#197 Fri (1/6/23) - 4 a.m. thoughts [OW]

 The dog woke me at 4:41 am vomiting, but after I cleaned up the mess and got him settled again, I could not fall immediately back to sleep.  Hee are some of the thoughts I can remember having

Titter makes a good case for why infomation platforms should be nationalized.  Why let one deranged billionaire control the information channel with no public disclosure of what algorithms they are using.  Well becuase it would be inefficient to have tit be a public resource.  Why is it considered efficient to have vast marketing and advertising deparments working to figure out how best to monetize everything for the benefit of a few shareholders?  If it was a public corporation, like PBS for example, it could open and transparent governance practicies and work to ensure fairness as opposed to profit.  Well,,, we don't really want that do we?  What we want is to suppress certain "wrong" opinions and promote other ones.  But that is always the case and right now, no one except Twitter shareholders gets even considered in the equation.  Certainly not the twitter users who are responsible for generating 99% of all Twitter content.

Imagine a society goverened by a vast AI called NoBuk.  Everyday all citizens are given the task of producing as many decontextualized fragments as possible.  Nothing more than a sentence or phrase.  Billions of phrases, lifted, created, adulterated, wrong are being disseminated every day. No one is expected to have the ability to retain a coherent thought pattern for more than about 8-10 seconds. Read fragment, react. Repeat.  What kind of society would this be?  Hellish?  Nightmarish?  Yes, probably.  Certainly one incapable of understanding anything or forming coherent thoughts or plans of action.

What is politics for and about? Management of public goods?  Is Public Good even a thing anymore?  At a time when basic human rights - education, housing, nutrition, health, welfare - were on open display, during a time of crisis, a global lethal pandemic - when our community health outcomes were literally life and death, and failing - we assumed that only the government should foot the bill to take care of all of these things.  The government should spend - without ever taxing anyone - on all the things that we as people need to not die. Which corporation spent money on the public good?  Which billionaire ponied up any significant amount of money to assist anyone but themselves?  If they did, I assume it was tiny amounts. We have allowed a system in which all decisions, all control and all resources are given to corporations, and yet corporations are only good for one thing - maximizing shareholder wealth.  There is not benefit to a corporation of doing good for people unless it is immediately apparent in the profit motive.  And yet, despite having all of this control and exhibiting no regard for the well-being of anyone, we somehow assume that this is the only efficient way to allocate resources and outcomes.  It is entirely non-transparent, with most people having no say in how corporations make decisions or set up their systems or extract wealth from us.  Corporations are siphons that squeeze wealth into ever tighter and tighter configurations. where an ever shrinking number have ever greater concentrations of wealth/power/resources.  At the same time, corporations serve as filters to endlessly sieve us into narrower and narrower strata so that we can be apportioned the bare minimum and more and more people are being constantly sieved into lower and lower strata. It feels like Squid Game or Singles Inferno, where eventually only a handful of the world's best looking and fittest people with get to compete for all of the wealth/prestige and enjoyment while literally billions of people die from starvation, exposure to the elements, lack of adequate sanitation, malnutrition, preventable diseases, police brutality, over work, anxiety, heart disease, obesity, etc, etc, etc. All of these social diseases are PREVENTABLE. The cure is money. If instead of being subsidized, the production of [insert a bad here, tobacco, guns, alcohol, transfats, high fructose corn syrup, for example] were taxed out of existence and the proceeds used to insure that everyone had access to adequate health care (including mental health), nutrition, education and housing that is safe, decent and affordable, that the total quality of life would skyrocket and global human suffering would plummet.  Idiots say (and take on faith and believe wholeheartedly) that humans without conflict and oppression, become humans with purpose and meaning and therefore we would all die of boredom and bad habits if not for our penal carceral work-sleep cycle that keeps us on the treadmill until we burnout.

2023 is the year that ChatGPT and AI will likely begin the move to render most of the daily drudge of all intellectual and literate work unnecessary. Education, law, software development, accounting can all be automized soon. The 4 hour work week is now within reach. Seemingly knowing what is coming, the {apocryphal} story goes that OpenAI is actively researching how to implement HBI. [Human Basic Income=social security or the dole for everyone] They suspect that most jobs will be eliminated and productivity will actually improve without humans in the loop of most activities. The problem now becomes what to do with the vast numbers of superfluous people.  I suppose we can just ask ChatGPT what to do with them? 

Work-life balance - mine?  Stuckness - me here. Things you can control - mood, mindset? How? Meditation, mindfulness, fitness/health/nutrition. The social media obsession with "the morning routine"?? What follows the morning routine? 10-12 hours of "productive" work.  Work for whom, in the furtherance of what goals? Mine? Likely not. Is the morning routine followed by an afternoon and evening routine?  What is the obsession with productivity and efficiency? Why are we all expected to spin ever faster and harder to get one more little pellet.  Is it because we are all exhausted with having to compete over every little scrap? Every single snippet of attentional awareness has been monetized.  Every pursuit, every activity is subject to the dictate of a profit motive. Anything that exists, exists because it can generate a profit. Why do you have to "belong" to a gym in order to exercise? Why are gyms not provided along with food kitchens and pantries, as something that we are all entitled to.  What are the "membership benefits" of belonging to American society? Are there any perks?

What is it about vacations that makes me feel worthless?  Why go somewhere that is kind of like here anyway? What might one hope to find, see, or do that would have any lasting impact? I thought about going to Mexico, because I thought the weather and climate might be nicer than the Midwest in winter.  But then, what would I do there? Sit by a pool and read? I can do that in summer here, but other people generally become an active impediment to any enjoyment of it by doing what people always do when the gather in groups for fun - scream at the top of their lungs or endless mouth-gabble in high chortling tones and laugh maniacally. Is cacaphonic a word? Going to Japan was genuinely eye-opening and life-(expectation)-changing.  I remember thinking I wanted to stay there.  (But I suspect it was largely because during that two week period, I did not have to think about work or the dictates of time and money.  Things were all prepaid, there were no bills, food was provided.  It was "all-inclusive."  What if life was "all-inclusive."