Monday, 27 April 2026

404 (13. 388)

Taking up even more bandwidth than the legion of MAGA influencers promoting the East Wing Ballroom and bunker as vital for national security, the resounding attitude that the show must gone on and its best to avert one’s eyes rather than forfeit one’s place at the table that demonstrates the inuring unseriousness of America and its desensitisation to violence, authentic or contrived and willingness to squander diplomatic opportunities in the midst of war, leaving Tehran to negotiate with Moscow and reach a concession to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with no guarantee to halt nuclear enrichment, casus belli, status quo ante bellum, and the German chancellor left to point out the humiliation to a class of students, we have the latest viral conspiracy theory that a time-travelling artificial superintelligence is inserting checkpoints on the internet timeline to warn people about the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and forestall other catastrophes to providentially keep Trump in office, now that actual divine intervention has been ruled out following his attacks on the papacy. 404 media co-founder Jason Koebler undertakes a yeoman’s task in trying to offer an explanation for this widely-shared notion that a tweet from 2023 from one Henry Martinez, the name of a co-author from a NASA study conducted while the alleged shooter was fulfilling an internship at the space agency in 2014, somehow shows that AI is trying to retcon the Singularity, Terminator-style. Proponents are saying that the image on the right is a sort of coded magic-eye illusion that foretells of all sorts of events to come (retroactively of course, but the image is not from some shadowy AI free agent called the “Time Machine” but a stock illustration that debuted on Unsplash under the name “Eternal Waterfall” and has been used, like many free graphics, to cross-promote a variety of both innocent and nefarious ideas.