#techno feudalism

[crippled-peeper]

this is a tactic drug dealers use. “your first hit is free”.

this is an ad I got on here.

yall… please don’t gamble. these ads look fun but it’s ruining people’s lives.

[foxyzoey]

FLCL: Raging Against the Machine

FLCL is a cult classic. A messy, unorthodox, expressive piece of art. And that's what makes it great. But as I was reading the news today I noticed something that I can't stop thinking about now: these AI data centers really remind me of something... they remind me of the Medical Mechanica facility from FLCL.

Placed into an unassuming small town by a shady corporation with unknown motives, is the massive, clothing iron shaped facility from Medical Mechanica, a company who makes, well, it's unclear, really. People think they make robots in there or something. We won't know for sure as there are no entrances or exits, no windows, no transparency really.

Every day it lets out clouds of steam that cover the town in a thick haze, obscuring everything. A sort of visual polution, instead of more invisible kinds that creep into the water, air, and local ecosystem and are not always noticeable at first glance, and which corporations put great effort into obscuring from the public.

We find out later its true purpose is to smooth out all the wrinkles. Including the ones in your brain so you can't even think for yourself anymore. And yet, people rarely ask "What is it? And what's it doing here? And what's it even for?" Perhaps the smoothening has already started, or perhaps the system of capital we're indoctrinated with teaches us not to ask such critical questions, we simply accept this facility being in our town because that's the way the world works. Perhaps the system of capital started the process of smoothening the brain long before Medical Mechanica showed up, and this is just the next evolution of keeping the population's brains nice and smooth so that no critical thought ever enters those minds. Thoughts critical of the corporation, of the system of capital, of those who rule the world. An uneducated population is easier to control after all. But hey, at least it'll bring jobs to the community, right? ... Right? Except... the Medical Mechanica facility doesn't really need that many people to keep it running... In fact, it seems to need more people to keep others out than people to keep the place going, as the only employees we ever see are the security guards... guarding this monstrosity... for what purpose again?

Shady corporations with shady motives A factory that makes robots or something, with the real purpose of smoothing out your brain wrinkles A facility that floods the town with polution and obscures vision, the truth even, obscuring the real harm being done. A facility that's seemingly not actually providing anything to the community at all... just, draining it of its resources, its land, its life, and its future.

FLCL is a masterpiece and perhaps it makes a little more sense than people think.

Obviously Medical Mechanica can be applied as a metaphor for corporations polluting in any era of modern human history from the industrial revolution to today, but the resemblance is one I wanted to explore further since I couldn't get it out of my head, and I think the way that the Medical Mechanica facility is quite literally meant to smooth everyone's brains out is very relevant to how AI is being used today. I could keep going I'm sure, but I'll need another rewatch of FLCL first.

Anyway, all that to say: go make Haruko proud and keep fighting against the big corporations that wanna smooth out all our brains and turn the world into a technofeudalist dystopia. Keep raging against the machine, literally.

[k-wame]

americans are so well trained to not even notice they're chained on a tech billionaire's plantation

[pluviolic]

‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?

Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the i

You think, “oh cool we can wear animal print clothes and confuse the surveillance state”. And then you read the article and it’s essentially an ad for a company that admits they haven’t tested the efficacy of these clothes at tricking facial recognition. And it’s framed as “this may about to be mainstream” when it’s one start-up doing this.

Preuß, who co-founded his company after reading about the whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about US surveillance in the Guardian, said his designs played with the fact that “facial recognition systems freak out when they see multiple faces at once”.

Is that true? I don’t think that’s true. I’m sure it figures it out.

Then:

“Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said.

Bell, however, said “none of these products are tried and tested, and a lot of these surveillance technologies can deal with a little resistance … [but] even if the designs don’t necessarily work perfectly, fashion is also a visible sign of resistance.

“This is consumers collectively coming together to make a visible statement.”

Consumers you must resist the surveillance state by buying our clothes.

Not relevant to my original point BUT:

You can fight the surveillance state by looking like a trash bag.

And if you want to keep facial recognition software from tracking you, a great way to do that is wear a medical mask.

[vilevexedvixen]

I know employers are bullshitting about needing someone with experience because now Gen X is also being handed mass layoffs again and extremely qualified specialists are being turned down who have 30+ years of experience.

Employers want someone "experienced" so they don't have to spend money or time or staff to train them, but also want someone young enough that they can manipulate them into being paid less / believe their labour is less valuable.

So both young and old people, trained, educated, experienced or not. BOTH are turned down because what is wanted is a human machine that will work for "free" and no one will ever be that.

Everyone I know who still has a job is doing the work of ten people minimum. Worked as if they are machines, running on fumes.

We NEED more people and more pay.

AI is not adequate to replace anyone. The point of it is to make us feel threatened so we bow our knee and beg to work for less pay. THAT is the point of AI.

[galerymod]

Happy World Oceans Day Eve! Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Acid 🌊🍿

A tiny crab is sitting on a reef, staring down at himself in absolute despair. Due to ocean acidification, his once magnificent, rock-hard shell has dissolved into something soft and soggy, looking suspiciously like wet parchment paper [United Nations].

Just as his left claw physically melts away into the current, a massive, exhausted blue whale swims past.

The crab looks up, waving his rubbery arm, and yells:

"Hey! Mate! Look at me! My chemical calcium armor is literally dissolving in the water! I am essentially naked! What on Earth is wrong with this bloody ocean?!"

The whale slows down, releases a giant, weary bubble of a sigh, and rumbles in a deep, booming voice:

"Oh, do shut up, little generic crustacean. You think you have problems? I am currently on an involuntary, radical, plankton-and-krill-free diet. There is absolutely none of it left in the entire global ocean. Not a speck! I am literally starving to death in slow motion."

The crab pulls in his eyestalks, astonished:

"Really? How could you possibly know that for sure? You’ve just been floating around this reef all day!"

The whale rolls his massive eye in irritation:

"I just heard it via the oceanic long-distance network. A colleague from the North Atlantic was singing the latest data updates to us. Mind you, the signal was incredibly distorted and barely legible."

"Why's that?" asks the crab.

"Because the entire line was completely jammed and deafeningly loud!" groans the whale. "The non-stop, high-intensity military sonar blasting from those strange, naked land-apes on their floating tin cans is driving us completely mad. They pour so much acoustic noise into the water that you can't even hear your own thoughts anymore."

The crab grips a melting piece of coral, thoroughly frustrated:

"Splendid. Just bloody brilliant. So, what are we supposed to do now?"

The whale slowly begins to sink into the abyss and murmurs:

"No idea. But seeing as you don't really need your house anymore... do you mind if I eat you? As a salty piece of chewing gum?" 💀🦀🐋

mod

Tomorrow is the official UN World Oceans Day [United Nations]. Hurrah. Cue the majestic background music, the slow-motion footage of dolphins doing flips, and corporations changing their logos to a slightly different shade of blue [United Nations].

But let’s be entirely honest for a brief moment, shall we? Why on Earth should we care about saving a giant puddle of salty water when we have far more pressing, highly sophisticated, and civilized matters to attend to?

Priorities, people. Priorities.

While the planet’s life-support system is actively flatlining, human leadership is far too busy playing multi-trillion-dollar sandbox games.

🎮 The "Top 6 Global Distractions": What We Are Actually Busy With

Instead of fixing the giant blue engine that keeps us alive, global civilization has collectively agreed to hyper-focus on the following magnificent geopolitical endeavors:

🚀 1. The Multi-Billion Dollar Satellite Shooting Match: We are currently launching thousands of weaponized satellites into low Earth orbit. Why? To ensure that when the resource wars inevitably peak, we can jam each other’s GPS signals with absolute, space-age precision while the coral reefs below turn into ghost towns.

🦾 2. The Drone-Swarm Innovation Race: Our finest engineering minds aren't designing autonomous ocean-cleanup vessels. Oh no, that doesn't yield high stock dividends. They are training AI-driven drone swarms to hunt infantry in trenches, ensuring that our border conflicts remain highly automated, efficient, and thoroughly modernized.

🌐 3. Building Sovereign Digital Fortresses: Nations are currently spending billions to build "Sovereign Government Clouds" [White House IIJA]. The goal? To encrypt the tax records and bureaucratic paperwork of states, ensuring that our digitized administrations remain perfectly secure and hack-proof right up until the day the rising sea levels submerge the actual server farms [White House IIJA].

🔋 4. The Rare-Earth Mineral Border Brawl: We are deploying naval fleets to secure tiny, uninhabited islands in the South China Sea and the Arctic. We need those border lines drawn perfectly so we can claim the exclusive right to mine the remaining oil and lithium, completely ignoring the fact that the burning of said resources is turning the surrounding water into boiling acid.

🤖 5. The Trillion-Dollar AGI Armageddon Race: Big Tech is locked in a frantic race to see who can achieve Artificial General Intelligence first. Trillion-dollar monopolies are burning through entire national power grids just to train chatbots to write mediocre poetry and fake corporate emails, while the actual physical world outside the server room melts away.

🏰 6. The Luxury Subterranean Bunker Boom: Our brilliant Silicon Valley Overlords have looked at the climate data and arrived at a magnificent, logical conclusion: Do not save the ocean. Instead, build ultra-luxurious, nuclear-blast-resistant underground bunkers in New Zealand, complete with vertical organic farms and premium subscription-based air filtration. If the surface becomes a boiling soup of toxic sludge, the billionaires will be perfectly comfortable inside, coding virtual realities that don't smell like rotting kelp.

🏛️ Let the Games Begin! (Ancient Rome Edition 2.0)

The Roman Empire collapsed beautifully because they ignored systemic rot, overextended their military, and poisoned their own elite with lead-lined plumbing. Classic. But we are a progressive, globalized society! When we collapse, we don’t just sink a Mediterranean city—we take the entire global biosphere down the drain with us. Go big or go home, right?

After all, what is the ocean anyway? It’s just a bit of H2O and some rather dim-witted cod that failed to adapt to the free market. 🐟🧪

🛑 The Tiny Plot Hole: The Plankton is Checking Out

There is, however, one minor, microscopic hitch in this flawless evolutionary strategy. The ocean has quietly absorbed over 30% of our industrial CO2 emissions and 90% of the excess heat [United Nations]. As a result, the water is turning into a delightful, fizzing bath of carbonic acid.

And the phytoplankton—those lovely little green specks that generate over 50% of the oxygen we breathe—are currently packing their tiny digital bags [United Nations].

“Goodbye, and thanks for all the diesel!” 🦠👋

Once the plankton says its final farewell because the pH scale got a bit too spicy, the global atmosphere will become rather uncooperative for breathing. Even inside an ultra-luxury tech bunker, you eventually run out of oxygen. Quite awkward, really. 💀💨

🎭 So, put on your best linen suit, pour a glass of microplastic-infused champagne, and let us toast to tomorrow! It’s just nature, isn't it? And as the old song goes: Always look on the bright side of death... du-dah, du-dah-du-dah-du-dah! 🎶🎪

Look at this breathtaking, minimalist aesthetic! 😍 No noisy whales, no acidic crabs, and absolutely zero plankton to mess with the view. Truly, the Silicon Valley vision of the future is finally coming to life. Just pure, sterile H2O. It’s a bit quiet, yes, but think of how much money we saved on fishing subsidies! 🥂💀

Look at it. Absolute, beautiful, corporate peace. 😍 No annoying whales screaming from military sonar trauma, no fragile crabs dissolving in our carbonated acid bath, and absolutely zero messy eco-systems to disrupt deep-sea mining profits. Just pure, sterile, dead H2O. We finally won the war against nature. Now hold your breath forever, because the plankton just checked out. 🥂💀

# # # # # # # # #

🧵 Sources & References:

🌊 UN World Oceans Day: Official United Nations data on global oxygen production and oceanic heat absorption [United Nations].

🦠 Phytoplankton & Ocean Acidification: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research on marine pH decline and its lethal impact on primary oxygen-producing microorganisms.

🏰 Tech Billionaire Bunkers: Investigative reports (e.g., Douglas Rushkoff's "Survival of the Richest") detailing Silicon Valley's elite survivalist strategies and subterranean insulation.

🌐 Sovereign Government Infrastructure: Analysis on the military and administrative migration of national security networks into private cloud infrastructure [White House IIJA].

Happy World Oceans Day! 🌊 Here is a live stream of our global legacy. Clean, empty, and perfectly optimized for Wall Street. We traded the lungs of the earth for cheap lithium, military submarine games, and tax breaks for tech billionaires' survival bunkers. It turns out the ocean wasn't a trillion-dollar asset—it was just a temporary staging area for our extinction. Enjoy the silence. 💀💨

mod

Don't worry, humanity! As the premier frogs of the ecosystem, we have everything under control. Potentially losing 50% of our oxygen because the ocean turned into carbonic acid is just a minor, administrative hiccup [United Nations]. Our tech oligarchs are already coding a virtual atmosphere for their underground tombs. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the rising temperature. It’s a beautifully fair system: we ignored every warning, and now the pot is delivering the ultimate evolutionary low-blow. Pure, cosmic justice! 🍿🎪

In celebration and support of the life and livelihood that the ocean sustains, UN WOD 2021 will feature keynotes, panel discussions and pres

And when the boiling soup of this planetary whirlpool finally blows up in our collective faces, please could the distinguished human race refrain from retroactively complaining and screaming that 'we didn't know about this,' because much like the demolition of Earth for an intergalaktic bypass route in the famous Guide, the plans to save our oceans have been on display for decades in the metaphorical basement of global consciousness, meaning that now, as the plankton packs its bags and nature delivers the ultimate low-blow to our evolutionary loins, it is simply too late to frantically panic and reach for your towel." 🐸🚀🌌

mod

[crashoutcannibal]

I used to think techno feudalism was in the near future

I was wrong

It's in the early stages

This is what the Trump reelection was all about

I knew it was bad

I had no idea

The Plot Against America

The richest men in the country are in the final stages of a 40-year plan to kill America and crown themselves kings.

[happychew]

I enjoy working in tech...

But I am sick of working in tech...

I like computers but I hate what they are becoming...

I also hate working with just men with less experience than me asking me if I know how to do things that I taught them 🤦‍♀️ and telling me i can ask the other men for help