Okay this is wild… I just learned that Lori Glaze, who led the Artemis mission and is familiar to those who watched the Artemis press conferences, is married to the original singer of PanterA!

I have one I forget to wear lol.

I'd include myself in this, but I've done it my entire life.

*surprise!*

People will still cling to their cheap gadgets, their social media accounts (we're all still here!), their phones, their convenience... They just don't like the surveillance capitalism, fascism, etc.

But like... You know it's the same shit right? They are just mask off now.

I'm pretty sure a huge swathe of western society isn't yearning for like... Destruction of tech... They kinda hope we can dial shit back a decade or so.

To the early 2000's when everything was magical?

Like... The world was super messed up then too. The old "modern west" was horrible also.

So yeah. They are assholes who want to take over the world... But it's sort of clear we just sort of woke up and realized we walked together to this point holding hands as we approached the cliff... And now we are freaked out by the cliff.

Like on some level the part we hate is that we provided the backstop that led to this insanity. We caused it collectively. Knowingly.

Everyone knows what Amazon did to mainstreet shopping... Hasn't slowed its roll.

They got rich selling us shit we *wanted*.

Bezos got rich because people would rather order online than walk to a local store.

Zuckerburg saved us the trouble of actually *interacting in person*.

Google helped us search for things easily + YouTube etc.

Apple sold us *cool* phones.

Nobody wants to pay for the shit we need. Everyone seems to want to blame the rich, when we continuously vote for politicians that promise to never make you pay for anything.

People naively believe the "private market" is more efficient and trust capitalism. We did this shit.

Blame those dipshits all you want, but they didn't make society incessantly suck at the teat of big oil for multiple generations.

We could have electrified ages ago, we could have shifted to renewables, but we actively avoided *paying for it* because we demand cheap convenience above all else.

I know everyone is aware we are in a poly-crisis, but it isn't just a result of the relatively recent elevation of the tech-broligarchy.

Like, we spent the last 40+ years not building, developing or maintaining adequate infrastructure because western society is largely cheap and lazy.

To be clear, those things wouldn't actually fix the problems caused by the massive AI energy consumption problem.

The grid hasn't been maintained properly and can't easily be upgraded because we privatized power delivery and there is no standardization.

Someone has to bear the cost we have avoided

Across the same time frame median wage for a 4 year degree holder only went up 30%.

Eventually that is a huge problem from a trust perspective.

Tuition only grew by 68% from 1973 to 2000. That is a lot but not insane for 27 years.

From 2000 to 2015 it grew by 83% in only 15 years.

Average cost of tuition (adjusted for inflation) at a public college in the US increased by 177% from 1973 to 2023. Inflation adjusted wages for 4 year degree holders only rose by about 30% in the same time frame.

I think the social contract has pretty obviously broken for the middle class and below in the last decade.

Most people believed if you worked hard and educated yourself you could succeed in a middle to upper middle class life.

The insane growth in wealth disparity, inflation & debt has ruined it.

I mean, they had extremely high levels of trust previously?

But the linkage to private tuition, the plausibility of educational attainment, and political polarization around speech and thought all feel very relevant.

Logically a couple things come to mind...

First - undermining it wasn't necessarily fixated on public trust of the institution.

Second - even if that was the goal of the efforts, they may have only borne fruit recently.

It is also arguable that part of what leads to the "predatory" belief and result is that by socially normalizing the idea that males shouldn't/can't be trusted around small children, men bizarrely live up to the horrid expectations or disengage entirely.

This then reinforces the normalized belief.

Anyway... This atomized nuclear family perspective that treats all outsiders as predators (stranger danger) is a normalized reactionary perspective that is rooted in social panics

Some strangers ARE predators. But they are largely an extreme minority.

Also from an evolutionary standpoint, Humans succeed because we historically had communal parenting structures (alloparenting).

We improved survival via social interactions where we looked out communally for relatives (males and females alike). Not just our own kids.

Humans (males AND females) are hardwired to respond positively to infantile features.

Women may have higher responsiveness to "cuteness" but brain imaging shows men show responses in the same direction, and activations of the same brain regions.

For the record - modern research into Hormonal Response and Neuroplasticity by psychobiologists shows that when males (even childless) come into contact/proximity of infants, they undergo significant hormonal shifts - prolactin and oxytocin both reinforce nurturing behaviours.

Or a male teacher?

The answer here is probably yes - and they just believe those people were/are predators.

LoL. Oh good.

We all know Donald doesn't understand percentages.

Yes, I always say that the person who is winning is the one that has to incessantly and loudly shout at you that they are winning. That is how you can identify who the winners are.

The ones who can't stop screaming about how unfair it is that other people say they aren't winning.

*Winners*.

Think seriously about what this means for a few seconds.

About what this says about what Trump is doing, and how absurd it is that he has this level of personal control over a global market.

Haven't heard Twilight Sad, but Mogwai shows are awesome.

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto The problems with our tech philosopher kings

New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally.
It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...