penpolyon

[penpolyon]

[penpolyon]

18/05/25

in the face of the lonelyness pandemic, one that is activeley encouraged by apps which see in person interactions as direct competitors to their platforms. To be activeley social is both necesarry, and an act of rebellion. You have to expend effort in this day and age to fight the current, to go against what every tech corporation wants you to do instead, to be your middleman, and hold a glass wall between you and your community, to keep you swipping ans scrolling togheter. We nolonger live in a world where people huddle togheter outside their buildings for a smoke, where people chat while getting their hair done, where people sat down and chatted at the coffe shop and shaired their newspapers, .

be activeley friendly, activeley neighborly and activeley involved in your community, they is no app on this earth that will actually bring them to you.

[penpolyon]

05/05/25

Your favorite content Creator, who loves their job, and is trying to teach you to to look out, stay woke, become financially independant, there is the news dosent tell you, here is the financial crash that looming and they want you be prepared for, here is how to avoid debt, there is how to meal plan, here is how to capsule wadrobe and avoid fast fashion, here is what the politicians are lying to you about, how to dunk on transphobes, here is what stocks to buy under the looming climate crisis...

I they think they might be helping, they haven't noticed, they've already missed the slight of hand. The gamed creator interfaces on many platforms, with a flicker of a freshly loaded screen and a tweak of code they now need to post again to ensure the percolate to the top of the algorithm.

The Creator, however much they love their fans, they are here first, second and third for the same reason that you the audience is. to generate ad revenue.

their job is to create material that advertisement can be attached to, to ensure you cast your eyes over it, undisturbed.

Penpolyon X

[penpolyon]

04/05/25

The fertility decline that everyone is talking about, (I like to imagining Musk foaming at the mouth as he Xtweets from his dark single cadle-lit gaming room, while his kids live elsewhere)

does not correlate with income, it's happeing in lower income countries as well.

It does not correlate with female educational attainment or rate of women in work, its happening in countries where both of these are low.

it is not correlating with housing cost, it is happening in countries where the cost of housing has remained stable.

it does not correlate with the cost of living crisis, its happening to countries that have remained relatively insulated from recent inflation trends.

it does not correlate rates of higher education, it's happening in communities where this low.

It's not correlated to vacation or leasure time, its happening in countries wilth lower expendable incomes and less paid leave.

The fertility crisis correlates with rates of Coupling, that is the rate at which people enter relationships. Futhermore the earlier people couple, the more children they tend to have over their lifetime as well.

The rate of coupling is correlated to use of internet and smartphone adoption.

Where smartphone adoption is high, the number of marriges per year is low. Furthermore where countries have a higher political divide between men and women, the rate of marrige is also lower. See Korea.

The "fertility crisis" no matter how much right-wing Musk-rat faced goons say so, is not caused by women who work, infact in high income countries more high income women tend to have slightly more kids than working class women. Its not womens' fault, its not them being too focused on money, or partying, or traveling, or being independent. Its not people being too lazy, or too career driven, or buying avocado toast.

Its a simptom of a silent pandemic, that of loneliness, of lack of in-person interacton, the decline of friendships, the decline of third spaces, the decline of time spent socialising, the decline in communities, the quieting of the town square and of bars. This is a crisis of friendship come far before that of babies. i personaly think that this is a much more frightening thing than people choosing not to procreate, any day.

Social media and smartphone addiction are only now showing their ramiphications on society, with the loneliness pandemic, the rise of right wing populism, and the widenig of the political divide between men and women.

The likes of Mark Zuckeberg (Facebook), Patric Dorsey(Xhitter) and Zhang Yiming(TikTok) have long acted as under the assumption that human social networks are resilient, predictable and sustainable entities that can be used as engagement extraction reasources that are largely determined by the behaviour of users as atomised individuals. With most recently Zuck announcing the introduction of Large Language Model driven "companion" chatpots that can can be engaged with in their webchatting services alongside human companions.

We have yet to recon with the fact that human social networks are, like any other Natural systems, actually delicate, dynamic, reactionary entities that are capable of generating dificoult to predict feedback loops and be made to amplify external stressors. They are less monoculture crop that can be reaped for what its worth come harvest but fragile upland meadow, vibrant and buisy when in their full glory with sensitive symbiotic reationships between many different individuals in the community.

Get off your smartphone, stop listening to Joe Rogan he's not going to get you laid anyway, log off, rise up, speak up, introduce yourself to a neighbour and Grow.

The relationship recession

global natality rates

internet use and fertility

new gender divide

Penpolyon X

[penpolyon]

08/04/25

Sam Altman writes (I presume ChatGTP did it for him) in September 2024 that if a Lamplighter, (a historic professional tasked with lighting gas lamps each evening) where to see the present, that they would think that technology of today permits a life of prosperity unimaginable to them beforehand. I ask myself if it matters much to the Lamplighter what their first impressions of the present day are, when they must then figure out how they may feed all of their family with an electric bulb? 

I’m sure Sam’s plans for himself are to take the money and run. 

When he does, what will he run to? Where do aspirations of success take modern people now? It is perhaps an increasingly atomised cocoon of your own self-actualisation. Staring in a mirror, with the perfect aspirational multi-step morning skincare routine, to then take you to an empty early morning gym, and plow along a treadmill alone, perform some squeaky pushups on your penthouse balcony in the dark, your face lit up under the glow of a screen and you discuss business plans with your AI-driven assistant (afterall you are going to have to at least make it to 10-thousand), have a meal cooked by someone else you seldom speak to in a room away from you, and brought to a plate at your desk. You then will go to a coffee shop and buy the latest  seasonal flavor syrup dowsed into your drink, packaged away so you can quickly leave the bustle of the shop, afterall you have an 12-step nighttime skincare routine to tend to, you check the 4k watch no one will ever ask you the time for and get into a new sports car home don’t forget to post about it, otherwise no one else would have seen you today. 

But is any of this actually aspirational? Or did the algorithm tell you it was? Does anyone have sex after their 12-step skincare routine? Do you need the latest google assistant to tell you how to smell spice in an ingredient, or do you need your elders huddled round the stove with you to talk you though it? Do you need an AI snapchat assistant to help you come up with a funny post or do you need some friends to laugh at your embarrassing texts you sent to your crush? Do you need your hotel to be operated by an app or do you need a hotelier present to help you if your room is missing the cot for your child that you booked for? Do you even need the perfect abs if you don't have anyone who might see them to go to the lake with when the sun’s out? Does a tree that falls in a forest with no-one around make a sound? 

We are social animals, Capitalism and engagement mining social media likes to paint you as your own mini-god looking in the mirror at videos of influencers who have the perfect grindset, the 4:00am start, the perfect summer wardrobe, the full face of makeup alone in the house, the ripped muscles talking about their weekly meal box order in their living room, the car-seat muckbang, the fashion haul, the gadget unboxing from its amazon packaging, the right breathing exercise before work, you’re going to have to take it at least 10-thousand. 

You do know none of these things have anything to do with you bent over laughing until your stomach hurts with your loved one on the carpet? Do you?  Let me explain it quite simply:  You don’t need the photos of you in front of your new flashy car, what you need to be sat on the bonnet of your old banger that you covered in stickers, eating cheesy chips in a car park, while other local petrolheads talking at the local car-meet. You don’t need the perfect gym sculpted abs, you need to be running across the field with all your might towards your mate who has the ball, so you can then chat about going to a pottery workshop once the kick-about is done. You don’t need the instagram likes, you need your friends huddled round the piano together. You don’t need the latest and most advanced AI to tell you how to cook for one, you need you and your relatives to be bumping into each other in a kitchen. You don’t need an AI expert to talk you through it, you need to pick the brain of your clever workmate over lunch to ask him what she’s working on. 

Sam talks about every child having access to a virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, but will they have access to a parent who listens to them intently waffle about Brachiosaurus? I don't think Sam will be sitting his child in front of a virtual tutor. 

Remember that you are a social animal, first, second and third, remember that the first firemaker did not use the heat of the fire to replace the warmth of their mother’s embrace. The inventor of the wheel did not use it to teach their child to walk. The first adopters of writing did not use it in place of choirsong. Do not let the AI developers and their ilk let you think that their Large language models can used as proxies to friends.

[penpolyon]

17/03/2025

I tried to be slow last weekend

I Had a moment that felt real. This weekend I and some friends were all sat together in the living room of a nice bnb we were renting. Sat amongst the sofas, I was playing chess with M. While the others where stood all round the piano as O played, singing along to songs from Les Miserables.

I never really liked musicals that much, at least not with the same intensity with which they do. Part of me recoiled as they started off with their thespian delights, mostly because of how foreign the whole thing is to me. No one in my family ever liked musicals either.

And yet, I was still enchanted by it all. And I remember thinking, -What a time to be alive?- of all the moments I could have been living, all of time eternal has forked in one moment in the present with me in it. All of humanity was here bringing this to me, the Music, the Piano, Chess, Warmth, Shelter, Victor Hugo, Friendship. Despite the madness of the modern world and humanity's relentless march towards capitalist hell and climate breakdown, we still had time to invent Les Miserables.

We have still done great things because humanity is still at its core Good, however much the present likes to show us otherwise, the ugly crack in the mirror, but the real thing is good.

There is still so much to save, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of the Great Walk Back, where we must choose the path that takes us where we can pick up and re-learn the wisdoms of those who came before us. To walk back and gather the kindling for the 8th Fire. the Green path.

I have spotted the first good wood to burn, the firekeeper that can bring upon a new dawn, its all of our Friends singing together, enjoying our own company.

[penpolyon]

14/03/2025

"[Xitter teaches us that] First: you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises. You are putting on those goggles and seeing the world through them. . . .

In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters."

Stolen Focus (2022)

by Johann Hari

[penpolyon]

10/03/25

You may find it interesting that, contrary to your feelings and trust in your favorite online content creator, no matter how wholesome they are and how much good they do for the world, or how positive their messaging and "spreading awareness" may be, they actually do not have your best interests in mind. Their interests may 100% be in the good—they may love the work they do, and they may enjoy creating content for you. They may not really be in it for the money too much; they may enjoy engaging with their fans and tailoring their work to their requests or creating something unexpected because they feel it is an important piece of media to spread out into the ether. They actually have no say in it, you have both already been decieved. they are not influencers, they have already been influenced.

Behind it all is the invisible hand, tugging at the strings—the platform creators, the tech company overlords who, with a sleight of hand, a new feature, a tweak of the algorithm, a points system, content boosts, likes, and heart reactions, have further optimized their machines. Just a little more reward for your favorite creator to post a little more often than before, a bit more captivating than before, a bit faster-paced, a bit more clickbaiting, a bit more rage-inducing, a bit more pity-mining than they would have otherwise wanted to.

And for you, the algorithm will feed you—just stay on for one more video, read one more post, scroll a little further. "Here, your favorite creator! We tricked them into posting twice in a week just for you. Come to your trough, the both of you, and feed for longer."

Now with Shorts.

I aim to make this blog as boring and unengaging as possible, I actually am glad when it only gets one or less hearts, it means I'm doing a good job, I am not creating "content" that can we weponised against us both to mine advertisement money from us. If you have gotten bored halfway through reading my ramblings, so much so that you put your phone down and look up, then I would consider it a victory even. But even better if no one is hooked into it entirely.

I aim to create non-content. if you are still here, well done, now look away from your screen,

[penpolyon]

10/03/25

accessibity:

*a photo of a ring-bound notebook with notes written on it in black ink, it reads:*

So few people use fountain pens now that paper in new notebooks has gotten progressivemey thinner from enshittification that when you do use a fountain pen the ink bleeds through the page, showing up on the other side.

Do you actually want to do offline? because when you do you will actually need to face all the things that you are distracting your self from.

Clawing back your time and attention away from online media is not a question of willpower. It's a societal ill, that is systemic and socially ingraned in much the dame way that we have an obesity crisis. Manufactured for corporate gains.

*end of written text*

[penpolyon]

05/03/25

I was going to say “I’ve recently come to realise…” but in reality, I’ve actually always on some level, and I think you have too, been aware of this. The old saying afterall goes that “if you are getting something for free, then you are the product”.  I will therefore say: “I have increasingly become intolerant to the fact…”.

Gradually over the course of the last 2 decades of the internet,  there has been a slow metastasising of a new way of supporting digital spaces, one where the platforms we find ourselves are increasingly designed not for human utility, but rather based on an extractivist midset, not unlike the mining of a precious ore from forested hillsides.  That forest is your mind, and the ore is your time taken away from you as you exist on this beautiful rock.  Social media and the wider internet have instead been increasingly more about mining more and more human time,  attention, and the opportunity to, really do anything else with the limited time we each have in this life.

Do not be fooled, You are not on here really to enjoy yourself, not to learn, to connect, or derive value out of your experience of this place, infact you will have noticed that social media ins increasignly bad at making you feel this way; your are here quite simply so you can cast your eyes on the ad, scroll on, thank you, next.

Every advertisement, consciously or not, that you consume on here, is putting money straight into the pockets of the Bezos, Musks, Zuckerbergs, and Pichais of this world. You donate your time for them every day, they wont ever pay you for it, but they will use it to refuel their private jets with it.

Over the course of our lives we have seen an evolutionary arms race play out, we are wonderful organic individuals, whose brains have taken millions of years to evolve, focused on finding brightly coloured fruit and spotting leopard print dangers. The other side is a machine, an algorithm developed with intention, handsomely paid, well resourced, and  adapting a breakneck speed. Human evolution does not stand a chance, you scarcely have time to learn a better habit before the latest methods of gamification are launched to drive you back in. What is one person’s willpower up against the artifice of the worlds brightest?

Whatever time you manage to carve out for yourself, in between work, travel and chores. You sit down to relax? You'e on the bus? You’re waiting for your meal to reheat in the microwave? That little bit of time when you should be sleeping? They will come for that time too. From our perspective this arms race has occurred in the blink of an eye, not even one human lifespan, merely the length of one childhood. Your child is not even born yet, They will come for their time too.

[penpolyon]

Actual image of Press meeting between Ukranian President Zelenskyy with US President Trump and JD Vance. 28th febuary 2025

[penpolyon]

27/02/2025

I spent 4h 26m on my phone this wednesday.

[penpolyon]

26/02/2025

I miss the old internet.

I remember as a kid sometime in 2005 I use to go on Google images, my favorite online site, and I would type into the search bar: "green dragon" and hit send. A few seconds would roll by, and the first few rows of images, all different sizes of various online artists, netizens who had been before me had all uploaded to their own blogs and webpages, illustrating stories and other informative pages on dragons, books or just sharing the artwork for the sake of it. I would scroll through and look at each image one by one, much like my favorite picture books, when I got to the bottom of where my mother's computer had loaded I would wait a bit, impatiently, for the new pictures to load. I wanted more, if I felt like the well of green dragons had begun to run dry, or I was seeing the same images again, I would head back to the search bar and type: "Red dragon" and hit the search button again. Little artist me would scan imagery, photos and illustrations to feed into my brain's training dataset so I could better draw my own fantastical creations. My sketch book was never too far from me, and it would also be filled with dragons. Sometimes I would copy pictures of them from the internet or from a picture book, but then again, there weren't a lot of books given to little girls whose focus and attention was solely on dragons and other reptilian monsters. So the internet just had to do. I did have a book of natural history, The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric life, by Dixon et al. 1988. Which I must of poured hours of scrupulous observation, I read it back to back hundreds of times over.

Sooner or later I learned what Deviant was, by then the menagerie of images had become somewhat endless, if your search bar was a boomerang, you could throw it outward, and no matter how much you turned it around to the next page, it would never quite swing back around to where you had started, someone had just uploaded something new after all. I uploaded a few pictures of my dragons, and it felt like a panic attach to hit upload, from the excitement, a world of strangers who could draw better than me had never seen my artwork before. My notification box alerted me to a few comments, all positive, some constructive, one person pleaded with me to never ever stop drawing, noone was selling anything here but their interest. Later I would get facebook, this was middle school, which in hindsight was possibly the worst time possible for the social network to drop. But still it was incredibly exiting, I could upload pictures from days out or parties with friends and share them with people, asking permission with every snap with friends if it could upload it on "Face" as it was called in Italy. I could also see what my classmates where up to, things that I was not invited to. I remember feeling like I did not have enough evidence to show people that I had friends and that I was normal. At some point I began seeing that my classmates weren't really posting photos of themselves out and about either, realistically, any individual one of them probably wasn't up to much given they had school work to do. But they where online, and they where reposting stuff, funny jokes and funny pictures, of jokes I didn't understand, two words and and image, celebs I didn't know, few really about personal interests I understood. Desperate to fit in I also wanted to to do the same. The only problem is I didn't know how to repost. Where did you find the source of these images? what button do I repost? how does one know which one is the right one to repost?

I remember crying because my Facebook dash did not look anything like my classmates, mine had images of walks I had been on with family, and my classmates shoes all lined up in the park together. One or two likes. Theirs was filled with memes, tens of likes and comments, all in understanding of the joke. I remember showing the monitor screen to my mother to diagnose the issue, eventually we found how to do it, and I had to hunt around these images to share. I had found some of the fanpages and groups that friends followed, columns and columns of memes and feeling posts to share, few made sense, I was not yet familiar with the new language. I found something I did understand, a picture of a full moon and the words "thinking about him". I didn't really know who "him" was, but I hoped others might, i liked the picture of the moon. The post went on my dashboard. The next day a classmate I seldom talked to liked it, Jenny, thank you Jenny, my personal profile now looked a bit like the rest.

The rest was a big surge, sharing, chatting, online calling, finding, deep diving, photographing, uploading, commenting, liking, disliking, reblogging, tagging, scrolling, viewing, watching, reacting, replying, swiping, tweeting, pirating, collating, shipping, arguing, reviewing, It was all a bit toilet stall wall, a bit town square, a bit library, a bit family photo-album left on the coffee table. But it was all quite personable, it was easy to focus on your little neighbourhood, your special interest, and yet a very shared experience, we where all dancing the same silly dance, but then retreating to our own little community space built around a book we like or something. It was the 15-minute neighbourhood of the virtual experience. You came home and checked for updates and replies from friends, you looked around a bit, and then you logged off, checked out, and did something else. For the people, by the people, until it wasn’t.

It creeped in little by little, I dont think we really noticed it much but it’s no longer personable, on Facebook now, when I remember that I still have one, there are no friends photos there, there are no memes that they have posted, there are seldom even much of identifiable persons that I know or care for. Not persons but professionals, in the business of "influencing" their only influence is on you screen time, and if the sleeping dragon over its hoard of advertisement is to be fed that day, you might toss your money its way. I cannot hear friends above the cacophony, the perpetual dawn chorus of sloppy content. And yet you cant look away, so you scroll away and away.

but hey, its 2005 and I have just typed into google images "diplodocus" from my mum's study, lets see what there is today.

[penpolyon]

[penpolyon]

Only capitalism can create a world where a new technology like ChatGTP fills people with existential dread.

[penpolyon]

Important to note that in the UK, the forms of direct action described in the reblog above are actually been made illegal by Thacher and her successors. it is illegal for unions to strike in solidarity, to continue to provide their services for free or intentionally mishandling work.

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

[penpolyon]

I legit have been feeling this for the last 3 years, I dunno what's changed, probably me, coming to greater awareness of it. But I just feel out of place, there is something deeply un homely, unwelcoming about the UK now, I've lived in this country for 10 years. And always felt up until recently that with every passing year if feel more at home, more like it was my country, but for the past 2-3 years it's been going the opposite way. And I can't quite pinpoint why. And I know obviously that my home country is by no means perfect, it has many issues. But there is something far more organic and human about other European countries that make me instantly feel at home even if I'm not in my home country. Something that Britain does not have.

I think eventually when I'm ready to I have to leave, unfortunately. I just don't see myself living my whole life here like I once dreamed of. I used to love the UK. There is still much to love about it but the thought of living another 10-20 years here sounds like a nightmare.

Having seen this Reddit post I think there are millions of people who care and notice. The last few years have been very instructive on how the rich wage class war on us, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the Tories have created a tinderbox atmosphere among working people. It’s just very rare to hear dissenting voices in the media which cranks out an endless stream of articles like this:

The people who get their news from the Newscorp and Facebook bubble tend to live in well off areas where they don’t see the long queues of families waiting outside food banks come heatwave or torrential rain, but it’s pretty obvious to everyone else something is about to snap. Rent and bills spiraling, real wages falling, the cost of living crisis is going to drive millions into poverty; it’s even more serious than the poll tax which brought Thatcher down. But it is encouraging to see things like the resurgence in union membership, Mick Lynch challenging the bosses’ lies on TV, the Don’t Pay campaign and Enough is Enough.