/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!
I read another book along similar lines called If We Burn, which was a broader look at the 2010s protest movements that sprung up from online activism. What I took away from it is that most of that activism was hollow and didn’t have a political vision or party program, it was just the masses shouting “No!” at their shitty governments. It was also easily put down once people in power got used to it.
The US empire is an ongoing environmental and humanitarian disaster.
Objectively speaking, the US nuking itself would solve a lot of the world’s problems.
Mostly I’m just being flippant as a way to cope with a very real fear that I am going to die.
It’s already in decay. A fascist turn would just destabilize society so much that the country breaks up into independent warring state-regions in a civil war. The US will probably nuke itself.
Those at the margins of the world will be saved from the long arm of the United States government.
It’ll be pretty bad for US Americans though.
Imagine not being excited for the collapse of the US government.
There’d be billowing clouds of steam coming from data centers if that were the case.
Pretty sure the water just goes through coolant piping and comes out the other side warmer, because water is a good heat sink.
Pagers are civilian objects, they’re categorically different from radio equipment because they can be used by civilians.
Furthermore, these exploded in civilian structures among the civilian population. Pagers blew up inside people’s cars while driving down the highway. They blew up on grocery stores. They blew up children.
It’s terrorism.
The water isn’t really consumed. It’s not like the servers are digesting it or boiling it away or something. Doesn’t the water just cycle through the system and then come out warm on the other side? There’s no reason for that water to go to waste!
Seems like these data centers are just dumping perfectly potable drinking water because it’s slightly cheaper than having their own water supply and cooling ponds.
Or (heaven forbid) learning to draw!
Love to burn down an acre of rain forest to generate a picture of an ape.
I just heard it on a podcast, but it seems some of the concept art is way different from the final designs.
I heard Concord was originally designed to have an entirely different art style, but some top-down decision came to make it yet another hyper-realistic shooter. That’s why the character designs are so weird, they’d be more at home in their original retrofuture/art deco stylized world.
Meanwhile, boomers will spend hours talking to a ChatGPT script that has convinced them its the real Oprah Winfrey.
They literally trained their models on the books lol
US Agricultural goods are heavily subsidized and, thanks to NAFTA, flooded Mexico’s markets and destroyed farmers’ livelihoods.
Musk will happily trigger Kessler syndrome to prevent competition.
China will be blamed, of course.
Burning down the entire rainforest so ChatGPT can talk to you while drilling holes in your teeth.
But can it make awkward one-sided conversation at you while it works on your teeth?
Oh I absolutely loved it, don’t get me wrong. I lived through that decade as my own political awakening, so every single event described was something I watched super closely and posted about and participated in as part of the online activist space (and sometimes in person!)
Your observation that the social media companies can leverage and benefit from these protest movements (and perhaps even create them) is important, I think. It’s probably why Musk bought Twitter, he wanted to wield that kind of power over the masses and their ability to organize. It seems to have worked, too. We don’t see anything like what we saw in the 2010s these days.