Saw a waymo in the supermarket parking lot this morning. First time I’ve seen one around here. Hard to express the withering sense of defeat that immediately washed over me.
“We’re obligated to vandalize it,” R said. But there was a guy standing next to it, his polo shirt the exact shade of pale blue as the car.
I recently downloaded the DeFlock app and am eager to use it. Not that it Does Anything, besides Make Me Feel Better. But I’m looking around the parking lot and was surprised I didn’t see any. No surveillance in a supermarket parking lot? Since when! Small victories. 9am on a Sunday.
Like I get there’s probably an argument the roads become safer without all the humans behind their wheels (most of whom are looking at their phones anyway). It’s just the tech conglomerate billionaires running E V E R Y T H I N G E V E R Y W H E R E. The additional fascist steamroller pass over anything even remotely resembling choice, individuality, creativity. Things happening to us simply because some impossibly wealthy demon wants it to happen to us.
I always think about that line from The Driving Crooner: “I gotta figure out how to make money on this, I really WANT to!”
AI to make sure all your websites, sentences, art, and logic looks the same. The aLgoRriThm is curated ~ just for you ~, but whether you’re on Facebook or YouTube or TikTok it all just coalesces into One Feed showing everyone the same things. Something something two-party system. Even something as formally banal yet theoretically individualistic like Your Job. The jobs are all the same thing, I see that now.
A while back when I was looking for a new music streaming platform I read a blog post by a guy who documented his search process. He listed his must-have deal-breaker criteria for a music stream and number one on his list was Must connect to Last.fm. Something absolutely bone-chilling about this. That’s your main criteria? I immediately logged into my last.fm account for the first time in years and deleted it. Not much of a protest really, more just a Make me more not like that type of thing.
I don’t think I’ve told you about this but I’m getting really into genealogy lately, so here’s a real kick in the nards: parts of my family came over from eastern Europe relatively recently (late 1800s) and it is brutal trying to find any information about them. Names spelled 3 different ways (Moritz, Morris, Maurice). Places of birth that had different flags every few years (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine).
Every day I turn off whatever new AI feature is blinking in front of me and move more files from google to proton. Then I spend my nights staring at my laptop, trying to research people I never knew, wondering who they were, where they came from, thinking how much easier it would be if I just had more of their data.