The United States has re-invented fascism with the appearance of a representative republic. Democracy itself has never been an idea that was fully embraced in this country. That is why the founding fathers did not seek to establish a directly democratic political process, they didn't believe the people could be trusted to govern themselves and thusly needed a vanguard class of ruling elites to shepherd them into making the correct decisions. This idea is directly rooted in the kind of enlightenment era thinking that led to the French revolution. Perhaps the only place that has truly embraced a democratic experiment in government has been Rojava, in Syria. Yet there are myriad ways in which that experiment has been less than successful. A lot of the ways it's been unsuccessful can be directly attributed to outside pressures, but this isn't a piece dedicated to the Rojava revolution and it's sometimes less than perfect implementation. This is about the massively flawed Fascist States of America.

What we know as "Democracy," is a form of government inherited from a blueprint designed by a ruling aristocracy that believed they were granted special gifts in governmental pursuits that the average member of the proletariat couldn't be expected to wrap their mind around, which has been transformed over time by the Neo-Liberal movement into something more and more akin to fascism. In fact the only way in which the United States is distinguishable from fascism is the lack of a singular autocratic leader in control of a single party. So what we see here is a delicate dance between two increasingly autocratic parties that are less and less in competition surrounding the major ideas of Neo-Liberalism and increasingly collaborating to stalemate government on any issue that isn't favorable to the ruling class. Where party has been the defining feature uniting the typical fascist state, class is the feature that unites the ruling elite in America. The result has been a complete divorce from the democratic process we only ever half committed to.

The 2024 election cycle is indicative of this re-imagining of power in the United States by the Neo-Liberals. We have Joe Biden, a mentally decrepit septuagenarian and historically inept politician with a sub 40% approval rating from the people, doddling around trying to figure out where exactly his campaign staff dropped him off today, facing off with Donald Trump, another septuagenarian, proto-fascist billionaire with a sub 40% approval rating. Both of these candidates are united by intense xenophobia, Neo-Liberal economics that have destroyed the post World War II middle class and a generally antagonistic approach to the rest of the world, combined with a generally antagonistic approach to the workers of their own country. Both have engaged very directly in union busting activities in order to enact strong economic growth for a handful of billionaires, that are using this windfall to build doomsday bunkers for the apocalypse they seem to be joyously endeavoring to bring to fruition. In fact, instead of trying to find differences in their rhetoric, the two presidential candidates seem to be doubling down on a strategy of competing to be the most tough on China, the most tough on crime, and the most tough on the working class. This two party system is increasingly looking like a one party system with a sort of farcical reality-television competition to become the liaison to the wealthy elite. Class is the ultimate deciding factor in elections, where the candidate that can raise the most money from Wall Street elites is the one that wins in just about every single case. The American middle class has no representation and the poor are entirely excluded from this entire affair, except for the largely ceremonial act of voting for their favorite team. In fact, if you were to glean all of your ideas about truth from politicians, you would likely believe that there are no poor people in America, because you will have never heard a politician even use the word "Poor." Imagine the confusion you would have if you ever ended up wandering around Los Angeles, wondering why so many people (40,000 by conservative estimates) are just choosing to live in tents on the street. Substitute Los Angeles for your city of choice and you will begin to have an understanding of the state of politics in America.

This new American fascism is single-mindedly focused on waging a class war against the lower classes and they often do it using the construct of race to divide and conquer the lower classes. Poor whites are taught to believe that their dwindling opportunities in the trades are because positions that used to be plentiful are either being outsourced to China or being filled by cheaper migrant labor from South and Central America. In many ways that narrative has a token of truth in it. The American farming industry has maintained exceptions to overtime and minimum wage rules, while relying predominantly on migrant workers who will accept the harsh conditions of working in the fields with no benefits, but these aren't the "good American jobs," that politicians love to harp on about. The ruling class has relentlessly pursued automation of skilled labor jobs, both to fuel this narrative and to eliminate the need for highly skilled unionized workers. This idea helps the wealthy to use poor white people to control poor African and Latino people, funneling poor whites through the racist militia to police and military pipeline. In fact, the FBI found that the majority of police departments they examined were in communication with and hiring directly from racist, white militias. They simply released the report on this subject to a very tepid media response and an AmeriKKKan culture that is flooded with examples of racial violence, perpetrated by white police officers onto people of color, with complete legal impunity. It is easy to imagine how those communities have come to feel about poor white people. In America, everybody hates everybody else. A lot of people have great historical reasons to hate poor white people, but ultimately it amounts to a complete lack of solidarity amongst the various factions of poor people. This is not an accident. This is class warfare in action. Since we have no solidarity with each other, we sure as hell aren't planning to unite with each other to address the excesses of America's billionaire class.

Gluttony is the sin of America.

A handful of billionaires control every form of media we consume and it is rife with celebrity worship and materialism and it has convinced many of us poor people, living off the table scraps of the rich, that we are just temporarily disgraced billionaires ourselves. We are not. We are simply poor. We should have solidarity with other poor people and against the rich, but in America we allow wealthy men like Tucker Carlson to control our understanding of class.

However, we are not poor because some other poor people are trying to take what we have as Tucker wants us to believe, we are poor, because men like Tucker are unwilling to share in the spoils of wealth that we all built collectively. Profits are simply the difference between a product of labor and the market value of that product. This means for a man to have disproportionate wealth, he acquired it in that difference. These are spoils created by labor that have been coopted by all of the wealthy people that believe they deserve a bigger piece of that pie than the very people who made the entire pie. America has divorced itself from this understanding of wealth and power by controlling the narrative at every possible point, be it state media, or through presenting anti-labor narratives through every single piece of media you are allowed to consume.

The single party system in America is class. At any given time, the dictator of America is the person that controls the most wealth. I know this because in America, legally speaking, wealth is speech. That was the idea central to the Citizens United case. If free speech is important to prevent tyranny, there is a constitutional recognition that speech influences thoughts and ideas and therefore must not be consolidated in the hands of a single actor. However, if wealth is speech, then those who control more wealth, control more speech, which is exactly what we see today. We see a dictatorship of wealth. A dogmatic reverence for the almighty dollar, extrapolated from the Christian idea that wealth is bestowed on the most pious. We have internalized the idea that the wealthy have been divinely sanctioned to rule by virtue of their wealth itself. This ideology has conflated money with divine will to the extent that the most wealthy are holier to Americans than their god of choice. In America, we cannot recognize our dictator, because we are looking at the wrong institutions to find it. The wealthy rule this country and bend the president to their will. When Elon Musk went to the border and demanded that we close it off to immigrants, despite being an immigrant himself, Biden followed suit. Trump has even looked to Elon to save his presidential campaign. Elon Musk is somehow, central to both campaigns. You can try to imagine for yourself why that might be. These sort of things should reveal to us, America's poor, where the real power lies. In generational wealth controlled by our de facto kings.

To summarize, America is actively a Neo-Liberal, fascist country. Elections are simply decoration. The state has already selected two people who they feel are amenable to the interests of the rich. There is nothing you can do as a poor person to influence their actions. We are just powerless workers with no agency over our lives and when we get out of line, our masters are there to beat the living shit out of us (As they did to every single Pro-Palestinian protest camp across a myriad of colleges throughout the country). Do what you want with this information, but please save your breath trying to convince me that any American currently living has ever experienced this mythical state of freedom you love to prattle on about. It's not real and for most of us living, it probably never will be. Biden just stomped out the last illusions any of us were holding onto about freedom in America and that will be his legacy. As it turns out, Trump wasn't as low as this country can go and the next 4 years, no matter which one of these dunces gets elected will be lower still.

Don't vote. Piss in the ocean instead.

Sometimes there is a string of events in life that force me to reconcile with the fact that I don't understand other people at all. This often takes the form of an existential crises. How could my experience of the same events lead me to such vastly different conclusions than those of the rest of the herd? This leads me to wonder about things like non-linear time and perhaps, simultaneous timelines that become linked somehow, akin to what is described in, "The Man in the High Castle," as opposed to one collective timeline. Perhaps what we experienced, "collectively," is not so similar and that is underpinning this lack of consensus. Perhaps there are important disparities in this lived experience that makes this consciousness so messy and incongruous. Ultimately, these existential questions have to remain in the realm of metaphysics. They are just theoretical postulates, with no way to discover any evidence that could support their validity, save for these anecdotal stories, that when experienced by the observer, seem to lend themselves to such conclusions. Such a moment is the one we are in currently. Or at least, that is how I am experiencing it. I am confused by the opinions of people I considered peers and I am baffled by how their brain could interpret these events in such disparate ways.

I don't understand how the world of my childhood could have such easily quantifiable moral assumptions, but that now those systems of ethics have become muddied, not by a change in understanding of right and wrong, but in the understanding of when and why we, "must," do things we know are wrong, though furthermore, by those that seek to change our feelings around these times that we believe we must do something we know is wrong. Often this is done by changing the definition of an action we already agree is wrong. I think that most of us have some consensus around the morality of genocide. But where it gets murky is when we start splitting hairs about what counts as a genocide. For anybody that understands that the Holocaust did in fact occur, we mostly concur that it was a genocide and of course we all have some consensus about how that is wrong. Now; can we all agree that what Israel is doing in Gaza is also a genocide? Apparently genocide that is presently ongoing, in which we ourselves are complicit becomes more morally murky. Instead of facing the truth we try to re-litigate what actually counts as a genocide.

I think it is telling that officials trying to distance themselves from the term genocide, while actively committing one, have taken a page from the Nazi playbook on this issue. During WWII, Nazi propaganda often sought to portray Jews as animals or demons, and generally as something inhuman. I would caution, that we must be truly skeptical of any person in a position of power that seeks to dehumanize other people. Even "bad," people. While it is true that humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty, we as humans must accept them as our own, because in so distancing ourselves from these evils perpetrated by humanity, we make it easier to justify other, often worse acts of cruelty. It is not some underlying animal characteristic that transcends the fact that we are actually all in fact animals, sharing that extremely diverse taxonomy with everything from insects to other primates, that drives us to kill, rape and steal. In fact, much of the most intense violence that occurs on this planet is uniquely human and not animal at all.

To paint a more exacting argument, we should examine some direct quotes from Israeli officials and other Zionists from around the world that both dehumanize Palestinians and reveal a genocidal intent towards them:

"We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly" -Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant Common Dreams

"(Palestinians are)... beasts walking on two legs" -Menahim Began Narchive

“Palestinians are like animals, they aren’t human” -Jewish Home MK Eli Ben Dahan Times of Israel

"...that Huwara needs to be erased" -Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich Rueters

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." -Benjamin Netanyahu A-Z Quotes

"erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth." -Former Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distal Atbaryan Common Dreams

These quotes not only express in clear, unequivocal language, that Netanyahu and his government don't view Palestinians as people(or that at least they don't want you to view them as people), but it goes a step further in expressing the intent to remove them from what the UN currently recognizes as Israel in an act of genocide that I think belongs to the subcategory of ethnic cleansing. This is language we can recognize from every historically recognized genocide that we know about. The dehumanization of the enemy, followed by the unequivocal call for their destruction. Mostly, we should recognize this dehumanization from the Holocaust, but we could find similar language used by Europeans towards all of the First Nations people they came into contact with and subsequently sought to eradicate from America to Australia. Compare the above to this:

"The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew." -Adolf Hitler A-Z Quote

It is precisely this type of dehumanization that leads us to re-litigate terms like genocide so that we might advocate for exactly such an action, without the obvious strain on our conscience. What is confounding about all of this is that we are constantly re-litigating history to tell the most convenient story, when in reality, the traits that we do share with our animal ancestors; things like territoriality and the tendency to transition from fear to violence, will forever drive these sort of forays into genocide. "Never Again," is a meaningless platitude when you consider the almost inevitable return to these behaviors that we seem inescapably bound to as a species. We can dispassionately observe these events as if they have nothing to do with ourselves and our own propensity for exactly that type of evil, but somehow, we are still inextricably bound to this timeline, where just such a horror is unfolding before our very eyes. What feels disjointed to me, is that somehow, none of this can penetrate through the increasingly rabid rhetoric driving these actions. It's as if a logical whirlpool opened up and is now ceaselessly pulling people in. More and more people are pledging their undying allegiance to this cause that we know is genocide... Except that they say it isn't. Instead it is a, "complicated," issue with, "blame on both sides."

Public opinion remains a mystery to me. For example: In the summer of 2020, public opinion polls showed broad support for defunding American police, but it didn't take long before that trend was reversed. Collapsing in on itself with impressive rapidity. I don't understand how a change like that occurs. How the media can compel us to re-litigate our own sense of morality, through the simple act of gaslighting and furthermore, that we can see it happen over and over and over, but still fall for it with the reliability of clockwork. Perhaps it is that we all have our own individual timeline that isn't required to synchronize around our observation of events, or that the collisions in our experience are completely random. Perhaps it is the collective understanding manufactured by social media and news networks that synchronizes popular understanding of these issues and we have no free will what-so-ever, but I don't understand how so many of us can flip-flop our positions just based on the half-assed gaslighting perpetrated by the US media.

Here we are as a people, once again trying to decide if the terminology like; genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, etc., have meaning in the current context, when what we know universally, beyond any doubt is that killing children is wrong. Killing innocent people is wrong. Exacting revenge for somebody's death, collectively, over an entire people, is wrong. But instead of leaning on the collective morals we had all agreed to prior, we are allowing our morality to be usurped by those who want to argue instead about whether or not these things count as a proper genocide, or if there might be a different term we could use to apply to this situation. Or perhaps, if this is in fact a genocide, is it in some way justified by some previous act that provoked it.

This is the consequence of our refusal as a nation to be vigilant about the global rise of fascism. In refusing to deny them platforms at every possible opportunity, because of our obsession with the idea of completely unlimited free speech at any cost, we have allowed fascists like Benjamin Netanyahu to re-litigate our morality, so that we could be once again drawn into the horrors that all right-wing governments perpetrate when they achieve a national consensus. Out of one side of their mouth they would tell us that words are harmless and that free expression of ideas is essential to democracy, but out of the other side, they tell us not to trust each other, not to love each other and eventually to kill each other.

I'm not sure how to synchronize our morality again as a society, but I suspect it starts with just believing the things we tell children about what is right and what is wrong.

The extent to which everything we know, and have ever known, contained within this world we inhabit, exists to satiate some rich man's greed, is something I find consistently infuriating. That we continue to go along with the pyramid scheme we call a society is something perhaps even worse. Delegating the responsibility for what happens to ourselves, and the planet, to those who have a quite obviously outsized impact is compelling, but in so doing, we have also diminished our own autonomy. It seems that our inherent desire to leave ourselves blameless is the only thing that comes through at the end of it all, and we've forgotten what it was we were willing to trade in return. Yet, it is not our fault, as those born, indoctrinated and confined to our wage slavery that such a system of wage slavery exists and that we've largely submitted ourselves to it. However, I think it could be argued that it is no living person's fault that this system exists as it does. In fact, despite the narrative of rugged individualism that exists in service of the capitalist class, everything humans have achieved through the entirety of our history has been the result of our collaboration towards certain endeavors. Capitalism exists as it does for myriad reasons related to our collaborative efforts, political momentum and frankly our laziness as it relates to creating resistance to the market forces that have been imposed on us. It is simply easier to suck it up, go to the job we hate, come home and complain about it, only to do it again the following day, because the vast effort required to oppose the current momentum, which happens to tend towards the destruction of the biosphere for profit, seems frankly untenable. This is to say nothing of the opposing forces that wish for capitalism to stay exactly the same, because it is very, very profitable for a handful of people. This collective laziness on the part of the proletariat is more of an intellectual laziness than any suggestion that the working class doesn't work hard enough. It is moreso, a failure of the imagination on the part of each one of us. We have ceased to believe that a better world is possible and if we are honest, that assumption might be entirely correct, but it doesn't serve us in the least to cling to it. Retaining hope in a hopeless situation is, as it turns out, pretty hard to do and whether by design or through the random evolution of coincidence and human tendencies, the collective forces of capitalism, both state and private institutions alike, have come together towards the destruction of hope and imagination.

In the end, there is a lot of blame to go around for our present material conditions. A good place to start in evaluating the failures of imagination might be our addiction to and dependence on corporate social media. This is not the whole story though and I am sure I could dedicate another post in it's entirety to the ways in which social media stifles the imagination and trains the mind to become indoctrinated into capitalism in ways our less technologically advanced ancestors could have only ever imagined. While I do believe the first step towards imagining a different society is to break that addiction, that is but a small bump in a very long road. Political revolution is always multi-generational. Those who begin to make waves, have seldom been able to predict their results. Furthermore, those who lay the foundation for revolution, rarely live to see their ideas implemented. In contrast to that message of hope, the end result of revolution has almost never been the intended goal of those that fought for it. Perhaps, we are so tired because true change is not possible. Considering that last point it is easier to understand the laziness we are all guilty of. The complexity of our present contradiction has become so intense, largely as a result of the rapid industrialization of our society, that we are now pulled in too many directions, by too many bits of contradictory information and distilling the truth from the noise has become something of a fools errand. Mixed in with provable facts is now a perpetual stream of misinformation, cleverly masquerading as the truth. Qanon is just one symptom of this problem, there are myriad conspiracy cults now being fed by exactly the same quality of misinformation. If that weren't enough, the content stream being generated by unreliable AI/NLP engines is increasing, mixing "hallucinated facts," with reality at speeds the human mind simply cannot replicate, much less evaluate. The only way out of this loop is to unplug from this, "augmented reality." To put down our phones and absorb the apocalyptic hellscape we have been collaborating to create, largely against our will, and decide if this is what we really want to use our very limited time, and energy to create.

What has progress actually meant to the planet and all of us people living on it? Is any of this worth it? Has it enriched our lives to be constantly connected with people we will never know, while we don't even know our neighbors? To be plugged into the horrors of the 24 hour news cycle/outrage machine, but to be unplugged from the natural systems that sustain us? What have we gained? What have we lost? I think the tendency in evaluating the answers to these questions is to be entirely too optimistic. We often envision tech billionaires as heroes, engineering green solutions to our dirty energy problems. I think we envision that, in part because that is the lie we are fed through social media, tv and the political propaganda machine constantly working in the service of the capitalist class. Furthermore, those are the promises our politicians make to us. Everything we interact with in our day to day conspires to tell us the lie, that there is a clean energy future just around the corner, and that somehow we have just failed to achieve it, since the very conception of this lie began in the 1960's. I don't think there is such thing as a green energy future, no matter how hard we might wish it into existence, and there is a lot of evidence to support this line of thinking. If capitalism requires constant growth in order for us to not fall into a recession and this growth requires the manufacture and distribution of more products and these products require the extraction of natural resources, then it follows that capitalism is inherently, environmentally unsustainable. It is assured that for capitalism to provide enough people with jobs and the money required to survive within it, we must continue to grind up the planet for profits. These processes require more and more energy, which requires even more extraction, creating a feedback loop of planetary destruction. There is no way to feed an infinite growth system the infinite resources it will need to remain healthy in perpetuity, but because we cannot imagine a different way of living, a way that might require some frugality, we continue to grind up more and more of the earth, so that a few billionaires can get online any time of day they want and always be able to reach an audience, to tell us that nobody wants to work anymore. The idea that capitalism is unsustainable is not new. At this point there is a huge body of evidence supporting this and you either believe that evidence or you don't. There are few people unaware of the evidence at this juncture. Ignoring it has become just another politicized choice, like denying climate change. The problem I have begun to unearth is that there is no economic system that addresses these concerns, because the alternatives that have been presented all rely on some version of industrialization and economic growth.

The inconvenient truth that has been buried deep below multiple layers of green capitalist horseshit is that we cannot continue to make the same demands we are making on the planet indefinitely. Furthermore, alternate forms of government that give more control to the working class like communism and socialism don't actually address these problems adequately. A society based on a more equitable ownership of the means of production is still a society based on the production of goods. All one can expect that even the most egalitarian society can do in this regard is to redistribute the responsibility for the consequences of the collective actions of an industrialized society. In fact the increased efficiency of socialist economies can exacerbate these issues, as could be clearly seen through a fair and honest study of the Soviet Union. While being far from a perfect implementation of socialist ideas, and an even less perfect implementation of communism, the planned economy of the Soviet Union often outpaced the United States in GDP, causing widespread ecological disasters throughout their sphere of influence with impressive regularity. I think this should force us to reconsider the trajectory of radical leftist thought. Communism and socialism alone cannot fix the ecological problems we are facing. Perhaps industrialized, technological societies do not best serve a thriving and fulfilled human population. Perhaps what we have lost in the process of industrial progress has now far surpassed those things that we have gained from our technology. It might be hard to imagine a different way of living where we would be forced to give up a lot of the advances of the last 300 or so years, but perhaps it is also the only way for life as we know it to survive on this planet. The course we've been on is not one that can be maintained, and should we choose to maintain it, we do so at the expense of all the living things on planet earth.

If you follow climate change news with any rigor, it is hard to miss the constant doom and gloom. We are hitting and surpassing climate survivability metrics at a rate that should be alarming to everybody. Yet, I look outside my Los Angeles window, overlooking the freeway and I don't see less traffic, nor do I see more people utilizing public transportation. If anything, the trains here are surprisingly vacant. There seems to be no level of bad news capable of changing our collective behavior, largely because we can't imagine a world where our bosses are more flexible about our work schedules. We have failed to creatively imagine a different world and so we have damned ourselves to this one. The conception of progress we've been force fed from the time we went through the education system, to the time when we entered the workforce only conceives of one possible trajectory. One where our technology gets more and more advanced, perhaps tending towards a more entropic state. One where our insatiable greed and avarice guide all of our actions and the conception of community becomes increasingly devalued. In this model, we must seek to use more energy, to have more resources available to us at all times and to have a form of rapid transportation constantly at our disposal. We can't imagine websites going dark for periods of the day, providing less availability to internet resources. Nor can we imagine returning to doing many tasks by hand without the aid of electricity. Nor riding a bike to work instead of driving. Yet these are the sort of things we must imagine if we want to survive on this planet through the next century. Furthermore the age where the use of private jets to zip from meeting to meeting is permissible, has come to an end. The disproportionate carbon footprint of the worlds elite, must be accounted for, by whatever means is necessary. We have been entirely too lax about the consequences of these actions.

The most difficult thing for us to imagine changing to account for climate change, seems to be birthrates. Allowing birthrates to decline by providing access to birth control and contraception, including things like vasectomies is an idea that terrifies even the gloomiest of climate scientists. However, as wage slaves, it is incumbent on us to think about what sort of life might be accessible to our progeny. In doing so it is necessary to extrapolate from our current position assuming that some tech billionaire doesn't decide to swoop in and save us all. Like everything in capitalism, the number of humans must always be increasing, regardless of our ability to support more children with the resources available and it is not the rich that will bear this burden. They perpetually demand more workers for the factories and more cannon fodder for their wars and so the poor must continuously provide a stable stream of babies to be the future workers and soldiers of our world. Furthermore, in capitalism, you can only be one of two things, and both are determined at the time of your birth. You can be a worker, or you can be born into the capitalist class, destined to inherit a great fortune in generational wealth. If you are born a worker, you will in all likelihood die as one, and that even suggests a certain degree of luck. You could always leave the workforce due to an injury or any other life circumstance that prevents you from undertaking the necessary degree of harsh drudgery required to justify your ongoing survival, in which case you will join the millions of people with no secure place to rest at night and no secure source of food. You will work, or you will die in conditions so miserable that medieval serfs wouldn't understand the cruelty. Due in large part to the decreasing availability of almost all of the resources we rely on, because of climate change and wealth disparities between the rich and poor, we are seeing more and more people with no secure place to sleep at night despite working full time jobs. There are two factors contributing to this actually. One is wealth inequality and greed amongst the wealthy capitalist class, which is by and away the biggest driver of this problem, but not insignificant would be the increasing demand on these resources, because of earth's ever increasing human population. All people, rich or poor, require certain resources to live and the demand on these resources only increases as a function of population growth. These two vectors driving the aforementioned increase in poverty are more related than they might seem at first. The wealthy have become so, largely by placeing themselves in between access to vital resources and the people that need them. Controlling access to these things is what affords them the power to continue to consolidate resources. Yet each human will always demand a certain amount of water, food and access to natural resources to build shelter as the bare minimum for survival. If we fixed wealth inequality tomorrow, we would still maintain roughly the same demand on our most vital, life sustaining resources. These are just some of the reasons why any new conception of a human society would need to prioritize bodily autonomy and birth control as a way to effectively facilitate a reduction in birth rates. In fact it is precisely the high birth rate in humans that perpetuates infinite growth capitalism. Maintaining access to birth control, abortions and other means to achieve bodily autonomy is vital to the fight against capitalism.

Perhaps the most heinous crime perpetuated by industrialized society is the industrialized animal agriculture complex. We have all had a hand in perpetuating the largest genocide of sentient beings in all of known history. Industrialized animal agriculture has mechanized the rape, and slaughter of billions of animals as a direct result of our increasing human population, and the difficulties we've had in meeting the food demands for so many people. In the last hundred years, industrialization of agriculture has allowed for a huge increase in human populations. As that population has increased, so has industrialized farming capacity. In fact during World War 1, large parts of Europe were going hungry due to food rationing caused by the war. It was becoming clear that there wasn't enough food being grown to support an increasing human population, until roughly 1912, when chemical Nitrogren Fixation was invented. This allowed people to grow more food, the excess of which became feed for animals. This put into place a system, where most of the grain and corn being grown in the United States began to be used to feed animals, which allowed farmers to raise increasing numbers of animals for slaughter. This relationship between food availability and population has always resulted in population increasing to the point that the new food systems could barely support it. This demand has fueled the mistreatment of animals on a scale never before possible. These systems have become a necessary part of the world food supply due largely to the infinite growth necessity of capitalism, and the industrialization that enables the underlying systems to exist. Furthermore, these systems have become the foundation for the society that we find ourselves living in, as if we have no choice but to continue to propagate this suffering. Again, we have failed to imagine a society where these things would be less necessary, though the answer might have been in front of us the entire time.

Our lifestyles were never meant to be maintained at the scale at which we currently live them. Megacities have created humanitarian problems the world has never seen before. These problems cannot be solved by continuing to grow, but only by reversing course. We need to use less of just about everything we use or we will destroy what is left of the planet. A lot of this is due directly to the carrying capacity of the earth. We have now blown past the 8 billion people metric that most modern studies suggest as a maximum carrying capacity, after which point the quality of our lives will drop dramatically due to plague, famine and declining access to clean water1. This also fails to consider the fate of all the animals we are in direct competition with for these resources or that we consume for food. Consider that the Whitetail deer in North America were almost hunted to extinction during the great depression, suggesting that the demand for food to feed the human population on the planet is so great, that if there is even a 10% increase in those of us attempting to hunt for subsistence it can dramatically affect the population of the wild animals that we hunt. If all humans were subsistence hunting and foraging, there wouldn't be many edible plants or animals left in the woods pretty quickly. Foragers are already doing a lot of damage in the US, consuming wild plants and fungi meant for the environment they are part of, but that pales in comparison to the damage hunting and fishing can do. The list of animals hunted to extinction by humans in North America is depressingly long, but would be much longer if we hadn't switched to industrial factory farms. If factory farming is necessary to sustain the growth of human population, it suggest that there is but one sustainable and cruelty-free solution to this problem. Degrowth.

Degrowth requires that we reject the necessity of progress and we find ways to make what we have, good enough in this world of ever increasing scarcity. To do that, I believe it is necessary that we exercise our right to bodily autonomy, by rejecting the idea that we need to have kids. In addition we should reject the notion that we must continue to buy unnecessary items as well as constantly producing these products with our labor for our economy to be healthy. In fact I would conjecture that a growing economy is inherently unhealthy due to it's unsustainable nature. Evidence of this can easily be found in the fact that capitalism produces a market catastrophe about once every 10 to 20 years. We must imagine a new society where there is time to be bored and we don't immediately pick up our phone to alleviate the discomfort of that boredom. These are things that are achievable, but we need to be asking ourselves, why these things are not being achieved. The answer to that is where my hopefulness turns to nihilism. Ultimately it is easier to keep going to work, to keep coming home, and tuning out the world to the constant droning of extraneous streaming services emanating from another 65 inch TV. We all tend to follow the path of least resistance, and those of us that don't, will face severe consequences for our resistance. I find myself asking, in my most hopeless moments: How can we ever defeat this cursed system when we are faced with such apathy in the face of it all?

It is one of the modern myths about AI that it exists to free us from tedium; a myth being promoted by Silicon Valley elites, who have no desire to free us from anything, least of all the tedium of our labor. Yet, that is the basic premise of their sales pitch to us concerning AI. Many of us have bought into the lie already, embracing chatGPT without concern for the consequences. Among the myriad concerns it's acceptance forces us to grapple with in real-time is that this whole premise is basically a ruse for the true intentions behind the desire to integrate AI into our daily lives, as we will explore below. Furthermore, what is being passed off as sentience in computers that can achieve performance supposedly matching that of humans, in some regards, is nothing more than a slightly more efficient form of data scraping. ChatGPT cannot think as you and I think. To the contrary; all it can do is match inputs to outputs and if the input is something it is familiar with, it can do so with what at first glance appears to be accuracy. Yet it is riddled with flaws and inaccuracies. All the while, it is being suggested that AI algorithms replace human labor across a growing number of job sectors. As should be obvious to anybody taking a cursory glance at the things chatGPT can do for us, it clearly cannot replace the thought and care that a human can, if they choose, put into their work and thus, the amount of time it can actually save the average person, for the average use-case is quite negligible. The real purpose of AI is actually much more mundane. The proof of this lies in the implementations that currently exist.

At present, we can turn to a few different examples, but I suspect that most of us have become more familiar with AI chat support than any other implementation of AI, save for those few AI enthusiasts that are experimenting with things like chatGPT or Dall-E. It might be hard for the average user to understand that the technology behind these products is more or less the same thing and often the chatGPT API lies behind the live chat support features we are starting to see pop up all over the internet. These chatbots generally don't have a transparent option to connect you with an actual human being and while this might seem like an oversight, it isn't. They point you through a circular labyrinth of unhelpful options instead, because that is the behavior that will make you give up and go away. The underlying purpose of support chatbots is to be as unhelpful as possible when it comes to solutions to consumer problems that could cost a company money. While I am not a fan of sitting on the phone with a human, trying to get my bank to correct an error they made or any other variation of dealing with customer support helplines, sitting on the computer, attempting to converse with an unhelpful chatbot is about the least productive use I can imagine for my time and furthermore, for an energy intensive neural network algorithm that could be applied to a real problem for that matter.

Natural Language Processing is certainly not the most efficient thing you could task an AI algorithm with. Neural networks are actually pretty terrible at the sorts of tasks we tend to use them for most, and the technology is not really getting better either. Understanding why requires understanding a little bit more of what it is exactly behind the curtain. Neural Networks are essentially sorting algorithms at the core. Inputs are passed through multiple layers of virtual objects controlled by weights and biases that are networked together to imitate how the human brain interprets information. A human neuron actually does a great deal more than that though, but I digress. Neural network algorithms are basically capable of sorting very complex data sets, but nothing more. You could imagine language as a data set in this regard, however, language is fluid and when considering the linguistics data sets available to those wishing to train their NLP algorithm, it is easy to see why these algorithms end up amplifying misinformation and speaking in tongues. The vast majority of internet content is some mix of conspiracy theory and gibberish and once an NLP algorithm begins to learn from the lowest common denominator content, or from interacting with a combination of people trying to get it to say things it shouldn't and/or break it in some other way, it is only a matter of time until it's usefulness degrades as a function of all the stupid things we post on the internet.

Perhaps usefulness is not actually achievable, because that is not a use-case considered by chatbot designers. What AI is actually good at, is finding patterns in data about chaotic systems. It is not capable of divining a truly reasonable solution to a novel problem that it's implementors have no interest in solving. In fact this problem is so pervasive that AI algorithms routinely surmise their own matches when they cannot accurately match the input to an output. We call this, "hallucinating facts," a term that exists now because of the propensity of these systems to do exactly that. However, despite this problem, there are compelling business reasons to use these unreliable systems to stonewall you when the inevitable outcome of connecting you to a more helpful method of customer support is an increase in costs and liabilities.

None of this is to say humans should be doing this sort of work either though. Humans were not meant to spend their lives being shit on by angry customers in a call center. That is the textbook definition of a bullshit job. If AI could save us from this tedium, I think that would be great, but it won't and if it did, it would simply be used to replace human jobs so companies can once again get away with paying less.

Customer service call centers have used cheap labor as a way to insulate corporate America from consequences since the inception of telephones, in much the same way they do now with computers, but humans cannot hold the line as well as machines. The ideal customer support line from a corporate perspective, is one that is in fact impenetrable, with nobody to contact that could be considered a legal representative of the company that can be served legal process. People don't fit this criteria well at all. At the end of the day these machines are not here to remove the tedium from the customer experience, but to relieve the company of expenses and liability. This is not making our lives more convenient as customers that frequently need support dealing with other poorly designed services that barely function on a good day, but for most of us that have had to interact with these Artificial Intelligences, the oxymoron is much more poignant than ever. The final result being, that you can never reach a person with the ability to take accountability for a problem. There is no way to even inform these systems that a potentially new and novel problem exists. And for the owners, they don't want to know if a problem exists. As far as they are concerned, there are no problems as long as the money spigot is still on, and spoiler alert; it is.

If AI is not here to enrich the lives of regular, everyday humans as the Silicon Valley elites would have us believe, what exactly is the point? AI, like everything else Silicon Valley has foisted on us, exists to serve the interests of the people trying to sell us AI as a solution. They are selling it to us, not because it will help us, but because if we accept it, it will help them. So, they dress it up for the American public in the form of novelty, like chatGPT or Dall-E, in order to lubricate it's acceptance into the popular zeitgeist, much the way surveillance technology has already been injected into our lives. Which is to say; without so much as poorly manufactured consent. If we can use these tools every day to make some weird piece of halfway lucid art or to write something with no feeling, then surely it can help us in other ways also. Or that is the logic they are attempting to gently steer us towards concluding for ourselves. If we are the ones to demand more AI products, then who are the good people of Silicon Valley to say no, even if they did manufactured that demand?

There are much more nefarious applications for neural network AIs though, like the facial recognition software being implemented by law enforcement agencies across the country. There have been a few notable cases where police relied on AI to pick up a suspect, without confirming that the details the AI matched on were actually accurate. In a few such cases, defendants have done real time awaiting trials where this information could come to light, and that is just what we know about. Imagine for a moment, what we don't know yet, or what we will never know because the person involved has disappeared into a black hole in Rikers. Furthermore the racial biases present in these systems have wide ranging and obvious consequences that are concurrently being exploited by mainstream news networks to distract us from having the conversation we should be having; do we want ubiquitous facial recognition scanning technology in the hands of law enforcement even if it works as intended? Is this inherently a gross violation of our right to privacy? Is there any redeeming, measurable good that could come from implementing these things to begin with? They are setting up a tightly controlled debate, not about whether or not we should use AI for surveillance technology in law enforcement, but about whether or not we should strive as a society to fix the inherent racial biases. This controlled debate implies that we have already consented to the latter point and furthermore, tokenizes the very real harm being done by the inherent racial biases in order to ensure this technology gets implemented more widely.

If the ethical concerns aren't enough to keep you awake at night, I implore you to consider that each of these systems consists of thousands and thousands of always-on surveillance cameras being fed into super computers so powerful they can rapidly interpret the results using neural networks. There is a huge amount of energy being redirected from the civilian energy grid in order to keep the infrastructure of privacy invasion running in perpetuity. To add insult to injury, consider that all of it is being built on the taxpayer dime, at the expense of other programs that might serve the people. This at a time when we are living out the dystopian stage of the aforementioned climate catastrophe, which has been caused, in large part, by the carbon emissions related to electricity production, and we could really use that money to help offset the effects of that climate crisis. To give context to this situation, lets explore the numbers. According to one paper, ChatGPT 3 required 1.287 Gigawatts of energy just to train. That is roughly the equivalent of 120 US households for an entire year 1. I've seen estimates as high as the equivalent of 2000 US households for a year for newer models, and development marches on. The data centers are getting bigger by the day, using more and more energy. The arguments in favor suggest that this could all be offset by renewable energy, but that neglects the fact that the entire battery industry runs on fossil fuels and making batteries for renewable energy solutions is itself unsustainable in it's present form. Creating one lead/acid battery for storage of renewables requires 1200 megajoules of energy and each battery needs to be replaced every 2 to 5 years 2. Lithium Ion batteries do not perform much better over the lifetime of a renewable system. So the reality remains, that this sort of energy usage cannot be justified for, "near human performance."

In addition to the environmental concerns above, there are a number of legal and ethical issues with this technology that cannot be simply written off as part of the process. For one; in the US, the accused have the right to face their accusers. If the accuser is a machine, how can we ascertain meaningful details about the context surrounding an event from a machine that cannot understand context? We rely increasingly on precision to eliminate discrepancies in the understanding of how events took place and thereby simulate context, but not everything in this world is so cut and dry. Sometimes details that illuminate context slip past surveillance technology. Consider that all a neural net can really do is match and sort events and adjust itself so that it can more accurately match in the future. Perhaps a more tangible example might help illuminate the issue. A machine might be able to discern that a person illegally jaywalked for example, because it observed events it has been trained to understand as jaywalking. It observes a person crossing the street in the middle of a block and not on the crosswalk, but perhaps it would not be able to understand that the jaywalking occurred because it was triggered by another event it didn't observe(this is an issue human police often struggle with as well, for reasons I'll address in other articles more explicitly tailored to the problem of policing). Lets say this event was; somebody on the originating sidewalk was threatening the person that proceeded to jaywalk, but the AI algorithm hasn't been trained to identify that mitigating context, so it invariably ignores that part. This context matters a lot, because in the context of the American legal system it would determine whether or not an actual crime took place. From the perspective of the machine that observed the action, it might reasonably assume that yes a crime has occurred, because all of the criteria that define that crime occurred. So the neural network has matched a series of events it is already familiar with that it received as input, to the definition of a crime. But, most of us spend most of our time in these grey areas where our actions could constitute a crime if you remove the context. It isn't a stretch to say that municipal legal codes are so unnecessarily bloated that if an AI algorithm were observing us and matching our behavior to crimes defined in municipal legal codes, it would conclude that we are just bouncing from one infraction to another. I can imagine this sort of enforcement being deployed in parts of cities with endemic poverty, while never being implemented in the richer parts of suburban areas. This sort of enforcement would be beyond reproach. More so than even American police forces are currently. After all, they will tell us, computers don't lie. Just like guns don't kill people. These sort of platitudes miss the point entirely.

Those opposing AI technology are being dismissed as luddites, when nothing could be further than the truth. I would like to acknowledge that we have reached a bifurcation in the trajectory of technology. Will technology serve us, or will we serve technology? Those are the stakes. For those who think that calling this a life or death situation is hyperbolic, I would implore you to imagine the consequences of these "hallucinated facts," in real life situations, on which the information might be relied(We have already talked briefly about how this happens in police work, but it is actually a much more ubiquitous problem). The best example I can pull from now, comes from a fact hallucinated by google's AI concerning the identification of mushrooms. It conflated Laetiporus Sulfurious (Chicken of the Woods Mushrooms), with Omphalotus Olearius (Jack'O'Lantern Mushrooms), one a delicious and edible mushroom, the other a poisonous mushroom that shouldn't be consumed:

"Yes, Laetiporus Sulphureus, also know as Chicken of the Woods can glow in the dark. This mushroom is bio-luminescent, which means it can glow in the absence of light... Laetiporus Sulphureus is poisonous to eat, but it is okay to touch."

These descriptions are not consistent with a legitimate description of Laetiporus Sulphureous, which is one of the most celebrated edible mushrooms in North America. While this description might cause somebody to steer clear of eating Chicken of the Woods, which would ultimately be harmless, it clearly demonstrates the hallucination of facts these algorithms are prone to due to the mismatch of inputs to outputs. Furthermore it unequivocally shows how these hallucinations can in fact be dangerous to the end user.

In summation, AI is a Kafkaesque nightmare of a bureaucratic nature. It presents too many dangers to be ignored, and serves as a prominent example of how far the elites in Silicon Valley are willing to go to insulate themselves from the consequences of their irresponsible actions as it pertains to us and the planet. Furthermore, machine learning is not nearly as advanced as our corporate overlords would have us believe, because it is not being developed to make our lives easier, but to assist surveillance technology in controlling our actions and to divert us from taking meaningful actions that could improve our lives. Under no circumstances should anybody be accepting the results of AI systems as authoritative when they are riddled with false positives, "hallucinated facts," inaccuracies, and rampant misinformation. This is not the direction that should be taken toward developing our relationship and reliance on technology, and the sooner it is abandoned for the tech fad it is, the better off we will become. The cost of the novelty of these systems has become too high for the planet for us to continue progress in this direction.