#algorithms — ROBOTJEANS

#algorithms

2 items

Digital Folklore

Apr 23, 2026 · 8 min read

The Invisible Persuader: How AI Became the Internet's Favorite Explanation for Everything

The belief that AI is secretly managing your opinions has become one of the internet's most viral ideas. It spreads through the same feeds it claims to be warning you about.

‘BLOCKADE’: The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

Someone sat down, thought real hard, and came up with the acronym BLOCKADE — Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism — which tells you everything you need to know about the people running this operation before you read a single word of the actual article. The program feeds books into an AI and scores them against a list of roughly 300 words ranked by how offensive they are to conservative values, which is a definition the AI itself gets to decide, because apparently the humans involved ran out of opinions halfway through and handed the rest off to a chatbot. One school district in Texas has already pulled over 1,400 books from its shelves while the budget to buy new ones sits frozen, which is the kind of number that tends to get lost in the discussion about whether the algorithm is biased. The whole enterprise is being sold back to the same districts it helped overwhelm, at five dollars a scan, which is either the most efficient grift of the decade or proof that someone out there has been paying very close attention to how this country works.