Fascism is changing everything America thinks it knows about itself, and people are really not grasping the extent of that. I keep hearing about all the court cases dude has lost, all the success the opposition has had in this or that political arena. But what do any of those victories amount to, while a fascist is president? Hey stop doing evil, says the court. No, says the fuhrer. Conversation over.
Ditto unions. A lot of federal employees are in unions, like AFGE. Their contracts are being ignored. They put those union dues to use, sue for injunctions, for damages. Who is responsible for enforcing those judgments? It’s fuckin’ over, guys. The unions and lawyers aren’t convinced yet, plugging away like laws still exist.
I believe there is a very outside chance dems pull a legislative coup out of the midterms, but they are up against absolute corruption, absolute power over so many states including some of the swingers, and against the apathy of blue voters who are paralyzed with a sense of doom. Honestly, pitching the last election with doom, as real as the risk was, may have helped the nazis. And now that the doom is here, is manifest, you think those voters are going to feel any more like they have a chance to win, like it’s worth getting up and trying? I hope they do, but it’s not looking great, and even if they do, who’s to say their votes will be counted?
Beating this is going to take something else. I can’t say what. It’ll probably be a combination of lots of things. But they aren’t going to look like they did before. We have some historical examples to look to, of other countries that pulled it off, that shook off corrupt right wing governments. However, this brings us to another problem.
Technology is changing everything about human society, surveillance, and warfare, and people are really not grasping the extent of that. I’m very much pro-AI (don’t @ me bro), but that is one of many tools of oppression we’ll have to contend with. Remember when the NSA got carte blanche to record everything anyone says anywhere forever, within spittin’ distance of electronic devices? As if they needed that permission in the first place?
We could kinda laugh it off. How will they sift through all that information? It became a meme, your google search terms putting you on a government watch list. Well now the NSA can work up an LLM to read information in minutes that would have taken agents centuries to get through. They can use that data much more easily now. Every phone call you’ve ever had, it’s reading material. Hope you were speaking backwards Assyrian when you said how much you wanna gank the pigs in 2006.
I say people don’t get this because they keep talking like this tech can be opposed. You can war of words this all you want, make legal cases (good luck not empowering IP lawyers to own your entire soul in the process), have a million people in the streets doing a hootenanny about it, but you can’t stop it. Now that it’s here, it’s too easy to use. Script kiddies with a few thousand dollars worth of hardware can run an LLM. I don’t think the NSA is going to be too concerned about your folk songs.
I’m not saying it’s hopeless. I’m just saying y’all aren’t having the right conversations yet. I don’t know what the right conversation looks like, but this isn’t it. Marcus’s blog has a convo going about the warfare side of things, and it’s getting close. The future of warfare is here, but money-wasters are still playing with jets that have a human inside. Anyone selling those is just a con artist at this point. There’s no reason for humans to direct any of this. If you’re going to do war now, you build up your drone and missile infrastructure and protect it. You tell Skynet it’s go time, then sit back as it purées your enemy with airborne death. Even without nukes, it’s a nightmare vision. Kissinger levels of evil.
Bringing it back to the intersection of tech and fascism, social media is another genie you can’t stuff back in the bottle. It’s here and it’s controlled by nazis, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Try to get Joe Shit to understand Mastodon, see how far you get. The main run of human conversation is subject to Fuckerberg’s accelerationist algorithms. How can you jam that signal? What can you do?
These things are all designed from centuries of experience with manipulation by politicians and businesses and religions, refined and turbo-charged by technology and money. Slot machines were good but online casinos and video games with microtransactions are better. Uploading Protocols of the Elders of Zion to usenet with your 14.4 modem is good, but buying out every platform of human communication and flooding them with Birch-flavored aggrievement politics is better. These techniques rely on humans being fools, and humans cannot resist them. We will not. We’re not smart enough, in masses. We see a picture of coke on the screen and we take a sip from our 64 ounce bladder-destroyer, watching Sell U Bobbleheads VIII in iMax.
How will these things be fought? Lots of ways, I’m sure. We can look at things that were done in the past. A lot of people are looking. But it isn’t going to look like it did in East Germany. And it damn well isn’t going to look like the democratic party’s facebook page. The web-based side of this is especially exciting. What would it take to wipe out the internet and phone service, globally? How long before that happens? What will it look like?
I just think too much discussion blithely assumes we’re still living in the world of the past, with cosmetic differences. We are in a full-fledged cyberpunk dystopia, and until the coming Mad Max era hits, we have to operate in the world we’re living in now, if we have any hope of making it better. Again, don’t know what that will look like, but we’ll never figure it out if we don’t change the discourse.
What would Johnny Mnemonic do?
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JM got himself an AI patron.
I’m sanguine; people and societies are quite adaptable; sometimes, it’s generational change, but we’re all swept along.
(Adapt or suffer)
I’m a little drunk now, and I’m going on vacation after work tomorrow, so I’m in a mood to be a little flighty. Who knows what I’ll be writing below.
Orwell’s 1984 has been read by every western schoolchild for several generations now. Probably a lot of eastern schoolchildren have read the novel too. But there is one aspect that I almost never see discussed, but is critically important to what Orwell was writing about. The proletariat is reasonably happy.
This crops up in a number of Orwell’s writings. Revolutions come from the middle-class, from people who have had a taste of power and want more. Revolutions do not come from the lower class, who have accepted that their lives can be disrupted at any time by the ruling class. The lower class keep their heads down, they don’t attract attention to themselves. They want to earn enough money to live, with enough extra to enjoy life a little. That may mean on occasion buying a car they really can’t afford, or spending more money on cigarettes than on food. But as long as their needs are met, and they can on occasion indulge in a desire, they will remain docile.
I’m not saying this is good, or bad. It’s a description of reality. Most of us on this blogging network feel, I’m certain, that everyone should have the opportunities to pursue their desires. But most of us can also recognize that our desires do not usually include having multiple houses (who’s going to clean them?), or a collection of fabulous cars (where would I put them, and how often would I drive the Duesenberg?). What most of us really want is freedom from worry. Worries about meeting health care costs. Worries about falling into poverty and having to sell the things we hold dear, until nothing is left and we die of starvation. Worries about having a place to sleep. Worries about having a job, getting paid, and being able to afford those minor luxuries we desire. If these needs were met, most of us would feel a lot more comfortable in our lives. If these needs were met, the nature of the government would concern us less. It would be hard to get a lot of people angry about a lot of things, including fascist overlords.
In short, we are NPCs. We don’t want to rule. We don’t even really want to go on adventures, except by proxy through books or movies. We want tomorrow to be much like today. We like to think we are main characters, that we would be the only people remaining calm in an emergency, that we would be able to land the plane when the pilots are too ill to fly. And to be truthful, we all are. A couple times in my life I’ve been in situations where the expectation is that people would panic, and they didn’t. They remained calm, did what they could to both correct the situation and alert other people who have more control and authority.
One of those situations was particularly humorous. I was on a short flight between Chicago and Detroit, a one hour hop. At about 30 minutes in, one of the air conditioners failed. I’ve worked on HVAC units in my time, so I know the smell of coolant, and maybe everyone else on the flight did to. But I doubt it. What the effect was, however was that a dense white smoke filled the passenger cabin. It was thick enough to obscure vision, i.e. you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Yet, there was no panic. What happened was about 100 steward calls, made by pressing an overhead button, occurred. And a number of voices were raised with the phrase, “Stewardess, there is smoke in the cabin”. Note the lack of exclamation points. No one was exclaiming about the smoke, just politely bringing to the attention of someone who might, possibly, be able to do something about it. Like the stewards were not aware, or that the smoke was localized to only a few seats (which suggests that many of the people on the plane had not paid close attention to High School chemistry). In a couple minutes the smoke dissipated and a few minutes later a pilot came on the intercom to announce that an AC unit had broken, has been turned off, and the other AC units have been put on maximum, so the smoke would clear momentarily. However, I’m never going to forget that an entire plane of people remained calm, and carried on, when the cabin of the plane filled with smoke.
We are NPCs.
As NPCs we really are not asking much. We want to live without fear. Give us that, and most of us would ignore the machinations of power. If Trump wanted to wave his pee-pee around to cow the other world leaders into submission, I wouldn’t give a crap. But, and this is an important but, when Trump, or Putin, or BiBi, or any of the leaders of the world start hurting other NPCs, I get mad about it.
What we need is an NPC political party. A party for people who don’t care all that much about power, but really want to stop being fucked by those who are in power. An NPC party who will say to those, like Musk, who consider themselves PC’s, “Go ahead, have your PvP games, but don’t touch the NPCs.” A party which looks after other NPCs. A party which can say, “Okay, John Oliver, we like what you are saying, but you are no longer an NPC. You have enough wealth and power than you should be set for life. We appreciate greatly what you are doing, drawing attention to the NPCs, but the NPC political party does not feel obligated to support you. You already have enough power to support yourself.” A party whose goals are confined to helping to remove the fear us NPCs are experiencing. A party who will take positive action against global warming because it will harm future NPCs. A party who is preferes stewardship to development so future NPCs can enjoy the world as well as we can.
Of course, cynic as I am, if such a political did form, as soon as the officers for the NPC party were elected, they would become PCs and screw everything up.
That’s enough of a drunken ramble for this evening. If anyone gets any inspiration from that screed, they are welcome to it.
[nice, flex]
Cheer up, there’s a wrinkle; a fantasy so many of us have is that we could, at true need, be a Reluctant Hero.
The NPCs’ status is to what they ostensibly aspire, though they are movers and shakers and potent.
(Another trope, of course, is https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LonelyAtTheTop )
preach it brudder.
i’m amused that for a while this post was right next to one that was titled “Some Things Never Change.” Just coinkydink of queue-posting.