Everything must be reinvented, shared memory is a dream

Let's look at some recent history.

In early 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. He then did his level best to destroy it. Partially so he could replace it with his dream of X, the Everything App, which like WeChat in China, would be used for everything. Partially so he could force everyone on Twitter to read his juvenile attempts at humor. Partially so he could wrench Twitter into a haven for neo-Nazis and other assorted far right figures as part of his acquisition of the United States government, which he later gave up when he found out running a large nation-state was actually kind of hard.

But regardless, Twitter (I refuse to call it X, much like I refuse to engage in many other of Musk's various delusions) rapidly deteriorated into something worse than even Facebook, which is now 8/10ths randomly generated AI slop by volume. Most people quickly decided that Twitter wasn't for them any more. This was when I decided, for example.

(Remember when we stood up for the ADL as a non-partisan anti-extremist group? Good times.)

I experimented with Mastodon for a while as a replacement, but found quite a few issues with it:

• it was difficult to onboard new users, due to its decentralized nature
• the users that were present were extremely insular, and had no problem with screaming at you if you broke some minor social rule such as alt-tagging your posts
• it had no way to quote-repost, which is one of my favorite ways of prompting comments on other people's posts with my own take
• at the time (this may have gotten better) it was a nightmare to run, requiring a fairly expensive AWS instance due to file storage requirements in the multiple hundreds of gigabytes

So when someone gave me a code to the new invite-only social media hotness, I was intrigued. Bluesky at the time... well, I don't think it was moderated. Like, at all. When I first installed the app (in May of 2023), I was greeted by a picture of a trans woman proudly showing off her chest.

I quickly learned a few things about Bluesky:

• I was right - it wasn't moderated, at all.
• It was populated by clusters of ex-Twitter leftist shitposters, a few tech early adopters, and overwhelmingly, by far, trans people who felt that posting on Twitter would literally have them doxxed and killed and were deliriously happy they found a place where they could just flirt and mess around like anyone else.
• There was no advertising, and no plan to monetize, at all. It appeared the entire enterprise was just running on fumes and vibes.

Over two years later and some of this hasn't changed.

Still no ads, or any way visible to monetize. I presume the entire enterprise is still running on venture capital money, and honestly, probably the least objectionable use of that I've seen lately. Jay Graber, the CEO, talks frequently about atproto, the publishing protocol behind Bluesky, which the team apparently believes is more likely to drive growth than, uh, the social network they already have. Meanwhile she's done the lecture circuit being notable mostly for not being Mark Zuckerberg.

However, Bluesky is trying to moderate now. Emphasis on trying. And in doing so, it's driving off the group that literally built the platform, trans women.

You can blame this guy.

Jesse Singal has made his career out of just asking questions about trans people for a decade now, which strikes one as a bit odd given he's, uh, not trans. (This raises questions. Which I'm just asking, mind you.) It's safe to say that because of the many articles he's written questioning why exactly trans people exist, he's easily the most hated person for that group. Even more than the President, who apparently thinks that everyone is trans now. (looks down) Nope.

So, of course, he joined BlueSky to just ask questions. Predictably, he faced furious denunciations and the occasional death threat (which we've all learned recently is bad, so don't do that). Faced with this, he did what any innocent person met with a wave of unjustified hatred would do: get Bari Weiss to immediately, within hours, publish a plaintive cry about how such a thing could happen to him.

This may make you think that Singal joined BlueSky, notorious for being a haven of thin-skinned leftists and refugee trans people, solely to troll for reactions he could then get paid to write about. I know, that happens! I'm as shocked as you are.

Anyway, that's three paragraphs about Jesse Singal, which is probably three too many, but it's my blog and I'll digress if I want to. But the upshot to all of this is that for years now, trans users of BlueSky have asked, pleaded, demanded and petitioned that BlueSky ban Jesse Singal for being, well, Jesse Singal, the man who thinks sea lioning is a good thing. BlueSky's response?

You see, according to the terms of service/code of conduct/Federation Space Law, Singal's done nothing wrong. The petition referenced above links to Singal's unmasking of interview suspects (doxxing, only much, much worse given the current social climate in the US vs. trans people), but that didn't happen on BlueSky (apparently he briefly linked to where he did offsite, which the petition linked to at the time). Singal is clearly only on BlueSky to, in order, troll other users, generate content for his articles and podcasts, and get publicity, none of which is against the rules. He's a human edge case.

Which is causing a lot of users to melt down. Including ones who should know better. Like, um, BlueSky's CTO.

And, uh, BlueSky's CEO.

The Waffles reference? This classic Twitter post about refined online discourse.

Because Jay, and the others at BlueSky, still want to be the cool kids.

Only, you don't get to do that when you're running the asylum. You can say all you want that you just want to make a protocol so everyone can run off and make their own social network, but what you are painfully having rammed into your skull with the collective crowbars of thousands of angry users is that the value of a functioning social network isn't the goddamned protocol that a server somewhere is using to ship packets to another server, it's being a safe space to shitpost about waffles. Which you don't get to do here because moderating the environment so people can make waffle posts without having a sea lion pop up and yell about cis pancakes is your goddamned job.

If only this had happened before, that someone could have asked about. You know, like that time we all played silly online games back at the turn of the century and found people who made edge casing their entire identity, and which eventually resulted in the people running those games say, no, actually, you're alienating our entire customer base, get the hell out.

Too bad it never happened, and we have to keep reinventing that wheel. Also, figuring out how to actually generate income. That would be cool. Not as cool as posting about waffles, mind you. But still cool.

We're living in the fin de siècle, the end of days and, well, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse was this guy...

...except that's not fair to Matthew Lesko. He actually sold something of value, if dubious value! In today's economy, a simple one-time exchange of money for a good or service is a stunning example of moral righteousness.

We don't do that here any more.

Now, there are tiers to today's market economy, arranged in a very simple diagram:

For example - computers. I'm currently typing this on an Apple Mac mini. I recommend them highly! They're well made, compact, run an operating system I like (you may strongly disagree and that's OK) and come with a fairly priced all-inclusive warranty, AppleCare. Apple also has a good (although not perfect) record of at least making vague promises about privacy using funny videos.

However, I paid for all that. The current best-in-class Mac mini, a M4 Pro model, retails for $1,400, which is fairly close to what I paid for my M2 Pro a while back. I was willing to pay for that, because it wasn't crap.

For those without the luxury of that option for a home computer that almost certainly, unlike me, isn't something their livelihood, hobbies and social life is based upon, the options are... not as good. If you know almost nothing about computers and don't make a ton of money - you know, most people - you might walk into a WalMart and see this very normal looking laptop on display.

It's an ASUS Vivobook, it costs about $200, and if you buy it it will try to kill you. Here's why.

• It comes with Windows 11 (expected) Home (uh OK) S Mode (oh hell no). Windows S Mode only lets you install applications from the Microsoft Store. And the Microsoft Store is an awful, user hostile storefront (but hey, it has AI now!) Turning off S Mode is theoretically possible, but the operating system tries to scare you out of doing it (did you know there were viruses on the internet??)
• It has system specs (i3 CPU, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD) that are barely usable enough to run Windows, but don't worry, Asus and Walmart included a bucketload of crapware to ensure that most of the computer's cycles are spent trying to sell you more shit.
• It includes Copilot! Yaay.

And our aforementioned "casual user" actually lucked out by purchasing this laptop. They could have purchased a Chromebook, which only runs web applications, or a random weird OEM version of a Chinese brand that blows up in three weeks thanks to all the cryptocurrency miners running in the background.

Basically, if you're shopping on the low end of the computer hardware market, the vast majority of machines aren't missing user-friendliness, they're actively user-hostile. And this user hostility extends to software as well – Google search's slide into user hostility is so well documented it's now being used in a rare (and probably politically motivated) government action to break up the company.

The issue is that successful companies (and by successful, I mean making absolutely obscene amounts of money for its stakeholders/shareholders, even/especially while churning through billions) are not focused on the quality of the products they make, but in constant, unconstrained growth at all costs. This is easily seen in the tech industry, where ever more exponentially increasing resources are poured into generative AI, despite its uses being limited to assistance with coding that sometimes works and sometimes seduces its users into a very expensive rabbit hole, creating something vaguely akin to but absolutely not art, and directing every single possible question into an insane conspiracy theory about a non-existent threat to Afrikaners in South Africa. On the other hand, it did create for me a somewhat plausible strategic analysis of the invasion of America as seen in Red Dawn, and possibly only inflicted three neighborhoods with poison gas pollution to create it, so, you know, jury's still out.

But – why is uncontrolled and uncontrollable growth at all costs the goal of our economy, despite its rapacious behavior demolishing literally everything in its path including the people who work for it and the planet that hosts it? The answer is sadly all too simple – money. The decision makers that have created this dystopian nightmare have concluded that growth at all cost is the only imperative, and if you disagree, you're a bad person.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual.

Our enemy is Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained Vision, Alexander Kojeve’s Universal and Homogeneous State, Thomas More’s Utopia.

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

It's a lot of words. What's the summary? I asked Grok.

Not letting me make money is bad.

OK, wait, that was my summary. For the record, here's Grok's.

Technology is the primary driver of human progress, capable of solving major societal challenges like poverty, disease, and environmental issues. He champions free markets, innovation, and risk-taking as essential for unleashing technological breakthroughs, while critiquing anti-progress ideologies and regulatory overreach that stifle advancement. Andreessen envisions a future where embracing technology leads to abundance, opportunity, and a better quality of life for all, urging society to reject fear and adopt an optimistic, forward-thinking mindset.

My version was better. I used cooler words*.

This "techno utopia" (more accurately a techno dystopia, but who's counting!) sacrifices everything in service to uncontrolled growth. Regulation is bad because you know more than pointy-headed bureaucrats what's good for your product. Quality is bad because it makes it longer to create your product. Longevity is bad because you want people to always keep buying your product.

"Fast fashion" learned this lesson so well it humiliated us into tarriffing it out of existence. For now, anyway. Maybe.

Yet fast fashion - spending $5 for shoes that may last a month - is just another example of uncontrolled growth. It's rushing to the bottom line of the most efficiently created product - and quality is inefficient.

The most efficient way to grow uncontrollably is to make everything a scam.

Note the texts I lead this piece with. You get them as well, I'm sure. Everyone does. Constantly. Every day. Every hour. Because there is no cost to sending them - generating billions of SMS messages and targeting them roughly to where someone might think they're relevant - is the ultimate in cost efficiency. When you spend nothing, if one return on one million approaches works, you have won.

It's like the old joke of the sex-starved guy who walks up to a thousand women and asks for sex. He's slapped and punched hundreds of times, but as long as one woman agrees, he wins. If your goal justifies the expenditure, and there is a way to make the expenditure virtually nothing at all, then why not send millions of messages? Why not enslave people and force them at scale to con people into buying your cryptocurrency? Why not use your position as President of the United States to convince people to buy into your "meme coin" knowing that they will lose money?

When the only goal is money for nothing, then nothing is an aspirational goal. In today's world where uncontrolled growth justifies anything – rampant pollution, abusive scams, literal slavery, destruction of the Constitutional republic – nothing sounds pretty good. If only we could have nothing. If only the incessant noise of advertising, the low insectoid hum of every scammer, the headache in the back of your skull borne from fatigue at trying to survive another day when everything surrounding you is an opportunity for exploitation – nothing is pretty damned great.

* "Could you use cooler words" is a directive someone in marketing once gave me, when I was doing an insufficiently exuberant job of writing marketing copy for them at a gaming company twenty years ago. I have endeavored to do so ever since.

Section 31 opens in the Terran Empire, with large letters helpfully telling you "THE TERRAN EMPIRE" without explaining what that means, such as its being in an alternate universe where the Roman Empire never fell and instead became full of crazy murder hobos. The landscape is blighted desert where young Philippa Georgiou returns from The Very Hungry Games to her family who, uh, farms odd plants and makes swords. None of this is referred to or explained. Why is this family trying to make a go of it in a ratty desert compound? Why is Malaysia (the canon home of Georgiou) a desert now instead of a lush jungle? Why should we care about any of this? Why is Young Philippa whispering so much? Oh, she's evil, got it. Anyway, we'll get back to Dune: Malaysia soon.

When Philippa Georgiou was sent back in time from 2000 years into the future by the Guardian At The Edge Of Forever, Currently Slumming In A Much Worse Series, she, by the definition of time travel, could have been sent at any point in the timeline where she could live out her life, as, say, a pirate queen, or a doomed queen, or a queen of cinema who makes bad career choices. Instead, she was sent right back to where she was originally. Great originality there, GatEoFCSiaMWS.

At the end of Discovery Season 1, Georgiou was (in an inexplicably never shown on TV clip which, incidentally, is more tightly plotted and better shot than this movie) in charge of a bar in the bad part of galactic town, where she was then recruited for Section 31. At the start of Section 31, Georgiou is in charge of an entirely different bar in an entirely different bad part of galactic town, where Section 31 recruits her. At this point we should just let Georgiou have her own damned bar already.

All the aliens in Star Trek's vast cosmology, and you go with the species that looks like it had an unfortunate accident with a can of spray paint and issues involving blackface? Really? Did you forget the whole thing where the entire species murdered each other over racial issues? Really? OK then.

Someone watched "The Fifth Element" and thought, "let's get the singer like in that stunning dance number, but only not nearly as interesting, and have her sing forgettable early 21st century pop music written by AI."

I can only conclude they had Georgiou and Alok do SPACE DRUGS to explain why they saddle Michelle Yeoh, an Academy Award winning actress, with hysterically awful lines like "I’m not feeling motivated to be valuable to anyone but myself." They were good SPACE DRUGS - you can tell because it took up valuable CGI time rendering Space Cocaine falling down the actors' faces.

Most of the Suicide Squad, er, I mean Alpha Team, makes so little of an impression that you don't care when one painfully dies literally five minutes after her introduction. The exception is not good. That would be Fuzz the Vulcan, who's introduced generally acting like the complete opposite of a Vulcan (laughing, joking, walking normally), which is just the sort of randomly calling attention to yourself in a crowded venue you would expect an experienced intelligence undercover operative to do. It turns out that Fuzz is not actually a Vulcan, something you probably guessed about 30 words ago, but is a host robot for what I think is supposed to be a sentient COVID molecule. Why Section 31 is using sentient COVID molecules, and why the consequent sudden and inevitable betrayal of a sentient COVID molecule was not easily predicted is not explained. Nor why this sentient COVID molecule has quite possibly the worst fake Irish accent in modern recording, or why, after his sudden and inevitable betrayal, Section 31 immediately hires his wife, who is also a sentient COVID molecule piloting a Vulcan host robot, but she instead has a horrible American Southern accent. Basically, everyone involved with this entire character arc should be properly ashamed of themselves.

Michelle Yeoh has fight scenes! Yay! Too bad the director has no idea how to film an action movie and constantly uses weird close-up angles, CGI post processing shimmer and a host of other things designed to make you forget that Michelle Yeoh is also 62 years old and is officially too old for this Crouching Tiger shit.

After the Suicide Squad, er, I mean screw it, finally makes it out of Georgiou's bar halfway through the movie, a move that had everything to do with the necessity of plotting and nothing to do with a constrained shooting budget for a project trapped in development hell, they for some reason strand themselves on a planet where fire randomly blorps from the ground. This is never explained, either why they chose to hide on Planet Fireblorp or why it just randomly blorps fire. Just one of those mysteries of space life.

Surely the most annoying character introduced so far isn't the guy who sold them all out for money! Oh, wait.

Then there's the sequence where everyone gets Unearned Emotional Catharsis, because this entire movie is essentially "Discovery But Edgy", the same people are involved in writing and production, and Discovery was also chock full to the brim of Unearned Emotional Catharsis, where characters have emotional moments together because the script said they had to. So Alok tells Georgiou he's actually from 21st century Earth (the entire explanation: "I slept through a lot") and fought in the Eugenics Wars for a tyrant so he totally gets where Georgiou, the Queen Bitch of the Mirror Universe, is coming from because he worked for a genetically enhanced forgotten warlord and that's totally the same thing. This is obviously a very important moment of character development, which is why the movie never refers to it again.

Pretty much every plot beat is like this: Georgiou and Garrett (the cameo appearance from, again, a much, much better story), the Federation stick-in-the-mud liaison officer, bond over Garrett really secretly being down to clown with chaos because, uh, why? Who knows, the plot said Garrett had to randomly turn into Chirpy Science Officer Tilly right about then, so she did.

Even the final scenes, where it's revealed that the antagonist is San, Georgiou's boyfriend from the Very Hungry Games who she defeated, enslaved, and drove to suicide except psych! No, now he's back to blow up this universe because who knows why, allied with the Terran Empire he hated because can anyone really say what's in people's hearts, and at the very end discovers he really does love Georgiou because he wanted to go out like Darth Vader did, muttering "You were right..." while his ship blows up. Alok and Georgiou then proceed to pilot the Genocide Bomb into the mirror universe because if you're gonna genocide a universe, it should be the one full of fascist baddies, only they then get beamed out at the last minute ensuring no one has to pay any price for their actions at all. All's well!

Look, it's Annoying Vulcan, only with a different bad accent! Look, it's Jamie Lee Curtis, who apparently is a computer that Discovery spent the entirety of Season 2 melting into slag! No one cares! Let's send the Suicide Squad to the Planet of the Rape Gangs, that'll be fun!

This entire movie has four underlying problems at its core, which doom it to... what it is.

First, an essentially unlikeable cast, aside from Yeoh, who tries and fails to carry the entire thing on her own shoulders. The best that can be said is that two of the characters are so ill defined that they elicit no feelings whatsoever. The others are all annoying. Oh, look, a shapeshifter with mental problems. Oh, look, a dumb soldier with mental problems. Oh, look, a sentient COVID molecule with mental problems. Oh, look, a Delta... oh, she died. But I bet she had mental problems.

Second, Yeoh's character has the problem of being an intensely awful person who has to be the anti-hero around whom the movie is built. The problem is that the movie doesn't actually show Yeoh being truly evil - she murders her family, but the Empire made her do it! She ran a brutal fascist murder machine, but, you know, she felt really bad about it! - so instead all the references of her being this hideous monster just seems like everyone is being mean to a nice old lady who just wants to run a bar somewhere.

Third, the writing is very, very bad. I don't mean it's bad in the sense of being cringe inducing - although it certainly is - but so bad that it actively stops you from understanding anything that is going on.

The Mirror Universe is described as "a universe full of CRIMINALS" which, I suppose, is a way of describing very bad people but I'm pretty sure it's not against the law to be a Mirror Universe fascist. I mean, they kind of insist on it, really. The dialog in general is Marvel Whedon; lots of quips to elbow the viewer, "we're having FUN now, right? This is FUN!"

But the worst part of the awful writing is the constant unearned Deep Moments which feel as though they were pulled out of a much longer script. For example, the opening scene in the helpfully labelled THE TERRAN EMPIRE, set in a desert. Some sort of expository dialog of why Georgiou's family is eking out a life as dirt farmers/blacksmiths, possibly relating to, in this universe, Earth being devoured of anything that makes it green and pleasant thanks to climate change from rampant over-industrialization might have made some sort of point. And it was probably a point they intended to make, based on a throwaway comment an hour later!

But that point is never made. You're just shown a weird desert compound, everyone dies, moving right along. I can only imagine how someone who hasn't watched every piece of Star Trek marginalia would be able to follow along - and to be fair, that clearly is not the target market for this. But even someone like me who has religiously watched every piece of Star Trek, no matter how awful, is lost.

And fourth, and finally, there is absolutely nothing about this movie that makes it "Star Trek", other than the title and the fact that one of its characters was previously in Star Trek. There is no sense of optimism, or really any philosophical outlook at all, other than "tyranny is bad, we should perhaps not do that". Canon, adherence to which is Star Trek's prime directive, is not so much ignored as just simply irrelevant.

For example, there's a character in the Suicide Squad whose entire identity, literally, is "guy in a mech suit". Except Star Trek has never had mech suits. That's from a level of technology the Federation surpassed long ago. It'd be as if, in a gritty James Bond movie, one of the CIA agents set to work with him, for some unknowable reason, walks around in a 15th century set of plate mail.

This could have been any low budget straight to streaming service sci-fi thriller about a Suicide Squad of mooks who somehow save the universe in spite of themselves. But it's not. It's a Star Trek movie. It has Star Trek in the name. There are expectations here. And those expectations are very much not met.

And that is what really makes this, as almost every review is labelling it, the worst Star Trek movie ever made. Congratulations, guys, you made Star Trek V look good.

I was a proud American. Now, I'm not so sure.

I'm not going to belabor the point. I work in video games, which often has the morality of comic books. Well, the villain won today.

I've already seen boundaries be tested in unexpected quarters. There has always been a tendency to theocratic authoritarianism in American thought, just bubbling below the surface (not very far below, if you grew up in places like the deep South) and it's just been given free reign, like a very angry id. Brace yourself for people you never expected to go there to show their true faces.

My generation was raised to believe that America was basically good. That there were dark parts of our history, that we had to work to overcome, but the arrival of an American, whether a soldier, a businessman, or a diplomat, was a good thing, because, well. That's who we were. Generous, tolerant, and willing to share the bounty of what blessings we were given.

None of those traits describe the people who will soon run our nation. There's not even the attempt at pretense.

It's not the country I grew up in. It's not the country I thought I knew.

I'm honestly so disenchanted and gutted that I'm through caring about politics any more. We, our generation, we screwed it up. We have nothing left to offer. It's up to those who follow, who will hopefully do a better job to clean up the mess we've left, and show an empathy we now mock.

Guess I'll make some games or something.

Back in January, I wrote this:

Every game developer is terrified. Every game developer knows someone who has been long-term unemployed over the past year, or is in that state themselves, or has left the industry.

This is unsustainable. We cannot work like this. We cannot function like this.

Game development is in an extinction level event crisis, and it is entirely self inflicted.

Nine months later, and it has gotten worse. Much worse. We are going extinct. For God's sake, there's a Wikipedia article about it now. According to the tally there, since I wrote about this last, over 6,700 more game developers have lost their jobs.

If you're a developer, LinkedIn is a particularly grim chronicle of the times. Posts there can be broken down thusly:

• People who have been laid off, and are relentlessly trying to be cheerful about it because they know they have no choice. "Time for new opportunities! This is a chance for personal growth!"
• Utterly tone deaf and clueless people, usually C-suite executives, who say that the panic is overblown, real talents have no problem finding work, and the real threat is the growth of unions.
• Even more utterly tone deaf and clueless people who see this as an opportunity to sell generative AI snake oil. "This is a natural retrenchment after a disruptive new technology! It's unfortunate for the people out of work, but now we can develop games cheaper and faster!"

I don't read LinkedIn much any more. Partially due to survivor's guilt. We'll get to that.

Ancillary industries are being hit hard as well. Unity, maker of one of the most popular 3D engines, has laid off almost 3000 people in the past year. Epic, maker of one of the other most popular 3D engines, has laid off over 800. And if you're a writer or reviewer who writes about the gaming industry? There is nothing there any more. A combination of truly insanely stupid mismanagement and relentlessly driving for AI-driven quantity over human-written quality has destroyed game industry journalism as a profession, almost completely. Worker-owned collective websites like Aftermath and small independents like Paste try to fill the gap left, but they can't afford to sustain themselves, much less the fragments of venture capital's misadventures.

And make no mistake, this is completely driven by venture capitalism. The game industry is profitable! There's no logical reason for companies to lay off so many of the workers that they need, save one: making shareholders happy. And shareholders truly do not care about the well being of workers, or the long term survivability of companies that they invest in. They are focused relentlessly on short term gains that they can cash out as quickly as possible. It's a Ponzi scheme writ large, and it is killing us in many ways. The game industry is just a very visible part, and one I happen to be intimately familiar with.

Venture capitalism is why companies like Embracer can purchase half a dozen companies, absolutely wreck them, fire everyone who works there, and then continue blithely on as if nothing ever happened with no consequences. Lars Wingefor, CEO of Embracer, had this to say:

I think looking at the 8% reduction in workforce [at Embracer], there is obviously – I don't know the number for the whole industry, but I think it's something that everyone needs to get through.

You know how Wingefor "got through" it? By keeping his job, despite directly causing the destruction of over a half dozen game companies and layoffs of over 10,000 employees. Which he was paid over $175,000 for last year in cash compensation, and over 20% of stock in the company.

This whole situation is insane! If I went in to work and wasted millions of dollars, I would not only be fired, I would probably be prosecuted! But for the executives currently piloting game companies into the ground at supersonic speeds, it's considered "willingness to take risks". And shareholders love it. Just be sure to lay people off before the quarterly earnings report. You know, to demonstrate fiscal responsibility.

I don't mean to pick on Lars Wingefor. I mean, I do, in that he absolutely deserves it, in that he is a perfect, platonic example of C-suite malfeasance that is destroying our industry for short term growth or stunning lack thereof through hilariously stupid decisions. But he's just one person. There is a Lars Wingefor at EA. There is a Lars Wingefor at Epic. We won't even talk about Unity. Instead, we'll mention the recent Lars Wingefor at Sony, Chris Deering, who had this incredibly insightful commentary on recent layoffs he was responsible for (hah, not really, no one in C-suites takes responsibility for any goddamn thing ever):

Deering also stated in the interview that having a skill in game development does not mean a lifetime of “poverty or limitation,” and that those who were recently laid off should “figure out how to get through it.”

“Drive an Uber or whatever, go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year,” said Deering.

He also said that he is “optimistic” about the future of those in the industry who have been axed from their jobs, and that their severance packages should help cushion the blow.

“I presume people were paid some kind of decent severance package, and by the time that runs out … Well, you know, that’s life,” said Deering.

These are the breathtakingly idiotic words of someone who has never had to take responsibility for one goddamned thing in his entire misbegotten life, and I'm including wearing pants. I would call them tone-deaf, but that is an unforgivable insult to people who aren't good at music appreciation.

AI isn't going to fix this, because AI isn't going to fix a single thing other than "we have a surplus of electricity this week". The only thing that will fix this is if corporate leadership at AAA game companies manage to extract their heads from their asses and remember what the goddamned hell the words "long term value growth" means. I'm not even going to try to expect them to take any kind of interest or responsibility for the thousands of people who depend on them not to fuck up their lives through stupid decision making, because that would require them to be goddamned human beings and at this point I'm just hoping for reasonably self-interested Ferengi who have the lobes for business.

It's too late for me, anyway. I'm in my late 50s, and unhireable. The job I hold currently will, almost certainly, be my last game industry job. And you know what? I won't miss it. I had fun, I shipped a few games, one of which I'm actually quite proud of, and learned enough to make games only I would ever want to actually play as a hobby, while earning enough via freelancing to hopefully not become a hobo or something. Because if I'm too old to be a game developer, I'm way too old to be a hobo.

But what makes me angry are the tens of thousands of my colleagues whose lives have been destroyed through incompetence, greed, and stupidity. What makes me furious is the fact that gaming, the hobby I still love despite being a grown ass adult, is being held hostage by huge budgets and failing megacorporations and the wreckage of late stage capitalism. What makes me sad is that this could all have been avoided if people just acted in their own long term interests for once in a fucking decade.

And another thing: I'm mad. Please put in the newspaper that I got mad.

OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT and its various offshoots, is currently worth less than the lint in your pocket.

I can confidently say this, because OpenAI is set to lose around $5 billion this year thanks to huge costs in server hosting not even coming close to matching its revenue. OpenAI's most famous product, ChatGPT, costs $700,000 a day to run. Whereas the most your pocket has lost was maybe the grocery list you were supposed to fill last week.

The response of Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, is alternately that it's not a big deal because he'll just get the UAE to invest seven trillion dollars, or maybe ChatGPT's next version will achieve sentience, or who knows, the world could just end or something. In other words, Altman really doesn't know what he's talking about, which shouldn't surprise anyone since, as Ed Zitron diligently researched, Altman's entire career has, like Seinfeld episodes, been mostly about nothing, or at least nothing achievable other than hype.

What is getting somewhat lost in all this hysteria and Silicon Valley's desperate need for something to throw money at (at least, that isn't the Donald Trump campaign), is that, well, the current iterations of what we call AI are really rather bad.

The issue is what we're calling AI - Large Language Models, or LLMs - aren't actually intelligent in any sense of the word. All an LLM does is, like the spell correcting software on your phone's text messenger, compare two bits of data to see if they should be next to one another. Except in the LLM's case, it uses the sheer brute force of all available computing power to compare all the data in the world, or at least massive terabytes thereof. Thus an LLM can, on a good day, accurately simulate knowing something. It doesn't actually KNOW things - it can recognize what a thing looks like, and it can try to make inferences of what a thing described would look like based on all the other things in the world.

It's really quite a technological marvel, don't get me wrong! And it does solve some pretty basic problems involving using computers - for example, the ability to phrase a request to a program in conversation English (or German, or Russian, or Chinese). That's not trivial at all. Language is hard!

But, it can't make basic logical inferences. It never knows anything. It recognizes things, based largely on its titanic set of reference data, but it doesn't have the ability to know whether a given thing is, say, correct.

And it never will, because it's just not built that way. You can't keep throwing wood at a pit in the ground and expect a house to magically appear. You just get an ever larger pile of wood. To actually simulate cognition - how a brain functions to store data, analyze it, and come to conclusions - is a very difficult problem in computing; it's been worked on in various forms for over 50 years. LLMs take that problem and say "what if we throw a lot of wood at the hole? I mean, a LOT of wood. I mean, literally ALL THE WOOD IN THE WORLD. Then, we'll have a house."

No, you'll just have a very large pile of wood, and a lot of people angry that you deforested the planet in your mad scheme to build a house entirely the wrong way.

So, the problem with this is that a fairly interesting use of large data and even larger computer systems has been mated with snake oil salespersons to create The Next Big Thing, which is utterly guaranteed to fall flat on its face when it's discovered not to work. Because it can't - remember, an LLM doesn't know a thing, it simulates knowing a thing. And it has no problem stating, conclusively, that it knows that thing, even when that thing is wildly wrong.

Which hasn't stopped Google from largely decapitating its own business by replacing its own search algorithms with LLM-driven results, which are frequently flat-out wrong.

You'd think Google would be a bit leery of utterly destroying its own business model in this fashion, but as Zitron explains, Google's business is no longer delivering reliable search results, but in delivering eyeballs on its own content for marketing purposes. So, enjoy your Elmer's Cheese Pizza, I suppose.

However, I have to believe that there is a hard limit to the amount of sheer failure that businesses will tolerate being injected into their work processes. Of course, it won't happen before everyone is laid off and replaced by AI that doesn't work, but that's a minor problem, really.

Managers at video game companies aren’t necessarily using AI to eliminate entire departments, but many are using it to cut corners, ramp up productivity, and compensate for attrition after layoffs. In other words, bosses are already using AI to replace and degrade jobs. The process just doesn’t always look like what you might imagine. It’s complex, based on opaque executive decisions, and the endgame is murky. It’s less Skynet and more of a mass effect—and it’s happening right now.

But in the meantime, OpenAI has to keep riding that wave and, in order to be able to afford all the wood on Earth to fill that hole, get all the investment money that exists to continue to function for another week.

Thus, SearchGPT, designed to replace Google, was recently announced. It's not yet available to the public, so I can't tell you how badly it fails. I can confidently predict, however, that it will be terrible, much like everything. And hey, it's not like Google cares much about search engines any more!

A programming note: the first draft of this was sent out via email with all the AI-generated pictures refusing to load. The irony of this has not escaped me.

I am an old man and today's Internet makes me very tired. Allow me to yell at a passing cloud for a minute.

Jenny Nicholson is a pro gamer/influencer who recently posted a video about Disney's now closed Star Wars-themed hotel. I'm told it's very good (the video, that is. The hotel was apparently not that great).

This post is not about Jenny Nicholson. It's only tangentially about the video.

The video is four hours long.

Prior to this, Harry "HBomberguy" Brewis, a Youtube commenter of longstanding, made a video exploring plagiarism in general and how one notorious film Youtuber was guilty of said plagiarism in particular.

That video was also four hours long.

I'm told both of these videos are very good - in fact, masterworks of their craft. HBomberguy in particular once made a video about Gamergate goons which had me laughing for a solid half an hour (skulls were involved).

That video was not four hours long.

A bit of Internet history as an introduction: Facebook, during the period (specifically, around 2015) when it was so dominant a social media network that it drove most traffic to other websites, once decided that text-based news was not as "sticky" as news in video format, and communicated that to the various journalistic outlets trying desperately to get the attention of Facebook viewers. The result was called, sometimes seriously as a command and sometimes jokingly as a curse, "pivot to video". Every major news outlet - cable news, newspapers, wire services, what have you - suddenly became video broadcasters, whether they wanted to or not, because Facebook said it was necessary (metrics proved it!) and it was the only way to avoid mass layoffs and the collapse of their companies.

Facebook was lying. The statistics it quoted to broadcasters were quite literally wrong - users were not in fact demanding more video journalism. And the broadcasters who pivoted to videos suffered mass layoffs anyway.

Fast forward about ten years, and journalism outside of a few tentpoles is an utter zombie wasteland, as is, well, Facebook itself. Everyone pivoted right out of a job and most websites these days are SEO-driven nightmares written either by laughably underpaid interns or the AIs "hired" to replace them.

So, now there's Youtube.

Youtube is one of the few places on the Internet where people still make money; while Internet advertising is a sinkhole of clickbait and repetitive appeals to retiring seniors on where to invest their millions in savings, it still pays enough to make posting videos something approaching an actual living.

Not a good one, mind you, for the vast majority of people. But better than flipping burgers. You could subsist, barely, off a million and a half people a month watching your videos.

But no one dreams of subsistence. They dream of being this jerk.

Asmongold (no, I don't know his real name, nor do I particularly want to) has made a very profitable career off of being a complete dipshit online. Originally famous for being precisely the sort of raider in World of Warcraft you tried to avoid, he has since branched out to other games and topics, most recently mocking anti-Zionist university protesters for being beaten by police.

And he makes more money than you or I ever will - about $4,000 a video, at a guess. And he posts a lot of videos. One every three to six hours, to be exact.

Each with a clickbait title, each with an engagement-driving thumbnail of Asmongold reacting, usually with some variation of "how can it be this stupid".

And that's just one channel. He has five.

What does this result in? To quote a streaming news site:

As mentioned above, Asmongold is able to generate around 80 million views on his YouTube content on a monthly basis, and thus this should translate into earnings of around $160-200k per month. Additionally, Asmongold is also one of the founding members of the gaming organization “One True Kind.” Hence, he is expected to earn a decent amount from his role in the organization alongside his various sponsorship related earnings.

Overall, Asmongold’s yearly earnings are estimated to be between $2.5 to 3 million every year. This includes his earnings from the various social media platforms he is active on, along with other sponsorships/brand deals that he has signed.

Meanwhile when I yell at people online, I don't make a dime. Clearly monetization is failing me.

Fine, Lum, you're saying to yourself, Youtube is a wasteland and everything is horrible, but why are you mad at some perfectly nice lady's four hour long video? Or, more to the point, why are people posting four hour long videos, and why does this make you (me, Lum, the writer) irrationally angry?

Well, the easiest answer to why people post four hour long videos is "it makes getting monetized on Youtube easier." Youtube's monetization requirements are based, in part, on how long viewers watch your content. Longer videos, quicker validation of monetization. But that's obviously not a consideration in this case; Hbomberguy has been making videos for over a decade and gets millions of views. Jenny Nicholson's Star Wars hotel video has almost 600,000 views as of this writing and has not been up for a full day.

Another answer is "it manipulates the Youtube algorithm in your favor". If you sit and watch, say, Nick Fuentes complain about how the Jews made him stream gay porn for hours, you'll get more barely-closeted Nazis in your Youtube recommendations. But not only does this not explain Nick Fuentes (who, mercifully, is no longer on Youtube thanks to being a blatant Nazi), it also doesn't explain our two examples, who, especially in Nicholson's case, don't have a political agenda to drive.

Honestly, I think the best answer is "because they can". Youtube video creators almost always act as their own editors. And when you edit yourself, you never trim content to make it easier for others to view or read (say, when someone is typing out a screed about Youtube videos and looks over to see he's already typed over 1000 words on the subject). You add more. There's always more!

But, and we get to the crux of why I am this guy this morning:

When you expect me to watch a video for four hours, you are not being respectful of my time.

Yes, I know, many people look on these long-form productions as, say, podcasts to be viewed while working, or playing a game, or what have you. I'm not one of those people. When I'm working, or playing a game, I'm, uh, doing that. I can't even really divide my attention enough to listen to an audio podcast, much less one with video.

And I simply don't have the time to devote four hours to an epic takedown of how bad the Star Wars Experience Hotel was. I'm sorry. I don't. I don't have the time to dedicate four hours to listen to Hbomberguy explain how plagiarism drives Youtube. I'm sure he's made many fine points, and I hope to hear them someday in a format accessible to me.

If a movie is four hours long, it's criticized, usually, as a director's epic sense of entitlement or loss of perspective; the four hour movies that are actually successful, such as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, are still examples of this fatal bloat. Return of the King was a fantastic treatment of Tolkien's masterwork, and literally everyone joked about how it had twelve endings.

There has to be a happy medium somewhere between manic thirty second TikTok loops about Donghua Jinlong's industrial grade glycine and four hour long videos about how Marxism has never actually been tried. And as long as Youtube is one of the only segments of the Internet that still gives people money, someone will no doubt find that out.

Meanwhile, I'll still occasionally type things into a bl0g-by-any-other-name and refuse to monetize it, because I still remember when people wrote things because they wanted to and not as a desperate hedge against the collapse of late-stage capitalism.

And when people post four hour long videos, I'll continue to react like this.

Ten years later, the hate factory continues.

"When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror."
– Karl Marx, 1849

"We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category"
– Christopher Rufo, 2021

“I realized Milo [Yiannopoulous] could connect with these kids right away. You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
– Steve Bannon, 2017

"I think it’s important to recognize that “we” already won. Game journos don’t have to be your audience. Game journos are dead."
– Mark Kern, 2024

What's the most important issue facing game development right now? I dunno, I would pick literally every game company destroying themselves in an orgiastic frenzy of completely unnecessary layoffs, personally. But what do I know, it's actually that a few people got a job contracting as narrative designers who had Bad Opinions About Things, according to noted cultural commentators KiwiFarms, which lead to a Steam group dedicated to ferreting out any game that these awful, awful people might have touched and perverted with their Woke Cooties. Kotaku has a write-up on the actual facts behind all this, if you care. You shouldn't, because absolutely no one involved on the Angry Internet Warrior side does, it's just an excuse to complain about how Woke Angry People are keeping gamers from seeing pretty girls.

Why are these people are so insistent on literally every woman they come across being scantily clad, vaguely Asian, and improbably voluptuous? Has no one told them that they can find scantily clad women virtually anywhere they care to look? Are they not aware that AI technology has advanced to the point that these women can literally be manufactured upon command?

The answer of course, is that they don't care. There is no actual argument. The argument exists to perpetuate itself, and to draw a widening circle of people into that argument. I, in writing this, am guilty of the same thing. I am engaging with an argument that is not only intentionally made in bad faith, it comes from a movement where bad faith arguing is the entire point.

That movement is, of course, the now ten-year-old Gamergate. The Early Access Alpha for the constant, wearying, nonsensical bad faith arguments that make up the entire rationale for one of America's two major parties. It started there, then. It hasn't stopped. It won't ever stop, because it works.

I mean, Mark Kern, in the abominable quoted tweet leading off this newsletter, is right. Game journalism is dead. Because venture capitalist jackals shot it in the head along with journalism in general, and then people like Kern showed up at the scene of the crime, snickered at the corpse, and took credit. Now what passes for game journalism is the odd listicle at zombie web sites that still exist in people's bookmarks, and the random worker-owned collective trying to survive in today's post-apocalyptic media hellscape. There is no "tyranny of game journalism" because actual tyrants destroyed it.

And game development is following closely behind, for much the same reason, and the reaction of the reactionary Gamergate jackals is laughter. Those woke scolds, getting what they deserve for banning me from their message boards! It's not that they don't realize that game development is dying; they simply don't care. Nihilism does not ask where the next meal is coming from, it merely assumes you will continue to feed it.

I wish I had a call to action to close this out with, some noble thing you can do about this, hell, even Five Tiktok Dances You Can Do To Make Right-Wing Assholes Suck Less. But I don't dance, and there's nothing noble about any of this, and the world in general is sinking into the mire of hate and hopelessness, the undertow is taking one of the few escapes we have left to us with it, and as we sink into the almost pleasant oblivion, someone with a Twitter anime avatar is looking down and laughing uproariously, because they think they've won, and they haven't yet found out what living in the world they've created will entail.

They will.

hope you liked the games of 2023 because that's all folks

There are approximately 330,000 people who work in the video game industry.

9,000 of them have been laid off in 2023.

3,000 more of them have been laid off this month. You know, the one that's only half over.

Over 100 were laid off today.

And that doesn't count the layoffs that went unreported in the gaming media which is also dealing with its own downsizing (there are many that I am aware of personally).

Or the layoffs disguised as Return to Office orders for remote workers who were hired long-distance specifically because of a remote work policy (there are many that I am aware of personally).

Or the layoffs disguised as "corporate restructuring" where employees are told their jobs still exist, just in another city that they will have to move to at their own expense (again, there are many that I am aware of personally).

Every game developer is terrified. Every game developer knows someone who has been long-term unemployed over the past year, or is in that state themselves, or has left the industry.

This is unsustainable. We cannot work like this. We cannot function like this.

Game development is in an extinction level event crisis, and it is entirely self inflicted.

Veteran industry members and watchers know that with many companies, shortly after a game's release, much of the development staff is let go. If a studio is large enough, they're sometimes given the option to move to another project in progress. Otherwise, well, that's the nature of the industry. You're either an owner or you work by the piece. The deal struck (sometimes overt, sometimes unstated) is that you either are there for significant performance bonuses (the bonuses I earned back in the 2000s for working on Dark Age of Camelot were far greater than my actual salary), or for connections and a resume line item you can use to leverage getting on a project that will have significant performance bonuses. Eventually you prestige out and make your own company. Or retire (is that still a thing? I'm 57, this is of more than academic interest.)

In 2023, there were many of these layoffs. But there were also a great many layoffs caused by venture capital buying studios, and then closing them. For no apparent reason. In Embracer's case, the owners apparently were chasing after Saudi investment capital, and when it failed to magically appear, over 1000 people were out of jobs. Whoopsy doodle.

Epic Games in September laid off over 800 people, almost 15% of the entire company. Epic is one of the most successful and profitable game companies that exist. Its CEO, Tim Sweeney, is worth over $7 billion. Fortnite prints money. For years, every other game company has tried to copy Fortnite, and mostly failed at the attempt. This is not enough to ensure job security, because, you see, number must go up faster.

EA in March laid off over 750 people in "corporate restructuring". EA is the largest game publisher in the world. But number must go up faster.

This is not a regular job cycle. This is decimation.

There are tens of thousands of experienced game developers who are unemployed. They will almost certainly leave the game industry, assuming they have skills which translate to the world at large (something which may be difficult for, say, a level designer).

The few game development positions that open up are swarmed by thousands of applications. HR workers are overwhelmed, and rely on software to filter them, which does a spectacularly bad job of it, and face the impossible task of somehow finding out how to interview 2000 people for 3 positions. Most likely, those 3 positions go unfilled because that task is insane. Or are filled internally, or by friends of people already at the company, because if given the opportunity, you would give someone you know that's out of work that lifeline. Anyone would. But that's another ghost opening.

For those who still have jobs? Remote work is a luxury no longer affordable. Unionization? Good luck with that (even though this illustrates how desperately it is needed). Cost of living raises? Be lucky you have a job. Money's tight, you know. Have you read the news lately?

This, more than anything else, is Bobby Kotick's revenge.

We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.
– Bobby Kotick, 2009

Kotick today, after playing a pivotal role in destroying any goodwill any outside observer might have for Activision Blizzard, sold the company to Microsoft and departed, deploying his undisclosed golden parachute. He's having fun, at least. Probably not that focused on deep depressions any more. Would that his former charges could say the same.

Because now, everyone wants to be Bobby Kotick. Every company is Activision. Every developer is terrified, not just focused, on the ongoing deep depression.

Terrified people are not very effective at their jobs.

You might have noticed in the above jeremiad, there hasn't been any mention yet of The New Thing, generative AI.

It's too new. It hasn't destroyed any jobs in gaming yet. But that's coming. And the wannabe Koticks who see their employees as entirely too loud drags on the corporate balance sheet LOVE that crap. All that noise about how AI won't take anyone's job, it will just be a "force multiplier" for developers to do more and make greater content?

Bullshit.

Watch this video, if you haven't already.

Gamers watch this video and think "Wow, that is some really trite and boring dialogue. Could we not?"

CEOs watch this video and think "I can fire so many people next week."

Designers? Just get the AI to shit out some dialogue, no one cares about it anyway. Artists? AI already pillaged all their work, no need for them to come in any more. Programmers? Feh, just slap some API framework together and call it a day, get an intern to do it.

Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love, from indie developers or the few good AAA development houses still running, and piles upon piles upon piles of AI-generated vomit that will make people nostalgic for the days when most of Steam's catalog was Unity Store asset flips.

And gamers won't buy them.

And game development studio heads will ask what happened.

And no one will answer, because everyone is gone.

Ludum mortuus est.

if we don't acknowledge anything ever happens, our mistakes are forgivable

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
– Ecclesiastes 1:9️

Reading the news today, my eyes were drawn to this headline:

They were drawn, mainly, because this is an insane assertion. People have been online in large numbers for roughly 40 years now, and in that time there has been quite a lot of abuse, sexual and otherwise, because people are awful and the anonymity and separation of the online persona enables them to be exponentially more awful.

Julian Dibbell, a lawyer and journalist who became famous chiefly for being on MUDs in the 1980s and then selling gold in Ultima Online in the 1990s, wrote a rather famous article (and later book) about exactly this, called "A Rape in Cyberspace".

What, some wondered, was the real-life legal status of the offense? Could Bungle's university administrators punish him for sexual harassment? Could he be prosecuted under California state laws against obscene phone calls? Little enthusiasm was shown for pursuing either of these lines of action, which testifies both to the uniqueness of the crime and to the nimbleness with which the discussants were negotiating its idiosyncracies. Many were the casual references to Bungle's deed as simply "rape," but these in no way implied that the players had lost sight of all distinctions between the virtual and physical versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt with in the same way a real-life criminal would. He had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO. 

The affair ended with the offender's account being terminated and the offender swiftly making a brand new account, surprising absolutely no one who has worked on an online game service. Since then we have progressed from that LambdaMOO drama, which involved around 30 people, to the first wave of MMOs such as Ultima Online and Everquest, which involved hundreds of thousands of people, to the second wave of MMOs such as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, which involved millions of people, to "the Metaverse", which involves around 30 people. In all of them, men have sexually abused women (and much more rarely the reverse, or other configurations of that interaction) because, as noted earlier and distressingly regularly, people are really not that great as a general concept.

But, you see, this is

and everything is NEW and SHINY and DIFFERENT and NOTHING LIKE THIS HAS EVER HAPPENED BEFORE because NO ONE HAS EVER TRIED THIS because WE ARE SMART and VERY SPECIAL and YOU SHOULD GIVE US BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.

So now that there are apparently 30 people in THE METAVERSE, someone was an abuser. This has never happened before, as the article clearly states... oh wait.

A girl was allegedly raped in the metaverse. Is this the beginning of a dark new future? | Nancy Jo Sales

British police are investigating the case of a minor who was allegedly subjected to a virtual gang rape. Expect more cases

The GuardianNancy Jo Sales

The question of whether virtual rape is “really rape” goes back to at least 1993, when the Village Voice published an article by Julian Dibbell about “a rape in cyberspace”. Dibbell’s piece reported on how the people behind avatars that were sexually assaulted in a virtual community felt emotions similar to those of victims of physical rape.

So, the dark new future is 30 years old, making it the dark new past which is well past old enough to drink legally and about into that awkward period when it's eyeing sports cars aimed at dark new futures making dark new futures seem hip and young again. Got it.

It's a pretty safe bet that when a news article directly contradicts its headline, it's because the editor has a point they already wanted to make and someone got paid $50 or whatever to go off and write words no one will read to justify slapping the headline up somewhere. You can always tell the intent from the URL of the article in question, written by said editor in an attempt to snag passing Google searches. So what can we learn in this case?

metaverse-sexual-assault-vr-game-online-safety-meta

Clickbait designed to bash Meta (aka Facebook) and the metaverse craze in general. Cool. I'm all about mocking both of those things (for proof, uh, this thing you're reading right now) but it's still mired in that tech La Brea Tar Pit of historical myopia.

Writing an article about how Horizon Worlds, which at 20,000 monthly users would have saved money by not actually creating anything and then paying each user one million dollars to say "yeah, I was on that metaverse thing, it was really great", still managed to attract awful men who somehow managed to sexually abuse a woman even though Horizon Worlds is quite possibly the least sexual online space that can exist where no one involved has any legs, that would be an interesting story.

But context is for losers that don't build fast and break things.

The most hopeful, the least important!

(Please note these are all just guesses, I don't have any inside info on any of these. I pretty much stayed away from gossip last year because it would have required some sort of socializing and who even does that any more.)

• Larian comes out with a new DLC for Baldur's Gate 3 because of course they do you fools! It's not a Throne of Bhall-esque "everybody's gods now, have fun" rules-shattering high level D&D escapade, but an island with More Stuff. Everyone is joyfully happy to have More Stuff. I continue to be completely unable to play the game without romancing Karlach. I'm told you can have relationships with other characters, but why?

• Bethesda comes out with a new DLC for Starfield, but more importantly releases the SDK for mod makers, which opens up the possibility of having more content than Bethesda's, uh, er, how do I say this, extremely flat writing.
• Expect a lot of AI-driven crap. And I mean horrible, awful crap. Far too many publishers and industry executives think game writers are completely disposable (just ask any currently out of work game writer) and AI can easily just crap out narrative design. And sure, it can. You know what results when you crap something out? Crap. No one wants to read AI-generated crap; Amazon currently has thousands of e-books written by AI published daily that are only purchased by accident. If the objective is to create MMO-quantity quest text that people angrily click through as quickly as possible without reading? Mission accomplished!
• In the somewhat shrinking MMO sphere, Final Fantasy XIV continues to dominate, though Dawntrail looks to be something of a let-down if only in comparison to the incredible epic nature of the past two expansions. World of Warcraft works on regaining its lost trust, while Elder Scrolls Online keeps on keeping on.

• In games that aren't MMOs, the title I'm looking forward to the most is probably Star Wars: Outlaws, because I love Star Wars and I love big fat open worlds and it just looks like a whole lot of fun.

• Western companies trying to break into the Chinese market will continue to be frustrated by an opaque regulatory scheme that sometimes explodes into an outright war on gaming itself. Chinese companies are somewhat immune from this for secret reasons.
• Thanks to widespread industry layoffs due mostly to corporate shenanigans, a situation which if anything looks likely to worsen in the coming year, considerably fewer new releases enter the pipeline. Since game companies still have a lot of work queued up from the pandemic, this won't really be noticed until 2025 or 2026 when people ask themselves "hey, where are all the good game releases?" and then shrug and queue up DOTA 2 again. On a personal note, Your Humble Scribe is OK personally... for now... maybe... (which is what literally anyone currently employed in the gaming industry would say) and also extremely fearful about trying to compete in a viciously cutthroat new jobs market while pushing 60. I guess Wal Mart is always hiring people to stand out front!
  
  Oh, I said this was supposed to be hopeful. Whoopsie-doodle.

Big Tech, little tech, it all fall down

• AI continues to consume all available attention and resources of every Big Tech company, because everyone is utterly fascinated by computers that talk to them and the possibility of laying off literally everyone that works for them. The main objectives for Google and Apple involve having LLMs (large language models, like ChatGPT) that can run entirely on a modern smartphone. This isn't as insane as you might think, because most modern phones are stupidly overpowered. By the end of the year, you can expect to say "Hey, Google/Siri, what's the latest" and your phone responds with a variety of news updates keyed to your particular interests. Your phone's digital assistant will also do a fairly decent job of searching your email and summarizing it, writing an email based on a spoken prompt, sending excuses for why you can't make it to a meeting on time, and other AI-driven things that will continue to make every interaction between people occur through a thick curtain of somewhat polite generated AI crap. AI does not, as many people expect, destroy the world. This year, anyway.
• AI-generated cruft makes the Internet utterly unusable as a tool for knowledge as websites that generate millions of fake stories on every topic exponentially flood Google into being completely useless as a search engine. People flee to silos such as Discord, Reddit and other gated communities, and bespoke curated search engines appear that promise to be immune to AI content poisoning. (They're not.)
• Cryptocurrency continues its slide into irrelevance, as it becomes a tool exclusively for criminals laundering money or making transactions they mistakenly think are untraceable, thanks to its ridiculous computational overhead making it useless for mainstream purchasing. The value of Bitcoin and Ethereum collapses even further as more people finally bail.
• Streaming video services continue to (a) combine into each other and (b) get worse in general as the era of free money ends and entertainment companies realize they have to once again somehow be profitable in an age where downloading videos for free is easier than jumping through Hollywood's hoops
• Apple's new VR goggles come out. They're really good and stupidly expensive. I keep telling myself I won't buy them. I'm lying. The tech media heralds their introduction as the breakthrough moment for THE METAVERSE but it isn't, because only stupid jerks like me buy them. Normal people continue to resist the siren song of strapping computer monitors directly onto your face.
• Bluesky is the "Twitter replacement" social network of 2024, thanks to user adoption and general platform improvements. Threads continues to lurch on as a text version of Instagram, where brands and influencers try to drive up each other's impression counts. Mastodon continues to exist, much like Linux on the desktop, and someone is probably still shouting at you there. I closed my Mastodon server down last year, and you never noticed.
• Elon Musk's sanity continues to deteriorate. His address at the Republican convention doesn't go well, especially when he tells Gavin Newsom to go fuck himself. Near the end of the year, he manages to sell a far-diminished Twitter for pennies on the dollar to an investment group led by MrBeast and Logan Paul.

Next: Predicting 2024, Gaming Edition. Yes, this is what I call a pro gamer move.

The easiest list to write, really.

Middle East:

• The Gaza war sputters on until early in the year an errant 5000lb. bomb slams into a hideously crowded refugee camp in Rafah (on the Egyptian border and supposedly a "safe zone") and kills a thousand people in full view of every news network.
• In the wake of the Rafah bombing, the US attempts to force Israel to withdraw. Israel refuses. Netanyahu claims in a TV address that Israel isn't a US vassal that bows under pressure. He is then almost immediately thrown out of office by a revolt of the ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition and a good portion of Likud who realize Israel's future without US support is very grim. The governing coalition is replaced through parliamentary maneuvers with a still pretty right-wing but not overtly fascist government under Benny Gantz. No elections are held.
• Hamas remains in control of what is now a devastated wasteland of rubble and rage. The hostages are never found, although a few occasionally show up in videos which may or may not have been taped months before. Israel continues to on an almost weekly basis bomb Gaza in support of raids trying to find any hostages or Hamas leaders; these raids almost always fail. Anyone who can flee Gaza does so in what is effectively very slow de facto ethnic cleansing, because Gaza can no longer sustain life.
• No moves are made towards peace with the Palestinians, and the death toll from the occasional raid into West Bank cities get higher and higher.
• Hezbollah and the Houthis back down from their confrontations after the Netanyahu government falls. Neither group wants to have their country turned into Gaza.
• King Salman dies and Prince Mohammed Bin Salman becomes king of Saudi Arabia. No moves are made towards normalizing relations with Israel, and MBS in general does everything he can (such as manipulating oil prices) to try to get Biden to lose his election. The Line continues to be a massive joke.
• Before the year ends, the Gantz government falls and elections are held which bring fascist Itamar Ben-Gvir to power. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis flee the country.

Europe:

• The war in Ukraine continues on in a stalemate reminiscent of World War One, complete with the rats. F-16s piloted by Ukrainians appear over the skies; Russia shoots down one and crows about it for three months. The F-16s shoot down many more than one Russian plane. Both sides are waiting to see the outcome of the US elections.
• Sometime in the summer elections are held in the UK, which Labor's Keir Starmer wins in a massive landslide. He immediately becomes hated by every progressive online for the same reason he won in a massive landslide: because he isn't Jeremy Corbyn.
• Tesla announces a new factory to be built in northern Italy which does nothing to quell the rumors that Elon Musk and Giorgia Meloni are an item.
• The EU continues to be hamstrung by Hungary's Viktor Orban, who uses the bureaucracy's need for consensus against it like a weapon. However in spite of Orban's opposition, Sweden is finally admitted into NATO, because NATO is more willing to play hardball than the EU (something Erdogan discovered last year).

Asia:

• The DPP wins the Taiwanese elections; China makes harrumphing noises but otherwise does little as they are distracted by Xi Jinping's continuing anti-corruption campaign. (This is primarily to make the PLA combat ready so that it can in fact invade Taiwan, but that doesn't happen next year.)
• North Korea continues to be North Korea, testing ICBMs and other rockets while trying to please Russia by giving it forty-year old munitions that promptly explode when unpacked.
• The South Korean government collapses, again, primarily because President Yoon is so wildly unpopular; some pretext is used to remove him from office (possibly directly to prison) and force early elections.
• Modi wins another term of office in India, although not nearly as overwhelmingly as in previous elections. Government interference in media and other forms of stamping out dissent become increasingly more overt.

Africa:

• continues to exist, though you couldn't tell from most media coverage.
• Wars continue to rage, undocumented and ignored, in Sudan, Ethiopia, the Congo, Nigeria, and most of the Sahel. For good measure Morocco and Algeria probably have a slapfight and Libya explodes again.
• South Africa continues its slow slide into kleptocratic collapse, with water outages joining power outages.
• Everyone who can possibly leave the continent continues to do so.

South America:

• Argentina stumbles into a complete omnishambles as it discovers that electing a president who is literally barking mad may not be the wisest of choices. Its currency collapses, hyperinflation reigns, businesses flee and unemployment skyrockets. At some point Milei replaces the Argentine currency not with the dollar but with bitcoin, which goes about as well as you'd expect.
• Venezuela tries to invade Guyana and fails completely. The US stands ready to assist Guyanese defenses, but most Venezuelan troops promptly get lost in the Amazonian jungle and wander aimlessly.

North America:

• To everyone's sorrow, the US presidential election is once again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In desperation at finding anything or anyone else to vote for, each third party candidate get occasional media-driven popularity bumps before saying something that torpedoes their candidacy completely (Robert Kennedy insists that spinach gives you mumps, Cornel West defends Elon Musk's oversight of Twitter).
• Trump is convicted in his federal sedition trial before the Republican convention. He's nominated anyway.
• Joe Biden is a walking panic attack on the campaign trail, and by Oct0ber is barely able to put together a coherent sentence during a speech. To be fair, Donald Trump hasn't been able to put together a coherent sentence since 2015, but life isn't fair. The debates are a comedy of errors with both men screaming at each other unintelligibly.
• Biden manages to win the election, by the narrowest of margins possible (a few hundred votes separating the candidates in several states). Trump announces, loudly and frequently, that he does not accept the results and in fact is now President, which no one tells him is not actually a thing you can do, legally. As Biden takes the oath in January, Trump's followers begin to plan violent insurrection in response, instigated by their leader's now completely insane social media postings.

Everywhere:

• The weather continues to be a freak show of once-in-a-lifetime disasters. Someone might want to look into that.

Tomorrow: Predicting 2024, Technology Edition. Elon Musk may be involved.

A16z jumps into politics. Oh frabjous day.

The Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, known also as "a16z" for a really dumb reason, announced today that they were going to save us all from those awful politicians stopping your iPhone from getting more pixels.

Politics and the Future

Technology startups need a voice. We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.

Andreessen HorowitzBen Horowitz

As software has eaten the world, it has become integral to every industry and nearly every endeavor in our society. As a result, the governments around the world have become increasingly interested in the implications and how they might regulate the technology.

As we’ve seen with Internet regulation in the 1990s, high quality regulation can enable an industry to thrive while protecting consumers. However, as we’ve seen with the regulation of nuclear power, misguided and politicized regulation can kill an industry and greatly exacerbate problems like climate change. 

We believe that advancing technology is critical for humanity’s future, so we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values specifically for technology. 

(Yes, they opened with "software has eaten the world". As a good thing. This is what we've got to work with here.)

Essentially this is the other shoe dropping from Marc Andreessen's hilariously overwrought manifesto that I might have written when I was 14 years old and very serious about things: technology is good, and people who want to stop technology are bad and we must stop the bad people from slowing down the good people who just want to help the world.

I am not making any of this up.

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz

We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.

Andreessen HorowitzMarc Andreessen

Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

Who are the bad people who aren't properly glorifying the neon gods that we have made? Oh, he'll tell you.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

That's right, "trust and safety". Social media moderators are against everything good in the world. The whole thing reads like someone who really wanted to like "Atlas Shrugged" but could only get through the first ten pages and then put it down (and if this is actually what happened, I respect Marc so much for that alone).

In fact, his bibliography of "techno-optimists" to read include such luminaries (no actual books cited, of course, as who has time to read?) as the alluded to "John Galt", who Marc apparently believes is a real person, and James Burnham, who actually was a real person and advocated a bizarre crypto-Marxist technocratic Fordist dictatorship where everyone lived according to the demands of the 1940s managerial class. You can also conquer the world as him in the "Kaiserredux" Hearts of Iron mod, because he's a freaking villain.

He also namechecks Friedrich Nietzsche because, I can only presume, one would need to be a nihilist to survive in Marc's techno-dystopia. Or maybe it's because he saw Nietzsche on a list somewhere.

Anyway, this is clearly a very serious person whose opinions you should pay attention to because of their import and thoughtfulness, and not the fact that a16z can presumably throw any election they want by dropping a few million here and there to get rid of politicians who annoyingly insist on retrograde ideas like "regulation", "safety", "competition", and "safety nets".

Of course, the first salvo in this barrage was Elon Musk's hostile takeover of Twitter (I mean, they let him do it, he was just very hostile about it) and the victory dances of technobros like David Sacks who hung around the Twitter offices immediately after the takeover, I presume as some sort of zampolit to ensure the liberals exited the building in a safe and orderly manner. People like Sacks, Musk, and Andreessen believe that since they failed gloriously upward in the tech boom, there is nothing stopping them from failing gloriously upward in literally anything they choose to do, and anyone who tells them "No, maybe not" is just mean like Mom was.

When fascism comes to America, it will be cloaked in stupidity like this. People who turned everything tech-related into literal shit, in a madcap race to direct everyone's money into their own pocket, want to do the same to our government. How hard can it be?