Project Nimby - Kat and Mause

Mause the uplifted Mouse and Kat the Cartoon Digital Intelligence Cat live together in a tiny storage unit in the future.  Rent is due and they have no immediate plan to pay it until the Block Party has a poetry slam planned.

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Heir of Sunfire - Introduction

Bron is not the protagonist of this story.  As a random peasant near an enchanted wood, he would be fine with that, but while he is not the protagonist, he is central to its resolution and two enchanted talking mice show up to enlighten him about why he IS important and frame the telling of the rest of the tale of Michael, Heir of Sunfire.

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Project Nimby - Project Nimby

First of seven stories about Post Humanism from the Chapbook of Water and Glass.  Ted was a human and Bob, his Cactus owner, had to make some....alterations to get him on Planet Metmetmetrion.+

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Poetry

 Sucker 

by Emmit Other

I have had my sanity questioned

My morality questioned

My memory questioned

My honor questioned

My word questioned

My value questioned

My purpose questioned

My theology questioned

My motive questioned

By allies and blood and strangers alike

So much so

That I joined in

Until that voice 

Was proven to work for a liar

Who did not keep their word

Now the demon sits in a box

Unable to torment me

About irrelevant opinions of celestial liars

Divine oathbreakers

Or any servant thereof

But while at great cost

He did be a boon

For I dont do guilt

But By questioning myself

Always

I reap a kind of wisdom

In genuinely trying hard

To learn from others mistakes

But despite it all

I still fell for flim flam

A well placed psychological manipulation

A false choice

A blasphemous descration of the sacred

But I did penance

And burned the link

But my dignity still suffers

Suffers still

Indeed

[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 3 - Scene 1 and 2

 Scene 1 - A black screen appears where the word “Solutions” slowly fades in.

VO: We could lecture you on what we think needs to be done to fix the situation, and its a big list, but we went out and talked to some other people, and this is what they said.

[Images of footage of other people giving their ideas on fixing the technology situation for 5-10 minutes]

Scene 2 - Screen shows black

Words: Did we forget someone?

Words: Someone that everyone is always talking about?

Words: Oh well.

[Roll Credits]

[Mock cover of You’re So Vain but the words are “I bet you think this film is about you” with Elon sneaking on from the sides again and again]

[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 2, Scene 6 (Continued)

 [Images of Psychology]

VO: Psychology is a powerful science that is a bit younger than our so called ‘hard’ sciences like Chemistry, Physics or even regular biology.  There is a lot about the brain and human behavior we’ve learned, but despite being inexact, because we as complex social animals are complex; there is still a lot that has been learned.  We are living organisms; we respond to stimulus, and governments and universities have poured billions of dollars into understanding what it is that makes people tick.

[Image of Stanford and Milgram Experiments]

VO: Two of the most notorious examples of human experimentation in psychology were the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments.  In Milgram, they connected a person up to electric wires to determine how much shock someone was willing to do under orders from an authority figure.  And let's just say it wasn't pretty.  In the Stanford Prison experiment, they had participants become prisoners and guards.  The Guards began to act more and more authoritarian, and things got worse and worse for the prisoners until after six days, the whole thing was shut down.  Now, some justifiably question a lot of things about these experiments but one thing that did happen was reform requiring more consent from people before they took part in one of these experiments.  Meaning, to be part of a psychological experiment, you need to consent to participate, and it has to be informed consent.

[Image of Facebook and addiction]

VO: And back to Facebook.  There is a popular element in software called Gamification.  It means that you get tiny little rewards for continued behavior; and facebook does this masterfully.  Again, remember the little games they used to have like Mafiawars or Farmtown where you were there to click and click and click to getahead.  Eventually, Facebook screwed Zynga, the company that made those games over when their research showed them that they had people hooked enough that they could make people click on outrage or fear instead.  Make no mistake, Facebook knew exactly what it was doing when it made the timeline less about your friends and more about conspiracies and outrage factories because by manipulating your emotions, you got addicted and made them more money.

[Image of Science images]

VO: But lets remember what an experiment is.  It means you have an idea; like Rocks can levitate things with their mind…and then use a hypothesis to test if rocks can do that.  You set things up, watch, repeat, and have a control group of say…plastic rocks that dont levitate things.  The point is, you have a theory, you test that theory and look at the result.

[Images of Teens and Children]

VO: Officially, teens as young as 13 can sign up for facebook, but realistically they are a lot younger than that.  But even 13 is a problem.  

[Images of Southpark and Eula episode]

VO: We’ve all read horror stories about the EULA, even if most people still dont actually read them.  But since our corrupt courts and captured alphabet organizations are useless against Big Tech; they can put illegal and unethical things in there and not get challenged on it. 

[Images of Clockwork Orange and Medeival Torture]

VO: But it doesn't matter what they put there; a 13 year old can’t give consent.  They simply can’t.  There is no country in the world where a 13 year old can, without their parents, given consent to take part in a psychological experiment.  Do you see? We know Facebook tests its psychologically addictive content on control groups to see what is more engaging..ie addictive, and we know that there are 13 year olds using it.  Millions upon millions of them.  That makes Facebook the largest unregulated experiment in human  history; and no one is taking them to task for this.  

[Images of Regulatory Agencies]

VO: All of these people have examined or in some cases even fined Facebook, but no one is thinking of the children.  If we won’t even enforce existing law, how are we going to ever hold these giants to account?

Taking a break from Social Media

 The indifference of so many to what WotC is doing to the OGL has made me literally physically ill.  I am very close to finishing Army of Fire so I am taking a break from Social Media so I can hunker down and finish Army of Fire and then let it rest while I move on to the Grenademan sequel.

Expressing empathy for a corporation over small companies, artists and creators is disgusting.  "Well its their property" ignores my property and tells me that any system that lets the rich, the large and the powerful take from the small and brainwash so many into siding with sociopaths is a system that shall not stand.

2023 Realignment

I discuss plans and status of writing and podcast projects for 2023.

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 2, Scene 6 (Continued)

 [Image of Peter Thiel]

VO: This guy has a company that, I kid you not, is named Palantir.  

[Image of Palantir, Lord of the rings, Sauron etc

VO: For those of you not familiar, a Palantir is a crystal ball that got corrupted by Sauron in Lord of the Rings and used to psychologically manipulate the nations of the west for evil.  Peter Thiel sells data, anywhere he can, anyway he can, to advance an agenda for a small handful of billionares.

[Image of the 27 billionaires who fund the GOP]

VO: These guys fun a radical fascist party that wants to undermine democracy.  What does this have to do with facebook? Glad you asked.

[Image of Cambride Analytica members, images and polls]

VO: Remember when facebook used to be fun? Like Mafiawars and Farmtown? And another thing that was fun about it were those weird little polls like “What Power Ranger are you?” and the like.  Well, Cambridge Analytica used the API (a tool to let programs talk to each other) to trojan horse one of these little polls that then stripped huge amounts of your data onfacebook to the fascist ecosphere.  This is a big deal, and in Europe, where they have real data protections, Facebook was fined billions of dollars for this crap.

[Images of Brexit, Trump, Desnatis, psyops, propaganda, jingoism]

VO: But this breach help microtarget fascist influence for Brexit, Trump and Desantis.   You have to understand, this wasn’t just taking data and using it to find how people might vote; they used it for something called ‘psychological targeting’ where they found those who were the most vulnerable to psychological manipulation on issues like immigration, class warfare or conspiracy theories.  It isn't an accident that MAGA is filled with conspiracy laden Q followers or Pizzagate believers; it's by design and the man who helped all this happened was Peter Theil.

[Images of Jan 6 riots and Proud Boys]

VO: Make no mistake, there’s a direct link between Cambridge Analytica and the Jan 6 riots.  Without Facebook, Trump likely wouldn't have been elected.  Without Trump, the radical GOP would at least still be pro America even if they were still anti worker and anti middle class.    

[Images of Mark Zuckerberg and 2018 Testimony]

VO: In 2018 Mark Zuckerberg testified to congress apologizing for their actions; but any actions that Facebook has taken have been temporary.  A lot of the controls they put into place, including restricting trump after 1/6/2020 have been removed.  It's like it never even happened.   In the United States, a ton of companies investigated Facebook, but basically nothing even happened.  As more and more data breaches happened, Mark just changed the name of the company to Meta, spent billions of dollars chasing virtual reality and no one can do anything because he is the only person that controls the company.

[Images of Mark]

VO: Thats important to remember that Mark is the ONLY person who controls facebook, which means that he is ultimately responsible for everything it does.  And the slide of the United States towards Fascism, is DIRECTLY attributable to the lax policies and quiet efforts to help conservatives and the billionaire class.  Mark and Mark alone could change it and Mark and Mark alone does not.  Let’s remember that as we discuss the third great sin of Facebook.

[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 2, Scene 6 (Continued)

 [Scenes of Massive Facebook size]

VO: Our scrappy little start up grew up.  Now it has 2.93 BILLION (that’s Billion with a B) users, or in a planet of 8 billion people, almost half have facebook.  Odds are, if you have an internet access; you have a facebook account or at least an account with Instagram, Whatsapp or one of Mark’s other companies.   In 2022, it earned over 140 BILLION and since it started in 2011, its earned over half a TRILLION dollars.  (Trillion with a T).   It is the most used source of news, the biggest source of advertisement, and the go to place to socialize for many people and groups in nearly every nation on Earth.  So what makes it so evil?

[Images of Mark in a Top Hat and Montebank Cape]

VO: Is it because they tied some poor lady and her dog to the railroad tracks? Is it because they made a volcano lair and wanted to hold the earth ransom with nuclear missiles? Maybe establish Orbital Supremecy so they could ransom the Earth to build a giant statue of him?  No.  Far far worse.

[Images of Random people]

VO: The crimes of Facebook are far too many to mention but we’re going to do three big ones.  We’ll start with little evil ‘e.’  If you use the logic of the show the Good Place, and assigned people good points for good things and bad points for bad things; nobody beats Mark.  The first crime is breaking up friends and family.  And it isnt deliberate, not really; but apathy can still be a form of evil, and in this case the worst evil.

[Image of a complex rube goldberg machine]

VO: The heart of Facebook is the Algorhythm.  That’s basically a complex mathematical formula to decide what it is you see.  All the big guys use them, but Facebook does it better.  Since it knows more about you than anyone else (except maybe Google), it takes all of the things you like, you want, you are or that you click or watch and feeds it back into the algorithm  Sounds harmless, right?  I mean, its ok if you know its addictive…right? Well…we’ll get back to that.  But the point is, it IS addictive.  And Facebook knows it is.  And advertisers do too.  The problem comes from the fact that, as a faceless amoral corporation, they act ammoral.  Which means, except for things they think will cost them prestige and money (porn, suicide, and sometimes violence), Facebook will show you what people watch and clicks.  Which means

[Image of Soviet Agents and Bad Bomb Throwing Bolshiviks]

VO: When bad guys figure that out and wanna lie and cheat and steal, they can put out lies specifically designed to get clicks.  And so those clicks get more clicks, and people believe their lies, and those lies are picked up by the bad guys and made worse, which feeds on itself.  And Facebook doesnt care.  And that makes people argue.  

[Images of Fighting, and cracks between friends and family]

VO: And that means real people argue about the lies.  So friendships and family are shattered.  The lies are bad enough (and we’ll get back to that) but the greatest crime Facebook ever committed was to break up families, break up friends and even whole communities as they argue about the lies while Facebook sits back and counts the money, laughing all the way to the bank.  Who doesnt have a facebook friend that they lost? A family member that doesnt talk to them anymore because of something they said or did on facebook? Even when those relationships are damaged, sometimes the wound is still there, festering.   

[Image of Mark shrugging]

VO: And all so Mark could make a buck.  And remember, he controls it utterly….so the blame is literally all on him.  He could change this, any time he wants, and he doesnt; except the minimum he can get away with.