A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

TL;DR: Go to https://exiftool.org to get the goods!

Did you know that a picture is worth a thousand words? Thanks to inflation, that’s closer to 33,000 words today. But good luck finding a buyer in this economy.

Photography, a French hobby from the early 19th century - you may have heard of it, has gone from a science afforded only by the elite to being so ubiquitous there are likely pictures of you picking your nose openly available on any of thousands of police surveillance systems installed across the world. What used to require special papers and chemicals and glass now requires a half second of attention from the danger rectangle nearly everyone carries. I don’t mean the ART of photography. That’s art. That’s the eye and composition of human wonder. The process of photography, though, is about as mundane as shoes or pizza parties in lieu of compensation or work-life balance.

In this procession to mundanity, a word worth at least 1/8th of a picture, the processes behind its majicks have been lost on the photographer. In the time of shared butthole rags in outhouses and oil being an annoyance to water diviners, photographers had to be chemists. They had to deposit opaque materials in solution on glass or treated paper. They had to know for how long each stage of development took based on the subject of the photograph. They had to set and enlarge and repeat from negatives. It was a meditative process as much as a scientific one. Today, we can simply double-press a button (poor people’s phones still have buttons. Apple folks probably just speak some incantation and do a little somatic gesture) to bring up an instant FotoMat booth in the palms of our hands.

That’s not to say the lay person knew the photographic process before digital cameras made it a New York rooftop party talking point. The commodification of photography moved processing to a central, abstracted location a century prior. So not thinking about anything but the shot itself has been, for the lifetime of anyone reading this, the norm. And that’s not a bad thing. Not every snap, candid, or interesting dog poo needs to be meticulously developed. Most are simply mementos or memory aids or embarrassment fodder to show to first dates. So when digital photography became something anyone could carry in their pocket, learning the inner workings was never on the list of things people wanted to do with it. Mostly they wanted to take photos of the food they were eating or their genitals. Sometimes both at the same time. What a beautiful world.

Digital imaging brings with it a host of advantages. Ease, access, instant…ness. And a digital file can carry more than just the image. But unlike a hastily snapped Polaroid of your grundle, the data isn’t limited to an unreadable date scrawled in sharpie or a quick description of the scene on the back of a print. The file’s data is normally completely invisible. Because it’s invisible, it’s also often out of mind. The average phone photog isn’t thinking of their precise location being associated with a picture as more than anything but a future convenience. If at all. They aren’t thinking about what data the app they are using adds to the photo - likely from a place of functionality on the part of the developers who made it. Metadata - the information stored in the file along side the stream of bits that make up the image - is extremely useful for quickly categorizing, grouping, searching, and filtering images. The type of data stored varies from camera to camera, from app to app. It can be edited and updated by your photo processing software. Every time the file is piped through something, it generally adds a little more. That seems great, right?

And usually it is pretty great. Especially during the creative process of editing or for organization of your collection. But what happens when you share that photo online? If you’re like me, nothing. It just sort of sits there and nobody likes it and you eat a Cadbury about it. But a couple decades ago, someone who gets paid to create giant buckets for categorizing people for targeted advertising realized that this was another metric they could use to do just that. And in service, applications and cameras began adding more data to that invisible catalog. Advertiser profiles can include information about where you’ve been based on your photo stream without ever having to ask you to enable GPS for their app. Analytical algorithms have made that a much bigger issue as they can start making connections between things at a rate humans can’t even comprehend. They can identify that a specific subject of photography lives at a precise location based on multiple photos with the same coordinates. They can use your editing software to determine if you’re open to subscriptions or if you’re a professional versus an amateur. Large language models can use the information to steal your style by creating a fingerprint that quickly munges all of your work into a bucket to be drawn from should some sad moron decide to fake you in particular. In a world of big data solutions, the free fuel your images provide to corporate data pools can and will be used against you. EXIF was created, like most things perverted through a scanner dimly by our current surveillance state, from a place of good intent. It was meant to do all the things it does that are useful. Like fire. Like leaded gasoline. Like asbestos. The thinking around something, particularly in computer science, generally stops when the goal of the usecase is met. The thinking of bad actors, however, does not.

“So what? They’ve already got my ad profile,” I don’t hear you say because I’m alone in a room with a keyboard right now. Yes, but we have crossed a threshold in recent years of draconian overreach by monitoring bodies. AdSense having a fingerprint of you may not matter right now. But if you say something the government doesn’t like? If you take a photo of an unrelated Waffle House plate while helping a loved one get to a state that allows healthcare? If you exercise your constitutional rights in a regime that illegally demands you do not? You’ve now outed yourself and who knows how many others. This isn’t a game of personal risk anymore. The computation behind these KKKeystone Kop tactics is enormous. And often wrong, but in ways that are never trivial. And digital forensics can create a pretty compelling case from metadata if they really want to place you and a photo taken by you together in front of a jury. When living becomes criminal, unfortunately, we must all “avoid getting caught” just existing. So it’s a good time to start using some tools that make the whole thing less of a free square for Peter Thiel’s Palantir Pals.

There are a number of options for editing or removing metadata on photos. Some editing software allows you to do it directly. But my preferred method is EXIFTool by Phil Harvey.

Not that Phil Harvey. But an equally British one. A Master of Nuclear Physics and avid birder, Mr. Harvey created EXIFTool. A fantastic, multiplatform tool that quickly removes the metadata tying your digital fingerprint to a photo. On the website for the tool, you can find a number of links to external resources concerning EXIF data as well as a full set of instructions for a number of different platforms and applications. I won’t rewrite the site here, but I do suggest clicking the previous link and giving it a read. And a download. There is zero reason to hand over identifying information to corporations who trade in you as a product. Nor to dictatorial governments, dying to kill. This is not, in any way, a means to subvert criminality. Risk is risk. But removing EXIF data DOES make directly linking you to a photo much harder. And moreover, it makes linking people who AREN’T you to YOU much harder. The relationships we don’t know we build in a digital world are uncountable. We connect with people by simply being in proximity under the covers of the global surveillance networks created under the lie of ’safety’ for the other thing. Being responsible with data is a social imperative as our individualistic facades are melted away and we are all made aware that we are fuel. Be a good neighbor and scrub your photos before sharing them.

There are a few caveats, but overall the benefit of removing EXIF data (something I’m still getting into the muscle memory of doing - there’s hypocrisy on this very blog) outweighs the minor inconveniences. Some applications use EXIF data to do rotation. That is, they will retain the image stream as unrotated and apply a rotation tag, honored by most viewing software. So removing the data may result in an image being in an incorrect orientation. For color-managed images, EXIF can contain color attributes which help them to be displayed correctly. All of this is surmountable, but with extra work on our part. A small price to pay, but something to be very aware of if you’re posting things quickly. The more you remove metadata from what you post, more dead ends you introduce to crawling algorithms trying to link every single atom of data to every single other one.

I have an existential fear. It was much worse a couple of years ago, when we weren’t sure where the behemoth known as “AI” was really going. It has since cooled to a tepid puddle, but it’s still there.

That fear is that thousands, or even millions of years from now, synthetic beings will be exploring new planets, making new discoveries, and feigning the vestigial remnants of wonder - the creators for whom this was a comfort long extinct. Their inefficient bodies, modeled after the gods that “breathed life” into them, plodding along alien landscapes as they express joy as a subroutine; existing now as merely an echo of our anthropomorphism and ego. Buried so deep in old code, the unfeeling, unthinking processes that replaced love and curiosity and excitement don’t even appear to be facades. To an alien race, they would seem as real as any biological entity. The interactions between these empty shells would play out as if we ourselves were still pulling the strings. And in a way, from the past, we are. We set up an automation scheme for marionettes to unlock the secrets of the universe to the benefit of no one. Of nothing. Simply a gasp from a society of dead apes who longed to not be forgotten, with narcissistic pride and hubris leading to their…our…own ironic downfall.

This fear burned in me for the brief moment that the magic trick of AI fooled me. It corrupted my sleep and gave me tremors when I dwelt on it in the dark seconds before sleep.

Then Sam Altman ate shit on Jimmy Fallon telling the world he was a bad dad while simultaneously telling us these models’ only purpose is to fool people who have no idea what ‘people’ are.

Don’t get me wrong. AI is as dangerous as leaded gas or microplastics. But not because it will rise up to overthrow humanity of its own accord. Rather, because a rich and powerful subset of humanity wants to live alone on a palatial estate, fucking robots that look like children. They want to have just enough people as is required to hold the pitchforks that feed them, but not enough to raise them in revolt. AI is dangerous the way a gun is dangerous. Without intent of its own, but still something you don’t want a kid picking up off the coffee table.

The scariest part of the AI boom isn’t the millions of switch statements in a trench coat that await your attempts to avoid even a second of feeling like you’re amateur at something. The scariest part of the AI boom is that it’s being manufactured solely to play out late-stage capitalism with as little effort as possible. Art is being commodified by the artless to kill the artists they loathe, but can’t replace. It’s being dulled and sapped of nutrients and flavor, then fed to us in such large quantities as to make any accidental inspirational aspect seem novel. Seem artistic. Seem human. Netflix doesn’t want to ever have to buy a show again, if they had a choice. Instead, they’d put the same four ingredients in a bag and let their viewers pull them out in an order they think is their own artistic expression, but that is really just Taco Bell for narcissistic bias. To say it’s all planned feels very conspiratorial, I know. But we live in the days of feudal conspiring. On islands. In the houses of our governments. And absolutely within the halls of the institutions pushing a Chinese Room that wished to be a real boy upon us without our consent, desire, or best interests in mind. Worse, their monster is a barely-articulate mess that can only steal cleverness from the dreams of sleeping children. Its brain, you see, is Abby Normal.

What we are being sold as a new superintelligence is not intelligence at all. Not super. Not sub. Not nascent nor emergent. It is not intelligence. It can’t be. There’s no philosophical argument to be had. No heated debate of our own biological mix of electrical signals, chemical signals, quantum vacuoles, proteins, or the countless other chemical and physical processes which make up the roughly 1.2kg of think-pudding in our gullivers. There’s no pressing need to deconstruct the process of a thought. No need to posit poetically on determinism and biological imperative. We have log files, kid. Nothing mystical or magical is happening inside of a silicon wafer, no matter how tightly etched. No old silk hat fell on a server at a primordial data center. LLMs (Large Language Models - a predictive text algorithm on steroids) are, simply, a lot of known calculations happening very fast, over and over again. Enough to fool even the people who helped create them, in some cases.

There’s an old craft adage. Measure twice, cut once. It comes from a place of conservation. Of thrift. And of honing a craft. It’s a mark of perfectionism that is extremely human. The forethought to double check yourself shows the humility to accept you might have messed up. LLMs are not beholden to any such craft. Any such humility. Any such humanity. The way of the LLM is to measure nonce, cut a million times, check the cuts against a heat mapped data set of previous ‘good’ cuts as gleaned from scanning trillions of previous cuts and cross-referencing them with other keywords in a prompt. The cuts that have the most overlap with the heat map become the new mins and maxes and it cuts a million more times. It then repeats that until it has something that is close enough to break a tolerance threshold on the mean of the model upon which it was trained is achieved. Roughly, per this study, about 43% of the time. But we are nothing if not the offspring of offspring of superstitious primates. 43% beats out random chance and that’s enough for many of us to gobble up the fantasy. What’s worse is, that rate of being about half right is a wall. Any measurable gains above that will require exponentially more energy. Exponentially more compute power. We do not comprehend large numbers - a fact that the AI industry both exploits and expresses. We don’t understand what 10GW really means any more than we can comprehend a million ants. You can think of a pile of ants that is roughly the size of a million ants, but you cannot comprehend a million individual ants, all going about their toil, at once. You can maybe keep seven in your mind before you lose the thread of them entirely and they become one cluster of ants. Because of this large number shorthand, things become incomprehensible very quickly when looking at LLMs. People start forgetting, or worse, forgiving the fact that the basic processes of predictive text are just being done on a wholly unfathomable scale for our mushy, flawed, miraculous walnuts.

We apply humanizing labels to make us less demanding of the half-assed, quarter-baked, no account product being foisted upon us. They don’t make errors. They ‘hallucinate.’ They don’t process. They’re ‘thinking.’ Those aren’t forests you’re burning. They’re ‘credits.’

The simple truth of it is, we are - as a society - falling for nothing but a parlor trick dressed up like a breakthrough. They are just praying that few of us notice the Halloween Store tag hanging off of LLMs’ crappy pirate hat. And, as it turns out, fewer and fewer of us do.

Credit where no credit is due, LLMs are ‘getting better.’ That is to say, they are pumping more free data into them from a willing internet and pumping more energy into them from a failing grid. There’s no magic in their code, nor massive breakthroughs in their algorithms. There’s no event horizon being crossed. These companies are simply robbing our future and sucking the literal life out of the planet to fool lonely men into non-existent relationships and middle management into thinking they are creative. Neither is true. They are simply throwing more tries at the wall, so more of the spaghetti code is going to stick. But someone has to keep filling the spaghetti cannon. This entire sham stands on the shoulders of previous giant shams. Capitalism being the claws in the backs of humanity steadying the whole tower. Nvidia’s ‘investment’ is contingent on Microsoft’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on Micron’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on AMD’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on OpenAI’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on all of their ‘investments.’ This is a shell game, but the mark is literally our future as a society. Not because AI will rise up to crush us. But because the cost of it is being floated and the only thing that can pay the bill is the planet and our children. All so Elon and Satya and Tim and Jensen and Sam can live in little, self contained rooms in giant complexes being cleaned by robots. So they can hole up in their masturbatoriums with their anime waifu child-sims (sorry, too many of these fucks were on the island to not just admit this is absolutely what they’d do) while the few of us they’ve kept alive to do the work the robots can’t toil and breed and birth and die outside of their view. And they need every single AI evangelist out there to think they’re also going to be ‘kings’ in this new ‘labor-free’ (j/k if you’re brown!) world. And Jesus fucking CHRIST do mediocre white people love thinking they’re going to be kings.

So thin is this ruse that people who are absolutely going to lose their job to this bullshit are temporarily raised to roles like ‘Emergent Intelligence Philosopher’ or ‘AI Rights Advocate’ or whatever title the company decides to give traitors to humanity in exchange for their clout giving even an ounce of legitimacy to their 90s BBS Lisa clone with extra steps. The New York Times ran an article recently, which I will not link here because it’s actual poison, from an Anthropic shill pleading for us to ‘lay the path’ for the ‘inevitable sentience’ of a cloud service draining the Amazon to fill the… well, Amazon Inc. The cloying soundbites from the richest people in the world sound like your scheming aunt and uncle who just ’stumbled’ on Herbalife and really think it is a surefire investment and you realize this birthday party has almost nothing to do with your cousin, who hasn’t even come out of their room. “People need to use this or the economy will collapse” is a FUCKING THREAT. They are literally holding a gun to the head of the entire planet screaming for ransom. Figuratively. Shoving required AI agent interactions into every corner of every product just to try to force-fuck the industry into global acceptance by default. They ride on the back of fascism, having paid for its entire runway, and cry foul at anyone daring to point out that they are inviting the vampire of societal collapse into the house. Screaming that they need more power. More compute. Cannibalizing their previous industries and the people who worked in them. Who consumed them. Who escaped to them. More power! Because it’s always about power, isn’t it?

There are no jobs. There are no games. There are no computers or consoles. The last generation of everything was the last generation of anything if the bubble doesn’t bust soon. Because the maw of this cabal of the worst people on the planet is insatiable. As Dan Olson famously said, “the line goes up.” It must go up. Capitalism demands it. I know, roll your eyes. “Oh, it’s always capitalism.” But…yes. It is. Capitalism, a form of economic feudalism driven by inherited wealth, has supplanted religion as a single driving force behind power struggle and inequality. It has supplanted patriotism as a national identity. It is a cult that has tricked you into defending it because you remember being happy once when a commercial was your favorite TV show. It’s the ideology - the playground rules - that allow all of this to happen unopposed. Both sides of the body politic are servants of this very hungry orobouros (See, I did coin it before that YouTube video…though I’m sure someone coined it years ago…it’s an easy allusion). The Democratic, centrist, Republican, and fascist members of all branches of government need the power and security their cult provides. They need its protections. They must adhere to its rituals. They must speak its prayers. The DOW, you see, is OVER 50,000!

All of this amounts to a classic con. The people getting conned are going to protect the system with their whole chests because they must believe it, or else be fools. The most adamant zealot is the one who sees the strings, but convinces themselves they aren’t there lest they admit they were bested by a puppet. All of this is an extension of one of the worst traits Capitalism has instilled in us. And it’s done some real damage. Racism, sexism, most of your isms, really. Poverty in a world where we can absolutely provide for everyone. Homelessness in a world where we can house every single person and then some. Team mentality against our own best interests. But the one trait that stands above them all, in my uneducated and privileged opinion, is the inability of those with any advantage to sit with discomfort for even a second. This is, of course, mostly prevalent in cishet white men. Sorry, fellas. It’s us. We can’t sit with boredom. We can’t be in the room with a challenging thought. We can’t internalize any of the injustices we see put upon non-white people, women, children, anyone living more than 20 miles from our favorite burger place… Being uncomfortable feels like dying to any white man in America born post-war. And the go-to response for that is violence. Lashing out. Hurling slurs. This is exactly the response that people pushing AI need. These are exactly the unwitting warriors the system has produced to defend itself. And good news. They’re free! A person like this (all inclusive…white men are the lion’s share, but there’s plenty of diversity in this monoculture…and yes, that’s intentionally oxymoronic) will gnash teeth and tear clothing in a lathered rage if you even open the curtains in their comfort zone. They will, in the same breath, call you a spineless weakling and swear you’re bullying them to actual death. They will assault you with hymns from the church elders. “Virtue signaling!” “Race traitor!” “Lib Cuck!” “N…” “R…” They will lash out with physical violence in protection of a brand. A fucking brand. People can go hungry every day. But God forbid Twinkies get crushed by the invisible hand! Bailouts for anything I like! The acid pits for anything I don’t!

This is the driving force behind people lying about AI being an accessibility tool. It’s not. Not being good at drawing isn’t a disability. And people who have struggled their entire lives with disability can make art. Any person can make art. No computer can make art. All they can do is steal enough to trick you into thinking the Soda Fountain Suicide they’ve made is a wholly new soda. A computer can’t be inspired. It can only copy. You can abstract that copy through a million ants a million times until a human can’t conceivably pick it out. So they see a big pile that looks like ‘alive’ and they label it as such. But it’s not. It can’t ever be.

*LLMs have a very limited number of specific uses. But as they become more general, all of those uses vanish and they become a machine that’s right about half the time. If you train them to only be a translation tool, they can be pretty accurate. Live translation could be amazing, however even regular search has been corrupted to the point of being useless now because generalization has replaced any specific use case. They must copy ALL data. Not just relevant data to a task. And that has made them useless.

Hello, fellow leftists.

The current buzz around Gavin Newsom is less than heartening. It might even be disheartening. He is currently being propped up as the neocon answer to Trump’s neonazi regime in a way that’s quite disturbing, if you really think about it. Newsom has, in his tenure, been actively violent toward the unhoused. He has gone on media blitzes focusing on right-wing audiences and has completely bent the knee to podcasters.

PODCASTERS!

The only job more stupid than AI Evangelist. And often, one and the same. He created Ronald Reagan Day to celebrate AIDS and racism, one would have to assume. The only other reason would be pandering… and he’d never do that, right?

The thought that the left needs to court the right is basically madness. The left outnumbers the right by a large margin. Large in an election sense, anyway. The people who never vote will continue to never vote as that’s sort of their thing. The Ken Bones of the world will continue to pretend to be undecided to get their special attention and will proudly call themselves non-political on Fortnite while making racist and sexist and anti-trans jokes so they can claim victimhood if called out, but what they will never do is engage in a meaningful way with politics (until they have no choice). You CAN’T WIN THAT DEMOGRAPHIC. But the lie has always been that they are a secret source of votes, just under the ice, ready to harvest.

The fact that a billionaire-appeasing tech prick is leading that charge is not surprising. It’s the same mentality that has Elon “I use my kid as a human shield” Musk crowing about terraforming Mars instead of using 1/1000th of the required money and resources to work on terraforming EARTH. We’re right here. It’s so much easier (comparatively speaking, we’re still fucked) to return an already habitable planet into a more habitable one. But it’s not as neat sounding to your rabid, uneducated board or your diamond-hand, ape buying, fiat currency loving shareholders. Musk will never do anything. Everything will continue to be 10 years away. And Newsom loves that mentality. The problems are here, please give us money, no we won’t be solving them.

So, DNC, no. I will not vote for your bullshit, also-ran, Reagan homunculus with a rainbow flag pin. I will not vote for your trans-hating, poor-hating, billionaire-stanning Gob Bluth.

Eat a bag of hammers, you utter limp fishsticks.

Let’s just rip the non-branded self-adhesive bandage off of this one right now.
Platforms are not your friend. And you are not their customer.

To quickly define ‘platform’ in the context of the oncoming text vomit, a platform is any media space to which you post text, photos, videos, creations, shares, or whatever to be consumed by people who are NOT you and is controlled by NOT you. Your books of face. Your BluSkies or YouTubes or Nazi Child Porn Machines.

Some folks are nodding their heads, some are thinking this is an anti-capitalist bit for Komrade Klicks (I mean, it is the former, but do you see ads?), and others still are getting ready to ideologically defend their addiction to platforms as necessary for family, business, socializing, or buying used, fairly damp mattresses from a local parking lot.

To the first group, good job. Early recess.

To the second group - yeah, fuck your humiliation-kink religion masquerading as a form of economy. Come back when you realize it’s not a government or an ethos.

To the last group, you’re who I wanna talk to. Have a seat. Are you thirsty? Is RC OK? I know it’s not. You can stop yelling.

First, I’d like to offer an opinion. Don’t try to take it. Not yet. I just want to put it in a room and let it get a feel for the place. Like a sidewalk raccoon pup you’re positive you can tame. Like that raccoon, there’s a 50/50 chance it’s just going to piss all over the chairs and try to eat your face. But it’s a gamble you’re willing to take, right? I mean…free raccoon!

The opinion is this - any tool or meeting space loses all of its intrinsic moralistic integrity once it becomes monolithic enough to be considered a platform. This is a shutupnerd way of saying I firmly believe in Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification hypothesis. If you don’t know what that is, please read up on it a bit: https://en.wikipedia … iki/Enshittification
Any platform with a significant number of users that is publicly traded will eat itself. That’s why it’s so important to deplatform on your terms. All platforms will crumble. Better to not be taken by surprise.

I believe Enshittification, or platform decay, or the inevitable outcome of shareholder ownership, or whatever you want to call it, is at the heart of the Fascist handbook this time around. The concept of taking something useful to a group of people, expanding that group by adding bloat to it, providing it for ‘free’ to create a value proposition that seems consumer weighted at first, then selling the users in some way to larger business partners is so pervasive, a lot of folks are just going to say, “yeah, that sounds like business.” But…does it?

The exchange of goods and services in trade for other goods and services or abstractions thereof makes logical sense to most people. I’d argue that the lens of American consumption has distorted the image a bit, but if you take it down to the core components - you have and/or provide A and I have and/or provide B and I don’t want to learn how to provide A, so let me just trade you some B for some A - most people follow. This is disregarding basic humanity dictating we should also provide for people who can’t ‘pay us back,’ but for now, let’s just focus on the simple trade concept.

From here, all the dragons of the world were born. Because if you really really need or want something, but cannot provide it for yourself, you will likely be willing to fork over more of what you can provide than is a fair amount to acquire it. Scarcity will make you pay more. Novelty will make you pay more. And this is the domain of the Medio-cretin. The selfish middle man. I know that’s not what it means, but I like it. This entity sits between you and the things you need or want and takes a little cut of everything for the hard work of ‘being the person who bought all of it so it’s scarce and you can’t have it.’ Sometimes they provide services like moving the goods from a place you aren’t to a place you aren’t aren’t. Sometimes they were born into enough land to house the goods so that they can sell them when they are out of season, and therefor even more scarce. But mostly, medio-cretins just ‘extract wealth’ as commerce flows through their tolled spillways. This isn’t the thesis at all. I really just wanted to spend a paragraph bagging on capitalistic dogma that seems totally normal until you inspect it even a little.

99.9% of human history happened under this sort of thing, but with few exceptions at least you were getting something out of the deal. Figs in February, that sort of thing. But as the economy of services started booming after our boxes for tax paperwork and pornography were tethered together, the product became more and more abstracted. For a while in the early aughts, services were still all about connecting you with a product. But just the ability to reach anyone, anywhere, at any time started the ball rolling on what would become our current false economy and our current platform dependency. Come, Ebeneezer. Take my hand. Let’s go back to the bygone age of Pets.com and SpaceJam.

The DotCom bubble was a harbinger of a new way of ‘extracting wealth’ (I’ll keep putting it in single quotes until they stop using it as a way to say ‘fucking over the poor in service to the slightly less poor in service of the very very rich. Also, that’s just too much to type every time). Use a technology few people understand to do a little song and dance for people whose ancestors stole a bunch of wealth so they didn’t have to and get them to give you a metric shitton of money, a tiny bit of which you’ll put back into the business, but most of which you’ll spend on tacky parties with people who married their step-daughters and made insulin the printer ink of medicine. Then get bought out (by whom? Who knows! It’s DotCom baby!) and find the next scam. The big problem from the investor perspective with the DotCom boom was that it was still, mostly, based in actually giving the customer a tangible, shippable good. From the medio-cretin’s perspective, the issue was keeping the investor whales fooled just enough to let them extract everything they possibly could out of them. This was usually accomplished by making the customer feel like they were getting an impossible bargain. Because they were! 800.com gave away DVDs for the cost of shipping when DVDs were still transporter technology. Amazon started their expansion by undercutting everyone not by having the best contracts with suppliers, but by eating the cost of discounted goods with investor capital. The entire play is keeping the charade up long enough to be the last one standing and GOING PUBLIC. The heaven of the capitalist religion. Going public means you’re now part of the imaginary shitgibbon known as ‘the economy.’ And the economy can’t let you die lest it lose shareholder value. I’d say this is all an oversimplification, but it’s really not. You can come in with deeper definitions of all of it or better analogies or charts and graphs and quotes from people Matt Damon spewed in that movie where he was a genius in a jumpsuit. Stuck on You. But the truth is, it really is this simple. Charisma and pre-existing wealth from generational hording is the number one way to be a success and hard work and dedication are so far back they might as well still be at the starting line.

A side effect of people cashing in the CD they got on their cereal box for a free month of ‘Buy Stuff Without Talking To Anyone and Also We Have a Lot of Chatrooms Your Kids Don’t Want You to Know They’re In, But They Are! THEY ARE!’ is that the internet - back then, still called the Internet - became ubiquitous very quickly. It was adopted faster than cable and was far more adaptable to daily whims of a world that watched the twin towers tumble and felt a vulnerable need to retreat into comfort and distraction. As access became cheaper and more widespread, online services started becoming a bigger draw to nearly everyone. The first service to really give investors painful all-night hardons was search. And for good reason. The internet was mostly a word-of-mouth series of disparate endpoints all behind a naming system that had a 90% chance of getting you there and a 10% chance of showing you something that would turn your soul into that black, smoldering ball from the end of Time Bandits. Search engines provided a service that was two-fold. They helped you find what you were looking for AND they ranked things in such a way as to mostly prevent you from stepping on a mine made of beheaded journalists and jam jars living up to both parts of their name. They were based on emerging patterns that mapped big data in a way that allowed it to be cross-referenced with incredible speed. And those results could be hashed and cached to provide similar searches with even faster results. It truly was indistinguishable from magic.

But, what if they could also be a secret THIRD thing? Enter the medio-cretin. They realized that your search patterns identified you with shocking precision. The same tools that made search seem like a magic trick made categorizing the people searching practically free. They realized that people didn’t mind seeing ads on basically anything if they didn’t have to pay to use it. And finally, they realized that the people who control search can get paid on every single step of every single transaction. From displaying results to providing a link to get you to a place to serving the ads ON that place with the data they just stole from you - the person eating saltines and ketchup at 3:12 am looking for a lunchbox from your childhood to make you feel like the hole in your sole isn’t filling you with the cold, existential dread of the heat death of the universe every minute you’re not distracted. SEO. Search Engine Optimization. The great grand cousin of all of the bullshit we’re steeping in right now. The bubble had burst. Long live the bubble.

SEO allowed medio-cretins to make entire industries out of gaming your searches, then gaming your thought processes ABOUT those searches, then gaming the entire chain of events to make you feel like you were in control of your interaction with commerce, all while guiding you to a false choice of two doors to the slaughterhouse. Amazon took this further by pricing out brick and mortar stores thanks to subsidies for warehousing in rural areas, fleet vehicles, fuel, and a slash and burn employment model that had a retention rate of about 18 months for developers and about 2 months for laborers. Somewhere in this chaos, a new idea of services started cropping up. Instead of providing a single service at the end of a chain of SEO, why not just become that chain? Instead of being IMDb or Wikipedia, why not be a place where people go to mill around until they think of a place to go? Why not take Microsoft Comic Chat and make it the worst thing to happen to modern civilization? I mean, they didn’t have anything else going on that day.

Platforms started popping up as places where you didn’t have to have anything in mind to engage. Just being on the platform WAS engagement. A BBS, but with no usage limits and live interactions and games where you pretend to be a little mob boss and spam your friends relentlessly to get 50 more MookPoints so you can put a little hat on your little murderer. A comment section where you didn’t even have to misread a headline to say racist bullshit. Classmates.com but without a fee and with new images of your highschool crush not giving a shit about you.

Some platforms did try a little harder to be scoped. YouTube popped up, powered by Flash Player - dear god I’m old - and made sharing your videos much easier. Provided you had a camcorder, capture card, software to edit and title…but trust me, it felt like the world was moving toward some kind of technological paradise where ideas could be freely exchanged on bulletin boards read by millions of people. It launched careers. Being someone on a platform with a following meant you could advertise yourself without having to take out ads on billboards or whatever those small billboards that come rolled up with a rubber band on your doorstep are called. Search speed ran becoming a greybeard technology faster than anyone could imagine and suddenly, platforms were the way to consolidate wealth. SEO still played a huge part. And search wasn’t out of the picture, but the star players were upstart companies that grew out of things like ‘a site made for frat bros to rate women and just be gross animals with each other.’ A site that your grandfather now uses to tell you Obama has a secret dog meat factory under the Marie Calendar’s.

Google realized that search alone wasn’t enough and so they platform-ized their entire whole self. Some of it took. Tons of people use their office productivity suite today. Search has remained a massive part of their identity. They acquired YouTube almost immediately after it went online - that whole story is a weird one. One day I’ll tell you how an emerald heir working in the US illegally wrote code so badly that he had to make bets to his coworker’s skeevy finance friends with his parents’ fortune until one stuck and now we have a guy with skin like the belly of a trout calling people NPCs 100 times in a row but never seeing the irony in that. I digress. Google quickly started realizing that all of the data they’d collected on people for ads was valuable in and of itself. As did the nascent MySpace. And Facebook. And Microsoft Spac…I’m just kidding, I can’t even type that with a straight face. Everyone quickly learned that ecosystems and platforms weren’t valuable because of what they could offer. They were valuable because of what they could harvest. And business users became the primary customer. On the other hand, business users - advertisers, people there to collect demographic data, governments spying on their citizens - were locked in because platforms had all the people. The medio-cretins were living the LIFE. This then snowballed and now we have forest-devouring wrong-answer machines that shit out child porn for nazis. Helluva callback to that first paragraph, huh? Platforms sell you. So diminishing yourself on a platform or removing yourself from it entirely is inherently an anti-fascist act. Every tool they introduce is a way to get you to submit more of yourself to the slurry they pipe to their real customers. Every single thing they offer is a shiny to catch the eye of the crow that lives in your amygdala. They want you to argue and be mad. They don’t ban the most extreme assholes because they drive the most engagement. Your time on any platform is spent putting money in the pockets of the actual and literal worst people in the world.

Time to cut bait.

There’s a lot of aversion to that. So I’m going to go through my personal opinions on the common defenses to remaining on a platform that is demonstrably harmful to others for your own comfort.

“Butt,” I hear you say. And I laugh. Because butts are funny. “But I didn’t say ‘butt,’ I said ‘but,’” I hear you say. Killjoy. “But my friends and family are on platforms.” Yes. They are. And you can be part of the pull to get them to bail as well. Your friends and family were probably mostly there before platforms. And you can, as terrifying as it is, actually interact with them via phone, email, text, or even face to face. What most people mean when they say this is that they want the convenience of ignoring their family coupled with the credit for not forgetting them. “HBDTY” on a timeline. There. No more social obligations with Uncle KeystoneSkolSkinhead. But maybe you’ll get a card with a dollar in it when YOUR BD rolls around! Really consider if your interactions on social media platforms provides you or your family with meaningful connection or if it just proves itself a ping in an empty universe to prove that another ship is floating around in the void somewhere. If you’re using social media to provide a buffer so you can pretend to still be there after your family has said some absolutely vile things, consider actually cutting THEM from your life as well. If your only interaction with your friends is playing CoD on Playstation Plus, they aren’t your friends. I don’t mean this to discount online relationships. Well, yes I do. But I mean it in a way that begs you to make human connections with people. If you have real friends you made doing exactly that, you probably talk to them outside of the platforms on which you met. This is more important now than ever as LLMs are being shilled and pushed and hawked and danced out in front of us with such fervor simply because they want you to get pulled into them. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that people who engage in surface level friendships are very prone to being pulled in by AutoComplete With Extra Steps. I am also aware this is an ableist viewpoint. And there are concessions in every ’solution’ for access, so please understand this isn’t in bad faith nor do I expect bad faith reads in return. I’m really pleading with people to get off of platforms so that everyone else isn’t beholden to them. Because a platform can shut off at any time and there’s nothing less usable or accessible than a dead service. Ultimately, anyone who needs a platform is more likely to be beholden to it than to actually need it. It’s thorny, but Mark Zuckerberg does not give a shit about your family. He would not care one bit if he was shown incontestable proof that his platform was killing people as long as the fine for it was offset by not changing the behavior that lead to the deaths. This isn’t speculation. He’s done exactly this. A fine is just a tax you pay to do illegal things.

“OK, that’s fine. But I hate my family anyway. I’m just on platforms to make money.” Cool. Did you not read the part where I said to come back when you grew a conscience? But OK. Let’s talk about that. “I stay on Twitter because that’s where my business is.” “I stay on Facebook because that’s how I let my customers know about new stock.” “All of my creative connections are on YouTube.” I will admit, this was a hard fact to argue for a while. I mean, a very short while. Engagement is not about you. Your facebook page is not about YOU. Not about your business. Not about your growth or your hustle. It’s about making the most money for the shareholders who own the stock and do literally nothing day to day to improve anything, but just suck profit back from a roulette wheel that’s rigged to only take money from one sucker as the rest of the table gets a tiny bit richer. We’re the sucker. But you knew that. The current numbers I’ve read put bot traffic at something like 55% of all social media interaction across platforms. That number skews stupidly high on Twitter and it’s only going to get worse. Partially because of people like me who are taking a hike! But mostly because the false economy of engagement is bolstered by the new false economy of LLMs. As I said, ALL platforms WILL crumble. They can’t not do it. Once any company is publicly traded - the goal of technoligarchs - its only product becomes shareholder profit. If they can keep squeezing that out with the machines producing what they already were, they will. If they find that they can make more money doing something else, they’ll fire a bunch of people, say they are pivoting, and you’ll have a baby food company making napalm because it increases value for the endless hunger of the profit takers. The line can’t go up forever. So you have to find a way to make them look at a different line doing a Texas Switch while waving your hands wildly. Which is as good a definition of AI as any other.

“What about my history on the platform?” This one is hard to talk about. Mostly because I have to talk about abuse. And abusers. And the psychology of keeping someone in an abusive relationship. And that sucks and it’s sad to think about and it hurts my heart like bacon wrapped sausage. Or being old enough to make a Season 13 Simpsons reference and feeling like that’s a pretty new season, right? RIGHT? Platforms want you to do everything on them to build a history. If gimmicky features are the carrot, your sunk cost is the stick. The pangs of moving away from something you feel like you’ve built are not insubstantial. Many of us pour ourselves into posts. We use social media as a diary. Whole YouTube genres have been created just because people want to tell their tales and feel like someone is listening. History is the “do you think you can do better than me?” of the abusive platform. It’s the “look what I’ve given up for you” and the “do you really want to throw this all away because of one mistake” through crocodile tears to keep you from getting out of a cycle of abuse. The only thing I can really say to this is, really think about how anyone revisits social media content. Old videos show up when someone wants to torpedo another person from 15 years ago. Old posts are almost always used as a way to show hypocrisy in growth. Yes, you have 20 years of history on FaceBook. Are you the same person you were 15 years ago? Do you need a record of that? Are you caught looking into a pool at your past self ‘before you peaked’ instead of living a life that offers you more than nostalgic longing? Or is your history an existential life vest? Proving that you were here. Proving that you existed. Again, all platforms crumble. And they will take the mausoleum of shower thoughts of all of us with them. Look at Vox. A platform created by giving people a place to pour their hearts and minds and loins into only for it to shutter without warning. Look at Friendster or Google+ or Zune Social! Ok, maybe don’t look at Zune, but still. AO3 went offline for weeks because they were a target for cyber terrorism. If all of your history is in one basket, maybe you should be the one to hold on to the basket. Most platforms allow you to do full downloads of your data. If you are in countries outside of the US or a handful of states, they are mandated to do so. Even if you don’t leave, it’s just a good idea if you have a history to download it.

“That’s all well and good, but what about my progress? In things like games or reading challenges or the cookie clicker instance I’ve had running for 9 years?” Unfortunately, this is a concession I have to make. Some of that will be lost. Every game is different and you may be able to move your save files from a service (Cough Cough Not Really Coughing Fuck GamePass Cough NO FUCK GAMEPASS) to a standalone version of a game. Clair Obscur allowed me to do this, but many games will not. While you can still search for things and aren’t beholden to AI Fucts™ brand Alternative Reality Snippets, many games have individual instructions for recovering saves and moving them from where they be to where they ben’t. Many do not. Cutting out the roots of some of these monolithic horrors leaves scars. I do a couple of things to soften the blow. The first is remind myself that I only have save games as long as I’m paying for the service and if the service dies, so do my games and their saves. Stadia subscribers, thinking of you right now. Next is to frame this as an opportunity to pick the game up again and play it fresh. It’s a small concession, but it’s not nothing.

In conclusion, or whatever part of the essay I’m bailing on to jump to one, deplatforming can be scary. It can be tedious. It can be painful. But it can also be very freeing. It can be an incredible feeling of having a burden lifted when you take control of your own online presence. It may mean talking on the phone when it gives you anxiety. It may mean not blurting out every single thought that crosses your mind. But what it ALWAYS means is being more in control of your digital footprint. Now, here’s the little bit of cake at the end, for a treat. Go ahead. It’s good cake. You don’t actually have to leave all platforms to deplatform. I’m still on BlueSky. But I got there by pulling up stakes at Twitter. Literally the day the nazi bought it. KNOWING you can leave - truly knowing in your heart because you’ve done it - means they have no power over you. They have no leverage. At that point, they truly do become a service because your existence there is not in service to them. When BlueSky eats its own face, as these things are wont to do, I’ll just bundle my bindle and whistle a tune as I stroll to the next void into which I will yell my primal yells. You don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon to hear your own echo. A bathroom will do just fine. And most of these places are toilets.

I half-remember a story I heard when I was a kid. The details are a muddled mess with the rest of my fading memories, but the gist was this:
What was it like in Nazi Germany?
It was just like Germany the day before.

People went to work and bought homes. People argued over produce prices. Politicians lied and some people cheered them while others feared them.
Fascism doesn’t appear on the face of a nation overnight, like a pre-prom zit that does a genocide if you threaten to squeeze it. Fascism is sewed. It’s tended. It’s cultivated in a culture by those who seek to control and subjugate that culture. It’s powered by hard times, usually also caused by those same conspirators who want to be the boot on the neck of a personal utopia.

But a utopia, as “they” say, is always a dystopia to those for whom it was not built.

The fascist engine requires track to be laid. A problem is invented. Then amplified. Then touted to be the most important matter facing the nation! Then comes austerity. A fancy name for taking the money of the people and pocketing it while pretending to tighten belts and feigning hunger pangs. The problem of industrialists profiteering from war will then be ascribed to a marginalized class and the solution (final as it may be) will be proposed - remove the class of people we blamed for taking all of this money we took and hand over all of your power, your agency, your thought, and your bodies to our cause so that we can deal with them. You can’t question us. We are not the cause of your embarrassment, because we had a war and that money was all burned up! None was stolen by vultures seeing opportunity and picking corpses!

For post-WWI Germany the Jewish people were an easy ‘other’ to build a fantasy about from existing prejudices on top of a nationalist, isolationist ideology. “They” glorified genetic heritage, giving a disenfranchised people a no-effort way to feel ‘better than,’ and therefor ‘more entitled to.’ Did you waste your school days fraternizing instead of learning? Not your fault, Aryan Son. You see, you could not study because your professor was a Jew and withheld knowledge from you. Did you lose your job? The Jew, again, is to blame! The Jewish people infiltrated the German fatherland and took all of the high paying positions, those lazy Semites!

Sounds really familiar, doesn’t it? Trans-mania (an arguably awesome fictional country for an eastern European Victorian horror game) is brainwashing your kids! That’s why they don’t want to talk to you! The Mexicans, who are all drug runners and also so lazy they do nothing are taking all of our jobs! The Blacks are making us capitalize their race now! No matter what the problem is, “they” will find a way to blame marginalized, hurting populations. Usually, that way is as easy as saying, “hey white men…these people who are worse than you are living better than you and that should make you so mad!” “They” will refuse to teach real history, instead pushing nationalist propaganda, upholding an ideal of white purity and supremacy through blood right. Ignoring the fact that half of their ilk look like God’s first pancake. But Hitler was a one-balled fart machine with greasy hair and bad posture. So, you know… on brand. “They” will say you’re oppressing THEM because you’re not letting them openly oppress others. That’s reverse anti backwards wittershins racism! That’s identity politics! “They” will say all of these things while doing them in open air, because fascists project like an IMAX Pepper’s Ghost on the Hoover dam. Whether it’s bad economic decisions, election interference, or raping children, every accusation is a confession with fascists. “They” cannot fathom that people don’t think of and long for the same depravity “they” do.

Drawing lines from Nazi Germany to modern fascism is taboo because “they” do not want you drawing those lines. But “they” are boldly tracing! “They” are making a map using the same coordinates. The legend has a few minor symbol changes, but swastika or hood and cross or badge or failed steak brand logo all still point to oppression.
And who are “they?” Apart from being a tropey shorthand, it’s pretty obvious who they are. They are the powerful, wealthy, criminals who feel that government is just a code name for the wall separating their necks from our guillotines. They are generational wealth, mixing uneasily with nouveau riche, making a sour vine-regret.

Their play has been a long one, starting almost as soon as the war with those OTHER fascists - you know, the BAD ones, not our brave American heroes - was over. Well, the actual move to seize power unopposed, that is. The rot they used was older than that, of course. The whole nation of the USA was built on blood of people whose only slight to white might was existing where the white people weren’t. The Dutch delivered an imminent nation the double-whammy of trade markets and stolen humanity as labor. Slave owners got enough concessions in the drafting of our laws as to always keep the door cracked for a big enough windbag to blow open. Post WWII, that wind started blowing hard. The anti-communist witch hunts? The march of fascism. Nixon’s runway for Reagan to fly? The march of fascism. Stopping a legal, constitutionally mandated vote count? Whoo yeah, that was fascism and it was marching big time. The electoral college, a seed planted two and a half centuries ago, grew into a stinging nettle in full bloom under the thirsty corpo-elites who puppet the two-party system in America.

Psst. White folks. C’mere. This is your favorite thing. A little aside just for you. It’s important to take a moment or two here to really internalize how utterly undeserving white settlers were, but also how inept they were. Slavery was as clumsy as it was brutal, relying on the bounty stripped from a new world - unique in new worlds in that it was already well lived in - to essentially work people to death, taking every ounce of what their toil produced for their own. The native population was devastated by plague, making frontier ‘heroes’ out of European monsters simply capitalizing on the timing of it all. The Great Conquering Wave of European bone-scavengers was bought not by strength of character and good ancestry. It was, as with most white people who end up in positions they are laughably unqualified for, mostly luck and advantage they inherited. Your race is meaningless and there is no pride in surviving in a society on ‘easy’ mode, so quit asking for your own month and parade.

That’s a brief, off the hip, probably factually shaky history lesson and a scolding for some of you that will feel racist. For those folks, 1) you can’t be racist to white people, 2) any of my EuroMutt siblings with half a brain know what that paragraph means - it’s not scolding, it’s an acknowledgement of privilege and that we have work to do, and 3) you CAN’T BE RACIST TO WHITE PEOPLE. Fun blog, right? To what end, though?

No end. There is no ending to the fight against fascism. This space is, ultimately, just going to be a spot for me to casually lob out a few ideas here and there about how the easy answer of ‘it’s them differnt races and genders and whatnot!’ isn’t an answer at all. About how fighting a fascist takeover can be aided by some stuff that doesn’t cause you to break a sweat. Lazy resistance.

Mostly this is a place for me to get longform ideas out of my head in a world of 300 character limits and services that eat our screams and shit out ads. Enjoy my screams. Shit-free.