Hello, friends and enemies. I’m back with more big political opinions today, but if you make it to the end of the post, you will be rewarded with photos of my cat. Fritz has not been feeling the best and has thrown up a hairball almost every day this week. I have to assume this is because the weather is getting warmer, which I’m not thrilled about either. I appreciated the weather not getting too hot in July, but of course I can’t expect it to stay cool through August.
I have been keeping busy as usual and I’ve really been enjoying volunteering at the Lavender Library this year. I think I have neglected to mention that, in addition to working the circulation desk, I started volunteering with their collections management committee. It’s gratifying to put my masters degree in library and information science to some use after over a decade. What’s funny though is I’m using my technical writing skills more than my library knowledge. The library has been working on getting some processes documented, which is exactly the kind of thing I do for work. I know my distaste for work is well documented, but I actually don’t mind putting my abilities to use for something I like and that feels important! On Friday, I learned how to prepare books to put on the shelves (like how to apply the barcodes and wrap the hardbacks in their special covering) and I took notes on the process so that we could share that information with the rest of the collections committee. It’s a small thing but it feels good to do something useful.
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Current Events
Hear me out: Believe women
Lots of people are frothing over Trump claiming there is no list of clients of known pedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t feel the need to get into the details of this because many already have. Sarah Kendzior’s book They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent has plenty on this because so much of it has already been reported on and is in the public domain. However, I think the most important detail of this story is that we don’t need some special list because a number of Epstein’s victims have already come forward over the years. As journalist Lyz Lens recently put it “You don’t need Epstein’s list; you need to listen to women.” The only novel thing coming out of the current iteration of this scandal is that MAGA loyalists seem to be cracking, as evidenced by the split in opinion in the MAGA bot farm on X (that is, accounts manned not by real people with real opinions but by imaginary people who post to sway public opinion). If we listened to women, we wouldn’t have people like Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Trump wouldn’t have ever been president, and many other horrors could have been avoided. Yet many people only give a shit about abuse when a man talks about it. This isn’t news.
AI and Fascism Are Best Friends
As the U.S. leans into its fascistic tendencies, I’ve been seeing comments online expressing the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) is the aesthetic of fascism. I’ve been mulling over the connection between these concepts and I thought I’d work it out here on the blog. First, some definitions. Fascism is the term for political movements characterized by, per Encyclopædia Britannica, “extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites” and I think it’s very easy to see these aspects in the current political landscape: Trump’s original entrance into the political spotlight by accusing President Obama of not being a U.S. citizen and later insisting the 2020 election was stolen to the point of inciting an attack on the capitol are certainly indicative of “contempt” for democracy. AI refers to the large language models (LLMs) that chat agents like Chat-GPT use as well as image generators like MidJourney.
Here’s a recent example of AI being used as the fascist aesthetic. When the government announced its new concentration camp in Florida, they used the nickname “Alligator Alcatraz” and posted these images on Instagram. These are from official government accounts.
These images are not what alligators look like (If you’re not convinced that these are AI, please go look at the wikipedia page for alligators. They don’t look like this. [By the way, I’m specifically using Wikipedia as a reference and not just google images because Wikipedia is working hard to keep AI slop out of the encyclopedia]). They kind of resemble an alligator, but that’s because most of us have a cartoon-like idea of an alligator in our minds. I’ve never been up close with one in real life and the odds are good that neither have you. The image on the right is particularly ridiculous, and it looks like the AI pulled references from Jurassic Park or something, giving the gators a velociraptoresque expression.
AI does not have the capacity to make anything new. It “generates” text and images but not in a novel way. When someone asks it to make a picture of video for them, AI makes a collage of all the images its ingested. It doesn’t know what an alligator looks like. It knows that pictures labeled “alligator” have certain patterns. AI is only capable of referencing things that came before it, which is why some are warning that we should be hoarding pre-AI content from an era free of slop.
Fascism, too, can only look backwards. What is the Trump administration’s vision for the future? There isn’t one. His future is a twisted reflection of the past: make America great again. We were once “great” and we’re going to reanimate America’s corpse to bring her back, just like PragerU is by using AI to animate videos of America’s founders. Fascism’s game is nostalgia. Wasn’t it great to live in a time when groceries for affordable and so was college and moms stayed home with their kids and didn’t get divorced? Wouldn’t it be great to bring back all the trappings of that era? We could eliminate no-fault divorce (conservatives literally want to do that) and then women wouldn’t be able to leave their husbands and take men’s jobs! None of those things will actually make America “great,” to say nothing of the fact that this allegedly lost greatness only applied to a very small segment of the population. If they really wanted America to be great for everyone, they would bring back the 90 percent tax rate for people making more than $400,000 (compared to 35 percent in 2021) and not let Taco Bell inflate the price of a burrito by 400 percent, but they’re cowards and they won’t do that.
This obsession with the past—even the recent past—is resurgent in our culture. I know that younger generations always have curiosity and nostalgia about the previous generation’s era; there was certainly plenty of fascination with the 70s and 80s when I was growing up. Now we’re seeing Gen Z romanticizing things from just 10 to 15 years ago. In pop culture, practically every big movie is a “reboot” or a sequel of existing intellectual property, and even songs are covering music from the early Millenial era (Doechii’s “Anxiety” comes to mind. And I’m not knocking Doechii! She’s just a ready example). I think it’s getting harder and harder to feel hopeful about the future thanks to politics, global warming, increasing income inequality, and all the rest. When my generation was growing up, we thought things were going to get better. Yes, the 2008 recession knocked us back but, on the whole, we didn’t have the despair that today’s young people are feeling. They’re reaching back for anything that might make them feel a dash of optimism.
Fascism is also sometimes recognized as a union of government and corporate power. This is the part of the essay where I start banging my anti-surveillance drum again. We are being inundated with news about government agencies and corporations abusing their access to our information. ICE is accessing private utility databases to track down immigrants. As the Washington Post reports, “ICE’s use of the private database is another example of how government agencies have exploited commercial sources to access information they are not authorized to compile on their own.” The UK has started requiring IDs for people to access “adult” sites online, which has quickly come to be defined as basically every website, and that means people have to trust any organization whose website they want to visit with their ID. This is a tremendously bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is that corporations and other entities are constantly subject to data breaches. For a recent, terrible example, the Tea dating app was hacked and hackers immediately made a map of all the women who were using it. AI is also being used for “dynamic” pricing that airlines want to use to make us all pay more for airfare, listing ticket prices based on what they think individuals are willing to pay, rather than the actual cost of a ticket. Grocery stores are considering surge pricing that would be powered by AI. As if we aren’t already paying enough for food right now!
I wrote last month about how our data is one of our most sought-after resources. This is why. Corporations have a wealth of data—data that we have often provided unknowingly or in good faith—and now they have the technology to weaponize it in search of profits. This is why we need to be careful about who we give our data to now, especially when it comes to talking to these AI bots/LLMs. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is the company that makes ChatGPT, recently said that these chatlogs are not private. If there’s a lawsuit that a ChatGPT user is a part of, the chats would be discoverable and OpenAI would have to provide them. AI is not a person or a character or a ghost in the machine. It’s about as smart as the text predictor on your phone. And the corporation that owns it will not think twice about sharing any you secrets you told it while treating it as a confidant.
All this technology is being used to enrich a handful of assholes who think they deserve to rule the world as technokings (for your consideration: Technofuedalism by Yanis Varoufakis). I keep thinking about the high cost of living and how AI is making it higher. Through things like surge pricing yes, but also more directly with AI data centers forcing power companies to raise their rates. Regular people are paying more just to get electricity because AI needs a tremendous amount of power. We know that rising costs of living are connected to increased homelessness too. Listen, I hate to keep bringing this up, but the Supreme Court made it possible for cities to make homelessness illegal, which means you can go to prison for not having anywhere to live. I will keep citing the fact that prison labor is a huge portion of the workforce producing things here in the US and that Californians did not pass the ballot measure that would make it illegal to compel prisoners to work. What could be more fascist than imprisoning people and forcing them to work so a small group can get rich? Private prison stocks keep going up in response to Trump’s actions. If we want to get really pessimistic, we could also consider the statistics about the aging prison population. The Atlantic recently published a piece explaining that very few young people today are committing crime and going to jail for it, noting that “virtually everyone who ends up in prison starts their criminal career in their teens or young adulthood.” The article continues, “the American prison system is simply not going to have enough inmates to justify its continued size or staggering costs.” But what if the government found a reason to put a lot of new people in jail? Something to think about while ICE gets a budget larger than that of most countries’ military expenditures.
Ultimately, AI is doing a lot more than providing the aesthetic of fascism. It’s a driving force for fascism. AI technology, as it currently stands, is making our lives materially worse and letting the fascists in charge profit off our misery. It’s ruining the environment, it’s raising our electric bills, and worse, it’s fucking ugly. Just like fascism is.
Books and Other Words
Disco Witches of Fire Island by Blair Fell is a really great read. It follows Joe, a 20-something, heartbroken gay man and his summer on Fire Island with his friend Ronnie. The story is set at the peak of the AIDS crisis, and deals with the extreme grief that comes along with it, bouncing between summertime hedonism and the existential dread of wondering who is going to be here tomorrow. The titular disco witches are two old queens who take Joe in when he arrives on Fire Island only to learn the “sure thing” bar tending gig his friend lined up didn’t actually exist. The story takes a lot of care for its characters who are working as hard as they can to make life worth living. I’ve read a number of male/male romances written by women in recent years but this book is written by an actual gay man and I could definitely feel a difference. In romances about men by women, it’s more like the male characters are just people and their gender is not necessarily relevant. However, Disco Witches has a palpable appreciation for the male body, which I hadn’t even realized was missing from some other books. The book also focuses on growing into oneself and figuring out who you want to be. Fell leans into gay culture’s stereotypical types of guys, but then showcases the disco witches as people rejecting that paradigm and being who they want to be, even if it’s uncool. In fact, the disco witches point out that they are queering queerness (if you will) by demonstrating nontraditional ways of living based on forming your own queer family and doing what you love (like dancing to disco and practicing witchcraft), rather than forcing oneself to slot into being a certain kind of gay. Finally, I thought it was interesting that the disco witches’ style of dancing to cast a spell was described the same way as the Sufi dervishes. We are hitting the dance floor and spinning with intention, but instead of god, it’s for disco!
In Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green starts out with the pithy argument that any event in human history can be traced back to tuberculosis (TB). He says that we can blame World War I on the disease since Franz Ferdinand’s assassins were radicals with tuberculosis who were going to die soon. Obviously this is somewhat reductive, but it underscores Green’s point that TB is a disease that has been with humanity for a very long time. The book alternates between data and the case of a young man named Henry in Sierra Leon who had drug-resistant TB, which puts a charismatic face to a disease that most Americans don’t realize is still around. Of course, the reason Americans think TB is a thing of the past, despite it killing about 10 to 15 percent of people in the US and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, is because of a huge public health campaign. In the 1950s, the US government sent mobile x-ray teams all over the country to find out who had TB and to treat it early, largely eradicating the disease. Unfortunately, the same interventions that were so effective here are seen as too costly for humanitarian organizations to send to countries with fewer resources, even though treating TB early actually has a huge cost savings. As usual, the world’s unbalanced distribution of resources is leading to needless suffering. Heavy stuff aside, one of the most interesting parts of the book to me was a digression on how TB spawned our modern image of beauty. Being waifish, pale, and big-eyed are all effects of disease ravaging the body, but it was so prominent and so thoroughly romanticized that its echoes live in our modern cultural ideals of beauty. Kind of fucking gross when you think about it!
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- U.S. birth rate hits all-time low, CDC data shows via CBS News. Lol. No shit. Why the fuck would anyone want to have a kid right now. Procreation is currently an that requires a level of bravery and optimism (or, on the other hand, rank ignorance) that most of us can’t muster. Children? In this economy?
- Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe via Ars Technica. A very interesting study came out in May suggests that overconfidence is a core piece of why people believe in conspiracy theories. People don’t necessarily want to be on the fringe because humans crave community and shared validation. The study found that people overestimated the number of people who also believed in conspiracy theories, with the author mentioning the example of the conspiracy that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was a “false flag” operation. About eight percent of people in one sample that was true and “that 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them.” Yikes. I think this means our best answer to people trapped in conspiracy thinking is to hit them with the “oh weird, I’ve never heard that before.”
- Curate your own newspaper with RSS via [citation needed]. We are still feeling the loss of Google Reader over 10 years later! This post explains how and why to get your favorite newsletters and posts into an RSS feed instead of your email.
Media
I’ve been playing more video games recently because I realized that I have once again gotten into a rut of hanging out at my computer and just idly clicking stuff. If I’m just idly clicking, I might as well do something a little more fun. I finished playing Puzzle Bobble aka Bust-a-Move on my little handheld emulator. It’s just interesting enough but doesn’t ask much of me, so I find it relaxing. I laughed when I got to the last level because, while this is basically a color-match game, a wizard appears as the final boss. Why is there a wizard? I have no fucking clue. I’ve also been playing a ton of Mario Kart 8 and I’ve let my completionist tendencies take the wheel. I’m gradually working through all the courses at each difficulty level. I like using Donkey Kong as my character and then setting him up in a vehicle that makes it look like he’s going through a mid-life crisis. That just seems like something Donkey Kong would be dealing with.
Languages
I’m proud to report that I’ve published another translation to Spanish Wikipedia on federal pardons in the United States. It seems like good information to disseminate!
Corporeal Form
Well, it turns out I did speak too soon about getting back into a gym routine because now my knee is fucked up. Annoyingly, it’s my “good” knee, that is, not the knee that’s been diagnosed with arthritis. I’m not sure if I sprained it or what (torn ACL, perhaps?), but it’s been bothering me on and off this summer. In tap class last week, I did a buffalo and then my knee went !!!! and I had to sit down. I have no idea what happened because I have shuffled off to buffalo a thousand times at this point. I am going to see my physical therapist about it but in the meantime I am icing and mostly lounging around, since being on my feet for very long is not feeling good and my ankle has started to hurt too. I am feeling discouraged because so much of the health advice for the problems I have (osteopenia, arthritis, etc.) focuses on exercising and staying active, which I am trying to do. It sucks to get injured especially at something I’ve been doing for a while now. I am trying to keep strengthening the area around my knees by doing some floor exercises and wall sits, but hopefully things will get better soon and I can do something more entertaining!
Kitchen Witchery
I looked back at my photos from the last two weeks and the only food I took a picture of was this bowl of corn soup, so I hope that’s enough for those of you who come here for food photos. I haven’t cooked anything noteworthy. I made burritos earlier this week and we had breakfast for dinner featuring waffles last Friday. Just regular food is happening here!
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
