You’re Not Ready for the Future

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?

–

Chaos Rules Everything Around Me

C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”  No, my fellas.  It is Chaos that reigns supreme.  I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms.  Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.

The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble.  No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent.  But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time.  Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.

But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now.  Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail.  The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor.  Start over, if you can.  The same principle seems to apply to civilization.

One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved.  By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring.  I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated.  Lovely vision.

I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way.  To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall.  Political ideas and orders fall.  The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history.  It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language.  Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity.  Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one.  Y’all fascists make me wanna puke.  Utterly beneath contempt.

Not what I was thinking about when I started this post.  Here it is:  when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other?  When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch?  Social media is a panopticon.  Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice.  VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail.  Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal.  The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right?  Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.

Chain e-mails?  I’m told e-mail has terrible security.  Encrypted e-mails?  How does that shit work?  Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down?  Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes?  What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?

Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites.  I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.

One sliver of hope in that:  When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty.  For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure.  Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies.  The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute.  Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.

It’s chaos.  The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day.  They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption.  We’re just fleas on the dog.

Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.

–

A Civil Restructuring

As Abe Oceanoxia mentioned, we’re in an era of endless recovery, where the damage wrought by natural disasters will always outpace our ability to repair it.  The slithering shitstain in chief is doing a blitz of horrible moves to make life worse for everyone.  Everything has everybody on back heel all the time, which parallels the recovery from natural disasters.  Before you can even get a handle on one fucked-up insult to human dignity, you are broadsided with another three.

But at some point, we are going to have to crawl out from under the fecal deluge, and make some moves.  You and I can only do so much, and we should of course do that much, but the people most responsible for fighting back?  That’s on the decent people in government.  What can they do?

It is distinctly possible this is the end of democracy in america for the next few decades.  Certainly it feels like the Civil Rights Movement was just busted back to the 1960s.  I used to say there was no way a politician on either side of the aisle would want to be the one holding the bag when Social Security runs out of money, but that sentiment belongs to a time when norms existed.  We’re in an era of uncharted fuckery, under the fascist deathclown administration.  Will they let the SSA fail?  They might.

This brings me back to those decent people in government, particularly in states where they have enough power and resources to make real moves for their people.  The governments of places like California, Washington, and New York, they need to start uncoupling themselves from the federal government.

What does it matter to your state if Social Security fails, if you have a state retirement system that covers your citizens?  What does it matter if Medicare fails, if you have a better state healthcare system?  Those things are not so trivial and not so easy, but I contend that they are possible.

Those would be the actions of true states – independent political entities.  Easy to forget that the very name of the USA is an artifact of a time when every state wanted to be its own country, with only a nominal federal government.  Well, the federal government is about to get nuked from within, so it’s time to start treating the situation with that kind of seriousness.

How hilarious would it be if the NYPD had its budget actually fucking constrained for the first time ever, to pay for important shit the people actually need?  It would be soooooooooo fucking easy to spot the excesses.  They could keep their massive salaries and benes and number of cops in the city, sure, and still save millions by, oh, say, not having offices in foreign countries?  Not having military vehicles?  I’d love to see it.

I had another article about this before, more or less, but that one didn’t get this specific.  I’m calling on the governments of blue states to make those baller moves.  Protect human rights.  Get teams of civil rights lawyers figuring out any way possible to keep civil rights decisions from escaping to higher courts staffed by fascist shitlords.  Get sociolgists forming comprehensive analyses of the ways people live in your states, where society is failing them, and develop more efficient and effective ways to palliate human suffering – thus making your states even more attractive to people fleeing from the United States of Jesusland.

Get civil engineers thinking of ways to take care of natural disaster preparedness without a lick of federal support.  Make concrete plans that will make your states physically safer and better places to invest in, for business and real estate etc.  Laugh at places like Florida letting themselves get blasted to pieces year after year, just to stick it to the transes and DEI wokesters.  What if Cali could figure out a way to make fire season less dangerous?  What an achievement that would be!

Yeah, there are a lot of items on here that seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, even sci-fi, but this is the future, guys.  Right now it’s a burning trashfire of a cyberpunk dystopia.  The failure of the central government might actually be just the opportunity you need to set this thing off – to really change the world where you are in ways that inspire all of humanity.

Do you have the political will?  You’ve never shown that spine before, but these are wild-ass times.  Show us what you can do, please.

Hey, why am I not making a hunnerd grand a year in a DC thinktank.  George Soros!  Hear me!  (in the voice of that guy that recorded himself kidnapping his kids and asked Qanon to save him)  Give me tha power.  Y’all know I’m good for it.

–

AI is Better Company

pinning this post in case anyone wants to know the low-hanging fruit of how to cancel me, so you can get it over with and fuck off.  pro-AI, not entertaining your need for ideological purity on this one.

***

This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

[Read more…]

Pondering Web Programming

i used to have fun doing redesigns of my art website, pondering doing that again.  only this time, it’s not trying to get me work, so it can be the sort of memory palace funplex of my auldest ambitions.  i can’t program my way out of a wet paper bag, leaning heavily on the one or two things i need to achieve my vision.  back in the day, that was creating a website out of tables and columns with fixed widths, filled with bespoke graphics, to make a very visually oriented interface.

i still want to do a visually oriented interface, where the page appears as an image, on which you can click the little parts to go different places, to explore.  like in sandra bullock’s The Net, where if you click on the hidden π, it plunges you into a world of danger and thrizzles.  flash shit.  anyway, flash is no longer an option, but i’m given to understand you can do a lot of the same things with html5.

the cheap tricks i’d need to learn:

  • how to do even one thing in html5 at all, haha.  css and java if absolutely necessary.
  • how to make an image scale to the window, so that on phone it’ll fill the screen and on desktop it’ll be the same proportions with some color field or tiling background to the left and right.
  • how to make different regions of the image clickable as links, without having the region selection get borked by scaling the image to different resolutions.
  • having an alternate graphic show on mouse-over would be nice.

if i could do those things, i’d probably be gravy.  also gotta buy a new domain name, i think.  the old one doesn’t fit anymore.  how can i learn enough to do those things, without really trying?

–

interesting video, elden ring

zullie the witch on yewtube specializes in short analytical content about the lore or technical aspects of soulsborne games.  they’ll have blood and horror content, of course, being dark fantasy.  this one is very interesting from a technical point of view, without being too complicated for the untrained to get, i think.  check it out.

–

Total Anarchy and Can’t Nobody Stop Us

I want to devise a virusTo bring dire straits to your environmentCrush your corporations with a mild touchTrash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrusI want to make a super virusStrong enough to cause blackouts in every single metropolis’cause they don’t want to unify usSo fuck it total anarchy and can’t nobody stop us
-Del the Funky Homosapien, Virus, from Deltron 3030 (2000)

Do you have respect for the law?  Fucking why?  Some laws are good guidelines for being a good person, like no passing in a school zone, pay the taxes that fund social programs libraries roads etc.  But if it ain’t one of those laws?  Who could possibly give a shit, that’s worth listening to?

Do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want, however you can.  If the government says “penalties now,” well, fuck the government.  They have to catch you first.  Now.  Tall talk coming from a bitch that almost never commits crimes because I’m afraid I’ll get caught, but still.  I think part of the despair of living in a land where laws are unjust is the feeling you will be subject to those laws.  That isn’t always true, strictly speaking.

This is one of the great ways blue states can protect people from shitty federal decrees.  Commit to non-enforcement, like they did with marijuana.  There’s precedent for this.  But on a personal level, same thing.  Who’s going to bust you for shielding immigrants from ICE?  Anybody whose opinions you value?  Anybody you’ll feel so sad about disappointing?  Didn’t think so.

If you’re brave enough to risk the consequences, you can do all sorts of excellent things.  And there are places and situations in which getting busted is massively unlikely.  Try to arrest somebody for sodomy in Haight-Ashbury at this point in history, see how far that gets you.  Try to throw somebody in federal prison for jailbreaking their modem to prevent youtube ads, see how well that goes over with the public – assuming you could detect that they’d done that in the first place.

Part of the catastrophizing I’ve heard sounds like, “if it’s illegal to be me, i’ll just have to do what they say and stop existing.”  That is just weird, guys.  Another part is the idea there will be death camps for trans people, which is very unlikely for other reasons.  But even if some flavor of that happened, were you planning to save them the effort by offing yourself?  Were you planning to walk up the chute like a cow to a slaughterhouse?

Given how many people violate traffic laws every day on every road in the country, it’s hard to believe you’re all that passive and law-abiding.  It’s time for the “be gay, do crimes” slogan to be put into action.  Although you’re probably already driving too fast in school zones.  Not that crime.  The other one.  Yeah, you got it.

–

WordPress Earthquake

WordPress is the software on which FtB runs, and I’d always assumed it was a service like facebook or xitter under control of one random corporation, subject to enshittification per their whims.

But not so!  WordPress was an open source nonprofit project to establish a shared software for bloggers great and small to use.  There are businesses involved that sell their own variations and services that are compatible with the core platform, and there’s a tradition of them chipping in some nominal amount to the org to keep the lights on for everybody.

But wait!  The org has a tiny board with only one active member, that guy is also CEO of a for-profit WordPress company, and he has started ignoring this blatant conflict of interest to leverage the org against his company’s competitors. (i tried to link to a website about the subject and it broke this article until I removed it! umm…)

That’s all very arcane, isn’t it?  What does it mean for you?  This is all very much above my pay grade as a bloggy persona, but more than one of the competing WP companies have had basic functions – including security features – threatened by this rampaging mini-musk, and the one we use could get disrupted as well.

In fact, I know so little about the subject that I don’t know if it ever will be a problem for us, what the problem will look like, if there’s a problem already, or if there have been problems for months.

On which corporation or corporations does FtB depend for basic function? If it’s Automattic, we’d be safe from the crisis by merit of being under the rogue CEO’s company.

Or maybe not, depending on how far-reaching his unethical behavior goes. The guy also controls a social media platform (tumblr) and once revealed a trans woman’s side accounts on xitter in retaliation for criticism – a move so blatantly wrong-hearted even musk hasn’t pulled it yet.

But it all just goes to show everything we have online is at the whim of bastards with too much power, and could be snuffed like a match in a hurricane if they sneeze. It prickles one in the anprim feels.

Shit, if FtB was a newsletter distributed thru the USPS, we’d still be spitting distance from a republican privatization push subjecting us again to the whims of hyper-aggressive coked-up billionaires. Whatever.
–

Programming Question

Let’s say you had a program for looking up the businesses in a given city.  Each business location serves a set of zip codes.  It performs perfectly when you enter a zip code, of course, but when you try by city name, there’s a problem.

Some city names are reused in the USA.  Big country, so we have several Parises, a few dozen Auburns, and probably more than fifty Riversides.  Of these cities, there is often a more notable one – the one you were trying to find.  You want the Pittsburgh in PA, not the Pittsburgh in Florida or whatever.

But the program, when searched by name, comes back with every result except the most popular one.  You get the Santa Fe from Montana Nebraska and New Jersey, but not the one from New Mexico.

Why would this happen?  Feels to this nonexpert there’d be a simple obvious reason and fix.  Totally theoretical, can’t show u the code, what do you think?

–