At some point recently I realized I had kind of forgotten about it. There is just an absolute deluge of ongoing and increasing threats that demand immediate attention that it can be hard to remember the thing that, while super urgent, has distant consequences. That thought made me really depressed because I realized that not only have we made little progress on fixing this existential threat to humanity, but in some ways we’re getting further from being able to fix it. Fascism and surveillance capitalism are tightening the noose around effective political organizing and improvements to technology like AI are only going to make that worse on top of it’s impact on climate and the environment.

I keep having this irrational thought pop up in my head that’s something along the lines of “surely… they won’t keep making this worse right? There has to be some limit on just how cruel the people in power can get… right?” and then I snap myself back to reality and remember all they’ve done and continue to do and realize that isn’t going to happen. Over my life I’ve watched as things have just steadily gotten worse. There were glimmers of hope when Obama got elected, but seeing him continue most of the bad stuff was a real shock to my worldview. I thought that maybe things were going in the right direction with Bernie’s campaigns, but then that was crushed and now we have more brazen fascists in power.

I was recently thinking about just moving to a communist country like China or Vietnam, but aside from the logistical challenges involved in that, but even there the US will still manage to fuck me over with climate change so…

At this point, the fight for our freedom is the same as the fight for stopping climate change. The rich and powerful are never going to stop driving us towards that cliff, so we need to do something about them first. I just wish I knew what that even was.

I think the answer is “yes” and “it depends on what you mean.” What is better or worse? For whom is it better or worse? Are we talking about the causes or the results?

If we are talking about results and how they affect the majority of people, yes, it is worse. Wealth concentration has increased. The environment has gotten worse. There is more war now than there was pre-2000, etc. All of these were problems in the past, but the course of history has naturally intensified them over time.

But a lot of what you’re talking about are causes: What politics leads to these things? Was it better back then and it getting worse now is why things are worse? And to that I say: Not really. America has been this cruel and greedy for a long time and that past greed and cruelty directly contributed to how things are today. Perhaps some of this feeling is you just becoming more aware of things, but part of it is that the politicians of that day cared more about keeping up the mask. They weren’t any less cruel, but they were better at hiding it behind a facade of respectability.

So what’s changed and what has stayed the same? The core feature running through all of this history is capitalism. Capitalists have immense power by virtue of their control over wealth and production and therefore the state primarily represents their interests. They might have different strategies for accomplishing that, different personalities, or different secondary priorities, but regardless of which politician is in office, support for capitalists is the primary concern.

This support for capital has to contend with various forces of history. Technology, labor power, geopolitics, etc all affect capitalism and the government must respond accordingly.

The period between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 9/11 2001 was considered to be a period in which the US became the unrivaled power in the world. It may have appeared more peaceful, but that was due to a lack of meaningful geopolitical rivals to fight against. But it’s not like it stopped developing the military industrial complex during that time. It was still prepared to exert it’s power over the world, violently if necessary. This changed post 2001 because they finally got push back for their imperialism and had someone to openly fight. And with a new foreign enemy, the US once again had something to direct people’s fear and anger away from capitalism.

Some combination of globalization and advances in automation broke what little power workers had managed to earn during the mid-20th century. This meant that the government and capitalists didn’t have to give as many concessions to workers as they used to and the resulting economic losses created an angry and desperate population. This anger COULD have been directed towards the root of the problem if there were better class consciousness in the US, but instead racists were able to capitalize on it to direct people to their causes.

The last major development to talk about here is the rise of the internet. On one had, this enabled people to see things and communicate with people they never would have been able to in the past. The potential for this to open people’s minds and connect people was tremendous and obviously a potential threat to capitalism as it wasn’t as easy to control the flow of information anymore. Unfortunately the dark side is that algorithmic social media has managed to bring out the worst in people. Some of that is due to deliberate manipulations by platform owners, but some of it is just the unfortunate consequences of how mass human psychology interacts with an algorithm designed to optimize the amount of time people spend looking at ads and getting others to spend time looking at ads. Certain kinds of content, usually ones that elicit strong emotions, are more likely to get people’s attention than others. So in the absence of that class consciousness, it’s pretty easy for hatemongers to get their messages to spread.

I suppose my point is, when you get these kinds of feelings, it helps to try to learn some more and take an analytical approach to understand better and hopefully find a way forward. Just feeling like things are generically worse is an oversimplification that misses the underlying forces responsible for that feeling. We wouldn’t be where we are now if things were different in the past, so just thinking of the past as being better misses the role it plays in the present.

How do you feel about sun dried tomatoes?

I haven’t tried them. I guess I’ll do that sometime.

In a broad sense, I don’t agree with the premise that technology is always good and it’s about how society chooses to use it.

Technology enables people to do things that previously weren’t possible. It gives people powers that those who don’t/can’t use the technology don’t have. It fundamentally changes the power dynamics between people. You don’t get to choose how someone else uses the technology. You have to deal with its existence.

For example, guns. Guns are a weapon that enables people to inflict violence on others very effectively without much if any athletic prowess. Previously someone who was more athletic could have power over someone weaker than them. With guns, the weaker person could be on an even playing field.

Now, guns are pretty difficult to manufacture, so an authority might be able to effectively control the availability of guns. But now lets say someone discovers a method that enabled basically anyone to make a gun cheaply in their house. Now it’s harder to stop people from getting them. It becomes more accessible, and once again this changes the potential power dynamic in society. We could all come to an agreement on how we want to use guns, but that doesn’t really matter if some guy can secretly build a gun in his garage, put it in his pocket, and just go shoot someone. The very existence of this technology has changed the nature of social reality.

Now compare that to AI. Generative AI has enabled people to produce novel media that is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentically generated media very quickly. While this is technically something that was possible before, it was far more difficult and slow. There is media in the world today that could not have existed without AI. (If only in so far as the quantity being larger means that things that wouldn’t have been made in the same time period now can be.) AI isn’t even a physical device. A computer program is essentially an idea translated into a language a computer can understand. It might be difficult to learn how to program, but anyone with a computer can do it. Anyone can learn how to write a computer virus, so now we have to live in a world where we all have to be careful of viruses. Anti-virus software changes that dynamic again, but it hasn’t changed the fact that someone can learn to write a program that gets around them. Now, AI as it works now is a bit harder to make on your own with just knowledge because it requires large quantities of data to train the models. So technologies and policies that could restrict people’s access to data could limit the availability of AI technology. But future developments may discover ways to make AI models with little or no data, at which point it would become easy for anyone to have that technology. So even if right now we put in place laws to restrict how AI companies operate so people don’t have easy access to the AI models or perhaps the AI models come built with logic that helps to identify their outputs, those laws would be meaningless if it were trivial for anyone to make their own.

Now, it’s going to be different for every different kind of technology and it’s interesting to discuss, but the root of any human decisions around the technology is the fundamental nature of what the technology is, does, and enables.

I don’t know. On one hand, if the crime is so bad that it otherwise warrants lifetime imprisonment…

a) maybe there is a line past which it’s deserved. I do generally view life as being something sacred and not something you should be able to take from others, but it’s a fuzzy moral question as to whether there are some acts that are so heinous that they would challenge that view. Maybe it has to be for a harm at a societal rather than personal level? Like maybe taking one person’s life isn’t a warranted punishment for them taking a single other life, but perhaps say, a Nazi has harmed not just so many people, but some essential essence of the society that keeps us happy and healthy. Maybe THAT is bad enough to merit the ultimate violation of personal rights?

b) Is the alternative THAT much better? Is condemning someone to spend the rest of their life in a tiny room with no hope of them ever getting to do something that they want much better than death? Is it really living a life? (Granted, my opinion on that point is colored by my depression. I genuinely think if things got bad enough in my life suicide would be a preferable alternative. A healthier person might have a different view.)

That said, regardless of the above considerations, there is also the issue of the permanence of the punishment not allowing for correcting mistakes. Humans aren’t infallible. Plenty of people have been wrongly convicted. If they’re merely put in prison then we can always free them if we later learn of our mistake. If we’ve already killed them… ooops…? Nothing we can do. So perhaps that issue overrides any other moral considerations.