General Discussion

Last edited Tue Nov 11, 2025, 11:28 PM - Edit history (3)

I follow this tech writer Yasha Levine who gets it. My friend and I were discussing yesterday how, the oligarchy aside, spooks have way too much influence in American society and how that cripples the left. Those sleazy industrial data miners-Google, Facebook, Palantir, MuskRubbish Inc are also defense contractors now. To make things even worse, a bunch of little known, small, creepy defense contractors are also in the woodwork, exploiting these dubious AI and big data booms. E.g.: the NSO group (Pegasus, Paragon etc are their way of saying “fu” to civilized society ), BlackCube all of which churn out spyware with few checks as is.

The influence of the national security state is palpable at elite institutions which are already corrupted by even the civilian side of the sleazy ass tech industry.
And via these worthless, trashy and criminal tech companies, that junk and these atrociously creepy methods are spread everywhere. It’s as though every place is to be like PRC or Russia or the worst parts of any democracy.

It’s corrupting medicine (especially psychiatry) since there are too few rules and laws regulating medical use of data scraped from the net and chatbots. And attacking someone’s sanity is a sure fire way to see that their credibility is damaged. Any whistleblower can expect to be harassed and to lead a shitty life.
Who the hell would trust a creep like Zuckerberg with anything medical? Shady Googlers like Thomas Insel, Andy Ng, that Woebot person whose name I forget - these are such awful people to have mucking around in brain science or psychiatry. The failed narcotics war could be used as an excuse by hucksters like these to peddle a totally bogus “psychiatric alternative” to the police, when the question is who said that systems filled with data mining creeps have the right to implicitly threaten people with coercive psychiatry or the police when they spill over into regular academics sans any IRB or informed consent?

Police reform itself is perverted by the corrupting influence of billionaires like Clare Wu or tech “critics” from the sleazy MIT Media Lab like Joy Buolamwini. This Prof I respected David Golumbia called it out. The Epstein connected MIT Media is itself tied to so many sleazy people: Alex Pentland, Neri Oxman (that’s that asshole Bill Ackman’s wife). Evgeny Morozow (one of the few respectable people associated with Stanford) pointed out how bad an influence the MIT Media lab is on academia. It’s not schizophrenic to note how sleazy this type of cross-pollination is. People like this awful edtech shill Sebastian Thrun are ruining education as fast as they can. These people are a cancer on society.

I had some shitty experiences and I am too much of a curmudgeon to trust anyone irl outside the most routine and mainstream things.

It has weighed on my mind. I find it alarming how tech and worse medicine is encroached into by these sleazy industrial types who are more overtly spooks now. Further, they implement totally useless and needless security theatre and other shit.

This is not stuff that should spread into civilian life and its influence outside its narrow use for any genuine fighting of terrorism or crime is not at all appropriate. My own dad is a military vet in my country. But he is an honest person. He gets that military psych studies and defense contracting are creepy and dubious.

Catherine Liu wrote in Unherd about how the guy who introduced this super annoying version of woke to universities was actually an FBI informant. Which totally makes sense. Any damn way they can trash the real left works for them. Even those counterculture movements (Dadaism, Surrealism etc) were infiltrated by those horrible creepy spooks.

It’s not Trumps bs about the deep state. This is more like this culture of deregulation and misogyny that leads to real holes in every area of life. Are we supposed to tacitly now be okay with more spooks and get resigned to a creepy, privacy free life? And a second rate “metaverse” growing around us?

The press is another corrupted area. Substack has a few good writers and journalists, but at the end of the day it’s sourced to the same sleazy Si Valley networks-Andreessen Horowitz etc.

I was just reading about Operation Mockingbird yesterday. I am not in the US. But the stuff you guys do over there can spread. The sort of sleazy Stalinists/the various brands of religious right/the blah corrupt left we have here would all be easily bought out by the industrialists, defense contracting etc.

That leaves the courts, the constitution and genuine community solidarity as the sole hope in most democracies at this point. That’s the point of democracy - not to permit a creeping police state bought to you by PRC/Russia/Si Valley and spooks the world over.

This piece Aziz Huq wrote earlier this year really stuck with me on that head.

Things have gotten so bad that I finally hope change is around the corner. Even if it isn’t, I’ll at least not feel as hopeless as I have since about 2011 when I first noticed that all is not right with the world. I realized that Si Valley was a far worse force than was obvious (though at the time I just went..”wait wtf?”). I came back to my home country and saw the same trash grow here, but intangibly enough that it’s hard to report or file complaints over without coming off as a crazy person.

Doesn’t help that I am a childfree catlady and a lot of these people are just misogynists.

The problem is that a lame worldview which pegs the bar for what is considered “paranoid or conspiratorial” this low is totally corrupt. It is justifiable to object to the bending of all sorts of rules because of these sleazy tech cos.
And the reason I like Levine is that I don’t buy astroturf tech criticism either. He is grumpy enough that I believe him.

AstroTurf exists to make a splash and make it seem as if “people are getting serious”. Bollocks- it’s all performative except for say Lina Khan. Splashy stories just numb the public and make people accept more and more bs over time. Real change is what Khan was doing and it’s coming.

We need a stronger defense of democracy and these tech creeps in data mining, AI, crypto etc have overplayed their hand. The internet was always a spook and corporate thing.

But there comes this breaking point..I think by the time a lame, enraged middleaged grouch like me stumbles into such things and keeps trying to exit quietly cursing it and ..lol..
I always hated cameras. Can’t live like that.

If these guys had not spread this cancer so much that now it gets to the point where some contract that very blah and irritating people work out spills over into the space of people like me who only required that people stay away and annoy just about anyone else ..

I am very progressive in my instincts but I get more and more strained and short tempered around theatrical bs.
And it is tied to what is destroying democracy and everything is just lame and awful and exasperating.

I vent on DU since it’s one of the few places I trust...