Author: harold

I think she maybe meant spineless sycophants.

I just finished Sarah Wynn Williams’ book, Careless People. Very well written. Like a movie except that this is reality. Recommended.

In a way, everything she describes is mostly how I imagined things to be there in the 2010s. But I also hoped that I was cynical or too harsh. But I could smell it.

In 2017 I wrote:

FB knows more and more how and exactly when we become docile. Knowing that at the scale of countries and entire regions of the world, for every generation alive and being able to run tests and tweak things to see what happens? That’s ridiculously powerful and unprecedented. FB learns more everyday, and with people on the Facebook’s board who also are heavily involved in politics and AI development, I feel concerned.

I’m not feeling it.

The latest elections. Oh boy. Sarah’s book confirms it all. Leadership and board do not care.

And today we have ICE raids sending Americans to camps in El Salvador.

I was dragged into Facebook. A couple friends annoyed me almost daily during summer 2008 to “get on Facebook!!!”. So I did at the end of the year, reluctantly.

I hoped, though. As a tech-savvy dude I admired how they scaled up to the big B (billion) without crashing. The opportunity of having that many people together on a common platform, felt like a civilization milestone.

All of that to sell ads made it the lamest, worst possible shit you can think of.

I am so glad I stayed strong and never joined Insta and kept my brain from rotting by not looking at endless streams of insipid performance.

No one realizes the damage. I do, being off all social media for years. Young adults who grew up with it are some of the most clueless, soulless people I have ever met. They’re conscious of it. They know the cause is 24/7 social media on phones. They can’t stop. It’s not a good look.

I keep going back at a point Sarah makes: Meta and its people could do the right thing and still be filthy rich and powerful. I would almost say, it might even make them richer and more powerful! For that you need knowledge, understanding and perspective. They don’t have that. They never had that. They never grew their understanding of the world. They’re just drones building systems and then claiming “I didn’t know it could do that!”. But they do know. The petulant child, ad nauseam.

I still have to have FB. If it was ethical, neutral, impartial, it would be the best thing in the world. But Facebook is completely unusable these days. I mention skateboarding to a friend in messages, my feed is now 90% skateboarding. I say one thing about playing music, guess what happens. He’s a straight dude, let’s try cleavage.

This moronic approach gets on my nerves. I haven’t logged in in months. Fuck adtech.

In the process of buying some land, y’all. I mean finding it first.

I am browsing a lot. Lots of interesting things happening. Like prices dropping by more than half in less than a year (???). Or value going from $75K in 2001, $476K in 2006 and back to $70K in 2011 and now $140K (???). Lots of sus.

Location is getting more precise I think. My supervising architect is waiting and I can’t wait to sign a contract and write her a check.

Workworkwork. Anything but this shit show with all these clowns I’m so sorry rest of the world! It’s just impossible to describe the difference between what I live daily in CA and the news. I’m so mad every day.

Yes, I’ve seen the Ghibli-fication of memes via ChatGPT. Yes, it’s mesmerizing and touching and it grosses people out because many said that AI can’t do shit and now their little hearts are moved by a synthetic organization of colors and shape on screen, and they. Can’t. Take. It.

And here’s the usual media take on how we, humans, are so much better than extremely complex systems (which is what we are, btw) who can do a lot and more every six months or so:

“I think the proliferation of AI tools and the subsequent explosion of AI-generated art is just going to lead to newfound desires and appreciation for the human-made varieties.”

It will not. For one, to appreciate the “human-made varieties” you need to know the world before AI-generated art and that’s a diminishing number of folks every year. Two, this assumes that humans can separate AI-generated art and legacy-generated art, and that’s as of today in the middle of giant improvements of the former, already impossible.

Third, this assumes that people give a fuck about human-made art that much. Everyone makes art. It doesn’t really have any value but the one we give to it.

What AI does is shatter the world of expensive art, yes. Did it ever make sense? I don’t think so. A hour or two of work and you sell that piece $40,000 because the patron is filthy rich? That’s the world of expensive art right there, and that market is now kind of irrelevant. Overnight.

So, everyone born 2000 and up is cooked enough to never see or even bother to see the difference between human and AI art. People born before don’t really give much of a shit.

Everyone with a bit of imagination can now create whatever they want, quickly. Unprecedented. We need UBI, on god. Let’s go.

We’re microdosing on a COVID x bird flu hybrid all week, probably.

Feeling restless due to being grateful for how things are going right now.

I’m looking even more at land, and I have to hurry up a bit, and it’s a bit overwhelming and it feels crazy that it’s happening and that things are aligning and that it’s going to be amazing. Or at least, I’m trying as hard as I can to make it so.

I have never hated a government like I do right now. Holy shit.

The silence of the powerful is deafening.

That’s the term coming to mind these days.

No one seems to have any. Everyone is using their phones the way you would scratch your shoulder: immediately, without warning, just not caring about anything at all.

It’s absolutely destroying society. I am witnessing it in real time, and it’s something. No one seems to realize it, as most everyone is doing it. I’m not because I was lucky to see the negative effects of phone addiction extremely early on, and I’m pretty good at resisting peer pressure.

The lack of digital hygiene is akin to farting and burping loudly whenever you feel like it. In line at the grocery store. In the elevator. Right in front of other folks on a sidewalk. While your supervisor or your mom is talking to you. At a wedding. After sex. While teaching. You get the idea.

Wearing wireless earbuds while scrolling is like farting and burping AND not hearing or smelling yourself. You become content and disrespectful to, disconnected from your direct environment in ways previously impossible to reach.

And we let that happened, somehow. All VCs and SV really, really wanted their 10x returns so they said fuck it, let’s trick them all. Let’s abuse people as efficiently as possible, using the latest research on human psychology.

I don’t know what to do. I’m just happy to not be like that. Having good digital hygiene is a bit lonely. But I worry about the rest of the world.

This scale, it’s no good.