A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

I’m going to make a bold statement.
Leaving Microsoft and Apple is fighting fascism.
See? It’s bold!

In a landscape where both companies are selling out their own employees and customers for a speculation bubble around a wrong answer machine nobody asked for, anything you can do to reduce their grip on the world desktop market is - true facts - a strategy against the regime they fund. Both companies have been openly complicit in, and have directly financially benefited from the Trump administration. Benefited in a way that robs the public chest and in a way that funnels more money from their own customer base up the chain without providing any meaningful goods or services in kind. Hell, Tim Cook got a personal gold sticker from Das Uberstench. And both companies have funneled millions of dollars into his pocket in return. Both in direct contributions, indirect ones via PACs, and by laying the groundwork for theft from the masses on a scale that would have been unimaginable, even by the most mad king, a decade ago. AI is a global grift that is going to kill us all, not because the actual product is dangerous. It is dangerous. But the real danger lies in the speculation capitalist vultures…sorry, vulture capitalists…who carve its name into the heads of the spears with which they plan on hunting us. This is a fire sale. Everyone must go. Leave your belongings. Your offerings. To the gods of industry. They have always wanted to wring all of the money out of the fabric of society and they finally have the proper snake oil to oil the snakes of a totalitarian, dementia-addled Polyp Pot. CoPilot needs you to forget how to open an e-mail so it can justify speculation on compute and DC expansion. Apple will do anything to keep you in their garden of antitrust nightmares and hardware rental disguised as ownership, up to and including literally sabotaging your devices in updates. Google wants to suck every ounce of tracking data from you and everyone who looks like you to feed you, the product, the slop their real customers pay them to feed you. There is no publicly traded company that is your friend. To them, we are all prey. On the gaming side of things, the world is not much brighter. Ignoring Xbox, something the world has been trying to do since the Xbox One, Sony and Nintendo also both wish you’d just die and will them your estate. Nintendo takes every opportunity to raise prices and blame anything but their own profit graphs. They sit on a mountain of patents like a dragon, using their brigade of willing acolytes as shields for any critique. Sony kills support for anything that doesn’t turn an instant quarterly profit with little fanfare. Concord, their much hyped copy-of-a-copy Multiplicity clone of Overwatch lasted from August 23, 2024 to October of the same year; the announcement it was being cancelled coming only 10 days after launch.

Removing ownership has deep roots in fascist ideals. The idea that every single aspect of your life is run by landlords, including your entertainment, is just a small tool in a large toolbox of implements to keep the masses docile and indentured. But all normalization is a win for people who feed on the work of the world through dumb luck or birthright. People will defend their hobbies to, in some cases literally, the death and will take up arms in the name of boots if you mention they’re on their necks. Again, this is all by design. Tribalism is the fire that lights the muskets and sunk cost is the black powder within them. Just go online and say a bad word about Elden Ring or Zelda and see how fast you get your digital teeth kicked in by die-hard dickweeds who spend more time falling on swords in real life than wielding them in fantasy ones.

So, if you love games and hate fascism, what are you to do? Give up your hobby and become an angry person with no outlet? I mean, that’s always an option. Trust me, being a curmudgeon has its advantages. But there are alternatives. A great option, which I will surely write about in the future but that deserves its own, dedicated post, is retro gaming. There are more great games from the past you haven’t yet played than you could get to in ten lifetimes. Another is theft. And while I have zero issue with Triracy, it’s also a piece that really needs a longer deconstruction than is allowed in this post. This post is about gaming on Linux.

Linux has not had the best reputation when it comes to gaming. It has powered the OS for a number of consoles, but up until the summer of 2018, Linux gaming was mostly relegated to emulation, manually ported open-source games and a handful of dedicated releases. WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) existed and was useful for a handful of light weight games as well as productivity software, but for the most part if you wanted to game on Linux, you had to get source code and recompile or hope that the game developer decided to do it themselves. But in August of 2018, Proton - a joint venture between Valve and CodeWeavers - was released. Without getting too far into the weeds, Proton is a compatibility layer that diverts Win32 and Win64 calls to Linux equivalents and hosts linked libraries to process anything that doesn’t have native Linux support. Windows runs on the X86_64 platform and code assembled to that instruction set can run natively, provided the functions hosted outside of the application are available to it. Proton brokers all of this in a mostly seamless way, allowing Windows-compiled code to run without overhead under Linux. Proton uses the previous work of WINE to host DirectX, Vulkan, Open-GL, and other game-critical libraries. What this means is, nearly every game which doesn’t require kernel-level anti-cheat can be run on Linux at roughly the same (or sometimes greater) framerates as on Windows. The project is opensource, so you don’t even need Steam to run it. But Steam does work great, as well.

The Good

As mentioned, Steam is a great way to play games on Linux. Everything is mostly handled for you. You can purchase nearly every Windows-compatible game and it should run just fine on Linux with nothing but a click of the Play button. You are, of course, still beholden to Steam at this point. And to be honest, Valve is not your friend either. It’s another corporation. The only difference is, Valve has a scoped purpose and seems to be less driven to take all of your money. Just most of it.

You can, however, use their launcher without buying anything and run games through it downloaded from other sources. Itch.io, GoG (now under less evil management), or even - GASP! - CD-ROM! Additionally, there are a number of very nice, very curated launchers out there. Heroic, Lutris, Hydra, Cartriges…the list is long and full of terrors. A decent rundown can be found here. Heroic is my launcher of choice. It provides hosting for stores such as GoG and Epic, allowing you to directly install your games from the stores without downloading offline installers. The larger launchers also generally include database scraping for cover art, descriptions, and settings, allowing a curated list of games without having to manually launch each one, providing a more console-like experience.

Performance can go either way, but in general, my experience has been better framerates - likely owing to more overhead and fewer spyware processes running.

The Bad

Not all games run as easily as ‘just click Play.’ A number of GoG games, in example, require manually adding symbolic links to older libraries for audio. Some games don’t correctly implement their resolution and you end up with incorrectly scaled, hard to read experiences until you can find the right settings. The Desktop Environment you use (or don’t use) can also have a massive impact on your ability to launch games at the correct resolution the first time. Gnome, in example, generally creates a secondary desktop space and includes this in the desktop canvas sizing response to software. So many games on Gnome will show the native resolution as doubled over the actual native resolution. Window managers and compositors such as Hyprland (possibly made by a neo nazi) have less overhead and provide a better dedicated game experience, but sacrifice usability and desktop functionality for Swordfish-style tiling windows.

Configuration can be a pain with older games, as well. Games that utilize 32bit PhysX calls, in example, require extra install steps and configurations to get the full benefit of a card which supports them. Driver support is hit or miss, with native drivers generally offering the most performance, but less support from the manufacturers than the community gives the open source drivers. Nvidia can be trickier than AMD simply because Valve (again, the very sung hero of Linux gaming) uses AMD in their handheld console, the Steam Deck, and therefor has much more quality control for AMD based gaming. Nvidia generally works, but some games are more fussy about it than others. Controllers can be a mixed bag as the big players are well supported, but some X-Input controllers that work a treat on Windows will have incorrect mapping or bad support on Linux.

Overall, the difficult stuff is usually a quick web search away, but you’ll do better to search old forums or Reddit as live interaction with the Linux community is pretty toxic (another post on the ‘to do’ pile). Once you start getting a feel for how it all threads together, though, you’ll be able to self-serve most issues when they do crop up.

The Fugly

Some games just will not work on Linux. Period. This goes for some productivity software as well. Adobe, being a huge culprit of the latter. This is a sacrifice, or a dual boot setup, you’ll have to make to get out from under Microsoft for gaming. Games from Riot, in example, use Valorant anti-cheat software. This is kernel-mode anti-cheat, akin to a root kit. Frankly, for me, this is a dealbreaker anyway. I don’t want kernel mode code that is not part of the OS doing kernel mode shit. But this does cut out some heavy hitters like League of Legends. And unfortunately, there are no options unless Riot games decides to release a Linux-specific build of these games. I wanted to play Project L (presently 2KXO, which is a stupid name for stupid reasons), but am unable to thanks to this incredibly invasive anti-cheat. I didn’t even want to play it multiplayer apart from couch matches, but it doesn’t matter if you plan on going online or not. The whole enchirito is off the table.

Conclusion

Since moving to Linux, I’ve actually been gaming quite a bit more. The reason is mostly because I’m thinking about it. On Windows, gaming is a given. But when moving to a new OS, it’s often on the forefront of thought to entertain the possibilities afforded you in the journey. It’s not all rainbows and kittens and that one rainbow kitten that might grant wishes, but you can never catch it. But it can be worth the trip just to know your hobby isn’t supporting IDF bombing of children, growing the power of a little dick’dtraitor, or giving your money to a company that Thinks Different by literally making 2026 like 1984 after swearing that’s the ONE thing they wouldn’t do. Your mileage will absolutely vary, as Linux is not a monolithic operating system. But switching does make the…WINE… a bit sweeter, none the less.

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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.