I am still looking for myself. I do not think it will be a quick search, but I had hoped to make more progress than I have. I have gotten moved to a more permanent home, I am doing well at work, and for all intents and purposes everything is going fine. In a little over a week I will take my family in to get our visas renewed for 4 years, and things are going smoothly.
I still feel lost, and empty. The longer this goes on the more afraid I become that I won’t be able to find myself again. I am hoping that putting an update on my life here will help me get some things mnetally in order and feel better about life.
I have learned some new things about myself. For instance, I fucking love bicycling. I did not expect that to be as fun as it is. I try to ride my bike a little every day. I have plans for a short bike camping trip (just an overnight) in September, and have a goal for a longer trip next year.
There have been some communities I have found myself as part of. Especially the community at Cozy Talk. They have been lifesavers. The whole community is just wholesome, polite, and fun to interact with. Haki, the sole developer, has made a fantastic site there. You should throw him a donation at his Ko-Fi if you get a chance.
Gaming has been another joy I brought back to my life. I have been playing a fair bit of Mechwarrior 5 lately, and that has been AMAZINGLY fun. After we got settled in I was able to set up my HOTAS (CH Products Fighterstick and Throttle), and I have been really enjoying piloting mechs. The Arena matches are really fun, and I need to get back to the main campaign of it… I also have a friend I have been playing that with from time to time.
A new Quake episode also dropped recently that I have been struggling through. It is a lot harder than I expected. I don’t know if I just picked a bad difficulty setting or what, but it is a SLOG getting through even the first level of the episode. I am determined to finish that though. It will just take some time. I do really enjoy the switching textures and levels from time to time. I think it has been a good application of the growth of FPS level design to a really old engine. It is refreshing.
My middle kiddo and I recently started playing the Age of Fantasy tabletop game from One Page Rules. This has also been a super fun diversion. It is good, I think, to have both a Sci-Fi (Battletech TW and AS) and Fantasy (OPR AoF:Skirmish) game in the rotation. That way nothing ever gets too overdone. It allows for a necessary variety to keep the hobby fresh.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered season 4 recently. That has been fucking AMAZING. I really love the genreatic switch up that has been happening for the first episodes of the season. It is clear something is going on with La’an, but I am sure it will take the whole season to unveil what that is.
The Scrubs revival is getting a season 2 in September. That also has me pretty excited. I am looking forward to that. The trailer showed an old character is coming back, and I know they are a minor character, but I am weirdly excited for that.
Also, yes, it has been many years, but I am finally watching the last 2 seasons of Stranger Things. I have gotten through Season 3, and am just starting Season 4 tonight. I have 2 whole seasons of this show that I haven’t had a chance to watch. I am honestly excited for these.
And that’s it for my update. I don’t normally just free-form blog about life, but I felt like it would be a good thing to do today.
I hope this blog post finds you having a fantastic day, and that you spend some time chilling today. You deserve it.
=====
TL;DR Ich schreibe um Leben, Angst, und die Kampf daran.
Ich suche immer mich an. Ich glaube gerade, dass die Suche immer weitergehen wird. Ich hoffte, bis jetzt mehr gefunden zu haben. Meine Familie und ich haben eine Immerwohnung gefunden und sind eingezogen. Alles geht gut bei der Arbeit, und, so breit es kann, alles geht OK. In noch ein bisschen mehr als einer Woche gehen wir unsere Visa verlängern.
Aber, fühl mich gerade noch leer und verloren. Die Länger ich suche, die mehr Angst ich trage das ich mich immer nicht finden könnten werde. Ich hoffe das diese Post wird hilfreich in mir Perspektiv zu geben.
Ich habe ein paar Sachen um mich gelernt. Erstmal: Fahrradfahren ist echt toll. Toller als ich hatte gedankt. Ich hatte keine Ahnung, wie spaßvoll Fahrräder sein könnten. Ich probiere jeden Tag, mit meinem Fahrrad zu fahren. Nächsten Monat habe ich einen kleinen Campingurlaub geplant. Wird noch in der Nähe, aber es wird echt cool, glaube ich. Nächstes Jahr plane ich, einen 40-km-Fahrradweg über drei Tage zu fahren.
Es gibt auch ein paar Gesellschaften, in die ich Mitglied geworden bin. Besonders die Menschen am Cozy Talk. Die haben mich echt gerettet. Die ganze Gruppe ist heilsam, nett, und macht damit ganz viel Spaß. Haki, der Entwickler, hat hier etwas Fantastisches gemacht. Sie sollen ihm eine kleine Spende, wenn ihr könnt, bei der Ko-Fi geben.
Spiele (Video- und Tisch-) sind ein anderer Spaß, den ich mir wieder vorgestellt habe. Ich spiele oft Mechwarrior 5. MW5 ist ganz spaßvoll. Ich habe meine HOTAS ausgepackt und eingestellt. Die Pilotierung des Mechs ist eine besondere Freude. Ich mag am besten die Arenakämpfe, aber ich muss die Kampagne fertigmachen … Ich habe auch eine alte Freundin, die ich oft mitspiele. Sie ist wohl meine alte Freundin.
Es gibt auch eine neue Quake-Episode. Die ist ganz schön fickend schwer, ich muss sagen. Ich bin nicht sicher, ob ich schlechter bin, oder muss ich nur “Git Gud”. Ich bin zu der Episode fertig gewillt. Vielleicht wird es nur eine Frage der Zeit. Ich mag die neuen Tricks in der Episode. Besonders die zwei Niveaus, die die Episode wechselt. Ist ein gutes Wiederbeleben für eine alte Spielengine.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds hat die neue Staffel 4 erlebt. Die Staffel ist PERFEKT so breit. Ich liebe die Wechsel zwischen den Genres in jeder Folge. Es geht klar mit La’an etwas schiefgegangen … aber ich bin sicher, wir werden nicht vor dem Ende der Staffel wissen.
Auch die neue Scrubs-Serie hat diesen Herbst eine neue Staffel 2. Es begeistert mich. Ein alter Charakter wird zurückkommen. Ich verstehe, der ist ein Kleincharakter, aber es hat mich seltsamerweise auch begeistert.
Und, ja, es ist viele Jahre her, aber ich habe endlich Stranger Things angeschaut. Ich habe vor, die ersten drei Staffeln gesehen, aber jetzt schaue ich die ganze Serie. Ich bin ehrlich begeistert, die Serie zu schauen.
Das ist hier mein aktueller Zustand. Ich schreibe nicht oft Posts wie diesen Lagebericht, aber ich fühlte heute, dass es wichtig ist, zu schreiben.
Ich hoffe, dass alles für Sie gut ist und dass Sie die Zeit heute zum Chillen finden können.
I am trying to improve my German. The ability to follow the grammar rules and be understood is a lot different from the ability to speak natively. If you find something that is awkwardly phrased or should be re-written, please feel encouraged to send me an email or a Guestbook signature and correct me :). I will be eternally grateful for the help.
]]>But I moved recently, and felt like I wanted to write some things down. I have gotten the furniture I have put together (I still need more. My kids, my spouse, and I have SO. MANY. BOOKS. and tchotchkes that need to be shelved.) I really love where we got moved to. It is a small town, with everything we need, and it’s just a short train ride away from Kassel. I look forward to exploring and finding new things to see, and experiences to have.
I am also on Vacation for the next two weeks, which should give me some time to go out and do things. It is frustrating that I still don’t get paid for another two weeks though. I am 4 weeks in to 6 weeks without pay (Not a punishment, the company I work for moved us all to the parent company, and because of the difference in pay schedules, we have to deal with a gap.) I look forward to getting settled in, and getting into a routine I know I will be able to keep. Living in, effectively, an Air BnB for 8 months will really put a lot of dampers on your ability to develop solid routines. Especially because it means you will have to change them as soon as you move.
Aber ich bin in den letzten paar Wochen umgezogen. Ich hätte das Gefühl, meine Erfharung zu schreiben. Ich habe meine neue Möbel wir hatten gelieferet gebaut. Wir brauchen auch doch viel mehr Möbel … Meine Familie hat SO. VIELE. BÜCHER und andere Kram, die Regel brauchen.) Ich liebe unseren neuen Wohnplatz. Wir wohnen jetzt in einer Kleinstadt mit allen täglichen Shops und Diensten, die man braucht. Die Stadt ist auch in der Nähe von Kassel. Ich bin außer mir vor Freude, neue Erfharungen, Sachen, und Orte zu finden.
Ich bin auch im Urlaub, deswegen ich Zeit zu untersuchen haben soll. Sonst ich bin auch frustriert, weil ich keine Lohnauszahlung vor noch zwei Wochen kriegen werde. Heute macht 4 Wochen von 6 Wochen ohne Lohn … (Die Situation ist kein Straf, sicher, aber aufgrund des Betriebsübergangs werden wir eineinhalb Monate ohne Lohn kriegen müssen.) Ich freue mich, eine Routine zu machen, die ich, da bin ich sicher, erhalten kann. Die letzten 8 Monate, wohnen ich und meine Familie in fast einem AirBnB, und das Szenario macht es schwer, Sicherheit in unserer Routine zu haben. Die wissen, dass wir umziehen müssen, war echt schwer zu handeln.
I am trying to improve my German. The ability to follow the grammar rules and be understood is a lot different from the ability to speak natively. If you find something that is awkwardly phrased or should be re-written, please feel encouraged to send me an email or a Guestbook signature and correct me :). I will be eternally grateful for the help.
]]>Journalling was always one of those things I had a love-hate relationship with. Writing things down is an important way to draw new neural connections and generally getting things out of my head. On the other hand, I was always trying to follow rules when I wrote things down in my journal. I tried:
Everything under the sun, to try and write things down with structure, and intentional planning.
Then I realized: Fuck all that mess.
Leonardo Da Vinci is one of those people that everyone seems to revere as a genius. I should say that I do not disagree; he totally was. On the other hand, he was also not the most organized human being on the planet and his journals reflect that. He just wrote shit down.
Had he written it down before? Maybe… Probably, even… but did that stop him?
Not for a fucking second
Among other quotes, Da Vinci is known to have said ‘An idea not written down is an idea lost.’ He also wrote a note down in one of his journals, that I cannot specifically find right now, a statement about how writing things down more than once is bound to happen, but it is better to repeat oneself than forget something that might be important.
To that end, I found a method of journalling that works for me, and maybe it will work for you too:
There is one rule in this method:
If you have a thought and it occurs to you that you could maybe write it down: Do that. Write it down. Maybe you wrote it down 2 months ago. Maybe you wrote it down yesterday. Maybe you will never look at it again, who knows? The important thing is to write it down. It will help you remember it, and help you put your thoughts into words.
That second part (putting thoughts into words) is the important bit. You need to practice writing and speaking if you want to do either one effectively. This blog post, for instance, is just rambling. I did not prepare this post ahead of time, and that probably shows, but that is OK. Sometimes, just putting the thoughts out there as they flow is good.
I will write poetry, prose, key points, simple ideas, essays, sketches, etc. Getting the ideas out of your head, and onto paper, is the goal. Your memory is far from perfect (well, perhaps it is better to say that no one has a perfect memory…). Writing it down will both help you remember, and give you a kind of paper brain to reference.
This part is 100% optional, but I do this a lot. From time to time it helps me to go back and look at the things I have written. Some times I go back and find things I thought about that end up becoming much longer blog posts, essays, or projects. Other times I go back and reference technical notes I made (especially for penetration testing and playing Hack the Box systems). Almost every time I look back at my old journal pages I find something that either gives me a boost of nostalgia, reminds me of something I wanted to do, or teaches me how far I have come since I wrote something down.
There are also a lot of times I go back, look at something, and think “Wow, what the fuck?”
Ultimately, the point is to take a journal, take a pen, pencil, charred stick, or something else, and get those ideas that are in your head, out of your head. Put them on paper.
You will forget them if they are in your head, and you can always reference them again if they are on paper.
]]>Having nice things that are repairable generally means maintaining them in a way that allows them to keep functioning for a very long time. This includes knowing how to disassemble, clean, and do the basic things that the object requires to function well. Maintenance is important for just about everything that has a mechanical component: Clocks, Watches, Pens, Glasses, Phones, and Headphones with replaceable components, etc.
One thing I would suggest is getting an iFixIt toolkit, and a watch maintenance kit (also good for glasses and other small things). Taking care of things is probably the best way to be sustainable. If you have a thing that should last a long time, don’t replace it: Repair it.
I really like having a good pen. It makes writing fun instead of a chore. This is important to me, largely, because I do not trust modern technology as much as someone thinks I might. The Cybersecurity to Farm pipeline is real, and I am absolutely part of it. Because of this, I take all of my notes by hand in a notebook. I use a free-form notebook method where I just write stuff down.¹ It is also super important to the future of the planet that humans stop just throwing shit away all the time. The destructive attitude of replacing everything is abhorrent and needs to end. We do not need new things, we need to maintain the things we have.
To wit, I use refillable fountain pens. In this example we are talking about a Lamy Safari Fountain Pen with a Z27 adapter.
You will need a few things you probably have laying around the house for this:
The pen disassembly steps are fairly straight forward:
1) Remove the cap 2) Unscrew the Feed Body 3) Remove the z27 adapter cartridge a) Empty the z27 adapter cartridge 4) Remove the pen nib a) This is achieved by simply pulling on the pen nib away from the Feed Body 5) Remove the ink feed a) Same as the nib, but a LOT harder b) Be careful, but just yank that sucker out 6) Place all of these components into the bowl of water a) Or Kem it all and take a picture. Something I failed to do for this post.
At this point, the pen is disassembled and ready to be cleaned!
Since you have already put all of the components in water, the substance the ink is soluble in, cleaning is very straight forward:
1) Take the components out of the water and brush each component to remove dried on or stuck ink and fibers 2) Place each component on the paper towel to dry
If you want to be a little extra there is a bonus step:
1) Fill and empty the z27 converter with water a few times to clean it out
That is it. The components are now clean!
Everything you did for disassemble, do it backwards.
At this point, your pen is clean and ready to be refilled. Congratulations! You have maintained your pen!
Now, when is the last time you cleaned your phone… or your earbuds?
¹ I should do a post about my journaling method of just write it down at some point.
]]>It is generally true that, outside of the absolutist moral forms, morality has some conditional elements. Even Kant would accept some (very little) wiggle room in moral action. Absolutist theories of morals and ethics tend to cause substantial problems in application.
However, some ethical paradigms are characterized by conditionality (or situationality). These paradigms, it is important to note, does not mean that the morals are applied without rules, inconsistently, or haphazardly. Nor does this concession mean that there is a heated debate in the Sociological or Philosophical academic circles about whether or not morals are conditional. In fact, there is quite the consensus that morals are, by nature, conditional. However, the conditional forms of morality do not match the vernacular use of “Conditional Morality”. When individuals use “Conditional Morality” in the vernacular it is almost always as a short form for “inconsistent” morality whereby a moral rule that would otherwise be applied is not for the benefit of the person acting. This does not reflect any of the forms of conditional morality, but selfish and immoral action. Educated discussions about conditional morality are about situations that are moral and consistently applied, but where the moral rules may depend on a change of situation.
There are three main theories of ethics that govern moral action. These three umbrella theories cover most of the other ethical and moral forms, and are differentiated by the perspective of what makes the action ethical: The Society (deontology), the person (virtue ethics), or the outcome (consequentialism). The three theories are, more clearly:
These theories inform the morals that guide personal actions in a sociological context. Each of these umbrellas has multiple forms that change how the framework is applied in determining if an action is moral. In this essay, the focus is on the conditional forms for these various umbrellas. It is important to note that each framework also has absolutist forms, and flexible forms that we will not be discussing.
These conditional forms cover how and when to determine if an action is moral based on a situational framework. The conditions in which the action is taken are a strong determining factor regarding the morality of an action in these forms.
Conditional Deontology, oft attributed to W.D. Ross, contrasts with Kantian Deontology in that it rejects the notions of a set of moral imperatives that must always be true. Conditional Deontology allows for a different set of rules for different situations. For instance, it may be generally immoral to engage in violence, however if one is attacked it may be moral to be violent in self- defense.
Moral Particularism, oft attributed to Jonathan Dancy, says a similar thing in that there are rules that apply in different situations, but it goes further to say that there is no defined moral thought or set of rules. Each situation is unique, and thus an action can only be considered moral when considering the whole situation. Generally, the viewpoint is that an action is moral when the person who took the action was acting from a place of virtue, and the outcome of the action did not create a negative result. Overall, particularists rely on the virtues of the specific individual taking the action.
Then we come upon Utilitarianism as a form of consequentialism. Utilitarianism is oft attributed to Jeremy Bentham, and is outcome-focused. This is not quite as bad as just accepting Hobbes’ postulate that the ends justify the means, in that it takes the viewpoint that an action is moral based on having a net benefit of happiness and well-being for the most people. This can be summed up really well by a quote from Mr. Spock of the U.S.S. Enterprise (Star Trek references abound!) that “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” Thus an ethically reprehensible action, such as murder, may be moral if it creates a net benefit for the society affected by the murder.
Each of these conditional forms has their respective benefits, detriments, and complications. Ultimately, studying theory like this does not lend itself well to judging which is best. These theoretical forms all exist for that reason: there is no easy objective answer to how one MUST behave. In fact, sociologically the question gets a little bit more complex in that morals and ethics are rooted in the society in question and what may be moral in one society may not be moral in another. However, and generally, theorists consider a person morally sound when they apply the same framework consistently within their own actions.
Crucially, all moral actions in any umbrella theory or framework are guided by a criteria of not causing harm. (This is outside the realm of this discussion but it does not mean that all moral theories are consequentialist.) All of these frameworks provide rules for proper and improper action based on a shared reality.
Ultimately, the study of ethics, morality, and sociology try to stay away from judging these theories in terms of better or worse. It is also something I will not be addressing in this essay. That is far beyond me.
Personally, I follow a conditional deontology. I think there are a few absolute imperatives that cannot be ignored, but I also believe that there are some rules that are heavily dependent on the situation. That said, it is a personal view. I agree with the world of Philosophical and Sociological theorists that believe the best thing to do is to act, consistently, within the same moral framework.
]]>There is a lot to unpack when discussing Generative AI, and a lot of arguments that have been already made. For instance Hank Green has a video that discusses the Water Use discussion about AI better than I can. The Power waste of Generative AI is a discussion that can also be had about the ethics of environmental protection and conservation of resources for the future.
I am only well educated in the power argument and educated enough to be dangerous in the water and environment arguments.
I am, however, an expert in Information Science, so today we’re going to talk about that. The use of generative AI has a problem with information sovereignty, societal control, bias, technnological access disparity and the wealth gap, and economic wealth consolidation. It is, quite literally, problematic in so many ways it is difficult to pick which ones to discuss.
Further note, this essay discusses AI solely in the context of Generative AI driven by Generative Pre-Trained Transformers as postulated between 2017 and 2018. It is not a critique on classical AI, Machine Learning, or Data Analytical models that can also be colloquially defined as Artificial Intelligences.
AI training is built on the works of hundreds of thousands of humans. That is not an exaggeration. The Training that goes into these models is absolutely massive, and contains everything from memes on Reddit to full on academic texts. Many of these humans have even come out and expressed an explicit discontent with the use of their information in this way. That information, knowledge, and wisdom these humans have created is then consolidated into a mathematical model that is designed to create an average, tantamount to mediocrity, of all of the inputs. This output hopefully approximates what all of these humans would have put together.
This does not create free access to the information, as all information should be freely accessible, but it exploits freedom of information for the profit of the few owners of the AI systems. (More detail on that to come in later sections.) When a human releases information to the world, ideally, that information should be freely accessible if it is to contribute to the betterment and growth of the societies we live in. Pretty much every Sociological theorist from Macchiavelli to Kant agrees that there is a baseline requirement of the members of a society to not actively damage the society they live in. AI’s wanton absorbption of information to regurgitate approximations of thought is doing just that. It creates, among other things, a consumerist mentality for the very information and knowledge we gain from the world around us.
Human beings, to paraphrase John Locke, are constantly molded by the world around us. We start as blank slates and learn from what we are exposed to. AI limits that exposure, and worse, by creating a mediocre approximation of human experience, designed to appeal to the bell curve of humanity, it drives everyone to the same thought patterns. It has the, intentional or unintentional, outcome of limiting the way humans think by exposing them to an onslaught of the same thought patterns. This, in turn, encourages the human to adopt that thought pattern to communicate with the machine¹ and thus the vicious synergy begins leading to humans thinking like the machine. This creates a “you” that is no longer unique, but part of a greater hive mind sharing the same thought patterns.
We are AI, Resistance is futile.
These manipulations of thought patterns create a society that is malleable to complete control. If we look at Hobbes and Macchiavelli we can see why that might be bad. The Macchiavellian types could manipulate these machines to create thought patterns that allow them to create a societal drive to perform actions that are to the detriment of everyone but themselves. This can be, and is, accomplished by creating Bias in the AI models themselves. An example of this is the blatant manipulation of the Grok AI by X to ensure that output conforms with certain political and cultural beliefs. These outputs are then fed to users who may have questions or thoughts they want answers to, and all of the information these human users learn from, provided by the Grok AI, is then tainted. It is not unbiased or proper learning. It is biased learning with political or cultural ends in mind. That is, practically, the definition of indoctrination. It is encouraging the user to adopt a set of beliefs while not only discouraging critical analysis, but actively preventing it.
In addition to these intentional biases, the access to information is limited by happenstance. By training these models on the accessible information of the internet, it is limiting the voice of those in cultures and societies around the world without strong technological access. If the information is not online, the information does not make it into the training models. This creates a further insidious bias that the only cultures with a voice are those that believe in, and regularly use, the tools that build profit for a technological elite, globally.
That voice-limiting gap in access to participate in the model training is further compounded by the actual ability to use the models. These models exist, largely, as online-accessible tools made by giant corporations. If one does not have stable or regular access to the internet, use of the Generative AI models is a practical impossibility. Not only does this mean that a large part of the global community is being left out of the training of the model they are left out of accessing the model. If one concedes a use of these linguistic and artistic slot machines (I do not concede that, but for the sake of argument I will entertain the logic), it is not accessible to a large part of the world population.
This means that a technological elite is attempting to create, and claiming in some was to have created, a world changing technology that is by the nature of its very accessibility restricted from a large part of the world itself. The sheer depth of the information and knowldge gap that exists in the world today is already profound, this technology kicks that into overdrive and increases the distance between the information haves and have-nots of the world to immeasurable lengths. So far, this has only considered technological access, when we also consider that most of these AIs are paid models, or have paid requirements for most features, it gets even worse.
The models also cannot be used by those who do not have the disposable income to waste on the tokens necessary to pay the companies that make these models. Make no mistake, this is definitely not an accident. The goal of these technologies is to create profit at massive scale. This is openly claimed that these companies will generate record profits for their investors, and that they will do so by monopolizing information. The goal is to consolidate economic power and wealth into the hands of the owners of these tools. I do not feel a need to elaborate too much on this as it is, apparently, a feature not a bug in the capital economies fawning over these information monstrosities.
One of the ways they claim this is by eliminating the need for human workers in entry-level roles. By doing so, they are openly admitting to a goal of removing jobs from an economy in, what I think as an amateur in the study of economics is, a blatant destruction of economic velocity. Removing jobs from an economy in a society that demands that all have jobs to survive is a morally reprehensible act. It is creating a situation whereby tens to hundreds of thousands will be left in abject poverty intentionally.
Additionally, by creating these shared thought patterns, the destruction of creative modalities of thought, and the removal of crucial experience granting entry-level positions these models and the owners thereof are complicit in a measurable injury to society. For societies and cultures to grow, new ideas need to be had and certain roles need to be fulfilled. For instance, an organization requires some level of planning. Successful planning of, say, an environmental project requires someone who has experience actually working on environmental projects. If the intellectual grunt work of, say, doing the research to determine what species need to be protected and how that protection is done is outsourced to a machine prone to hallucinations (which we did not discuss here, but is also fascinating) there will be no one experienced enough in fulfilling these higher-level planning roles to ensure that the planning is done properly. An artist who never experiences the frustration of not quite being able to get the right color match, or the right brush stroke, on a piece of art will never grow into a great artist, capable of creating the masterpieces that define humanity.
Folks who write down everything from fiction to design and operation manuals for critical and dangerous machinery will never experience how to edit and properly define their own copy. The myriad ways this can lead to actual physical injuries cannot be understated.
Society requires experienced individuals. If AIs are filling the roles that grant the experience, then there will be no one to fill the more experienced roles. We are actively creating a time-bound experience gap that will, inevitably, lead to economic, industrial, intellectual, and academic failure in the not very distant future.
All I can do, from my position, is scream into the void the risks and problems we are facing. Change of this scale requires societal and individual action at a coordinated level. For my part, I do not use Generative AI, and I discourage others from the same. I try to educate folks on the risk so that maybe, just maybe, we can stop the damage in its tracks.
That said, Ned Ludd went further and actually destroyed the Knitting frames that were stealing jobs … But knitting still became an industrial act. I fear that we will only change our ways on this path when we have gone so far as to be, as humanity, damaged beyond repair. We are sowing seeds for the future, what hell will we reap from them?
¹ Theories of communication to be addressed at a later time, but I suggest reading some works of Jean Piaget and the absorption of knowledge in education for more on this.
Updated 08.05.2026:
This is the first in a series of posts that explain how the various projects I build work. My hope is that folks will be able to use these breakdowns to encourage their own projects.
The bannerlink relies on Javascript as the programming language, and uses a simply formatted CSV file.
The CSV file operates here like a simple database. It has two columns:
The banner image is the image that will be displayed. All of the images are of uniform dimensions, in this case a standard of 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. The reason for the standard image size is that it allows many users to put the banner on their website and plan for the dimensions in their website design.
The URL is a fully featured URI, and this allows the string to be inserted into an HTML link element on the page.
This file is hosted separately to allow for ease of maintenance. When I initially took the code from hbaguette it had two Arrays that were hard-coded (or as part of the code script directly). This has the draw back of more points of failure and harder to maintain in the long term. The benefits of transitioning the code for a separate file makes it both easier to maintain manually, and also leaves open the opportunity for programmatic maintenance.
<script type="text/javascript">
// Rewritten from the original BannerLink code from https://hbaguette.neocities.org/#misc-bannerlink
// Improved to use CSV instead of static listing, allowing for future automation and ease of maintenance.
function randImg(csvData) {
try{
var splitData = csvData.split("\n");
var size = splitData.length;
var x = Math.floor(size * Math.random());
var adData = splitData[x-1].split(",");
document.getElementById('image').style.backgroundImage = "url('"+adData[0]+"')";
document.getElementById('imglink').href = adData[1];
setTimeout(randImg, 30000);
} catch (error) {
randImg(csvData);
}
}
async function fetchCSV(url) {
try {
const response = await fetch(url);
const data = await response.text();
randImg(data);
} catch (error) {
console.error('Error fetching CSV:', error);
}
}
fetchCSV("https://j4yc33.neocities.org/bannerLink/bannerads.csv");
</script>
The code consists of 2 functions, fetchCSV, and randImg.
The first function, fetchCSV takes a URL and downloads a CSV file from a provided URL. It then takes this data, as an array of lines, and sends it to the randImg function. If it fails to download the CSV, it will log the error to the browser console.
The randImg function then takes this Array of elements and chooses a random line from the CSV file. That line is split into it’s parts by using the comma as a delimiter (as is standard for Comma Separated Value, or CSV, files). This line is then made into an array variable with 2 elements, element 0 is an Image URL, and element 1 is the URL it needs to link to.
Using these elements, the Image URL is assigned to the backgroundImage attribute of the HTML element given the ID ‘image’. The URL value is assigned to the href element of the HTML link element given the ID ‘imglink’. Assuming the correct elements exist on the HTML page, the banner will now show the chosen image linked to the chosen page. If it fails, it tries again. There are some instances where the random choice will return undefined, although it is extremely uncommon to happen twice in a row. For that reason, the try,catch pair for this function is recursive.
It then waits 30,000 miliseconds (roughly 30 seconds) and will change the page elements to another randomly chosen banner.
]]>In the last several weeks I have been thinking a lot about various aspects of Sociological theory. I think a lot of this is driven by the current state of the world around us collapsing. I have also been showing my kids the TV Show “The Good Place” to drive some discussions about Ethics and Moral Philosophy. It has lead me to a lot of questions and thoughts, some of which I will try to express here, regarding how people interact and should interact in society.
There have been a number of different philosophers way smarter than I am over the centuries who have tackled this topic. Every religion from the beginning of time, and probably before our knowledge of time begins, has something to say about good behaviors and how they should manifest in our daily lives. Durkheim’s evolving definition of Religion comes to mind here where, initially, he had claimed that a religion was a set of obligatory beliefs and the behaviors bound to them (which he found too prescriptive as a definition, but in many modern religions seems to hold true), and his ultimate definition that religions are unified belief systems related to the sacred that unite a community into a single moral “Church”. In essence, Religions exist specifically because they provide sets of rules dictating how we behave in relation to each other and the elements our “Church” consider sacred.
The problem with religions is that they rely on the authority imbued into that sacred to gain and retain their power. In truth humans, especially modern humans with a strong belief in Individualism, are loathe to accept higher authorities than the self. This can be seen reflected in the current trends to reject scientific analysis, the rise of “alternative facts”, and the growing Machiavellian tendency for people to justify abhorrent actions for a nebulous greater good.
Scanlon, Kant, and Machiavelli walk into a bar. The Bartender says “What do you want?”
Scanlon says “To be bound by a set of fair and objectively moral rules.” Kant says “For the universe to accept the truths of society’s shared will.” Machiavelli scoffs ans says “You both want what is best for you, and to tell others how to give it to you. Give me Wine.”
Machiavelli had some terribly hot takes on what is acceptable in the behaviors of individuals and governments. Thomas Hobbes came in and took Machiavelli’s theories deeper and pointed out that humans will always act with selfish means to achieve selfish ends. Through the lens of these two darker philosophers one can find a utilitarian cynicism in moral contractualism and deontology. The only reason humans act with any sort of morals is because it benefits them; it only matters how broadly they view themselves as being benefited. Someone who feels supported and enfranchised by the society they live in will adopt a view that the greater good is to their benefit. Of course they would do what is best for the most people because it benefits them as well.
When people feel disenfranchised by their society, however, an entirely new set of problems arise. The concepts portrayed in the works of Scanlon, Kant, and all of the other deontological theorists are, arguably, only extant because of the privileges they had in their positions in society, and the relative wealth and growth of society in the last 300 years. We have seen scientific and economic progress come to benefit the masses as time has progressed since Machiavelli and Hobbes died. Food production methods improved, medicine improved, and then industrialization saw commodity goods and the distribution of goods to the masses. These same growth benefits were seen by Marx who thought that a post-agrarian, post-industrial society would inevitably have so much wealth (in terms of liquid wealth and commodity goods) that everyone would be able to focus on the communal good.
There was, in the eyes of these technological optimists, a growing body of evidence that what benefits everyone would, inevitably benefit every individual.
That … was a mistake.
This worked for awhile; a good long while, even. Up until around the mid- to late-1800s everything seemed to be trucking along. More people were largely being benefited by academic, scientific, and intellectual advancements (in the global North, but that is a discussion I am wildly unqualified to start or have). Medicine was reaching the masses, food production and commodities reached more and more people who had growing liquid wealth to spend it, and it looked like the world was moving to something resembling a more egalitarian state. It is no coincidence, in my view here, that Kant, Marx, and many, if not most, of the other 18th, 19th, and 20th century philosophers trended toward the view of the world as moving toward an inevitable egalitarianism.
In their zeal for a better world, however, they discounted Machiavelli and Hobbes as being abject. Even today Machiavillian and Hobbesian are thrown around as insults to dismiss arguments and behaviors as something akin to immoral. Meanwhile, the growing bourgeoisie class would read “The Prince”, and “Leviathan” in Business college, with the field of modern economics actively studying the works to learn how to grow businesses and develop stronger advertising modalities. (Fun fact, I first read “The Prince” for a Web Marketing class at University!) The undesirable truth of the matter was that the selfishness and greed that Machiavelli and Hobbes noted in their works of philosophy were still very much present in people. Worse, it was being ignored for a belief in a greater altruism. Altruism can, and does, exist in humans. I firmly believe that. The belief that something will benefit the greater good, even to the detriment of the individual, can be seen in human beings chronicled throughout history and the modern day. We, as a species, clearly have evolved compassion and compassionate act. I think that we are only able to be in that state, however, when our other needs are fully met and allow us the flexibility to know that handling the pain of that sacrifice is something within our power to do. (Maslow and I would, inevitably, have had some fun conversations.)
On the other hand, in a society that since the middle 1800s has only lead to increasing wealth-based inequality, failure of science to meaningfully acknowledge works of note (Eunice Foote had things to say about the carbon-driven climate crises in 1856, for example) because they did not lead to profit, and a growing need for human power to run the machines of industrialization to drive profit for the growing bourgeoisie … there is a vested interest in making sure that some of everyone’s hierarchy of needs is left unmet. Someone who is afraid of where their next meal will come from, or how they will pay the rent for their house, is far more likely to tolerate abuse in the workplace than one who is secure in their environment.
We live in a time where the benefits to “everyone” do not actually benefite every individual. People are being asked to sacrifice for a society that has left them behind.
So now we have an entirely new paradigm. One where everyone is expected to sacrifice, but only a few see the benefits of that sacrifice.
It is no longer altruism; the person being sacrificed for does not need the sacrifice, they want it. It is not fair to ask a starving person for their last morsel of food if you had a meal that was slightly smaller than you wanted. If the starving person were to give you their morsel that is not altruism. There is no concern for the welfare of the person who has eaten: There is a lack of concern for the self.
Another example of false altruism: if you are working for a business that pays you, and you give them more time or do more work to get a larger bonus. This is what I call Machiavellian Deontology. You are acting in a way that could be defined as altruistic, but (like the example above) there is no concern for the welfare of the institution that is the business. The concern is predominately on the benefit to the individual. This is no longer an act of classical deontology, but is a sort of selfish altruism that leads one to do something that detriments them only in the short term.
These two related problems can be distilled in:
The outcomes of this are either cyclical, in that to become wealthy is to push someone out of the wealthy class, and thus creating another member of a lower class, thus perpetuating a cycle of self-destruction and moral decay; or they are self-defeating in that everyone becomes a member of the wealthy class, leaving no one to do the work that is providing for them, thus collapsing the entire system.
I hate discussing logically flawed systems because it always sounds logically flawed …
Our scientific, academic, and industrial progress did not, ultimately, lead to a prosperous and more equal society, as early predictions suggested. It lead to a growth of inequality abhorrently great because of the willingness of a small few to manipulate the system to their own ends and create cycles that detriment society and the greater good to their own gain.
I am left with two questions, my initial question and a new one. What DO we owe to each other? and How do we get to a place where we are giving it to each other?
I think it would be the height of hubris to say I have valid answers, but I do have ideas.
In my view, we owe each other a respectful and fair disposition. We owe each other consistency and honesty. If we can be reliable in our actions and beliefs we can create strong bonds to other individuals that will eventually grow into sub-cultures, cultures, institutions, and dare I say, societies of their own someday. I think the quid pro quo of contractualism is problematic, and we owe each other kindness regardless of what is returned to us. I also understand and respect anyone who points out that my view is likely naive.
How we get there is a much harder question to answer. There is a class of people actively operating against the above point. A class of people who have read the works of Machiavelli and Hobbes as instruction manuals that teach them how to get ahead and leave everyone else behind. This class does not even respect the classical pseudo-altruistic philanthropy of their forebears who were well read and understood the outcomes of trampling on a society.
I am, given my own moral and ethical code, loathe to suggest violent uprising. I do not think that violence and violent acts are the best way to have discourse and affect meaningful change. The Glorious Revolution was, in my view, the height of humanity. Other peaceful revolutions have occurred in history as well: The Egyptian overthrow of British rule in the 1900s, The Anti-Communist takeover of Mongolia, the Peaceful Revolution of Germany in 1989. It does happen, and can happen, where revolutions without violence can bring about necessary change.
On the other hand, I am fully aware, in my reading of history, that these tend to be the exception and not the rule. If you were to ask the French, for instance, I think they would tell you with glee that “Guillotine” is a French word, and that the Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité de La République were hard won.
In truth, I do not know how to solve this problem; which has me violating one of my own maxims in that I do not like posing problems without solutions. That said, I think this is a problem that will take generations to solve, and I can at least help define it … Which has to be at least half the battle. As someone, probably not Einstein, once said “if I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes understanding the problem.”
I am alive in those 55 minutes … I can only hope to see the solution.
Es ist ganz wichtig, für mich, um Politik zu verstehen. Ich habe Gesellschaftswissenschaft studiert und die Politik ist eines der wichtigsten Ergebnisse menschlicher Interaktionen.
Auch, bin ich ein Migrant in Berlin. Ich bin in Wiesbaden geboren, aber ich bin kein “echter” Deutscher, weil meine Eltern Amerikaner sind. Das heißt, ansonsten ich kann Deutsch, und meine Geburtsurkunde hat einen Bundesadler dabei, ich bin schon ein Migrant. Ich bin hier für meine Arbeit gekommen. Ich organisiere Cybersicherheit für Krankenhäuser und kritische Infrastruktur.
Warum? Weil ich Deutschland liebe und ich die Probleme mit Cybersicherheit sehe, braucht Deutschland Hilfe dafür.
Die AFD kommt wieder, alle Migranten wegzuschmeißen. Ob wir ausgebildet und qualifiziert, sind oder nicht: Die AfD will ein „pures“ Deutschland haben. Kein Mensch ist illegal. Alle Menschen verdienen das Recht zu leben und Frieden zu sein.
Die AFD will auch eine Organisation wie ICE in die USA, und auch die Sozialordnung und Unterstützung verkleinern. Das ist schlimm für ganz Deutschland, nicht nur für die Migranten.
Die AFD ist nicht eine Partei von Politik und Gesellschaft; die ist eine Partei der Zerstörung der Grundordnung und eine Gefahr für ganz Deutschland und die Demokratie.
Auf diesem Grund, und so sagt das Lied, wie: Alle meine Freunde, hassen die AFD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x76Vn4_hI0
]]>The algorithm pushes songs that everyone can listen to, but no one loves. AI writes songs that are the most average mediocrity (mathematically. They aren’t designed to achieve, but to replicate.)
The <Insert E-book company here> discover feature pushes the newest bestsellers and AI slop.
Streaming Services push their newest shows indiscriminately; An ad for a Cop show precedes Star Trek.
Even a Candy Bar is made to be just sweet enough to be a candy bar, but not bold enough to be memorable.
Our society is built around profiteering. The goal is no longer to make good products, compose good music, write good books, or develop new shows. The goal is to make as much money as possible in as fast a way as possible. We are being fed subsistence, when we deserve gourmet. Stop letting the algorithm define your tastes; Go out and explore.
You will find things you love, you will find things you hate. Both are equally important to defining yourself to the other. There is more than just physics at play in the phrase “There is no darkness without the light.” You NEED to know what you despise to know what you enjoy. Let yourself wallow in hating a song for 3, 5, even 10 minutes. Maybe it will grow on you, and maybe you will just be that much more sure you never want to hear it again.
Society grows when cultures develop. Stop becoming monoculture and go cut your own path. We are being fed a wealth of things that are offensively unoffensive to create a profitable monoculture, ignorant of the fact that being offended is how we know where our boundaries are. Being out of your comfort zone is important for growth.
Go forth and grow, friends.
]]>Ok, for a blog post, this might get deep. There will be citations, there will be suggested readings. It is going to be a lot; try to bear with me.
Buckle up and be prepared for stream-of-consciousness rambling in long-form.
In this essay, I will discuss the foundations of society through the lens of a shared religion of the individual. I will also discuss how the Hobbesian approach of Equality leading to conflict, and the contractualism between individuals and the Governed/Governing relationship of social contract theory lead to an inevitable conflict between the Anomically cynical elements of a society and the Fatalistically cynical elements of a society. Briefly, I also discuss a short possibility on the outcomes of these views on the individual and their greater impact to the institutions they belong to. I believe it is also important to say that while this is an essay, and I have tried to hold to some rigor in the research and logic to my conclusions, it is also a blog post. There may be a “fuck” or two… and some breaching of academic writing norms.
I think it is important to say here that I am, somewhat, biased in my viewpoint. Recently, I have been trying my hardest to figure out who I am, what I am doing here, and how I got to where I am in life. In this soul-searching I have found that I, against all my attempts in life, ended up a fucking cynic. Not in the sense most might think of cynicism, but at a diametrically opposed end. I provide so much weight to the social constructs of modern society that I have an ultimately jaded view of society and that the most self-serving thing an individual can do is uphold those views. There will be a whole discussion on this when I define Fatalistic cynicism and how that apparent oxymoron is, in fact, equally problematic to Anomic cynicism.
I do not think any two sociologists, anthropologists, historians, doctors, psychologists, or any other social scientists will ever actually agree on a generalized definition of Society. For the purposes of this specific essay, Society is the collection of social institutions that bind a given group. This is, perhaps, a short section but also an important one. Our shared definition of society will be important as a foundation for the discussion of how societies come into being, and how individualism can lead to one of two Durkheimian outcomes.
It is also important here to discuss that in a modern society, or a society where an important institution is the institution of the individual, is noted to be a problem rather nebulously by Durkheim. His body of work is somewhat dedicated to answering this question, but it is my humble hope to shine a light on a different facet of looking at this problem through two lenses he gives us, specifically, the continuum between Anomic and Fatalistic viewpoints as inferred in his work Suicide. The discussion is further compounded by the contractual interplays between individuals, cultures, and sub-cultures that create the greater institutions that form a functional (or perhaps dysfunctional) society.
The foundations of modern society include a fanatical, sacred attachment to the individual and individualism. We, especially in the western world, most especially in the United States, are obsessed with the individual. The rights of the individual are paramount over the rights of society, and the John-Locke-Given right to property is sacred above all else. This has the, perhaps, unintentional outcome that, that which is good for the individual is sacred and that which is good for the greater social group is profane where it conflicts with that which is good for the individual. This is most easily explained in terms of American Capitalism and profit-driven thought. American workers are drive by their employers to have a profit-driven mentality. The goal is to make as much money for the business, not because it is good for the institution of the business, but because it is good for the individual as the profit drives their Salary and Salary growth¹. This also reinforces an idea that if you work harder, you two can become the next Jeff Bezos and own a disgusting dragon’s hoarde of wealth! This phenomenon is known as the “Temporarily Embarassed Millionare” and has been discussed at length in other essays. Consider looking into that as an exercise for the reader.
What this does, however, is it leads to a psychological fallacy where the individual only grows by providing selfishly for the institution that provides for the individual. Despite this abhorrently cyclical reasoning, the greater part of American society, and to a lesser extent other Western societies, seem to spiral into this never ending abyss quite readily. In reality, what this does is takes the spectrum of Egotism and Altruism and turns it into an abstract Möbius strip of egotistic altruisim. “What is good for me, is good for society, because it is good for me.” I apologize for the rambling explanation there, but a detriment of trying to explain broken logic is that it will, inevitably, sound like broken rambling.
Hopefully that concept is now understood because it is key to the next point: Religions, as defined by Durkheim in his work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, are built of two key elements (The Sacred and The Profane), and are solidified by the willingness of individuals to follow the Sacred even to their own detriment. This, in Durkheim’s view, leads to the emergent properties of the system of social interactions that are the very institutions that create society. In my view, this creates a world where modern societies could be considered a religion of the individual, where the shared beliefs and practicecs that guide the moral “Church” to which people belong is, in fact, a “Church” of the individual.
The paradox here is addressed in Ann Swidler’s introductory Sociology course for UC Berkley in 2011 as being problematic in that the individual becomes the very thing binding society together. Creating a problematic cycle where the thing that gives society its power is taken away from the society. The individual benefits, and the social institution begins to crumble.
This selfish view of societal growth creates a problem. I am loathe, here, to say that Hobbes’ view of Equality creating struggle might be right. The equality of every person to become stronger mentally or physically than any other person seems, in fact, to lead to constant conflict. The current state of American Capitalist society seems to demand, and rely heavily, on Hobbes’ expressions of the inherent selfishness of man to be precise, correct, and accurate in every sense of all three terms. This creates an unforeseen friction with a problem in the way American government and society were founded:
“We the People” as the defining Hobbesian sovereign of American society requires altruism to function.
The Constitution of the United States opens with the Preamble. This section of the document defines that the people of the United States are the ultimate authority. Note: This is also thrown around by, especially, Conservatives in America with phrases like “My tax dollars pay for X, Y, or Z” and “We are the President’s boss” (most commonly when their preferred candidate did not win the most recent election). This requires Americans to work, together, to define and provide the means to “Form a more perfect union, provide for the common defence, and assure the blessings of Liberty for [Them]selves and [Their] posterity…”. This is increasingly hard to do in a society where everyone is expected to become the person with the most in the country. One could argue (outside the bounds of this essay) that this has lead to a representative Anarchy of businesses governed only by what they can do in a sociolegal culture where regulations are often suspended for those organizations with enough money to pay the fine.
The Constiution, if we look to the very folks who inspired both the Declaration of Independence that preceded it and the document itself, creates an inherent problem with the very contractualism it demands. These documents rely heavily on the consent of the governed as defined by Locke, Rosseau, and Montesquieu in their compounding works that gave us the modern theory of the Social Contract. The problem becomes the fact that the very society and governing element are no longer operating at the will of the sovereign, but the institutions the sovereign has created as a proxy for their egotistic self growth. (Warning, logically broken sentence ahead to explain a logically broken viewpoint) Thus, the altruism required by contractualist thought is lost to a paradoxically egotistic altruism that fails to consider the posterity and union in favor of the individual because of the very belief that this egotism is, in fact, better for the union and posterity itself.
It is here that we have to conclude, regrettably, that given the right environment: Hobbes was right. People given complete equality with no sovereign greater than the self will, in fact, be at a constant state of war with each other…
Compounding on all of this is the fact that we are, for the first time in Human history, able to be aware of and at some level socially interact with an exceedingly vast number of individuals, cultures, and sub-cultures across the planet. We, as Human beings, are being subjected to an extraoridarily well studied and ignore problem of constant cognitive overload. In short: Everyone with a smartphone in their pocket is overwhelmed. They are overwhelmed by information, expectations to form an opinion on every topic, and the requirement to be in constant communication. Humans may be social creatures, but we also need dwell time to recover from social interactions. When Humans are overwhelmed, as we see in psychological studies of the self and self-identity, they do not have the capacity to actually integrate the information and knowledge they have been exposed to into a complete picture of the self. If this goes on long enough, the individual becomes a pastiche of their surroundings and creates a loss of self-identity.
"But wait, J4YC33, didn't you just say we all have too much individualism? How can we be selfishly individualistic if we have lost ourselves?", I hear you cry.
My answer is simply a shrug and "Yea, that's a hell of a problem I am not going to touch with a ten-foot pole, but I recognize it!", I answer.
This loss of self-identity and overwhelm prevents us from being able to solidify our thoughts and processes into unified streams of consciousness. This leads inevitably to the taking of extreme positions. Extreme political positions, extreme positions of likes of food and art, and extreme positions of how we conduct ourselves socially. Most concerning to me right now is that last one, because fuck how complex this mess is and I am just trying to write one essay, not a book (yet).
This leads to two extreme viewpoints on how we should conduct ourselves in society when it comes to the application of how society functions. Luckily, Durkheim (in Suicide) gave us two continuums and one of them is all about the rules of society: The Anomic extreme to the Fatalistic extreme.
An undeniable fact that we have spent a fair number of paragraphs discussing directly and indirectly, is that society is made up. Whether intentionally made up, or as an emergent property of the system of social interactions, society’s rules are all Human social constructs.
Given a loose definition of Cynicism stating “being scornful or jadedly negative, especially towards the motives of others”, we have an obvious outcome:
The rules are made up, and none of them should fucking matter because of it (Anomic Extreme)
but we have a slightly less obvious outcome that I have found myself embroiled in:
The rules are made up, and every single one of them is sacred because of it (Fatlistic Extreme)
I have, somewhat embarassingly, gotten into actual arguments with people about the position of my fork on the dinner table. Why? BECAUSE THE RULES SAY THAT’S WHERE THE FORK GOES.
I am not at a state dinner, there is no societal institution present at my dinner table (outside of the very family whose institution should be making the rules), and there is no greater society to offend if the forks arrive stuck straight up and down in the meat course.
Yet, in my overwhelmed lizard-brained (yes, I know that isn’t actually a thing, but colloquialisms are also part of language, dammit) state, the fork goes on the left, the knife goes on the right with the blade facing in, and the drink cup must go above the knife.
In practice, most people will always exist somewhere between these extremes. For instance, most people would not be so Anomic to go to the local market completely devoid of clothes, and attempt to walk out carrying an entire wheel of Parmagiano Reggiano.
It turns out that, when my fork is not in the right place, society does not crumble and my meal can still be eaten. What the problem comes down to is that both the rigid adherence to the rules of one institution in another institutional setting is equally damaging to the continuation of social institutions and norms as a complete disregard for them is. Almost everything human beings are doing in the modern day is at an unprecedented level of social interaction (classically defined) and has an oddly magnified societal importance. When taken with the fact that humans are being driven to extreme viewpoints it has extremely damaging potential for what we classically consider important societal institutions.
Ultimately, we, as Human beings, are in such a state of flux that everything we have known about society and its development is being turned on its head. It is quite probable that entirely new forms of society, government, and modalities of social thought emerge from this tumultuous time in world history.
All we can really do is sit back, observe, and hope.
Oh, and we can all take a minute to sit with our thoughts, and maybe let our forks be put in the wrong place. Just make sure you at least wear clothes … at least outside of your home…
There is only the one.
[1]This is demonstrably untrue, as the higher echelons of the business will inevitably take more of the profits and nothing actually trickles-down but Reaganism dies hard.
This is my bajillionth website. I used to make them as a freelance job, and then I have made several dozen personal sites over the years. All of them were attempts at doing something the way other people did things. They were personal websites with the same layouts, features, and pressure to keep it updated that everyone else had.
Fuck that.
I do not want to feel pressured to keep my site up-to-date. I do not want to feel like I have to keep a regular blog. So this time, I have made a website of things I have done. Not things I intend to do, not series I want to write. Things I have already accomplished or completed are on this site. There are always things I want to do. I want to join the SCA and do medieval things again (I used to LARP a lot, and I miss the hell out of it…). I have Star Trek and Battletech things I want to write about. I have a whole article on Potatoes I want to put out there. I want to crochet more. Hell, I have not even made a page for the things I have already crocheted.
Note: all of those things are things I want to do. Not things I plan to put up here. These are glib statements of examples, not plans for my future pages. I might make 700 gifs about toast before I get to any of those things. I might never get to them. Who knows?
To-do lists on websites create a pressure I just do not want to deal with. So, here it is. A site of things I have done. Not empty intentions that will never happen. Not hopes and dreams and wishes. Actual shit I have done.
The only To-Do is to update the things here when it is relevant.
There is one other thing to discuss here: The dying internet. The internet was designed to be a place for people. Not for bots. Not for AI Slop to ruin humanity. It was a place to share data, information, knowledge, and wisdom with each other in semi-social ways. It was never supposed to replace going outside and touching grass, but to give us space to express, learn, and share.
Clearly, that shit failed. Capital interests took the internet and started monetizing every, last, single bit of it. Technologies built to track people, advertise to them, and make them spend more and more money they do not have on more and more things they do not need.
It. Needs. To. Stop.
We need more human-made content. We need people who absolutely love bugs to post more things about bugs. We need indie authors to use the internet as it has the potential to be used and publish their own books. We need people obsessed with Gifs, sci-fi, the history of textile arts, or whatever else to make bespoke websites full of information and bad design. We need the internet to stop being about making as much money as possible being performative, and start being about the human beings on this fucking planet.
We are not numbers, we are free people.
Be a people.
Make a website.
]]>There is not much interesting to write here. I legitimately added this while following the Jekyll tutorial to convert my site to an SSG that is not going to be developed with AI Slop.
I used to use Hugo. That was a disappointing revelation. Then I had written my own SSG … in Python. I have recently learned that Python is also written with AI Slop. Now I have to go and learn Ruby.
The world is so frustrating.
]]>I’m typing this post surrounded by new. I have a Steam Deck charging, I have a Pixel 6a and a PinePhone on my desk. This laptop has 32 GB of RAM, and the Blu Ray player showing me Strange New Worlds is smarter than anything I am going to advocate for in this post.
On the other hand, I don’t have a calculator. My E-reader doesn’t touch networks, I don’t like cars built after 2004, and I think that pens are more important than keyboards. I do complex math with a slide rule long before I put it to an application.
I was raised around computers. I learned to read because of Hugo’s House of Horrors on an Acros 386. I remember typing applications into a computer from a magazine, and saving them to a cassette tape (in the early 2000s… ). Dial-up and I were… I’m not going to say good friends… reluctant acquaintances might be a better way to refer to it.
I hated most of it. Dial-up was unreliable and slow. Older computers were full of security holes and you always needed to upgrade them, or (as we see now) replace them outright. It was horrible.
Little did I know, it really wasn’t about the technology at all. In fact, there are several ways that an 8-bit computer could have substantial amounts of use in the modern day and on the modern internet. There are even multi-tasking operating systems that work on older hardware to provide a relatively modern and understandable experience. (Like Symbos)Symbos[1].
I spend a lot of my time repurposing and reusing old things as much as possible and new things where appropriate.
Which brings us to the Amish…
The Amish don’t shun technology. That’s a fact that is so prevalent in the field of religious studies and sociology that I don’t need to cite it. I welcome you to google it if you want to. Google[2]
Instead, it’s far more nuanced. Generally, it boils down to:
Technology should benefit the community, not emburden it.
It’s about thinking long and hard about the technology you incorporate into your life, and how it might cause detriment. (I have entire posts about this and modern social media. Just click around a bit.) We haven’t been good about that as a society when it comes to information technology. In fact, we’ve been pretty bad about this as a society with all technology (looking at the 1865 papers on human-mediated climate change ::Shifty-eyes::) The Conversation[3]
There’s a follow on here, however. For this bit, I’m going to turn to Star Trek (and a non-coincidentally Amish-like race).
In Star Trek: Insurrection the primary conflict is… (Spoilers… I guess?) between two species: The Son’a and The B’aku. The B’aku are a peaceable happy agrarian species who are being observed by the Son’a under the pretenses that the B’aku are a pre-warp society (trust me, it makes sense). Long story short: they aren’t (They’re actually the same species, but the plot is no longer important here). They’re an extraordinarily advanced species even with knowledge of positronics (Advanced, even for the 24th Century).
When discussing this later, one of the B’aku assert that “When you make a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man”.
Both of these concepts highlight something we do not do in the modern drive for the biggest and best next thing: Consideration of impact, and consideration of self-worth.
Moore’s Law really fucked us up with this one: The number of transistors on a chip will double every 5 years (we finally hit that ceiling about 3 years ago). This drove people bonkers. The technological boom was insane. (the Commodore 64 was still sold as a NEW COMPUTER until about 1998. Think about that.)
In my working memory we have gone from systems where a gigabyte of RAM was an extravagance to 32 GiB in my latest machine. (Choices of SI prefix, also to make a point.) I also remember the introduction of the Start Menu in Windows. (But I was young enough to not hate it…).
That said, those machines are still as capable as they were. I was updating a website last year from a TRS-80 CoCo2 as a proof of concept. On the other hand we’ve been conditioned to need the next big thing. Moore’s Law and the explosive growth didn’t make those things less capable, it made us less efficient.
Modern applications are lazily controlled when it comes to memory allocation. Most developers never touch a low-level language, and of those fewer still will truly understand how to manipulate memory in a strong way. It’s not the fault of the devs, for the record. It’s the businesses that kept making higher and higher level languages (read: wayyyy more overhead) to make them easier and easier to learn to use. More devs, more profits.
This drive made the need for more computers (guess what?! More profits…) and folks kept buying them. We still do. The problem with systems is that systems are complex, and meta-systems are moreso. A drive for new tech always comes at a cost of more raw materials. In this case, rare earth metals are the big one.
REMs are absolutely necessary for the construction of modern computers. From the ICs to the traces in the motherboard. There aren’t a lot of them. So what have we done?
The same thing we always do Pinky! Send our military to a new continent and we started mining. Usually, for super cheap (read: exploitatively). This lead to a compound of problems: We are ravaging the environment for things we don’t really need, and we have created a huge disparity in the “haves” and “have-nots”.
But, we can solve both of these problems with one solution:
What the fuck happened to teaching kids the 3 R’s? Computers are a clear place to apply Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. We need to mine old computers to reclaim those REMs (for the ones just sitting in land-fills). We need to enable folks to repair and repurpose old technology with right-to-repair protections and accessible tools, parts, and education. We can utilize Single Board Computing to create modern gateways for upgrading tech for modern mitigations to old security flaws (and upgraded encryption methodologies.).
If we stop, just for a few minutes, we would be able to use what we have far more mindfully, far more productively, and help level the playing field such that we can become one society.
[1] http://www.symbos.de/ ↩︎
[2]https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=amish+shun+technology ↩︎
[3]https://theconversation.com/scientists-understood-physics-of-climate-change-in-the-1800s-thanks-to-a-woman-named-eunice-foote-164687 ↩︎
]]>Seriously though. The internet was, at least in my memory, a place where we could go and find new things made by people and not by all 5 of the corporations that own fucking everything. (Ok, maybe 5 corporations that own fucking everything and the 50 more that are collecting and selling your personal data). The world wide web, since web 2.0, is a cesspool.
It’s all traceable back to some pretty key events in recent history that turned the web of the netizens of old to a mindless consumptive engine designed to feed and sell to everyone, not just netizens. On one hand it came with a lot of benefits: accessibility on the internet, multimedia sharing tools, and other such utilities. What we lost, however, was the humanity and inspiration that came from customizing and making our own site , our own zines, or our own blogs. Before the world of CMS’s, when the MySpaces, Xangas, and Livejournals reigned supreme. When surfing the web meant taking some time to find creators you liked. Building a custom home page to make getting to all of those creators’ sites much, much , easier. You would find fun little banners and badges on websites, and join/browse webrings and neighborhoods. Surfing the web was a matter of taking a series of coordinated steps.
The way people use the internet now is much less personal, much less enjoyable, and reflects capitalist values. It’s all about efficiency of action, encouraging consumerism, and destroying everything good about the world. Browsing the web now is, for many people, either making a very well crafted google search, finding the single nugget of info they need without context, and moving onto the next one; or going to one of the many social networks to scroll the Feed. The feed, brought to us by Facebook™ around 2005 to the dismay of the internet to the end of time. Both of these, however, end with the same result: You get a set of information and data curated for your personal profile. Google, Facebook, and all the others track the ever loving shit out of everyone.
This data is used to give you exactly what you want to see. They give you results that will make you happy in your microcosm: they don’t give you what you really need to see. You don’t get the best information, or the right answer. You get Satisfaction™. The feed gives you posts that will engage you (often this involves just the right amount of negative posts in ratio to positive ones to keep you scrolling. People tend to engage more with negativity than positivity… That should tell you all you really need to know, but let’s keep going!), the search results give you results that will keep you searching, viewing, and shopping in trackable ways. But trust me, you will be better off to break this cycle.
TL;DR: The internet is fucked y’all. It’s being fed to us a la Wall-E. We need to mindfully consume the internet. Just like eating a whole bunch of junk makes you physically not well, ingesting a whole bunch of mental junk makes you mentally not well.
Alright, y’all: Flashback time. It’s 2004-2005, you’re a older-teen/young-adult. Think about how you used the internet.
It probably went something like this:
This was, generally, mindful. You had to seek out specific chat rooms to talk to people. You had to find or stumble upon the content you wanted to read/see. You had to seek out new life and new subcultures. You had to go boldly into the internet, and hope you didn’t get lost. You communicated by sporadic comments on variant websites, instant messengers, IRC, and forum posts. WE controlled our online existence, and we controlled all of it.
At this point, memes, that existed, came from blogs and forums. Friends would share things on the various instant messengers. Then came the dark times.
This is where 2 things kind of started happening in confluence, and in opposite directions. On one hand you had the *chans, on the other Facebook, Google, and the start of forced centralization.
One of those paths was better than the other. They both had problems. What this comes down to, is, really, the ultimate struggle between Anarchy and Fascism.
Woah, woah, woah. How the fu…? Anarchy and Fascism? I hear you cry. Anarchy: A World Without Authority or Moderation
The *Chans were/are the ultimate expression of Libertarianism (Anarchy) on the internet. Anyone is allowed to participate for any reason, and only the community has the right to do full moderation (yea, I know, the admins and mods do exist, they’re just very sparing in their use of power.) This means that you can equally go to the *Chans to express your opinions on Human Rights regardless of what side of the issue you come down on. This was OK in the early days. Most people self regulated. It rapidly became a cesspool, and by the time I was reaching my heyday of using the *Chans the /b/ board of 4Chan proudly proclaimed itself the “Asshole of the Internet, and it spawned a fucking movement. This is where Anonymous came from, just about, as well. We were all a bunch of nerds and, to use the parlance of the day, weebs who had grandiose ideals about how the world should be vice how it was. We were all to young and naive to realize we didn’t all have the same grandiose ideals. This caused problems.
Now, Anon, pseudoAnon, and semiAnon image boards deffo have their place in ethical consumption of the internet… If you can find a decent one. It really all depends on the how it’s being used. The issue is that the predominate use of the boards tends to be problematic; consuming problematic content is a complex issue, and I’m not going to get into it here, but tread carefully, or find a relatively safe imgboard. Fascism: A World with Total Control
Now, with the imgboards, I took a more general look. Most people reading this blog probably know something about what the *Chans are/were. This I’m going to break out a little more cleanly. Both because I think it’s less well considered, and because if anything drew someone new to this post, it was probably the point I’m about to be making.
This is going to be the long part.
Now, let’s break these down a bit. 1 gives us something that it takes a little unpacking to figure out why it’s wrong, and epistemologically it’s a fucking nightmare, but ultimately Facebook controls what you see, read, believe, and your social group. That might sound weird, and even a little conspiracy-driven, but it’s kind of the point. For instance, in early 2021 Facebook began “combating extremism on their platform, both by marking posts, and by deprioritizing users it thought was extreme. When The Feed deprioritizes someone, it sends their results to the bottom. This means they get fewer interactions. This leads to them being deprioritized. (Protip: If you have any friends who have such radical beliefs as posting on Facebook about how maybe Universal Healthcare is good, check on their Facebook. Find out how much they posted that you haven’t seen. Also: yes, they do consider that extremism). Now, that’s a controllable problem, right? Wrong.
If you look at problems 2 and 3, in context this becomes a truly horrific outcome. A single website can now present to you only the content it wants you to see, when it wants you to see it. It knows your browsing patterns, (by about 2011) it knows your social groups, and you’re using their service to log in to other things. They can now see what you’re doing, and if they want to, say, change your mind… wellllllll. Just read this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/?sh=43d5b090197c
It’s from 2014. If you had a Facebook, there’s a real chance you were inadvertently emotionally controlled by Facebook. They say for Science, and maybe that can be justified. But I firmly believe that ex scientia pax not ex scientia valeo. This was a study to determine limits of control and power. It worked.
For about 7 years since, people are still chugging along on Facebook. It’s kind of terrible. (Disclosure: I still have a Facebook… and I use it for more than just my Oculus access.) The Dichotomy
Neither of these paths have the right answer. The *Chans have near 100% repudiability; almost everything you do is completely anonymous, when they do track data they track IPs which are not particularly useful evidence in a vacuum. Facebook, on the other hand, got so in the everyone’s business that they were literally emotionally controlling users for giggles.
We consumed the internet more safely, and more ethically, when there was more thought involved. Having 100 different accounts with 100 different passwords in the days of yore was inconvenient, sure (With modern password managers it’s trivial). In a work environment, so professionally, we centralize accounts and systems for 1 ultimate reason: Control. We want to be able to control what the account can do when, where, and how, and we want to control each and every system on our network with utmost granularity. This is a terrible, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing. In a professional environment we do it because of Risk and Responsibility. We have responsibility for the data and information in our custodianship, and we take seriously our responsibility to protect it.
In the personal life, the data and information are you, and it is your responsibility to keep it safe. Facebook not only does not want to keep your data safe, it openly admits to wanting to be able to sell the data you give it. You are the product, if you haven’t yet heard that or figured it out. The *Chans are less of a risk here. They don’t have your data, they don’t want your data. But you’re very likely to come across indoctrination, radicalization, and straight up illegal content.
Having all of those different accounts was, oddly, a way to keep us safe. Even when one of the sites did want to sell your data, it was sold piecemeal, and only the parts of it they had. More websites were independent, and more websites were genuine. Think, really hard, when is the last time you went to, found, etc. a website that was not trying to sell you something, a news article that probably had a paywall, reddit (without Facebook being involved in the internet session, I’ll talk about how supplementing can be damaging), or anything else that was not Facebook.
It was probably a couple of days at least. There are some folks who that’s pretty much just how they consume the internet. Breaking out of the Feed
I’ve been thinking about this a shit ton lately since I found a whole bunch of alternatives finally, but for years less intensely. The Feed is a problem. It’s controlling, it’s manipulative, and it’s already being used in espionage and law enforcement activities. We are all getting wrapped up in MISO and Nation-State actions all the time. Don’t think about that part, but like, it’s there.
When we used the internet more mindfully, it also tended to be more ethically. We had identity. We wanted to maintain that identity. I’ve broken it down into the following categories:
Profiling and Identity building - These are our social websites. Using them correctly is to have a limited interactivity profile that showcases who you are, and who you want to be. SpaceHey is one of the only ones I can think of. Darkstarlings, VampireFreaks, MyYearbook, are all defunct. Most social networks have taken on the Facebook Feed mentality in a bid for profit.
Blogging - This is where we share our thoughts, opinions, fun cat pictures, etc. These tend to have more interactivity, but the people who come to read it come to read it. Self-hosted blogs, wordpress, blogspot, blogger, livejournal, xanga, Tumblr, etc.
Aggregators - Memes. We need them. New Stuff. We need it. These are link aggregators, RSS feeds, podcasts, etc. This category includes Reddit (almost as bad as Facebook), Digg, Lemmy, etc.
Image sharing - Microblogs with images. Oddly, Facebook actually shines as a platform here if not for their other issues. Instagram is also owned by Facebook. This part of the internet is not my forte.
Forums - These are special built websites were people come together to post about a specific topic.
Personal pages - These are like Old Geocities. Just a website someone is serving about themselves or a passion project. Web Comics fall into this category.
Outside of these categories we have some more fringe type things. We have the pubnixes, smolnet sites, gopher, i2p, TOR, etc. Those are outside the scope of this article dedicated to the average internet user. But I did list these here so they can be googled if you want to know more.
I also have the following recommendations:
Only have 1-2 blogs, 1-2 profiles, 1-2 personal pages. These can be broken out because you maybe want to maintain two identities? More likely that you want a blog for personal stuff, and a blog that you can share more openly that might have some professional stuff on it.
For the rest of the categories, make lists. Pick the sites you like. Keep it manageable. Follow the things you care about.
News, read news from as many sources as you can. This will help you pinpoint and weed out bias.
Never. Trust. Anything. Verify, verify, verify. (INCLUDING THIS. YES, READ UP, CALL ME OUT IF I’M WRONG. It’s one of the best ways we learn: being corrected.)
What does this mean to me?
To be frank, I have no idea. Maybe you wanted to learn more? Maybe you’re going to go use the internet more ethically and mindfully.
]]>First: I’m just some person ranting and rambling on the internet. Consider that before you think anything I say is anything resemlbing authority on the various questions that mean 42.
I think a lot about the internet. I think about it for work, I think about it for fun, and I think about it compulsively. I was born into the internet. I was raised by it, molded by it. Well, not really. A little before the internet, but still. And there are a lot of great things about the internet of today. The ability to make websites more accessible is fantastic. The sheer amount of sharing that can come of the interconnectedness of the world… all of it.
Some of my oldest, and most of my fondest, memories are based around tech. But they were from a simpler time when the internet was, somewhat out of necessity more mindful. I’m going to rant here about accessing the internet , navigating the internet, and our purpose in using the internet. Constantly Connected.
The early naughts brought us a pretty amazing fucking thing: broadband. To understand why this was a big deal let me take you through the internet I remember:
This was pretty standard up until broadband happened. Broadband connections were the first widely available connections to individual consumers that provided “always-on” connectivity. No * longer would you need to stare at the box waiting for your downloads, you could leave them on overnight. Your access wasn’t governed by the minute, but in bandwidth and download counts. This was hugely great at the tail end when the web was still the web.
In practice, what it gave was a constant window into our souls and lives by corporations who wanted to use that window to sell us things. They wanted to force you to have to pay for their service to continue playing the games you have purchased for your self. It was less than a few years, and even then only when about 20% of the population of the USA had access to reliable home broadband when Facebook and “The Feed”™ took over.
Around this time Facebook came into existence and everything went to shit. (If you want to know more about Facebook and The Feed™read this). This is where my first pontification on how to exist on a shitty internet comes into play: Fucking disconnect. We weren’t always-on. Make your connection more mindful. Treat opening your browser and getting to a website on the internet like dialing -in to the ISP. Make an application that disconnects you from the internet after 5 minutes of inactivity, and before you can connect plays the dial-up sound (bonus if 1 in 100 times it times out and you have to redial or get a busy signal.) However you have to do it, make your choice to seek out the internet a more mindful one.
But wait, how do I get great stuff to read?! Easy: Browse the internet, dust off some hard-drive space and make local caches of websites. That’s what we used to do way back when. We’d browse a bunch of websites, and save the pages/pictures/whatever for later viewing offline. It was like having a little mini internet of our own locally.
This brings us to my second pontification: Pay some fucking attention. The internet is the tool you make of it. There is so much shit and garbage on the internet to be avoided. When we would save web pages we knew we were sacrificing our precious little hard-drive space for this content. We did not save any old thing. More importantly, we were time limited in our usage of the internet… We had to know where we were going or, more importantly, the paths and currents to get us to what we wanted. There was no Feed, there were no tailored search results. We “surfed” the web currents to what we wanted to read. Tools
A great character written by a shitty TERF once said: “Just because you’re of age doesn’t mean you need to whip your wands out for everything!” This is true of any tool people use. It’s very tempting to find uses for a new tool just because you have one. (This is also a great way to end up making an entire room in your house unusable for long periods… ahem) The internet is the same way.
That said, our misuse of this tool isn’t actually our fault: it was forced on us. The internet was a booming social place. Many if not most websites were run by small web-admins and individuals with passion, drive, and a desire to meet more people who liked the things they like. It’s no wonder when the promise of groups like that came along with social media we jumped . What we didn’t know yet, though, was that they were absorbing the truths of our lives, all of our datapoints, into their machine to know when to sell us a different underwear. Friend, we have been stolen.
This brings me to my third and final pontification for this ranting: Fucking Care. The worst thing we can do to them is care. About each other, about the world, about the environment, and about what the corporations are doing to fuck us left and right. When we care we have drive. When we care we pay attention. It is hard to keep an attentive populace complacent when they have drive to fix things. Use the internet with the purpose we had it originally: find and make communities. Build care groups, and put info out there on the things you have knowledge and passion. Make the internet the tool of knowledge and sharing it should be.
Our purposes were always the same, but they were coopted in the worst ways. We have to take them back. Seize the means of production on the internet, host your own site. Run a tilde, join a tilde, be a pioneer in a frontier we were told was empty, but is brimming with potential hidden from us. The revolution is to bring about a society for all, and we need to make sure we bring the internet with us.
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