The DU Lounge

Last edited Sat Jun 28, 2025, 12:51 PM - Edit history (2)

(And evidently going by the length of this post-clipped/succinct etc)

However, please bear with me Skittles while I enlarge on that. Your post evoked an existential issue around identity and free will I have been pondering.

I keep reading that humans are social and sometimes when you are preoccupied you vaguely go “huh?”. However, as a subset of technologies get more intrusive, you do start to wonder..

I don’t accept that it is broadly true that humans are wired to be hyper-social online or offline having thought about it. Yasha Levine, whom I generally respect, recently said that he doesn’t think that the social web will change the world for the better and that indeed it may be making things worse. That was my intuition as well. Though I don’t think irl organizing is the fix either without dramatic changes to modern life which I at least can’t see succumbing to.

This pitch seems to come from : 1)social media companies on the one hand and 2) a subset of very social people with large circles irl on the other. That also seems more correlated with religiosity (benign or scary) than not. Maybe if you believe in God anyway you are never alone? An odd notion when you really examine it..Is God like an inescapable police state? The problem of other minds.

I at least largely see these connection technologies (beyond the essential) or truly cool (if that ever happens), as a nuisance, time suck and think they will go nowhere. This hyper-connected world is draining, a huge bore and offers no utility.

Most emerging tech seems like such trash. Now I respect Yan LeCun’s take on AI for instance. He is the sole scientist in that field aside from DAIR (which is tiny and on the outs typically) who doesn’t sound incomprehensibly Hollywood. That’s a weird field. No one in the biological sciences goes around hyperventilating about biowarfare which is far more real.

Generic rubbishy Agentic AI or chatGPT seem likeannoying nuisances. Non-profits like the NIH or NIST could probably make decent AI. But does NIST even exist still? And without someone like the awesome Lina Khan around to regulate tech, I feel gloomy overall.

As for the web, I am still mildly fond of DU-Auld Lang Syne and all..but that’s about it.

I must confess to being a fan of the atomized modern existence (what’s wrong with that when you are not bothering anyone else and paying taxes/voting/working or doing adequate amounts of voluntary work/making charitable donations etc). I feel a bit defensive and resentful about implicit suggestions that..well..that one should leave one’s room when one doesn’t absolutely have to.

I thought not having to meet people beyond the essentials was the whole point of a home, modern society etc. However, the more religious (whose cultures are different) tend to have larger families and over time my type of lifestyle-solitary, bookish and happy (J D Vance’s much maligned childfree catlady) can seem endangered.

IMO people conflate the issues with technology with voluntary cultural differences such as smaller families, innate introversion, liking personal space, non religiosity etc. Being solitary/an atheist, having a small family etc is not a mental disease. It’s a choice and one that factors in the environment for real not just as an “externality” the free market will fix etc.

Left or right we seem headed towards Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! world.

I really frowned over it wondering if I was a misanthrope (which didn’t really fit because I am an animal lover and humans are animals). Given that I like animals it seems unlikely that I dislike even this rambunctious, very populous and somewhat destructive animal.

It was an identity issue that was confusing me since I prefer a kindly worldview (as long as the obligatory suffering of fools or worse creepy and boring men is not demanded).

I got a possible solution re what my worldview could be oddly enough from a piece by Ed Zitron on how ai cannot really rip off Carlin. I saw a piece in The Humanist later on regarding Carlin’s humanist misanthropy. That is quite possibly my own worldview- benign misanthropy ;-/. Because paranoid or angry misanthropy didn’t fit.

It was a good article on how Carlin thought individual humans are okay, but in groups and mobs, collective intelligence seems to typically drop rather than rise. Or that was my takeaway.

Humans could be mostly harmless given a shot. But in this overpopulated global society which is experiencing resource strain on every part of the planet, everything looks like it’s in free fall.

I do notice that most people don’t actually choose to be packed together like sardines. It seems non-optional rather. And even in large families you have a large contingent that likes solitude.

There aren’t really very many stable jobs, most random jobs are vanishing thanks to ai and infrastructure is getting worse. The quality of healthcare or education access gets worse.

While you can churn out humans relatively fast, you still can’t produce enough oncologists, scientists, educators, plumbers or electricians.

Human dignity does seem to go down with overcrowding. And our industries are turning out such junk-truly E M Forster’s Machine for Secondhand Ideas.

Replacing journalism/writing with rot like Substack and services/education with that awful and useless GPT thing/edtech/medtech makes little sense.

Graeber got it re: bullshit jobs, which is what the private sector in tech seems to largely produce.

I shudder to think of the day OncologyGPT arrives because doctors are that short of time. A rando human caregiver would be luck of the draw.

And yet we are in so much denial about it that falling birth rates are apparently the concern .

Whether libertarian or Marxist, more babies to feed the efficiency machine seems like the worst fucking idea ever.

I recently read in the Jacobin what I considered the worst supposedly leftish oped ever written. It was by someone called Ben Wray where he referred to reproductive choice/abortion rights as “popular”.

Well there you go ladies ..our rights are still “popular”. Isn’t that cool? I really like it when women’s rights come back in fashion!

He cited two economists who really talk about humans as if we are legos (to quote Andrew Nikiforuk of the Tyee) and that’s left? Can’t be.

Anyway how is it left to ignore the effects humans are having on the planet? A moral obscenity like ventilation shutdown is a barometer of societal sociopathy and it is casually normalized now.
Except for say Nathan Robinson, Maria Bolotnikova or Samuel MacDonald Miller the media (outside of dedicated greens) barely touches on topics like those.

It’s fascinating how environmental issues, reproductive choice for women at any rate seem to have become outdated and even passe.
It feels more and more like all the major religions and a significant enough segment of the male population has quietly dispensed with more universal values like feminism, separation of religion and state etc. We nonreligious, childfree feminists do seem to be getting muscled out entirely.
Thine loin is not fruitful heathen female-thou has no rights …

Idiocracy but even more brutal strikes me as a perfect depiction of this reality ;-/. It’s one of the biggest failures of global public health to not have included information about the benefits of family planning with drops in infant mortality and increasing life span. And pointing out the benefits for non-human life/planet.

Apparently you cannot call any choices selfish except those made by billionaires or us childfree who are managing on our own.

The goal seems to be to destroy pensions and social safety nets, strip-mine the planet and exploit humans to the fucking hilt sans regulations or much real democracy, destroy journalism and education and healthcare. Keep making more exploding rockets/junk ai while defunding science.

Anyway I digress Skittles. What was the question again? What word doesn’t describe me? Yeah - sociable. It sounds exhausting.

Sorry about this meditative stream of consciousness. I have been pondering free will.

Apparently determinism predicts that the only people in society with a say are somewhat controlling, pushy, alpha, truly agentic(!), ultra super free will (!) types or the very gregarious.

Or that’s my sardonic take.

Which makes me vaguely wonder what I should do. How much free will can a person like me (who detests non-essential communication) even have in a hideously social, Pronatalist, increasingly religious, sexist, hyper-connected and overcrowded world?

I do wonder about determinism and free will.
Whether it is proliferation of junk tech or human overpopulation, neither seems to be particularly conducive to collective societal free will.

I do feel we are too inter-connected-especially when it’s as confusing and non-specific as it seems to be.