Vanessa Le Page

Just the bad ol' Bernie bros with their "horrors of socialism".

Ohhh. They think it would have been all roses and sunshine now, if Hillary, the Goldwater Girl and friend to Robert Byrd who would have (hypothetically) "obliterated" Iran, the same as Trump, had won that one time.

They think that the single-minded party of women, bipoc, and lgbtq+ haters, who have been working on various incarnations of Project 25 for the past 45 years, would have been miraculously subdued, and not simply resumed their mandate, after having blocked her at every turn, as they did her democratic predecessors; Trump at the helm or not, checks and balances or not.

They think that the neoliberal economic policies that her husband, and Obama, and Biden carried out had nothing to do with everything that lead to Trumpism in the first place.

Ralph could be the new Rupert Rigsby, or, even better, the new Reginald (Reggie Iolanthe) Perrins. What were they thinking with Martin Clunes? Couldn't do more than 5 minutes.

It would be a position I held right up until the late '90s, with the rise of the World Wide Web. It wasn't until 2000, when my mother and step-father browbeat me (and my then partner) into buying a PC, with their help.

Of course it wasn't long before I had to eat my words, easily latching onto creating images and art and making websites, using the web to do things like search my family history (even before Ancestry dot com), and, of course, going headfirst into the world of online chat groups and message boards.

Funny that that last bit was the part my mom side-eyed, but as both shy and an introvert, not to mention neurodivergent, it was a revelation; finally being able to express myself, and settle into a large group of friends. Something that had largely escaped me "IRL".

But even as I saw the personal benefits, not only for people like myself, but for research and information and art, and so on and so on, the very real, greater drawbacks were never far from my mind.

While people like me benefited from finding community, it was already clear that it too easily enabled and fomented tribalism on a grander scale. Racist comments flourished on YouTube, even before the rise of Facebook and Twitter. And while the latter had temporary organisational benefits, vis à vis resistance movements, the damage the original 140 character limit did to discourse is enormous.

That this was all happening in conjunction with the ongoing neoliberal carving out of society and post-9/11 fear-mongering should have been a signal to more people, but there was Survivor and American Idol! Most people could still shut their eyes to the growing inequity and rise in extremist movements. To the death of brick and mortar stores and established service industries. But the convenience! And we've all been complicit to one degree or another. It's all a matter of whether one recognises it or not.

And now we have Ai (in name only, of course), and all my worst fears are coming to fruition in real time. Everything all the best sci-fi writers warned of. (And no, I don't mean the self-aware Ai part.) But the gullible, apathetic, anti-intellectual, and easily-entertained masses eat it up. Defend it even. Swayed by tech gaslighters still holding the line on us silly, little luddites. They will continue to try and paint us as being "afraid", of being "anti-science" and "anti-tech".... "anti-intellectual", even... as they appeal to the actual anti-intellectual/anti-art crowd while fully implementing their surveillance state. But we were warned of that, too.

Even people who normally mock the climate-change deniers, and shame people who don't care about the environment, are turning a blind eye; swayed by the ease of making images they don't seem to realise are facile and fugly, sounds that are formulaic and banal to the extreme, and verbiage that is flat and uninspiring.

And so it will fall, largely, to the working and underclasses to hold the line, to fight against the data centres that are being built in areas that too many 'good liberals' will maintain that blind eye towards. Just as these good liberals do with communities impacted by fracking and factory farming (never mind the poor animals). Just like with Flint, Michigan, and the rusty water; or, here in Canada, ongoing in far too many Indigenous communities. (And then they wonder why the people in these various communities don't all vote Democrat/Liberal -- as they spout the same anti-socialist rhetoric as the far-right. LoL)

It's creating environmental havoc via water misuse and rare earth mineral extraction; 

It's raising electricity costs for consumers; 

It's exploiting workers (who "train" the systems); 

It's eliminating jobs in a variety of sectors, with the goal of eliminating even more (and further being used as a cover for general, already corrupt, corporate downsizing); 

It's being used to cut into an already problematic Gig Economy. No one needs autonomous cars or taxis or cute, little delivery robots;

It's interfering with and compromising early childhood development;

It's actively dumbing down multiple generations of people; 

It's further harming already vulnerable, social-media-addicted people's mental well-being, whether it's the mirroring and the sycophancy, or the "therapy" bots and phony spiritualists inducing psychosis, the grief inhibitors, or the fact that no one can trust their own eyes anymore; 

It's turning society into a fully complicit surveillance state: #panopticon (Alexa or Siri, anyone? Ring? Flock? No, thank you. Smart phones are bad enough); 

It's being used for political propaganda and social engineering, on all sides, but especially of the far/alt-right kind, aided and abetted by social media algorithms; 

It's being used to kill people, on a massive scale, and deflect blame when people don't fall for the war PR; 

It's being used to harm women and children with revenge porn and csam; 

It's ruined Google and has undermined the Internet (the Information Age is over, such as it was) and the whole notion of websites; 

It's playing havoc with artists and the arts, be it the written word, the visual arts in all its forms, or music, contributing to an already overwhelming atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and corporate abuse. No, it's not democratising, and suggesting that disabled people need it is infantilising; 

Its output is fugly and banal - #uncannyvalley - appealing to the lowest common denominator (who knew it could get any lower);

Its generation of "hallucinations" cannot be eliminated and they are contributing to widespread mis and disinformation; 

Ai-driven Ai-detectors are completely unreliable, adding to the quagmire;

It's being used to manipulate and scam the masses with false advertising, online, and price gouge on the down-low, with fluctuating e-price tags, at the brick and mortar; 

It's actively and purposefully being used to destroy learning and academia; 

It's undermining the legal system with fake information and harmful advice; 

It's corrupting scientific research papers, a field already dealing with a proliferation of fakes; 

It's filling medical transcripts with errors, and dumbing down even medical experts, never mind laymen; 

Its over-hyped promises of miracle drugs are massively underperforming; 

Its analyses of cancer scans are not rooted in biology, after all (shocking!); 

It's all built on the theft of intellectual property; 

AND the megalomaniacs ushering all of this in are *explicitly* authoritarian, racist, and misogynistic...

Like, they actively say the quiet parts out loud. Not to mention that they fund Trump...

Nasty Women...