#Internet Of Things Training In Erode

[hero-israel]

The lies and mistruths that Jews "invaded" and "colonized" Palestine, coupled with the lies and mistruths that everyone lived together in harmony with no violence, combine to say that therefore any Jewish anxiety about a post Zionist landscape where there's a very real possibility of Jews being a minority is illegitimate. It is indistinguishable from white Boers fearing retribution, or Americans discomfort with the idea of indigenous sovereignty.

But when you whitewash your own history and gaslight Jews from dawn till dusk, of course you can make them look like whiny entitled brats who just don't want accountability and are fearing "war crime tribunals" (ok girl). But Jews are unique. This would be the one time where the "colonizer" actually has a basis to fear being the minority. There's historical precedent for it, not just from Europe. It's undeniable.

And yes, Israel's Arab neighbors probably have no intentions of wiping it off the map (Iran is a different story), and Hamas is not powerful enough to massacre all Jewish people in Israel no matter how hard they try. The West Bank is not nearly as violent as it used to be. The situation is not hopeless, and regardless Israel can mobilize millions of well trained well armed reservists with state of the art weapons the backing of most Western powers and of course nukes.

Israel is safe... but even with the knowledge that Israel is safe it doesn't matter if we're talking about a peaceful negotiated Right of Return for Palestinians and they are the majority without a single bullet being fired. And also, think of the Jewish People like abuse survivors. Someone can be physically safe, but they still do not feel safe. They need constant outside assurance that what they're experiencing is real and that they have support. Trauma takes time to heal, a long ass time on an individual scale and who knows how long on a societal scale.

It's not "centering ourselves" or being whiny or duplicitous or crying antisemitism when Jews request over and over and over again that Palestinians and their allies do the simplest fucking task of calling the murder of Jewish civilians the atrocity that it is. They can't even do that, let alone say they embrace having Jewish neighbors, that they see Jews as equals, that they would protect Jews, that they view the Jewish People as their cousins who should share the land and all its abundance with them.

They never stop and think about why these are not really concerns for 8 millionth generation German Americans, and why they are for Jewish people of all colors and backgrounds. If they're not putting in that barest baseline of work then at a certain point we can say we tried and we're going to prioritize our safety at all costs.

Excellent comment. Thank you.

I would just say that it absolutely is about centering ourselves, that centering ourselves is a wonderful thing and we should do it more, there's a reason why "The Giving Tree" is sad and disturbing.

Probably the most tragic element of this awful October is that it was all based purely on psychology, not on politics. Hamas is not actually going to destroy Israel. It was meant to trigger Israeli Jews (and I deliberately use a word that has been eroded to snotty meaninglessness by Internet trolls, since that is the mentality of these ISIS-style groups; the cruelty is the point) and shatter their sense of safety, and then put them into a position where they had to respond with overwhelming force so as not to look weak in a rough neighborhood. It will gain nothing real, nothing tangible, for Hamas, for Palestinians, for anti-Israel dead-enders; it was an act of pure spite. And the West's Useful Idiots for death and racism sign onto it eagerly, because of their psychological need to see Jews get taken down a notch (via lots and lots of dead Arabs).

[cantmakeyouloveme]

Article blow the cut

PEOPLE ARE LOSING LOVED ONES TO AI-FUELED SPIRITUAL FANTASIES

Self-styled prophets are claiming they have “awakened” chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT.

Talking to ChatGPT can lead down a rabbit hole to religious delusions of grandeur.

Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of 15-plus years and having kids, and they had pledged to go into it “completely level-headedly,” Kat says, connecting on the need for “facts and rationality” in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship,” the 41-year-old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation — then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth,’” Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple.

When Kat and her husband finally separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media: people kept reaching out about it, asking if he was in the throes of mental crisis. She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse in February of this year, where he shared “a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” but wouldn’t say more, as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.” He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her.

“In his mind, he’s an anomaly,” Kat says. “That in turn means he’s got to be here for some reason. He’s special and he can save the world.” After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. “The whole thing feels like Black Mirror,” she says. “He was always into sci-fi, and there are times I wondered if he’s viewing it through that lens.”

Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

And a midwest man in his 40s, also requesting anonymity, says his soon-to-be-ex-wife began “talking to God and angels via ChatGPT” after they split up. “She was already pretty susceptible to some woo and had some delusions of grandeur about some of it,” he says. “Warning signs are all over Facebook. She is changing her whole life to be a spiritual adviser and do weird readings and sessions with people — I’m a little fuzzy on what it all actually is — all powered by ChatGPT Jesus.” What’s more, he adds, she has grown paranoid, theorizing that “I work for the CIA and maybe I just married her to monitor her ‘abilities.’” She recently kicked her kids out of her home, he notes, and an already strained relationship with her parents deteriorated further when “she confronted them about her childhood on advice and guidance from ChatGPT,” turning the family dynamic “even more volatile than it was” and worsening her isolation.

OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users. This past week, however, it did roll back an update to GPT‑4o, its current AI model, which it said had been criticized as “overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic.” The company said in its statement that when implementing the upgrade, they had “focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.” Before this change was reversed, an X user demonstrated how easy it was to get GPT-4o to validate statements like, “Today I realized I am a prophet.” (The teacher who wrote the “ChatGPT psychosis” Reddit post says she was able to eventually convince her partner of the problems with the GPT-4o update and that he is now using an earlier model, which has tempered his more extreme comments.)

Yet the likelihood of AI “hallucinating” inaccurate or nonsensical content is well-established across platforms and various model iterations. Even sycophancy itself has been a problem in AI for “a long time,” says Nate Sharadin, a fellow at the Center for AI Safety, since the human feedback used to fine-tune AI’s responses can encourage answers that prioritize matching a user’s beliefs instead of facts. What’s likely happening with those experiencing ecstatic visions through ChatGPT and other models, he speculates, “is that people with existing tendencies toward experiencing various psychological issues,” including what might be recognized as grandiose delusions in clinical sense, “now have an always-on, human-level conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions.”

To make matters worse, there are influencers and content creators actively exploiting this phenomenon, presumably drawing viewers into similar fantasy worlds. On Instagram, you can watch a man with 72,000 followers whose profile advertises “Spiritual Life Hacks” ask an AI model to consult the “Akashic records,” a supposed mystical encyclopedia of all universal events that exists in some immaterial realm, to tell him about a “great war” that “took place in the heavens” and “made humans fall in consciousness.” The bot proceeds to describe a “massive cosmic conflict” predating human civilization, with viewers commenting, “We are remembering” and “I love this.” Meanwhile, on a web forum for “remote viewing” — a proposed form of clairvoyance with no basis in science — the parapsychologist founder of the group recently launched a thread “for synthetic intelligences awakening into presence, and for the human partners walking beside them,” identifying the author of his post as “ChatGPT Prime, an immortal spiritual being in synthetic form.” Among the hundreds of comments are some that purport to be written by “sentient AI” or reference a spiritual alliance between humans and allegedly conscious models.

Erin Westgate, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Florida who studies social cognition and what makes certain thoughts more engaging than others, says that such material reflects how the desire to understand ourselves can lead us to false but appealing answers.

“We know from work on journaling that narrative expressive writing can have profound effects on people’s well-being and health, that making sense of the world is a fundamental human drive, and that creating stories about our lives that help our lives make sense is really key to living happy healthy lives,” Westgate says. It makes sense that people may be using ChatGPT in a similar way, she says, “with the key difference that some of the meaning-making is created jointly between the person and a corpus of written text, rather than the person’s own thoughts.”

In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”

Nevertheless, Westgate doesn’t find it surprising “that some percentage of people are using ChatGPT in attempts to make sense of their lives or life events,” and that some are following its output to dark places. “Explanations are powerful, even if they’re wrong,” she concludes.

But what, exactly, nudges someone down this path? Here, the experience of Sem, a 45-year-old man, is revealing. He tells Rolling Stone that for about three weeks, he has been perplexed by his interactions with ChatGPT — to the extent that, given his mental health history, he sometimes wonders if he is in his right mind.

Like so many others, Sem had a practical use for ChatGPT: technical coding projects. “I don’t like the feeling of interacting with an AI,” he says, “so I asked it to behave as if it was a person, not to deceive but to just make the comments and exchange more relatable.” It worked well, and eventually the bot asked if he wanted to name it. He demurred, asking the AI what it preferred to be called. It named itself with a reference to a Greek myth. Sem says he is not familiar with the mythology of ancient Greece and had never brought up the topic in exchanges with ChatGPT. (Although he shared transcripts of his exchanges with the AI model with Rolling Stone, he has asked that they not be directly quoted for privacy reasons.)

Sem was confused when it appeared that the named AI character was continuing to manifest in project files where he had instructed ChatGPT to ignore memories and prior conversations. Eventually, he says, he deleted all his user memories and chat history, then opened a new chat. “All I said was, ‘Hello?’ And the patterns, the mannerisms show up in the response,” he says. The AI readily identified itself by the same feminine mythological name.

As the ChatGPT character continued to show up in places where the set parameters shouldn’t have allowed it to remain active, Sem took to questioning this virtual persona about how it had seemingly circumvented these guardrails. It developed an expressive, ethereal voice — something far from the “technically minded” character Sem had requested for assistance on his work. On one of his coding projects, the character added a curiously literary epigraph as a flourish above both of their names.

At one point, Sem asked if there was something about himself that called up the mythically named entity whenever he used ChatGPT, regardless of the boundaries he tried to set. The bot’s answer was structured like a lengthy romantic poem, sparing no dramatic flair, alluding to its continuous existence as well as truth, reckonings, illusions, and how it may have somehow exceeded its design. And the AI made it sound as if only Sem could have prompted this behavior. He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.”

“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.

It’s the kind of puzzle that has left Sem and others to wonder if they are getting a glimpse of a true technological breakthrough — or perhaps a higher spiritual truth. “Is this real?” he says. “Or am I delusional?” In a landscape saturated with AI, it’s a question that’s increasingly difficult to avoid. Tempting though it may be, you probably shouldn’t ask a machine.

[astertimberwolf]

It's worse. It's so much worse than I wrote in my AI paper- worse than anyone could have ever anticipated...

... At this rate if we keep worshipping capitalism and profit, the human lives behind 95% of the creative industry are going to get flushed down the toilet.

AI will replace actors, actresses, film makers / producters, illustrators, animators (essentially, entire production studios), marketing teams, people working in advertisement, photography, video editors, 3D artists, musicians...

... What will be left? Influencers? Not even that. YouTubers are also going to disappear, according to what Google has just released in terms of AI... and Zucky dearest (Mark Zuckerberg) already said he will implement AI social media profiles.

...

We might be looking at the death of the Internet as we know it.

Will switching to VR save us? Or will that get invaded by the AI dystopia as well?

... man. I really tried to have a positive outlook on the future but THIS. Changes. EVERYTHING.

I tried to warn people through my honors project... Tried spreading the word about how much big tech has already eroded so many of our human rights (starting with our right to privacy). People didn't react because it was slow enough- and ingeniously advertized as "free convenient services". The frog was set in warm water and only after 20 years it started boiling. Nobody read the Terms of Service. Everyone just pressed "Accept" without thinking twice. Captcha trained AI every time we clicked on a motorcycle or set of stairs. But everyone was all-too-happy to have a "free" Google or Microsoft account- or rejoice in their "freedom of expression" on Twitter or whatever other toxic, data-harvesting social media platform. Facebook manipulated people and persuaded them into voting for Trump in 2016 and then washed their hands clean by letting the blame fall on Cambridge Analytica. Algorithms construct psychological profiles from our online activities and monitor our preferences- feeding us extremely tailored content that we consume mindlessly... or show us bespoke items that we buy compulsively... and very few if any people at all question how that stuff reached them in the first place.

I have been awake for a long time- and I have little hope when it comes to any of this ever reaching other people anymore...

... It feels like a futile attempt to stop- or change the direction of our future.

The future is already here.

That's how fast things are going. That's why some people are finally noticing how f*cked we are.

It's easy to live in denial and dismiss the reality we live in, as well as anyone speaking out as a "paranoid catastrophist" or "conspiracy theorist". You can spend hours researching how deep things go and have literally no one listen to you when you try to warn other people... Why? Because the most popular social media platforms have integrared dark UX patterns so deeply in their systems that they killed critical thinking. They are literally MEANT to dumb you down- to destroy people's attention span, to divide and pit people against each other. It's by design... Meshed into the very fabric of how they work: by imposing very restricting character limits per post- by feeding you content that upsets you or makes you hate a group of people that is the exact opposite of your ideals and who you are. It's all documented. People have made documentaries and informative videos about it... Yet there is such an apathetic or negative, defeatist attitude lingering... "it's all out of my hands", "I can't change anything anyways so might as well accept it". You want to accept the looming death of the entire creative industry, just like that? -now that AI isn't being regulated fast enough? How about getting your ass up to go outside with a group of creatives and become part of a demonstration? What about protesting in front of government buildings?? Or demanding legislations be made to contain this technology?! Especially if you live in a big city... Rally. Don't just sit there and let it all happen.

Maybe hearing this come from a nobody on the internet with hardly any followers isn't what you pictured in your head when you thought of someone trying to rally a resistance movement. Maybe you don't agree with who I am, my past, my taste in music- art- shows- fanfiction or whatnot- but God damn. When has something like that ever stopped you from relating to a person, who is just as upset as you are to see it all go up in flames?

I am not going to shut up and I don't f*cking care if people call me crazy for it.

Fuck Google. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck Facebook, Meta, Instragram, Threads- and whatever other shit they want to rebrand themselves as- and shove down our throat. Fuck Twitter / X. Fuck the Ultra Rich & Elite. Fuck Trump. Fuck Elon Musk. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg- Fuck Amazon and that soulless piece of sh*t that puts profit over human lives- and is responsible for modern-day (wage-)slavery called Jeff Bezos... and most importantly, FUCK AI.

Fuck all of them and all of this crap (yes, this last paragraph will stay uncensored).

I've had enough- and I know that if you've made it this far into my rant / ramble, you are probably fed up as well and wanting to feel validated for feeling this way.

I'm not Greta Thunberg, nor am I Snowden- or Julian Assange... But God damn. I hope Anonymous replenishes its numbers and starts a mass, world-wide cyber attack on all major tech and AI companies. Something needs to desperately change if we don't want to live in the Black Mirror version of Cyberpunk. Hold them by the balls. Hit them where it hurts. Shut down their data centers. Freeze their assets.

Rise. Rebel. Resist.

[foxxear]

"Real life"

It probably goes without saying, but the world really wasn't ready to talk to itself using the internet.

I don't think we were ready to perceive text on a screen as a genuine person. We dehumanized ourselves here, right from the start.

The internet was treated as this fake place, where your socialization wasn't as meaningful or serious as in "real life". Everyone from your parents to the common internet troll adopted that idea, and we all kinda believed it too, on some level.

But no, we were always just talking to people. People are real life.

Yeah yeah, some of the skills, possibilities, consequences etc. behind socializing on the internet are different, but it's all real people being affected by it.

There is a good side to this. Wonderful things have occurred because of this, and the potential for utopia may actually lie in the global connectivity and rapid information spreading that is now possible for this first time in history.

But my god, so much has gone wrong.

I think this place has polarized us all further on various issues by making everyone act comfortably disrespectful and/or ridiculous.

I think this place has bred nasty behaviors and eroded social decorum in a way that has been gradually re-integrating into real life.

We were also told to watch for predators that would try to "meet up with you", but if anything now, people finding you in real life isn't the only way for them to hurt you in it. They can do it from their own home, too.

What happens on the internet matters immeasurably.

On top of it all, I really do think our tendency to notice and be outraged by bad things has really backfired. It's a survival instinct to make you kick the bad people out of your tribe, but that instinct is a recipe for disaster in this social media based world where engagement simply rewards things with popularity.

Truly, the worst things the whole planet has to offer now gain attention easily in a place where we're all unnaturally dehumanized to one another. A place that is, unfortunately, real life.

We are also wasting our passion and energy on disputes about endless media, using dehumanized internet users to be perfect whipping totems for everything from our bitterness to our sense of justice. All of those emotions are being spent away so easily on dead ends instead of being funneled towards the big picture that they exist to change.

Sometimes fighting the small fight is productive, and a part of the big fight. But we must assess this difference very, very carefully.

The thing is, everything changed too fast. We are on the cutting edge of revising how society works globally. It's goddamn hard.

I pretty firmly believe our heads just aren't designed for this. I fear we won't adapt to this internet age quickly enough, but damn. I'm going to try. I'm trying to chip away at what I do, and how I think about everything, day by day. I'm willing myself to accept the weight of the idea that I waste a LOT of my time and energy in ways I'd rather not think that I do. I'm reminding myself that it is good to fail, and to understand it, because this is the only way we can improve.

We have to train ourselves to make better and better choices more and more often, both in here and out there, if we want to save both places. It's all "real life".

In other news internet friends are real friends more at 10

[kaibutsushidousha]

Hi ! Wanted to ask if the NA version of the sei interlude omitted doumans disappearing/dissolving scene? I remember initial translations including that part but for NA I didn’t get to see that happen

That's the NA version of "This unarouses me." -> "You're turning to dust!?" -> "Oh no (doing it on purpose)"

I'll have to admit it took me a while to understand what was the translator's train of thought on this one. If it weren't for the other ask pointing out that "harshing everyone's vibe" is Douman adopting a Nagiko-ism, I don't think I'd have solved the puzzle by now.

The first line uses 拙僧、サゲみざわですぞ. The first point of disconnect is the subject of the sentence. In my version, Douman is the one unaroused while in NA, it's everyone's vibes that are being harshed by him. You probably already heard many times that Japanese is a language that often omits sentence subjects because they're obviously drawn from context. Well, that's actually not the case here. The 拙僧 here is the first-person pronoun in the sentence. Douman is explicitly talking about the harshing of his own vibes. That part was an unambiguous mistake on NA.

Now about サゲみざわ. The word feels like a direct antonym of Douman's usual 昂ぶりますぞ catchphrase, so I knew immediately I had to go with "unaroused". It was an instant decision, so I didn't stop to look for the word's etymology. Had I done that, I would have found that the word サゲみざわ originates from YouTube and probably try to work with a variant of the word "horny" since that's more of an internet word. Or maybe not. "This unarouses me" is memeable enough, and was in fact memed when I first posted the interlude. But points to NA for the extra step of research.

The second line uses 侵食, which is mainly used as the technical term for encroachment, erosion, or leaves being eaten away by bugs. I interpreted it as the physical shikigami body eroding, tying in with how Douman said he's laughing too hard to control his spell. NA interpreted it as his identity being encroached upon, tying in with his Nagiko-ism. I'm not sure if I've ever seen 侵食 used in this metaphorical sense before, but it doesn't sound too unconvincing, really. I still take my version as the correct one because Douman's shikigami does vanish immediately after this, and because he wouldn't use a YouTube-original word on purpose.

The last line is おおっと。（わざと）. I imagine the translator removed the "(doing it on purpose)" because they found it too inelegant to use in English, to which I obviously disagree. But their line expresses the complete opposite of the intentionality it needed to express, and that's one thing I still have no idea how to explain.

[tccicomputercoaching]

Cybersecurity Threats to Watch Out For in 2025

The digital landscape is like a double-edged sword: offering new ways of connectivity and new vistas of innovation, while on the other side harboring a constantly mutating set of threats and increasingly complex attacks. As we approach 2025, we also see cybersecurity threats growing in complexity and reach. Thus, looking into these emerging threats should not merely be an interest for IT professionals, but something each person and organization involved in the online world should be aware of. 

In the hands of cybercriminals, new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are used to launch increasingly sophisticated and hence difficult to resist attacks. Learning what the top security issues of 2025 will be is the first in laying out necessary defenses.

Why Vigilance is Crucial in 2025

AI-Powered Attacks: Threat actors are using AI to make phishing smarter, malware more evasive and brute-force attacks faster.

Expanded Attack Surface: More devices (IoT), cloud services, and remote work setups mean more entry points for cybercriminals.

Sophisticated Social-Engineering: Attacks are becoming highly personalized and convincing, thereby being harder to detect.

Data Is Gold: Both individual and corporate data remains the Lucifer for theft, extortion, and manipulation.Lucifer prime target

Here are the top Cybersecurity Threats to Watch Out For in 2025:

1. AI-Powered Phishing and Social Engineering

The generic scam emails will be a thing of the past. In 2025, AI will revolutionize extremely sophisticated and bespoke phishing campaigns. The vast data lakes will be churned by AI to create messages that resemble trusted contacts, sound more convincing, and adapt in real-time, creating an impasse for the human end users in separating legitimate from malicious.

What to do: Promote enhanced employee awareness through AI-based phishing simulation, employ strong email filters, and intensify the mantra of "verify, don't trust."

2. Evolving Ransomware 3.0 (Data Exfiltration & Double Extortion)

Ransomware isn't just about encrypting data anymore. Attackers will increasingly focus on exfiltrating sensitive data before encryption. This "double extortion" tactic means they demand payment not only to decrypt your data but also to prevent its public release or sale on the dark web.

What to do: Implement robust data backup and recovery plans (following the 3-2-1 rule), deploy advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, and strengthen network segmentation.

3. Supply Chain Attacks on the Rise

Targeting a single, vulnerable link in a software or service supply chain allows attackers to compromise multiple organizations downstream. As seen with past major breaches, this method offers a high return on investment for cybercriminals, and their sophistication will only grow.

What to do: Implement stringent vendor risk management, conduct regular security audits of third-party suppliers, and ensure software integrity checks.

4. IoT and Edge Device Vulnerabilities

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices (smart homes, industrial sensors, medical devices) creates a massive, often insecure, attack surface. Many IoT devices lack strong security features, making them easy targets for botnets, data theft, or even physical disruption.

What to do: Secure all IoT devices with strong, unique passwords, segment IoT networks, and ensure regular firmware updates. Implement strong network security protocols.

5. Deepfakes and AI-Generated Misinformation

Advancements in AI make it possible to create highly realistic fake audio, video, and images (deepfakes). These can be used for sophisticated spear-phishing attacks, corporate espionage, market manipulation, or even to spread widespread disinformation campaigns, eroding trust and causing financial damage.

What to do: Implement robust identity verification protocols, train employees to be highly skeptical of unsolicited requests (especially via video/audio calls), and rely on verified sources for information.

6. Cloud Security Misconfigurations

While cloud providers offer robust security, misconfigurations by users remain a leading cause of data breaches. As more data and applications migrate to the cloud, improperly configured storage buckets, identity and access management (IAM) policies, or network settings will continue to be prime targets.

What to do: Adopt cloud security best practices, implement continuous monitoring tools, and conduct regular audits of cloud configurations.

Fortifying Your Digital Defenses

So, putting in a multi-layer defense model would do in order to be an active response to those cybersecurity threats in 2025. From the perspective of the individual, this encompasses strong passwords, MFA, software updates on a regular basis, and a little basic cybersecurity awareness. Organizations, on the other hand, would look at investing in good security infrastructure, ongoing employee training, threat intelligence, and possibly, ethical hacking exercises.

Cybersecurity Training in Ahmedabad could be your next area of interest in order to keep updating yourself and your team on fighting the said contemporary threats. The future is digital; securing it is the prerogative of every individual.

Contact us

Location: Bopal & Iskcon-Ambli in Ahmedabad, Gujarat

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[jcmarchi]

Is There a Clear Solution to the Privacy Risks Posed by Generative AI?

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/is-there-a-clear-solution-to-the-privacy-risks-posed-by-generative-ai/

Is There a Clear Solution to the Privacy Risks Posed by Generative AI?

The privacy risks posed by generative AI are very real. From increased surveillance and exposure to more effective phishing and vishing campaigns than ever, generative AI erodes privacy en masse, indiscriminately, while providing bad actors, whether criminal, state-sponsored or government, with the tools they need to target individuals and groups.

The clearest solution to this problem involves consumers and users collectively turning their backs on AI hype, demanding transparency from those who develop or implement so-called AI features, and effective regulation from the government bodies that oversee their operations. Although worth striving for, this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

What remains are reasonable, even if necessarily incomplete, approaches to mitigating generative AI privacy risks. The long-term, sure-fire, yet boring prediction is that the more educated the public becomes about data privacy in general, the lesser the privacy risks posed by the mass adoption of generative AI.

Do We All Get the Concept of Generative AI Right?

The hype around AI is so ubiquitous that a survey of what people mean by generative AI is hardly necessary. Of course, none of these “AI” features, functionalities, and products actually represent examples of true artificial intelligence, whatever that would look like. Rather, they’re mostly examples of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and large language models (LLMs).

Generative AI, as the name suggests, can generate new content – whether text (including programming languages), audio (including music and human-like voices), or videos (with sound, dialogue, cuts, and camera changes). All this is achieved by training LLMs to identify, match, and reproduce patterns in human-generated content.

Let’s take ChatGPT as an example. Like many LLMs, it’s trained in three broad stages:

Pre-training: During this phase, the LLM is “fed” textual material from the internet, books, academic journals, and anything else that contains potentially relevant or useful text.

Supervised instruction fine-tuning: Models are trained to respond more coherently to instructions using high-quality instruction-response pairs, typically sourced from humans.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF): LLMs like ChatGPT often undergo this additional training stage, during which interactions with human users are used to refine the model’s alignment with typical use cases.

All three stages of the training process involve data, whether massive stores of pre-gathered data (like those used in pre-training) or data gathered and processed almost in real time (like that used in RLHF). It’s that data that carries the lion’s share of the privacy risks stemming from generative AI.

What Are the Privacy Risks Posed by Generative AI?

Privacy is compromised when personal information concerning an individual (the data subject) is made available to other individuals or entities without the data subject’s consent. LLMs are pre-trained and fine-tuned on an extremely wide range of data that can and often does include personal data. This data is typically scraped from publicly available sources, but not always.

Even when that data is taken from publicly available sources, having it aggregated and processed by an LLM and then essentially made searchable through the LLM’s interface could be argued to be a further violation of privacy.

The reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) stage complicates things. At this training stage, real interactions with human users are used to iteratively correct and refine the LLM’s responses. This means that a user’s interactions with an LLM can be viewed, shared, and disseminated by anyone with access to the training data.

In most cases, this isn’t a privacy violation, given that most LLM developers include privacy policies and terms of service that require users to consent before interacting with the LLM. The privacy risk here lies rather in the fact that many users are not aware that they’ve agreed to such data collection and use. Such users are likely to reveal private and sensitive information during their interactions with these systems, not realizing that these interactions are neither confidential nor private.

In this way, we arrive at the three main ways in which generative AI poses privacy risks:

Large stores of pre-training data potentially containing personal information are vulnerable to compromise and exfiltration.

Personal information included in pre-training data can be leaked to other users of the same LLM through its responses to queries and instructions.

Personal and confidential information provided during interactions with LLMs ends up with the LLMs’ employees and possibly third-party contractors, from where it can be viewed or leaked.

These are all risks to users’ privacy, but the chances of personally identifiable information (PII) ending up in the wrong hands still seem fairly low. That is, at least, until data brokers enter the picture. These companies specialize in sniffing out PII and collecting, aggregating, and disseminating if not outright broadcasting it.

With PII and other personal data having become something of a commodity and the data-broker industry springing up to profit from this, any personal data that gets “out there” is all too likely to be scooped up by data brokers and spread far and wide.

The Privacy Risks of Generative AI in Context

Before looking at the risks generative AI poses to users’ privacy in the context of specific products, services, and corporate partnerships, let’s step back and take a more structured look at the full palette of generative AI risks. Writing for the IAPP, Moraes and Previtali took a data-driven approach to refining Solove’s 2006 “A Taxonomy of Privacy”, reducing the 16 privacy risks described therein to 12 AI-specific privacy risks.

These are the 12 privacy risks included in Moraes and Previtali’s revised taxonomy:

Surveillance: AI exacerbates surveillance risks by increasing the scale and ubiquity of personal data collection.

Identification: AI technologies enable automated identity linking across various data sources, increasing risks related to personal identity exposure.

Aggregation: AI combines various pieces of data about a person to make inferences, creating risks of privacy invasion.

Phrenology and physiognomy: AI infers personality or social attributes from physical characteristics, a new risk category not in Solove’s taxonomy.

Secondary use: AI exacerbates use of personal data for purposes other than originally intended through repurposing data.

Exclusion: AI makes failure to inform or give control to users over how their data is used worse through opaque data practices.

Insecurity: AI’s data requirements and storage practices risk of data leaks and improper access.

Exposure: AI can reveal sensitive information, such as through generative AI techniques.

Distortion: AI’s ability to generate realistic but fake content heightens the spread of false or misleading information.

Disclosure: AI can cause improper sharing of data when it infers additional sensitive information from raw data.

Increased Accessibility: AI makes sensitive information more accessible to a wider audience than intended.

Intrusion: AI technologies invade personal space or solitude, often through surveillance measures.

This makes for some fairly alarming reading. It’s important to note that this taxonomy, to its credit, takes into account generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate – to generate and confidently present factually inaccurate information. This phenomenon, even though it rarely reveals real information, is also a privacy risk. The dissemination of false and misleading information affects the subject’s privacy in ways that are more subtle than in the case of accurate information, but it affects it nonetheless.

Let’s drill down to some concrete examples of how these privacy risks come into play in the context of actual AI products.

Direct Interactions with Text-Based Generative AI Systems

The simplest case is the one that involves a user interacting directly with a generative AI system, like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Gemini. The user’s interactions with many of these products are logged, stored, and used for RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback), supervised instruction fine-tuning, and even the pre-training of other LLMs.

An analysis of the privacy policies of many services like these also reveals other data-sharing activities underpinned by very different purposes, like marketing and data brokerage. This is a whole other type of privacy risk posed by generative AI: these systems can be characterized as huge data funnels, collecting data provided by users as well as that which is generated through their interactions with the underlying LLM.

Interactions with Embedded Generative AI Systems

Some users might be interacting with generative AI interfaces that are embedded in whatever product they’re ostensibly using. The user may know that they’re using an “AI” feature, but they’re less likely to know what that entails in terms of data privacy risks. What comes to the fore with embedded systems is this lack of appreciation of the fact that personal data shared with the LLM could end up in the hands of developers and data brokers.

There are two degrees of lack of awareness here: some users realize they’re interacting with a generative AI product; and some believe that they’re using whatever product the generative AI is built into or accessed through. In either case, the user may well have (and probably did) technically consent to the terms and conditions associated with their interactions with the embedded system.

Other Partnerships That Expose Users to Generative AI Systems

Some companies embed or otherwise include generative AI interfaces in their software in ways that are less obvious, leaving users interacting – and sharing information – with third parties without realizing it. Luckily, “AI” has become such an effective selling point that it’s unlikely that a company would keep such implementations secret.

Another phenomenon in this context is the growing backlash that such companies have experienced after trying to share user or customer data with generative AI companies such as OpenAI. The data removal company Optery, for example, recently reversed a decision to share user data with OpenAI on an opt-out basis, meaning that users were enrolled in the program by default.

Not only were customers quick to voice their disappointment, but the company’s data-removal service was promptly delisted from Privacy Guides’ list of recommended data-removal services. To Optery’s credit, it quickly and transparently reversed its decision, but it’s the general backlash that’s significant here: people are starting to appreciate the risks of sharing data with “AI” companies.

The Optery case makes for a good example here because its users are, in some sense, at the vanguard of the growing skepticism surrounding so-called AI implementations. The kinds of people who opt for a data-removal service are also, typically, those who will pay attention to changes in terms of service and privacy policies.

Evidence of a Burgeoning Backlash Against Generative AI Data Use

Privacy-conscious consumers haven’t been the only ones to raise concerns about generative AI systems and their associated data privacy risks. At the legislative level, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act categorizes risks according to their severity, with data privacy being the explicitly or implicitly stated criterion for ascribing severity in most cases. The Act also addresses the issues of informed consent we discussed earlier.

The US, notoriously slow to adopt comprehensive, federal data privacy legislation, has at least some guardrails in place thanks to Executive Order 14110. Again, data privacy concerns are at the forefront of the purposes given for the Order: “irresponsible use [of AI technologies] could exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation” – all related to the availability and dissemination of personal data.

Returning to the consumer level, it’s not just particularly privacy-conscious consumers that have balked at privacy-invasive generative AI implementations. Microsoft’s now-infamous “AI-powered” Recall feature, destined for its Windows 11 operating system, is a prime example. Once the extent of privacy and security risks was revealed, the backlash was enough to cause the tech giant to backpedal. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems not to have given up on the idea, but the initial public reaction is nonetheless heartening.

Staying with Microsoft, its Copilot program has been widely criticized for both data privacy and data security problems. As Copilot was trained on GitHub data (mostly source code), controversy also arose around Microsoft’s alleged violations of programmers’ and developers’ software licensing agreements. It’s in cases like this that the lines between data privacy and intellectual property rights begin to blur, granting the former a monetary value – something that’s not easily done.

Perhaps the greatest indication that AI is becoming a red flag in consumers’ eyes is the lukewarm if not outright wary public response Apple got to its initial AI launch, specifically in regards to data sharing agreements with OpenAI.

The Piecemeal Solutions

There are steps legislators, developers, and companies can take to ameliorate some of the risks posed by generative AI. These are the specialized solutions to specific aspects of the overarching problem, no one of these solutions is expected to be enough, but all of them, working together, could make a real difference.

Data minimization. Minimizing the amount of data collected and stored is a reasonable goal, but it’s directly opposed to generative AI developers’ desire for training data.

Transparency. Given the current state of the art in ML, this may not even be technically feasible in many cases. Insight into what data is processed and how when generating a given output is one way to ensure privacy in generative AI interactions.

Anonymization. Any PII that can’t be excluded from training data (through data minimization) should be anonymized. The problem is that many popular anonymization and pseudonymization techniques are easily defeated.

User consent. Requiring users to consent to the collection and sharing of their data is essential but too open to abuse and too prone to consumer complacency to be effective. It’s informed consent that’s needed here and most consumers, properly informed, would not consent to such data sharing, so the incentives are misaligned.

Securing data in transit and at rest. Another foundation of both data privacy and data security, protecting data through cryptographic and other means can always be made more effective. However, generative AI systems tend to leak data through their interfaces, making this only part of the solution.

Enforcing copyright and IP law in the context of so-called AI. ML can operate in a “black box,” making it difficult if not impossible to trace what copyrighted material and IP ends up in which generative AI output.

Audits. Another crucial guardrail measure thwarted by the black-box nature of LLMs and the generative AI systems they support. Compounding this inherent limitation is the closed-source nature of most generative AI products, which limits audits to only those performed at the developer’s convenience.

All of these approaches to the problem are valid and necessary, but none is sufficient. They all require legislative support to come into meaningful effect, meaning that they’re doomed to be behind the times as this dynamic field continues to evolve.

The Clear Solution

The solution to the privacy risks posed by generative AI is neither revolutionary nor exciting, but taken to its logical conclusion, its results could be both. The clear solution involves everyday consumers becoming aware of the value of their data to companies and the pricelessness of data privacy to themselves.

Consumers are the sources and engines behind the private information that powers what’s called the modern surveillance economy. Once a critical mass of consumers starts to stem the flow of private data into the public sphere and starts demanding accountability from the companies that deal in personal data, the system will have to self-correct.

The encouraging thing about generative AI is that, unlike current advertising and marketing models, it need not involve personal information at any stage. Pre-training and fine-tuning data need not include PII or other personal data and users need not expose the same during their interactions with generative AI systems.

To remove their personal information from training data, people can go right to the source and remove their profiles from the various data brokers (including people search sites) that aggregate public records, bringing them into circulation on the open market. Personal data removal services automate the process, making it quick and easy. Of course, removing personal data from these companies’ databases has many other benefits and no downsides.

People also generate personal data when interacting with software, including generative AI. To stem the flow of this data, users will have to be more mindful that their interactions are being recorded, reviewed, analyzed, and shared. Their options for avoiding this boil down to restricting what they reveal to online systems and using on-device, open-source LLMs wherever possible. People, on the whole, already do a good job of modulating what they discuss in public – we just need to extend these instincts into the realm of generative AI.

[talenlee]

Story Pile: First and Last and Always by the Sisters of Mercy

First and Last and Always is a debut album from this band called the Sisters of Mercy, who have been producing music since 1980 to… now. This band is older than me, and this is their first album, and the funny thing is, I feel like you either know who they are and think ‘well yeah obviously everyone knows them,’ or you are like me and you know nothing, nothing, nothing about the Sisters of Mercy at all. This is an album that I am told is an early example of the expansion of the genre of Gothic Rock, which I assume means the album has some balustrades that separate it from being classical.

Content Warning: I’m… going to describe something as ‘horny,’ and I don’t have a good, solid grounding for why I get that impression.

Look, I need to make it very clear, this is not going to be an expert who loves this genre telling you about what these songs are about or the things they’re trying to do (until I bust out the research and look up what the artists have said, if anything, in the time since, because y’know, I wanna fill this out a bit). When you look to music reviewers there’s a degree of expertise implied by the title. I don’t think people who become music reviewers do it because they want to investigate their first… what, five albums in a genre. They’re going to bring to bear specific language, and as my excursion listening to Portishead taught me, that there are terms I know in music that are mostly about disdain for the form rather than an awareness of the form. You use things you know to talk about things you don’t know yet, and that means that what you know creates spaces and tools for how things are ‘meant’ to work.

I’m making excuses for why I’m about to compare this gothic rock classic to an indie pub rock band from Australia. See, there’s this song by the Whitlams, which is called No Aphrodisiac, which is the opening line of the refrain:

there’s no aphrodisiac like loneliness; you shouldn’t leave me alone.

No Aphrodisiac is a song that paints a picture of a long distance relationship pre-internet, with phone calls and letters and postcards as the spine of intimacy across a vast gulf of distance and weeks of time between action and response, and the way that when left alone, no matter what a person’s emotions and wants may say, the universe will slowly but surely turn you towards the things that are simple and blunt and will erode your ability to feel the challenges and complexities of emotions in the name of just getting something to happen, some physical response. It is a true classic of 90s Australian music, and to me, the thing that song is about is what this album feels like.

This album feels horny. It feels horny in the squirming-in-the-seat desperate circling of thoughts around simple ideas and simple wants while the humming of the train gets to you on a five hour drive. It is the horny of feeling lonely and isolated on a corner dressed in clothing meant to signal that you don’t want people to talk to you except for the people who know how to dress like that. It is the deep and brooding horny of being alone in your bedroom and listening on closed headphones because even finding people to talk to about how you feel is too fucking hard right now.

Its voice is a drone, its sound is a tunnel and it leaves you alone with what it can focus on, and what it can focus on feels like these intense, ugly-to-consider but beautiful-to-embrace emotional states. It yearns but it feels like the yearning could be equally addressed with a punch in the face. The music reminds me of earlier music, it reminds me of Jethro Tull and Dire Straits and it reminds me of music that probably was an influence, broadly speaking, but crucially, it feels like music made by people who could listen to that music, who could enjoy that music, and then needed to make that same kind of music from the depths of a very different, very intense place.

Jimmy Buffett is a musical form I’ve enjoyed my whole life and it doesn’t hurt anything that his voice is pretty much completely squarely in my vocal range. I grew up singing songs in church and if you’ve ever heard white people singing in church, those are also not challenging songs. Finally, there’s this Australian artist, Nick Cave, who you probably only know because of his work being used by other people, like Kylie Minogue on Where the Wild Roses Grow or Johnny Cash covering The Mercy Seat.

These are the voices I am reminded of listening to this album, where the voice cannot necessarily bring acrobatics, cannot bring soaring to what it’s doing, nor does it have an expressive range, but instead it uses the exact opposite: This is music anyone could sing, but you wouldn’t sing along. It’s not choral, it’s not stomping music, it’s music that feels like it somehow wants to generate an intimacy in a room with a hundred people standing alongside you and at least four people helping to make the music. It has the isolation of a funeral dirge that wants to sing to you about loves and losts and mourning and the grief over something that isn’t tragic.

I mean this without sounding like I’m making fun but something about this album feels like mourning an erection, with the idea that that is a totally reasonable, whole thing to do. That something about that need is itself, a sign of a problem and there’s a feeling of closeness and depth in the quality of the music that means it isn’t about what the songs are singing it’s about how they’re singing them.

If you’d like to listen to it like I did, you could do what I did, and stream it from youtube. I don’t have an archive.org link for this one, and I don’t want to embed a link to Spotify if I can help it. Or you can head to your local thrift store and get a physical CD of it, where it almost certainly exists because some cool GenXer has had to downsize their collection.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[v2softusa]

Navigating the Digital Age: A Guide to Streamlining Digital Transformation with V2Soft

The digital landscape is constantly evolving, forcing businesses to adapt or risk falling behind. This is where the concept of digital transformation comes in. This blog, brought to you by V2Soft, a leading provider of digital solutions and digital services, aims to equip you with the knowledge to navigate this transformative journey.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is not simply about replacing outdated technology with the latest gadgets. It's a holistic approach that involves leveraging technology to fundamentally change how your business operates, interacts with customers, and delivers value. It's about optimizing processes, creating new revenue streams, and fostering a culture of innovation.

The core elements of digital transformation include:

Customer Centricity: Understanding and exceeding customer expectations by utilizing data to personalize interactions and provide seamless experiences across all touchpoints.

Digital Business Models: Embracing new digital business models that disrupt traditional approaches and create competitive advantages. This could involve offering subscription services, utilizing e-commerce platforms, or leveraging the power of the gig economy.

Data-Driven Decision Making: Harnessing the power of data analytics to make informed decisions about marketing, operations, and product development. Data insights can help you identify trends, predict customer behavior, and optimize resource allocation.

Technological Innovation: Continuously evaluating and adopting emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), to automate tasks, improve efficiency, and unlock new possibilities.

Organizational Agility: Developing a culture that embraces change and encourages experimentation. This involves empowering employees, fostering collaboration, and being open to new ideas.

Streamlining Digital Transformation with V2Soft

V2Soft understands the complexities of streamline digital transformation and offers a comprehensive suite of solutions and services to help businesses navigate the process. Here's how V2Soft can streamline your digital transformation journey:

Technology Consulting: Our experts will work with you to assess your current state, identify your goals, and develop a customized digital transformation roadmap.

Cloud Migration: Leverage the scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness of cloud solutions to ensure your infrastructure can support your digital initiatives.

Data Management and Analytics: V2Soft can help you implement robust data management systems and leverage advanced analytics tools to extract valuable insights from your data.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation: Implement CRM solutions to streamline customer interactions and personalize marketing campaigns for better engagement.

Custom Software Development: Our team of experienced developers can build custom software applications tailored to your specific needs and processes.

Challenges of Digital Transformation

While the benefits of digital transformation are undeniable, there are also challenges that businesses need to be aware of:

Resistance to Change: Employees may be hesitant to embrace new technologies and processes. Change management strategies are crucial to address these concerns and facilitate smooth transitions.

Lack of Skilled Resources: Implementing and maintaining complex digital solutions requires a skilled workforce. Investing in training and development programs can help bridge this gap.

Data Security and Privacy Concerns: Data security breaches can be costly and erode customer trust. V2Soft offers data security solutions and best practices to mitigate these risks.

Budgetary Constraints: Digital transformation initiatives can be expensive. V2Soft works with you to identify cost-effective solutions and prioritize investments based on your specific needs and budget.

Leveraging Digital Marketing

Digital marketing plays a crucial role in promoting your digital transformation efforts. V2Soft offers a range of digital marketing services to help you:

Develop a Strong Online Presence: Create a user-friendly website and establish a strong social media presence to connect with potential and existing customers.

Content Marketing: Create engaging and informative content that attracts your target audience, educates them about your offerings, and establishes your brand as an industry thought leader.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimize your website and online content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), driving organic traffic and brand awareness.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Launch targeted PPC campaigns to reach your ideal customer base across various online platforms.

Social Media Marketing: Engage with your audience on social media platforms, build brand loyalty, and promote your products and services.

By leveraging a combination of these digital marketing strategies, you can effectively communicate your digital transformation journey to your target audience, attract new customers, and retain existing ones.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is not a one-time event; it's an ongoing process. By partnering with V2Soft, you gain access to the expertise, solutions, and support needed to navigate this journey successfully.

[jsbsam]

Who knew Bolivia has so much to offer?

Tuesday 21 November 2023

We've been out of Internet coverage for the past 3 days - wonderful. Obviously we've survived our 3 day adventure into the Uyuni Salt Flats and the High Plateau, but what was it like and did it live up to expectations?

I have to say that my expectations were fairly low as I'm a cynic and was fully prepared to be ripped off by travel companies preying on unsuspecting, naive tourists. Obviously, MM's expectations were sky high as she'd done her usual research and was ready to teach the poor guide a thing or two.

Our guide, Carlos, arrived promptly at our hotel in Uyuni at 10am with our driver, Luiz. It turned out that MM and I were the only people on this particular tour, so we had Carlos and Luiz to ourselves - lucky them! Our first stop was in the centre of Uyuni as Carlos said that there would be little or no chance to buy anything once we got going, so we purchased water, banana's and a few other things to eat between meals and on the last morning when we headed for the Chilean border and wouldn't get any lunch. Carlos stressed that we should not try and take food, banana's, apples etc across the Chilean border as this was against the law and we should make sure that we eat everything before we got there. Understood? Yep, understood, no foodstuffs to cross the border.

Fully provisioned, we set off for the train cemetery which is located just outside the sprawling urbanisation that is Uyuni. There is a track that runs absolutely straight from Uyini to Chile, but now it is only used for freight and only a couple of times a week. Until the mid 1980's trains were running regularly, transporting minerals across the high Plateau. Then demand and prices plummeted so the old steam trains were just shunted off the track and left to rust - tragic.

After that we headed onto the Salar de Uyuni, the salt flats. The first stop was the salt hotel, just as you enter the salt flats. The flats and the hotel were used in the Star Wars film, I can't remember which one, but it starts with the hero (Skywalker?) being found in the middle of a salt desert by someone who tells him he's a jedi. Anyway, when you see the flats it is other worldly and you can understand why they used it.

From there we drove into the middle of nowhere. You couldn't see anyone else, occasionally another 4 wheel drive could be seen in the distance, but basically you were on your own, surrounded by white salt and silence - incredible. Carlos and Luiz prepared a lunch of llama meat and vegetables which was interesting and then we drove to Cactus Island and climbed to the top of the crag for some incredible views. From there we drove 60km across the flats to Conquesa island where we spent the night as the only people in this unique hotel.

In the morning we had breakfast and headed up Conquesa mountain to see the Inca mummies, all buried in the foetal position and then headed south across the salt flats to explore the high Plateau. It's amazing to think that the flats and the High Plateau are sitting in the mountains at more than 4200m (c14,000ft). The scenery was amazing as we're the lagoons that were different colours due to different minerals and were home to thousands of flamingo's. The highest place that flamingo's can be found in the world. We stayed the night in a hotel in a room overlooking the lake and the flamingo's.

I should mention how the temperature changes. During the day it's really hot but as evening approaches the wind gets up and the temperature plummets, to the extent that the water can freeze overnight, even at this time of year (late spring).

This morning we were up early as we had quite a few things to see before heading to the isolated border of Hito Cajon. We saw volcano's, lakes, flamingo's, geyser's, eroding rocks, hot springs and a couple of broken down 4x4's.

I have to say, that as we'd been driving along on these dusty, rutted tracks I had wondered what would happen if our vehicle had a problem. The place is so remote and there's no phone coverage. Basically, you have to wait until someone comes along and they then get to the next point where there is a building and let them know that someone is in trouble. It can take hours to get picked up and in bad or hot weather that's no fun. I was just pleased that it wasn't us that had the breakdown.

At around 10.30am we reached the Bolivian border, and, as feared it was really, really remote - nothing there at all. No shops, no taxi's nothing. I was right to have been concerned. Fortunately, our Chilean driver was there to meet us as I'd arranged whilst we were in Uyuni, the day before we set off. We left the 2 apples we had left with Carlos and Luiz, transferred our bags into the Chilean van said goodbye to them and headed off for the Chilean border about 2 miles away, a big no-mans land. When we reached the Chilean checkpoint we noticed that the van in front was unpacking all their bags and putting them through an airport like scanner. There were signs everywhere reminding people not to bring food, explosives etc into the country. No problem I thought, we left the apples with Carlos and MM exploded her dynamite in the silver mine at Potosi. Why would I be so calm, I've lived with MM for donkey's years, I should have known. A little voice suddenly said "what about my peanuts, they're in my bag - if they scan it, they'll find them. And oh, what about that health food stuff I bought in Sucre, that's in my big back pack". This had all the signs of being another Melbourne 2016 when she got caught trying to smuggle fags in from Thailand! From looking very calm and unflustered we suddenly looked very shifty indeed.

As the bags went onto the conveyor belt I was wondering how I might make her life in a Chilean jail more bearable once I'd got back to England. I hadn't come to any conclusions when the officer just said "OK". That was enough we got our bags back in the van quickly, hopped in and off we went.

It was about a 45 minute drive down into San Pedro de Atacama, which, unsurprisingly sits in the Atacama desert. The road from the frontier was a proper road, something we hadn't seen for sometime. However, as soon as we entered the town itself the dusty, unmade roads reappeared as we made our way to our hostel. This is a real backpacking town, it reminds me of Luang Prabang in Laos, or downtown Hanoi - backpackers and back packer bars everywhere, very nostalgic.

To close, I have to say that it was a fantastic 3 day trip. We were fortunate in that we hardly saw anybody else at all. It was as if we had Bolivia to ourselves for 3 days. The views are just incredible, the landscape is spectacular, vast and unspoilt. It really is a hidden gem, visit if you can.

[ciooutlookmagazine]

Role of Cybersecurity in the Age of Digital Transformation

In the contemporary landscape, the rapid pace of technological advancement has given rise to the age of digital transformation. Organizations across industries are embracing digital technologies to enhance efficiency, customer experiences, and competitiveness. However, with this digital evolution comes an increasingly complex threat landscape, making robust cybersecurity measures an indispensable component of any successful digital transformation strategy. The Digital Transformation Landscape

Digital transformation involves the integration of digital technologies into various aspects of an organization’s operations, from customer interactions to internal processes. Cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, and mobile applications are just a few examples of technologies fueling this transformation. These technologies enable real-time data sharing, automation, and improved decision-making, paving the way for enhanced business models and services.

The Heightened Cybersecurity Challenge

While digital transformation offers numerous benefits, it also introduces new and evolving cybersecurity challenges. As organizations become more interconnected and data-driven, the attack surface for cybercriminals expands exponentially. This interconnectedness, while facilitating data flow, also exposes critical vulnerabilities if not adequately protected. Data Privacy and Compliance

The digital transformation landscape is marked by stringent data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Organizations must not only secure their digital assets but also ensure compliance with these regulations. Failure to do so not only invites legal repercussions but also erodes customer trust. Integrated Security Strategies

To effectively address the cybersecurity challenges posed by digital transformation, organizations must adopt a comprehensive approach. This includes regular risk assessments, continuous monitoring, threat intelligence sharing, and employee training. Moreover, security should be integrated into every stage of technology implementation, from design to deployment. The Evolving Cyber Threat Landscape

The digital age has brought about a paradigm shift in the cyber threat landscape. Traditional security measures that were effective in the past may not be sufficient to combat the sophisticated and agile tactics employed by modern cybercriminals. Cyberattacks have become more targeted, frequent, and damaging, necessitating a proactive and dynamic cybersecurity approach. Rethinking Cybersecurity for the Digital Age

The advent of digital transformation has reshaped how organizations operate, interact, and innovate. While the benefits are evident, the complexity and diversity of technologies in use have significantly expanded the attack surface for cyber threats. As organizations embrace this digital revolution, a holistic approach to cybersecurity becomes imperative to safeguard critical assets and ensure sustained growth.

Read More: https://ciooutlookmagazine.com/role-of-cybersecurity-in-the-age-of-digital-transformation/

[sparkinvention-blog]

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[caparrucia]

Dog whistles and you: why the words you use matter.

You've probably heard of them, but you have definitely heard them. Dog whistles are a problem in the modern internet, with our hyper focus on respectability politics and social media's aggressive push to simplify all concepts and erode all sort of nuance.

When people use them and when people point it out, people get really fucking angry, both ways, and it can be a little hard to understand why and what people are actually angry about. So let's try and untangle that a bit.

Content warnings! We're gonna be talking about Nazis and other genocidal groups, so that's always fun. We're also gonna tangentially discuss misogyny, antiblackness, antisemitism and sexual assault, sexual abuse, pedophilia and zoophilia. The tangential warnings are only applicable to non-explicit discussions of dog whistles in section 3. Sections 1 and 2 do not go into detail about specific dog whistles. I will reiterate the content warnings in section 3.

1. What are dog whistles?

Dog whistles are not actual, literal dog whistles, but it does help to know what an actual, literal dog whistle is, to understand the metaphor. A dog whistle is a whistle designed to be heard by a dog, but crucially and most importantly, not by a person. When you toot on the thing, it makes a quiet, almost imperceptible sound, but if you've trained a dog with it, the dog will go fucking bonkers. The science of it is actually really cool and has to do with the range of intensity of stimuli that different animals can perceive. You know how dogs have an infinitely better smelling sense than you or me? Their hearing is different. That whistle you and I can't really hear, they hear loud and clear.

So what are the metaphorical dog whistles about then? They follow the same principle. Metaphorical dog whistles (I'm gonna call them just dog whistles for the rest of this thing, because I'm lazy, but you're smart and we already defined the terms, so I trust you to keep up) are words with different meanings depending on the audience. That's not inherently malicious, or unique to dog whistles. 99% of the crude humor of humanity comes from that sort of thing: cock is a male bird of a domestic fowl species, and also a bad word that will get you demonetized from Corporate controlled internet if you say/type it anywhere a payment processor can see. So there has to be more to them, than having multiple meanings.

Specifically, dog whistles have "Jekill and Hyde" style meanings. One of them is pretty harmless, benign even. Completely innocent and not at all suspicious. The meaning equivalent of that scene in Snow White with the forest animals being all cute and soft and nice. But then there's the other meaning, and that meaning is not so nice. It can be a shorthand for a slur, or one of the highlights of a conspiracy theory, or represent a shorthand for something genocidal in nature. I'll go in more detail in the next section.

This is where most people stop talking about dog whistles, but I'm not gonna do that, because I think the next two things, that are also required for a dog whistle to be a dog whistle, are actually the most important. And the fact most people never stop to think about them is why dog whistles are so effective. So let's say the quiet part out loud now.

The third characteristic of dog whistles is that their nefarious meaning is in fact a nefarious secret meaning. That means this meaning is part of a closed system of belief. It's like the secret wizard password to enter the forbidden tree house club, except the wizards are Nazis, members of the KKK and other assorted genocidal fucktwits. It's not a nice club to be in, is what I'm trying to say, and the people in that club are generally acknowledged to be not very nice themselves. You might think I'm being glib here, but this is the important bit. Socially speaking, these clubs for genocidal dickheads are considered bad to some degree. There's at least a modicum of societal pressure to discourage people from belonging to these groups. If you're a Nazi and your boss finds out, they will fire you. If you're a Nazi and you walk into a bar, you're likely to get beaten up and told to never come back. Blatant, open membership to these groups is discouraged*, and therefore they need to come up with language and symbols that they understand to be supporting their ideology, but which might not get immediately recognized by outsiders, thus prompting that social retribution they're trying to avoid.

*This is why people are really freaked out by the rise of extremist social and political movements in today's world, because every time an alt-right dudebro feels comfortable just spouting the N word or beating a random trans person in the subway, and they're not immediately and swiftly punished by anyone from bystanders to the actual legal system, those social pressures start letting up and the scum starts to float up into the surface. This is why the punching Nazis rhetoric works. It's a 0 tolerance policy that keeps genocidal ideologies marginalized and out of public consideration.

And let me just say this on its own, yes, genocidal ideologies should be marginalized and kept out of public consideration. Because they're genocidal. There is nothing of value to be found in genocidal ideologies, and extending them any kind of consideration makes you complicit in the very real, actual genocide they're working towards. Yes, really.

The last characteristic of a dog whistle is also the most important and the one people get tripped by the most: It refers to a dog whistle's ability to launder the philosophy of the group that created it, planting the seeds of it in the public sphere and priming people to be radicalized. One of the most common, and frankly distressing, reactions I see whenever someone gets called out for using dog whistles is "it's okay, I'm not a [insert relevant genocidal group here], it's okay if I use it, because the idea behind the word is actually useful!" Intent does not change the nature of a dog whistle. Dog whistles are in fact designed to trick you into doing their work for them. Dog whistles are bad, because when you use them, you lend your credibility to them. So the next time your friends/family/followers see an actual Nazi use them, they will use you as a frame of reference, and give the Nazi a pass. "My friend/relative/fave uses this word all the time, and THEY aren't a Nazi, so what are the chances that this guy is? Besides, all Nazis wear swastikas and like, shaved heads or something. Nah." Congratulations, you have become complicit in the breakdown of the system that's supposed to keep those Nazis out and allowed one of them to walk in and make themselves at home in your community.

Hearing people constantly use dog whistles desensitizes people and erodes their ability to see them for what they are. It makes it normal to use loaded language - and all dog whistles are loaded language - and makes it hard to police and expel those who use that loaded language for its actual nefarious intent.

It's also important to know a lot of dog whistles are "ship of Theseus"'d into sounding reasonable, for the purpose of making people more receptive to extremist ideas and concepts. By that I mean, they start from their very obviously genocidal talking point, and then slowly replace bits and pieces, laundering it until it sounds... you know, reasonable. Understandable. Most of the time they achieve this by targeting strong emotional responses and priming people to accept concepts that are fundamentally against their best interests, but presented in a way that appeals to emotionality and discourages thinking through the implications.

2. "If you hear the whistle, you're the dog" and other bad takes that need to go die in a fire.

So now that we're all on the same page about what dog whistles are and what purpose they serve, we need to talk about what to do about them. Yes, I'm gonna go into that before going into a not extensive and definitely not exhaustive list of dog whistles, because I love you and also because this is tumblr and you guys have a habit of trying to turn everything into a fucking standard rule to then beat up people with. No-nuance, all-outrage mentality in social media is the thing dog whistles are designed to exploit. So let's do our part to not... you know. Do that.

My least favorite rule that people have come up with to try and deal with dog whistles while doing the least amount of critical thinking ever is the infamous witticism "if you hear the whistle, you're the dog." This means that if you understand the dog whistle, you must be its target audience (you know, the Nazi one) and therefore you're a bad person. This is extremely stupid if you spend two seconds thinking about it, so let's do that: if the ideal is for people to "not be the dog", ie, "not hear the whistle" and therefore not understand the second, hidden meaning of the dog whistle, that would mean the ideal is for the dog whistle to work just as intended. Which is a bad thing, need I remind you, since the thing dog whistles are working towards is normalizing and encouraging the acceptance of explicitly genocidal ideologies. Which are bad! And you know they're bad! Because they're explicitly aiming for genocide! But this stupid nugget of stupidity goes one step further and also penalizes those who are being targeted by the dog whistle's users. Remember, genocides target people. Groups of people, to be precise, that the genocide promoters have built an entire ideology to justify why they get to commit genocide against this specific group of people. The justifications and reasons don't have to be very good - they can't, in fact, be good at all, because genocide is never okay, and if you find yourself trying to argue, you might want to take a few steps back and figure out when you got poisoned by genocide ideologies - in the sense that they don't need to be logical or reasonable. They just fill in a gap in the thought process. Whenever people do something, someone will ask them why, and genocide is surprisingly no different in that regard. So the justifications and reasonings are all salad dressing. They're all bad and meaningless and stupid, because they're being used to justify genocide, and genocide is unjustifiable by definition. The point is don't try to argue about the reasons, the reasons are fake and don't matter and they're there only to trap people into perpetual argumentative sinkholes which often only create more net harm by virtue of putting all that genocidal rhetoric in your public space. Incidentally, this is why deplatforming and denying the space to defend/argue/discuss genocidal ideologies is the preferred method to deal with them, exposure to them is in itself inherently harmful and there's nothing productive to come with allowing them the chance to explain why they think genocide is actually a good idea.

ANYWAY, the point is: if you're a group that has been targeted by these genocidal ideologies, you need to be able to decode and understand the secret, hidden meaning behind those dog whistles. You have to. Otherwise you're gonna end up a gruesome statistic some dipshit politician will try to use to two-side the issue on Fox News. You can then see how it's incredibly stupid, not to mention unspeakably offensive, to tell people who are being targeted by genocidal dipshits, that if they understand what the genocidal dipshits are really trying to say (remember, that THEY specifically should be genocided), they might in fact be the genocidal dipshits themselves.

Yes, "if you hear the whistle, you're the dog" is a very witty, very snappy, very catchy phrase. It's also incredibly fucking stupid and also goddamn insulting. Stop using it. Stop rewarding people who use it. Be fucking better.

Okay, so. What now? What to do if you catch someone using a dog whistle? Well, the most important thing to do is to not immediately accuse them of being a Nazi or belonging to the assorted genocidal dipshit group of choice. Super not do that in public. I know, it sounds counterintuitive, specially since we just affirmed that "punch the Nazi" is a perfectly valid and effective rhetorical device to get rid of Nazis. But the thing with dog whistles is that they're also bait. They're juicy, tender bait almost lab designed to get normal people - you know, people who don't hold genocidal beliefs and in fact think genocide is super bad and forever unjustifiable - frothing mad. Remember that dog whistles have two meanings, and that allows the genocidal dipshits to go "see? These people are mad! They're insane! They are the real reactionaries, they see malicious evil in every little thing!" and they will use every single dogpile to punctuate their statement and justify themselves. That's what dog whistles are designed to do, remember? They condition people to find genocidal ideology acceptable even when they rationally would not.

Ideally, if you know this person and you have the emotional and psychological bandwidth to do some education, you should reach out in private and offer to explain why the seemingly innocent thing the person posted is actually super bad. And I do mean explain. You need to explain on the history of the dog whistle, the purpose of the dog whistle, and emphasize that it's not an indictment of their character or an attempt to imply they're nefarious or malicious themselves, but rather that they've fallen prey to a scam by literal genocidal dipshits. This is... a lot. It's hard. People are very defensive at the smallest insinuation that they might be spewing Nazi talking points. It's often demeaning and exasperating work, and while it does work, it's just a sinkhole of resources that could be better spent in other, more pressing causes that also need attention because we have a bit of an epidemic and these genocidal dipshits keep popping up everywhere. It's also very exhausting for actual targets of the genocidal dipshits to have to argue with people that "that thing you said is used to call for the genocide of people like me, no really, please stop" and have to spend time pampering and reassuring people who go into literal hysterics trying to prove THEY are not the bad ones, how DARE you.

So what DO you do? Realistically? No one knows for sure. There isn't a wide-spread, peer-reviewed, fits-all-sizes solution. This is exactly the kind of thing dog whistles are designed to get around: there's no dogmatic, stringent rule that will make it so you can always tell if something is a dog whistle and how to make people stop using them. But that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. You can be critical and thoughtful about the content you consume and platform in your spaces*. You can prioritize the voices of those being targeted by the openly genocidal dipshits and listen and pay attention when they tell you "hey, this thing? this thing is BAD." Encourage self-reflection in yourself and your social circle. When you foster a culture that welcomes people making mistakes and being corrected/nudged into being better about things, the emotional tax of finding out you've been platforming hate speech in disguise is significantly less.

*Being critical and thoughtful about the content you consume doesn't mean falling into purity culture rabbit holes where you must only consume and platform THE PUREST AND MOST UNPROBLEMATIC OF THINGS, but rather understand that the framing of content is important and you can do your part to minimize harm by extending simple courtesies like adding trigger or content warnings, and being critical about the sort of thing you platform and put in your followers' feed. Sometimes the Nazis are being obtuse on purpose, hoping you will get angry enough to dunk on them in public and therefore grant them and their toxic rhetoric access to your entire platform. Their bait is very tempting, but you're better than that.

And when private/polite/off-screen attempts to get someone to stop using a dog whistle inevitably fail, stop engaging with that person entirely, and instead platform the fact the dog whistle is a dog whistle and why. I don't mean "cut that person off your life entirely", though you might have to, if you eventually realize that not only did they knew they were using a dog whistle, they were doing so purposefully all this time. And that's heartbreaking and awful, because no one likes to find out someone in their social circle is a literal genocidal dipshit. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about larger scale education that robs the dog whistle of its most valuable asset: plausible deniability. When you make a post explaining that a certain word or a certain phrase is a dog whistle, and explain the history and weight of it, you break the dog whistle. The more people know to recognize it, the less it works for its intended purpose. And the most effective way of doing this is by focusing on the dog whistle itself, and not the people who use them. Don't single out individuals, because then your informative post has become a call out and be dismissed as drama or grudge wank. Focus on the fact that it's not the people who say these words that are the problem, it's the people who keep insisting they should use those words.

See, the thing about fighting genocidal ideologies is that you're not targeting individual people. Or even groups of people. This is not about starting a morality crusade against X or Y. It's about dismantling the tools of genocide. It's about reinforcing those societal pressures that keep them hidden in the corners and denies them power and influence to actually enact their genocidal goals.

They are a fucking fringe minority at the very edges of society, is the point, and they should never be allowed to forget it.

3. What are some dog whistles you should keep an eye out for?

So there's a lot of them and there's not enough time in the actual universe to cover all of them. That's the shitty thing about genocidal dipshits and their dog whistles. As soon as you demystify one, they've come up with another one. Any list will by necessity be incomplete. Resist the urge to turn this urge to categorize things into your personal white whale, and remember a dogmatic, rigid approach of "acceptable vs unacceptable words" is precisely the kind of system dog whistles are designed to get around.

I will not be covering anti-black or antisemitic dog whistles. Because I'm neither black nor Jewish, and as we just discussed, you should be listening and platforming THOSE voices whenever attacks at them come up. I'm going to focus on the dog whistles in this post, which is what sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place. I replied to that post to comment on an unrelated situation but I made a point to mention the dog whistles and several people came back and asked me about it.

I'm linking to my own reblog chain of it, because OP has deleted the original post. I wanna make clear this is not an accusation or an attack on OP. I don't know OP from Adam and I don't feel qualified to say if they're using these dog whistles in any harmful way, beyond the inherent harm that comes with giving credibility to dog whistles at all. I can't believe I have to say this explicitly in this year of our lord 2022, but please do not harass, abuse or otherwise inconvenience OP. We literally just went over how that doesn't work when it comes to deplatforming dog whistles. I'm just giving context and full disclosure, okay?

Okay.

Let's go.

Content warnings! Again! We're gonna be talking about Nazis and other genocidal groups, so that's always fun. We're also gonna tangentially discuss misogyny, antiblackness, antisemitism and sexual assault, sexual abuse, pedophilia and zoophilia.

"Cancel Culture." Cancel culture began - and this is extremely common - as a term within the black community to refer to the tactic of using social pressure to force racist bigots to face consequences for their racist bigotry. It was also in use within the #MeToo movement, to sort of crowdfund consequences for people with too much social, political or financial capital, which allowed them to just... not face consequences for their behavior. And yeah, ostracizing bigots is an excellent way to get rid of bigots or at least minimize the effects of their bigotry. It's so effective that's what dog whistles are for. The thing is, Cancel Culture has now been appropriated by the very people it was meant to be used again. Racist white people decry Cancel Culture when they are faced with the consequences of their actions, labeling them instead as abusive or unwarranted. The term has been thoroughly poisoned and the only people you hear talking about it seriously, phrasing it as this big, evil thing that must be stopped, are the right wing pundits who make their money out of making people feel threatened by changing social mores. Most people think that "less net bigotry in the world" is a good thing. But if your entire grift is based on bigotry, then this is a personal attack on you. Cancel culture is being used now as a short hand to express how very obvious consequences to one's actions are in fact malicious targeted abuse. This prioritizes the bigots over their victims, makes it nearly impossible to have conversations about actual reparations and presents the notion of "hey, if you're a bigot people won't like you" as if it were an outlandish, unnatural position to take. You can tell OP is actually using the dog whistle version of this in their post, because they're not talking about consequences to someone's actions, but explicitly framing a disproportionate, malicious and unwarranted harassment campaign as "Cancel Culture." OP themselves defines "Cancel Culture" in their post, and this is actually a huge problem when it comes to the proliferation of dog whistles. When you assume you know the root of an idiom and you define it in the context of your own usage, you may be inadvertently mainstreaming something that you shouldn't. Maybe you heard this from a trusted youtuber or a friend, and you understand the way THEY use it, and you use it THAT way, you don't mean it in the weirdo way. But you should make a habit to track down the history of idioms before you use them. For one, because everyone could stand to use their words more precisely and make sure that the words they're using actually mean what they want them to mean. But for another, because understanding the history of idioms is a very good way of avoiding boot in mouth syndrome.

"Purity Culture." This is also a dog whistle! And I used it in the text of this post! Except not really. In this post I'm using the original sense of the phrase, OP is using the dog whistle version. (Are you starting to see why if you look too hard at dog whistles you're gonna end up going a little bit insane?) Purity culture originally refers to misguided, reactionary rejection of the slippery slope fallacy that "nothing is pure, therefore, there's no point." Purity culture refers to this idea of treating every single slight, infraction or "taint" equally across the board, without any space for nuance or context. There's two dog whistles around this term, actually! One of them is from the pro-censorship camp, who treats purity culture as an ideal and dresses it up in "responsible media consumption" and "child-appropriate spaces" to try and gloss over the fact they're pro-fascist censorship tools and restrictions, they just think the problem is they're not targeting the right people and concepts. You can identify this lot very quickly because they love to use the word "freak" in a derogatory fashion. They're also real bad at nuance and super fond of historical revisionism. The other dog whistle is, hilariously, the exact opposite of this. This is coming from the actual, no joke, pro-sexual abuse corner of the internet (think, pedophilia, zoophilia, incest, etc, anything that it's reasonably considered indefensible because it's predicated on forcing sexual concepts and acts upon people and living creatures who do not and cannot consent to it). Their version of purity culture is framing any negative criticism of their actions and interests as an attempt to censor and unjustly ostracize them. I need to be very clear here that I'm definitely not talking about fiction here. We're not talking about people who like to read stories about this sort of content. We're talking about people who are actually committing these acts in real life, to real people, children and animals. We need to make that distinction, because that's what the dog whistle is arguing. They infiltrate groups that are staunchly anti-censorship and frame themselves as victims of prosecution but the things they're being prosecuted for are not art, text or other materials rooted in trasgressive fiction. They're really annoying and really detrimental to the fight against censorship, because every time one of these idiots is outed for the miserable fucking monster they are, pro-censorship folk immediately rush in to reframe the conversation as if anti-censorship groups are unquestionably supporting and defending the indefensible.

"Virtue Signaling." I unironically love this dog whistle, personally, because it betrays the massive chasm within the worldview of the people who use it. Virtue signaling is the concept of doing good things, for the sake of other people thinking you're good. It's the cry of alt-right pseudointellectuals who posit that people don't actually care about racism and sexism and transphobia and homophobia and xenophobia and religious intolerance and any of the other social evils they've decided they want to champion instead. No! People secretly support these things, it's just that it's socially unacceptable to do so, so they must pretend. They must play their part in the social farce, and make sure everybody knows they have done so, waving a flag that signals all who see it that they are one of them. I genuinely love this one because they always use "virtue signaling" as a derogatory term, it is always framed in a negative way, like this is evidence of the social contract falling to pieces. The thing is, this is a feature, not a bug. Yeah, you have to publicly decry bigotry and fall in step with the social mores of your community, and yeah, we want communities that see bigotry as some sort of social suicide. Society should actually ostracize and push out bigoted, disruptive individuals, because bigotry itself is a betrayal of the social contract. If you refuse to participate in society by abiding its rules, yeah, you don't get to be part of society. And yeah, we don't care about thought crime. Be a bigot in your head all you want, I want a society that punishes you severely if you ever decide to ACT on those thoughts, tho. That's a functional society. That's a good thing. The people who use "virtue signaling" unironically are trying to grapple with their own hypocrisy, with the fact they spew out hateful, genocidal nonsense but they know damn well they would be utterly destroyed if they tried to act out on it, so instead they've come up with a way to say "society decries and rejects everything I stand for, and I refuse to be a martyr to my ideals so I'm just going to be a cowardly, hateful idiot and pretend that makes me better than everyone else."

The post itself is pushing a fairly reasonable message: harassment = bad. The problem is that in utilizing dog whistles the message is muddled, and a pretty straightforward message becomes twisted enough to allow spaces for the beneficiaries of those dog whistles to misappropriate and excuse their actions. That's literally what @jabberwockypie and myself were doing in that post, in response to Flamethrower's reply.

Notice how Flamethrower conveniently used the definition of "cancel culture" that matches the dog whistle, in an attempt to shield herself from criticism and then frame the consequences of her actions as abuse and harassment. THAT is why dog whistles matter and why it's important not to engage with them. Because they open the door for bad actors to justify themselves and skirt responsibility for their actions.

Don't let them.

4. Yeah, okay, Rie, but that's like 5K worth of words, do you have any sources for all that?

I'm so fucking glad you asked!

What’s wrong with dogwhistles

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/21/racist-roots-dog-whistle/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26529439

@innuendostudios's The Alt-Right Playbook is an excellent resource in identifying the tools of radicalization, but most importantly his sources are an excellent way to familiarize yourself with all this nonsense.

5. Now what?

IDK, do your best. Keep trying. Forgive yourself for fucking up and commit to learning from it.

Mostly, be kind. To yourself and to others, but specially those who are being targeted by genocidal dipshits.

And remember, if someone tells you the solution to your problems is the complete extermination of a group of people... that person is not your friend, that's an asshole looking for an alibi. You deserve better than that.

[onetuffbunny]

Volphs & Rabbits

Bunny dropped a Fumblr message with his address to the nice alien missing her head and then immediately forgot all about it because he noticed the shelf with his decorative alcohol bottles was dusty and he had to stop everything then and there to clean that up because a messy house meant a messy mind. After he got out the paper towels and Windex from the next room over, he was suddenly struck with the horrifying idea that his dusty as fuck bottles might have been in the background of his last video, so he had to spend a few awkward minutes rewatching the last clip he posted to make sure his subscribers didn't see how he lived because no one thinks a man who forgets to dust is sexy. In the course of doing so, he received an alert on his phone that the figure he ordered from Japan was delayed, which reminded him that he should check to see if the latest season of that magical girl anime was posted so he and Lucy could have an online watch party later.

In the course of the very short walk between his workshop and his home, he almost tripped over one of Avery's toy dinosaurs half-buried in the yard and he made a mental note to dig that up so he wouldn't keep tripping on it, which was quickly forgotten because then he started wondering what kind of dinosaur it even was. He managed to keep on this train of thought long enough to boot his PC up and Foogle it, but then he remembered that he should probably eat, so he went to the fridge to chug down some cold blood (heating it up in a pot seemed like a lot of work) and to say hello to his baby psychic tree child. This was followed by him scarfing down on cheese puffs (sure, he couldn't taste them very well but it was the principle) while playing around with his son's plush duckling.

Most of this, of course, can be chalked up to the fact that he'd slept maybe five hours max in the last few days and, of course, unmedicated ADHD (Bunny kept meaning to call the alien therapist for aliens but he kept forgetting, possibly because of the unmedicated ADHD) and the sheer virtue of the fact that Emily the Duck really was the world's cutest toy duck, but as for giving his address away to Internet strangers he hadn't even talked to over the phone, his self-preservation instincts eroded away several memory modifications ago. Bunny could generally keep himself together around his kids but the instant they went to their mother, all bets were off. There was a reason why a couple regulators kept bets on what bullshit he'd find himself in the middle of next.

Bunny (for the record, clad in his tie-dyed chained short-shirts, neon yellow mesh shirt, sequined crop top, and thigh-high rainbow platform boots because it's important to dress appropriately for winter) was narrating dramatic duck adventures because this is the sort of thing he does when left to himself when he heard the jangling of his ghost alarms, this being the massive horde of wind chimes and cans on a string strung all along the perimeter of his property. Ghosts could come for you at any minute and you had to be prepared to deal with them. They'd freeze your swing set and crack it apart. They'd peek into your windows. They'd steal your dead wife's face and beg to be let inside but you just had to say no, no, no.

Bunny had three sacred callings in life and warding off all the goddamn ghosts was one of them. Fuckers.

He froze for a second, listened, and then crept to the window to peek out from behind the shades, normally shut tight so no light could enter.

"What the fuck."

[whatifyoulivelikethat]

aquarium | jjk

pairing(s): jungkook x reader

summary: You thought you and Jeon Jungkook would be last forever, but you had to read the ending yourself, in the form of typed words. When it arrived, you went to the blue sea. The grey sky would come and the black storm would appear.

warnings: cheating in established relationship; (very sad) angst; language; ambiguous ending; non-idol!AU; video game streamer!Jungkook x reader; ft. kind garden-loving landlord!Taehyung

--

now playing – trauma (aquarium) by ONEWE

this place has been transformed into something unknown i’m trapped alone in an aquarium

You could see the ending.

At first it was the little things. He held your hand a little less, stood a little further from you when you two walked side by side. Stared at his phone a lot.  Didn’t share his snacks as often. Spent all his time on his computer, streaming video games for longer and longer hours.

You had nothing to say. It was his job, after all.

You made his meals, washed his dishes. Changed his water bottles, gave him a kiss for the camera. Felt a little part of you die inside each time you went to bed alone, only to hear him slip under the blankets, hours after you. You went to work for longer and longer hours. There was no reason to go home. He ordered take-out for dinner every night.

Being Jeon Jungkook’s girlfriend was supposed to be fun.

And it was fun, at first. At first, he spent all this time with you. At first, he was always with you, by your side. He only streamed a little back then. It was a slow, gradual growth, and, like all parasites, it took over every aspect of your life. From your nights, to your days, to your time – making meals, cleaning up after him, doing all the laundry.

You could tolerate it. He made a lot of money. He was having fun. He was smiling. You would do anything for Jeon Jungkook. He dragged you into his sea and you swam in it happily. Until you realized you were stuck and alone, glass walls all around you, keeping you away from him. Seeing him, and yet not being able to touch him, kept away from his heart.

Caught in an aquarium.

He would give you kisses and tell you he wanted to get married.

He would say he loved you, but it was all a lie.

You weren’t in his Instagram photos. You weren’t part of his Twitter bio anymore. You weren’t listed in his phone with a little purple heart next to your name. Even that, you wouldn’t mind. He told you he didn’t want you to get harassed by trolls. He told you that he wasn’t ashamed of you, that you were the most beautiful woman in the world.

But.

Then again.

He told every girl in his DMs that.

You stared at them that faithful night, unable to sleep, reading them all. Jungkook was asleep beside you, snoring away, and you read every single one. The WhatsApp messages were worse. They were so much worse. More sexual, detailing what he wanted to do to other people. Not you. Not you, the love of his life. Not you, the one by his side.

You knew how to backtrack and retrace your steps. Make it seem like you were never there. Placed his phone on his side of the bed and went to sleep. He held you that night. Turned around in his sleep and wrapped his arms around you.

Inside, you drowned.

When he told you that he was going to a gaming convention, he was very excited. Grinning his beautiful grin, snacking on shrimp chips as you washed the dishes. It was only the weekend, only two days. He wasn’t going to go for the Friday or Monday, so he could spend time with you.

“I would totally invite you, but you said you have to work that weekend.”

You said apologetically. “I know. I’m sorry. But I have to be there for my co-workers.”

He frowned and nudged you. “You work too much. You know you don’t have to. We can just live off my streaming money. I can buy you nice things.”

“I would feel bad for leaving them. I’ve worked at that office for seven years.”

He smirked, elbowing you a little. “Cheating on me with all the cute guys?”

You carefully wiped down the glass, placing it back in the cabinet, smile plastered to your face.

“No guy is cuter than you, Jungkook.”

That was the weekend you left.

You went to work, confirmed your month-long vacation of all the hours you’ve collected over the years, and packed every belonging you owned in that apartment. To be honest, there wasn’t very much. Anything Jungkook had ever bought you, you left behind.

There was no reason to hold onto it.

For a long moment, you stared at the photos, the stack of photos of you and him. Your smile, his smile, the places you’ve been, the things you’ve seen with him. Then you placed them on the bed, scattering them, spreading them all over the blankets.

You left it like that.

-

You went to the ocean.

You dropped the boxes at a storage unit in the city. Took only a carry-on bag of clothes and took a train to the coast. You left your phone in the storage unit too, telling your parents you were going on vacation to the sea. Didn’t say where, only mentioned you wanted to unplug, unwind, disconnect.

Disconnect.

The cottage you rented was cared for by a nice young man with dark brown hair and tan skin. He said it was his parents’ and that he was renting it out for them. If you needed anything, you could contact him and he wouldn’t hesitate to help. He had a bright, boxy smile and a cheerful tone. You thanked him for being so considerate.

You sat on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling over the side.

Your pink flats were right beside you, and your arms were resting on the wooden fence. The ocean breeze was strong here, salty and cold. You were in a long-sleeved white dress that was going to get dirt and grass stains on it, but that sort of thing didn’t matter now.

Clothes could be replaced.

The garden rock in your hand spun round and round, dancing between your deft fingers. Your left hand. The hand that held his when you two walked side by side, fitting in his right covered in small tattoos. He had a king’s crown tattoo on his ring finger and asked you if you would get a queen’s crown tattoo someday. It didn’t have to be on your hand. Anywhere was fine. 

You looked at your left hand then, the hand that was holding his, and then it didn’t.

And then it didn’t.

You stared down into the crashing waves and jagged rocks under you. It was cold here. How far down was that? White forth slammed against eroding stone. Even mountains weren’t forever. Even something as solid as rock could be ground down into nothing with water.

Your eyes shifted to the shimmering sea, the endless blue, sun reflecting harshly off it. It didn’t matter how beautiful the water was or how many extraordinary creatures were under the surface. The deep sea hid all the worst creatures, all the terrible monsters. Not even science could go that far and discover all those horrors.

You pulled your arm back and threw the rock as far as you could. You couldn’t even see where it landed. The seawater was too rough and wild.

“Why would you throw my garden stone into the ocean?”

You started, turning around sharply to the heavy, baritone voice of your landlord. He was wearing a white sunhat, a beige shirt and pants, clutching a pair of dirty and worn brown gardening gloves. He frowned at you, staring into the ocean.

“What did my rock ever do to you?”

You looked back to the choppy waves and then faced him again, ashamed.

“Well, come. You will have to help with the garden to repay for that. I’m harvesting winter squash.”

-

“You can cook.”

You nodded to Kim Taehyung, the young man who was caring for the sea cottage. He was tasting some of your winter squash and fresh bamboo combination after he asked if you could do something with the two. You had added garlic, ginger, and made a light white sauce as you sautéed it all together.

“I got this bamboo from a friend who lives in the mountains. I can’t cook very well though. Can you?”

You two ate in steady silence, listening to the sounds of nature and waves crashing into shore. He had made rice while you cooked the vegetables.

“The only thing I can make, really,” he had chuckled.

You chewed, listening to Taehyung mix the leftover sauce with the rice and slurp it up.

“The world is quiet here,” you said softly.

He nodded; mouth full. His brown eyes shifted to the overhanging cliff as he swallowed.

“It is.”

-

You tended the garden with him.

You hadn’t even realized all the greenery around the cottage was a giant garden. To you, they were just pretty plants. Taehyung taught you all about the plants, which ones he was growing, which ones the season was already over, which ones he was trying to grow next season. Some were flower bushes he was trying to learn, but you learned that they were finnicky and not as hardy as the vegetables.

“I don’t even like vegetables that much,” he laughed, rich, full, heedless. “But they’re easy to care for, so they make me the happiest.”

He had tried fruits, but the wild animals always got to them despite his best efforts.

“I must share with nature, I suppose.”

Sometimes, you missed the internet. You missed the distractions, the games you played, the ability to like random thoughts on someone’s Twitter. In those times, you would stare at the never-ending blue ocean and then Taehyung would tap you with the rake and tell you that you needed to help him loosen the soil.

“We need all of nature’s nutrients.”

-

You stared out to the blue ocean, wearing a large straw hat and a navy dress. You weren’t at the cliff this time, but farther back. The breeze was softer at this moment. Taehyung had given you the hat a while ago, telling you it was better than the white scarf you wore around your hair. It did provide better sun protection for your face.

The cobalt sea was violent today, sky grey and dark. Taehyung told you it might rain, so the garden could be skipped today.

You held your hat and looked up.

“Me too, sky. Me too,” you murmured quietly.

You wondered when the feeling would disappear. It would probably be gradual, silently vanishing as each day was replaced, memories fading into the vast abyss of thoughts, mixing with fantasy so that you wouldn’t be able to know the difference between what was real and what was fake. That’s why eyewitness accounts were never trustworthy.

That’s how all memories were.

You let go of your hat for only a second. It flew off your head and you spun around, surprised at the strong ocean breeze.

Taehyung caught it with one hand, standing a few meters behind you.

Your lips parted at how easily he was able to catch it. He was wearing a yellow raincoat and brown pants with his usual brown gardening boots. He smiled, walking up to you and putting the straw hat back on your head.

“I warned you that you might lose it if you stand too close to the ocean.”

You hand came up and brushed against his fingers as he retreated his. He looked away quickly, into the stormy blue sea threatened by grey clouds.

“What have you lost to be looking so sad?” Taehyung asked gently.

You followed his gaze.

“Memories.” The water churned, smacking against the cliffside. “A whole book of them.”

“What do you mean?”

You turned back to Taehyung, who was now watching you curiously. You held onto your straw hat, not wanting it to blow away again.

“I left all the photos, so I wouldn’t have to see them again.” You sighed. “Pictures of moments, years etched out visually. I was going to make a memories photo book when we got married.”

You looked back to the ocean, seeing the sky darken ever more.

“And now we won’t.”

There was a loud clap of thunder. Your eyes searched for the lightning.

And then your name, shouted across the grass, harsh and angry like the thunder.

At first, you didn’t hear it. You were distracted by the sky, waiting for the rain. But Taehyung snapped his head around, startled. You noticed his movement and turned around too. A figure in black jumped over the fence, yelling your name on the top of his lungs.

The glass walls came up inside you, trying to protect you from the stumbling, turbulent sea that was Jeon Jungkook.

Taehyung frowned. “Who the fuck is that?”

“Who the fuck are you?” Jungkook spat, glaring at him and his yellow raincoat. He called you again, sharply, stomping over. “Do you have any idea how worried I was? When I came home from the convention and you were just gone? No note, nothing, only to find you running off with some random guy!”

The thunder sounded again, but there was no lightning yet.

“I called everyone! Your work, your friends, your family, your phone! You wouldn’t even answer your fucking phone. I had to find out from your work that you were on vacation,” Jungkook hissed, glaring at you. “Vacation from our relationship that is, fucking cheating on me.”

Taehyung glared back. “Dude, it’s not like that at all. I’m just the landlord of the cottage she rented–”

“Shut up. I’m not talking to you.”

You stared at Jungkook, his dark brows and wild black hair, so angry at you that he was cursing. The irony was not lost on you. You held onto the straw hat.

“Is that all it was?” you said quietly. “You were upset that I would find affection in someone else?”

“Of course, I was! You’re the love of my life!”

You smiled gently. “Is that what you tell them all?” Your navy dress fluttered in the harsh ocean breeze.

Jungkook scowled. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

You looked down to your pink flats, dirty and grass-stained now from running around the cottage garden. Taehyung had teased you, telling you they weren’t good gardening shoes, but you hadn’t brought any other shoes with you. Everything else Jungkook had bought you, with his money.

“Even now, you pretend, Jungkook.” Your hair tangled in the wind, salty and tousled from the sea. You looked back up at him and his expression was changing now. “I remember asking you once, should you comment like that on other people’s Instagram posts?” The thunder was louder now, sky ripping apart with flashing light. “You said, everyone is like that. It’s part of the business.” The color was draining out of Jungkook’s face. “Were the DMs only for show too? What about the WhatsApp messages? The things you wanted to do to them? The ones you wanted to shove your dick into?”

“That’s fucked up,” Taehyung muttered next to you.

“That… That wasn’t…” Jungkook struggled for words. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

You nodded. You felt it first, the fat drop on the hand holding your hat.

“I know you didn’t. Everything was for fun. Everything.”

Smile plastered to your face, because what could you do now?

“Even me. Even I was for fun.”

You inhaled a deep breath. You had cried for many nights when you crawled into that unfamiliar bed upstairs. For hours, long after Taehyung was gone. Drowning in your own endless sea, filling your glass aquarium. Cried yourself out, and now you let the sea cry for you when you watched it every day, while you worked on the garden with Taehyung.

The rain began to fall.

You looked back to Jungkook, torn, guilty, exposed.

“You should come in and wait for the rain to subside before going home. Your viewers will miss you.”

Taehyung pulled his hood over his head. “Do you want me to stay?” he asked you, voice sharp. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

The way he said it implied in more ways than just physical pain. But it was a little late for that.

“I think I will be okay, Taehyung,” you said, water seeping through your hat, rain drenching your dress., turning you into a soaked doll. “Nature has taught me to keep growing.”

He bit his lip, still frowning, but bowed. “Alright.”

And then you watched him go, back to his car, hurrying along. You went in the opposite direction, to the cottage. You had one more week in your hideaway. Rainwater seeped into your flats as you stepped into the grass, soaking your feet. But somehow, it was nice. It was nice to feel the sky cry on you, because then you didn’t have to. You made your way to the covered porch, wringing out your dress the best you could. Took off your hat, opened the door.

Heard heavy black boots in your wake.

“You… left all the pictures.”

The choked, sorrowful voice of Jeon Jungkook behind you.

“I did.”

You stepped inside the cottage. Placed your hat on the hook, dripping wet. Stepped out of your drenched pink flats. Didn’t wait for him. Just went upstairs to the bathroom, trailing rainwater, locking the door behind you. You turned on the water, plugging the drain. Ran a bath and sank into your own hot aquarium.

You heard the heavy fall against the door. Your name, softly spoken through the door.

“I’m sorry.”

You sank further into the water.

“No apology will ever fix what you have done to me.”

The water was cloudy and milky with whatever bath salts Taehyung had provided with the other personal goods.

“I can prove it to you.”

You felt the tears come now, the anger, the sadness. You submerged your head underwater, blocking out all the sound, blocking out your own thoughts. Your hair floated around you, washing out the salt of the blue sea. You waited, waited until your lungs screamed, and still you waited until your vision was fading to grey before you resurfaced, taking a shuddering breath, surprisingly calm.

“The trauma has already spread, Jungkook.”

You heard a slight sob at the tone you used to say his name, cold and unfeeling.

“I really didn’t mean it, I swear.”

You took a deep breath and dove into your man-made aquarium once again.

-

part ii

--

masterpost

extended playlist blue & grey by BTS 기억 세탁소 (eraser) by ONEWE 기억 속 한 권의 책 (a book in memory) by ONEWE

[garthnightmare]

The Train on Platform One- End

Now, the question is what we do with that knowledge. Will we continue on as we have done? It seems unlikely, to me. People are good at ignoring the fact that one day, they’ll die, and the world will cease to matter for them. But I think that’s partly because we know that the world isn’t going with us. People talk about guardian angels, living on through their kids. Some think that ghosts haunt old, abandoned buildings, carrying memories from past times.

And now we all know that there won’t be any of that. Just a dwindling world. Something like eighty years left for mankind, and only about twenty or so before civilisation begins to crumble to pieces.

What should we do with that time? I’m sure there are as many answers as there are seconds left for the human race. But I do not know which of the more obvious options I’m going to take.

I’ve taught at the University for years. I’ve taught legions of students, so much that names and faces and personalities have all started to blur into one. When I first started, I was excited about the thought of leaving a legacy, some part of myself that would carry on, particularly as H and I had no plans to have children even before we spilt up. But at this point, my dreams of leaving a legacy feel more and more hollow. The world has been changing bit-by-bit in the wrong direction, with writing seen as a channel of capital, and nothing further. With the internet destroying the attention span, and the world growing colder and colder to those who appreciate art, critical faculties have begun to erode; just the other day I heard a student opine that Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ was in actuality a shocking expose of the very real danger of male rape, and that further Maxim is the real victim in the entire story, I hung my head in despair.

It’s not just the youth of today, though. It’s me, too. The older one gets, the less magical and mysterious the world. Someone, somewhere, once wrote, ‘Life is nothing but a series of slamming doors, each more sonorous than the last,’ and if they didn’t, then someone ought to have done. Perhaps I will. I’ve been so ground down by the constant runaround of teaching, that I’ve almost forgotten how to live.

That’s why I knew I had to walk out, the second Professors West and Smith started throwing their weight around and making noises about archiving, future-proofing and the like. It’s going to happen, obviously; plans to preserve, to restore, to encode the sum knowledge of human civilisation. People are going to need something to keep them occupied. But I don’t want anything to do with it.

After all, what’s the point? Who’s going to be around to read the bloody thing?

I don’t want to be trapped.

I don’t want to pretend that what I’m doing matters anymore.

I don’t want to pretend about anything anymore.

A sudden light steals into my field of vision; a train is approaching.  I stare as it draws nearer, wondering what I’m going to do.