I was reading a report about drones used in archaeology and it started to bother me.

AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose

Specifically, as I reflected on what Wittgenstein taught the world, there’s a deeper philosophical point being completely missed in this rapid rise of robotic fieldwork.

Archaeology now has a genuine epistemological crisis when drone surveillance (accelerated observation) generates category confusion between reading symbols and measuring phenomena.

The Paradox of Geoglyphs

When people write that there are no written records found with the geoglyphs, I have to say the geoglyphs ARE the form of writing and recording.

We’re looking at intentional symbolic communication. Yet researchers somehow treat them as physical artifacts to be analyzed rather than texts to be read.

Imagine a pile of bones arranged to say SOS and a team of robotic archaeologists saying “we found all the bones and recorded all the designs but there were no written records to explain what SOS stands for on this mountain top.”

Genius. They might be the ones making the unfortunate next pile of bones.

A Wittgensteinian Cat

Wittgenstein would say we don’t need the cat to write “cat” for the word “cat” to have meaning. Similarly, we don’t need the Nazca people to provide a written explanation for their geoglyph of a cat to be meaningful records of a cat.

What scientists have been doing in the past is going to be creating problems when it is turned up to drone levels of discovery speed. These researchers present interpretations as hypotheses because that’s been proper scientific method: present findings and let others verify them through independent analysis.

But here’s the new visible tension: fleeting symbolic interpretation of a huge static sign isn’t the same kind of claim as a repeatable empirical measurement.

“This compound has X molecular structure” needs lab verification.

“This stop sign means stop” has verification demonstrated through observable use, which is what is reported in the first place. So scientists need to stop, otherwise they are overthinking the sign to stop.

The paradox: all the sign interpreters are transient (each generation comes and goes, their readings shift), but these hidden geoglyphs of unknown meaning sat for 2000 years basically saying the same thing with a reasonable level of certainty: cat.

“Everything flows” thus meets a giant stone message that doesn’t flow at all, and simply needs to be interpreted. The tension is treating an interpretation as the unstable thing requiring verification, when actually the sign is the stable thing and has been communicating continuously. The instability is in observation, not the observed.

Right, Heraclitus? Maybe we should put this into Plato’s cave and take a survey.

The uncertainty isn’t about what the drones found. It’s epistemological uncertainty about whether successfully interpreting symbolic communication counts as knowledge. The researchers read the text but won’t claim they’ve read it, as they only claim to have a “compelling hypothesis” about what the text might mean.

This is treating interpretation as shadow rather than direct perception of meaning.

What They Actually Found

The researchers demonstrated:

1. Relief-type geoglyphs depicting humans, domesticated animals, and decapitated heads appear along walking trails (average 43m distance)
2. Line-type geoglyphs depicting wild animals appear near ceremonial centers (average 34m distance)
3. The two types differ systematically in scale, motifs, and spatial associations

From this they conclude relief-type geoglyphs were for “sharing information about human activities with individuals or small groups” while line-type were for “community ceremonial purposes.”

That’s reading. That’s interpretation. That’s understanding meaning through use.

The Problem With Data Integrity Hypotheses

When you frame symbolic interpretation as scientific hypothesis requiring verification, you create an odd situation:

The geoglyphs were made to communicate. The researchers have understood what they communicate. But scientific protocol apparently requires framing a successful reading as tentative hypothesis about the success of reading.

It’s like finding a book, reading it, understanding it, then saying “I hypothesize an object with markings may have been for communication, pending verification by other researchers. Please read my book about what is a book.”

AI Archaeology Issues

The “intelligent” system found 303 new geoglyphs in six months with “certainty” nearly doubling the known examples. This should have meant interpretation became MORE certain by revealing clear patterns.

Instead, the scientific framing makes it sound like more data only equals more uncertainty and doubts:

“We found way more examples and must share expanded reading as only hypothesis pending distributed verification.”

The geoglyphs ARE the writing. The researchers CAN read them. Scientific protocol just won’t let them say so without the hedging generated by higher certainty in discovery methods.

Maybe that’s appropriate caution. Or maybe it’s overly STEM-centric, applying wrong epistemological frameworks to human symbolic communication in order to avoid signaling execution (while literally reading execution symbols).

Either way, I hope the next expedition doesn’t end up as bones spelling SOS while debating the meaning of north and south.

It’s counterintuitive and genuinely problematic: AI bringing better discovery methods paradoxically undermines the integrity of stating what is being discovered.

But let me dig deeper. A woman who had to flee authoritarian demands for ideological conformity spent decades documenting Nazca geoglyphs. She directly read and interpreted these ancient communications. We are in the shadow of “discovery” by a woman who spent her life freely expressing her views on ancient symbols in the desert, erecting liberal interpretations.

Reiche did fieldwork the old fashioned way, walking the desert, measuring geoglyphs by hand, making interpretations based on embodied experience. She could say “this is a monkey” or “this represents a calendar” with confidence born from humanist engagement. She sought truth in a remote region of the world far away from her home country, which by 1933 made such simple acts of confident reporting illegal.

Modern AI archaeology thus operates as an interesting regression with imposed distance overhead, using imposed pattern recognition algorithms and learned statistical analysis. This means epistemological weakness creeps in that makes its researchers less willing to claim interpretive certainty, all the while its adherents are more willing to claim superiority over human analysis.

Both Wittgenstein and Reiche trusted direct observation and pattern recognition. Wittgenstein said look at how language is actually used. Reiche said look at how desert glyphs are actually used. Both had confidence in stating what was observable.

Modern AI archaeology automates observation to gather MORE data faster but ends up with LESS confidence in stating what it shows, which means intentionally withholding any reading beyond tentative hypothesis.

Apple ICEBlock Ban is A Predictable Failure of Historical Literacy

Apple’s abrupt censorship of citizen accountability from its App Store following Justice Department pressure represents corporate complicity in authoritarian consolidation. What makes this instructive is not its novelty—there is nothing novel here—but how faithfully it reproduces historical patterns.

Know Nothingism: Weaponized Ignorance as Strategy

The 1850s Know Nothing Party deployed ignorance as methodology, not accident, to build a foundation of “invisible” racism that could seize power yet remain unaccountable. “I know nothing” created plausible deniability for violence against Irish Catholics while delegitimizing those who documented it. Contemporary “anti-woke” rhetoric operates identically: opposing consciousness of systemic injustice. To be “anti-woke” is to advocate for not noticing how power operates.

The Accountability Inversion

ICEBlock enabled citizens to observe ICE operations in public spaces—classical democratic accountability. The Justice Department reframed observation as threat: apps “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.” This inverts the logic entirely:

• Citizens observing government agents are inverted by describing them falsely as threatening those agents
• Public documentation likewise is inverted falsely as a security risk
• Observers thus are inverted falsely to be targeted as the threat requiring suppression

This is not poor reasoning. It is deliberate inversion to criminalize accountability itself. Do you remember that American white supremacist mobs of the 1800s would murder anyone who dared to report let alone oppose a racist lynching? Do you remember that by the 1900s support for such racist mob violence came from the President and federal troops? The state of how ICE is being run today is… history.

Corporate Complicity: The Banality of Apple’s Decision

Apple’s compliance requires no conspiracy theory. Corporations resist state pressure only when resistance is profitable. This is Arendt’s banality of evil in corporate form—routine bureaucratic compliance without moral consideration. Apple likely evaluated this as standard content moderation, ignoring the historical precedents and democratic implications entirely.

What makes corporations particularly effective instruments of authoritarianism: they require no ideological commitment. Profit motive suffices.

The Wilson Precedent: When Federal Power Backs Nativist Violence

Know Nothings never captured the presidency—Fillmore lost badly in 1856. But their ideology evolved into “America First” and captured the White House under Wilson (1913-1921):

• KKK propaganda screened in White House
• Federal government resegregated
• Institutional legitimacy provided to white supremacist violence

Result: Red Summer 1919 (coordinated massacres across dozens of cities), Tulsa 1921 (police deputizing rioters, National Guard participating, aerial bombing of citizens, mass graves hidden for a century).

This is what happens when Know Nothing ideology acquires federal backing: mob violence becomes state policy, observation becomes criminalized, accountability mechanisms are systematically dismantled.

The Current Pattern: Federal Authority Deployed Against Accountability

We are not at the beginning. We are observing the pattern’s return:

• Presidential military deployments protecting ICE from public observation
• Justice Department pressuring technology platforms
• Federal troops deployed to multiple cities despite local opposition
• Systematic reframing of observation as aggression

The Suicidal Logic of Cook’s Decision

Tim Cook is an openly gay man. By the 1920s KKK era—the culmination of Know Nothing ideology achieving federal power—he would have been explicitly targeted. The KKK’s enemies list: African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and “sexual deviants.” No amount of wealth provided immunity.

Cook has now established precedent that Apple will remove accountability applications at federal request. He has built, tested, and validated the censorship mechanism for an “America First” administration using 1920s terminology.

Delving into archival research, Weil found that Bullitt and Freud saw Wilson as a neurotic obsessed with his father, whom he both deeply loved and hated, and that the image of his father was later projected into other characters who first were his friends and later his enemies. Bullitt and Freud also found that Wilson had an unconscious bisexual desire that drove his love-hate relationships. Finally, the conversation offers some reflections on the difficulties presidential systems have in screening mentally unfit candidates for their positions and getting rid of them when they seem unable to fulfill their duties.

A President unfit for the job who hates his father? Sounds familiar.

What Cook actually did was hand an unfit President’s Justice Department proof that Apple’s infrastructure can be weaponized for state information control. When enforcement operations expand their targets—and historically, they always do—the mechanism for suppressing documentation already exists. Should the administration demand removal of apps enabling LGBTQ+ individuals to document harassment or identify safe spaces, would Apple refuse? They have already established they comply with federal pressure to remove basic transparency and accountability tools.

Historical Illiteracy as Strategic Failure

The story that comes to mind is of Nazi Party founder Ernst Röhm, the gay “Stormtrooper” commander who helped Hitler consolidate power, presumably believing his position made him exempt from an ideology that hated him. Like many people who helped Hitler seize power in 1933, Röhm was executed by Hitler in 1934. Marginalized individuals who enable authoritarian movements consistently believe there will be exceptions made for just them. History demonstrates otherwise.

Wealthy Greenwood District residents during Tulsa. Jewish collaborators in various regimes. The pattern is consistent: collaboration purchases temporary delay, not safety. Wealth makes targets more visible, not safer.

Gay rights movements specifically studied how Nazis targeted LGBTQ+ individuals incrementally, how oppression infrastructure was built gradually, how collaboration purchased only temporary safety. Cook knows this history. He built the censorship tool anyway.

Know Nothing ideology, when it achieves federal power, expands targeting systematically. The KKK did not stop with African Americans. Enforcement machinery, once established, does not remain narrowly focused.

And the accountability tools that might document that expansion? Cook just removed them. At federal request to deny transparency into activity of law enforcement. Who needs a backdoor when you no longer are allowed to report who is coming through the front door?

One struggles to identify a historical precedent for this level of collaborative suicide dressed as pragmatic business decision. Cook has armed his ideological enemies—who explicitly use the terminology of movements that targeted people like him—with the censorship infrastructure they will deploy against him, while demonstrating Apple will comply with federal demands to remove accountability mechanisms.

This is not speculation. This is pattern recognition from easily accessible historical record. The question is whether democratic institutions retain sufficient strength to impose costs for this decision, or whether we have progressed too far for corporate behavior to be meaningfully constrained.

Apple’s Revealing Choice

Total capitulation to the latest “America First” demands from the White House are particularly striking given Apple’s history. The company famously claimed to have fought the FBI’s demand to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, refused to create backdoors for law enforcement, and positioned itself as defending user privacy against state overreach. Cook personally testified before Congress on these principles, as if to say “I fought the law and won”.

Instead we see today the same Apple—which spent years and considerable resources resisting federal pressure when it involved encryption and privacy—immediately complied when asked to remove simple accountability tools that track government enforcement operations. This reveals what the company actually values. Protecting consumer data had some sort of business case: it differentiated Apple’s products and justified premium pricing. Apparently protecting citizens’ from abuse by government overreach, even just the ability to observe state power, suddenly has no such case?

The company that fought for its own right to say no back doors surrendered away the right of its users to say no back doors. Apple’s principles, it turns out, are so selfish as to extend exactly as far as their own market advantage. When federal pressure threatens consumer trust in Apple product security, resist. When it targets citizen apps bringing transparency to government operations, comply immediately.

Cook has demonstrated which historical pattern Apple will follow: not the resistance that built the company’s privacy reputation, but the complicity that characterizes corporate behavior when democratic accountability conflicts with political convenience. The FBI fight revealed Apple’s capacity for resistance. The New Know Nothing’s cancellation of ICEBlock reveals its limits.