broligarchs – Treehouse Writers

When I meditate – which I do sporadically, though I keep intending to get more regular about it because it always makes me feel better – I see myself as being one with the universe.

I don’t mean I’m the all-encompassing universe all by myself. I mean I’m a tiny speck of this amazing great whole.

I find this very comforting. It reminds me that so much of what is touted as of paramount importance is really meaningless.

It doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to do good in the world as best I can, but it does help me let go of too much attachment to the outcome of anything I do. These days, with so much damage being done to our lives every day, I find it helpful to remember that while doing is up to me, outcomes aren’t.

In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman has a chapter called “Cosmic Insignificance Theory,” which I think is much the same thing as my meditation. He observes:

Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks [four thousand weeks is an average human lifespan] isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely – and often enough, marvelously – really is.

Cosmic insignificance theory is diametrically opposed to the kind of world the broligarchs seem to be after, particularly the ones who think they’re going to live forever, perhaps uploaded and combined with some all-powerful “AI.” Continue reading “Time Is on Our Side”…

Back in the late 1990s, when we were all getting used to email and setting up websites and googling was so new it wasn’t a verb yet, the business pages of our newspapers were full of stories that went something like this:

The internet is fun, but how is anyone going to make money off of that?

Fast forward twenty-fiveish years and we have been overwhelmed by the answer: capitalism. Turns out the internet wasn’t immune to being taken over by people who were more interested in short-term profit than in making cool stuff that worked and was useful to people.

This is an even deeper situation than enshittification. Ed Zitron calls it the Rot Economy and he discusses it in great detail here. (Very long and very worth reading.)

So these days we have constant updates that break things, apps that limit your rights in a way that using regular web browsers does not, and devices intended to steal our attention by constantly intruding.

I remain amused by the idea that the young folks are digital natives because they’ve grown up with cell phones and tablets. What they’ve grown up with are devices that have set us up for the worst excesses of so-called AI, ones that supposedly think for you, only they can’t actually think, so they approximate.

And because those young folks are not also raised with the knowledge of how things work, they don’t always recognize the many errors. Plus they assume – because it’s true of everything they use – that everything will glitch all the time.

As I’ve said before, it’s absurd to lump Boomers, who have been using computers for 40 years and include a large number of people who built their own or wrote their own software, with their parents and grandparents who were approaching retirement years in the 1980s and 90s and didn’t have to learn to use this stuff for work.

I may not be great at Discord, Slack, and online meeting multitasking – in fact, I suck at all of those – but I am very good at recognizing when I’m being bamboozled. And a large amount of what’s going on in the digital world is, in fact, bamboozlement.

Late stage capitalism ate the tech industry and — unfortunately — the internet. Continue reading “Tech and the Present”…