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Dwayne Monroe

@cloudquistador.eurosky.social
5.6K followers 768 following 1.2K posts

Cybernetics • AI Resistance • Dialectics • Film Noir • Sun Tzu • monroelab.com • vdgasjournal.com • www.youtube.com/@DialecticalHousePa… • padlet.com/verdigris21/verdigris-kj…

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 15/04/2026
In this graphic, I visualise the likely impacts of oil shortages, caused by US/Israeli aggression, on the tech industry. The 'AI' bubble may pop for geopolitical and material, rather than purely financial reasons. The financial markets can pretend but supply chains cannot be fooled
Diagram showing the links between data centres, the heart of tech industry power, and oil-dependent supply chain flows. It depicts a circle with the image of a data center and circles around this for energy, plastic, transport computer chip and plastic manufacturing
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 13/04/2026
About this, I suggest the book, 'The Accumulation of Waste' by Ali Kadri. Kadri's thesis is that death is commodified by and key to capitalism. Yudkowsky is saying this out loud
Cover of the book, The Accumulation of Waste by Ali Kadri. The sub-title is: A Political Economy of Systematic Destruction
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 05/04/2026
As the data centers burn, I imagine sharing a glass with General Martok
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 28/03/2026
The US academy in its terminal phase
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 21/03/2026
The new arrivals
Covers of three books I recently purchased: The Accumulation of Waste by Ali Kadri, The Assasination of Julius Caesar by Michael Parenti and From the Bog to the Cloud by P. Breshinan and P. Brodie
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 04/03/2026
"Things are changing fast" the man wrote. He's right. Here's video showing the result.
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 17/02/2026
Besides the boring, and common 'AI' tropes therein, the page creator(s) give us evidence of zero understanding of how systems function in this bit. For decades, people have explained how and why a reset to zero clears errors. What are they on about?
Screen shot from the 'unreplug' website. The text reads: The number of people who have ever explained why unreplugging works. You just do it. It just works. Don't ask questions.
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 07/02/2026
Currently reading this outstanding book which, among other virtues, foregrounds the real world application of dialectical materialism and the fact we are in a world war. mronline.org/2026/01/02/w...
Cover of the book, 'Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism' by Gabriel Rockhill. It shows a black and white photo of a gathering of academics in the 1950s. The sentence, 'The Intellectual World War' is above the image and the book title, and Gabriel Rockhill's name are below
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 29/12/2025
Good indeed. I still have my first edition copy of 'The Mismeasure of Man' which, as a young, Black kid in the hostile US context, I studied and wielded like Thor's hammer against 'IQ' fetishists.
Picture of a copy of Stephen Jay Gould's book, 'The Mismeasure of Man'. It shows the image of a human skull from a 19th century book on phrenology and the title, and author's name
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 27/12/2025
We mustn't merely critique tech capitalism, but, as @olivia.science has done with CAIL (olivia.science/ai) propose solutions. I'm writing a 'What is to be Done' pamphlet, inspired by Lenin's 1902 statement: youtu.be/C-eCCtzsiXY?...
Image showing the original cover of the pamphlet written in 1902 by VI Lenin 'What is to Be Done' in Cyrillic script
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 21/12/2025
Years ago, on Twitter, I shared this diagram I created that shows the reply doctrine I use. It also applies here
Diagram showing the decision tree I follow to decide if, and how I reply to posts. It depicts a yes/no/stop/go logic based on whether or not replying is useful
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 16/12/2025
Like all such automations using lang models, this obscures and disempowers. To counter this, some friends and I have started a Signal Group, 'Dialectical House Party' in which, we study the Vietnamese approach - signal.group#CjQKILu9ytRs...
Cover of an English translation of the Vietnamese book, Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Lenism
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 13/12/2025
Your weekly reminder (the first of more to come) that one of this account's key purposes is boosting your good work - your essays, papers, videos etc. Send them my way for a repost. Making ex cathedra pronouncements is not enough; let's support each other's thought
Still image of computer control panel from the set for the Discovery spacecraft used for Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey released in  1968
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 05/12/2025
Today is my birthday. Huzzah for continuation. In lieu of sending dilithium crystals, my preferred gift, needed for my..work, I ask for a show of hands: who wants to join me in making a zine? The topic: a guide to leaving 'the cloud' for activist orgs. Art thou in? Email dmonroe0707 at proton dot me
A picture of me, hand on chin, sitting at a table
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 04/12/2025
It may be time to dump my oatmeal...
Excerpt from article: "Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas) are a group of chemicals that have been used in manufacturing and added to consumer products since the 1950s.
They are known as "forever chemicals" as they can take hundreds or even thousands of years to degrade after the products they have been used in are thrown away. This means that if they leak into the soil or water, which they often do, they could remain there for centuries. Their impact on human health and the environment is only just becoming clear, with new studies frequently emerging about some of the chemicals' links to diseases such as cancer."
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 02/12/2025
Precisely. The opening paragraph reeks of rancid, yet warmed over Brit press fetishization of Calif; as old as the supposedly new and 'innovative' firms that are worshipped.
Image of opening paragrap of Guardian article, 'It’s going much too fast’: the inside story of the race to create the ultimate AI' - "As the northern California hills scroll past, instructions flash up on screens from bosses: fix this bug; add new script. There is no time to enjoy the view. These commuters are foot soldiers in the global race towards artificial general intelligence - when AI systems become as or more capable than highly qualified humans."
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 01/12/2025
I continue to read the accounts of people and orgs such as the Electronic Intifada, Justin Podur, Mark Ames, Ali Abunimah, Lilly Lynch and others who're carrying on in the face of decay. Still, it is indeed worse... this is what greets you as the app is launched
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 19/11/2025
Reuters: 'OpenAI head and general fool, Sam Altman, desperate for "more electrons" turns for aid to one of Spiderman's oldest foes.'
1960s era cover of the comic book, The Amazing Spiderman' showing the villain Electro, shocking Spiderman
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 16/11/2025
The Trump regime is not the beginning of US fascism, it has always been oppressive, but the acceleration of a particular type. As @harrysimmons3578.bsky.social has proposed, MAGA's contradictions make space for other fascists to move. Enter Greene, who has crossed the Rubicon
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 10/11/2025
Once again for emphasis. This time, with a graphic borrowed from classic Trek and a diagram of factors I cooked up a few years ago
On the left side of the image, there's a still from classic Star Trek, showing Kirk firing a phaser rifle at a foe with no effect. This is captioned, Tech Industry Ideology vs the harsh, unforgiving facts of material reality. The right side of the image depicts the physical factors of the tech industry
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 05/11/2025
It's interesting to note that the Italian originators of European fascism in Italy (where some of the most serious scholarship still happens) fetishized a mechanistic future of speed combined with a mythologized past. Current fascists, as Alberto Toscano states, lack even this.
Cover of Alberto Toscano's book, Late Fascism
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 04/11/2025
Another lesson we can take from this marketing release thinly disguised as high level overview is that 'the west' has never been serious about addressing climate change. The ad includes this statement, then blithely goes on to say: 'let's try it even though the Earth, she burns!'
Picture of an excerpt from the article that reads as follows: "Of course, the discussion is not limited to this one topic. The use of generative Al is clearly not uncontroversial either when it comes to environmental impact, data provenance, transparency and privacy. In this blog, we only zoom in on the issue mentioned in the title"
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 03/11/2025
Look at this carbuncle's work..
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 03/11/2025
To the other suggestions, I'll add: although I think it's important to read key works (certainly Capital) the aim is to understand the method which can be applied to what we see. I find this very helpful:
Cover of Bertell Ollman's book, 'Dance of the Dialectic'
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 02/11/2025
I use the term, 'political economy' to describe how to *materially* analyze the tech industry and its 'AI' push. Here, applied dialectics, from Ollman's 'Dance of the Dialectic' and my notebook visualization.
A quote from the book, Dance of the Dialectic' -
The relation is the irreducible minimum for all units in Marx's conception of social reality. This is really the nub of our difficulty in understanding Marxism, whose subject matter is not simply society but society conceived of "relation-ally." A photo of a diagram from my notebook showing the relationship between so called AI and the material relations supporting it
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 27/10/2025
Fantastic! I've started my yearly re-read of 'Dance of the Dialectic' and Prof Sheehan's lecture is a marvelous companion, application and energizing source (and of course, I'll get the book).
Cover of the book, Dance of the Dialectic, steps in Marx's method by Bertell Ollman
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 22/10/2025
A reminder...
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 11/10/2025
The simple beauty of this decades old, imagined interface almost makes me weep. We are forced to use stone knives and bear skins with a splash of paint and advertising...
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 09/10/2025
Good luck indeed. What will these men, who've built almost their entire identities on a few companies, do when capital dries up and collapse follows? www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
Image from Bloomberg article, 'OpenAI, Nvidia Fuel $1 Trillion AI Market With Web of Circular Deals'. It depicts a collection of circles representing each company, with lines showing investment interconnections between them
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 09/10/2025
Earlier today, someone wrote, as encouragement for dismayed US-ians, that Europe overcame fascism. I propose that this isn't the case, as near uniform elite support for genocide shows and, this, from Gabriel Rockhill: www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/t...
Screenshot of Counterpunch magazine from October, 2020. It shows Gabriel Rockhill's essay: The US Did Not Defeat Fascism in WW2, It Discretely Internationalized It
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 28/09/2025
Many posting can, and should, write essays, drawing upon expertise & experience. Most lack time and encouragement to pour knowledge into words. Journalists and academics aplenty: few practitioners. Behold Verdigris. Contact us: fire your arrows into the darkness - contact@vdgasjournal.com
Image showing colorized radar scan of the surface of Venus taken by the Pioneer probe during its 1978 flyby of the plant.
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 27/09/2025
The entire 'west' and camp followers pursue the fascist path as colonialism falters. I would be remiss to fail pointing out that this was predicted by George Jackson in 1971 in his book, 'Blood in My Eye' - ia803400.us.archive.org/31/items/geo...
picture of the original cover of George Jackson's 1972 published book, Blood in my Eye. It shows a stencil image of Jackson walking
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 21/09/2025
I'm re-reading Weizenbaum and it's striking how, in the late 1970s in response to his ELIZA program, he witnessed precisely the same behavior.
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 14/09/2025
There are no 'right moves' when it comes to these platforms; all owners are enemies. My reasoning for using Twitter is plainly stated:
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 08/03/2025
In this episode of the Film Conversations podcast, my cohosts @wisehack.bsky.social and Dennis Claxton discuss Murnau's Faust (1926). As usual, we range far afield: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...
Still from the 1926 film, Faust. The necromancer, Faust, sits on a mountainside, pondering.
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 03/03/2025
Agreed! I'll only add: 1.) Deliberate lack of cybernetic knowledge, along with industry propaganda, explains the belief LLMs think. 2.) This week, I'm formally announcing a study group. We'll start with this book...
Cover of the book, The Cybernetic Brain by Andrew Pickering
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 24/02/2025
Exactly. When LLMs hit the scene, cyberneticians immediately saw the grift: AI bros pretending feedback loops are cognition. I'd like to begin a study group about the lost history generally and Stafford Beer particularly. Here's the starting text...
cover of the book, The Cybernetic Brain by Andrew Pickering
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 19/02/2025
In this announcement, Microsoft claims to have created "a new state of matter" an assertion I'd like to see analyzed by physicists who aren't on the payroll: news.microsoft.com/source/featu...
Screenshot from article: The topoconductor, or topological superconductor, is a special category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state. This is harnessed to produce a more stable qubit that is fast, small and can be digitally controlled, without the tradeoffs required by current alternatives. A new paper published Wednesday in Nature outlines how Microsoft researchers were able to create the topological qubit’s exotic quantum properties and also accurately measure them, an essential step for practical computing.
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 05/02/2025
In this essay, I argue that the snobbery long deployed against Wikipedia and blogging laid the propaganda ground for ChatGPT and other word assemblers. This is a call for more voices. monroelab.com/2025/02/05/a...
Title: Scriptorium Monk at Work.
A monk copies a text from a large book on his writing table.
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 04/02/2025
After nearly 20 years of being encouraged to overshare, it's time to return to an earlier mode: moving in silence, cultivating mystery. Your enemies are listening.
Photo of Robert Mitchum from the 1947 noir film, Out of the Past. Mitchum, in character as Jeff Markum, stands in front of door, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora. He's ringing a doorbell
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 27/01/2025
Evil never sleeps. We have recent history to guide us. It's easy to predict SV's next moves: 1.) Call for a ban 2.) Copy code 3.) Lay-off hundreds or thousands of US workers 4.) Deploy Deepseek in 'AI' data centers to get sweet federal cash while lowering runtime costs 5.) Lie
Screenshot of news headline from CNNC market that reads, Nividia falls 12% as China's Deep seek triggers global tech sell-off
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 17/01/2025
On a tech note: I'm curious to get recommendations regarding the use of open source LLMs, running within containers for infosec isolation, to build a text query engine that can answer prompts based on the content of jsons. Ideas welcome!
Promotional photo from the 1960s for the IBM 360 mainframe computer
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 01/01/2025
In this essay, I discuss the evidence Br. Hans-Benjamin-Braun has presented that a new type of nuclear weapon, a fourth generation device, was deployed in Tartus. Syria, ushering in a new age of even greater danger: monroelab.com/2025/01/01/n...
Image of an explosive detonation in Tartus, Syria with the words, Not Mutual But Assured superimosed
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 19/12/2024
Everyday, all day, tech corps such as Microsoft propagandize about the alleged capabilities of 'AI'. How to course correct? I propose returning to the study of cybernetics, a research program bastardized by the tech cartel.
Picture of the cover of the book, The Cybernetic Brain by Andrew Pickering. The book recounts the history of cybernetics in the UK
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 25/11/2024
Before publishing, I'd like to include the work and thoughts of others who are doing similar things and have resources and insights to contribute. If that's you, or someone you're aware of, DM me and I'll share a Discord link for collaboration /finis
Caravaggio painting: The Calling of St Matthew (1599-1600).
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 25/11/2024
For activists, I'm writing a resource essay on infotech best practices for Trump 2. Main arguments: 1.) Abandon Windows and MacOS - replace with secure Linux 2.) Limit phone use and adopt secure practices when using 3.) Abandon cloud; build on-premises services /1
Painting by Caravaggio: Saint Jerome writing; 1605-1606
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 17/11/2024
My proposition is that this is a fictional model of how people - the African diaspora in the US particularly - should psychologically engage with the system we're in. Marcrinus does what he must but *does not believe* Abandoning belief is the first step.
Promotional poster for Gladiator 2 showing Denzel Washington as  Macrinus, former gladiator turned wealthy mover and shaker. Macrinus works to undermine Rome
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 14/11/2024
At monroelab.com I write about the tech industry using 30 years of experience as a foundation. The analytical toolkit is on the left. The style muse is on the right. 'It is not a fragrant world' Chandler wrote. 'But it's the world you're in'
A picture of two books, laid next to each other. On the left, The Marx Engels Reader, edited by Robert C Tucker. On the right, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 13/11/2024
In recent years, this scene from the ending of the 1951 film, Day the Earth Stood still has often come to mind...
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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 13/11/2024
Lo and behold, the continuity of terror
A photo of Trump and Biden, seated next to each other in separate chairs, shaking hands in front of a fireplace in the oval office. There is irony in this photo: only weeks ago, Biden declared Trump to be the greatest threat to democracy. Now, all smiles, he welcomes him.
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