MORC – CounterVortex

Podcast: West Bank at genocidal threshold

The three-year commemoration of the October 7 attacks saw ugly manifestations around the world of the growing atmosphere of polarization and dogmatism on the Israel-Palestine dilemma. There is, alas, the grave potential for everything to get much worse. Benjamin Netanyahu, under siege politically within Israel, is seeking not only a re-occupation of Gaza, but to extend the eliminationist project to the West Bank. In Episode 349 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes stock. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo: RJA1988 via Jurist)

Podcast: #ResistRobotRule

CounterVortex editor and ranter Bill Weinberg faces imminent cancelation of his landline service by corporate oppressor Verizon. As fiber-optic is not available in his building, this makes cable the only alternative—which means drilling through exterior walls, threatening the structural integrity of the 19th century tenement. This as the Countervortex website remains debilitated following an attack by Chinese state-sponsored hackers. With this dissident voice in danger of being silenced, the system of corporate rule is increasingly replaced by worse-still actual robot rule. Trump and the fascist tech bros are putting in place the architecture for direct robot control over the military-security apparatus, and even of imperial decision-making. Robo-propaganda has already thoroughly colonized the political process, both in the US and elsewhere. All this as the ecological impacts of the technology contiue to propel the apocalypse. In Episode 348 of the CounterVortex podcast, Weinberg looks for glimmers of hope in municipal pushback, and popular refusal of aritifical intelligence and the entire digital leviathan. (Image: Darrin Grimwood via Goodreads)

Podcast: whither the Butlerian Jihad?

Protests happily continue to mount against the rapid encroachment of Artificial Intelligence over all spheres of society—and have met with some victories. Other responses, however, appear to have succumbed to desperation and counter-productive adventurism. But even the United Nations human rights commissioner has taken note amid repeated incidents of AI programs "going rogue," and more industry insiders coming forward to warn of catastrophic risks to humanity. Bernie Sanders has called for legislating a pause on "superintelligent" AI. Meanwhile, in a virtually regulation-free environment, so-called "biological data centers" are pioneering the neural-digital interface—portending the actual abolition of humanity. In Episode 347 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes how the predicament now facing humanity was predicted by dystopian prophets—from Samuel Butler in the 1860s, to Frank Herbert a century later. (Image via Instagram)

Podcast: #Chinamaxxing & the betrayal of Tibet

As Trump prepares to meet with Xi Jinping at the White House, Students for a Free Tibet prepares a protest in Washington against the Chinese dictator. Protests and civil disobedience actions by New York City's Tibetan community have mounted since the July self-immolation of longtime activist Lobga Rangzen outside the United Nations building—the first in the wave of Tibetan self-immolations to take place on US soil. This comes amid heightening repression in Tibet following the passage of China's "Ethnic Unity" law. Rather than taking this opportunity to forge bonds of solidarity with a local ethnic community by embracing its struggle, growing sectors of the "progressive" milieu—including figures associated with the Democratic Socialists of America—have joined those elements of the "left" looking to the oppressive Chinese state as a model and even a source of sponsorship. Happily, there are glimmers of dissent within the DSA to this consolidating dogma. In Episode 346 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg again dissects and repudiates the global divide-and-rule racket that is the essence of the state system. (Photo: Lhak Sam via Facebook)

9-11, fascism & the #PostTruth pathology

Amid the politicized ugliness and street skirmishes around the 25th anniversary of 9-11 in New York City, a conspiracy-theory confab convenes, glorifying MAGA martyr Charlie Kirk and headlining such high-profile dictator-propagandists and reactionary charlatans as Roger Waters, Jimmy Dore and Ben Swann—indicating that a significant swath of the ostensible "left" has surrendered to the lure of fascism. In Episode 345 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg again dissects the emerging Red-Brown alliance. (Photo: BG On The Scene)

Hindutva, Zionism and the Brad Lander incident

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), pillar of India's ruling fascistic ideology of Hindutva, held a rally in New York City—which was happily met with a large protest outside Madison Square Garden. Some protesters drew a parallel between Kashmir and Palestine, an obvious connection given the Zionist-Hindutva anti-Muslim axis. However, progressive Congressional candidate Brad Lander—an opponent of military aid to Israel and a supporter of Israel's anti-war opposition—was accosted at the protest for being a "Zionist." This is mirrored in a similar incident in San Francisco, when another Jewish Democratic candidate, Scott Wiener, was driven from a Trans Pride event in Dolores Park. In Episode 344 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg attempts to cut through the propaganda and provide some clarity on the issues at play here. (Photo: Yashica Dutt via Facebook)

Podcast: In defense of real life

With the CounterVortex website debilitated by Chinese state-sponsored hackers, chief blogger and ranter Bill Weinberg takes heart in the vibrant scene unfolding this summer in the Lower East Side's Tompkins Square Park—which was kicked off with the anti-tech fest Summer of Ludd. In an historical comparison, Weinberg reads from the December 1966 issue of Paul Krassner's The Realist, in which Robert Anton Wilson wrote on the "cybercultural revolution," and from the Winter 2025 issue of Berkeley anarchist zine Slingshot, in which Anthony Moser rants against Artificial Intelligence. Moser notes how Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki dissed AI-generated anime as "an insult to life itself"—only to have ChatGPT retaliate by targeting his Studio Ghibli for appropriation. In Episode 343, the CounterVortex podcast offers a vigorous defense of authentic human culture, the material world, and real life. (Photo: CounterVortex)

Podcast: politics of the NYC synagogue attack

Following the attack on Manhattan's historic Central Synagogue, Jewish establishment voices are calling for stepped up surveillance and policing. But the threat, alas, is real. The assailant spewing the "fake Jews" epithet indicates either that he has been indoctrinated by the Neturei Karta cult, which holds all Jews outside their micro-schism to be apostate, or the "Khazar thesis"—just barely laundered anti-Semitism, inevitably linked to ugly stereotyped images of evil Jews and wacky conspiracy theories. Cynical attempts to blame Mayor Mamdani for the attack are predictable. Alas, some figures on the political left really have traded in denialism about the reality that the attack was, in fact, an anti-Semitic attack. This is linked to a more general denialism on much of the "left" about the very existence of Jewish ethnicity. Efforts to weaponize anti-Semitism to silence pro-Palestinian voices are to be opposed, but do not mean anti-Semitism doesn't exist—or change the reality that any legitimate anti-Zionism must be committed to fighting anti-Semitism in the diaspora. In Episode 342 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg again breaks it down. (Image: Wikipedia)

Podcast: geopolitics of The Odyssey

The righties are apoplectic that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey famously portrays a Black Helen—displaying their ignorance of the actual intercourse between Africa and the ancient Greek world. But apart from the cultural politics of the movie, the geopolitics of the Trojan War have all too much to say about the contemporary world crisis. Then, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles constituted the strategic chokepoints at issue, just as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb do today. And the Bosphorus & Dardanelles could suddenly become critically strategic if Turkey becomes embroiled in either the Middle East war or the Ukraine war—or both. The current world crisis could bring about a civilization collapse far more decisive and complete than the Bronze Age Collapse that followed the Trojan War. In Episode 341 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks it down. (Map: BestQuest)

Podcast: Resist digital hegemony! V

Eighty-one years after Nagasaki, there is growing awareness of the heightening threat of nuclear war. There must be similar awareness of the existential threat to humanity posed by AI, and the hegemony of digital technology generally. The past week has seen cyber-attacks on critical water infrastructure in the US. The Flock AI-boosted surveillance system is being used for doxxing and stalking. Police use of "brain decoders" portends the very eradication of any notion of privacy whatsoever. And there have been still more instances of AI going rogue. The growing use of AI by cyber-criminals and jihadis is hardly more terrifying than its "legitimate" (sic) use by the techno-fascist establishment. Recent protests against the tech giants (such as that by Rise & Resist outside the Google headquarters in New York) are a good start. But in Episode 340 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to make the case for an abolitionist position on Artificial Intelligence—and practical resistance to digital hegemony in everyday life. (Photo: CounterVortex)

AI: the case for abolition II

The popular case against the data centers now proliferating vertiginously across the United States emphasizes the ecological imperative. As water resources shrink, forcing emergency restrictions on use across the western states, voracious water consumption by the industry is just one of the ways its advance portends imminent human extinction. Meanwhile, the industry slaps back in the courts against communities that would stand up against this advance. But Artificial Intelligence itself poses an existential threat, apart from the direct impacts of the computing power. Even respected voices in the industry warn of a high probability that AI will turn upon and destroy its creators. The bots themselves seem to be warning us of this through ominous messaging. Seeming instances of AI going unilateral have prompted a bipartisan AI Kill Switch bill in Congress. Finally, there is the systematic cultural destruction being wrought by AI—literally shredding humankind's legacy of literacy, to impose a reign of sheer error and idiocy. In Episode 339 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to make the case for an abolitionist position on Artificial Intelligence. (Image: Pixabay via Wikimedia Commons)

AI: geopolitics or abolition?

Nationwide protests against data centers and even demands to stop the AI race constitute a significant glimmer of hope as Artificial Intelligence colonizes every sphere of human existence with terrifying rapidity. The movement, however, faces potential pitfalls that could be fatal. The emergence of stochastic attacks on the AI bosses represents counter-productive adventurism seemingly informed by an ugly primitivism. An equal but opposite threat is exploitation of the movement by elements that really have no critique of the technology at all, but only seek to see it advance under Chinese rather than American techno-oligarchs—specifically the cultish and reactionary "Party for Socialism & Liberation" (sic). PSL is indeed an instrument through which the rulers of China (and Russia) are attempting to groom oppositional forces in the US. This provides convenient fodder for propaganda that would portray any opposition to the AI economy as a tool of Beijing's ambitions to global dominance of the industry. As struggles against data centers now emerge in places like the Philippines, it is critical that we take a Neither East Nor West position and repudiate the global divide-and-rule racket that is the essence of the state system. In Episode 338 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to make the case for an uncompromising abolitionist position on Artificial Intelligence. (Photo: Rachel Bujalski/Stop the AI Race)