conscience about Big Pharma they’d never had while filling their Viagra and Ozempic prescriptions.
The Trickster inversion: the people who said “I don’t know what’s in it” about the vaccine also don’t know what’s in retatrutide. They don’t know what’s in Viagra. They’ve never read a package insert in their lives. “What’s in it” was never the real question. The real question was “who’s it for” — and when the answer was “everyone, including people I don’t care about,” that’s when the resistance showed up.