Hi there. My name is Matei Stanca and I make websites and stuff.
Featured project
Neurocracy


Neurocracy aims to be equal parts interactive fiction and cautionary tale about the intersection of surveillance capitalism, big data, and authoritarianism. This is conveyed through the medium of a futuristic equivalent of Wikipedia known as Omnipedia, in which the reader is presented with articles and information in a familiar format so that they may piece together the history and events of the year 2049.
Latest snippets
"It made me feel like I was eavesdropping"
The workers with knowledge of the project said it was initially intended to improve the chatbot’s voice capabilities, and the number of sexual or vulgar requests quickly turned it into an NSFW project.
“It was supposed to be a project geared toward teaching Grok how to carry on an adult conversation,” one of the workers said. “Those conversations can be sexual, but they’re not designed to be solely sexual.”
“I listened to some pretty disturbing things. It was basically audio porn. Some of the things people asked for were things I wouldn’t even feel comfortable putting in Google,” said a former employee who worked on Project Rabbit.
“It made me feel like I was eavesdropping,” they added, “like people clearly didn’t understand that there’s people on the other end listening to these things.”
A rude technology deserves a rude response
Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms, the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output, the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides, the problems with consent and copyright, the way AI tech companies further the patterns of empire, how it’s a con that enables fraud and disinformation and harassment and surveillance, the exploitation of workers, as an excuse to fire workers and de-skill work, how they don’t actually reason and probability and association are inadequate to the goal of intelligence, how people think it makes them faster when it makes them slower, how it is inherently mediocre and fundamentally conservative, how it is at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy, defined not by its technical features but by its political ones.
[…]
I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money.
AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway

Angela Collier nailed exactly how the big tech hype and misleading claims would go when she posted this in 2023.