Musician, writer, artist, gardener, Jane-of-all-trades. I keep astonishingly busy with a wide variety of things. Recently into visible mending. Still fixated on Mass Effect. Wrote A Star to Steer Her By, writing Sunset and Evening Star (Yes, still going, just slow!).
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm sure that working in social media â dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions â is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.
But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.
We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.
Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:
The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":
Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.
Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:
When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:
https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/
Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:
If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form â a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:
When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:
Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters â if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.
For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."
Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:
For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.
At first, Zuck tried tweaking his algorithm to replace your friends with trolls who'd bait you into flamewars. When that petered out, he stole a march from Tiktok and recruited an army of theater kids to do amateur dramatics for you in exchange for the promise of an intermittent reward schedule payment for the sketches that got the most views:
The problem (for Zuck) is that theater kids are also people and they resent being jerked around by the algorithm and ripped off by Meta's rigged revshare slot-machine. Last year, he started signaling that he would replace the theater kids â and your friends â with chatbots:
Chatbots have been a catastrophic bet for Meta, far worse than the metaverse. Meta shares are in a death-spiral as investors figure out that when Zuck fired all his coders and replaced them with chatbots while spending $300b on AI, he was excising the heart of the company's skilled workforce, pissing away all its free cash-flow, and sinking into a bottomless pit of debt to produce a substandard product that no one wants, at the expense of the company's only profitable lines of business:
But Zuck is sure that chatbots can solve his most pernicious problem: the search for a gimmick that will keep you locked to his platform that is under his complete control. Zuck doesn't want to rely on your friends with their unwillingness to maximize your engagement. He doesn't want to depend on volatile and unpredictable trolls to bait you into sticking around to argue and see more ads. He wants to be shut of theater kids and their amateur dramatics that inevitably come with demands for decent treatment.
For Zuck, chatbots dangle the promise of social media without socializing. Zuck thinks he can solve all his problems by imprisoning you in a house of mirrors where you interact with LLMs that are tuned to keep you scrolling no matter what, chatbots that will never demand anything of Meta.
He's been at this for a while, and each generation of chatbots was worse than the last. How bad? The last batch had to be killed off after they took to luring children into explicit sexual role-play:
https://archive.is/fopCh
Nevertheless, the dream of a world without people is one that Zuck can't let go of. Solipsism's seductive song convinced him to buy a company called Social.ai, which specializes in trapping people in conversations with chatbots, and now he's announced his plan to flood Facebook and Instagram with LLM slop:
The amazing thing about this is that Zuck is talking about chatbots as a way to capture a younger audience for his graying platforms. Kids hate chatbots. My 18 year old and her friends use "that's so AI" as a pejorative to dismiss anything distasteful or ugly:
For Zuck â who owns a controlling share of voting stock in his company and need not answer to his board â it's a spectacular act of delusional self-sabotage. Zuck refuses to understand that the majority of his users are on his platform because they love their friends more than they hate him. Zuckerberg is on a relentless quest to isolate you from the friends who keep you on his platform and transfer your bond to groups of people (and now chatbots) who can be commanded by Zuckerberg.
Only someone who doesn't think other people are real could believe that you'd prefer to talk to chatbots than your friends â or that a habit of talking with chatbots would be so hard to break that you'd endure an ever-increasing number of advertising interruptions to maintain those pointless conversations.
In 1993/1994, AOL connected its millions of users to the public internet. These users were unaccustomed to the internet's conversational and technical norms, and they kept coming. It wasn't that the old internet was incapable of absorbing surges of new users: every September, an incoming class of undergraduates found their way online through their universities' computer labs.
But the AOL bridge was different: the flood of users was much larger, and it never stopped. The old internet people who struggled to transfer the culture and techniques of the internet to that flood of newbies called it the "Eternal September."
For the Facebook and Instagram users who are about to be buried in an endless botshit avalanche, this is the beginning of the "Eternal Sloptember." From here on in, the slop only gets worse and thicker and harder to avoid. Zuckerberg refuses to acknowledge that he owes his fortune to the fact that his users love each other more than they hate him, so he has set out to shatter those bonds of love and sharpen that hatred.
It won't end well. Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put). Zuck's "agency" isn't higher than yours or mine. The difference between him and us is that he doesn't think we're really real, and we know that he's really a monster.
a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel
Not even that. A virtual world he ripped off from a spunky (fnarrr) little company named Linden Labs, except violently shoved into bleached and starched underpants in order to be pitched as a companion app for the VR hardware in order to sell it to the least interested people for least suited purposes.
If you ever used Second Life, you know what I mean. If you didn't, maybe that's for the better.
The teeny little problem with that enterprise was that people weren't keen on coughing up five hundred bucks for one-trick hardware that's as much of a curiosity as it was thirty years ago, but with less hype (if you remember things like The Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and the music video for Queen's The Invisible Man, you know what I mean). So Suckerbug took the costs up the ass and pivoted to AI.
Which was an even dumber idea.
Facebook and Instagram run on stolen content since ever, but stolen content can be fought thanks to the unexpected side effect of the Device of Malicious Corporate Abuse that, entirely by accident, sometimes manages to work for the little guy and not the corporate behemoths trying to fuck him every which way. So Meta came up with content creation tools (italicized for contempt) that allow anyone to pull painfully derivative (but not stolen) new content out of their ass in seconds without even a single breeze of thought to say nothing of a honest-to-god brainstorm, with Meta pocketing the profits from the ads slapped in front, on top and behind it.
Look, we all know this is true. But there isn't a SOURCE for this, and the graph itself is basically illegible beyond "ooh colors". If we want to be good stewards of our informational resources, we need to cite our sources.
From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea:
All clearly show a sharp rise in temperature beginning around approximately the 1980s, which corresponds with the graph in OP's post. But now we know where this data came from, and we can verify its validity accordingly.
is it bad that it came at a GREAT shock to me as a kid when learning that that hawaii wasn't its own country but an american state which i think is fucking stupid. my logic back then was "what the fuck are americans even doing there". my logic today is still the same. what the fuck!!!!!!
Free Hawaii. State-ify Puerto Rico
so we (USA) have to actually legally care about what we do to/with the land and people there BECAUSE we already treat it as a state without any of the legal benefits they'd get from BEING ONE. Also, you could leave the flag the same. This is my Hot Take for the day.
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iâm just curious, is there any artist(s)who you know their entire discography⌠like everything they ever made is just imprinted in the back of your mind
Something about me is that due to Allergy Reasons I have had extremely little fast food in my life but a culvers location has opened near me and this particular one will let you ask for gluten free fries & I haven't stopped thinking about them. I need more. The texture is so much better than the baked fries I've been having at home. I need Oil. I feel like the united states military
Being a celiac haver whose family went gluten free when I was a baby so I simply haven't Had a lot of Normal People Foods makes me feel like a space alien but it's so good when I Do get to have them. Just found out about fries. Like fried in oil fries. They come in a little paper cup and everything. I'm entering my fries era
Vulcan in starfleet who starts trying Earth foods & gets really into various forms of fried potatoes. It's similar to some baked plomeek bullshit they ate at home but a little bit heavier which is nice for staying warm in the colder climate. Having a great time with a completely blank expression
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Update: she has already accepted her human coparents, but the cozy nest under the drafting table isn't good enough. I had to stop her moving the family into my closet.
I was twenty⌠twenty-five, I think?⌠when I was sentenced. Four hundred years was a length of time I couldnât even imagine. It was a length of time I donât think anyone could imagine, even the judge. It was just a big showy number that let everyone know Iâd never see the light of day again. The mages who cast the spells were dramatic about it, practically shouting the part about âuntil death claims you, or four hundred years hath passed, forsooth, thou shalt be imprisoned hereâ. They donât waste that kind of magic on most prisoners, but I was special.
The Slayer, they called me then. The Monster of Sentan. Iâd killed nineteen people⌠I remember that number because I was so furious that they stopped me so close to my goal of twenty-one. And I didnât just kill ordinary people, no, but the Chosen of the Gods. The Great and Good. They were terrified of me. So they locked me away, to die forgotten.
It had been a little less than a hundred years when the king died without heir, and a civil war tore the country apart. When the fighting was all over, the losers were dragged down to the deepest cells under the castle, and the new king and his soldiers stopped and stared at me. âWho⌠who is this?â he asked, frowning. âSome victim of the usurper?â
People like cooks and jailers and scrubbers donât change as easily as kings. The same man whoâd been bringing me my meals since there was still brown in his hair and beard shuffled forward, hunched and grey now. âNo, yer majesty,â he said humbly. âThat be a special prisoner, from before the old king died.â
âSpecial? Special how?â He frowned, moving closer to my cell. âThe old king died more than ten years ago. This woman must have been a child then. What could she have done to - â
âDonât get too close, yer majesty,â the old man said sharply. âThatâs the Monster of Sentan⌠anâ she bites.â
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A trad music session I'm in played an hour long set at the county fair once. There were maybe 15 of us, but most of them were 'heads down' players, focused on their own instrument and not what was going on around them, so no one but me saw the woman with a kangaroo in a sling in the front row.
When we got done I was all "Oh my god, did you see the KANGAROO?" And all these people whom I actually know (not random internet strangers) tried to convince me I had to be wrong and I'd "just seen a dog." Friends, it's BIG BABY KANGAROO LEGS were sticking out the back of the sling. They joked that I was delusional.
Jokes on them. We were all waiting for the shuttle bus back to parking, and who should join us at the bus stop? KANGAROO SLING LADY.
Suck it, haters. Surprise kangaroos happen in real life!
Wild serendipity! I saw this a bit over a werk ago. I was completely unaware of any Mexican harp tradition, and was tickled to have my assumptions revealed and broken, and to hear a very different type of harp music.
The NEXT DAY I went up to fiddle camp and saw Los Originarios del Plan play, and the next werk i took a bunch of workshops from them, learning the fiddle parts of Arpa Grande tunes!
gummygunk
2087
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turnnoffyourmind
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gamechangershow
