Search for tech coops, quite a few seem to be popping up recently. I’m not directly in tech and still haven’t found who I’d really love to work for, so I can’t help much, but it’s a lovely question and I’m curious about other people’s answers!

Mumbo jumbo sounds very defensive to me. It’s strange how people get quite angry or at least really dismissive when you mention anything that is beyond the commonly accepted mainstream science - even when there’s no direct harm done to them by people talking about it. It’s also strange when you find out how many actual scientists are animists or carry some sort of spiritual belief.

When you get deeper into indigenous philosophies (branded since the times of enlightenment as superstitious mumbo jumbo) you often find belief systems that are incredibly pragmatic and would solve many of the social and environmental problems our rationalist thoughtscape has brought about, but our Western supremacist education makes it difficult for us to accept how much we could gain by opening up to it.

I became an animist after reading about the concept of Wendigo, and then applying the scientific method to indigenous belief systems by just acting as if they were true and finding out what happens in my life. For a brief period after the landscape and my ancestors were starting to speak to me I wasn’t sure whether I was descending into psychosis, but ultimately the results of listening to these voices and taking their guidance were more sound than continuing to follow the un-guidance of Western rationalist culture. At the same time I met quite a few people who were going through the same changes of mind. There seems to be an interesting process going on that brings more and more people back into a connection and relation with non-human life (animals, plants, rivers, mountains, ancestors …) and those who open up to it are usually those who I consider working for positive improvements (social justice, environmental issues), so I consider them my family.

The very first opening up, even before reading about Wendigo, was by me being a pet owner and having some experiences with my horse that showed a depth of soul I could not continue to dismiss - so maybe you want to ask your dog about what they think about the mumbo jumbo? ;-)

So this year everybody installs the AC, next year even more people die because even more heat gets generated. Rock and hard place really but personally my luddite ass will keep going without AC for as long as I possibly can. Common spaces with AC cooling (public libraries anyone?) might be a better solution than individual units.

Don’t forget that you have to pay for an additional subscription to use SamsungShave with your new 5 fold and that your have to give the app access to all your private data - but who wouldn’t do that for a really close shave!

'“This allows you to continue exploring topics of interest and engage in more meaningful conversations with the AIs across our apps,” a Meta spokesperson said. ’

‘meaningful conversations with the AIs’ makes me want to laugh, or cry. Welcome in a world where meaning has lost all meaning.

This hints at a problem of academia being in favour of ‘lots of expensive words good’. They start training us for this at school - more often than not churning out a longer and more complex text is rewarded over writing succinctly and in language that is easily understandable to all.

Yes, I understand using accurate terminology is a thing, and that this terminology can get extensive and complex. But it doesn’t account for all of the word salad produced because we expect academic texts to sound a certain way. And that’s how we get desperate people using robots to keep up with the silly demand for overcomplicated word salad and then other desperate people using robots to work their way through the aforementioned word salad.

The Gillette-ization of phones? How exciting /s

As an animist I recognize and respect the sacredness of all that is, as a former skeptic this notion would have made me deeply defensive a few years ago, and even now I still find myself resisting to anything I perceive as prescribed group practice. My own experience makes me wonder how others who haven’t reconnected to landscape yet would perceive such an idea.

Not good arguments imo. Art can be this ‘blood, sweat and tears’ thing if you are into it, but art also can be an activity you do because you enjoy doing it, without a single fuck given that the result looks like the wet fart of a 3yo. I mostly don’t care how people make art. Scratch your art into rock with a baguette if you feel that’s the level of pain needed, or paint with your period blood if that floats your boat.

But use AI? It is incredibly bad for the environment, uses other people’s work without their consent, and it’s being owned by fascist fucking tech bros who want to drown the world in doom. You wouldn’t kick a puppy and call it art, same goes for AI.

What would count as a definition for you?

What is an address broker?

Cutting down the Amazon rain forest, mistreating your workers, mistreating animals, perpetrating genocide, driving a country into fascism, to just name a few. There’s probably more stuff I’d consider evil.

Here’s a rather specific example of greenwashing I had to do with, of the kind that’s a bit silly and very wide spread and almost impossible to avoid, but has a huge impact on where I live: I was doing a translation for a paper producing company. Their brochure was describing how they were caring for the forests that produce their paper and how they were championing the protection of the environment. They made it sound like they were planting and caring for some kind of fairy tale forest full of wildlife and biodiversity. The reality: all they ever plant is eucalyptus monoculture that by now covers half of the country and is one of the main causes of wildfires getting worse every summer.

Another example that I do not have personal experience with but that I imagine must be very difficult to navigate is being a programmer and working on some tiny snippet of code for something that has the power of causing unimaginable harm to society - like most of financial and stock market stuff, or election winning manipulating algorithms.

Water is a limited resource and even tech like desalination doesn’t solve anything if you have nowhere to put all the salt. As long as our tech includes BS like water-guzzling data centers to run AI for creating stupid fake cat videos there’s not much hope. We’re monkeys with technology and some species wiser than us should probably take our monkey toys away because all we use them for is causing more damage.

Technology =|= Civilization

Humans are nice to each other as long as they can afford it. Limit their access to clean water and food and they will turn into bloodthirsty monsters, like any animal will do.

Most people are busy surviving - in the USA and in other places as well. I am one of them, sitting in a relatively safe Europe that is not entirely overrun by nazis (just yet). 90 years ago it were my family members in Germany - while things gradually got worse for some citizens they still had to go to work, feed their kids, pay the rent. They were branded as nazis after they lost the war. Before the war they were just citizens of a country gradually sliding into authoritarianism, just like the USA is now.

When I read headlines about Israel and USA I feel some angry disbelief that this horror reaches me as a normal sounding news headline - like something I should just listen to and get vaguely annoyed about, not something that makes my heart feel rotten and my brain boil, not something that makes me want to take up arms and fight for what makes us humans instead of monsters. But then I have to think about rent and food again, and everybody around me does the same. So here we are - letting things happen because we are busy surviving, and because the media makes what’s happening sound like just another headline.

The entire list of mental disorders is made up - people have just grouped certain symptoms together and gave them an invented name. This can be useful for categorizing and treating people, but ultimately your mind is your own and nobody can really say what’s going on inside. I have diagnosed myself and find categorizing myself as autistic useful - although I hate the idea that whatever goes on in my brain is considered a disorder, so I prefer the term neurodivergent. I’d use official diagnoses where they are useful for getting help and support, but always take them with a grain of salt. Psychiatry is not an exact science and both diagnosis and treatment are often not much more than trial and error.

Be especially careful when you are a person who has every reason to be angry about something in their life and someone tries to diagnose you with something like “Is-angry-for-no-good-reason” disorder, as it used to be the case of women suffering from ‘hysteria’ and abused teenagers getting diagnosed with personality disorders.

My kitten is called Maxim Schnorky. According to him a certain amount of ethically doubtful compromise is okay if that keeps the cat food coming in.

We need more trees in cities. ACs produce even more heat, it’s absurd to want to solve the problem like that. People in Southern Europe have managed without it since ever.

The sudden lack of slrpnk made me sad, and inspired me to post and comment again after just lurking for a very long while. Thanks, admin team, for sorting out the problems so quickly and keeping this space up and running!

Our current treatment for such types of depression are essentially still in the stone ages. Throw something at it, see what happens, adjust as needed.

I know, and I guess watching a loved one being slowly destroyed by the trial and error that is ‘modern’ medication made me want to never consider it no matter how bad i felt - so this AI thing seems to be an even more dangerous trial and error method, because it seems even more invasive and less tested than the medication that’s available now. On the other hand I’ve found self medication with plant medicine (yes, it’s weed, weed, and more weed, but also quite a few other herbs I collect myself) quite efficient and safe. I’ve managed to keep myself going for a few bad years and have now reached the point where I went off it cold turkey - something my loved one never managed to do once he was hooked onto the meds. All done on my own terms, no doctor pretending they know better than me, giving myself the time I needed. So that’s for a true stone age method, and given the fact our bodies are still working the same way as they did in the stone age I feel it might be safer than any novelty they have come up with in the last decades. Probably that’s a controversial take on this, and I don’t expect this to work for everybody (you need to have lots of time to be able to afford to rest and relax and have access to unlimited amounts of plant medicine).