Riot Leviathan Woodhouse. he/they, genderfuck. millennial solidarity. anarcho-socialist sjw. memes. bullshit. Formerly Dr. Ducks, a name which no longer serves me. Mostly reblogs with the occasional jarring tonal shift to deeply personal and uncomfortable internal monologue.
July 23, 2026 - Thousands marched during the second day of protests in Madison, Wisconsin, in response to the police murder of Corey Ruiz, a 38-year-old Black man. Ruiz was shot three times while several cops already had him pinned on the ground. [video]
i was dealing with my own mental health crisis, so i never made it to any of the protests, but i see a lot of my friends in this video and in many others.
two weeks later, the cops, on orders from our mayor, a democrat who is running in today's gubernatorial primary, bulldozed the memorial. one of my closest friends was there. she said they drove their cruisers over tents without checking if there were people in them first. she said she saw a cop grab the yarmulke off a Jewish man's head and swing it around like a wet t shirt while taunting the man. they arrested a dozen people just for being there, including my friend's son.
there still has been no accountability or transparancy.
the protests should've moved straight to the police station. the protests never should've stopped.
the protests never should've stopped since the murder of George Floyd.
Madison is a liberal city with a democrat mayor in a county with a democrat sheriff in a state with a democrat governor. Just like Minneapolis was a liberal city with a democrat mayor, in a county with a "nonpartisan" sheriff, in a state with a democrat governor, in 2020. The protests were never about 45/47. The protests never should've stopped. but as soon as joe "1994 crime bill" biden and kamala "top cop" harris won the election, all the white liberals went home. the. protests. never. should. have. stopped.
It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.
It has always been possible. It is still possible.
if so: GENIUS move artistically bc it probably would absolutely blind someone with LED headlights about as much as their headlights are blinding the driver, with that much of it.
Safety-wise, not really sure how bad it would be but it does concern me. Unlike LED headlights, which I already know 1000% are a safety concern based on how often i find myself driving at night and then literally can't see the fuckin road or other traffic due to someone with LED headlights.
[image description, courtesy of @displaybagel: A photo of a spare wheel cover on the back of a car that has been taped over with neon yellow reflective tape, with pink accents around it. black tape has been added to read "No offence but your L.E.D. headlights are gonna kill us both babe" in all caps. /end description]
**Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism**
*Revisiting the Difference Between Mutual Aid and Charity*
https://crimethinc.com/RevolutionaryMutualAid
Much has been made of the distinction between charity and mutual aid. Charity is top-down and unidirectional, while mutual aid is supposed to be horizontal, reciprocal, and participatory. In practice, however, the majority of todayâs self-described mutual aid projects remain more or less unidirectional efforts to provide goods and services to those in need.
This has contributed to a situation in which conventional non-profit organizations are rebranding themselves with the language of âmutual aid,â while some anarchists have given up on the concept entirely, fed up with a rhetoric that some say amounts to âmutual aid being good and radical, and charity being bad and conservative.â
Is there more to the distinction than this? How can we unlock the revolutionary potential of mutual aid?
Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of yearsâfar longer than settlers have been in Canadaâand made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotÄn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racismâlike Kashechewanâbecause it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm sure that working in social media â dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions â is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.
But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.
We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.
Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:
The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":
Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.
Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:
When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:
https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/
Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:
If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form â a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:
When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:
Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters â if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.
For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."
Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:
For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.
At first, Zuck tried tweaking his algorithm to replace your friends with trolls who'd bait you into flamewars. When that petered out, he stole a march from Tiktok and recruited an army of theater kids to do amateur dramatics for you in exchange for the promise of an intermittent reward schedule payment for the sketches that got the most views:
The problem (for Zuck) is that theater kids are also people and they resent being jerked around by the algorithm and ripped off by Meta's rigged revshare slot-machine. Last year, he started signaling that he would replace the theater kids â and your friends â with chatbots:
Chatbots have been a catastrophic bet for Meta, far worse than the metaverse. Meta shares are in a death-spiral as investors figure out that when Zuck fired all his coders and replaced them with chatbots while spending $300b on AI, he was excising the heart of the company's skilled workforce, pissing away all its free cash-flow, and sinking into a bottomless pit of debt to produce a substandard product that no one wants, at the expense of the company's only profitable lines of business:
But Zuck is sure that chatbots can solve his most pernicious problem: the search for a gimmick that will keep you locked to his platform that is under his complete control. Zuck doesn't want to rely on your friends with their unwillingness to maximize your engagement. He doesn't want to depend on volatile and unpredictable trolls to bait you into sticking around to argue and see more ads. He wants to be shut of theater kids and their amateur dramatics that inevitably come with demands for decent treatment.
For Zuck, chatbots dangle the promise of social media without socializing. Zuck thinks he can solve all his problems by imprisoning you in a house of mirrors where you interact with LLMs that are tuned to keep you scrolling no matter what, chatbots that will never demand anything of Meta.
He's been at this for a while, and each generation of chatbots was worse than the last. How bad? The last batch had to be killed off after they took to luring children into explicit sexual role-play:
https://archive.is/fopCh
Nevertheless, the dream of a world without people is one that Zuck can't let go of. Solipsism's seductive song convinced him to buy a company called Social.ai, which specializes in trapping people in conversations with chatbots, and now he's announced his plan to flood Facebook and Instagram with LLM slop:
The amazing thing about this is that Zuck is talking about chatbots as a way to capture a younger audience for his graying platforms. Kids hate chatbots. My 18 year old and her friends use "that's so AI" as a pejorative to dismiss anything distasteful or ugly:
For Zuck â who owns a controlling share of voting stock in his company and need not answer to his board â it's a spectacular act of delusional self-sabotage. Zuck refuses to understand that the majority of his users are on his platform because they love their friends more than they hate him. Zuckerberg is on a relentless quest to isolate you from the friends who keep you on his platform and transfer your bond to groups of people (and now chatbots) who can be commanded by Zuckerberg.
Only someone who doesn't think other people are real could believe that you'd prefer to talk to chatbots than your friends â or that a habit of talking with chatbots would be so hard to break that you'd endure an ever-increasing number of advertising interruptions to maintain those pointless conversations.
In 1993/1994, AOL connected its millions of users to the public internet. These users were unaccustomed to the internet's conversational and technical norms, and they kept coming. It wasn't that the old internet was incapable of absorbing surges of new users: every September, an incoming class of undergraduates found their way online through their universities' computer labs.
But the AOL bridge was different: the flood of users was much larger, and it never stopped. The old internet people who struggled to transfer the culture and techniques of the internet to that flood of newbies called it the "Eternal September."
For the Facebook and Instagram users who are about to be buried in an endless botshit avalanche, this is the beginning of the "Eternal Sloptember." From here on in, the slop only gets worse and thicker and harder to avoid. Zuckerberg refuses to acknowledge that he owes his fortune to the fact that his users love each other more than they hate him, so he has set out to shatter those bonds of love and sharpen that hatred.
It won't end well. Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put). Zuck's "agency" isn't higher than yours or mine. The difference between him and us is that he doesn't think we're really real, and we know that he's really a monster.
Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put).
It's no different than the monarchists who genuinely believe that royal families are genetically or divinely more fit to rule society than those without power. The rich and powerful will always make stories for themselves justifying their wealth and power. But these people are also human, and thus social creatures, so these stories tend to wind back around to explaining how they are better than everyone who isn't rich and powerful.
Zuck might think he is better than everyone else, but he is also still thinking about everyone else all the time.
Paradigm Pudding @riotleviathan - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
