neutral ⌛

I used to circle tpot and related scenes as examples of this, but they're only exemplars insofar as they're made more obvious because they narrate that condition *specifically* as unusually refined epistemics.

It's a reflex everyone who's been "too online" has, that clique just loudly annotates it.

Not saying there's literal physical damage, mind you, I don't have an MRI handy and I doubt many of you would line up if I did. But we've all been reshaped by permanent high-compression discourse. But it's just legibility theater.

We all like to pretend we're on the quest for Ideal Truth Online but everyone who uses this stuff has got the same kind of compression CTE.

and so on (sniff)

more or less yeah

One of our finest traditions: reduce a structural critique to a countertop appliance, declare victory, log off spiritually unchanged.

Just a magnificent species, us humans. Social media is truly the pinnacle of our achievements.

Online reading habits are basically optimized to prevent charitable precision. People don’t want to locate the exact seam where a thing is right and wrong at once, because that takes effort and doesn’t perform well. Team reading is cheaper.

A civilization of tremendous gifts.

People read for alignment sorting before they read for content, especially on social media. Especially here on short-form, knee-jerk social media.

So instead of "her structural point is valid, her spiritual totalization is shakier", we get "washing machine lol"

Most people arguing for automation are not saying "abolish all meaningful human activity so we can become larval streaming pods."

Anyway, the argument isn't wrong in substance, but still the wrong register for the claim asking to be taken seriously.

"Corporate tech is not going to get us that" is strong, but "rather than replacing all forms of labour with robots so we can sit around dissociating on Netflix all day" is weaker: the opposing view is caricatured into a kind of pleasure-zombie fantasy.

Thread's got the same pattern, but it's more exposed because threads force compression and escalation. Unfortunately, it also keeps making category mistakes that make it easy to dunk on.

The piece (and thread) correctly sees that tech optimism often hides the substrate, but over-corrects by treating the substrate critique as sufficient explanation for human attachment, political failure, social delusion, etc.

It becomes a total theory. Total theories are catnip and usually trouble.

With no offense intended to OP; I think the problem here in the discourse thunderdome is that the piece/presentation is rhetorically effective but analytically squishy.

So people read team out of habit, because everything must be flawless in the quest for Ideal Truth Online (haha, hahahahaha).

I keep seeing people dunking on this, but this isn't necessarily wrong?

Saying "automation has not reliably delivered broad working-class freedom" and responding with "ah, but this one machine made a task less miserable" is not addressing the same claim. It's more of a register collision.

Did baby boomers eat all the pies? Is this a zoomer, or an old man? Or some sort of penis? What the fuck is eve going on here, The Guardian? What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE??

are we sure that's all they were doing with the pies

Our political vernacular oscillates entirely between compliance theater and impotence theater, then wonders why nobody wants to join the coalition.

That really builds coalitions. It's worked so well in the past, I think, which is why it's encouraging to see it again now.

The online impulse reduces to the choice of

Shut up, eat the degradation, history needs your compliance
-- or --
Since the menu is corrupt, I’ll convert helplessness into a moral gesture

Which is fun.

We don’t yet know which compromised ghoul you’ll be required to support, but when the time comes, please have the proper attitude. Non-compliance will be noted.

It's not even 2028 but it's nice to see people prepping to be the hall monitors for historical necessity. Very optimistic of them, actually.

The dnc won’t let me be

They couldn't pay me enough to deal with this place

PKD really nailed the counterfeit economy before it really gained scale; not just the fact of it, but the social metabolism of authenticity anxiety surrounding it.

Today we are all the man in the high castle, squinting at genesis cartridges, reddit posts, artwork and human souls for signs of original manufacture

www.reddit.com/r/SEGAGENESI...

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to pirate Andor, hustle at GameStop, and shoplift at Whole Foods.

Is there a solution here? I don't know. Probably not one you'll find here, anyway.

A functioning commons does require ordinary restraint. But restraint can’t be restored by preaching it downward while elite predation remains both continual and normalized upward.

The issue isn’t whether small acts of compliance matter; it’s that calls to restore them now, after decades of elite impunity and institutional arson, sound less like civic renewal than downward enforcement for everyone except those who broke the contract first.

It's not wrong, not exactly, but a sermon on dog poop and subway fares feels less like civic ethics and more like downstream discipline for people with dwindling power.

It doesn't make the street-level breaches any less real, of course, but such things generally don't emerge in a vacuum.

Civilization depends on small acts of compliance; sneering at that is juvenile. Sure, okay. But there's low-trust antisocial behavior, and then there's acknowledging that the social contract has been basically abandoned by the side with power for decades, culminating in current spree of arson.

Signage for "Excel Church"

"You know who else pivoted a table?"

I'll probably back-port some of the driftwatch stuff into the labeler reference architecture I made earlier. driftwatch is actually a labeler structurally, but it's detect-only and never emits public labels. Basically watches discourse for patterns like narrative clustering, information half-life.