#oneaday Day 622: Are we fucked? Revisited

Back in October of 2024, I wrote a post entitled "Are we fucked?" in which I was concerned about the direction the world appeared to be going. At the time, my main concern was with the growth of the AI space, and its seeming lack of any benefits whatsoever to humankind, while demonstrating its clear potential to cause very serious problems for both society and the environment.

That hasn't gone away. And neither has the other fear I expressed in that post: that, if Donald Trump would somehow, inexplicably, find himself in the White House once again, that America would become an unpleasant, unsafe place to be. In fact, things have ended up in that regard far worse than I think anyone could have imagined: a lawless "police" (and I use the term loosely) force gunning down innocent people in the streets; people being forced into utterly inhumane conditions having not committed a crime; the systematic revocation of a system of human rights we spent the best part of the last century putting in place, and which still had quite a bit of work to do.

Every day I look around at what the world has become and I am, honestly, scared. I feel like significant portions of the world have just gone completely insane.

Take the AI thing. AI is fucking everywhere now, despite it being abundantly clear that everyone except shareholders and C-Suite tossers hates it. It's making things worse. It's causing people's skills to atrophy at a frightening rate. It's destroying the environment. It's crashing the economy. It's making the Internet near-unusable in certain areas. And all for what? I couldn't tell you. All I can tell you is that the whole thing is a terrifying waste of money and resources, and I hope beyond hope that it will not be long until everyone wakes up and realises "what the fuck have we been doing?"

Except, at this point, with such a significant portion of the world's economy being propped up by this odious, utterly useless "industry", things coming crashing down are going to affect everyone — including those who have always been against this garbage. It's a financial disaster waiting to happen — and all the people who have spent the last few years completely discarding any practical skills in favour of "prompting" are going to be utterly screwed.

As many have pointed out, it's a symptom of a larger problem. The AI industry's dominance of things like the RAM and storage market are part of corporations' attempts to take away ownership of "The Computer" from individuals and force us all into "the cloud". Because if all we're using are dumb terminals to log on to the corporate cloud, that means the corporations can absolutely completely and utterly control what we can do. And everything that is wrong with politics and society right now can be laid at the feet of the few rich, corporate billionaires. Not coincidentally, pretty much all of them appear to have ties to legendary nonce Jeffrey Epstein.

I dunno man. I don't know how to deal with this any more. I'm scared for my future, and I'm scared for the world in general. I don't like it. This is not what "The Future" was supposed to be like. We had lots of cautionary tales telling us not to do all this shit — and yet we appear to have just gone and done it anyway.

The human beings with all the power absolutely suck, and they don't give a shit what all this is doing to regular-ass people, so long as it continues to make them more money than they will ever be able to spend in their lifetimes — money which will never, ever be spent on anything even vaguely approaching "the common good".

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#oneaday Day 507: Things that haven't got better

I wasn't sure what to write about today. I'm still not entirely sure what to write about, and as I do at such times, I found myself hitting the "Random Post" button a few times on this site to look at things I've written about before. And I was mildly dismayed to discover that a number of things that I find frustrating about life in 2025 — both in a personal sense and in a broader, societal or cultural sense — have been An Issue for a lot longer than I'd realised.

For example, I've written a few times recently about how "analysis paralysis" can easily descend when you're preparing to enjoy some entertainment for the evening. I also wrote about this back in 2013 — though I do feel like it has only continued to get worse in the age of streaming, Game Pass and all that stuff, not that I subscribe to any of those things.

I also wrote about how frustrating I found websites' "guide content" used as clickbait back in 2016, though this was less of a surprise, since I was forced into the production of SEO-juicing crap like that when I was laid off from USgamer. That has definitely gotten worse — and the specific issue I complained about in that post, which was websites posting a "landing page" for a guide that didn't actually exist, is still a thing that happens.

I just don't feel like the world is significantly better in 2025 than it was in 2013 or 2016! In many ways, it's significantly worse! We reached something of a tipping point with tech in particular where new innovations stopped being about making life better for everyone, and instead became about cynically making money for people who really don't need any more money. Such is the way of capitalism, of course, but it feels like that side of things has been especially obnoxious over the course of the last 5 years or so.

Then, of course, there's the fact that intolerance of marginalised groups is way back up compared to what it was ten years ago. There was absolutely still work to be done back then, of course, but the mid-20-teens had shown a marked amount of progress in generally accepted progressive attitudes. Much of that progress feels like it has been spitefully torn up in the last year or so in particular — unsurprisingly, coinciding with the inauguration of the world's most embarrassing authoritarian.

But hey. At least you can use AI to generate revenge porn of people you don't like, completely without their consent, and then share it with the world, again, completely without the subject's consent. So that's nice!

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In praise of slow

(With apologies to Carl Honore for shamelessly liberating the title of his book, which I haven't read, but respect the sentiment behind the title.)

I sauntered to work today. Tomorrow I might amble, stroll, perambulate or, you know, walk. This is nothing unusual, you might think, but I've noticed a curious phenomenon develop over the last few years, and that is the fact that everyone seems to have somewhere more important than the place I'm going to get to, preferably much quicker than I do. As such, as I wander down the street, it's almost inevitable, even at unsociable hours in the morning, that at least one person will come charging past me – not running, because that would look panicky – but walking at at least twice the speed I do. I don't walk as slowly as, say, an elderly gentleman, but I still walk considerably slower than these people who are inevitably dressed in some sort of suit, wearing clip-cloppy shoes that immediately makes them somehow seem incredibly arrogant. Quite how shoes can be arrogant is anyone's guess, but that's what it makes me think.

Then there's London. Anyone who's ever visited London, however much you may have liked it, will have noticed how much of a hurry every damn person in that city is in. Traffic lights go amber and horns sound immediately like some sort of automatic reaction. Dare to stand slightly left-of-centre on the escalators leading down to the Underground and some greased-up City-boy businessman will make a snide comment like "Slow lane's over there, mate". Stand in a queue at Pret and you'll see at least five people who have been waiting roughly fifteen seconds storm out in seeming disgust, muttering about inefficiency. (Contrast this with my experience a few years back when an entire symphony orchestra descended on one tiny kebab shop in the middle of Warsaw which was staffed by one rather uncomfortable looking man. Now that was inefficiency, although to be fair he was somewhat up against the wall. Almost literally.)

Then there's the laziness of people who use computers. "Why can't I drag that text into my subject header?" I heard one person ask of an email application – because using two keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste it was obviously just such a hassle. "Why can't it do this?" "Why doesn't this do my work for me?" "Computers are supposed to be efficient!"

And then – then – there's the attention span of people on the Internet. Dare to write in more than one paragraph on a message board and there will be at least one response along the lines of "OMFG WALL OF TEXT" with nothing more meaningful to say. Well, thanks for that.

You'd think there'd be a point to this wall of text. And I guess there is. It's to say to these people "slow the fuck down". Leave ten minutes earlier so you can enjoy a walk to work without barging past people. Take your time over writing your emails and they might actually be spelled and punctuated correctly. Read someone's wall of text and you might actually find something interesting that they had to say. And London? Just climb out of your own arse and realise that some people don't want to live their lives at 300 miles per hour before dying of a heart attack at 28.

This post is dedicated to the people who take the time to sit down, chill out, relax, enjoy some time, some space and don't mind being a little bit wordy and pretentious along the way. If you're reading this and you've got this far, chances are you're one of them. And to you I say, "Good job. Keep it up."