What a Fucking Mess

As the year draws to a close, I cannot help but stop and think about just how much of a sea change it has been over the past year.

And no, I am not talking about my own personal circumstance---I've done that throughout the year, and find no need to revisit it again right now.

Much of the world is run on the idea of precedence, with a bit of courtesy put in place. In a place of low trust (i.e. where one is more likely to meet strangers than familiar people), precedence and courtesy provides the kind of basic interaction protocol that ensures that at a minimal level, people can talk with each other. One may not like the other person, but at least there are grounds to work with the other person.

But the past year has shown that precedence is to be ignored, and courtesy gets one no where except continual abuse by those whose lack of courtesy is not only unpunished, but allowed to flourish due to the increasing self-inflicted hopelessness of the patient.

Looking away from the world stage, similar patterns of misbehaviour can be seen at a much lower level, where the Karens are starting to get more of their way, upending the precarious balance that once existed in society to allow its many different denizens a quiet room to exist.

On a different scale, there is the increasingly instable structural changes in the economy that makes the future highly uncertain. Services need to be rendered, products need to be manufactured, and food needs to be grown to ensure the basic level of sustenance of people, and yet there is this overzealous obsession being spent on trying to obsolete everyone, a type of techno-driven extermination programme.

While I am not fully in favour of bullshit jobs in the first place, the increased erosion of such jobs that have once kept a large proportion of the population fulfilled and out of trouble is a cause for alarm. The most fingered culprit for this is ``AI'', but it is less about the AI and more about the directions of the companies who have declared themselves the harbingers of a new Utopian Age---they just happen to be doing things relating to AI, directly (release of pre-trained large language models of all sorts), or indirectly (infrastructure providers for the training and use of all these prepared models).

Two decades of lacklustre investment opportunities have created a pent up greed that is suddenly released upon the world, consequences be damned.

Money. Money at the expense of what it may mean to be human (the replacement of the process of ``creating''). Apparent short-term gains at the expense of the preparation for the next generation's lives. Consumerism beyond mere material goods, as material goods have a true physical limit for consuming (how many washing machines can one buy?), while abstract services with low marginal costs can be consumed indefinitely often and intensity, with money being the only true limit.

In the past, machines are brought in with the explanation of freeing humanity from menial labour so that they can better cultivate the human's true power---intellect. What about now, with AI acting as an alternative model to accessing intelligence without all the pesky ethics that using a human has?

And what happens when everyone's out of a job, and yet we are all still living in the city? How can we survive when the object of trade is no longer easily accessible?

Bleak. It pains me that I cannot see any easy way out of this. Governments need to stand their ground and actually look out for their citizens, yet they can claim that they are---it's just that some citizens are much more important than other citizens. Corporations that misbehave need to be taken on at a scale that befits their juggernaut-nature---a multi-national corporation is a multi-headed hydra, and the current laws make it impossible for a country to exact punishment that can actually hurt the corporation as opposed to merely ``increasing the price of business''.

The problem with peace is that people keep forgetting that it is the viable threat of violence that helps keep the peace.

``MT, doesn't that go against your whole `courtesy' concept?''

Perhaps. I don't claim to have my thoughts in order---it would be folly to believe so. That's probably part of the reason why my head hurts half the time, and my anxiety keeps shooting through the roof. And we're not even talking about the actual things that are happening to me personally.

What a fucking mess.

I think I'll stop here for now. It's too depressing to continue. Till the next time.