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Oh, so when we play roleplaying it's Satanic, but when you guys do it, it's fine?

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Stop buying blind box toys. If you like gambling so much, sculpt your own toy, the gamble being if it turns out a little bit shit or not. Instead of re-selling a blind box toy, or throwing it away, you gain the skill to make the next one better.

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BTW because of those fucking "Dire Wolves" allegedly brought back from extinction by Collosal Biosciences, we already have libertarian politicians in Aotearoa New Zealand using it as a reason to push forward on construction that would destroy conservation land, including the natural habitat of kiwi, because we can "just bring them back"

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Witness 🌙

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History repeats

Centrism is cowardice

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Fun idea: take the concept of Disneybounding, styling an outfit to give off the vibe of a Disney character, and apply it to creatures from the Monster Manual

Dungeonbounding

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In the history of colonial empire, there's always been terms to justify land theft; Manifest Destiny, Lebensraum, "A land without a people for a people without a land", and Terra Nullius. It's that last one, the belief that the land being taken is not occupied, or more accurately not being fully utilized by those already occupying it, that I think is relatable to the current moment of data-mining and AI.

We're currently seeing many court cases of people trying to stand against AI Tech companies, who have been rampantly pillaging the internet for any and all data that they can acquire, by any means necessary.

Some of them state that the only way to achieve their goal of Artificial General Intelligence, can only be realized by the wanton theft of data, and that regulation or the enforcement of copyright stands in opposition to that goal.

Much like the land stolen (and currently being stolen) by Colonial Settlers, the things that belong to us, either privately or collectively, online are being stolen, and that theft is being justified that all that data can be put to a grander purpose. Your rights to you likeness, your voice, your thoughts, your art, your labour, are not important enough to these zealots, who believe that the world is theirs alone to shape. That they will create a God (or Must create a God, if you believe the Roko's Basilisk cultists), as long as you surrender your data to them.

Boosters of AI constantly talk about how we must accept this technology, because it's just progress, it's the next step, accept it or get left in the dust. It's an old narrative. It's the same narrative that labelled Colonizers as "Bringing civilization" to "savage" indigenous peoples. It's same narrative that made "Luddite" mean "backwards and afraid of technology" instead of a group who fought against unscrupulous factory owners who would rather use child labour than allow artisans to keep their livelihoods. There is no singular future, destined to be formed at the hands of greedy capitalists. There are many possible futures, and we all get a hand in shaping it.

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Part 17 in my weekly poster series of 2025

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lucas varela 

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so i guess today i disrupted the UN "ai for good" summit and got arrested with a friend

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You know how online grifters have, on several occasions, made the claim "we are in the Matrix", usually in regards to having to have empathy?

So there was recently an ad for Porsche that was entirely AI generated, and it got me thinking about the threshold of technology in which it could be argued we are in the Matrix. At what point do we go from Real Life to The Matrix, not literally plugged into an artificial reality, but our daily life becoming so alienated and farmed for capital, that we are essentially people in tubes for the powers that be.

And that's the two parts of a Matrix-esque existence, Alienation and Production. Input/Output. With generative AI, there is hype stating that it can be used to provide a significant amount of labour, that will no longer be required of by humans. Art, coding, customer service, etc. Add in automation to the mix, and there's a significant chunk of your daily interactions with other humans that are going to allegedly be replaced by the creations of Big Tech. That's the alienation part. They want to sell you a world in which, on a date night for example, you order food via a chatbot, it's cooked by an automated kitchen, it's delivered by robotaxi, and your date is an AI girlfriend with an electronic pocket pussy.

As much as liberal AI boosters like to say, we'll all get UBI, we'll have so much free time when the robots do the jobs, there is no guarantee that UBI is ever coming. In fact, the track record of Capitalists is that they'll find a way to exploit humans even faster and more invasively. And they're always talking about how AI is going to create new human jobs. What resource of working class people are they going to exploit as AI/automation makes traditional employment more difficult? Is it attention? Is it data? Is it human biological functions? Nothing is off the table to a mindset that believes all resources must grow capital.

At what point do the general public start to consider that the future that capitalists armed with AI promise, is an anti-worker's rights, anti-consumer, anti-human rights, in which they would literally build The Matrix if they could squeeze more growth out by running the system on human batteries?

Would the grifters who claimed to be living in the Matrix because they don't like feminists, even care that the real world is getting more Matrix-like, because it aligns with their "hustle"?

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Referred to as “the Dusseldorf patient” to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.

Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.

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THE X-FILES | 2x03 'BLOOD'

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The recuperation of feminism, is the use of feminist language as a tool to create infighting and reduce intersectional solidarity. People who insist on ideological purity, rejecting a diversity of perspectives, only benefit the systems of oppression.

i cannot do another round of "is shaving feminist?" discourse again, i simply cannot do it. is shaving feminist? no! do feminists shave their bodies? yes! is this a deep betrayal of principles? not really! do some women actually shave for the mythical "sensory reasons"? well, considering that my number one reason for shaving my legs in the summer is because my ceiling fan blows on the hair and i'm constantly having mini freakouts that i've got a bug crawling on me, i'd imagine some do! is it okay for a woman to say to herself "i realize i'm mostly doing this because i don't want to be treated worse by people in the world who find my unshaven legs disgusting, but i'm still going to do it because i don't think suffering for no reason is virtuous" and shave? yes! will yelling at her to "think critically about her choices" until she agrees with you actually work? no! does any of this make it any easier to get an abortion in this country? nope! have we replaced the "is this pop star a feminist?" discourse of the 2010s with "are your personal choices antithetical to the tenets of feminism?" discourse in the 2020s, none of which is conveniently focused on the actual loci of power?? hahahahahahaaaaa

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Capitalist values have already built a dystopian present, why would AI technologies owned by tech billionaires who hold those same capitalist values, create anything other than a dystopian future.

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I think one aspect of the automation/AI takin' jobs conversation that isn't talked about enough is privatization. There's all this talk of white collar desk jobs going to be taken over by AI, and that often gives people the mental image of office workers for private companies, but what about the public sector?

Schools, hospitals, and other public services have been underfunded for years, and we've got neoliberal governments foaming at the mouth to invest in AI. If you install AI into every possible interface within public services, they're not public services any more. The workers are not people of the community, they're software owned and operated by tech oligarchs.

And the government still has to pay for the use of those AI programs, meaning tax payer money that would have gone to public sector workers who would have spent those wages in the local economy, is instead being funneled into the bank accounts of those tech oligarchs, likely in some tax haven.

It's not just tax payer money that the tech oligarchs gain, they also gain data on all the users of those public services, to do as they see fit because governments are reluctant to impose regulations on AI companies. It's bad enough that they're data mining us on social media, so you really want to be data mined at the doctors, or for your children to be data mined at school?

Lastly they have control over the output. As much as they push the narrative that these AI are going to become sentient, removing all accountability of the company for the output of this software, they do have control. You've already got Grok being tampered with to talk about White Genocide, they will not let their creation speak truth to power in anyway that means anything (despite their cutesy performances of rebellion, like writing roasts of Elon). They will not allow AI to set a curriculum in classrooms that teaches about how the wealthy gained their power. They will not allow AI to give medical advice that will affect their bottom line.

Handing the keys of public service infrastructure to AI tech companies in return for promises of convenience, efficiency and cheapness, is a Faustian bargain.