I feel like IT people have a lot of efficacy on this one.

I hope that some of the coders losing their jobs to AI find a way to poisoning the well somehow and create tools to undermine the technology, the companies paying for it, and the oligarchs that want it.

I have them, they are great. Here are a few obvious things I’ve learned that I didn’t appreciate beforehand:

The complexity of the endeavor rises exponentially with the number of kids. That is to say, 3 is a much bigger leap from 2 than 2 was from 1.

They get dramatically more expensive and complicated as they get older. All that exhausting baby activity is the easy part. As you start to figure out how to do it, the rules shift and you have to get learning again.

I never imagined how much of adult life as a parent revolves around the literal management of shit. Between kids, pets, and aging parents, I just never expected to be so preoccupied with the logistics of excrement. I guess I was living in some kind of Disneyland in the before times. You sort of get used to it though. Sort of.

Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.

20 years ago, a piece of shit like Mark Zuckerberg would have used a similarly meaningless term like “political correctness” instead. Made no sense then and makes no sense now. What is the problem exactly? Is there something wrong with having an ethical framework and applying it consistently? Or, having standards? Using this framing, any ideological viewpoint is inherently bad, including the nihilistic and hypocritical one that Zuckerberg himself is expressing here. It’s all just nonsense, and further evidence that the economy that plied this asshole with so much wealth is anything but a meritocracy.

This is correct.

Feudal lords like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk will wrap themselves in fake populist notions like “free expression”, but they will never, ever tolerate speech that meaningfully challenges the entrenched power structure that they benefit from. All of their feel good taglines are an intentional misdirection designed to pacify the mob that would tear them to pieces if they actually realized what was happening. Remember “Democracy dies in darkness”? I work in Silicon Valley and I’ve been trying to educate family members who continue to mistakenly believe that the tech community is comprised of lefty California hippies. Tech will not save us from fascism. The professional media won’t either. Given the institutional corruption now fundamental to our government, I fear that there is no ‘rules-based’ solution to any of this.