#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".

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 606: How evil is too evil?

Every new reveal from the Epstein files seems to bring with it brand new and exciting horrors to be disgusted by. It is unsurprising to see a veritable Who's Who of The Worst People In the World cropping up as having had contact with the rancid old paedo — and yet with every new name that bubbles up from the sewer, I find myself wondering, more and more, if anything is actually going to happen because of all this.

You'll forgive me for not having a lot of faith that these people will suffer any consequences whatsoever.

We live in a world where companies can just set fire to billions of dollars a year for a technology no-one wants, and where no amount of people going "please fuck off, please fuck off" will make them fuck off.

We live in a world where the President of the United States is demonstrably both an actual criminal and an incompetent fuckhead who shits himself in public, but nothing is done about either of these things — both of which, one would argue, should probably put him out of the running for being in charge of one of the most powerful nations on Earth.

We live in a world where the world's richest man proudly takes over what was once a good method of online communication and turns it into his own personal playground, where his antisemitic, CSAM-generating chatbot floods the world with disinformation and allows some truly vile examples of humanity to thrive. (At least, in this case, something is being attempted in response, though due to all of the other things I'm talking about today, I don't have much faith this will end in any other way than someone paying a lot of money to make it all just "go away".)

The world is dominated by rich people who are making existence for everyone except themselves objectively much, much worse. And I feel like they're going to get away with it. I know legal action takes time and money to come to fruition, and it's entirely possible that things are going on behind the scenes to bring some of these scumbags to some sort of justice, but I somehow doubt it at this point. I suspect what will happen is that some of them will get a slap on the wrist at most, and then maybe asked to pay some money that is a meaninglessly miniscule fraction of their total fortunes, and then we will all be expected to forget about everything.

As the quote frequently misattributed to Final Fantasy Tactics goes, "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that crime only exists for the lower class". It's true. If Elon Musk is made to pay even several million dollars by the French authorities for his CSAM-generating chatbot, it means nothing to him. Same for Donald Trump. Same for the myriad rich folks who engaged in barely literate email exchanges with Epstein about "partying" (and we know what that means, unfortunately) on his special paedo island, or how they were going to manipulate and fuck up the economy, politics, tolerance and inclusivity… the list goes on.

I'm open to being proved wrong on all this. But at the moment it feels like there simply isn't anyone to hold these rich fuckheads to account… aside from The People themselves. And, despite growing evidence that people in the States are willing to hit the streets when it really counts, I'm not sure The People have the motivation or the strength to be able to undo all this damage that's been done.

I hope one day we can look back on this period from a better place, and feel like we all learned something from it. After all, the world has recovered from terrible things before. But has anything ever really been quite like what we're dealing with right now…?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 843: This World Ain't Big Enough...

Ever get the feeling that the world just isn't quite built for you?

It's a feeling I've been getting quite a bit as I've got older. I suspect such a feeling is largely age-related, as it centres around the fact that certain things quite simply don't appeal, because they're not aimed at me.

It just seems a little odd that "popular culture" is often taken to mean "people under the age of 25 who aren't that bright".

Let's take Britain's Got Talent, for example, which Andie's been watching recently — primarily to get annoyed at, lest you judge her harshly for it. Any time I've watched Britain's Got Talent, I've got annoyed too, but I don't find the experience of getting annoyed at it particularly fulfilling or fun. If anything, I just get inordinately frustrated about… well, everything about it. Simon Cowell is a douche, the judges' comments are vapid nonsense that don't mean anything, the acts are cringeworthy and the audience is made up of the very worst kind of braying moron who thinks that constructive criticism is a personal attack and thus must be booed.

Take gaming, too. I have zilcho, zippo, nada interest in the upcoming "big" games that are bearing down on us like multi-million dollar juggernauts. I don't want to play Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed III, Halo 4 or anything like that. (I did recently play Binary Domain, which certainly was a an impressive experience, but one destined for obscurity)

Or the Internet at large. Everything must be social these days, it seems. And long-time experience has taught me that if you make something social, you will generally attract illiterate, ill-informed, angry morons. Just look at the comments section of any website ever. (I often find myself wondering why the most notorious cesspits don't just close comments forever. It's rare that any meaningful discussion takes place on them. Obviously I'm excluding my own blog from this because I have a small group of intelligent people who sporadically comment here and are willing to engage in actual conversation, as opposed to a vast community of pillocks.)

Fortunately, any time I start to get frustrated by any of the experiences I describe above, a moment's reflection simply reminds me that they are not the only experiences out there — just the most visible. And while that can in itself be frustrating in that you have to look a little harder to find people with whom you have things in common, we're certainly not beyond hope just yet.

On TV, I don't have to watch Britain's Got Talent. I can watch Community. My Little Pony. And a whole host of other stuff thanks to the magic of streaming video, giving me access to a whole ton of quality entertainment that doesn't make me want to throw bricks at my TV. I haven't seriously watched live TV for ages, a couple of episodes of The Apprentice aside. Instead, I can binge on Star Trek thanks to Netflix, or dig up obscure Channel 4 shows on YouTube.

In the gaming world, I can play everything from Binary Domain to Pandora's Tower and A Valley Without Wind to escape from the blockbuster insanity. Gaming is now so big that you literally can't play everything that comes out.

On the Internet, there are mature communities. I have the Squadron of Shame. You lovely people who comment on this blog. Twitter (at least the people I've trimmed my "following" list to, anyway). Gamers With Jobs. Fitocracy.

While the world may not be built with me in mind any more, I certainly don't have a problem living in it for the moment.

Unless you make me watch Britain's Got Talent. Then we might have a problem.