It recently occurred to me that Buddhism is a refuge for the neurodivergent. Like me.
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@slumdogbuddha
It recently occurred to me that Buddhism is a refuge for the neurodivergent. Like me.
Slumdog Buddha, aka the Cyberpunk Buddhist, is pushing back on AI Data Centers. There are rumors that data centers are being proposed in Worcester County. The C-Punk Buddhist is ready to stop this shit.
Check out Erin Brockovich's Map of Data Centers in the US.
Interactive map of major AI data centers across the United States — built or being built. Understand the community impact and report issues
Politics or Liberation?
I'm tired of politics. I'm tired of hoping that politics can solve our human predicament. I do think it's critically important to vote, that votes have serious consequences. Obviously—look at the current regime in the US. But voting won't ultimately solve the cultural morass we are currently in. That requires Liberation. Liberation of the mind, of views, of allegiances, of self-definitions. Liberation of fellow humans in community. But we can't liberate people that don't want to be liberated. We're not going to free MAGAs from the cult. But we can liberate those who aren't so tied to extreme views. They may be ready to be liberated. That term, liberation, is resonant with 'liberal' and 'liberality.' I experience liberation politically as 'liberality.'
How does one obtain liberation? Through art, through creativity, through exploration of the unknown. Through letting go of fundamentalist and ideological allegiances. Through questioning what I think I know or believe. Through being open to other ways of living, to new ways to experience life.
My focus now is not on politics, but on liberation. That is a spiritual principle that has political implications.
What does it matter if you achieve perfect enlightenment or not? Cause when you’re dead, who the fuck cares? You won’t, and probably no one else will.
I wonder about all these monks and super Buddhists if this question ever occurs to them. Do they ever stop to question: what is the point of all this striving for perfection? When you’re dead, does it really matter?
The perfectionists must secretly believe there is some kind of ‘afterlife’ to enlightenment, some eternal reward. Being born into a better life. Rebirth, in other words.
The Buddha said that the purpose of enlightenment is to relieve suffering. Now.
I read ‘reduce suffering’ as ‘make life worth living.’
All that matters is that you are as enlightened as you can be in this life so that you cause the least harm and create the most benefit to yourself and those around you.
Leave something good behind when you go. That’s good karma.
Lesson for the day: the cycle of Samsara. Right/ Left /Right; Conservative /Liberal / Conservative; Democrat /Republican / Democrat; it just goes around and around; the endless cycle of Samsara.
Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/#veena-dubal
What industry calls "personalized pricing" is really surveillance pricing: using digital tools' flexibility to change the price for each user, and using surveillance data to guess the worst price you'll accept:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/
At root, surveillance pricing allows companies to revalue both your savings and your labor. If you get charged $2 for something I only pay $1 for, the seller is essentially reaching into your bank account and revaluing the dollars in it at 50 cents apiece. If you get paid $1 for a job that I make $2 for, then the boss is valuing your labor at 50% of my labor:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#
Surveillance pricing is a key part of enshittification, relying on three of the key enshittificatory factors that have transformed this era into the enshittocene:
I. Monopoly: Surveillance pricing is undesirable to both workers and buyers, so in a competitive market, surveillance pricing would drive labor and consumption to non-surveilling rivals:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
II. Regulatory capture: Surveillance pricing only exists because of weak regulation and weak enforcement of existing regulations. To engage in surveillance pricing, a company must first put you under surveillance, something that is only possible in the absence of effective privacy law.
In the USA, privacy law hasn't been updated since Congress passed a law in 1988 that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
In the EU, the strong privacy provisions in the GDPR have been neutralized by US tech giants who fly an Irish flag of convenience. Ireland attracts these companies by allowing them to evade their taxes, but it can only keep these companies by allowing them to break any law that gets in their way, because if Meta can pretend to be Irish this week, it could pretend to be Maltese (or Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, or Dutch) next week:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
What's more, competition laws in the EU and the USA ban surveillance pricing, but a half-century of lax competition law enforcement has allowed companies to routinely engage in the "unfair and deceptive methods of competition" banned in both territories.
III. Twiddling: "Twiddling" is my word for the way that digitized businesses can use computers' flexibility to alter their prices, offers, and other fundamentals on a per-user, per-session basis. It's not enough to spy on users: to engage in surveillance pricing, you have to be able to mobilize that surveillance data from instant to instant, changing the prices for every user. This can only be done once a business has been digitized:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Combine monopoly, weak privacy law, weak competition law, and digitization, and you don't just make surveillance pricing possible – at that point, it's practically inevitable. This is what it means to create an enshittogenic policy environment: by arranging policy so that the most awful schemes of the worst people are the most profitable, you guarantee that those people will end up organizing commercial and labor markets.
When surveillance pricing is applied to labor, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination," a term coined by Veena Dubal based on her research with Uber drivers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
Happy birthday Ram Dass. 1931-04-06
I <3 Ram Das.
it’s about staying alive.
CELEBRATE TRANS BODIES!
inspired by @inlovewiththemooon’s art
Absolutely beautiful drawing.
The Quiet Rebellion: the most profound and poetic explanation of the insanity of the world and how we can survive it by refusing to participate.
This video explains that the Five Aggregates was the Buddha’s way to explain the feeling of being or having a ‘self’. I’ve never heard it applied in this way before. Makes perfect sense.
Morning Meditation | Accepting Difficulties
Let discomfort speak.
Let frustration burn clear.
Let the heart lean toward the cold, hard edge of the moment.
Stone by stone, breath by breath, we walk through the fire...
... and call it practice.
Tracks from my 30+ albums on BandCamp. The SubAltern project is 'cybertronic punk.' I have been fascinated with cyberpunk stories, films, a
What we are doing is not reprogramming ourselves, but freeing ourselves from all programs, by seeing that they are empty of reality. Reprogramming is just jumping from one pot into another. We may have what we think of as a better programming; but the point of sitting is not to be run by any program.
— Everyday Zen: Love & Work by Charlotte Joko Beck
Những ngày bước chân vào đời, hầu hết ai cũng ước mong mình sẽ trở thành những con người đặc biệt, có địa vị, có danh tiếng, có tiền tài và có tất cả mọi thứ trong tay.
Khi đi qua hết những giông bão, nếm đủ những cay đắng của kiếp người, khi mà đôi chân đã cảm thấy mệt, đôi mắt đã nhìn thấu rõ cuộc đời.
Vào một buổi chiều, ta trở về bên Phật, lắng nghe một lời kinh thiêng, có lẽ giờ này thứ ta mong cầu nhất chỉ đơn giản là một cuộc đời bình yên. Vậy là đủ rồi !
Cư sĩ Long Khả Nam