But you know the right wing has one idea:
rich get richer.
In their backyard grows three cherry trees.
These threes have nothing in common.
These trees do not get along.
But as the right wing craft their policies
in order to get voters, philosophers, and pundits on board
with making the rich richer,
they can always, always find
the perfect cherry to pick.
They have money →
They have media →
They have the throne →
The ymake money
And if it was JUST the Koch brothers
or Manchin
or the Trump family
or Putin
we could defeat them.
But the system’s sickness is such
that whomever in the deep caves
under the Misty Mountains
happens to find
the Exploitation Loophole of Power
will float to the top.
This is called emergence.
Oh, they are evil all right.
Don’t get me wrong on that.
They have mauvaise foi.
“I have a fiduciary duty
to plunder the Earth and the public coffers.”
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that a commensurate carbon tax would have to be infinite or larger than infinite (and that rationing is a better solution).
Here’s the situation. I’ll use Sweden as the example just to get numbers but similar applies to all lands and realms.
Our plan was to go from 21 Mt CO2e in 2010, through 6.3 Mt CO2e in 2030, down to zero, and then into net negative.
Showing someone just shown the first two points on that line and asking them for a solution they might be like “oh, okay, you want to go 21 Mt emissions down to 6.3 Mt? Let’s use a carbon tax! A commensurate number would be somewhere around 11.55 SEK per liter.”
Now, two problems with this. First, what we did was nowhere near 11 SEK per liter. We did 3.27 SEK. That’s among the highest in the world and still nowhere near enough just for the 6.3 Mt CO2e by year 2030 goal.
As bad as that problem is, second problem is the bigger.
Because as we want to move to zero, and through zero to negative. We didn’t show them whe whole problem. We’re not just trying to make the numbers small. We need to make the numbers go away and even flip.
Now, my original thinking on this was:
Price = Demand / Supply.
At low supply (like a 6.3 Mt emission year 2030 goal compared to a 21 Mt emission year 2010 reality), price goes up. You’re dividing the demand by a lower number.
At a zero supply like a 0 Mt emission goal, you’d have to divide by zero which breaks math. (For a tax where absolute values is what matters, it’d have to be infinite.) It breaks math even more at a negative supply. You’d… pay people to emit? So stupid. It’s a singularity pinch. The tax is beyond infinite.
Turns out that’s not really how they do it with these Pigouvian taxes. They use marginal abatement cost curves.
You want the tax high enough that it can often be cheaper to solve the problem in a way that doesn’t require buying the problematic good. I.e. you want to set the tax high enough so people are like “okay, never mind drilling for this project, solar is cheaper”.
So they put all the possible “abatements” (like switching to solar) on a big old curve and used that to guide the tax value. That’s where the 11.55 SEK number above would come from (and that’s before the flat-per-liter energy tax and VAT).
But we need to go to zero and net negative. Net negative even if everyone everywhere 100% stopped emitting (above what the carbon cycle normally can handle) means some sorta CDR. DACCS (direct air capture) or bio-CCS. Sweden has gone all in on the latter with a current contract to jam 0.9 Mt annually into the floor of the North Sea.
0.9 Mt is still only like less than one fifteenth of what just the Swedish transport section today emits, let alone all industries total. So the sequestering corporations are building out the bandwidth to jam things down there (it requires pressurized tanker boats to ship things there).
If the world doesn’t stop drilling & burning, even if we could figure out a way to jam things down there fast enough, the North Sea floor storage site would be full in just over two years. (At the current 1.5 Mt bandwidth—Sweden bought 0.9 Mt of that—it’d take over fifty thousand years to fill it up. But. Looking at what the world emits total in a year it’s almost half of what can total fit down there. The fifty thou years number is only there as a result of how slowly they can currently squeeze things down there.)
So I’m thinking maybe my original “naive” mental model wasn’t so wrong. Maybe I’m a bit Dunning-Kruger here but the more I think about this, it seems more that the marginal abatement cost curve model is what’s naive.
It’s based on carbon storage deposit amounts so big that we might not ever figure out how to do them. I’m all for CDR to the extent that it’s possible, but it’s not an infinite sponge.
We need to actually stop drilling and leave the fossil fuels in the ground!
Solar, hydro, wind, and bioCCS are all great as a consolation to not wreck our qualities-of-life too horribly when we leave it in the ground, but they’re not and can never be an excuse to not leave in the ground.
That’s what I mean with zero or even negative “supply”. Our “supply” of how much we can afford to drill and burn really is limited, even with CDR tech like bioCSS. Our actual physical supply of oil and LNG is way bigger than what we can afford to actually burn up because the bottleneck is CO2e PPM. That’s why “peak oil” spiels are wrong. It’s already way more pinched than that.
Banding was an incredibly powerful and underrated creature keyword in Magic that ended up a bit dysergic together with evasion abilities on cards like Mesa Pegasus. If Mesa Pegasus and Benalish Hero attack in a band, the flying becomes pointless. (Flying + Banding still pretty good on blocks though.) Because if the enemy can trip up the Hero on the ground with a Wall of Brambles or something, well, RIP the pegasus too.
Similarly, the Capital can attack all of us through one of us. That’s why intersectional solidarity is scary. No social movement has successfully overcome its backlash. Labor rights, reproductive rights, BIPOC rights and queer rights are all down.
But if Mesa Pegasus and Hurloon Minotaur join up (the Hero can come along too), then it’s bye-bye Brambles. The Minotaur would’ve just bounced with the Wall of Brambles normally but the Pegasus helps it go over the top, and the Brambles can’t take down a band that has a three-toughness minotaur (or even Dire Wolves with [Grizzly Bears][GB] to both take on one damage each).
Everyone on the banding side come through unscathed, doing a better job than they could alone. That’s why intersectional solidarity is the solution. ¡Les puebles unides jamás serán vencides!
[GB]: https://scryfall.com/card/10e/268/grizzly-bears “Grizzly Bears”
Economics really undervalue future damage. The reason they do that is this:
Imagine I’ve used the time looker-forward tube and seen that a broken staircase step will cause a $10000 Steinway piano to fall down the stairs and break in the year 2126.
Repairing the step will cost $10.
The time-discounting economics say that if I instead invest the $10 in meme stonks, and it compounds to $10000 and 50¢ in the year 2126, I can buy a new piano and have enough left over for a pack of chewing gum too. Ergo we need to time-discount the future disaster’s value to see if it’s worth the $10 today. And this has become mainstream in economics. This is how things are actually priced.
You’ve correctly compounded the opportunity cost. One of the flaws in this is that you haven’t compounded the catastrophe cost. If you think you can buy a piano for $10000 in 2126 or a pack of gum for 50¢ then.
If a stitch in time saves nine, you can’t just compound the one stitch.
Clean water and breathable air are priceless.
Let’s postulate a scenario where I, an open borders lunatic with one immigrant parent and one Swedish parent, could’ve been convinced that Sweden should keep some limit on the amount of people who gets to stay temporarily, and/or some limit on the amount of those who gets to move full citizenships.
I’m not saying it’d be easy to convince me of that. Arguments would have to get pretty tender, like “Okay, we are gonna try to let everyone in later, we just need to get everything ready first and build up a good social safetynet robust enough to handle the influx safely so we can help everyone”. So the point of this essay isn’t gonna be that I’ve gotten on board with “limits on immigration” because I haven’t and that’s not what this is. So put an pin in that worry.
The scenario where you’ve managed to convince me about a limit on either or both of those two “gates” being a good idea is just a hypothetical for the sake a point I’m trying to make:
Even then, 99% of the policy suggestions I see from the far right (and from S in their current “stram migration” hellscape era) are about making the lives of people worse. In the name of limiting migration they instead propose and implement hassling and harassing human beings at various stages through those two sluice gates. In the name of integration they keep furthering segregration.
Personer med dubbla medborgarskap ska kunna fråntas sitt svenska medborgarskap om de döms för brott som allvarligt skadar Sveriges vitala intressen, enligt ett beslut som nu fattats i riksdagen.
So even citizens can never truly feel Swedish. How can we build a shared community when there’s this foundational inequality?
S is now talking about an “integrationsskuld”; an idea trying to convey a racist idea that we “let in too many” immigrants and they messed it up for everyone and now we’ve got to clean up. But if that were true (and again, that’d be a hard sell for me given how that same decade coincided with catastrophic privatization reforms causing massive corruption and furthering segregation in health care and education), it doesn’t make sense how all their political proposals serve to instead further segregation, alienation, and distrust.
Except of course to the extent it binds the outgroup. “Vote for our rich-get-richer policies and we’ll protect you from the muslims, Mexicans, and queers,” just like Mussolini drew it up.
On Fedi, Reverse wrote:
On the 6th of May, the Swedish Parliament decided to accept a new law that is supposed to “strengthen competition”, via harder punishments on public companies that compete “unhealthily” with private companies
This has been widely (and jubilantly) reported by various media operated by Svenskt Näringsliv, which is to be expected. With a quick search I didn’t find any leftist publications talking about this. Perhaps because it’s just a strengthening of an existing law from 2010 that (according to the lizardpeople from the article linked in this message), it proved toothless? So perhaps all the red ink has already been spilled back then about it?
In any case, trying to understand what it means made it seem disgusting in many parts. The classic example given in explanations of both the old and the new law is “what if the state or municipality decides to run a gym at undermarket prices” (I’m paraphrasing but that’s the gist of it).
Oh yes, what a tragedy indeed. The horror.
The project leader for the new rules at Konkurrensverket spells it out:
Offentliga aktörer kan ha fördelar som de privata företagen saknar som exempelvis att verksamheten kan drivas utan vinstkrav
What fucking lizardpeople this government is.
And yes, the law includes things that even I think are reasonable, like that public companies cannot restrict access to infrastructure that they alone can have, so that there can be private actors that offer better terms to the public.
But the most important part is that the law guarantees the opposite: that even the public sector has to offer services at terms that are at least as bad as the private sector.
The public sector is “inefficient” my ass.
Yeah, although I’m not even onboard with that part. I get that you wrote “reasonable”, not “fantastic”, and maybe that’s where I’d land too as in “contrary to the rest of this law which is tyrannical, suffocating, makes a mockery of freedom, and furthers corporate trampling of people power, this part at least makes sense, I ‘only’ disagree with it (reasoning that it’s great if public infrastructure primarily benefit public works, and that this paragraph whiffs of the ‘marknadshyror’ debacle and, like it, will lead to furthering the collapse of what we the people built together and have together), whereas the rest of the law is just complete and thorough cruelty without any amount of reason, motivation, or consistency with self-professed free-trade values, just a blatant money grab and a punch in the face of all of us” kind of “reasonable”.
Thanks for bringing attention to this. I hate it so much. And because of the ratchet effect and the de-leftification of the S party (although thankfully they did vote no on this one), I despair that this won’t be easily fixed or restored anytime soon.
There’s one thing I wish you all could understand.
The way Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon owns the world? It doesn’t have to be that way. It used to not be that way. Their ascendancy should’ve been illegal.
I was on the FOSS bandwagon before those companies took over the world. I belatedly fell off it and drank the proverbial iPad Kool-Aid in 2021 (and have also gotten into the equally proprietary, just more openwashed, “alternative” called Android in the years since) but I don’t think that was a good decision on my part.
I was a weirdo who refused to join Facebook or even have .doc files from the old Microsoft Word era. Not refusing just to be a weirdo, but refusing because these corporations are bad for society.
I have seen the world willingly tether themselves in this poison cage. These days, more and more people can see how that’s a problem but fewer and fewer can actually do anything about it.
My own life as a weirdo is getting more and more difficult. Often I’ve stumbled in my determination and tried to get down with the sickness but been unable because there’s often a bootstrap problem where the apps expect you to already be deep in that toxic “ecosystem”.
When I see our policy-makers knit our fates even closer to the fealty of these monstrous beings I don’t know what to do. The daily gaslight dose is insanely high. The streets and even the inside of the local city busline are full of TV monitors constantly saying “Use apps! Use apps! Use apps! Use apps!” I’ve had to watch that “here’s how you, loyal Apple/Alphabet customer, can activate your app ticket correctly” video loop ten thousand times since it’s blasted directly into our eyes on the bus line here where I live. I can’t handle it! I grew up in an era where there weren’t even any ads on TV, that was illegal! And now the entire city is like a never-ending ad-break.
I come from a world where this wasn’t how it worked. As I always say: we lost the downhill battle in three decisive blows just one after another:
The network effect is a very strong poison. It is an externality that our economic system just isn’t equipped to deal with. I have to keep reminding myself to not really blame anyone for succumbing. It’s a foundational bug in how money works.
But our politicians all around the world have to accept some of the blame here. Corrupted by lobbyist bribes they have enacted things like DMCA, EUCD, TRIPS, ACTA and so on. We could’ve had a much different world. We still can. ♥︎
I’ve longed for so many years for the new Swedish e-id system to finally bring liberation from BankID but it’s going from bad to worse. It shares the incredible drawback of requiring a Google or Apple smartphone, but adds a hard requirement of NFC at all times. (A few years ago I belatedly gave in and got iPad and a GSF/Play-Store enabled Android tablet but neither has NFC (and neither has this Android game handheld) so hello e-waste.)
It’s insane to me that the Swedish police will be literally requiring every citizen to be a customer of one of these two American tech giants that among the richest megacorps in the world. That’s beyond any cyberpunk dystopia I’ve ever seen.
The fact that they trust them (or the OEMs, especially on the Android side) to not spy on their users is also pretty strange but tertiary to the forced customer relationship aspect. It’s as if schools required kids to bring a bottle of Coca-Cola™ every day or the DMV only gave out licenses if you drive Ford™. It’s a complete concession to all ideals whether it’s social democracy or free markets. It’s the billionaire oligarchy stomping on a human face, forever. The only one happy about this is Ayn Rand. She is laughing her head off in hell, making sure the railway there only runs on official Rearden® Metal™.
A new proposal from the Swedish government is to stop welfare and other social help to those convicted of severe felonies.
I’m not onboard with that idea.
We’re not supposed to have the death penalty in Sweden and I don’t like the “once a thief, always a thief” mentality. If they’re not in prison or in psychiatric care, we still wanna prevent more crimes. Not create more homelessness or relegate them to the “shadow society” they’ve been given so much lip service to opposing.
This proposal will create outlaws and lawlessness.
From a “get votes” strategy perspective this move is genius from them. Emotionally it does resonate. It feels bad to have to help villains. So people who protest this law are gonna look bad, look like they’re on the side of the bad guys. It also further conditionalizes the welfare system which is a great win for the employer class. The more miserable the breadline is, the cheaper and more compliant labor becomes, is the idea. They want employing to remain a buyer’s market. Making sure there are “unhelpables” that are just sentenced to die in the streets is a necessary stepping stone for them, it’s a way to try to erode our empathy. (Not saying it’ll work because as long as hearts can beat they can bleed. I know there is love.)
It’s evil genius like that Azarello “Lex Luthor” comic where he tries to make the people of Metropolis to become mad at Superman for saving the life of a criminal. An especially disgusting one that Luthor secretly funded. (That blurb doesn’t spoil the whole thing, there’s more, it’s still a great read.)
Helping the bad guys does feel bad but pushing them into the arms of organized crime feels worse. If you’re declaring them dead this way you might as well pull the trigger for real. One of the best arguments against the death penalty is that it fosters desperation and escalation (“I’m already bound for the mercy seat so I might as well kill a couple of dozen more”) and I agree with that and I do oppose the death penalty and that argument applies even more here, way more actually since they’ll still be living and be even more dangerous and desperate than they would’ve been if they were in the grave.
Another popular argument is that sometimes people are innocently convicted. Yes. Sweden is certainly not immune to that happening. It’s so easy to get tangled up and misunderstood when trying to talk to authorities and institutions.
I actually think AI is fun and good. It’s just that if we don’t solve the problems it’s not worth it (if the problems will destroy us all).
It’s like cars. I oppose cars but I actually love riding in the shotgun seat on the open road bopping to that hecking song that goes “and all that I can see is just another lemon tree”. Yeah, yeah, I get motion sick on small bumpy country roads but being in transit, being on the way between places, feels good somehow. And that joy of course pales in comparison to all the good cars do, what they enable, all the problems that cars solved.
It’s just… We only have one planet and so many ways to mess it up.
Humans, like other eusocial species, have a tendency to create systems and structures larger than themselves. We create these runaway processes like whoops we invented the stock market (or it emerged, rather) and now corporations sort of kinda metaphorically are alive and are trying to kill us. So not only are direct fossil extraction and burnination bad, other runaway systems are also risky AF because look at where we are with these billionaires and corrupt policy processes. Yeah, yeah, maybe the solution will also come in the form of a runaway process but let’s make sure we fix the problems before we wreck ourselves here.
People (including me) make fun of young Earth creationism (that has got to be an exonym, right? Because whaddayamean “young” when in their world view the Earth is literally the oldest thing that exists) but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how even though the actual Earth is super old and it’s in a universe that’s even older, and hominids like us have existed for many hundred thousands of years, the world of writing is actually pretty young. Only a few thousand years.
We’ve managed to destroy the planet in an embarrassingly short time. That to me really goes to show that we’re doing something fundamentally wrong and that wrong thing is called fossil fuels so leave it in the ground. And our entire protcol for resource and task distribution thrives on exploitation loops widening wealth gaps and destroying the environment in many ways.
I’m writing this a few years before Bitcoin’s twentieth anniversary as one of humanity’s biggest mistakes.
Bitcoin is three things:
I’ll try to be brief on why the token thing is bad.
Y’all know I think a post-scarcity, pay-it-forward mindset can be explosively productive in the digital world. Sharing is caring. Introducing a limited, scarce resource—whether it’s an artificially created one or not—into that mix does a lot more harm than good.
The blockchain ledger exists just to enforce the contracts that emulate those money-like tokens. That is why the ledger was invented and the tokens named the project.
Money is bad and I’ve spent the past twenty-five years arguing against market capitalism. The tokens share all the drawbacks of money and add a whole bunch of new ones.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that either you actually like the token thing, and/or that you’ve found other valuable uses for the ledger, so we can get into where Bitcoin really messed up:
The ledger is built on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. If you’re an Xennial like me you’re thinking “that’s awesome! P2p is great!” with fond memories of things like BitTorrent. Hold your horses for three seconds because BitTorrent becomes better the more reciprocators are connected. That’s actually a problem that PeerTube is struggling with; that so many of the clients and federation approaches don’t connect to the WebTorrent part of it and just hotlink the upstream copy of the video, leaving the servers overloaded.
Bitcoin’s not like that. Bitcoin becomes worse the more people are connected. So much worse. It provides the same block rate and transaction speed whether the entire network ran off one dinky li’l pocket computer as it does now when it’s over 70000 nodes, but the more nodes that connect and “help”, the more energy the whole thing uses.
Because they’re not helping, they’re competing. Instead of just making the network more resilient or better, they are racing each other, distrusting each other. The pool that burns the most gets the most rewards.
I know that humanity has a long history of creating systems that reward and exacerbate greed and injustice but this one is a doozy.
Other proof-of-work schemes like the “hashcash” anti-spam proposal and the new “Anubis” website blockers are really bad and I hate them (it’s not fun when my dinky li’l e-reader hangs for five rapidly battery-draining minutes just because I wanna look up a Dominion game card. If you wanna put a penalty or payment for connecting I’m not stoked that that payment is going directly down the drain. It’s like putting a toll sign on a bridge saying “burn a dollar bill in front of the camera in order to pass the bridge”) but at least they have constant difficulty rates that are manually settable by admins. Bitcoin’s difficulty scale is managed by a computer (and increases automatically so that the block rate is constant) which has led to it increasing to 150 trillions times higher.
“It’s not waste, it’s worth it because of the benef—” It is waste. It’s a penalty for participating. It’s a deliberate deterrent as an attempt to mitigate the “Sybil” attack (the risk of someone starting a bunch of extra nodes to overwhelm the network in order to falsify transactions). So in the infinite unwisdom of Bitcoin’s founders, they put in both a deterrent for participating (the recklessly limitlessly scaling “proof-of-work” hashing) and a reward for participating (the “mining” rewards that will be gradually metered out for over a hundred years, if there’s still a civilization then).
So in our “burn a dollar on camera in order to pass the bridge example from earlier, it’s like if on the other side of that dollar-burning-bridge there’s a two-dollar-payout. So lots of money burnery in order to make money. Destructivity that the clumsy invisible hand of the market can’t distinguish from productivity so it runs amok. Instead of creating good and useful products or services it’s pure destruction (repeating myself a bit but the purported “benefits” aren’t increased).
Except it’s even worse than the dollar-burning-bridge for two reasons. First is that instead of one dollar vs two dollars, it’s about 70 k on either side of the equation (margins are pretty tight—that’s how economics work) so it’s a rich man’s game, and the second reason is that dollar burning was an environmental disaster. It’s as if it was a poison dollar that killed birds and even humans as it burned because energy externalities is an unsolved and urgent problem.
“But (setting aside that almost half of it is dirty energy), when we use renewables, it’s making use of extra energy during peak hou—” It’d actually be less bad if that extra energy from solar and wind were wasted than it going into Bitcoin’s ASIC e-waste poison mill because you’re not helping by mining. You’re only increasing the difficulty scale for those dirty coal-fueled Bitcoin miners out there.
Bitcoin is a runaway train, a headless constrictor, a gray goo apocalypse, and it’s incredibly difficult to fight. Some approaches to stop it involve regulating energy externalities (which we need to do anyway in order to stop climate change) or tanking the value of BTC by making it harder to interface it with other goods and currencies.
The other day, someone told me that “Discord is a good product”. And I’m grateful for that phrasing because it helps me explain why I’m having such a cow about Discord.
Because it’s not a good product. The worst part about it is how mandatory it is. As an analogy, let’s take some soda… what’s a really gross one? Pepsi? Pepsi has a lot of problems but it would be a heck of a lot worse if it was a “mandatory” product. If everytime you went past a grocery store you would loose all control over your hand and it’d drag you into the store and grab a bottle and you’d physically be forced to get it, even though you have water at home—or you’ll lose your friends or not be able to access product support or an event or even in some cases housing.
While normal, free, common-sense alternatives like email, IRC, XMPP and Fediverse are “products” in some senses of the word (they are produced things that exist and you can use them; and this goes extra for commercial but FOSS-friendly forums like Discourse or Vanilla), they’re products the same way breathable air is a product. If someone were to take away your lungs in order to sell you bottled oxygen that’d not be a product I’d be a happy customer of. I might be buying but I’d be pretty sad about what they took away.
In one way it’s even worse than heroin—not in all or even most ways, and not to make light of the opiate crisis, (stay in school, kids!) but with dope there’s at least multiple vendors.
That’s what Discord did. We have free ways to talk to each other, but they made a way that they own.
With Discord you have to make an account with this one company.
There are no other “products” like this, “mandatory” products, outside of the internet. It’s even illegal. Antitrust laws date back to the Roman Empire. But we tolerate it online for some reason (and that reason is that we have to because it’s mandatory).
You might’ve heard this slogan before, but with Discord’s business model, “you are the product”. We’ve known about this stuff since 1973 but people still get sucked in (because they have to).
While the people who participate in a forum on Discord don’t have much of a choice, the people who start the forums do. If you are a community organizer, don’t choose Discord. At least not only Discord. The normal, classic internet tools like email, IRC, Fediverse or XMPP still exist.
And if you’re a lawmaker, a policy-maker, it’s time for you to step up.
I get this a lot from people who have a bad client for email or IRC or XMPP or whatever it might be. Yes, there are bad ones. But there are also good ones.
There are situations where the word “NIMBY” applies. It’s short for “Not in my backyard”, like someone might think needle exchanges and refugee housing are great but don’t want them in their own neighborhoods (FWIW, I used to live in a neighborhood that had both and it was great). When something is good for everyone including the people who live there but the people who live there are squeamish for bad-faith reasons, NIMBY has been a pretty appropriate slag on them.
But it can also be completely misapplied. If the Galactic Empire wants to excavate your entire planet to death in search of kalkite for its Death Star, and you protest that, it’s not really fair to trot out the old “NIMBY” slag as you’re under the boot.
I’m not saying I know all the ins and out of each situation. I was pretty surprised when Thunberg protested a wind power installation—I thought wind power was good?—but I’m not fully read up so I’ll hold off on coming to a conclusion on that. Similarly, lots of communities here have been protesting uranium mining. Since I’m pretty sure nuclear isn’t the solution we’re looking for, I’m leaning in their favor even more than the wind power thing.
To my surprise, an acquaintance of mine said something like “Oh, what NIMBYs they are!” and it made my jaw drop. “Calling NIMBY” seemed like fair game as long as it was between peers. Like “Oh, stop being such a NIMBY, we both live in this neighborhood and I think we should shoulder this responsibility for good the entire city” or, at the very least, although distantly second-tier, something like “Oh, stop being such a NIMBY, we both live in equivalent neighborhoods and if my neighborhood had been selected to have to have the garbage burning plant, I would’ve gladly said yes, it’s my duty for our city”. (Bringing to mind the old “two cows” joke: “If you had two farms would you give one of them up for the motherland?” “Yes, of course!” “And if you had two cows?” “…” “Why do you hesitate?” “Because I have two cows!”)
But if I’m part of the oppressor/exploiter class, there’s no way I’m gonna call someone under my boot “a NIMBY”! That’s one thousand percent impolite and inappropes!
Now, I know I usually like to zoom out and take the holistic “whole-forest-rather-than-a-single-leaf” approach in these essays so I’d better call out that this time, I’m not doing that. This isn’t me making a final judgment call on the whole “uranium mining yes or no” situation. I’m leaning no on nuclear, it’s just a really inefficient and destructive non-solution as far as I can tell, but the fossil-burning situation is a desperately urgent emergency and if we doom the whole in quest of preserving every part, all parts will die anyway. So a lean no on the uranium thing but a decisive no on the whole NIMBY shaming of these folks. That was strong “let them eat cake” vibes as you sat in your palace fueled by what they had and your class took from them.
Let’s say a land wanted to make burglary illegal. They notice that a lot of people who do breaking and entering wear shoes when doing so. So they make wearing shoes illegal.
That’s sort of how many EU laws are.
I’m getting a li’l frustrated with how my particular headphones and DAC and app combo I can’t hear anything except at the highest volumes. But every once in a while the audio will cut out entirely and I have to fish out the LP3 from deep inside the bag and fiddle with the volumes and up pops the legally mandated volume warning dialog. This is really frustrating and also pretty dangerous if it happens when I’m outside. I don’t want to stop and fiddle with this stuff on the sidewalk or an escalator. I get that it’s well-intentioned to not have people blast their own ears off but the phone can’t know the decibels from a particular DAC/headphone combo so this isn’t really a vector of regulation that works in real life.
There’s also the whole “Do you love cookies? yes/sure/yep/legitimate/accept” click maze on websites. They should’ve made tracking ads illegal instead. This is an even better example than the headphone thing since here they didn’t even criminalize the end. It’s as if in the burglary analogy, they only criminalized the shoes, not the actual theft.
This is also the problem with “Chat Control”. Unlike some very frustrating and self-foot-shooting and frankly gross and horrific anti-Chat-Control ad campaigns here in Sweden, I don’t have a problem with the EU going after abusers. I’m glad that those ends are criminalized. CSAM is actually bad as much as that might come as news to some. I only have a problem with how they do it, by undermining all e2ee which is only enforcable through super dubious methods.
Sweden disastrously had the biggest year-over-year CO₂E emissions increase since 1990 as a direct and immediate consequence of our elected government’s policies—it’s proven that their diesel pricing was the culprit. When people tell me “We’re such a tiny country, we don’t need to do anything” that’s so wrong because:
“Everyone aboard the boat needs to stop drilling holes in the hull” “Okay but we the shuffleboard club isn’t gonna stop because we’re just one eighth of a percent of all the passengers on this boat and we’ve seen other people drilling too! 🎼🎵 Drill drill drill 🎶” “But you’re among the ones drilling the most! Not as much as the dining club and you’re not as numerous as the dance club but– wait, what, you’re increasing your drilling in the middle of this conversation!?” “🎵 Drill drill drill 🎶”
On a fundamental level the designation of this group as “the shuffleboard club” is arbitrary. We went and talked to someone in the dance club who was a real drillmaniac and she said “uhm we with shoesize 37.293 doesn’t need to stop drilling, we’re just one percent of a percent of the passengers, why are you going after us shoesize 37.293 folks? It doesn’t matter what we do, we are so few”.
There is a “clever” personality type, I’ve had several in my life, that become more susceptible to propaganda and myths when they are presented as some kind of secret insider knowledge or a way to get a leg up on what the general public knows.
Like our climate discussion group in my old hometown fell apart when one of the more driving members suddenly switched overnight to the “well actually it’s not gonna be a problem because peak oil is coming soon and that’s gonna be a bigger problem” myth. That was 20 years ago and no, climate change by far was the way bigger driver of calamities during those two decades. Keeeping his focus on that would’ve been much more important and saved more lives and also the solution to climate change includes leaving it in the ground which includes becoming less oil-dependent which also addresses peak oil automatically whereas the peak oil hysteria didn’t come with a solution beyond sky-is-falling hysteria fueling a carter-doctrine style “oil interests” panic grab at immense cost in human lives.
When a lie is being presented as an obvious truth, it can still fool a lot of folks. But to a certain “clever” kind of personality, a lie that’s presented as a secret truth becomes much more convincing. When it’s wrapped in “well actually” trivia. When it’s “if you memorize this fact you’ll know something most people don’t know”, that becomes tasty to them even when that fact is an outright lie.
It’s disheartening that a lot of the things we get (rightly!) upset about in US politics we are just numb to and cowed under when it happens here in Sweden. ICE raids, shutdowns of BLM protests, profiled stop-and-frisk, political leaders mocking climate activists, fossil lobbying, deforestation, ocean exploitation and pollution, abuse of indigenous groups, propping up tyrannical and genocidal regimes abroad, union busting, increasing poverty, worsening wealth gaps, climate recklessness, fossil industry subsidies, factory farms, segregationist politics, huge military industrial complex, overfull prisons, racist “fair and balanced” right-wing media, and an appified society propping up the network effect overlords.
S, the biggest party on the so-called left has long been fiscally blairite; unwilling to undo the ratchet effect horrors of the fiscally thatcherite right. Selling out what we had built together. Now as the right wing (currently in charge but slightly behind in the polls ahead of the 2026 election) is taking a speedrun into racism, they’re eager to dive right in on that. When the stop&frisk “zones” were first introduced there was some mild oh-no-that’s-wrong naysaying from S which quickly shifted to a “we would’ve made the zones even bigger and crueler” song you could barely make out for the proverbial bloom in their mouths.
That’s not to say I suggest voting for the right wing block as if they were a lesser evil version of themselves. That’s an illusion created by S’ eagerness to get dragged all the way through the Overton window. But ultimately the villains doing that dragging are the right-wing parties and they’ll go even further if they get reelected.
Arguably a lot of the problem rests with the electorate, with the general public. Media has a big responsibility there. People have long been subject to racist flimflam and climate downplaying and self-righteous hypocritical nationbuilding. Things that are absolutely hecked up mad world have been normalized.
Last night I dreamed that I traveled far and wide through many distant lands. What did I see there? A scientist named Professor Meme and his friend, who went by Joe or Jake or if it was Robert—you know how dreams can get fuzzy—and their buddies, a couple of clown comics of yesteryear.
They explained to me that “Everyone in this land is sorted into one of two categories. Evans, who have an even number of teeth (usually 28, 30, or 32), and Prims, who have a prime number of teeth (usually 29 or 31).
Evans have higher salaries and love vanilla and comedy and yellow clothes. Prims do all the housework and love chocolate and drama and orange clothes.”
Through the life-changing magic of dreams I had been granted the super power of “vector space analysis” (which is how I knew it was a dream because in real life I can’t do those things) so I traversed their realm and saw that yeah, for the most part, those traits did cluster together. Usually. But there were plenty of chocolate lovers who told me in confidence that they wouldn’t mind a good comedy every once in a while. And the whole thing about lower salaries turned out to be a pretty big point of contention! There were a lot of traditionally-minded folks clad in orange who said they were glad to do the housework, they were better at it than their yellow-draped companion who always left the butter out anyway and broke plates.
Because yes. Prims and Evans were usually paired up in constellations of one of each. That had actually been the largest political issue of all time just one generation ago; whether two Prims could shack up together, or an Evan with an Evan. And why always groups of two? That’s what you get with dream logic… I found a trove of old newspaper articles that proclaimed the collapse of society if two Evans were to partner up, and to vote for the Traditional Constellation Party that would protect everyone from that (the same party that incidentally also wanted to steal from the poor and give to the rich) or the proverbial sky would fall.
That battle had been lost and in some areas of the land I did meet some Orange+Orange couples and some Yellow+Yellow ones too.
Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert didn’t seem to mind that as much as they were fighting a “new” menace: people who didn’t neatly fit in these two categories.
Actually… talking to them about it was quite confusing in that dream way where things tend to shift and morph, because when I said that the salary/housework thing seemed a little unfair, they said “of course! We fight for the rights of Prims, and these reactionary category straddlers are muddying that issue with their performative housework and parodic chocolate-gobbling. It’s disgusting!” In all my stay in this faraway land I never saw them actually talk about the rights of the Prims; in fact, time and again I saw them side with factions that wanted to constrain Prims even further, even lower salaries for Prims, even more housework. “Don’t you see?” they said angrily. “We’re prioritizing their right to even be a Prim. Isn’t that the most fundamental of all Prim rights? And now all of a sudden it’s under attack after being completely static throughout history.” (I actually saw in museums there that a couple of hundred years ago, everyone was wearing orange regardless of which ice-cream flavor they were eating. I also saw that the vanilla-eaters were all strictly wearing velcro shoes and all the chocolate-eaters were strictly wearing laced shoes, and I saw that when the first chocolate-eaters had dared to put on velcros just a few decades prior, they had been fined and jailed, but these days I saw all kinds of people—including Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert—wearing velcro shoes with completely no reaction from anyone because it was completely normal now. But each younger generation thinks they’re the epitome of punk and each older generation thinks they’re the sentinels of eternity.)
There were three kinds of people that this duo and their clown comic hangers-on hated. The first were those who blurred the lines. A vanilla-eater who loved drama. A comedy watcher clad in orange. This was the worst thing. “No! No! You’ve got to stick to your tooth-given lane!”
The other kind where those who sought (or provided) dental care. Pulling of wisdom teeth, dentures, fixing cavities, repairing crowns. People who had after dental care ended up with a different quantity and/or quality of teeth, and reregistered as such in the National Dentist Registry and applied for a new passport. This was also the worst thing. Whether or not they then sought to associate with the traits associated with their new dental parity group or not. Dental care was called “mutilation” and “grooming” and several laws were on the docket to outlaw it.
So one of the most confusing parts of the dream was how they hated the some of the “cluster transgressors” for being too visible and they’d yell “we can always tell”. They hated others for being too invisible and they’d yell “stop confusing us, put on your orange clothes, you’re being deceitful”. There was no winning with them. You’d think sticking rigidly to a thin line between these two ends would’ve made them happy but those who tried that ended up getting both kinds of hate since those hatreds overlapped by quite a margin.
Looking back through the history of the land had told me that while
conflicts between the orange-clad and yellow-draped had been an issue
for ten thousand years, this latest batch of category-separation
hysteria had started out as quite a minority, an issue only a few
people had known about or cared about.
That’s when they came up with their stroke of genius:
Sports.
They brought up how in some sports like championship flossing, the 300-yard brush stroke, and pie eating contests, different teeth were likely to perform differently, and they then generalized that to all sports like long-distance running or Omaha hold’em. And this did become popular! Even the emperor of the land would as a complete non-sequitur bring up how ridiculous he thought the idea was of an Evan participating in the Prim sports category. Of course, this emperor was a strong proponent of the steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich politics that the dental parity traditionalists like Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert had sided with so he saw a chance to make hay while the sun shone.
And what started in sports soon extended to all facets of society. Going to the restaurant, going to the grocery store, even going to the powder room! Leaving your apartment in any way would induce scrutiny and accusations and paranoia, for everyone. All for the greater good of the Olympics!
This sudden sports-mania ushered in a new law: you shall be categorized as Prim or Evan at birth. I know, I know, babies don’t have teeth. And neither do old people. That’s just how crazy this dream was! The doctors (the few remaining doctors, since dental care was under legal attack) would just take their best guess. And that was the parity category you would stick to for the rest of your entire life. Problem solved easily and perfectly.
That created a third kind of people for our diligent duo to hate on. For example, there was a boxer… or maybe it was a runner. The doctors had categorized them as Prim at birth. Which they were happy with. They loved orange. They loved chocolate. They loved drama. All was well. Until they won. Didn’t their mouth look kind of even on TV? Something about the cheeks, the way they moved… an invasive dental counting procedure was promptly ordered and it turned out they had… I forget if they had two teeth (both prime and even) or 27 teeth (neither prime nor even) but out came the hate, long before the mouthcount. That’s how it was in this land. They hate you if you transgress your medically assigned dental parity cluster and they hate you if you stick to it. They hated everyone until there was no-one left and darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
You see, they were scientific and rational.
And in their rationality and science-mindedness, they had come up with all manners of slags and mocking names to apply to everyone who didn’t stick to their lane. “Oh, so you’re stick-to-your-laners?” I asked, and they boiled over with anger. “How dare you utter such a slur?!” they screamed, “We’re just normal people!”
After a few years of this, they came up with the term “cluster-critical” for themselves. I thought that didn’t make any sense. Weren’t they the ones who were more strongly than anyone else trying to really enshrine these societal clusters of traits into two immutable granite-carved groups, and erase all outliers and overlappers? How is that being cluster-critical? They slapped me with a splintered ruler and said “You dolt! You clod!” and explained that the whole idea of speaking more generally about the two groups as being mere “clusters of traits” was “propaganda of the cluster movement” which they opposed, which they saw as denying the biological tooth of dental parity, denying how almost everyone has either an even amount of teeth or a prime amount of teeth. How that’s a natural fact. (Question marks on how that 27-denying factoid, even if it had been true, would apply to ice cream flavors, clothes color, or TV genres.)
I asked them if is this what they spent all their time fighting about? What about climate change? It has already killed millions of people. They just looked at me stubbornly, and started to explain, once more, from the top, something about the delicate flavors of vanilla.
You would think that in this land, everything would’ve been teeth-forward. Everything would’ve been all teeth teeth teeth on billboards and t-shirts and mugs. But actually no. Teeth were a very private thing and had been so throughout the ages. Ogling teeth was considered vulgar, and was sometimes done in an exploitative way. You’d see a poster with teeth in a workshop or a pair of rubber dentures hanging off the back of a truck, for shock value, but normally people covered their mouths when they ate. When a movie scene featured bare teeth, usually a “tooth stunt double” subbed in for the actor, or dentures were worn. Asking each other about their teeth was a big taboo.
Under a mossy stone in the deep, dark wood, I found a file showing that before they came up with this teeth-counting business, they had been counting people’s nose hairs. Everything had been all about the nose hairs. Until they discovered that the teeth thing had a three percent stronger correlation with the socially created cluster roles.
So if you’ve ever wondered why some wear yellow and others wear orange, now you know.
I saw a docu about a nun who’d spent 25 years in a Carmel cloister. Which for Sweden is unusual. Obv I was fishing for info about digital minimalism but the docu didn’t deliver what I wanted in that regard. She says at one point “We don’t have radio, TV, or newspapers, and we use internet very sparingly”. I was like “Internet?! Deets please! Exactly how many times a day do you refresh Antenna or sync your newsgroups? What’s your IRC bouncer, how’s your milter pipeline?” to no avail.
And while for her that’s a 25-years-and-counting journey, for the lady next to me in the theatre even the 100 min runtime was too long to forgo checking socials apparently. I don’t blame her; that’s just a sign of how addictive these apps actually are. (Okay, I do blame her a little but I try not to.)
So while the movie was slim pickings for my monomaniacal obsession with offline living (which for me has become increasingly theoretical since I got tablets to suck me back online after switching to dumbphone eight years ago), the devotional side of it was more rewarding. I love “The Interior Castle” and have read it a couple of times. But at the same time these are the folks (and her fam def belonged to the most reactionary faction) that fight against reproductive autonomy and affirming care—not just for themselves but in legislative chambers around the world. That subtext stayed sub, glossed over, unexamined in this film. Overall a worthwhile watch if you can complement it with your own political awareness and ability to recognize efforts to bind the outgroup.
coffeetree: the chatbot paradigm is literally an infinite feed
baconlad: hard disagree on this. Its not feeding you content.
coffeetree: That’s like saying “I only use this one tiny feature of Facebook, and no other features, and no other platforms, and I handle that paradigm just fine.”
And some people do say that. I think both sides are right here in that yes it is a useful tool and you get to avoid a lot of the bad parts of the web, but also, it is addictive and like how many silo social media sites it adapts to you to keep you hooked, and also, the environmental and economic impact is huge. The increased wealth gaps and increased concentration of ownership of means of production is an undeniable ginormous downside of the current slate of LLM and ANN tech. Our economy was already a broken buggy system even before the gigaton wrench thrown into it by ML. 😭
They in some very real semiotic senses are different, yes. But the similarites are that they are these huge data center machines that take all the input from what people post online and chew it up and push it back to you in a way that they control and can profit from. AI is in someways even worse, an even more purely distilled version of the idea of The Algorithm.
Now, that’s social media in the sense of algorithmic silo socials like TikTok, X, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and similar. Not all social media is algorithmic (Discord isn’t, although it is a silo) nor is all social media even silos; email and fedi are examples of non-silo socials.
And by “algorithm” we mean specifically recommendation/discovery algorithm; obviously all computer stuff uses running code i.e. “algorithms” in a much broader and gentler sense. Even a 1980s BBS “had algorithm” since it used computer programs to work but in a more specific sense of “algorithm”, we mean the reco engine. The hideous world-wrecking reco engine. And AI chatbots keep that part, the bad part. They just remove the part of it that were your friends.
The comparison of “chatbot as the ultimate social media feed” (in a negative sense) is stretched but insightful and I appreciated it.
That said, one very real difference is that while there is some amount of vendor lock-in, it doesn’t hold your friendships hostage the way silo socials do.