"Anything I do today I regard as urgent, for a man only has so much time to complete whatever is his life's work."--Malcolm X Revolutionary. Scholar. Music Lover. Writer. Fun-Haver.
I actually do think it’s better for abusers and abusive characters to realize the harm their past actions caused and seek to do better than be literally or metaphorically executed for their crimes
I think it’s better for abusers and abusive characters to realize the harm their past actions caused and seek to do better than be literally or metaphorically executed for their crimes.
I think it’s better for abusers and abusive characters to realize the harm their past actions caused and seek to do better than be literally or metaphorically executed for their crimes.
Original Post: Keith Porter was tragically taken from us by an off-duty ice agent, and his family is seeking justice during this difficult time. Every donation can help support their fight for truth and accountability. Please consider clicking the link below to contribute or share it with others who might want to help. Thank you for your support! https://gofund.me/530afb61e
America’s collapsing consumption is the world’s disenshittification opportunity
I'm at the end of my tour for my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification. My last two stops are CCC in Hamburg, Dec 27-30 and the Tattered Cover in Denver (Jan 22). Hope to see you!
We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American era and a post-American world. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors.
When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America's hard power – the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it's America's soft power that established and maintained true American dominance, the "weaponized interdependence" that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book The Underground Empire:
As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as a more than a global power – it is a global platform. If you want to buy things from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances were you're use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world's hub-and-spoke telecoms system.
No one serious truly believed that these US systems were entirely trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, weaponize) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world's fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world – lords and peasants, presidents and peons.
Instead, we got the US confiscating Argentina's foreign reserves to pay back American vulture capitalists who bought distressed Argentine bonds for pennies on the dollar and then got to raid a sovereign nation's treasury in order to recoup a loan they never issued. Instead we saw the SWIFT system mobilized to achieve tactical goals from the War on Terror and Russia-Ukraine sanctions.
These systems are now no longer trustworthy. It's as though the world's brakes have started to fail intermittently, but we are still obliged to drive down the road at 100mph, desperately casting about for some other way to control the system, and forced to rely on this critical, unreliable mechanism while we do:
This process was well underway before Trump, but Trump's incontinent belligerence has only accelerated the process – made us keenly aware that a sudden stop might be in our immediate future, heightening the urgency of finding some alternative to America's faulty brakes. Through trade policy (tariffs) and rhetoric, Trump has called the question:
https://archive.is/WAMWI
One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control).
When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader – anyone. It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they own it).
The move put teeth into Trump's frequent reminders that America no longer has allies or trading partners – it only has rivals and adversaries. That has been the subtext – and overt message – of the Trump tariffs, ever since "liberation day" on April 2, 2025.
When Americans talk about the Trump tariffs, they focus on what these will do to the cost of living in the USA. When other countries discuss the tariffs, they focus on what this will do to their export markets, and whether their leaders will capitulate to America's absurd demands.
This makes sense: America is gripped by a brutal cost of living crisis, and contrary to Trump's assertions, this is not a Democratic hoax. We know this because (as The Onion points out), "Democrats would never run on a salient issue":
It also makes sense that Canadians and Britons would focus on this because Prime Ministers Carney and Starmer have caved on their plans to tax US Big Tech, ensuring that these companies will always have a cash-basis advantage over domestic rivals (Starmer also rolled over by promising to allow American pharma companies to gouge the NHS):
But there's another, highly salient aspect to tariffs that is much neglected – one that is, ultimately, far more important than these short-run changes to other countries' plans to tax American tech giants. Namely: for decades, the US has used the threat of tariffs to force its trading partners into policies that keep their tech companies from competing with American tech giants.
The most important of these Big Tech-defending policy demands is something called "anticircumvention law." This is a law that bans changing how a product works without the manufacturer's permission: for example, modifying your printer so it can use generic ink, or modifying your car so it can be fixed by an independent repair depot, or modifying your phone or games console so it can use a third-party app store.
This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method.
It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is was that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't.
So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders.
This is a point I've been making in many forums lately, including, most recently, on a stage in Canada, where I made the case that rather than whacking Americans with retaliatory tariffs, Canada should legalize reverse-engineering and go into business directly attacking the highest margin lines of business of America's most profitable corporations, making everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turning America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world:
There's lots of reasons to like this plan. Not only is it a double reverse whammy – making everything cheaper and making billions for a new, globally important domestic tech sector – but it's also unambiguously within Canada's power to do. After all, it's very hard to get American tech giants to do things they don't want to do. Canada tried to do this with Facebook, and failed miserably:
The EU – a far more powerful entity than Canada – has been trying to get Apple to open up its App Store, and Apple has repeatedly told them to go fuck themselves:
But anticircumvention law is something that every government has total, absolutely control over. Maybe Canada can't order Apple, Google and Facebook to pay their taxes, but it can absolutely decide to stop giving these American companies access to Canada's courts to shut down Canadian competitors so that US companies can go on stealing data and money from the Canadian people:
Funnily enough, this case is so convincing that I've started to hear from Canadian Trump appeasers who insist that we must not repeal our anticircumvention laws because this would work too well. It would inflict too much pain on America's looting tech sector, and save Canadians too much money, and make too much money for Canadian tech businesses. If Canada becomes the world's first disenshittification nation (they say), we will make Trump too angry.
Apparently, these people think that Canada should confine its tariff response to measures that don't work, because anything effective would provoke Trump.
When I try to draw these critics out about what the downside of "provoking Trump" is, they moot the possibility that Trump would roll tanks across the Rainbow Bridge and down Lundy's Lane. This seems a remote possibility to me – and ultimately, they agree. The international response to Trump invading Canada because we made it easier for people (including Americans) to buy cheap printer ink would be…intense.
Next, they mumble something about tariffs. When I point out that the US is already imposing tariffs on Canadian exports, they say "well, it could be worse," and point to various moments when Trump has hiked the tariffs on Canada, e.g. because he was angry over being reminded that Ronald Reagan would have hated his guts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCKmMEFiLrI
But of course, the fact that Trump's tariffs yo-yo up and down depending on the progress of his white matter disease means that anyone trying to do forward planning for something they anticipate exporting to America should assume that there might be infinity tariffs the day they load up their shipping container.
But there's another way in which the threat of tariffs is ringing increasingly hollow: American consumption power is collapsing, because billionaires and looters have hoarded all the country's wealth, and no one can afford to buy things anymore.
America is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped recovery":
A K-shaped recovery is when the richest people get richer, but everyone else gets worse off. Working people in America have gotten steadily poorer since the 1970s, even as America's wealthiest seen their net worth skyrocket.
The declining economic power of everyday Americans has multiple causes: stagnating wages, monopoly price-gouging, and the blistering increase in education, housing and medical debt. These all have the same underlying cause, of course: the capture of both political parties – and the courts and administrative agencies – by billionaires, who have neutered antitrust law, jacked up the price of health care and a college educaton, smashed unions, and cornered entire housing markets.
For decades, America's consumption power has been kept on life-support through consumer debt and second (or third, or fourth) mortgages. But America's monopoly credit card companies are every bit as capable of price-gouging as America's hospitals, colleges and landlords are, and Americans don't just carry more credit-card debt than their foreign counterparts, they also pay more to service that debt:
The point is that every dollar that goes into servicing a debt is a dollar that can't be used to buy something useful. A dollar spent on consumption has the potential to generate multiple, knock-on transactions, as the merchant spends your dollar on a coffee, and the coffee-shop owner spends it on a meal out, and the restaurateur spends it on a local printer who runs off a new set of menus. But a dollar that's shoveled into the debt markets is almost immediately transferred out of the real economy and into the speculative financial economy, landing in the pocket of a one-percenter who buys stocks or other assets with it.
The rich just don't buy enough stuff. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own.
Meanwhile, consumers keep having their consumption power siphoned off by debt-collectors and price-gougers, with Trump's help. The GOP just forced eight million student borrowers back into repayment:
As Tim Wu points out in his new book, The Age of Extraction, one consequence of allowing monopoly pricing is that it reduces spending power across the entire economy:
Take electricity: you would probably pay your power bill even if it tripled. Sure, you'd find ways to conserve electricity and eliminate many discretionary power uses, but anyone who can pay for electricity will, if the alternative is no electricity. Electricity – like health, shelter, food, and education – is so essential that you'd forego a vacation, a new car, Christmas gifts, dinners out, a new winter coat, or a vet's visit for your cat if that was the only way to keep the lights on.
Trump's unshakable class solidarity with rent extractors, debt collectors and price gougers has significantly accelerated the collapse of the consumption power of Americans (AKA "the affordability crisis").
But it gets worse: Americans' consumption power isn't limited to the dollars they spend, it also includes the dollars that the government spends on their behalf, through programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid/Medicare. Those programs have been slashed to the bone and beyond by Trump, Musk, DOGE and the Republican majority in Congress and the Senate.
The reason that other countries took the threat of US tariffs so seriously – seriously enough to hamstring their own tech sector and render their own people defenseless against US tech – is that the US has historically bought a lot of stuff. For any export economy, the US was a critical market, a must-have.
But that has been waning for a generation, as the Lambo-and-Sub-Zero set hoarded more and more of the wealth and the rest of us were able to afford less and less. In less than a year, Trump has slashed the consumption power of the an increasing share of the American public to levels approaching the era of WWII ration-books.
The remaining American economy is a collection of cheap gimmicks that are forever on the brink of falling apart. Most of the economy is propped up by building data-centers for AI that no one wants and that can't be powered thanks to Trump's attacks on renewables. The remainder consists of equal parts MLMs, Labubus, Lafufus, cryptocurrency speculation, and degenerate app-based gambling.
None of this is good. This is all fucking terrible. But I raise it here to point out that "Do as I say or Americans won't buy your stuff anymore" starts to ring hollow once most Americans can't afford to buy anything anymore.
America is running out levers to pull in order to get the rest of the world to do its bidding. American fossil fuels are increasingly being outcompeted by an explosion of cheap, evergreen Chinese solar panels, inverters, batteries, and related technology:
What's more, it's gonna be increasingly difficult for the US to roll tanks anywhere, even across the Rainbow Bridge, now that Pete Hegseth is purging the troops of anyone who can't afford Ozempic:
And Congress just gutted the US military's Right to Repair, meaning that the Pentagon will be forced to continue its proud tradition of shipping busted generators, vehicles and materiel back to the USA for repair:
Eventually, some foreign government is going to wake up to the fact that they can make billions by raiding the US tech giants that have been draining their economy, and, in so doing, defend themselves against Trump's cyberwar threat to order Microsoft (or Oracle, or Apple, or Google) to brick their key ministries and corporations. When they do, US Big Tech will squeal, the way they always do:
But money talks and bullshit walks. There's a generation of shit-hot technologists who've been chased out of America by mask-wearing ICE goons who wanted to throw them in a gulag, and a massive cohort of investors looking for alpha who don't want to have to budget for a monthly $TRUMP coin spend in order to remain in business.
And when we do finally get a disenshittification nation, it will be great news for Americans. After all, everyday Americans either own no stock, or so little stock as to be indistinguishable from no stock. We don't benefit from US tech companies' ripoffs – we are the victims of those ripoffs. America is ground zero for every terrible scam and privacy invasion that a US tech giant can conceive of. No one needs the disenshittification tools that let us avoid surveillance, rent-seeking and extraction more than Americans. And once someone else goes into business selling them, we'll be able to buy them.
Buying digital tools that are delivered over the internet is a hell of a lot simpler than buying cheap medicine online and getting it shipped from a Canadian pharmacy.
For an America First guy, Trump is sure hell-bent on ending the American century.
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:
In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
"Friend" is an AI wearable device designed to provide "companionship + emotional support"— i.e replace human friendships. Its literally an AI chatbot that you wear around your neck. "Friend" just paid for the largest ad campaign in NYC subway history
And Every. Single. Poster was vandalised, it literally looks like some of the most beautiful art you have ever seen
I cannot stress enough how much I would like more of us to get more unhinged about Abraham Lincoln and specifically about the House Divided Speech, and its, apparently neglected, assertion that one half of the house must utterly crush the other half. Civility?! You dumb chuds! No compromise with traitors! No argument but the cannon’s mouth!
hey so a bunch of people have taken this post as an opportunity to decry interpreting media sexually/suggestively at all and it’s pissing me off. joining the war on eroticism on the side of eroticism. #ThatCigaretteIsAPenis
it really is insane how little you hear about "america has the world's highest prison population by such a significant margin that it would be seen as excessively over-the-top if it was used in fiction"
before you say "4% isn't that big of a difference between the US and China"
for anyone bad at math 1.4 billion divided by 340 million is about 4. we have a fourth the population of china but a higher prison population and a higher incarceration rate by far. this is just widely publicly available information that you're supposed to just accept. it's not supposed to make you go insane.
The US has the largest prison population AND the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The US is home to 4.2% of the world's population but 20% of its incarcerated population. More than 0.6% of the US population is incarcerated.
Men make up 93% of the US prison population, but despite this, the US accounts for 30% of the GLOBAL population of incarcerated women.
Housing insecurity is the most significant predictor of incarceration with 22% of state prisoners experiencing it shortly before incarceration.
12% of state prisoners in the US were unhoused before their 16th birthday.
68% of US state prisoners were first incarcerated before their 16th birthday.
More than half of people in prisons and jails in the US have a mental illness.
Cognitive learning disabilities occur in state prisons at nearly 500% the national rate.
[all data sourced or derived from the Prison Policy Initiative]
Correction: 68% of US state prisoners were first arrested before the age of 19. 38% of US state prisoners were first arrested before the age of 16. (prison policy report)
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.
I am not that old, and I didn't have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.
Gen alpha is so brainrotted because there’s too many satellites affecting their astrology. These babies got Starlink #637 in Pisces and BeiDou in Aries and ISS in Virgo and shit, its like spiritual microplastics
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