From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
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Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.
Billionaires are plagued by solipsism. Not believing other people exist is a great aid to billionairedom, because it lets you amass your fortune without scrupling over the population-scale misery you're inflicting on the way:
To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist - to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist - otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?
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One of the most surprising professional/creative developments of my middle-age has been discovering my love of collage. I've never been a visual person. I can't draw, I can't guess if a piece of furniture will fit in a given niche, I can't catch a ball, and I can't tell you if a picture is crooked.
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An artist at an easel, wearing a smock and holding a palette. The head of the artist and the subject in the oil painting have been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' which has angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth.
The laborers come from an LoC collection of portraits of children who worked in coal mines in the 1910s. They're pretty harrowing stuff. I spent a long plane ride cropping each individual out of several of these images.
I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a climate activist. I used to be - I even used to ring strangers' doorbells on behalf of Greenpeace.
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A field of utility scale solar. Behind the mountains on the horizon line loom two logos: the original EFF 'clenched fist and lightning bolt' logo and the first Earth Day logo. They are reflected in the solar panels. Behind them roils hellish red-shot smoke.
And of course, the kind of person who amasses billions is pretty much never a benign person. The story you have to tell yourself in order to become a billionaire makes you into a literal psychopath:
Billionaires don't think we're real. How could they? How could you inflict the kind of vast misery that generates billions of dollars while still feeling even a twinge of empathy for the sufferer in your extractive enterprise. No wonder Elon Musk calls us "NPCs":
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He retired, got a hell of a lot richer through passive gains to his investment portfolio, then came back to run Google, presiding over the precipitous decline of search quality, which he responded to by telling his workers that he expected them to put in 60 hours/week:
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about surveillance infantilism: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
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Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse avatar's head atop the body of a figure from a earth 20th century editorial cartoon; the figure wears a suit, holds a long fork, and stares into the eyepiece of a microscope. The microscope is attached to a sinister scientific apparatus. The microscope is trained on a tiny human figure, limned in red, who shouts through a megaphone back up into the microscope's lens. The background is a 1980s NASA oil painting of the red, rocky surface of Venus.
If we make it illegal to spy, we make end the conditions for rampant billionaireism. We become unoptimizable.
Billionaires are overgrown toddlers, after all. They don't acknowledge the humanity of others - indeed, they probably don't even believe that the rest of us are really real (we're "NPCs"):
According to @WIRED, the video game company EA tried to remove LGBT and Black non-playable characters (NPCs) from The Sims 4, and instead changed them into "straight" and "white" characters.
(for the uninitiated: non-player background characters in online games, scripted to do the same thing over and over again).
It’s so true!
Honestly, their school is obsessed with disciplining; obedience overrides everything else. None of this equips them for dealing with the challenges they, the world will face in 10 years time. So depressing. #Education
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