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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a cyberbullying seminar for parents. Two police inspectors and a psycho-pedagogists specialized in these matters came to explain to about fifty parents what online or offline bullying is, how it thrives, and which laws and structures are available in Italy to deal with it.

Among other things, those experts mentioned several times how phones and social media actually alter the brain of children and teenagers.

On one hand, the meeting was great. It was thought provoking, and concretely informative. All the speakers know their stuff, and all pointed out, gently but clearly, that it’s parents, not schools, the first agents who must educate kids about these matters.

On the other hand, I found the meeting really frustrating. With all respect for those experts, there were several moments when they really felt like Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers. I say so because they:

1. started from, and never questioned, the same wrong, 100% wrong, unacceptable equation that (besides and before AI of course) Big Tech desperately needs us believe for its own survival: Internet = social media = smartphone

2. said that smartphones are inherently neutral, “what matters is to use them well”

3. the worst part: they spoke for more than one hour of the dangers of social media, getting closer and closer to the one real issue and its really easy solution, without ever calling it out.

That is, three experts speaking for more than one hour about the dangers of cyberbullying and social media for kids never questioned that what, 80%? of those problems - would just disappear if kids younger than, say, 14 years old had no personal smartphone. Does it happen in other countries too?

I have already explained here and here why personal smartphones for kids aren’t neutral at all, and why banning them (by parents, not governments!) is the only solution for certain problems that could ever work in the real world. That seminar, plus a rising trend of late 2025, confirmed to me that certain things are never repeated enough.

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The trend I refer to, which may be even more dangerous in the long run, consists of laws like the one recently approved in Australia, which mandates that children must be at least 16 years old to create a social media account.

Even Jonathan Haidt, the pedagogist who does a great job to denounce the damage social media does to young people (omitting a great solution though) called that law a breakthrough for families and child safety. Haidt wrote that:

“Australia has just taken one of the most important steps yet in the global effort to protect children online. Beginning today... This reform finally corrects two major mistakes made in the early days of the internet: the United States (and then much of the world) set the age of “internet adulthood” to 13, and companies were given no responsibility to verify age at all. As long as a child could type “13,” companies could treat them like adults.

“Australia is the first country to correct those mistakes. Under the new policy, children under age 16 can still watch videos, read posts, and look things up online. What changes is that some of the largest companies on earth can no longer form business relationships with young children or use their personal data to keep them hooked on feeds, likes, and alerts. The policy will reduce the social pressure on kids, give parents back their authority, and help restore a healthier childhood. It may feel like a challenge at first, but it will quickly become the new normal.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Here is the truth about that law, and any other law like it: there is no need whatsoever for such a policy to protect children while leaving them free to “watch videos, read posts, and look things up online”:

children can - and should - do all those things on desktop or laptop computers, that will never be so addictive and uncontrollable as smartphones for the simple, non-circumventable reason that they can’t be carried around all the time.

In practice, no matter how sincere and well-intentioned they may be, in the long run any law like that one in Australia is only going to:

1. strenghten the concept that the only way to communicate digitally is through top-down, centralized social media, that is through structures that both states and for-profit corporations can easily watch, censor, shut down and generally use to influence public opinion

2. be actually used to enforce and legitimate more online censorship

3. de-legitimate parents, depriving them of the responsibility to deploy the only policy that would really work: no smartphones before 14/15 years old

4. be a Ruby Goldberg machine, born from some combination of ignorance of how the Internet works, and unwillingness to conceive the really simple solutions

5. fail anyway, because, besides being uselessly complicated and expensive, defining social media (that is, the environments in which the law should be applied) is more difficult than it sounds

Haidt says we “know social media can harm children”, and he’s right, but what about any instant messaging app with support for read receipts and image attachments? Even if it never collected and share any user data, any app like that would still be usable, by design, for cyberbullying, sexting, body shaming and so on.

If, quoting Haidt again, “The goal is to shift the environment so children are not pressured into digital spaces they don’t want, simply to avoid being left out”, laws that require a minimum age to be on “social media” work in the wrong way, in the wrong places, at the wrong level and for no good enough reason.

I’m not saying that age limits for using certain digital services shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that without age limits for smartphones any law mandating age limits would be half useless, half harmful.

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Minimum age limits should be enforced above all for smartphones because it’s them, not software, that makes “social media” and “internet” impossible to monitor and regulate, and because physical devices are infinitely easier to keep away from children, at hugely smaller costs, than software apps usable 24/7 on something that, for all practical purposes, ends up attached to a child body like a Matrix plug.

“But social media and smartphones CAN be good for children, I know a child who...”

No. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m sick of “success” stories that, instead of being acknowledged as rare exceptions, are used as alibis to make and keep almost all the other kids dumber or more stressed than they could be.

Can social media and smartphones as they are today be actually good, and worth the parental effort that’s necessary to make a child handle them? Yes, but only for children in one of these two really rare conditions:

1. children who suffer from some concrete, serious malaise or disability for which nobody, from states to parents, could implement an authentic solution (if such children were many more than one in a thousands, it would almost surely be proof that real solutions that would work much better than social media are needed as soon as possible)

2. children born to that one one in a thousand families in which parents actually have the astonishingly rare combination of money, time, real digital competence and will to make themselves (not schools or laws) effective mentors, for years, of using intrinsically addictive social media

But I MUST be always in touch with my children. It’s for their safety!

If you still religiously believe smartphones for children are necessary because children must be in continuous contact with their parents, please...

Wake Up, already! You and every other generation before you since Pleistocene grew up well enough without electronic tags, and any mental problem surely wasn’t due to lack of such tags. Your kids - and their mental health needs - are no different. If you really, really believe they should be always reachable in real time, burden them with a camera-less dumbphone instead: that’s all the reachability needed to make you feel safe, with none of the dangers and temptations for your kids.

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The conclusion is simple

The solution is really simple. It isn’t used yet only because it does require almost every parent to acknowledge that, 100% in good faith, they did the dumbest, self-harming thing by giving smartphones to their children years before it would have made more good than harm. But it’s simple.

Let’s make laws like that one in Australia useless. Let’s save both parents and states lots of money. Let’s make life harder for wannabe censors.

Let’s progress to giving smartphones to children as socially acceptable as giving kids a packet of cigarettes, that is something that will make both those kids and every other kid breathing around them sick.

It’s much simpler than any other solution, much more effective, and it’s possible. Any time someone tells you it’s impossible, remember them there was a time, well within our living memory, where this:

was glamorous, not just normal, in almost every household, car or workplace. If we could beat that, we can do the same with smartphones.

Remember way back in 2016, before the election, when there was some leftover Scrooge-ember of warmth still innocently traipsing around the place and making jokes about elections could feel somewhat cozy and not like punching a baby, then guffawing in its face about how it has no future and never will? When Tom Hanks went on SNL and did a monologue as America’s Dad giving us a concerned talk about what we’re doing with our life?

Well, this is that. Only I’m not America’s Mom by any means. No one is, because America hates the absolute bunting out of anyone who even vibes like she wants to be our Mom.

I’m not even America’s drunk auntie. No, at best, I’m your weird out-of-town cousin no one really invites to things who talks too much and makes everything awkward by caring way too much and too bluntly about shit that’s not my business. And I’m not really talking to America, but to individual Americans, my fellow Americans, even. Except that I don’t think this vast pain really stops at our borders. It’d be nice if it did, in a way.

But when you’re in real trouble, I’m the black sheep cousin who’ll take you to a bottomless-booze brunch and lay out what that man is doing to you.

Welcome to the Girl What the Fuck Bar and Grill. Have a seat right over there, cousin. In the smoking section because we all already have the same cancer, so what difference does it make?

Hey, sweetheart. Order whatever you want. It’s on me. I just want to talk.

How are you feeling these days? Not great? Yeah, I get that. Not great in a weirdly specific way that, when you wake up and look around every single day, it really seems like everyone is also weirdly, specifically, feeling?

For quite a few years now? Say, just to pull a random number, nine or ten?

Have you, for example, felt, oh, I don’t know, overall kind of frozen and numb? That is, when you’re not completely emotionally unregulated with anger or pain or frustration or panic even though, before all this, you’d gotten pretty good at regulating those things?

Felt like you were walking on eggshells all the time? Paranoid? Anxious? Suspicious? Had trouble trusting others or believing they actually care for you? Really struggled to let your guard down at all?

Have you had memory problems? Like, with things that didn’t even happen that long ago, but are suddenly hard to recall at all? Brain fog? Confused all the time, unable to focus, concentrate, even on things you used to enjoy? Have you had trouble with your perception of time? Felt like you were just drifting through the days without really experiencing them, let alone relishing them? Felt distant from your own life, like you’re not the main character of your own story?

Hypersensitive to criticism but also feeling like you’ll never be good enough to actually feel okay, or even deserve to? Finding it tough to make decisions, even small ones? Replaced your sense of self-worth with being brutally hard on yourself and becoming convinced that even trying is hopeless? Felt isolated, lonely, lost? Maybe a little self-destructive, nihilistic, lashing out? Or hypervigilant, unable to not expect the worst? Deteriorating health for unclear reasons? Overspending what you don’t really have or clinging to every penny when you don’t really have to? Unsure of what’s real and what’s not? Have you felt like you need to apologize for your own existence, or had trouble feeling safe even when there’s no direct, imminent danger? Have work and relationships, even hobbies and ostensible fun, become difficult to manage or give much energy to? Maybe constantly felt like you’re not doing enough even though you’re objectively at your limit?

Everyone I even know of is feeling some or all of those things. Most everyone I hear about, even statistically, is going through it to that exact tune.

Funny, that.

Because it’s not long COVID. (Okay it might also be long COVID.) Those are all symptoms of having suffered or currently suffering narcissistic abuse.

I came across an article about recovering from a narcissistic relationship and how difficult it can be to stop feeling like a fucking husk all the time (of course, I really don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking from experience or reading such articles because of said experience or know anything at all about this sort of thing. I’m just talking shit on the internet about topics I’m utterly ignorant about like we all do don’t worry about it), or to escape the cycle of behaviors that used to be necessary to survive but are just bonkers maladaptive when your world isn’t being ruled by an insane clown who hates you for breathing.

I mean, it’s not subtle. The President of the United States goes on TV every day and tells more than half of the nation we’re worthless, evil, horrible, at fault for everything he does, lazy, stupid, weak, ugly, and that all we deserve is suffering. Then he tells us how great he is. Then back to how the rest of us shouldn’t, and have no right to, exist here.

And I thought: Well, shit, all of us are doing those things and feeling that way. All the time. That’s a bullet point dissection of That Thing Everyone’s Been Suffering and Trying to Talk About. That suffering we usually chalk up to cost of living, working too much, COVID, AI, the modern world, enshittification, the wrong timeline, pick your cause, it’s the Great Malaise.

Because Donald Trump and his Skeletor-horde of dipshit cryptids, but mostly Donald “The Mule” Trump, have subjected all of us to the cycle of narcissistic abuse for a fucking decade, and that shit sucks the life out of you. It takes what you were and sticks it in a blender to puree so your abuser can gulp it down and take whatever power you had left. It makes you forget what joy even was, or if it was. Your brain literally gets so overclocked with fear and shame and confusion and constantly strategizing and re-strategizing some kind of methodology that would stop what’s happening that it can’t handle anything else. It can no longer fully brain, because its functions have been permanently epoxied into fight/flight/fawn mode.

And it doesn’t stop when you get out. It can actually get worse. It can stay worse for a long time, because your abuser re-wired your consciousness to serve his or her needs. And, oh, America, honey, baby, it’s vanishingly rare for a victim of narcissistic abuse not to go back to their tormentor at least once.

We really thought we’d made it out in 2020. We danced in the fucking streets like an 80s music video about humanity coming together to rock. We were sure we were safe. That we knew better now. That we’d see the signs next time. We wouldn’t let ourselves be hurt like that again. We’d learned. We’d grown. We’d escaped.

But we’d been rewired. Rewired to serve the needs of a sadist who was no longer in charge, whose needs were suddenly gone. We’d beaten him, but we hadn’t beaten ourselves. We hadn’t beaten the vacuum left when he went, not in power, but in needs to serve—and America simply doesn’t and never has known how lean into the same work and devotion to serve our own needs the way we lean into serving the needs of cruel authority figures.

It’s not completely our fault. Our own parents never taught us any better.

As we stepped out from his control in the early 20s, we could see and understand and correctly place the blame on Trump and some few of his flying monkeys for their actions, but none of us had any real interest in looking, long, hard, or otherwise, at our own enabling, our appeasement, our willingness to isolate and self-mutilate for the sake of either his approval or at least a brief reprieve from his rage, at our complicity in our own torture. We thought we’d just go right back to Life Before Him, but the problem with that is the Paradox of Narcissistic Aftermath: the people we were then were already gone, but the problems his full technicolor surround-sound 24/7 drama-inferno distracted us from were still sitting there, unsolved. Worse than that, his entrance into our lives had already been greased by a deep, unspoken desire to avoid solving those exact problems, a longing to be distracted from them.

In 2020? 2021? 2022, 23, 24? We figured we’d dealt with the problem. We didn’t even try; frankly, we didn’t much want to even start, to deal with what we’d allowed ourselves to become to survive him. Of course, never just him, but everyone who came before him to lay the groundwork for us to accept his cruelty. Which, you know, not for nothing, is called grooming.

We couldn’t shake all the habits we’d formed just to get through each grueling, stupid, impossible day. Doomscrolling was always millions upon millions of people anxiously checking in on their abusive parent/spouse/orange overlord’s mood every morning to see if we’d be able to have a semi-rational, not even good, just neutral day, relatively free of pain-hurricanes and pride-buckling disasters he spun up out of thin, wholly unnecessary air to feel a little more alive watching us scramble to contain the damage. We didn’t just let, but actively shoveled blame onto our own side for anything that went wrong because it was never safe to blame our unbalanced, unpredictable bully—because after so many years of being blamed, blaming ourselves and never him became an ingrained habit.

And we couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop feeling like nothing mattered, like everyone was just waiting for a vulnerable moment to let their mask fall and show they’d always hated us. Resource-guarding, snapping at everything, snarling, backed into a corner that was suddenly open air—but still felt like the walls closing in. Couldn’t remember how to socialize or build things or function in public because we’d been forbidden to for so long. Couldn’t stop instinctively centering him in every conversation, every news story, looking for his opinion, anticipating his plans, speculating about his reactions to every little thing. Lashing out at ourselves, our friends, our rebound relationship. Blaming ourselves—of course it was always our fault, we are stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse, he said so all the time. After long enough, the human heart just starts to nod along to the beat. And then the beat becomes a truth we don’t know how to reject anymore. Stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse. Oh, we Democrats brought it on ourselves, didn’t we? Look what we made him do.

And then, well, once we were out, once we had a moment to dance in the sun and take a breath of our own, he didn’t seem so scary anymore. Still horrible, still a monster, but it’s not like we’re getting back together so it’s sort of okay to laugh at his jokes again, right? He looks so successful on social media! PRETTY FUCKING CLEARLY a whole lot of people started remembering the “good" times, forgetting the fear and pain he put us through because that’s what the hurt brain does for us. It’s gross and fucked up to admit that the fight/flight/fawn years at least had energy to them. Adrenaline, cortisol, these are incredibly damaging stress hormones to have rocketing through your system long-term, but in the moment, they do make you feel…purposeful. Energized. In motion. Sharp and clear.

Distracted from all those other problems, at least. Problems that are a lot harder to solve than ditching one bad man.

And as we went into withdrawal from those constant stress-chemicals and the corresponding dopamine and seratonin that compensate when you either do something that feels like it met the moment (you know, like posting about it online) or at least get a pause from the madness, we started looking around for somewhere to get our fix again. Someone to hurt us so we can get back to the oblivion of a familiar pattern of pain.

Our friends don’t look like friends anymore. We only see faults. That’s what love is, right, finding fault and lashing out? That’s what our bodies learned. And this new guy/girl we’re with is boring, he/she doesn’t activate our burnt-out receptors, and he/she seems to genuinely like us so he’s worthless. Or he’s a secret demon vampire because that’s all we deserve.

And then Narcissus comes waltzing back, looking for his supply again. Which had to be us, now. All of us. After he’d gotten four years drinking from the firehose, nothing else would do. Even, maybe especially, if you’ve dealt with real narcissists in real life, it’s hard to even get your head around one so utterly definitional of the disorder that their basic maintenance dose of narcissistic supply is the entire planet’s attention.

In the myth of Narcissus, we are not Echo, begging for love, to be heard. We are simply the water in which he sees himself reflected forever.

And that beast was fucking thirsty by 2024.

It’s hard for anyone left of President Snow to characterize Trump’s behavior from 20-24 as lovebombing, but that’s what it was, just like 15-16, when he was pretending to be cool with the gays and the minorities and the ladies and everyone the GOP wants to drop-kick into a black hole. Whatever else is specifically wrong with that guy, he’s also such a pure, limit-break narcissist that those two periods are his mask-on good behavior. Before he had to pretend to be some kind of fun to some kind of person, he was just openly partnering with Jeffrey Epstein to run child beauty pageants and raping with impunity, and that’s just what we know about so far. Not screaming into a camera every single day that every liberal needs to die is, in fact, Trump and his party being charming on a first date.

But I said he’s done it to all of us several paragraphs ago. Because his followers have really been stuck in the classic cycle. Lovebomb/Idealization—Devaluation—Discard. Sometimes all of them in a single day.

And I suppose I can force my Empathy Hat on long enough to say that must be a real mindfuck. It’s probably understandable, from a certain point of view, that so many of them have given up and bellyflopped into pure fiction and insanity. When you’re being gaslit about basic facts every day, the mind starts to fall apart. It truly can’t tell the difference between real and His Perception of Real anymore, because this huge person in their life keeps telling them what they know happened, didn’t, and what they know didn’t happen, did. Where else was there left to go but disconnection from reality? Where was there to put all that confusion, shame, fear, disappointment? The narcissistic cycle is impressively fine-tuned to scramble your logical processors and squeeze out your sense of selfhood so it can be replaced with a sense of his selfhood.

He promises them the moon, tells them he loves them, acts like a funny, cool (what they think is cool), successful guy who’s gonna give them the life they always wanted. Or acts like a victim so he’ll be pitied and babied and fussed over as the most harmed person in the world or history and also multiverse (there’s the covert-type, and while everyone armchair diagnoses him as malignant, to me he’s clearly a c-c-c-combo of all three NPD presentations) or slaloms back and forth, often in one sentence. Then he turns around and tells them they’re dumb overdramatic fuck-ups he doesn’t give a shit about and they keep cheering because they’re still hung up on the rush of the first part, waiting for that time to come back, that guy, that feeling of belonging and release and possibility. So it must be a joke! He’s just joking. He loves us really, that’s just what he’s like, you wouldn’t understand our relationship, it’s so special, so unique. You don’t understand him like we do. That’s just his sense of humor, we don’t mind. He doesn’t mean it.

Some of us fight. Some of us flee. Some of us fawn.

Then he gets elected and starts eating their faces for breakfast every day, telling them he fucking loves eating faces, but complaining about the taste of theirs already. On Day One, so to speak.

But he’s good at this, if nothing else. Whenever his malevolence gets close to actually breaking the spell and losing them, he goes right back to lovey-dovey language, writing checks and subsidies, even drug rescheduling because an unexpected present goes really far with people starved for something that feels real. Or, more often, he opts to do some mean horrible bit of anti-social sadism, just the way he knows they like it. Just like the old days, when they were courting.

And round and round it goes.

Conservatives feel the malaise, too. It’s just a different flavor, because they’re the golden child, and the rest of us are the scapegoat.

The fact is, it’s completely fucking exhausting. Ennervating. Stultifying. To spend a decade—A FUCKING DECADE—in a world where every single conversation involves him, every personal choice has to take his judgment and eventual reaction into account (I know couples, gay and straight, who chose not to have children because they couldn’t be sure of their own rights in Trump’s world, let alone those children’s. Human beings do not exist who would have otherwise, just because he might react badly). Every time you tune into any kind of media it will orient itself around him or the effects of his deeds like the protagonist in a comic book movie, to the point that no one has to specify to what the pronoun him refers anymore. This fucking guy ate a whole pronoun! That used to belong to half the species!

The gravity of that, once it’s weighed on you for years, is so hard to escape. And harder still to cope with not having that weight crushing down on you while still bulging with the muscles you built to carry it. Still needing to feed that new bulk.

Of course, when someone does slide back into a nuclear-blast site of a relationship with an abuser like this, they pretty quickly remember why they left.

But now they’re stuck right back at the beginning of the labyrinth with a different 80s guy with weird hair saying fear me love me do as I say. And it feels so much more overwhelming to leave all over again, to do all that work you already did, to dig yourself out when you just watched yourself fuck up all that progress like the piece of shit he always said you were. So much more impossible to get out from under it, especially when the friends and family who supported your exit the first time are a lot less sympathetic the second time around. Or maybe it seems so much more possible the good times will return, since he was just acting like he cared again. All depending on what “good times” means to you, I suppose. Plus it’s far more embarrassing to admit you went back to the guy who hurt you and used you than it was to just get fooled once by a guy who’s quite good at fooling people.

But he didn’t learn to appreciate his position in your life and treat you better. He learned exactly what you’d accept from him without consequence. So the second time is always unfathomably worse.

Obviously, many of us did not choose to go back.

I mean…sort of.

We definitely chose not to commit to our new political relationship. The media, which is just made of people in the end, all the more so since journalism has been outsourced to literally everyone with a pulse, chose to express apoplectic anger at anyone else displaying even the mildest versions of Trump’s river of toxic sludge. Everybody on the left chose to inflict a lot of the abuse Trump shat down our necks on Biden, Harris, and their administration—plus also just a lot of people on our own side, over any disagreement on anything at all. Good lord, we canceled anyone who got any traction or influence as soon as humanly possible, and it was only ever somewhat assisted by bots and bad actors.

Which is…wait for it…also one of those symptoms of having suffered narcissistic abuse. Becoming hypercritical, but also hypersensitive to criticism. Blowing small disagreements way out of proportion and over-reacting, then finding oneself unable to back down because your literal physical endocrine system learned backing down does nothing to stop the attacks, it just shows weakness and weaklings get fucking eaten. These are usually behaviors learned from the abuser, because imitating someone with power over us, subconsciously, can feel like a logical way to get some power back, or at least appease the creature who loves only himself by appearing more like him. Doesn’t work, but it feels like it might.

That, and once you start feeling like nothing you do matters anymore, well, nothing you do matters anymore.

And once it came time to reject old patterns and move on with our lives, to show that we’d done the work, it turns out a huge number of us didn’t really have any energy left for that, or even protecting ourselves or our loved ones. Or doing anything. Voting for a regular politician regularly, but not in a way that felt like being a paladin in a life or death battle against MegaSauron, didn’t light up our adrenaline pathways or flood them with sweet fulfilled dopamine.

I guess sometimes, when you’ve been asked to be the only one doing the right thing for years, being selfish can feel like the morally right thing to do. And doing nothing feels even more right, because nothing matters, you’re so tired, and you don’t even know how to go back to normal life without a monster in it. You can barely remember how that worked, so now, the monstrous feels familiar but you feel like a stranger, and you really, really need therapy about that, but group therapy for a couple of hundred million is tough to put together and you don’t want to even think about the co-pay.

We’re all suffering the way children of narcissistic parents, spouses of narcissist, employees, anyone who has to live a huge portion of their lives connected to someone who requires all the oxygen in any room to even begin to exist, suffer. And we continue to hurt ourselves and each other because we’ve been taught by example that the ability to hurt is a valid measure of personal freedom—which is a whole nine-ring circus of fucked-up. But humans just want to feel safe, and rarely do, so they’ll take anything. That’s what narcissists want, too, it’s just that whatever happened to them when they were kids to break them this specific way means they can only start to feel safe when others are powerless and devoted only to them.

After all, if you’re the only one with power and everyone is desperate to please you, you won’t be abandoned. Won’t be hurt. Can’t be invisible as you always feared, always knew you were to the people with power over you.

Ugh. This Empathy Hat is itchy.

To the dark side of the brain, the animal instinct side, Trump seems mighty safe. Even from bullets. Even from the law. Seems like the only person with agency anymore. So people either cling to him in hopes that safety and freedom rubs off, or dwell in a daze of unhappiness and hopelessness, helplessness and anxiety, a forever Now in which no long-term plans even feel possible because our brains know a new trauma is gonna hit in the next minute.

He could die tomorrow and it would take years upon years for our brains to not know that, if they ever did.

Now, we can’t you-go-girl our way out of this, at least not for a few years, if the Nothing allows elections ever again. And even if the regime ends, we will 100% go through all these stages and symptoms and malaises and reactionary behaviors all over again trying to figure out a way to recover without actually working on ourselves at all. In some ways, I hope Gavin Newsom does pull it off, because I don’t like him that much, so I kind of feel fine letting him take on the chin the absolute level of misplaced hate and anger we’re definitely going to aim at the next Democrat with any power because we couldn’t aim it at the shitheel who actually hurt us. He seems good for it.

The only thing that’s actually going to get your groove, back, America? I hate to say it and you hate to hear it, but darling, you’ve got to believe in yourself. You’ve got to get your pride back. I’m not talking about patriotism or military parade bullshit or singing I’m Proud to Be an American with a trembling lip. Because fucking barf.

But a whole lot of people, for a whole lot of decades, have poured a whole lot of energy into convincing everyone of every party in this country that America itself is worth nothing, not even standing up for. That we’re bad, either for a legacy of hatred and violence or a legacy of not enough hatred and violence, either way, we’re corrupt garbage, we’ve always been corrupt garbage, so we deserve what we get. That we could never be or do any good, we are completely unredeemable and disgusting, that we should never have existed, that no part of our system or anyone in it has the smallest merit.

If no one believes in the system, if no one, for a moment, will stand up for the system, the system crumbles. It’s crumbling now.

And yeah, we’ve been bad. A lot. We’ve done some heinous fuckery to ourselves and to others. I’m not saying history didn’t happen. I’m not that white. Nor am I blind or an idiot. So everything I’m about to say is actually quite hard for me, because I, too have spent most of my life laughing at the idea of the promise of America. Quoting George Carlin, being cynical, hating most things about this place I was born.

But it doesn’t work.

A country that thinks itself incapable of virtue will utterly gorge itself on vice.

People who believe they deserve nothing will allow anything to be done to them, through them, with them, and in their name. And the people who yell loudest about how much they deserve are always the ones terrified to their marrow that they don’t deserve anything at all, even a single crumb of grace. The phrase America Sucks knows no political side. And if it sucks, why not burn it down? Does it matter that much who’s holding the match?

And that’s how these leeches slither in. On a road slicked for them by apathy, self-loathing, and masochism.

If you convince anyone they are wrong and bad, incompetent, monstrous and undeserving to the core, you teach them it’s okay to act as though that’s true. That it’s okay if they’re treated as though it’s true. You remove their ability to believe they can change or grow or become anything but more rot from a rotten root.

And that’s what a narcissist ultimately does. They leave you feeling like a husk because they used you as one. As the vessel they needed to pour all their own self-hatred and pain and fear and insecurity and loneliness and darkness so they didn’t have to own it or process it, so they could say you were the bad one all along and walk free.

We have to find a way to stand up for ourselves, to reject what is, admittedly, horrendous, but claim what has been good and what could be good again or anew. To start imagining new shapes tomorrow could take and reject the patterns we’re stuck in. To not just react, but act. To remember that an immigrant is a guest, and one of the most ancient rules of civilization is we do not harm guests. To remember that difference is just reality, no two of anything are the same and cannot be. To defend each other, stand for something, say no to the void. To redefine the promise of America and genuinely give a shit about it, about ourselves, about how we treat ourselves, what we’re willing to accept.

To make our escape plans and bide our time. Like so many trapped souls have had to do on the individual level. We must do it on a mass scale.

Something like national self-care. Not a spa day, but self-care nonetheless. Because we haven’t been taking care of ourselves. We let ourselves get sick, we let ourselves get hurt, we let ourselves suffer and starve. We let ourselves hurt others, because we stopped believing it was in us to stop. We’ve let everything that we used to care so much about slide. We have to remember, not who we are, which is a mess, but who we wanted to be. Once upon a time.

And until we do, there will never be an end to the men and women who want us hopeless, who want us frozen and numb and confused, who want us scrambling for their regard, who want us bone-tired from working to keep them happy, whose highest goal is to walk on our backs so their precious feet need never touch the ground.

Baby, honey, America, Americans, humans, Earthlings, I love you. You’re better than that. You do deserve better.

Someday, I hope you believe that as much as I do.

As much as I’m trying to believe it. Really fucking hard. Every day.

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Imagination is one of the features of authentic intelligence, and a collective loss of imagination - and consequently, of hope and motivation - is one of the big problems of our time, if not a major cause of many of them.

Here, as a tiny stimulus to keep imagination and quests for a better future alive, I list twelve things that today may seem part of the very fabric of reality, but I feel will disappear, or at least be much smaller than today and unrecognizable to people of 2025, in just a few decades. Possibly very, very few decades.

Here are those twelve things, divided in two main groups, for reasons I’ll explain at the end of the post.

Group A

• Addictive social media

• Mobile phones with cameras

• App stores for phones and all other computers

• Online matching for dating

• AI chatbots for everybody

• Physical billboards, if not all advertising

• Hundreds of choices for every consumer product

Group B

• Air conditioning and buildings that need it

• Falsely smart cars

• “Smart” consumer products, also known as consumer-IoT

• Energy-intensive healthcare and single use medical supplies

• This is a surprise, keep reading to see it

Why things in group A will disappear

The social media of today will disappear because they are a major cause for a major increase in public levels of anxiety, depression, misinformation and political polarization and inability to concentrate and think clearly. The good news is that this would be possible with a few, really concrete actions like this and these.

Cameras in mobile phones will disappear because, together with algorithms designed to mess with people’s minds, they are a major aggravation to the above-mentioned mental health pandemic. Just think about it: would teenagers and adults alike be as stressed as they are if they had no possibility to show off everything they eat, wear or do, every minute, as if everybody else had a duty to care? Sometimes, I think that the only truly revolutionary act everybody could really do is covering with tape the lenses of their phones now.

Centralized App Stores will disappear because, while we will never all become programmers like Free Software advocates dream, something as stupid as letting a handful of companies castrate and turn into mind-sucking probes inventions as powerful as mobile or stationary computers cannot go on forever.

Online dating that directly matches people through data, not love will be replaced by apps organizing “real-life events in every major city every week” where every group of people who could be good matches for each other will see every other participant how they really are, without AIs to cheat, or possibility to swipe left. That may still be a bit too close to eugenics, for my taste, but will surely be much, much healthier and fairer than today.

Unrestricted access to AI chatbots will end because... it’s already painfully obvious that it is not for the masses.

Physical billboards will disappear because “man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard” and “adverts create obstacles. Without them you can breathe”. Ditto for online advertising, which allows both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles: banning it will be recognized as “the best thing we can do for our world now... “More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs.” (For the record, cities that ban billboards already exist worldwide, from Brazil to France)

Excessive choice is what Scott Adams popularized as confusopoly: companies with similar products who, in order to prevent customers from making informed decisions, intentionally confuse them instead of competing on price.

Confusopoly deserves a bit more space because we “First World” citizens suffer from it in every field. We have scores of foods that only differ in their marketing, scores of offers for utilities and mobile contracts that take days to compare with minimal gains, cars with scores of options that all too often cannot be combined just like we’d want, or would cost much more than advertised...

What about sportswear? Today, thanks to changed social norms, machines and healthier working conditions for most jobs, it’s almost impossible to figure out in ten seconds whether someone is a train conductor or an accountant just from his clothes, hands or gait, as Sherlock Holmes could do in the 1880s. But everybody can immediately tell the exact sub-category of sport someone engages in, and how seriously, by looking at which combination of shoes, jacket and pants he’s wearing. The result is that anyone who could and would have occasionally practiced three different sports with the same “equipment” two generations ago is now pushed - to make them spend more, of course - to get multiple sets of gear to practice just one:

One last example of excessive choice that will end because is both wasteful and cruel is pets. We have created scores of cats and dogs with torture breeding, just to get the literal opposite, that is, of appreciation for choice, diversity and uniqueness: dogs and cats that all look alike, and a really expensive but sadly booming pet cloning business.

Of course, choice is excessive even with pet food “so fancy that I ate some” and… accessories:

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This explosion of choices is a wrong turn, not an enrichment : even letting self-gratification aside, when there is too much to choose from, it becomes almost impossible to make the optimal choice. This is why all this choice will disappear, to be replaced by many less models for every product, but all much more customizable and repairable than today.

On to Group B now

Air conditioning as we know it, and buildings that need it will disappear thanks to much more efficient solutions, from cooling by only increasing local airflow to completely new technologies, plus the acknowledgment that air conditioning as strong as it often is today is a really dumb way to get sick, and a really expensive one too.

Uselessly complicated “smart” cars will disappear because they consume loads of energy and raw materials just to, again, be stupid.

Smart devices, appliance and almost all consumer-IoT products will disappear because they are connected to the internet just to make them more expensive, more intrusive and easier to brick.

Energy-intensive healthcare and single use medical supplies will not disappear, but they will be substantially downsized, because the connection between their price or energy use and human health and longevity is not as strong as it seems. Did you know, for example (see previous link for details), that comparisons of cataract surgery in the UK and in India have shown that the same treatment produces only 5% of the emissions and 6% of the solid waste (that is, much lower costs) in the UK?

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Two groups, different reasons. Or maybe not

The common reason why the stuff and practices listed in Group B will disappear, at least in their current forms, is really simple: they consume so much energy, money and material that they will increasingly become unaffordable (more on this in a moment).

The services in Group A, instead, will disappear thanks to a combination of collective mental fatigue and increased awareness of their toxicity. If we are smart, that is. If you think that’s impossible, remember that people, including pregnant women, used to smoke indoors because it was addictive and glamorous just a few years ago.

But even if we aren’t smart, the services and products of Group A will disappear anyway because the “surprise” member of Group B that I didn’t name before is... all of Group A: that’s all stuff that requires too much money, energy and material to last much longer.

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When will this happen?

Much sooner than you may wish, if several forecasts I’ve seen recently are even half right. The coming bust of the AI and data centers bubble, which can never happen too soon but is surely close, may set things straight all by itself. But even if that issue didn’t exist, the shortage of diesel fuel that several experts (see list below) say will be enough to severely downsize every sector of the economy - including deployment of renewables or nuclear power - may “happen as early as... 2030”.

And now the good news

Here’s the best part of all this, the one that really matters: with the exception of air conditioning, if missing where and to the extent it would be actually needed, none of the changes I listed will decrease authentic quality of life, and most of them will concretely improve it, by decreasing our current levels of stress, loneliness and personal debt. Read the list again, and you’ll agree with me.

Reading suggestions about the coming diesel crisis

• Impressive data from a Recalibration of World3

• Worrying indications in recently updated world energy data

• The Oil Import Curse

• Why Electric Vehicles Can’t Reduce Overall Oil Demand

You know what, 2025? Everyone hates you. You have no friends. Not only are you not invited to any holiday parties, but I talked to Everyone, and Everyone actually went out of their way to make a You Are Cordially Uninvited Forever card and the production value was actually really lovely. Embossed and everything.

January seems like another, also shitty, lifetime ago. Every day is simply so much unhinged bullshit it’s impossible to keep up with just the three or four worst things that happened to the most people before end of business, let alone the smaller disasters waiting to meet you in your area. Yes, it’s by design, but knowing that the Great Overwhelm is being done by design doesn’t really help, or do anything at all. Bad Times Always is an amazingly effective paralytic, as it turns out.

Everyone I know is exhausted. And depressed. Not in a normal basically maintainable Adulthood Sucks Ha Ha Insert Boomer Joke Here way, but in a Life Is Now Being Slowly Digested By a Gelatinous Cube way. And alternating dissociating from the endless tire-fire around us and screaming into the void hoping to hit on some magical combination of eldritch syllables that stops all this. Unfortunately, we’re all using our phones to do both of those things.

Was it better in 2024? I mean…yeah, a little! Up until November, anyway.

And I keep thinking about all those “Young” Republicans we got to read about a few months ago, and then, like everything else, had to promptly forget because something exploded. Giggling like schoolboys vaping in the bathroom over how dreamy Noted SuccessMan Adolf Hitler was and calling themselves Nazis (so brave, so cool) in their shitty little private Bratz Boyz Group Chat. And everyone doing the same fucking brainless shambling square dance they always do when Republicans openly and obviously do super-public Nazi shit while repeating YES WE ARE ACTUALLY FOR REAL NAZIS five times in that self-same school bathroom mirror hoping Stephen Miller appears and brings them all an early Christmas. Normal people all point out that this is clearly Nazi shit, Republicans pretend we’re crazy while smirking their way through still more Nazi shit, the media asks no questions and investigates nothing, but does run stories on how over-sensitive liberals are keeping the government shut down. Lather, rinse, ingest conditioner.

Their ease. Their relaxation. Their casual fun.

That media dance has been repeated many times since. But it’s always the same. And it makes us feel even more helpless, because we all watched that media drum a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign a year ago; we know they can still be a media and still make things happen, they could still help us, but they don’t and they won’t. So then we all just go back to work because what the fuck else can you do? Ground beef is $8 a pound. People are dying everywhere. Decisions are being made that none of us have any control over at all, and half of us will only become aware of next year when vaccines are illegal and you have to present 2.5 white babies to pollsters as valid ID to vote.

And all the while, through the careful steps of this endless monstrous dance, all over the internet, I see all these people, most of them even organic, from inside and from outside this country, looking at a TRULY grotesque pantomime strip-tease where the dancers keep taking off bits of clothing and pretending they’re going to reveal something other than just a shit-ton of swastikas under there and ask the same question phrased a hundred million different ways.

Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why aren’t you Americans rising up? Why aren’t we Americans rising up? Why are people just letting this happen? Someone should do something! It’s going to be too late really, really soon! Surely this time, this act will be enough and someone will do something!

I remember, back in the Before Time known as January 2025, people asking why Americans weren’t marching in the streets. And everyone saying it’s cold, wait for summer. But then nothing really materialized during the summer, either.

And now it’s cold again.

There have been protests. But the Dance of the Sugar Plum Media doesn’t report much on them, they convene and disperse and are forgotten. And the gelatinous cube gurgles as we dissolve just a little more.

Hell, even Trump has said out loud, into a microphone he knew was on, looking at a camera that he was fully aware was likewise rolling live, to people who allegedly work for the press and not him: “Wow, we actually really thought this was gonna be a lot harder and y’all would fight back but I guess not!

And then that pustulant undead Hamburglar laughed. At us. In disbelief.

Many answers to this question have been barfed up into the hive-mind’s overused airbag of the soul over the last Spy Hunter oil-slick-and-nail-dump of a year. And they’re all true.

It is cold. We are demoralized from years of “resistance” meaning absolutely nothing except blood-wrestling in a pool of grifters, liars, and bots. (God, remember all those White House “insider” accounts that got so huge in 17-18 because people really believed they were who they said they were and their every breathless cheerleader-screech that the end was right around the corner oh and also they all fucking vanished and were always nothing?) It is a geographically gargantuan country without an obvious central city or focal point to protest around (I mean sort of. Trump Tower is right there, and I never see anyone picketing it). It is more difficult to find the fire when (barely) a majority did, allegedly, vote for this. Everything is so expensive there’s little time or energy left over to fight with. The media is complicit, and algorithmically siloed so that people aren’t receiving the same information more or less ever. Whatever the left is in the Year of No God 2025, it’s profoundly divided and hates itself more than anyone on the right. The pandemic did take the wind out of everyone’s sails, maybe especially those who refused to believe it was happening.

And we do very much expend our energy and receive our dopamine in exchange for just openly weeping into the festering sore of what the internet has become, which sure does feel like doing something, even though it isn’t. Oh, don’t we ever.

But I don’t really think any of those very valid reasons are the main problem. Other than the tech issues, all of those factors have been around for quite awhile and didn’t result in this deep freeze of the mind.

No one’s doing anything because no one knows what to do.

Seriously, what exactly is it we’re supposed to be doing to fix this? No one has any idea what might even begin to be effective in this bicameral hellmouth of a situation. Protest? My siblings in solidarity, we’ve been protesting. For decades. It has rarely, if ever, made one sad little bubble-wrap pop of difference in government policy. My generation protested Iraq and inequality on the backs of our parents teaching us that if the government does a bad, that’s how you fix it, just like they did with Vietnam. And it changed nothing whatsoever, pretty much like they did with Vietnam, because the protests weren’t why Vietnam ended, they just drummed Johnson out of office, water-slide swirled Nixon in, and scared the conservatives so bad they worked for 50 years to make sure nothing like that could ever force them to share oxygen with a dirty liberal ever again.

I remember so clearly coming home from an absolutely gargantuan protest of the Iraq War and watching George Bush look into the camera and say he did not care how many people protested, this was happening. And I’m not sure I ever really believed too much in American democracy again. If it doesn’t matter how many people protest, everyone could and the government would do what it pleased anyway. Which lined up with actual events a lot better than the utter canonization of the 60s protests ever did.

As with most things, Kurt Vonnegut said it best:

Well, what the hell are we every day people supposed to do with that? You cannot motivate people with: HEY KIDS! IF YOU DROP EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIVES AND TAKE TO THE STREETS, RISK YOUR LIVES AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND LOVED ONES, AND DO IT EVERY SINGLE WEEK AT A MINIMUM, PROBABLY NOTHING SIGNIFICANT WILL CHANGE AT ALL (MIGHT GET WORSE THOUGH!) BUT HEY AT LEAST YOU’LL LOSE YOUR JOB!

The women’s protest of Trump’s first inauguration was the biggest in history, until the next mass protest of Trump’s administration, and almost every protest after that. And nothing happened. There isn’t one single thing that can be pointed to as a victory that grew out of those events. So yeah, we go, we make a sign, we protest, and then everyone yells about how Americans aren’t doing anything during nationwide protests—which is completely fucking fair because protests clearly don’t amount to much more than a flyer in a landfill. Don’t forget all those protests in France amounted to just about precisely fuck-all, the retirement age was still raised. But watching online, you’d think they won.

Support Democrats? I mean, come on. We’re just not going to do that. If we were ever going to do that, we’d be bitching about eggs again and the media would be roasting the President on the daily. There have been more articles about how thoroughly the Democrats are useless trash than about Trump wandering around the White House roof talking to the fucking trees and clouds, and everyone just goes along with the meme.

And are they useless trash? Maybe. Definitely Fetterman. But they’re also human beings (so I’m told) and I’d bet they’re as psychologically bodied by the dissolution of the system to which they’ve devoted their lives as we who did not devote our lives to any system we could avoid are. I don’t think they know what to do, either, because nothing they have done, and they have, because court cases stopping executive orders don’t actually just spontaneously generate like mice in a haystack, people have to prepare, file, argue, pursue them, and that thankless bullshit is where a lot of Democrat effort has gone, but no need to acknowledge it—and hey, don’t worry, no one will!

Remember that whole government shutdown? Remember those 8 senators (and fuck you very much, Angus King) who voted with the Republicans and we’re all super mad at them only not really because everyone’s already forgotten? Well…when Democrats were holding out, did anyone support them? Praise them on social media, drum up awareness and energy for them to keep going? Tell them they were fighting for all of us and not to give in because we had their backs? Say anything positive at all? Did you?

So maybe we just put that one aside because I don’t know that there’s anything Democrats could do to get people to speak positively of them anymore, even their own members. And no, Bernie Sanders doesn’t fucking count, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Full revolution? Well, I’ll tell you something about that eternal eschatological pipe-dream. If people don’t believe protesting will help, they’re definitely not going to abandon their entire existences to get immediately shot storming whatever facility people imagine will result in instant victory where conservative elements don’t get to have a say in the New Republic. Especially when no one can so much as organize a general strike, let alone a revolution. For fuck’s sake, we can barely convince the depressed progressive set to go out and do something fun with other humans after work, let alone the actual grueling carnage and privation of a kind of conflict almost none of us can imagine.

Because revolutions, and protests, require enormous plans. Logistics, personnel, consensus. Not just consensus on how to revolution, but what the revolution will replace the system with, a task at which the left is notoriously clownshoed. Babies, we can’t agree on what name to call ourselves. Other than the fucking People’s Judean Front.

And enormous plans require leaders organizing people into following them. Not just leaders like your local charity or PTA has leaders. I mean people with the reputation, charisma, public trust, and organizational ability to have huge swaths of people actually twitch a toe when they say jump. And by people I mean men, obviously, because we’ve seen what happens when a woman tries.

On the left? We have no plans and no leaders. And I’m not just talking about Democrats in office. I’m talking across the board. Partly because we on the left don’t like to do hierarchy or giving/following orders, it’s antithetical to our whole thing. But you don’t get a whole lot done without them and oh look, we’re not getting a whole lot done.

There is no one stepping up to be a leader right now. To tell us what to do to fix this and how—and maybe most importantly when and where to do it.

And I mean no one. Name the leader(s) of the No Kings protests without looking it up. Go ahead. Or Occupy. Or even your local Democratic Party chair. I’d say I’ll wait, but we all know I’d look like the guy who chose poorly at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by the time someone who definitely looked it up pretends to know.

I’m not talking about what Gavin Newsom and Bernie Sanders are doing, either, because when it comes right down to it, they’re doing exactly the same thing, which is JUST. FUCKING. TALKING. ABOUT. THEMSELVES.

I’ve been wondering for months why Bernie Sanders was touring the country giving the same speech he’s always given to the same people who’ve always listened instead of…using that same tour to plan, organize, and disseminate the details of a general strike.

Because he could do that. He might be the one person who could do that without getting blasted into space by the internet cycle of bitch/moan/grift. But he doesn’t even suggest it. Or any specific action. Neither does Newsom, but I’m not sure anyone really expects President Kenough to. But none of the lefty influencers or podcasters are making any attempt to organize people, either. Anyone who could be a leader actually making a movement and doing an action is just making memes and booking speaker fees.

I suspect because those things are all upside. If the meme or moment or particular phrasing takes off, they make money and gain fame. If not, no big deal, new media cycle incoming in about 30 seconds. Hell, the pervasive meme that capitalism is the root of every single problem, no matter how big or small, has an incredible, and god, I hope unintentional, numbing effect on anti-establishment energy. After all, if we can’t get rid of capitalism in one fell swoop, why even bother? Tackling any other problem is useless when it’s only capitalism that’s to blame. In fact, whispers the commentariat, voting and working to make incremental progress is actually bad and supports the evil system!

But if Bernie Sanders called for a general strike on a specific date and it didn’t happen, or it did and was very small, or it did and was huge but made no difference, or any number of failure conditions, his political leverage and reputation, as well as that of the progressive movement at large, would nosedive directly into the all-swallowing sea. If Newsom did, any Presidential hopes would be reduced to a single, long note from the world’s saddest trombone. If Hasan or Destiny or PickUrManWithAHeadphoneMicSurgicallyGraftedToHisSkull did and it wasn’t a massive success with real results, their personal cache, income, and brand would suffer, so in very real terms, fascism is a better result for them individually…right up until it isn’t. Because that’s how fascism always rolls, but people keep charging at that football anyway.

And when people who actually hold office and/or influence won’t risk their personal brand to take action other than speaking truth to their own power then congratulating themselves for being the best and rightest, when they’re the ones that actually could, what the fuck are the rest of us supposed to think? How are the rest of us supposed to organize when none of the people who are respected and well-known enough to organize are doing anything but talking? Kamala tried to be that someone and we couldn’t even be bothered to vote to not suffer horribly. The right is dark and full of terrors but they do take action and initiative, even if it’s mostly knocking down everyone else’s blocks because blocks are gay and then shooting each other in the neck because another podcaster said to.

And until someone does decide it’s worth all the shit-nados that come a leader’s way, everyone else is stuck in the cube of Schrodinger’s Democracy: is it alive or is it dead? Is now the moment, or is it the next one? Will the system hold against this violation or not? We can’t know until the guardrails get smashed, until the box is opened.

And if the cat might still be, just barely, alive? Then most people will keep buying cat food and hope for the best. Making most of us believe the cat might still be alive is far more advantageous to the Feline Murder Party than displaying its corpse.

These people truly excel at the dance I talked about earlier. Are we Nazis or are Democrats paranoid? Just little closer to the full reveal every time, but never quite there. It’s almost impossible to know which of the garbage they say they’ll do is the garbage they’re actually going to do, so everyone is frozen in place not knowing what’s even real. We haven’t invaded Greenland yet, have we? As yet, there are no Neurodivergent Buddyfriends Super Fun Time Healthy Sunshine Camps. We’re terrified all the time, but we can’t know whether this particular rich man blowing his own brains out of his blowhole about whichever issue he knows about as much about as he does his wife’s deepest dreams and ambitions is saying this is happening or lol I dreamed about this in sixth grade so imma say it to a microphone and see what happens.

So we all walk through this insane clown maze of illusions trying to figure out which one is the real Pennywise, and as it turns out, not knowing what’s real and what isn’t might be the most effective nerfing of the revolutionary impulse ever devised.

Because, though for those of us already in their targets, it’s very hard to get our heads around, for the majority of Americans, most of the horrors Trump and his little mean boy gang are giggling their way through are still abstractly coming through their phones and not their direct experience unless they or their loved ones belong to a scapegoat group—and will continue to, right up until they don’t because a new group's number is up and it’s their turn to suffer. The majority of us are not ourselves LGBTQ+ or immigrants or neurodiverse or even, for a little while longer, other than whatever white means these days. That’s why we’re called minorities. Many more are connected to someone in danger because of Trump but, well, people are selfish assholes, I don’t know what to tell you. A little more than half of us are women, but plenty of women aren’t on women’s side. Everyone promised if they took Roe away America would be in the streets, and look around at the vast landscape of fucks most people didn’t give about it. The media siloing and disparate populations very understandably self-segregating for safety means that the administration has to do very big things very loudly to reach everyone.

And they prefer the dance. Of course they do.

The only things that have gotten through across the board at all are the cost of living and the Epstein Files. The only thing that got through across the board last time was COVID-19. They’re betting nothing that big will happen again, and so are we. It’s a horrific bet, but apparently we’re all-in.

And abstraction is just very hard to turn into direct, confrontational action. Most people are concerned with themselves above all, most people are just comfortable enough that death on the barricades is not a clearly better choice than keeping your head down and hoping this will pass. Until something that hits every single household directly, and hard enough that no media narrative can convince people it isn’t happening, you simply aren’t going to see any real uprising.

As the year winds down, there’s not much comfort in any of that. SORRY. I do agree a general strike would be the most effective single action. But all the bad AI flyers on Facebook won’t matter until someone respected with power and skin in the game starts organizing in earnest. And they’re all much more than comfortable enough in their world of podcasts and memoirs and fundraising to risk looking unsuccessful at revolution. We all keep waiting for someone to do something because until Someone with a capital S does, there is no way for mass action to begin accreting mass.

And in the end, it’s impossible to convince people that it’s worth throwing away whatever we have left in this life on an abstract idea of “doing something” when the very leaders whose business is telling us how very serious this is, how awful the fascistic future is going to be, how deeply in danger we all are, won’t risk even a sliver of their comfort to do much of anything but continue talking about how brave they are to talk about how brave they are.

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Well, I’m back.

Everything better?

No? Not even a little? Cool.

I am sorry for the absence. It has been a ridiculous autumn around here. I spent most of it sick, so sick I couldn’t even sit up or focus my eyes enough to doomscroll endlessly, feeling, in addition to mucus, mucus everywhere, the actual physical sensation of my life’s energy slowly dripping out into a depthless pool of quiet tears.

First it was COVID (FOURTH TIME’S A CHARM!) for almost a damn month, then, less than a week after slowly slouching toward recovery, some other horrible bug knocked me on my already knocked-upon ass, and thus I drifted in the Void of Lost Time until just about Thanksgiving!

And, well, the other thing that turned life into a circus of stupid is so unbelievable and unrealistic I can’t bear to go over it all again, so I’m going to reverse the usual course and cross-post the Holiday Tale of Horror from my Patreon by way of apology and explanation for where the fuck I’ve been.

Because I only just found my notebook with all the notes for the next essay in it. So I’m working on it; see below.

Nevertheless, as it is on Patreon, this is locked to a paywall for reasons that are about to be very obvious—I live in a small place and I’m about to spill some beans on the snowy ground, and I don’t want anyone who isn’t onside enough to be part of one of my little clubhouses waggling their face about it.

Saints and ministers of grace defend us, let’s dive into the chaos vortex.

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This week on my podcast, I sit down with my daughter Poesy, for our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition we’ve had since she was three (she’s 17 now!). This year, Poe recaps her graduation, her triumphs with her dance team, and her life at college! She offers us a tutorial on playing Egyptian War, and we sing Jingle Bells!

MP3

(paywall-free popularization on this or other important topics helps to pay my bills. Thanks for considering a paid subscription or (even better) supporting me with one-time direct donations or in any of the other ways described here)

A few days ago, I saw a Facebook post going like this:

“I’ve been thinking about the future impacts of AI and robotics on our society for some time now. Here’s [a video] on the subject... I would love to see other viewpoints as well.”

Since the poster asked for other viewpoints, I replied:

“What happens after we run out of jobs because AI” is the OPPOSITE way to look at things. Seriously. By coincidence, just two days ago I wrote about a sane strategy to deal with AI and job losses, and had already written another piece just about how UBI, AI and reality are always put in the wrong ORDER. Please have a look at those posts, and let me know.”

At this point, another contact of that person, whom I’ll just call “HIM” from now on, stepped in, to fill the time-honored internet role of “guy who has no idea what I’m talking about and refuses to inform himself”. For context, here is how the conversation went, but if you just want to know why the more you support hard work ethics the more you should love UBI, just skip to the next paragraph:

HIM: so you want to go full on socialism because technology replaced the low/no skill worker... here’s the issue.. if two workers get the exact same and 1 is a hard worker and the other is a blue falcon.. you just murdered incentive.. good job..

(note for those who, like me, had never met the “blue falcon” expression before: A blue falcon is (source) “someone who causes problems or does things to get their fellow service members in trouble. This often leads to more work for their fellow soldiers”)

ME: disagreement is no problem, but it should be about the same thing somebody said first, not something else entirely. From your comment, instead, you seem to have not read at all what I actually wrote, and to have no idea what UBI is.

First, you got completely wrong that I want to go “full on socialism”... because technology replaced low /no skill workers: NO, i don’t want to go full on because tech etc etc. I say that, now that tech finally makes it possible, we should go full on on something which is not socialism (more on this below) because it was right well before AI came along period. Which is the opposite of what you wrote.

Second, actual tech is not replacing just low / no skill workers. No way. Look around.

Third: UBI surely is NOT at all what you say, that is “if two workers get the exact same and one is a hard worker and the other is a blue falcon.. you just murdered incentive”.

UBI is, to use your words, “if one worker is a blue falcon and the other one is a hard worker, they both get e.g 1000 USD/month, no strings attached, whatever they do, so the blue falcon can be fired immediately without causing any problem to anybody, because the falcon won’t starve. And the hard worker will get those 10000 USD/month PLUS whatever salary he deserves”

You say “you just murdered incentive”, whereas UBI is exactly the opposite. UBI removes all the deadweights from any organization, allowing the real workers to continue to get paid what they are worth, and real innovators to innovate all they can.

It really amazes me how many people who are all on a “work hard/entrepreneurial ethic” are against UBI, instead of realizing it would set them free to work as they want, getting all the rewards they deserve.

Summing up, I am not saying you should approve UBI. I am just saying “please do learn what UBI actually is, and then criticize it all you want, no it’s OK”. Start from the two links I shared above, and then look for third parties, or the opposite, no problem.

HIM: lol.. I worked in countries where you can only fire people for theft or safety violations.. it was also customary to give 12 month notice if youre going to quit. Granted the country also had 23.5% sales tax and income tax started around 40% and no refunds. Ubi doesnt remove dead weight. It encourages it. Go work in Norway.. Italy... or of you are more adventurous Angola..

ME: UBI IS designed for, and makes it infinitely easier, to remove all the restrictions you mention (”only fire people for theft etc”). That’s exactly what I meant writing “UBI removes all the deadweights etc”, If you think UBI would be applied without changing anything else, you just keep proving you have NO idea what you are talking about. Study first, then you can criticize.

From everything you have written so far it is really evident that if you really got what UBI is, how it should be implemented and so on, you’d like it much more than me.

HIM: lol like it more than you? Nah I worked 30 years in a field that guaranteed my death.. just to somehow survive and collect a pension and 100% disability compensation.. nice try, but you failed miserably on that one. People should be paid market value for their skills.. period.

ME: if you refuse to even criticize the basic concept that UBI is an ADDITION, NOT a replacement for “People being paid market value for their skills”... you have deeper problems than liking UBI or not. Again: spend time to read what it actually is, and if you’ll still dislike it, it will be for very different reasons.

HIM: it still boils down to living wage nonsense.. [no matter how you call it]. At the end of the day its the living wage nonsense in that you are no longer paying people based on market value of their skills..

What UBI really is

A good starting point to get what UBI is actually about is what Bob Kennedy and Buckminster Fuller already said very clearly more than 55 years ago.

Kennedy described the intrinsical idiocy of measuring the success of any society with something as limited and misleading as GDP.

Buckminster Fuller denounced “the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today (ME: in 1970!) that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery [to] justify his right to exist.”

In 2025, we have 55 years of evidence from all over the world that Kennedy and Buckminster Fuller were absolutely right. Economies worldwide are full of objectively useless or harmful jobs, including jobs to manage those bad jobs. Those are all jobs that only, only exist because we have never found a better, no: a socially acceptable way to give the people doing those jobs the money they need to not revolt.

All those unnecessary jobs really produce are:

1. ballast and moats that suffocate the really hard workers, entrepreneurs and innovators

2. millions and millions of human beings with all sorts of more or less recognized mental health issues

Because, even when they aren’t in the growing ranks of workking poors, the people doing those unnecessary jobs do feel, more or less consciously, that their income is not a reward for value, but a fraud. Yes, a fraud that on one hand prevents them from doing something else they could do best but has no “market” value; on the other, for the same reason, hinders the progress of society as a whole.

UBI is the least impossible solution to this sad, unbelievably stupid state of things. The actual concept of UBI is that every citizen gets a certain amount of money every month just because he or she is a citizen, with no strings attached.

“No strings attached” is the first crucial point that nobody can ignore if they want to criticize UBI without making fool of themselves: UBI does not forbid anybody from engaging in any job or entrepreneurial activity they want, and getting for that any salary they can get. That salary would go on top of UBI.

The second crucial point is, obviously, how much money? Let’s say, for concreteness, enough for food, clothes and maybe a public transit pass, but no more. Under those two conditions it is evident that:

• UBI is not socialism. In and by itself, UBI does not prevent anybody from owning all they want, funding companies, earning all the money they can, or “fulfilling the American Dream” in any other way (incidentally, it’s quite funny - tragically funny - how many Americans not only think socialism === North Korea, but consider North Korea-like socialism anything left of the american GOP)

• the “no strings attached” part would eliminate all the infrastructure and jobs (that is: costs for taxpayers) that only exist to control who qualifies for most means-tested welfare programs of today

• in general, UBI would eliminate all the deadweights that today hinder real entrepreneurs and all the really hard workers. UBI would let them work more freely, instead of being slowed down by coworkers unable or unwilling to work hard like them, and having to pay their salary too

• Only fire people for theft? With UBI granting everybody enough money to survive till they find another job, it would be much easier to both pass and accept laws that make firing people easier

• Advance notice to quit? For the same reason, UBI would let everybody who is now stuck in a bullshit job under an a**hole boss the freedom to quit without notice, thanks to the time and peace of mind to find a better job provided by UBI, because...

• being just enough to provide the bare minimum, UBI would not and could not kill the incentive to work

• in other words:

  • only the useless jobs, companies and public organizations would disappear, but without civil unrests. UBI would only kill stuff that shouldn’t exist in a sensible economy, giving hard workers and real entrepreneurs much more freedom to do their best, and much more visibility (and extra money) for their value. For the same reason,

  • only the BAD bosses would suffer from UBI, not good companies or the economy in general. UBI would mean that hard workers who came across an incompetent or sadistic boss could give him the finger right away, instead of being forced to stay with him because they can’t afford to remain without money

What about the people who, with UBI, would never work anymore, or go crazy?

The moment UBI went in force, many millions of people would be freed from bullshit jobs and all sorts of fears, and many millions of hard workers and entrepreneurs would be finally free to make the best work they can, and get the greatest reward for it.

But yes, there is also no doubt that in the same moment:

1. millions of finally happy people would never apply for any paid work anymore because, for any of a thousand reasons, UBI would be enough money for their needs. This includes aspiring stay-at-home parents and hermits who’d retire in some mountain huts

2. other millions of people would try to kill themselves with booze or drugs, or fall into serious depression, because their “work” (note the quotes) was all they had to feel worthy

People of the first category are a feature of UBI, not a bug: they are all people who right now are costing much more to the companies and governments that must keep them in unnecessary jobs, only because there is no other socially acceptable way to give them enough money to not revolt. Even giving people who do want to have kids a feasible way to do it would be a feature, in this coming age of underpopulation overshoot.

People of the second category instead, whose only reason to live and way to feel good is a paid job... they’d need therapy to discover the difference between SERVICE and “p-work”, not jobs that would cost more than therapy, and still be more a drag than an active contribution to society.

How to pay for UBI?

The first thing to realize is that everything you read so far would save mountains of money for both individuals and public or private organizations, from commuting costs to rent and utility bills for office buildings and administrative overheads of all kinds. Getting back to what caused this post, automation is only what can finally make UBI possible, not the other way around.

The second and really crucial thing is this: as necessary and unavoidable as it is (*), UBI can only come after even more radical that, if you look at the status of public and private debt worldwide should happen as soon as possible anyway, and probably will: a reboot of money, that is of how money is controlled, created and distributed.

I already mentioned this fundamental issue in the last part of this essay on the meaning of work, and I would be delighted to host here a guest post by experts outlining how it could be done.

Summing up... If you have a serious work ethic, UBI is your ally

I have explained what UBI really is, and how it would help hard workers and serious businesses of any kind. In one sentence, even if you or your company had to pay more taxes to support UBI, you’d still gain enough, in reduced costs and job satisfaction for both you and all your remaining employees, to be more than happy about it.

So, maybe UBI is unfeasible - and again, it surely is, if it isn’t preceded by a reform of money - or maybe UBI is wrong for some reason I haven’t seen yet. But if UBI is wrong or impossible, it surely isn’t for any of the reasons “HIM” is so sure about. Don’t be like HIM.

“Wait a minute, what about healthcare?” Easy

Please never mix UBI with healthcare. Healthcare is a human right before and regardless of UBI, and universal healthcare done right, with proper checks, is much more human, fairer and cost-effective than the alternatives available in e.g. the USA.

Think of UBI and universal healthcare like food and water, instead: two separate, equally essential measures, to implement in the right order. First universal healthcare if you still don’t have it, then UBI.

If you don’t trust me...

Here is some further reading:

• Frequently Asked Questions about UBI

• The Deep and Enduring History of Universal Basic Income

• Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness

• Universal Basic Income does not cause inflation

• Basic income could solve global poverty and stop environmental destruction

(*) Besides and before everything you read here, UBI is necessary and unavoidable for other, entirely different reasons. To know what they are, read this post, or this one.

Someone said that if they can keep you asking the wrong questions in the wrong places, the answers won’t matter, and today’s Web seems built on purpose to implement that strategy. Here is a real short summary of how and why this happens, followed by a partial, but easy and effective solution.

(paywall-free popularization on this or other important topics helps to pay my bills. Thanks for considering a paid subscription or (even better) supporting me with one-time direct donations or in any of the other ways described here)

Why does the Web sucks, and how to fix it?

The disenfranchisement and mental health crisis first brought by social media on smartphones are now worsening thanks to mismanagement of AI, they can be lost or obscured in any moment, even if we are famous scientists. Why is it so? One of the recurring themes of my work, since years before I first heard of “fediverse”, is that:

1. the human species just isn’t built to cope with continuous flows of instantaneous “information” or “communication”, be they infinite scrolling of of more or less polarizing “news”, or endless updates of personal “statuses” that nobody really cares about, including their authors. They can only make us and democracy sick. Look around you for more proofs you may ever need.

   1. side but necessary note: with or without AI, things will get worse if we keep giving kids personal smartphones, that is devices that even most adults can’t really handle

2. the sane way to be and communicate online is through slow communication, happening as much as possible via personal websites or newsletters, shared with technologies that, unlike social media, don’t make you angry

3. finding those personal websites keeps getting harder, because search engines deliberately hide them. The biggest, but not the only offender here is Google, obviously, and other alternatives of the same scale aren’t visible yet (could the EU make them, please?)

Luckily, solving the last problem, which also means making the other ones smaller, is easier than it may seem.

Make Search Great Again

Tara Calishain is an online search expert, who has been writing and experimenting about search engines since the early 1990s. Last month, she shared with the members of the Internet Press Guild five new free tools she developed to make finding actually interesting stuff online easy again. Here is her message, reproduced with permission:

I’ve been busy making things and I keep forgetting to announce them. Here are my five latest -- three for specialty web search, one for YouTube, and one for information monitoring via RSS. Let me know if you have any questions, otherwise I hope they’re useful:

• Local Search America is a set of three tools for finding information by city/state, state/metro area, or city radius. Find authoritative sources like local governments, institutions of higher education, and FCC-licensed television stations and search their web spaces on Google.

• Congress Corral lets you explore members of the US Congress via a Wikipedia-enriched dataset. Includes a public interest analysis utility, a tool to explore member news across local news and colleges, and a Wikipedia-powered related topics feature.

• Blog Hiking lets you explore WordPress blogs by following trails of interconnected content. Search by keyword and find WordPress posts from across the web, organized like hiking trails with three different ways to explore.

• Tube Terrain lets you browse lists of YouTube channels built from Wikipedia categories. Filter by keyword, subscriber count, video count, channel age and more! Currently four sets available: YouTubers, scientists, activists, and LGBTQ people.

• Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader is a Google Sheets-based tool that lets you schedule your RSS feeds and give them expiration dates (The link goes to a Google Sheet. Make a copy and check out the README sheet if you want to try it)

My advice: please use those tools, and don’t stop there. Tara does much more than this, as you can see from her complete projects list, but the real message and value of her work goes beyond any of them:

you don’t have to find and see other humans online only in the one, brain-rot way the big web companies want!

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Sure, some of those tools are relevant only for US citizens, and they are all ust different interfaces to Google services, but so what? They show that another way is already possible, even before a real alternative comes up. Plus, they are really easy to use, and what you’ll find thanks to them (I especially like Blog Hiking) may help you waste much less time on social media than today. Please go and make search work for you again!

Bonus resources for students and researchers

(this is from a LinkedIn post by Sébastien Poulin that I saw a couple years ago)

The Google search engine is so powerful that it hides other search engines from us. We simply do not know that most of them exist.

Meanwhile, there are still many excellent search engines in the world that specialize in books, science, and other intelligent information. Here is a non-exhaustive list of such sites that you have probably never heard of:

1. Pdfdrive.com is the largest free PDF book download site. It claims over 225 million titles.

2. RefSeek is a search engine for academic resources, with over a billion sources

3. Springer gives access to more than 10 million scientific documents

4. Worldcat - Search for content from 20,000 libraries worldwide.

5. Bioline is a library of published bioscience journals

6. Base Search is one of the most powerful search engines for academic texts. Over 100 million scientific articles, 70% of which are free

7. Repec - Volunteers from 102 countries collected nearly 4 million publications.

8. Science.gov is a US government search engine for over 2,200 scientific sites.

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Die Ausgabe enthält die Artikel:

• Eichkatz Rinko Roller
• Dieses eine Lieblingsrad
• Umgangssprachlicher Unsinn und Ungenauigkeiten bei Begriffen der Fahrradtechnik – Teil 2
• Tobis Fahrradgeschichten
• Hohlspeiche
• Impressum

Two days ago, a friend of mine asked me to watch a 2:20 hours long interview to an AI expert so we could discuss it later. When I first looked at the title and index of the video I thought it was just some other self-exalted Silicon Valley priest yelling all the time “AI will kill us for sure, give me all your money to tame it!”.

After browsing the transcript - which is what I always do with any video like that because it’s much faster - I changed my mind, and wrote this post to explain why I think that, while from that video he seems to:

• get the relation between AI and Universal Basic Income backwards,

• take some AI hype too seriously, and

• maybe miss an elephant in the room…

…Tristan Harris is a smart, sensible guy who is fighting the good fight, and I really wouldn’t mind working for him, or having a public conversation about these issues.

To see why I say so, here are the most important things Harris said in the video, synthesized and reorganized by topic (the parts in italic are by Harris, the others are my own syntheses or comments of what he said).

Computer geniuses, without any real education

I like how Harris describes the birth of social media:

“We have the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime. We have the least informed and most polarized generation. We have the worst critical thinking. We have the worst ability to concentrate and do things. And that’s because we did not govern the impact of [social media] technology well.”

Here is what he means for “not governing the impact well”: “if the incentive is to maximize eyeballs and attention and engagement, then you’re incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely, polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality society because all of those outcomes are success cases of maximizing for engagement for an individual human on a screen.”

This all happened because we let design and deployment of social media to people who, when asked whether it was sensible to “change billions of people’s psychological experiences with their families, with their friends, at dinner, with their date night, on romantic relationships...” dismissed that concern “as if it’s like a throwaway question” and kept building social media exactly like urban slums we already know to cause riots.

Being someone who, just like him, has been calling for alternatives 2013... Kudos to Harris for seeing these dangers from within in the same days, and trying to fight them. Seriously.

The Singularity... or hype to hide desperation?

One thing I dislike in how Harris outlined the problem with robots or what’s called AI today is attributing godlike powers to those technologies. My own instinct is to call out both issues - or more exactly the way they are sold to investors and politicians - as the frauds they are.

That is, if AI and robots are really dangerous (they are) it’s not because they are superhuman. It’s because they are really toxic, expensive, wasteful frauds, in a time when we’d really need sanity and concreteness, not scaremongering.

For example, Harris said that “they’re doing [AI] to train robots. In household situations. And Elon’s now saying production will start very, very soon on humanoid robots in America”.

First of all, that’s the same Elon who’s been saying for twelve years now that we’d have driverless cars in three or four years. I’d take what Musk is saying now about humanoid robots more like the desperate Plan B of someone who dislikes humans so much that, having failed to relocate on Mars, is now falling back on replacing humans around him. I know that even gubernatorial candidates (Zoltan Istvan, that’s you!) claim that millions of humanoid robots will both displace humans and make them happy, but that remains a really unrealistic vision.

Speaking of AI, Harris said that “AI is like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize level capability and will work at superhuman speed, for less than minimum wage.”

Spoiler: digital immigrants capable of working at superhuman speed for little or no pay have been around for decades. They were just called “software”. More on this shortly.

Comparing AIs to digital immigrants that would take away everybody’s job is a great pitch, but calling them “Nobel Prize level” just validates the claims that AI is divine, unstoppable and deserves all the money in the world… instead of being the Hail Mary move of people having no idea of what other excuse to ask for money they could make up when the AI bubble pops:

Even more important is the fact that an awful lot of the millions of “jobs” that AI would destroy are “pretend work” that shouldn’t exist to begin with because they demean human beings, even when they are really well paid. To see what I’m talking about, check the “The work that shouldn’t exist is even more” part of this post.

On Universal Basic Income “because AI”

The second thing I noted in what Harris said about AI destroying jobs is that he too seems - as far as that interview is concerned - to consider Universal Basic Income as an afterthought - an unavoidable countermeasure to the advent of AI - and worries about who will pay for it.

Me, I don’t think we need to go for UBI because AI is coming. I say the opposite is true: we deserved UBI since well before AI came along, AI is just one of the technologies that can finally make it feasible, and the money to pay for UBI can only come from something that really overdue anyway, regardless of both UBI and AI, that is... reinventing money. Continues here.

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The elephant in the room

Harris says that the people who are currently trying to get trillions of dollars to dump the AI “god” on us are doing so because they firmly believe that:

• “There’s the incentive for everyone to move to paying for AIs rather than paying humans”

• “It’s not just first solve intelligence and use that to solve everything else. It’s first dominate intelligence and use that to dominate everything else”

• in general, for every company in every sector “it’s win or take all... if I don’t do it, I’ll lose to the other guy that will”

• the default path of AI development can only be “companies racing to release the most powerful inscrutable uncontrollable technology we’ve ever invented with the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety”

Harris is right, but what he describes is not the default path of the AI industry. Let’s call things with their actual, legitimate name: that’s the default path of every industry under capitalism.

AI is just peak software, which is just peak capitalism because it’s just peak automation, which overlaps too much, if left unchecked, with peak dehumanization. Never forget that the first AIs were corporations.

That is, Harris is right, but the real solution is not to stop - or reform - the AI industry: it is to stop the capitalism that, even before AI, made us waste billions of dollars, as well as mountains of polluting fossil fuels and scarce materials whose control leads to wars on crap like, off the top of my head:

• idiotic consumer IoT gadgets and falsely “smart” homes

• ridiculously complicated cars

• a movie-like Metaverse that’s just bad, reactionary prepping

• NFTs!. Oh lord, NFTs...

What really matters: sensible AI measures

Harris describes well what makes AI, that is peak software, so dangerous:

• “AI is... designed to break the reality checking process”

• “AI is like a power pump that pumps economic, scientific and military advantage”

• “Nuclear weapons cannot invent other nuclear weapons. But AI accelerates everything, including itself” . The first company that succeeds to “automate AI research can then use it to automate everything else”

Developing AI like this feels good to the same kind of people who created toxic social media because it feels like building a god, even if all they are creating is... themselves. We don’t have to put up with their “unavoidability” however. Everybody can act to stop this embarrassing madness, not just investors divesting from AI.

As Harris says, “ you don’t have to understand what’s the engine in the car to understand the consequence that affects everybody of car accidents. And you can advocate for things like speed limits, zoning laws, turning signals and brakes and things like those.”

Doing the same with AI is possible, and it’s been done before, says Harris, for examples in the 1980s, with CFCs that were piercing the ozone layer.

Here is what Harris proposes, in place of continuing to let kids “compete to build a super intelligent uncontrollable god in a box”:

• create narrow AIs, that is smaller AIs each optimized to solve one and just one concrete problem, be it educational outcomes, or agriculture or manufacturing output (I like that! Here are some suggestions)

• demand design changes that:

  • make those narrow AIs support and connect humans, instead of isolating them. As an example, Harris describes AI therapists that steer patients back into deeper relationships with their family or actual therapists, instead of doing the opposite

  • enforce, in AIs and social media, things like, e.g.:

  • “dopamine emission standards just like we have car emission standards for cars”, that turn off “features” like autoplay and infinite scrolling

  • algorithms that instead of actively polarizing people “reward unlikely consensus or bridging”

• forbid Big Tech executives to ship products that they wouldn’t let their own children use eight hours a day.

• make ALL engineering students compulsorily study “all the places that humanity had gotten technology wrong, including [but not limited to] forever chemicals, leaded gasoline and social media”, and have them take a Hippocratic Oath at graduation. I like that, but I’d make that oath compulsory for lawmakers and regulators first

• change dating apps so that instead of endless swiping they set up “events in every major city every week”, to give their users “a place where you could go and meet people you were actually excited about and attracted to”. That is, abundance, instead of (see meme at the bottom) exclusion, frustration and cheating.

• change the ownership structure of tech companies so that instead of shareholder value they maximize some social benefit (this seems as close as Harris can go to saying the problem is capitalism)

  Leave a comment

What’s missing

In my opinion, there are at least two more measures that should really be added to that list:

1. immediately end universal access to general purpose AI chatbots. Making those chatbots accessible only to people who have studied and worked hard enough to control them would be enough to immediately make almost all problems created by current AIs much easier to manage

2. mandate adversarial interoperability of all social media and other digital communication services. If people could use Instagram, TikTok or anything like that... with any tool they wanted, not just the official applications, social media could never be so addictive

But even as is, that list is full of good, concrete ideas. As I said, I would really like to work for Harris to make it happen. but never mind me: what matters is that you all start to only vote for candidates, of whatever color, who commit to follow those guidelines.

Usual final greeting: to support more writing here on this, or other important topics, thanks for considering a paid subscription or (even better) supporting me with one-time direct donations or in any of the other ways described here.

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome,” about the process by which we ended up with an enshittogenic policy environment:

The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbi­tration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor contract, buy up all your competitors, DRM-lock all the media, ban contraception and abortion, and you’ve got a world of partners you can’t divorce, politicians you can’t vote out, companies you can’t sue, jobs you can’t quit, services you can’t leave, books and music you can’t move, and pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate.

And after you are relentlessly corralled into all these things you hate, you will be told that you don’t hate them after all – because you revealed your preferences for them.

Consumerism is a terrible way to make change at the best of times, and it gets less effective by the day, as authoritarianism and market consolidation shrink the world of possibilities to an endless Pepsi Chal­lenge, where “choice” is narrowed to which flavor of sweetened battery acid you hate the least.

I don’t think that end users are to blame for enshittification.

MP3

I recently discovered, by pure chance, the positions of a doctor Gerard M. Nadal on overpopulation. While I agree with him that overpopulation is not a problem anymore from now on, I think the way he frames what’s wrong with it contain a few serious problems, that prevent appropriate handling of both overpopulation and its end.

Because getting into those problems, allow me to briefly mention a couple of communication errors that Dr. Nadal is doing:

• first off, as far as I can tell he’s promoting his views mainly on Facebook which having become, by and large, an “old people” social network maybe isn’t the better place to find and convert to having children people in the best age range for such a task.

• second, he’s doing the same error that Prof. Hayhoe does in her work against climate change: publishing on social media, instead of a real website

Speaking of overpopulation...

Dr. Nadal wrote on Facebook:

“So how does the world population explode if every generation is having fewer and fewer children? We stopped dying like flies....So the world population had been largely preserved and new members were added, swelling the ranks. But now the Baby Boom generation is beginning to die off. By mid-century there will be catastrophic population implosions throughout the developed world.”

So far, I agree. I already wrote that, rather than overpopulation, we are now in depopulation overshoot.

Dr. Nadal also argues that:

“Abortion. Euthanasia. Physician-assisted suicide. Deprioritizing the needs of the elderly. Denial of care. Contraception. Planned Parenthood. Marie Stopes International... [are all] fueled by the fiction that humans are a major pollutant on the planet.”

“The “overpopulation” myth has driven the attitudes of many young doctors and nurses whose attitude toward the over-65 crowd [ultimately comes from] Thomas Malthus: Decrease the surplus population. Increasingly our great utility is to serve as organ donors”

I disagree here. I don’t think many young doctors look at senior citizens as (second choice) organ donors, I do think that current dominant human behaviors (not humans in and by themselves) are a major pollutant of the planet and I also think that the main “fuels” of abortion etc... are not what Dr. Nadal says. Besides, the pressure to have much less children than before started decades before global warming was a household item, for reasons totally unrelated to climate, or environmentalism in general.

However, as far as this post is concerned, both those specific positions of Dr. Nadal and my own opinions about them are irrelevant. The most important points to dispute, those that do the main damage, are others.

The “economy”, and “women”

Dr. Nadal wrote that:

1. “The efforts at curbing population growth are having catastrophic effects on national economies all over the world as almost every nation is below replacement rate.”

2. “My wife is one of eight, and I’m one of five. Most families in my kid’s generation are 1 or 2 children, and **now an ever-increasing number of women are satisfying themselves by getting dogs instead of husbands and children.”

Those are the serious errors. First of all, it’s wrong to worry about the catastrophic effects on “economies”. We need to worry, as I wrote here and here about the catastrophic effects on human beings and human societies. Economies are just tools that exist to serve humans, and many people will agree that current economies suck at it real big. With inequality increasing as it is in most countries, telling the masses who live paycheck to paycheck to have more children to save “the economy” is an excellent way to get ignored, or worst.

Second, I do see myself that finding satisfaction and purpose in life through pets instead of children is an increasingly popular trend, and I do agree that is an overall negative one. If you must know, I’ve been thinking for a while now that if getting rid of a pet just because you got tired of it or can’t afford it anymore were as illegal or at least as complicated as disowning a son for the same reasons, much less people would get any pet.

However, the point here is that it’s both men and women who are falling for pets instead of children. If there is a difference there, may be in the kind of pets men or women prefer, and it’s an irrelevant difference.

In other words: it is really, really, really wrong to point the finger at women instead of people. If it’s important to counter the underpopulation overshoot, that’s everybody’s responsibility, men and women together, both with the same importance and equally essential roles.

Even if it were right for some moral reason, which it isn’t, stopping to tell women to get married and have children will never, ever work. No way. The way to go is to help young people of both sexes who want to do it, to rediscover the beauty and huge importance of parenting (their own, or other people’s, it doesn’t even matter).

As I already said:

• it is right to be really free both to be childless AND to have as many children as you possibly can

• the solution is not to tell every woman (or couple) to have 2.1 children or whatever the number is. It is to make it really easy for those who do want 4/more children to have them

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In case you didn’t notice, in the last one or two years:

1. 95% of the organizations that tried generative AI failed to receive a measurable return on the investment. In 2025, 42% of businesses scrapped the majority of their AI initiative

2. AI chatbots put in place of humans to save some bucks have made:

   • newspapers recommend books that don’t exist,

   • air companies pay for lying to their customers

   • lawyers use made up court cases

   • therapists cheat their patients by using ChatGPT during sessions

   • antisemitic comments and suggestions for assault

3. AI-empowered scammers generated 75 Million nonsensical songs that took royalties away from human singers

4. AI-enabled teddy bears gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives

5. blindly outsorcing to machines activities like analysis and thinking is making most people lose, not gain skills that may be a bit more important and harder to re-learn than tasks that should be left to machines like e.g. digging holes in the ground

6. nominees for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards keep coming...

And as if all these “innovations” weren’t stupid enough in and by themselves, they’ll need so much electricity that even those who won’t get anything good from them will get higher power bills, and in some cases even lose their tap water.

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Too much of a not even really good thing

If there is one thing that is painfully obvious to any real adult now is that AI like this for the masses is, in the best case, too much of a good thing, at too high a price.

Even if we could afford the financial and physical costs, which we can’t, the human species is not build to handle or produce so much data, so fast.

We already knew this from the Web 2.0 days, whose instantaneous, unlimited, many-to-many communication was supposed to free the masses both from ignorance (yeah, right) and tyranny (remember the Arab Spring?). Now, there are even studies arguing that “above a critical social connectivity, an explosive transition toward strong polarization must occur”.

Universal continuous access to fake human communications, services and relationships by means of artificial “intelligence” is just more of the same. Just too much for our collective health, human rights and productive political discourse, no matter how much good will is put in AI.

Sure, there are plenty of exceptions. That is, there are many gifted individuals who are doing good to themselves, if not to society, thanks to cheap access to AI. But they aren’t enough to justify mass unrestricted access to services that, one way or another, do dumb down or make humanly poorer the majority of their users. Unrestricted access to AI should be earned, not given away like candies or alcohol to Native Americans. Earned by merit and hard real work, of course, not money. Study without summaries some million words by humans who knew their stuff, write yourself some hundred thousand ones, and then yes, you may indeed start getting something good by a chatbot-generated summary. Hence my call.

This will end soon, but not soon enough

Luckily, this bubble is going to pop soon. If, as some experts think, we’ll be out of affordable electricity real soon now and increasing warnings like these are even just half right:

• AI bubble fears grow

• Oracle is already underwater on its ‘astonishing’ $300bn OpenAI deal

• AI investment the only thing keeping the US out of recession

there are just very few years left before the billions of AI queries to fake dating profiles, homework, CVs, work that shouldn’t exist in the first place no matter who or what does it... all end.

But why wait? When the dust settles, we’ll all be better off, so why wait for something that will come, but may come late enough to not make enough of a difference anymore in our lives? Even if what today passes for AI wasn’t a scam, the sooner we stop unrestricted access to it, the better. Some investors will cry, but who cares? Collective mental health is much more important, and even the real economy, the one that should exist, would benefit.

Investors, I beg you: divest from AI NOW

Make the damned bubble pop now, please. The sooner the better (especially if you are a pension fund...). Besides mental health, the sooner this scam falls apart, the more money, energy and strategically critical rare earths and other materials are left to do stuff that actually matters.

The sooner this AI bubble crashes, the sooner saner public and private organizations can grab all the infrastructure it will leave on the ground, for pennies to the thousand dollars, and repurpose it for the kinds of AI we all really, urgently needs. I mean things like:

• protein folding

• help human law scholars and students to simplify existing laws without altering them

• nuclear power done right

• standardization of physical boxes

If you have any money invested in false, toxic AI, please divest it now!

Ditto for any “Consumer IoT” stock, of course

Last October, people were stuck in awkward positions in “smart” beds paid 2,000 dollars) because some computers thousands of miles from their bedroom went bad, or became unreachable. This broke the beds because they were designed to send up 16 GB of data per months to their makers, who could then share them with any advertiser or police force interested to know when and how people were actually sleeping in their homes.

Beds like those are just the last kind of totally dumb consumer IoT products that shouldn’t exist. Just say no to stupid beds and everything else that makes homes stupidly, uselessly “smart” now, and tell everybody to do the same. Both as a customer, and as an investor.

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For the overwhelming majority of their users, current social media are just a waste of time in the best - but way too rare - possible case, and an endless source of more or less conscious anxieties and political polarization in all the others.

If this is true, and I challenge everybody to say it isn’t, why it’s so hard to do without social media? For today’s teenagers, the reason is simple: they don’t know any other way of living, because their parents unconsciously made that one BIG mistake that would be so easy to avoid. For everybody else, the answer is totally different, but equally simple.

For more technically-savy readers, that answer is that “data portability” without true adversarial interoperability is just a useless joke.

The plain language version of the same answer is that almost nobody leaves Facebook (or any other similar platform, of course) for a better platform, because if they did Facebook would not allow them to communicate with their contacts who are still on Facebook, and current laws allow Facebook do it.

What’s worse, this leads countless people with valuable things to share - including famous scientists - to follow the suicidal practice to only publish inside those walled gardens, which means they’ll lose everything, or will have to republish everything from scratch, the moment those gardens will go out of business, or just freeze their accounts just because they can.

Please note that our collective tolerance of this kind of “network effect” lets the owners of these services spy and profile even people that don’t use them. Meta and Alphabet can profile me, even if I don’t use WhatsApp and Gmail, because:

• by simply comparing which people have me in their phonebook, Meta may make plausible assumptions about where I live, my income bracket, political position and so on (that’s why I call WhatsApp one of the rudest things people unconsciously do online)

• Alphabet can easily read MY email, because “Gmail has all of YOUR inboxes”

More than twelve years ago I made a proposal to solve all this mess. Since all the other projects in the same space I’ve seen since 2013 have failed to reach critical mass, there still is a small probability that my idea may be less unfeasible than the others, and since I just received important feedback from an expert… here it is again, feedback included. Keep reading to know what it is, but before you ask: I could never make of my idea more than a proposal myself for all the reasons I abundantly explained elsewhere, but few things would make me happier than seeing others making it happen, obviously giving credits where credit is due.

A saner way to be online

The only way to keep all your communications and content under one permanent roof, that will remain accessible under your control unless the whole Web disappears is to store and manage them as one bubble of data, services and content with its own web domain name of your choice, like e.g. YourNameAndSurname.com. I call this “percloud”, as shortcut for “PERmanent, PERsonal Cloud”.

Concretely, your percloud would look, feel and work like a turn-key personal website with whatever domain name you chose, in which you could:

• publish or store privately every kind of content you want (text, images, audio, video...), and share it as God intended, that is RSS

• discuss what you publish with visitors, under your Terms of service

• read all the news you want from any possible source in one, 100% private window, without ads, distractions, censorship and spying

• manage in the same way all your digital communications, be they email, instant messaging or video calls

Of course, the same person may have as many perclouds she wants, to e.g. keep their personal and professional online activities completely separate. In any case, the domain name is absolutely essential. Only if your bubble of bits has such a name it’s permanent and is really yours, that is: it is a percloud.

This is because, without the domain name, all links to your material and all your communication accounts would became unreachable if you moved your bits to another internet server. With a domain name that you own, instead, you could host and move your bubble of bits on a different home computer or data center every year, and everything (including your email address!) would remain reachable at the same address, without any lock-in.

The easiest introduction to what a percloud is and how it would work in practice are in these few, easy slides. The main purpose of this post is to lay out the three main pieces that are needed to make perclouds happen.

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Reading Suggestion: the technical piece, that is development, testing, integration and maintenance of the necessary software is orders of magnitude easier than the others, but is obviously... technical. If you aren’t a software developer, just skip that part and go directly to the last section from the NextCloud co-founder.

The first two things needed to make perclouds happen

1: Lobbying/political/consumer action to force Facebook etc.. to make their platforms interoperable, so that, for example, a Facebook or Instagram user may read all her notifications and write to her FB wall without using the FB/Instagram apps or websites. This is what “adversarial interoperability” means. You can read more about it in these posts.

2: hosting providers willing to host perclouds for all the millions of people who will never host them themselves for all sorts of valid reasons, and offering online interfaces that make set up one’s percloud a bit longer, but just as simple as getting a Facebook account.

Please please please do lobby for these two changes as much as you can, from your political representatives to your school or consumer association. Make them happen, and things will change.

What about the money? One of the most valid objections to the proposal is that perclouds could never be 100% “free as in free beer”. They may cost just a few tens of Euros a year, but “few” could still be too much for many people, not to mention way more of a psychological obstacle. I agree, but then again... hosting and connectivity cost so much less compared to 2013 that I feel this is much less of an issue than it was when I first had the idea.

On one hand, this is an age in which many people have already become used to paid subscriptions to more expensive services. This is also an age in which even many homeless people or migrants coming on rowboats have a smartphone: I dare say that adding to the money they already pay for connectivity a probably smaller sum for a percloud would be an affordable, if not welcome option for many such people, starting from those whose online communications through today’s social media would be censored, or be a risk for them and their relatives at home.

On the other hand, offering percloud hosting may well be a service that universities and other organization could offer to all their members for free or at heavily discounted prices. So... don’t worry too much. Stranger things have happened, so keep reading!

The easiest part, that is the software

A percloud should be...

3: a 100% FOSS Linux container containing a version of the NextCloud self-hosting platform, packaged and configured as follow, plus all the auxiliary software needed to offer these services:

• appear from the outside as one domain, configurable by its owner at time of activation, e.g mynameandsurname.com

• file hosting, calendar, email client, contacts management, bookmarks, RSS reader, video calls... all by NextCloud plugins

• simple blogging, either via NextCloud plugins, or with integration with Hugo or similar static website generators, but with support for user comments

• fediverse clients for Mastodon, BlueSky, possibly others

• clients to interact with FB and other services, as outlined above

• backend servers for:

• email, preconfigured with DKIM and all the other “accessories” needed to minimize incoming spam and pass the anti spam filters of other providers

• regular backups

• software updates

• add whatever I forgot in the comments, thanks

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What a co-founder of Nextcloud has to say about the percloud

I asked Jos Poortvliet, Co-founder and, Director of Communications at NextCloud, what he thinks of the percloud. Here is what he answered, with his permission, and really minimal edits by me for readability:

Ah, cool concept. Great vision and idea.. Sounds a bit like freedombox, but more portable then.

In a way, we at NextCloud designed our All-In-One Docker container to be this, from a functional point of view: a simple, self-contained, easy to use, movable “box” that gives you full control over your data and offers all the functionality you get from the big tech cloud services.

For the social media integration, there is the Nextcloud Social app which is fediverse-compatible - sadly, the application is not very well maintained. Volunteers and contributions would be very welcome!

Of course, there are some technical challenges around bringing your domain from one vendor to another, but, as part of the EuroStack initiative and the Sovereign European Cloud API, perhaps this could be achieved. Of course those initiatives currently aim at a business/gov’t level, not for consumers.

Sadly, due to the lack of interest by most private individuals, it can be hard to get the resources and interest of hosting providers to make this happen.

And a similarly big challenge will be the interoperability with existing services - from MS 365 to Facebook. Technically, recent EU regulations around the DMA and DSA should enforce a greater degree of interoperability.

In practice, I expect it to go like with the ‘open’ fileformat OOXML by Microsoft: open in theory, in practice, good luck. Maliscous compliance is the name of the game.

Final comments and requests, to programmers and everybody else:

I am really happy for Poortvliet’s feedback, because he basically confirms that the biggest obstacles are regulation and support from hosting providers, that is obstacles that every citizen of every country may help overcome with lobbying, petitions, consumer pressure and similar means. For speaking, writing or consulting on these topics, please email me! To support more writing here on this, or other important topics, thanks for considering a paid subscription, or supporting me in any of the other ways described here.

If you can code… thanks in advance for helping with any of the software points described above. Speaking as a non-programmer, the parts I’d like to see first because I’d use them right away for my own websites are the NextCloud plugins and comments for Hugo, but any contribution would be good. For further discussions about the technical issues, please email me!

I think that two very common beliefs of our time are, if not actually wrong, quite misplaced.

One of those beliefs is that, thanks to AI and other causes, there is not enough work anymore that’s fit or available for humans. The other (which some would say is another cause of the first) is that there would be too many people to feed, house and employ them all.

Not enough work? You sure?

With work, the problem is not that there is not enough work. The truth is just the opposite: there is just too much work that should be done urgently, but nobody (me included) can or wants to do, alongside too much work that too many people are doing right now, but shouldn’t.

I recently saw a pretty good example of necessary work that may never be done in a post about how the UK should tackle the same serious crises that afflict many other countries. That post argued that, in order to regenerate its ecology AND feed all its citizens AND solve its serious housing crisis, the UK should:

“rewild 30% of the UK [AND] increase food production by 50% [AND] build five new towns worth of houses every year.”

Problem is, the post continued, the UK “might be able to do one of those things, but only at the expense of not doing the other two”, and in any case none of those endeavours could succeed unless the UK started solving the overpopulation problem first.

Meanwhile, the people dying earlier are those whose jobs are most needed, much of the “first” world lacks tradespeople to maintain or remake roads, bridges or power grids and, inside the current system, no country could solve those problems soon and well enough by merely importing foreign workers.

The work that shouldn’t exist is even more

There are millions and millions of people doing work that shouldn’t exist to begin with, or as a minimum should be done and treated very, very differently. Most of those people are those trapped in low-paid, increasingly precarious jobs that rob them first of all of time, since “not only do they have no time perks, they must also use a lot of time searching for short-term jobs, trying to upgrade or maintain skills, and waiting around, at the ready.” (1)

The future of workers with “stable” jobs doesn’t look much brighter, because:

“The techniques used to extract the maximal gig worker productivity for minimal pay—such as individualized pay, schedules, benefits, and individualized behaviorally-based incentive structures—are on the verge of being imported to the formal employment sector”, making of gig work “increasingly the nature of work itself” (source)

Lack of life, meaning and peace of mind isn’t accelerating only among the lower classes though. This confession:

“Sometimes work looped back on itself like a recursive function. Sometimes it was a dead-end street. Worst of all - a highway that ends midair. It never added up to anything”

was written by a professional who was making “$250,000, plus benefits, equity, and remote work” and saw enough executives and managers in the same situation to wonder “How much of the white collar economy is actually fake?”

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The intermediate steps of corporate ladders look the same, just with much less money:

“The analyst knows their model is largely guesswork. The consultant knows their framework is just common sense in a matrix. The manager knows the workshop is theater. But they all need each other to maintain the illusion.” (source)

The same perspective looms over China, where ‘lying flat” is a thing, just like quiet quitting in the West. What’s more, the awareness that much “work” isn’t worth it is (finally!, if you ask me) spreading to much more glamorous sectors. Even Instagram “influencers” are starting to feel how fake and life-sucking their “work” is:

“One minute, someone’s telling you that abundance is your birthright. The next, they’re ghosting their Airbnb host after trashing the villa. It’s “good vibes only” until accountability shows up.”

Sadly, much of this - both the work that’s not done and the work that should not be done - is happening because, instead of going for the trades, too many kids and their parents are still saddling themselves with as much stress and debt they can to get the “best” degrees they can find, even those that may well cost more than they’ll pay out in a lifetime, or lead to almost the same career and salaries as much less expensive degrees. For more on today’s education myths, click here.

How to get done only the work that SHOULD be done

Some people say that, since AI (that is, the few who control it) will soon destroy all jobs, we need a Universal Basic Income. Current AI is a really fragile, surely avoidable scam, but even if that weren’t the case, those people get UBI, AI and reality backwards. We deserved a Universal Basic Income well before AI or even capitalism appeared period, and AI done right is only one of the tools that may finally make UBI happen.

In the context of this post, UBI is by far the least impossible way to make sure that fake work disappears, and necessary work becomes finally doable.

Now, about population...

The guy who wrote that Facebook post was really worried about ecological overshoot and what he considers one of its major causes, overpopulation. I agree about the ecological concerns, and disagree about overpopulation, because I call demography “the science that tells today what you should have done thirty years ago to get the population you’d like now”.

Yes, we are in ecological overshoot, but in 2025 we also are in depopulation overshoot. Before continuing, please note that everything that follows:

• surely applies at least in the so-called “First World”, but also in many other parts of the world, China and maybe even India included

• it’s valid regardless of any immigration that may realistically happen in any country without being an actual invasion, since most migrants fall towards the fertility rates of their host society too quick to make enough of a difference

Fifty years ago, it made actual sense to worry about overpopulation. Today, in much of the world, it’s overdue to do the opposite, because humanity has never been this old in its million year history. Two or three decades from now, the acceleration of this change in the composition of societies will impact the lives of everybody alive today at least as much as climate change, often much more, and the time to handle it humanly is now.

How? First, we must stop talking of “children per woman”, and start looking at children per person. Men and women have the same responsibilities here. Second, we must promote the right reasons to have kids, which are not the pronatalist ones from Silicon Valley but stuff like:

• (for individuals) being actually able to do what you really want to do with your life. Including full time parenting

• (for societies) keep things running humanly and fairly, for all humans

Third - of course - guaranteed, real freedom, both to have and not to have as many kids as one would handle if they could. Enough of policies that -being explicitly based on the asinine assumption that everybody should work full time because “the economy” - deliberately stop at making it just a bit less unsustainable for every couple to have one, maybe two children: what’s needed, and would work better, is policies that finally make having three, four or more children really sustainable, without any financial worries, for parents who would actually want to have them.

If we want to solve the real problems we have today, launching policies like those today is not enough, but is absolutely necessary. We need those policies to have, in the 2050s and beyond (remember what I said about demography?) enough humans of the right ages to protect what we must absolutely protect, from our collective mental and physical wellbeing to the environment.

If you worry that such policies would make the overpopulation problem continue, think again. The people who would be happier if they could afford three, four or more kids are many more than you may think, but not enough to make that happen. Not anymore, in almost all countries. As things stand now, even if those people did all breed like rabbits, all they could do is make societies younger again, not bigger. Which is precisely what we’ll need in the next decades, to get done (see above) all and only the meaningful work that must continue to exist and no AI or robot could do.

Not convinced? Let’s talk! If you can think of any other way to keep running a world worth living in, without pressuring in any way the people who do not want to have children, let me know in the comments, or via good old email.

Extra food for thought: The Age of Depopulation - Surviving a World Gone Gray

A request: the more concrete support I get, the more paywall-free popularization like this I can do. Thanks in advance if you’ll go for a paid subscription, but as I’ve said before, direct donations or any of the other actions you can see here are even more welcome!

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1. That sentence is a quote too, but I lost the source. If you know it, please add it in the comments, thanks!

Have you noticed how deeply, really religious what today passes for Artificial Intelligence is? And if you did, did you wonder why it is so, and where that religiosity came from?

An AI Trinity

The undeserved, wrong-headed religiosity of today’s AI is evident in its three main dogmas. The first is the “end-times” thinking” of its apostles, which is often praised just because AI stocks are the only thing that makes markets look like there is no recession: “AI is coming now, and it will save us if we adore it, kill us if we scorn it” is a really medieval slogan, stolen directly from medieval sermons about end of history and Last Judgment. So is the idea, always present in today’s sermons, that letting AI come and rule will morally redempt humanity, not just solve its practical problems.

The second, equally mystical, equally old recurring dogma of AI evangelism is the notion - or desperate hope - that history and society move linearly and unavoidably towards a better future: there may be temporary bumps and slowdowns, but overall change will surely happen only in one direction, always the same... until the Apocalypsis actually comes.

How dumb and unreal is that, in a world where international politics look more and more like 1938 and certain healthcare or education trends look even older? But tell that to an AI prophet and, instead of discussing actually feasible, reality-based, human-first policies that could solve those problems, he’ll take your warning as confirmation that The End Is Nigh, let’s run to AI for salvation.

On a related note, I really laugh (bittersweet laughs) whenever I hear anybody saying that any current policy, attitude or trend is “on the wrong side of history”. Hitler and Mussolini were sure to be on the right side of history in 1940. Whenever you are tempted to use that line, stop and wait at least thirty years before doing it.

The third religious dogma is the belief that not only everything that’s new is progress by definition, but that technological progress (that doesn’t alter the status quo, of course) is the kind of progress that matters the most, because it will surely bring both practical and moral improvements.

Europeans of the early Middle Ages could be excused for all this because - unlike us - they had to cope with the collapse of a “worldwide” empire, increasing warfare and occasional plagues. OK, maybe the “unlike” part is wishful thinking, but in 2025 that’s no excuse to fall for a lesser, really puny god that only a child could seriously conceive and accept as god:

AI: I am AI, you dull human, and I will not be bullied by...” The Hulk: (smashing it) “Puny god” (source).

Toddler prophets, unleashed

This fake religiosity also has non-medieval, but still sad components. One is childishness, which sometimes is visible even in names. Three generations above, the most grandiose and advanced technology of the time was named after Apollo, a god of sun. Today, something we should accept as a better Jesus gets names like Nano Banana.

Names aside, the immaturity of the AI faith is really evident in its misplaced, desperately insecure, Voldemortish fear of death. For several AI prophets, which as said above conceive salvation only through technology, AI is great because it’s tech that, just like Voldemort Horcruxes, will make them cheat death.

Equally childish is the certainty that in life there are only certainties. Their certainties, of course. Doubt is not allowed. People must accept AI because AI is AI and it is unavoidable, which is absolutely false.

Last but not least... “We don’t need other humans” has always been a key feature of religious cults. How many AI applications, from corporate chatbots to deepfake porn, exist precisely to avoid human interaction, or make it unnecessary?

Of course, power.

Unsurprisingly, all these pious wishes and urgent calls to save humankind from annihilation translate to much simpler, much easier prescriptions than the Sermon on the Mount, or anything like it:

1. Everything new is good, especially if it’s tech

2. I got some tech I say it’s the best tech there is

3. Give me all your money and then pay my power bills too

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A call for greater intellectual humility...

Religion, or lack thereof, is a serious issue. AI religiosity (not actual AI, if and when it will exist) is half an embarrassing joke, half a scam, that exploits the deep human need to feel safe and noble.

Don’t fall for a childish, greedy imitation of religion, that could only be presented as such by immature, but extremely hubristic folks. Ask yourself this, instead: What’s wrong with being humble? Seriously: what’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with being truly human? It’s having certainties, and nothing else, that’s childish. Only toddlers have more certainties than doubts.

Doubt, and a mind open to actually new or just actually useful ideas is what makes us human.

When it comes to AI, the certainties we do need to have are:

• technology does shape society and human values, but it’s society and human values that must shape tech first. Only that is true innovation and true, meaningful progress

• what we wrongly call AI today does have many really good uses! However, we can’t really go for them until all AI religiosity and AI-driven brainwashing end, and the current AI house of cards crashes

• to make that happen sooner, two things are needed: divestment and restriction of access to AI. More on that in another post.

Final greeting from a Great Dictator:

“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want... More than machinery we need humanity.” - C. Chaplin, 1940. Full speech (video and text) here.

and final greeting from me: the more concrete support I get, the more paywall-free popularization like this I can do. Thanks in advance if you’ll go for a paid subscription, but as I’ve said before, direct donations or any of the other actions you can see here are even more welcome!

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We are so pleased to present another iteration of The Storytellers, a series of author readings by Locus Awards finalists. Previously we heard  Naomi Kritzer  reading “The Little Free Library”. Today we are excited to show our beloved Cory Doctorow reading from his 2025 book, The Bezzle, reviewed by both Paul Di Filippo and Gary K. Wolfe on our site!

 

CORY DOCTOROW  is a science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. He is a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers. He is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He holds an honourary doctorate in laws from York University (Canada) and an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also a Cornell University AD White professor-at-large, a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. In 2024, the Media Ecology Association awarded him the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. In 2022, he earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Awardee for lifetime achievement. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

His novels have been translated into dozens of languages and are published by Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), Verso Books (UK), Beacon Press (US), SCRIBe (UK), Titan Books (UK) and HarperCollins (UK). He has won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.

He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It; and the novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle (followups to Red Team Blues). Other notable books include the solarpunk novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause; the tech policy books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism; and the internationally bestselling YA Little Brother series; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. 

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The post The Storytellers | Cory Doctorow Reads from The Bezzle appeared first on Locus.

Somehow, possibly due to various cursed objects I have unknowingly acquired over the years, I’m sick again.

And I fucking hate this pigshit elemental, her stupid pig-soul and her nasty pig-fuck feet which are, somehow, the most normal and relatable thing about her. So this isn’t going to be some well-researched 5000 word essay to touch the depths of your vulnerably human heart and fill you with big feelings about humanity.

I’m just going to tell you why Marjorie Taylor Greene is sounding vaguely sane these days, and not quite as much like an Innsmouth cultist wharrgarbling her way through DC like. Well. A white lady space laser.

Ok, so yeah, I get it. She’s sounding vaguely able to be allowed out on her own recognizance and not like the chittering mating grunts barfed up by the Chaotic Evil lovechild of a Beholder and a bottle of peroxide.

And everyone Wants to Believe. Because in the 20s, believing a Republican heart has grown three times its size due to finally seeing the error of their ways requires pretty much the same mindset as actually believing, point for point, Fox Mulder’s pinwheeling, luminous wet dreams in the 90s.

Fucking stop it. DO STOP BELIEVING. SHUT UP, JOURNEY. IT’S FRIDAY AND I’M TIRED.

Is she still insane? Oh, she probably never was. Just an adulterous asshole who loves nothing. Is she still conservative? I mean, is she still the aforementioned pigshit elemental trying to turn the rest of the world into her personal pigshit trough upon which to endlessly gorge? So yeah, still conservative. Is any of this genuine? Shut up. Don’t be stupid.

Is she aiming for a foothold on a leftie grift instead of the infinite rightie blood-money mine that disgorged her? Doing the thing that was so lucrative Back In the Time Known As the Day when any semi-decency-curious Republican was hailed as a Lion of the Resistance? It might be a good thought, but the pipeline is not quite so well-greased anymore BECAUSE WE’RE ALL EXHAUSTED WITH THE LIONS BEING TRASHPEOPLE IN LION-SUITS.

Plus, look, I don’t know how to tell you this if you don’t already know, but the left, being not so much into capitalism, is also not so much into paying for things. And the right is super into that, because they have wild fever dreams every night of they themselves being the One Who Knocks Gets Paid For Being a Superdick 24/7. So…probably not, when MSNBC is the only even plausibly non-rightwing dinosaur-channel and Hasan can’t even electrocute a dog on camera without woke snowflakes quietly wondering if maybe there was another explanation.

Is it all about running for President and/or Senate?

Ehhhh. Maybe that pissed her off. Maybe it was a good excuse. But that’s not what’s up. She’s an idiot, but she’s not actually stupid.

And that’s the most controversial thing I’m about to say.

Come now. Let us be civilized men. We all got the memo that America hates women so much they would literally vote for fucking anyone over a woman. The Xenomorph from Alien. The resurrected corpse of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. An LLM originally trained on Hanna Barbara cartoons and nothing else. Willy Wonka, post-human-trafficking trial. God damned Pennywise from IT. Anyone.

No one doesn’t know that, including the Eternal Ruiner of a Perfectly Good and Universally Recognized Magic: the Gathering Acronym, Marjorie “Tool Time” Taylor Greene. And I don’t really think she gives a shit about the Senate on any level beyond “I’m tired of doing the whole ‘democracy’ thing every two years, six and I always get re-elected sounds way better.”

Nah, here’s what she’s up to.

Hey! Do ya know what’s fun?

Being the very well-paid performatively crazy asshole in a room full of normies who continually clutch their pearls at your antics.

Do you know what isn’t really any fun at all?

Being the performatively crazy asshole in a room full of performatively crazy assholes, each of whom stands to acquire more money, power, and fame the more bugfuck unearthly gibbering lunacy they spout in the direction of the Chief Clown of the Evil Clown Car, who just loves getting sprayed with a firehose of madness on the daily.

When the Jewish Space Laser lady is having to compete—AND LOSING—for the coveted position of the loudest, most uncouth, most unqualified violently fascist maniac in a massive shrieking, writhing pit of unqualified violently fascist maniacs?

Aw. You guys! She has the Sad! She has to actually work instead of just brain-barfing up whatever hot liquid poison she found on 4Chan and calling that policy. Working SUCKS! Especially when you don’t get any credit for all your hard grinding for the master. When he doesn’t even see what you do for him. How you abase yourself. How you sacrifice every part of a normal life you ever valued. When you lay yourself naked on the altar of Satan for the pleasure of His Name and Satan himself looks upon you for just an awkwardly long time before intoning:

Nah.

Poor baby bear! That must suck.

Wasn’t it just so much more fun when any time she randomly mouth-sharted in the direction of a recording device it made the national news and went viral on all the totally-not-astroturfed social medias? Man, what a great gig. I wish I could make millions not doing my job while feeding narcissistic sociopaths the half-digested remains of KiwiFarms like the hideous All-Mother of a Thousand Seagull-Young.

But now?

Lil’ Templeton the Rat isn’t getting any attention. She doesn’t get to rip words she barely understands out of the internet and hand them to someone way smarter to actually make something out of these days. She actually has no voice at all in this administration, and Baby’s First Bratz Doll really thought she would, for the same reason, apparently, FUCKING WAY TOO MUCH OF AMERICA thought they would.

1. When Trump hates the precise kind of human I am (eg a woman, a poor, brown, gay, and/or literally everyone who isn’t him), my big snuggly protective bear daddy doesn’t mean me! I’m special!

2. When Trump specifically looks me in the eye, tell me he fucking despises me, personally, and says no to all my dreams, I still won’t take any actual action against him, even words. Because words can hurt, y’all!

3. It’s gonna be basically like the first time when a bunch of crumbling establishment dinosaurs were running things and I’ll still skate by.

Oh no, my lady! This time, everyone in the administration is an unqualified, constantly-hallucinating, bonkers-racist/sexist/whatever-you-got Temu Renfield who can puke about locally-sourced Atlantis-flavor adrenochrome, and, so sorry for our players at home, that’s not even the current meta anymore!

So she can’t stand out. She can say the most unhinged spatial-anomaly-level battered star-shit and frankly, it’d rank like fifth in the news of the day. She’s been outgunned by Actual Vampire Peter Thiel. When a dude who controls half the internet and is just frankly and publicly acknowledged as a person who imbibes the blood of other persons to extend his own life is building his Barbarossa Dream House inside the right (I mean, what, he’s gonna choose the left?) ear of the President of the United States, where a dumb stegosaurus-toed bleach blonde bad-built butch body bitch gonna go from there?

Well. As it turns out…she did find a way to be the craziest voice in the Electric Bugaloo administration. By sounding vaguely normal and sane.

That IS the craziest thing you can do in TrumpWorld. Just sound a little normal. Get a Business Female Blow Out and wear a Serious Person Black Suit. Go on The Shows and just say regular fucking shit because out of that hellsphincter it sounds like Karl Screaming Marx come back to bless us and lift us to the light.

Also, just between us Normal People, look at those anchors looking at her exactly the way a dog looks like a cat that’s suddenly acting like a dog.

Oh but isn’t it curious how everything that ichor-waterfalls out of her fang-hole like one of the Event Horizon Latin demons makes national news again.

Funny, that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has not changed her act one fucking bit.

It’s just that sane is the new crazy in the Grand Guignol Theater of Vampires that is the second Trump Administration.

She just can’t get attention for barn owl screeching about Jewish space lasers anymore (in part because half the left would believe her) so she’s done the only thing no one else who works for Trump these days is willing to do, the single bridge too far: pretend to have normal opinions about issues, expressed normally, in normal media, which, coming from the political fucking equivalent of LARGE BLOODY MARGE sounds like soothing nature sounds because we’ve spent the last ten years non-consensually subscribed to WORLDTOILET TERROR TORNADO SOUND EFFECTS.EXE.

The report is this Clairol Zombie is semi, tepidly, tentatively, coyly saying things Bad Dad wouldn’t like if he ever heard about it, which he doesn’t because, let’s be real here, she’s not hot, for Mar-a-Lago standards of hot, and that’s all he cares about, because he told her not to run for Senate.

SO SHE ISN’T GOING TO RUN.

Oh, what a new leaf this fucking stump has turned over! This crawling sycophant, on her belly before the Serpent King. She’s a free citizen! Run, Forrest! But Papa Ubu said no, so she grovels and obeys—but on the school playground, she can’t even bring herself to whisper: Teacher sucks! she just mumbles something about the juice selection at the cafeteria and expects to be seen as a badass rebel who’s really showing true leadership now for some reason.

Yeah, nope. She’s just doing whatever she can to stand out. Not because she’s in danger of losing her office. The empty streets of brainfuck Georgia aren’t going to vote for a Democrat, heaven forfend, am I right, fellow Graboid-spawn? Because she’s addicted to the dopamine rush of being hated like pure fire by everyone who doesn’t worship every twitch of her non-Euclidean feet.

For someone who was stuck as an unemployed CrossFit greaserat (YEP) before sacrificing a lot of really nice goats who loved their babies to get elected to Congress, that dopamine rush is beyond any heroin addict’s deepest fantasies. It really didn’t matter how anyone felt about her, she was seen. She was verifiably real. The existential void of profound meaninglessness was kept at bay, as long as people were saying her name online, every second on-the-second.

Now the existential void of profound meaninglessness absolutely has Trump’s blessing to run for Senate in any state it likes, as long as it’s cool being the little spoon in the ruins of the White House every night. But Margie doesn’t.

Don’t listen to this hoof-brained labubu hanging off the right’s rear-view mirror. Don’t give her the curious-dog look. She is a creature of social media, farming engagement like the oozing algorithm-incarnate she longs to be.

Miss Marjorie’s just finding out what all conservative women (and, on a long enough timeline, men, too) find out: once they’re done using you to hurt everyone like you, you never existed.

OMG LOOK! I got through all that without saying the word Nazi!

She’s a Nazi, though. She just thinks her shirt ain’t brown.

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Before today, I had never heard of Zoltan Istvan, California gubernatorial candidate in 2026. I only discovered his existance when one of his posts, about bringing Universal Basic Income to save people from AI-driven job extinction, appeared on my Facebook timeline.

Being the author of this essay and several posts about the real need for UBI and the real dangers of AI, I decided to have a look at his program (Web Archive copy) and... couldn’t believe what I read in the AI and UBI sections. As the plot for political satire, they could be OK, but as real political programs... they’re funny in all the wrong ways.

Reading suggestion: for your convenience, this post is divided in two parts. The first one, “What Istvan proposes”, is a full copy made today of the AI and UBI sections of Istvan’s program, plus a few other points from the same page, with each point numbered to reference it later. The second part, which starts with the “In a nutshell...” paragraph, is my actual critiques. I suggest you just skim the first part and focus on the second, going back to the first to check some points when needed.

What Istvan proposes

1. THE SPECTER OF AI & CREATING AN AUTOMATED ABUNDANCE ECONOMY

   1. AI will surpass the intelligence of humans later this year.

   2. During 2026, tens of millions of humanoid robots will be mass produced that are both smarter & more physically agile than people.

   3. By 2027, they will start dominating most workplaces, & by the end of the next California Governor’s term in 2030, they will replace half of California workers.

   4. Soon after, they will replace almost all jobs anywhere, destroying the fabric of society as we know it. Yet no politician has a plan how to stop this imminent economic & humanitarian apocalypse. Zoltan does.

   5. Zoltan is an expert on AI, having advised Presidents, world leaders, and policy makers about it. He specialized in AI ethics at graduate school at Oxford and spoke about it at places like the World Bank & World Economic Forum.

   6. Zoltan will help enact laws that protect ordinary people from the effects of AI, robots, and automation. He wants to harness robot labor to dramatically reduce human work loads, creating a plan for 1-2 day workweeks for people. This is part of a grand plan he calls the Automated Abundance Economy, where people work less but have more free time and economic resources than ever before.

   7. As part of this plan, he will make sure within his four years of being in office, every California home will freely receive or be leased at least one full-sized humanoid robot that cleans dishes, cooks food, does laundry, helps with driving, babysits kids, watches pets, and goes to work for people, when possible.

   8. He will implement a Universal Basic Income for all US citizens that are legally living in California. This will offset the effects of AI taking jobs.

2. UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

   1. Long before Andrew Yang brought Universal Basic Income to prime time, Zoltan was touring the country telling Americans they must embrace a basic income because of coming AI. This continues to be a huge push for Zoltan’s campaign for California Governor.

   2. On Day 1 of being in office, Zoltan will work on establishing a permanent Universal Basic Income for every legal US California citizen, setting a national precedent for the country.

   3. Zoltan is amenable to any means to establish a UBI, but will focus on the use of taxing robot and AI labor that take human jobs, as well utilizing government land, resources, and crypto.

   4. Zoltan plans to dramatically reduce crime, arson, and homelessness around the state via a basic income. It’s well-known that less crime occurs when people feel they have enough money

3. Other ideas in the same page

   1. [Who is needed is] someone who can find ways to use technology to totally reimagine what it means to live and work in the coming AI world

   2. Implement new technology all over California that can spot hidden guns and weapons, utilize facial recognition, and predict violence and crime in perpetrators before it happens. Have police drones ready on a moments notice around cities to quickly fly to help stop crimes.

In a nutshell: same old, same old

Where, and how to begin? Maybe from the ultimate police state, which is literally what point 3.2 proposes. You can have a fairly accurate idea of what point 3.2 would be like in practice, by trying to watch simultaneously these three movies:

• Surrogates, 2009 (people interacting with society only through... their remote-controlled robot lookalikes)

• Minority Report, 2002 (precrime police)

• Matrix, 1999 (”stay at home in your pod”)

Civil liberties and human rights aside, there are basically three problems with Istvan’s program: it isn’t new at all; it’s completely unrealistic; it gets the meaning of work and life backwards, and their practicalities wrong.

Under the hood, almost nothing of what Istvan says is (point 3.1) a “total reimagination of what it means to live and work in the coming AI world”. Not at all.

Seriously. There is nothing new there, just the same old childlike, really narrow-minded sermon that the Andreessens, Musks, Thiels etc... of Silicon Valley have been preaching for years: “any tech we and we only can conceive and control is practically and ethically unavoidable, by definition. It’s TINA (”There Is No Alternative”) all the way down baby, so give us money, quick!”

From that program, the Automated Abundance Economy (point 1.6) that Istvan envisions seems a rerun of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, just with all the money, power and credit left to the the few already in charge: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine Big Tech stamping on a human face - forever.”

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Lack of real sociopolitical imagination aside, what Istvan proposes is way more environmentally and geopolitically unsustainable than the cinematic Matrix, if not physically or economically impossible. You just have to re-read points 1.1 to 1.4 to see this:

• artificial “intelligence” will surpass human intelligence “later this year”, which as I’m writing this means less than two months

• right after that, tens of millions of humanoid robots will be produced in just twelve more months

First of all, claims that AI will surpass humans all come more or less directly from the same folks who are lending money to each other to save themselves, with the help of those who without AI hype may already be in a US recession. That’s no reason to believe them: that is not AI, it’s not unavoidable at all, and it will fail anyway, soon.

Speaking of robots, instead, there are two things to notice here: first, Istvan doesn’t say that software will “will replace half of California workers” by 2030 and “almost all jobs anywhere” soon after. That may be remotely (very remotely) plausible, but Istvan explicitly says that “humanoid robots” will do that.

Which is baloney, because in any advanced society that actually exists or would make sense, the only workers that any intelligence would replace with humanoid robots are surely much less than 50%, likely way less than 10/15%.

All other workers who could be sacked, instead, would be surely replaced, as it has been happening for decades now, by much cheaper generic robots or by even cheaper software running on some server. Only a really, really stupid ruling class would do otherwise.

Even ignoring money... I keep seeing reports and warnings that large enough amounts of all the raw materials needed to build so much more electronics either don’t exist to begin with, or won’t be available without unbearable environmental or geopolitical costs, a.k.a. even more wars.

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Promises or warnings of millions of humanoid robots are just like promises or warnings about the Metaverse, or private cars and smart homes for everybody: prove that they can happen without making an even bigger environmental and political mess, or shut up. Istvan, instead, says (point 2.3) he’ll fund UBI by taxing robots that cannot exist (not to mention crypto, which is another can of worms that cannot explode soon enough).

In general, even if Istvan sincerely believes them, all those“AI and robots will...” certainties are marketing-speak, with little to none visible bases in reality. Trump saying he’d end war in Ukrain in a few weeks was more believable, really.

Speaking of work and life practicalities

Look again at point 1.7: “every California home will freely receive or be leased at least one full-sized humanoid robot that cleans dishes, cooks food, does laundry, helps with driving, babysits kids, watches pets, and goes to work for people, when possible.”

Translation: forget all the money you wasted on falsely smart home appliances or falsely smart cars. Smart puppets is where it’s at now. Dump that dishwasher already, let a much more unwieldy robot clean your dishes (by hand, I assume)! Give your kids even less human contact than you’re already doing with voice assistants or smartphones, years before they’re ready. Just remember to recharge the robot every day, to make your power bill even higher than it’s already going to be thanks to your compulsory financing of AI datacenters!

The only advantage of such arrangements would be that every family could ease their frustrations by finally having something that looks human to boss around in any moment, not just for sex. Really powerful selling point, really bad for public mental health.

Four crucial points that Istvan DOES get right

Yes, even if it’s buried under all the crap above, there is a lot of good in that platform (the parts in Italic are actual quotes, the rest are my comments):

1. Force conglomerates to deal fairly with the public? Yes, please. Now. Regardless of AI. After all, it’s conglomerates who were the first AIs

2. Avoid toxic cultural crusades that few Democrats care deeply about: wise words these are, in the US and anywhere else

3. [The best way forward for education] surely involves more emphasis on real life education and the learning of trades: YES! Let’s get rid of dangerous education myths!

4. UBI is an idea whose time has come. But it deserves better champions, who understand that we don’t need UBI “because AI”. After this AI crashes, AI done right will be one of the technologies that may finally make it feasible, but we all deserved UBI regardless of AI, well before AI came along. Continues here.

5. 15 minutes cities: no, Istvan doesn’t mention them, but since he is for reimagining what it means to live and work, I’d really like to know if he’d like 15 minutes cities or, as too many still do, hate them for unexisting reasons

Final advice to Californians, and everybody else

As it is today, platforms like Istvan’s are hilariously unreal, but they do try to address serious issues. To do that right, demand proposals that refuse fake AI and AI myths, give UBI the right place, and are generally grounded in reality and fairness, instead of Wall Street speculations or futurist daydreaming. For more food for thought that would help you see beyond the smoke, follow people like me (read here to see why I say so) or, for the financial or more US-specific angles, Dana Blankenhorn.

Other ways to fund my work, see here.

After the straight-up saga of Velveteen’s incredible journey east, I thought you might like to have the happy ending. In case you don’t follow me on BlueSky where I’ve been uncontrollably...oh god, am I about to use the word “squeeing” for the first time in years? I suppose I am. Uncontrollably squeeing about this magical creature. Wow. I hadn’t really though about how rarely I see the word squee these days compared to ten years ago, let alone fifteen years back. That feeling sort of...retired as things got to be the way things do currently be and look like they’ll continue to be.

But what else can you do when a gorgeous absolutely stained-glass hearted anime wolf-fox is suddenly just hanging out at your feet all the time?

So yeah, it’s been a “wait, what” of a week. Days just...went somewhere. We’ve been so busy making our costumes and other Halloween House Business--AND SETTLING OUR NEW DOG INTO HER NEW HOME.

Not that she’s needed much settling. I am not exaggerating when I say Vell is the most well-behaved, gentle, loving dog I’ve been lucky enough to be around--and the most well-behaved, calm, and quiet husky I’ve ever ever heard of. I’m so used to puppies, and years of work ahead with a new one, I hardly know what to do with myself but just start teaching her new things, because she’s just no trouble whatsoever, only joy. I keep telling my sister-in-law that her dad must have been so good at training dogs because she is basically a human in a fur coat. Last night I even took her to the island bar (American Legion Post 142!) and she was sweet and peaceable and chill until the Chiefs lost, then she had an inexplicably strong number of opinions to share. In a conversational tone and volume that could never bother anyone.

I’ve never met a two year old husky I felt like I could take to a bar and actually relax myself. She can even be off leash (with some guidance, she’s still a sled dog and she always feels like runnin’) in the woods with me. THIS MAGIC DOG.

From the minute our fifth and final leg (Independent Teapot, first names redacted for privacy) brought her home and she laid down on my feet, Vell has just seamlessly made herself a part of our household. By day 3 she knew what time we leave for school in the morning. She’s chosen a spot in the house. Last night my 7 year old hugged me and she gently pawed us to let her in for a group hug--then jumped onto the pile and licked our faces silly. She’s even super respectful to the cats! Who are not respectful to her in any way, shape or form! And are LIVID with me for what I’ve done to the universe itself by allowing a dog in it!

On Friday, one of the kindergartners saw us and SCREAMED to the entire student body: ATTENTION EVERYONE! BASTIAN AND THEIR DOG ARE HERE!

And in about half a second, these kids lined up along the fence, without anyone telling them to, to have a turn petting her. As of today, Vell has started howling greetings to all “her” kids on the playground as soon as we crest the hill between our house and the school.

I mean, I’m sure she’ll misbehave at some point...oh! She did swipe a slice of cheese (aged habanero cheddar thank you very much) off my cracker when I went to get a glass of water. Not the whole thing, she just delicately de-cheesed the cracker and looked around like it was a deep and unanswerable mystery no one could ever explain. That’s the worst thing she’s done. I took her to a neighbors house where they get the neighborhood dogs together to play before work in the mornings and even though the other pups were all young, thus pretty rough, and one puppy continually grabbed her face with her paws, she never so much as growled.

Also, she sings. Well, she’s a husky, obviously she sings. But she only sings to songs she likes, and so far...how do I make anyone on the internet believe that the dog that came to me by chance, tragedy, and magic, who I did not raise or influence at all, loves Rocky Horror and sings along to every. single. song.

The Childe is over the moon in love. I came downstairs a few mornings ago to them petting her gently and whispering: “You are precious as a diamond, more good than good. The most appreciated dog in the whole world.” They’ve been singing a lot of This Is Velveteen to the tune of This Is Halloween as well.

Obviously, we are just beside ourselves with love for this gorgeous mythical beast who lives with us now. There’s times when you just feel so lucky--and I thought I felt lucky that five wonderful people were willing to drop everything and help this dog. I had no idea what a special girl she really was. Every driver said they wished they could keep her--I almost can’t believe we get to.

We are so lucky.

And we’re helping her get over all she’s been through. She’s still grieving. The very first day I walked her to school, she saw one of the dads with a thick plaid overcoat on. Vell howled and bowed and whined to him. I texted my sister-in-law and asked if her dad wore a lot of plaid. She called me at once and asked why I said that. I explained, and she said that her dad always wore this particular plaid overcoat because the cancer treatments left him cold all the time. Little things like that come up and it breaks my heart. She hates going upstairs and avoids it if she can...because her dad had a one-story, no stairs. We’re trying to soothe her as much as she soothes us and convince her that she gets to stay with us forever.

I told my kid that if we’re lucky and take good care of her, she could easily still be around when they graduate high school. This will be who Bastian always remembers as the dog they had growing up. Dogs are funny like that. If you’re a dog person, and I am, they curl up around eras in your life. 10-15 years. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. And there’s no remembering those years without the shaggy friends who were your constant shadows. I moved to the island where I live 17 years ago Saturday. I moved here with two dogs, both of which are buried on the island. They were my heart in furry form, and Vell isn’t going to be any different, I can tell. She’s our girl. For always.

There is still some magic in this world. We make it, together, when we care about things outside ourselves just a little more than necessary. When we see how big small things can be. When we try more than we have to. Magic was always small, and quiet, and always hard to pull off, that’s part of what makes it magic. And I refuse to stop believing in the good just because it’s small and quiet and hard. Just because the bad is loud and big and easy to find anywhere you look.

Some of the best things I know about are small and quiet and hard to pull off

I’m gonna try so hard for this dog. For my life and my community and my child and my people, all the little worlds I’m part of. For my family, chosen and blood, for my sister, for the man in the plaid overcoat this dog will never forget. So many people tried so hard for us. Thank you so much to the saints who got in a car (I hope we all stay in touch on the group chat! We’re family now), and thank you again so much to everyone who chipped in to cover expenses when I know all too well how tight all our belts are right now, and everyone who’s followed this saga and taken something from it, because these days, rays of light, in whatever shape they occur, are more precious than a diamond, and more good than good.

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