Scary how that reminds me of the Rio Grande corridor down to Albuquerque. Maybe in winter, or under forest fire smoke. Was that part of the design prompt?
But very useful, Stephen; thank you. It’s funny; I wasn’t actually thinking about data cows, though that is very available here, and the written part below is really quite a great summary. I have continued to wrestle with a certain specific set of assertions, which to me were totalizing. Not only data, but the whole pro-natalism program, the Amazon driver-eye-tracking surveillance, and on and on. Total possession and disposal of what formerly were called people. The assertion is one that I first got from Arendt, and probably mentioned here. She distinguishes between party fascism and movement fascism, and says there was something very important that (somebody; in the day (?)) had failed to grasp: that the Parties wanted to control the government, while the Movements wanted to destroy the government. Parties and Movements are two categories for her, which she doesn’t ever “define”, but just starts referring to and kind of fills in by context. As if those were current terms among the readership she had in mind. Snyder, in some recent essaying, has been making not-the-same point, but one using the same assertion: that what people are not getting is that the destruction by the MAGA Honchos isn’t incidental to some other point; that it is itself the point. And that the cabal who envision a Really Different Future are conscious and deliberate about this. They imagine that they see something that will make their power sufficient to whatever it is they want, and the destruction of the “country” as a place that hosts “citizens” and all those related concepts, is explicitly a step to get there. I have no way to know if this language is always in the air for historians, or if Snyder inherits it as a point from Arendt or others who preceded him. So I don’t know if I should take these as independently formed insights, or repetitions of one same thing. But he wasn’t using that language a few months ago, the way he is now regularly. More memes running through the discourse. Eric > On Sep 3, 2026, at 10:19, Stephen Guerin <[email protected]> wrote: > > woah, Eric S, love the CAFO metaphor - I had to look up the acronym for > Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (feedlots) > > it gave me a better visual for the cloud companies and their data centers. My > AI Slop rendering: > > <cafo.jpg> > > My AI Slop Summary: > In the CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) metaphor, human users > cease to be sovereign agents and are reduced to captive "data cows," grazing > on algorithmically synthetic feed while centralized data centers function as > industrial feedlots engineered for continuous behavioral and biological > extraction. Rather than enabling autonomous movement across an open, > peer-to-peer digital commons, each cloud titan fences off human activity > within proprietary pens to harvest high-yield telemetry, attention, and > cognitive labor. Within these computational complexes, every interaction is > quantified, concentrated, and processed into predictive models or metered > rents, stripping the human commons into an industrialized resource base where > escape is foreclosed by deliberate technical friction, network lock-in, and > legal enclosures. > > Across the industrial landscape, each major cloud operator runs a specialized > processing line within its data center infrastructure: Meta operates the > affective agitation feedlot, where engagement algorithms provoke emotional > volatility to extract behavioral surplus for hyper-targeted advertising; > Google runs the zero-click information corral, ingesting global search > intent, ambient Android location, and video dwell times to process human > curiosity into programmatic auctions; Amazon manages a dual-sided marketplace > pen and logistics abattoir, using fulfillment monopsonies, platform ad-tolls, > and AWS compute meters to squeeze both sellers and consumers; Microsoft > maintains the white-collar corporate pen, capturing workplace enterprise > telemetry through mandatory OS, identity (Entra ID), and Copilot > subscriptions; Apple runs the gilded luxury paddock, using hardware > sandboxing, ecosystem tethers, and App Store tolls to extract recurring rents > under the banner of security; OpenAI and Anthropic operate the high-density > cognitive rendering plants, scraping the digital intellectual commons to > digest human language into proprietary token-inference engines; Epic Systems > encloses clinical healthcare into administrative vaults, processing patient > biometrics and doctor workflows into un-exportable electronic silos; Esri > runs the spatial registry pen, turning public geography, civil > infrastructure, and hazard response into metered proprietary service credits; > Adobe and Autodesk manage specialized creative and architectural cages, > locking design files behind perpetual cloud subscriptions; while Oracle and > Broadcom serve as the corporate extraction facilities, leveraging audit > threats, architectural dependency, and sudden 300% to 1,000% hypervisor rate > hikes to strip-mine trapped enterprise IT departments. > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Stephen Guerin > CEO, Founder > https://simtable.com > <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fsimtable.com&c=E,1,aser_-Ofcf43lLHEFgZbSdpW8uTE_2deEFrWduPoDxU6AyEkjbUJ0f3qrEWZSTFbJJPb5CpE3DGik9o4RQ5Fd5goK-9ojgcjFz-eryMEQmwNLe1v&typo=1> > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Visualization Research and Teaching Lab > <https://hwpi.harvard.edu/eps-visualization-research-laboratory/home> > Harvard Earth and Planetary Science > Landscape Architecture > <https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2025/02/landscape-architecture-students-explore-pioneering-climate-visualization-techniques-to-inform-design/> > Harvard Graduate School of Design > > mobile: (505)577-5828 > > > On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 6:48 PM Santafe <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> I noticed, somewhere else, too, that Anne Applebaum has now started to use >> the term “predators” explicitly to refer to the various oligarchs and the >> relatively small and connected band of people trying to end the society and >> turn it into a CAFO. It has been about time for that term to be one of the >> standards for a while too. Not just in the generic term “predatory >> capitalism”, which is also correct in some ways but has been both >> long-enough used, and rhetorically over-used enough, to have become >> semantically bleached. Applebaum’s use is more specific and meant to draw a >> role distinction in a place and a time. The predator group are the thing >> that will still be here when trump is gone, and that is what the world both >> knows and needs to come up with some plan to deal with, if there is a path >> to be found through this that isn’t pretty miserable. >> > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... > --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,w9glZGvIvSYJRqEGS4i-tq9tGGoj1NMC-Veu6-8G9xJKEFolQWzyhjzLwYen4MzciZl_hA2Vg6aoBxdQ6H-a5b_jb_vWoh4TW2HdmvqT6a5zpwE,&typo=1 > to (un)subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,d_yVdoMSCLkeMipiNKSVi7UQfYNQ-6fNM_iOR7E-kYTZiSbgPd3rpdNFFN52QviXAdp1nkTA-wqgM1LxT6yYUFCOLxYd08LSpKOpc_I_VzENlmrP8GwCtA,,&typo=1 > FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,wOZDVjaXvXhfH7bMK8TwxelnxmR5OFPhi9nQgDjVftm7PE0h3MiWRPXixCSBlmNoyf2UPi6arrU5pp9zIn7iiWu7Mcs2rw3cCIFMczkoBDmYsCi4mzuyAGLi6BsP&typo=1 > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,IeljYyYd6Yz1xEWkAa3Y2frMcqW_qUnG4qPVQbIfAqlursKUmEHwOfFVgdgwSX8vHQeJBEe3vvqypVMdxk-qOhZNrambVJKx1zoS8TJIEQ,,&typo=1 > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
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