The Handmaid's Tale: a long, sad, boring mockery of contemporary society

I finally forced myself to watch The Handmaid's Tale. 

My intuition was right. It's a long, boring TV show. The story is promising - but rarely convinces. There's no suspension of reality. Low expectations, low quality. 

But it's a show that needed to be made. 

It's a mockery of contemporary religion, superstition, demagoguery, and politics. And we needed to challenge them.

We take religion and politics so seriously, now. So we don't even recognize demagoguery anymore. 

So the show is actually a very sad, sad form of Monty Python. 

We needed this serious, lugubre, boring, sad movie, to mock ourselves, and our society.

It's not tech acceleration. It's an avalanche

I'm reading the printed Financial Times and Daily Mail - for the first time in maybe 10 years. 

Courtesy of Austrian Airlines, who offers wifi, but internet connection not working, so only static content is available (i.e. scanned newspapers). 

Very interesting experience. The gap between online and offline content is amazing.

The printed version is interesting. But... static. No search /filter /browse. Not summarizable. No right-click for additional details, or research /deep search. 

This is a good moment to realize how fast our world is changing. Today's society is significantly different from 10 years ago. The tools used now are so different. It's not only a change between generations. A 10 year gap in learning /re-training is now enormous: it makes you obsolete.

THIS TRANSFORMATION made me change significantly my view on the speed of history, and tech acceleration.

Until a few years ago, I thought that the acceleration was an illusion. A time bias, when we consider recent events as more important than distant events. A kind of speed fallacy, where the nearest objects seem faster than distant objects. I thought that 50k years ago, innovation was as fast as today, but we cannot see it from our distance. (Except for propagation, which obviously was much slower - information travelled by foot, not by internet).

I no longer believe that the transformation is linear.

SEE: there was almost no difference between the tools used 1 mil years ago, and 100k years ago. We used pretty much the same stone tools, or pottery. If you woke up after 5k years, your life wouldn't change very much.

There was almost no difference between the agriculture of 5k years ago, and 300 years ago. If you woke up in a hundred years, you would use similar tools, and grow similar crops.

BUT if you now work in any blue-collar job (modern farm, retailer, factory, delivery, distribution), you operate robots, drones, and satellites that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Or, if you work in a white-collar job, any job that handles information, then you use email and internet that didn't exist 30 years ago; and E-commerce, CRM, videoconference, cloud, content, collaboration, analytics, and productivity tools that didn't exist 5-10 years ago.

Even more: we use AI today, which didn't exist 1 year ago. 

So, printed newspapers, or any static content, are now anacronic.

Of course some people still read printed news. Well, some people are still hunting and gathering, aren't they. But printed information is already anacronic.

We cannot afford to ignore the technology avalanche. 

We live in a completely new world, every year.

The modern "iron-carbon civilization" predicted by Isac Asimov

 Isac Asimov perfectly predicted (in 1950) our social resistance to AI.

We are afraid of technology (we always are).

Afraid of losing jobs - to robots.

Ethical issues.

Fear of the unknown. Fear of change.

In his novels, Asimov designed and examined societies with few stupid robots, and with few very smart robots; societies that rely on massive cheap robot labour; balanced societies; as well as societies largely manipulated by robots.

He invented the concept of "iron-carbon civilization", to describe the dynamics of humans and robots/AI, how we learn to cooperate, and coexist.

This is what we witness today !

We learn what AI is, and does. 

We get INCREDIBLE economic benefits.

We revolt, and resist. 

We define artificial rules for what AI-generated art is, vs. "real" art. 

We create AI agents to simulate exactly what we do. We bitch that AI cannot imitate us perfectly.

We detect AI-generated work, and then we train AI agents to avoid detection.

We are afraid.

We adapt.

We live in tremendous times. 

[Social experiment: this post has zero-AI. Did anyone notice? Is this good, or bad?]

The Cookie & AI Banner is coming to the EU

Get ready for Cookie-Banner.v2 — aka the “Cookie & AI Banner.” Every app and website in Europe will display the notification: “this site uses cookies and AI.” And a purple magic wand, because these days everything is “AI-powered,” and AI seems to love purple.

The new EU AI Act starts applying transparency rules in August 2026. Chapter IV, Article 50 (“Transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems”) requires explicit disclosure in several cases: users must be informed when they interact with AI systems; AI-generated content must be marked as artificial; and deepfakes or certain AI-generated public-interest texts must be disclosed as AI-generated or manipulated. 

Which is funny, because AI is already mainstream: 30–40% of people already use generative AI tools.

So, all websites and apps will simply modify the cookie banner to mention AI.

And, the new Cookie & AI banner will be exactly as useless, irrelevant, and ignored by everyone, as the current one.

Religion is anachronistic. Shared myths are essential to darwinistic success

Religion is anachronistic.

It is astonishing that they still exist in our age of information, logic, and science.

Well, superstitions are not necessarily (reverse) correlated to advance in science - physics, mathematics, chemistry, or biology. But they should have been correlated to advances in thinking and logic.

I expected modern men to reject religion by using simple logic. Scientific skepticism, the Socratic method, 3,000 years old tools. What is new is not the methods themselves, but the quantity (to speak in Hegelian terms). 

I.e., 2500 years ago, only 1 in 100,000 people learned proof, evidence, syllogism, inference.

The change over the last 200 years, however, has been dramatic - not only qualitatively, but quantitatively. Literacy and access to knowledge reached phenomenal levels: 95% of the population can read and watch videos about these topics, about Plato, evolution, the scientific method. And yet, despite exposure to evidence and logic, people still believe that the Earth was created by an imaginary being in six days. And then He rested, got sleepy, and forgot about the dinosaurs.

That is why I am shocked. A thousand years ago, fine - nobody had heard of Plato, nobody knew how to read, nobody went to school. So people muttered (sic) religious sermons, because that was all they heard from the local priest — semi-illiterate himself.

But I would have expected that today, with so much information available, 90% of the population would have some kind of intellectual revelation. To say: “Wait, this is nonsense: gods, creationism, miracles, hell, purgatory, sin, saints.”

But that didn’t happen. It is a fascinating social phenomenon. The overwhelming majority still believes in imaginary friends, gods, saints, miracles, relics, creationism.

The phenomenon is phenomenal (sic). It shows that social bonds, and the importance of myths in social construction, overwhelmingly outweigh logic or science in terms of their importance for evolutionary, Darwinian success.

Communities that believe in shared superstitions and myths achieve greater evolutionary success. From a sociological perspective, that is an extraordinary conclusion.