I still believe that YOUR rights and quality of life depend every year more on how software in all its forms, including robots, cryptcurrencies and AI, is used AROUND you.
From now on, however, I will also write here about all the other, many faces of the current crisis. That is, in more or less random order: climate change, families and parenting, overconsumption of natural resources, inequality, mental health, pollution, education, and other major obstacles to a fairer society.
This multi-faced look at things will be very likely bad for finding and retaining “followers”, because many people seem to prefer very specialized, single-topic “sources” these days.
But on one hand, I find it necessary, because a recurring topic here will be that those crises are all related, and cannot be solved independently. For example, I do think that climate change is real and man-made. But I also see it is only a symptom of something bigger and deeper inside us, which must be fixed first.
On the other hand, I just don’t care anymore about extending my audience with all the usual tricks.
I’ve stopped caring about any form of Search Engine “Optimization” because, in an age when search engines use one’s SEO efforts to find which sources to leech first with “AI”, but keep them hidden from people, it just doesn’t make sense anymore.
I’ve stopped caring about social media optimization too. I do try to remain and advertise my work on social media, because I accept that if I want people to hear my message I need to go where they already hang out... but I refuse to play by their rules:
unless it’s some really throw-away thingy, I will always POSSE, that is “Publish (on your) Own Site (1), Syndicate Elsewhere”
when I’ll post on social media, I may sometimes add a picture to each post even when it wouldn’t be necessary, and (usually) surrender to the totally idiotic practice of putting “link in the first comment”, but nothing more
and I will try to post as little as possible, not whenever the algorithm says I should do it
Ditto for Substack, of course. I’ll try to post here once a week, but sometimes it will be more, sometimes (as lately) much less. Without AI generated images.
What you can do / your part in all this:
I have stuff to say that several competent people agree it’s worth knowing. But I don’t want everybody to agree with me. I want everybody to know the issues I write about, instead of ignoring their existence and interconnections, so they have no excuse to not make their own informed decisions about them.
This, plus my dislike for the subscription economy (see “unusual request” here for details) is why none of my writing is paywalled, and will remain such (1). But of course, the more concrete support I get, the more I can write. So, thanks for helping with any combination of:
comment my posts and recommend this blog (NOT “substack” (1)!) here on Substack
Much more often than not, on the Web a thousand words is worth more than an image or video. Text is hugely easier to reuse, share and preserve, and more respectful of users’ time too: skimming text to get its gist is way faster than doing the same with its audio or video versions.
Besides, while I have spoken around the world many times, I am good at writing. I was definitely not born a video or podcast person. Should I ever set up a podcast or YouTube channel, it could never be much more than me repeating my written posts vocally. If you think that doing so would still be enough to significantly increase my reach and are willing to share detailed advice, by all means please do it, and thanks in advance!
(paywall-free popularization on this or other important topics helps to pay my bills and write even more. Thanks for considering a paid subscription or (even better) supporting me with one-time direct donations or in any of the other ways described here)
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a cyberbullying seminar for parents. Two police inspectors and a psycho-pedagogists specialized in these matters came to explain to about fifty parents what online or offline bullying is, how it thrives, and which laws and structures are available in Italy to deal with it.
Among other things, those experts mentioned several times how phones and social media actually alter the brain of children and teenagers.
On one hand, the meeting was great. It was thought provoking, and concretely informative. All the speakers know their stuff, and all pointed out, gently but clearly, that it’s parents, not schools, the first agents who must educate kids about these matters.
On the other hand, I found the meeting really frustrating. With all respect for those experts, there were several moments when they really felt like Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers. I say so because they:
started from, and never questioned, the same wrong, 100% wrong, unacceptable equation that (besides and before AI of course) Big Tech desperately needs us believe for its own survival: Internet = social media = smartphone
said that smartphones are inherently neutral, “what matters is to use them well”
the worst part: they spoke for more than one hour of the dangers of social media, getting closer and closer to the one real issue and its really easy solution, without ever calling it out.
That is, three experts speaking for more than one hour about the dangers of cyberbullying and social media for kids never questioned that what, 80%? of those problems - would just disappear if kids younger than, say, 14 years old had no personal smartphone. Does it happen in other countries too?
I have already explained here and here why personal smartphones for kids aren’t neutral at all, and why banning them (by parents, not governments!) is the only solution for certain problems that could ever work in the real world. That seminar, plus a rising trend of late 2025, confirmed to me that certain things are never repeated enough.
The trend I refer to, which may be even more dangerous in the long run, consists of laws like the one recently approved in Australia, which mandates that children must be at least 16 years old to create a social media account.
“Australia has just taken one of the most important steps yet in the global effort to protect children online. Beginning today... This reform finally corrects two major mistakes made in the early days of the internet: the United States (and then much of the world) set the age of “internet adulthood” to 13, and companies were given no responsibility to verify age at all. As long as a child could type “13,” companies could treat them like adults.
“Australia is the first country to correct those mistakes. Under the new policy, children under age 16 can still watch videos, read posts, and look things up online. What changes is that some of the largest companies on earth can no longer form business relationships with young children or use their personal data to keep them hooked on feeds, likes, and alerts. The policy will reduce the social pressure on kids, give parents back their authority, and help restore a healthier childhood. It may feel like a challenge at first, but it will quickly become the new normal.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Here is the truth about that law, and any other law like it: there is no need whatsoever for such a policy to protect children while leaving them free to “watch videos, read posts, and look things up online”:
children can - and should - do all those things on desktop or laptop computers, that will never be so addictive and uncontrollable as smartphones for the simple, non-circumventable reason that they can’t be carried around all the time.
In practice, no matter how sincere and well-intentioned they may be, in the long run any law like that one in Australia is only going to:
strenghten the concept that the only way to communicate digitally is through top-down, centralized social media, that is through structures that both states and for-profit corporations can easily watch, censor, shut down and generally use to influence public opinion
be actually used to enforce and legitimate more online censorship
de-legitimate parents, depriving them of the responsibility to deploy the only policy that would really work: no smartphones before 14/15 years old
be a Ruby Goldberg machine, born from some combination of ignorance of how the Internet works, and unwillingness to conceive the really simple solutions
fail anyway, because, besides being uselessly complicated and expensive, defining social media (that is, the environments in which the law should be applied) is more difficult than it sounds
Parent trying to clean his mouth with the table equivalent of age-limit laws for social media. Source: Wikipedia
Haidt says we “know social media can harm children”, and he’s right, but what about any instant messaging app with support for read receipts and image attachments? Even if it never collected and share any user data, any app like that would still be usable, by design, for cyberbullying, sexting, body shaming and so on.
If, quoting Haidt again, “The goal is to shift the environment so children are not pressured into digital spaces they don’t want, simply to avoid being left out”, laws that require a minimum age to be on “social media” work in the wrong way, in the wrong places, at the wrong level and for no good enough reason.
I’m not saying that age limits for using certain digital services shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that without age limits for smartphones any law mandating age limits would be half useless, half harmful.
Minimum age limits should be enforced above all for smartphones because it’s them, not software, that makes “social media” and “internet” impossible to monitor and regulate, and because physical devices are infinitely easier to keep away from children, at hugely smaller costs, than software apps usable 24/7 on something that, for all practical purposes, ends up attached to a child body like a Matrix plug.
Parent, giving his 11-year old son a new smartphone for Christmas. Source: Reddit.
“But social media and smartphones CAN be good for children, I know a child who...”
No. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m sick of “success” stories that, instead of being acknowledged as rare exceptions, are used as alibis to make and keep almost all the other kids dumber or more stressed than they could be.
Can social media and smartphones as they are today be actually good, and worth the parental effort that’s necessary to make a child handle them? Yes, but only for children in one of these two really rare conditions:
children who suffer from some concrete, serious malaise or disability for which nobody, from states to parents, could implement an authentic solution (if such children were many more than one in a thousands, it would almost surely be proof that real solutions that would work much better than social media are needed as soon as possible)
children born to that one one in a thousand families in which parents actually have the astonishingly rare combination of money, time, real digital competence and will to make themselves (not schools or laws) effective mentors, for years, of using intrinsically addictive social media
But I MUST be always in touch with my children. It’s for their safety!
If you still religiously believe smartphones for children are necessary because children must be in continuous contact with their parents, please...
Wake Up, already! You and every other generation before you since Pleistocene grew up well enough without electronic tags, and any mental problem surely wasn’t due to lack of such tags. Your kids - and their mental health needs - are no different. If you really, really believe they should be always reachable in real time, burden them with a camera-less dumbphone instead: that’s all the reachability needed to make you feel safe, with none of the dangers and temptations for your kids.
The solution is really simple. It isn’t used yet only because it does require almost every parent to acknowledge that, 100% in good faith, they did the dumbest, self-harming thing by giving smartphones to their children years before it would have made more good than harm. But it’s simple.
Let’s make laws like that one in Australia useless. Let’s save both parents and states lots of money. Let’s make life harder for wannabe censors.
Let’s progress to giving smartphones to children as socially acceptable as giving kids a packet of cigarettes, that is something that will make both those kids and every other kid breathing around them sick.
It’s much simpler than any other solution, much more effective, and it’s possible. Any time someone tells you it’s impossible, remember them there was a time, well within our living memory, where this:
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Imagination is one of the features of authentic intelligence, and a collective loss of imagination - and consequently, of hope and motivation - is one of the big problems of our time, if not a major cause of many of them.
Here, as a tiny stimulus to keep imagination and quests for a better future alive, I list twelve things that today may seem part of the very fabric of reality, but I feel will disappear, or at least be much smaller than today and unrecognizable to people of 2025, in just a few decades. Possibly very, very few decades.
Here are those twelve things, divided in two main groups, for reasons I’ll explain at the end of the post.
Group A
Addictive social media
Mobile phones with cameras
App stores for phones and all other computers
Online matching for dating
AI chatbots for everybody
Physical billboards, if not all advertising
Hundreds of choices for every consumer product
Group B
Air conditioning and buildings that need it
Falsely smart cars
“Smart” consumer products, also known as consumer-IoT
Energy-intensive healthcare and single use medical supplies
This is a surprise, keep reading to see it
Why things in group A will disappear
The social media of today will disappear because they are a major cause for a major increase in public levels of anxiety, depression, misinformation and political polarization and inability to concentrate and think clearly. The good news is that this would be possible with a few, really concrete actions like this and these.
Cameras in mobile phones will disappear because, together with algorithms designed to mess with people’s minds, they are a major aggravation to the above-mentioned mental health pandemic. Just think about it: would teenagers and adults alike be as stressed as they are if they had no possibility to show off everything they eat, wear or do, every minute, as if everybody else had a duty to care? Sometimes, I think that the only truly revolutionary act everybody could really do is covering with tape the lenses of their phones now.
Screenshot of Google image search.
Centralized App Stores will disappear because, while we will never all become programmers like Free Software advocates dream, something as stupid as letting a handful of companies castrate and turn into mind-sucking probes inventions as powerful as mobile or stationary computers cannot go on forever.
Online dating that directly matches people through data, not love will be replaced by apps organizing “real-life events in every major city every week” where every group of people who could be good matches for each other will see every other participant how they really are, without AIs to cheat, or possibility to swipe left. That may still be a bit too close to eugenics, for my taste, but will surely be much, much healthier and fairer than today.
Unrestricted access to AI chatbots will end because... it’s already painfully obvious that it is not for the masses.
Excessive choice is what Scott Adams popularized as confusopoly: companies with similar products who, in order to prevent customers from making informed decisions, intentionally confuse them instead of competing on price.
Confusopoly deserves a bit more space because we “First World” citizens suffer from it in every field. We have scores of foods that only differ in their marketing, scores of offers for utilities and mobile contracts that take days to compare with minimal gains, cars with scores of options that all too often cannot be combined just like we’d want, or would cost much more than advertised...
What about sportswear? Today, thanks to changed social norms, machines and healthier working conditions for most jobs, it’s almost impossible to figure out in ten seconds whether someone is a train conductor or an accountant just from his clothes, hands or gait, as Sherlock Holmes could do in the 1880s. But everybody can immediately tell the exact sub-category of sport someone engages in, and how seriously, by looking at which combination of shoes, jacket and pants he’s wearing. The result is that anyone who could and would have occasionally practiced three different sports with the same “equipment” two generations ago is now pushed - to make them spend more, of course - to get multiple sets of gear to practice just one:
One last example of excessive choice that will end because is both wasteful and cruel is pets. We have created scores of cats and dogs with torture breeding, just to get the literal opposite, that is, of appreciation for choice, diversity and uniqueness: dogs and cats that all look alike, and a really expensive but sadly booming pet cloning business.
This explosion of choices is a wrong turn, not an enrichment : even letting self-gratification aside, when there is too much to choose from, it becomes almost impossible to make the optimal choice. This is why all this choice will disappear, to be replaced by many less models for every product, but all much more customizable and repairable than today.
Energy-intensive healthcare and single use medical supplies will not disappear, but they will be substantially downsized, because the connection between their price or energy use and human health and longevity is not as strong as it seems. Did you know, for example (see previous link for details), that comparisons of cataract surgery in the UK and in India have shown that the same treatment produces only 5% of the emissions and 6% of the solid waste (that is, much lower costs) in the UK?
The common reason why the stuff and practices listed in Group B will disappear, at least in their current forms, is really simple: they consume so much energy, money and material that they will increasingly become unaffordable (more on this in a moment).
The services in Group A, instead, will disappear thanks to a combination of collective mental fatigue and increased awareness of their toxicity. If we are smart, that is. If you think that’s impossible, remember that people, including pregnant women, used to smoke indoors because it was addictive and glamorous just a few years ago.
But even if we aren’t smart, the services and products of Group A will disappear anyway because the “surprise” member of Group B that I didn’t name before is... all of Group A: that’s all stuff that requires too much money, energy and material to last much longer.
Much sooner than you may wish, if several forecasts I’ve seen recently are even half right. The coming bust of the AI and data centers bubble, which can never happen too soon but is surely close, may set things straight all by itself. But even if that issue didn’t exist, the shortage of diesel fuel that several experts (see list below) say will be enough to severely downsize every sector of the economy - including deployment of renewables or nuclear power - may “happen as early as... 2030”.
And now the good news
Here’s the best part of all this, the one that really matters: with the exception of air conditioning, if missing where and to the extent it would be actually needed, none of the changes I listed will decrease authentic quality of life, and most of them will concretely improve it, by decreasing our current levels of stress, loneliness and personal debt. Read the list again, and you’ll agree with me.
Reading suggestions about the coming diesel crisis
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A few days ago, I saw a Facebook post going like this:
“I’ve been thinking about the future impacts of AI and robotics on our society for some time now. Here’s [a video] on the subject... I would love to see other viewpoints as well.”
Since the poster asked for other viewpoints, I replied:
At this point, another contact of that person, whom I’ll just call “HIM” from now on, stepped in, to fill the time-honored internet role of “guy who has no idea what I’m talking about and refuses to inform himself”. For context, here is how the conversation went, but if you just want to know why the more you support hard work ethics the more you should love UBI, just skip to the next paragraph:
HIM: so you want to go full on socialism because technology replaced the low/no skill worker... here’s the issue.. if two workers get the exact same and 1 is a hard worker and the other is a blue falcon.. you just murdered incentive.. good job..
(note for those who, like me, had never met the “blue falcon” expression before: A blue falcon is (source) “someone who causes problems or does things to get their fellow service members in trouble. This often leads to more work for their fellow soldiers”)
ME: disagreement is no problem, but it should be about the same thing somebody said first, not something else entirely. From your comment, instead, you seem to have not read at all what I actually wrote, and to have no idea what UBI is.
First, you got completely wrong that I want to go “full on socialism”... because technology replaced low /no skill workers: NO, i don’t want to go full on because tech etc etc. I say that, now that tech finally makes it possible, we should go full on on something which is not socialism (more on this below) because it was right well before AI came along period. Which is the opposite of what you wrote.
Second, actual tech is not replacing just low / no skill workers. No way. Look around.
Third: UBI surely is NOT at all what you say, that is “if two workers get the exact same and one is a hard worker and the other is a blue falcon.. you just murdered incentive”.
UBI is, to use your words, “if one worker is a blue falcon and the other one is a hard worker, they both get e.g 1000 USD/month, no strings attached, whatever they do, so the blue falcon can be fired immediately without causing any problem to anybody, because the falcon won’t starve. And the hard worker will get those 10000 USD/month PLUS whatever salary he deserves”
You say “you just murdered incentive”, whereas UBI is exactly the opposite. UBI removes all the deadweights from any organization, allowing the real workers to continue to get paid what they are worth, and real innovators to innovate all they can.
It really amazes me how many people who are all on a “work hard/entrepreneurial ethic” are against UBI, instead of realizing it would set them free to work as they want, getting all the rewards they deserve.
Summing up, I am not saying you should approve UBI. I am just saying “please do learn what UBI actually is, and then criticize it all you want, no it’s OK”. Start from the two links I shared above, and then look for third parties, or the opposite, no problem.
HIM: lol.. I worked in countries where you can only fire people for theft or safety violations.. it was also customary to give 12 month notice if youre going to quit. Granted the country also had 23.5% sales tax and income tax started around 40% and no refunds. Ubi doesnt remove dead weight. It encourages it. Go work in Norway.. Italy... or of you are more adventurous Angola..
ME: UBI IS designed for, and makes it infinitely easier, to remove all the restrictions you mention (”only fire people for theft etc”). That’s exactly what I meant writing “UBI removes all the deadweights etc”, If you think UBI would be applied without changing anything else, you just keep proving you have NO idea what you are talking about. Study first, then you can criticize.
From everything you have written so far it is really evident that if you really got what UBI is, how it should be implemented and so on, you’d like it much more than me.
HIM: lol like it more than you? Nah I worked 30 years in a field that guaranteed my death.. just to somehow survive and collect a pension and 100% disability compensation.. nice try, but you failed miserably on that one. People should be paid market value for their skills.. period.
ME: if you refuse to even criticize the basic concept that UBI is an ADDITION, NOT a replacement for “People being paid market value for their skills”... you have deeper problems than liking UBI or not. Again: spend time to read what it actually is, and if you’ll still dislike it, it will be for very different reasons.
HIM: it still boils down to living wage nonsense.. [no matter how you call it]. At the end of the day its the living wage nonsense in that you are no longer paying people based on market value of their skills..
What UBI really is
UBI is against free markets, private property and entrepreneurship? Who told you this crap? (image source: Reddit)
A good starting point to get what UBI is actually about is what Bob Kennedy and Buckminster Fuller already said very clearly more than 55 years ago.
Kennedy described the intrinsical idiocy of measuring the success of any society with something as limited and misleading as GDP.
Buckminster Fuller denounced“the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today (ME: in 1970!) that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery [to] justify his right to exist.”
In 2025, we have 55 years of evidence from all over the world that Kennedy and Buckminster Fuller were absolutely right. Economies worldwide are full of objectively useless or harmful jobs, including jobs to manage those bad jobs. Those are all jobs that only, only exist because we have never found a better, no: a socially acceptable way to give the people doing those jobs the money they need to not revolt.
All those unnecessary jobs really produce are:
ballast and moats that suffocate the really hard workers, entrepreneurs and innovators
millions and millions of human beings with all sorts of more or less recognized mental health issues
Because, even when they aren’t in the growing ranks of workking poors, the people doing those unnecessary jobs do feel, more or less consciously, that their income is not a reward for value, but a fraud. Yes, a fraud that on one hand prevents them from doing something else they could do best but has no “market” value; on the other, for the same reason, hinders the progress of society as a whole.
UBI is the least impossible solution to this sad, unbelievably stupid state of things. The actual concept of UBI is that every citizen gets a certain amount of money every month just because he or she is a citizen, with no strings attached.
“No strings attached” is the first crucial point that nobody can ignore if they want to criticize UBI without making fool of themselves: UBI does not forbid anybody from engaging in any job or entrepreneurial activity they want, and getting for that any salary they can get. That salary would go on top of UBI.
The second crucial point is, obviously, how much money? Let’s say, for concreteness, enough for food, clothes and maybe a public transit pass, but no more. Under those two conditions it is evident that:
UBI is not socialism. In and by itself, UBI does not prevent anybody from owning all they want, funding companies, earning all the money they can, or “fulfilling the American Dream” in any other way (incidentally, it’s quite funny - tragically funny - how many Americans not only think socialism === North Korea, but consider North Korea-like socialism anything left of the american GOP)
the “no strings attached” part would eliminate all the infrastructure and jobs (that is: costs for taxpayers) that only exist to control who qualifies for most means-tested welfare programs of today
in general, UBI would eliminate all the deadweights that today hinder real entrepreneurs and all the really hard workers. UBI would let them work more freely, instead of being slowed down by coworkers unable or unwilling to work hard like them, and having to pay their salary too
Only fire people for theft? With UBI granting everybody enough money to survive till they find another job, it would be much easier to both pass and accept laws that make firing people easier
Advance notice to quit? For the same reason, UBI would let everybody who is now stuck in a bullshit job under an a**hole boss the freedom to quit without notice, thanks to the time and peace of mind to find a better job provided by UBI, because...
being just enough to provide the bare minimum, UBI would not and could not kill the incentive to work
in other words:
only the useless jobs, companies and public organizations would disappear, but without civil unrests. UBI would only kill stuff that shouldn’t exist in a sensible economy, giving hard workers and real entrepreneurs much more freedom to do their best, and much more visibility (and extra money) for their value. For the same reason,
only the BAD bosses would suffer from UBI, not good companies or the economy in general. UBI would mean that hard workers who came across an incompetent or sadistic boss could give him the finger right away, instead of being forced to stay with him because they can’t afford to remain without money
Help all hard workers to see how UBI would be their ally: share this post, in and outside Substack!
What about the people who, with UBI, would never work anymore, or go crazy?
The moment UBI went in force, many millions of people would be freed from bullshit jobs and all sorts of fears, and many millions of hard workers and entrepreneurs would be finally free to make the best work they can, and get the greatest reward for it.
But yes, there is also no doubt that in the same moment:
millions of finally happy people would never apply for any paid work anymore because, for any of a thousand reasons, UBI would be enough money for their needs. This includes aspiring stay-at-home parents and hermits who’d retire in some mountain huts
other millions of people would try to kill themselves with booze or drugs, or fall into serious depression, because their “work” (note the quotes) was all they had to feel worthy
People of the first category are a feature of UBI, not a bug: they are all people who right now are costing much more to the companies and governments that must keep them in unnecessary jobs, only because there is no other socially acceptable way to give them enough money to not revolt. Even giving people who do want to have kids a feasible way to do it would be a feature, in this coming age of underpopulation overshoot.
People of the second category instead, whose only reason to live and way to feel good is a paid job... they’d need therapy to discover the difference between SERVICE and “p-work”, not jobs that would cost more than therapy, and still be more a drag than an active contribution to society.
How to pay for UBI?
The first thing to realize is that everything you read so far would save mountains of money for both individuals and public or private organizations, from commuting costs to rent and utility bills for office buildings and administrative overheads of all kinds. Getting back to what caused this post, automation is only what can finally make UBI possible, not the other way around.
The second and really crucial thing is this: as necessary and unavoidable as it is (*), UBI can only come after even more radical that, if you look at the status of public and private debt worldwide should happen as soon as possible anyway, and probably will: a reboot of money, that is of how money is controlled, created and distributed.
I already mentioned this fundamental issue in the last part of this essay on the meaning of work, and I would be delighted to host here a guest post by experts outlining how it could be done.
Summing up... If you have a serious work ethic, UBI is your ally
I have explained what UBI really is, and how it would help hard workers and serious businesses of any kind. In one sentence, even if you or your company had to pay more taxes to support UBI, you’d still gain enough, in reduced costs and job satisfaction for both you and all your remaining employees, to be more than happy about it.
So, maybe UBI is unfeasible - and again, it surely is, if it isn’t preceded by a reform of money - or maybe UBI is wrong for some reason I haven’t seen yet. But if UBI is wrong or impossible, it surely isn’t for any of the reasons “HIM” is so sure about. Don’t be like HIM.
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“Wait a minute, what about healthcare?” Easy
Please never mix UBI with healthcare. Healthcare is a human right before and regardless of UBI, and universal healthcare done right, with proper checks, is much more human, fairer and cost-effective than the alternatives available in e.g. the USA.
Think of UBI and universal healthcare like food and water, instead: two separate, equally essential measures, to implement in the right order. First universal healthcare if you still don’t have it, then UBI.
Again: never mix universal healthcare with UBI. It’s not one or the other.
(*) Besides and before everything you read here, UBI is necessary and unavoidable for other, entirely different reasons. To know what they are, read this post, or this one.
Someone said that if they can keep you asking the wrong questions in the wrong places, the answers won’t matter, and today’s Web seems built on purpose to implement that strategy. Here is a real short summary of how and why this happens, followed by a partial, but easy and effective solution.
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The disenfranchisement and mental health crisis first brought by social media on smartphones are now worsening thanks to mismanagement of AI, they can be lost or obscured in any moment, even if we are famous scientists. Why is it so? One of the recurring themes of my work, since years before I first heard of “fediverse”, is that:
the human species just isn’t built to cope with continuous flows of instantaneous “information” or “communication”, be they infinite scrolling of of more or less polarizing “news”, or endless updates of personal “statuses” that nobody really cares about, including their authors. They can only make us and democracy sick. Look around you for more proofs you may ever need.
side but necessary note: with or without AI, things will get worse if we keep giving kids personal smartphones, that is devices that even most adults can’t really handle
the sane way to be and communicate online is through slow communication, happening as much as possible via personal websites or newsletters, shared with technologies that, unlike social media, don’t make you angry
finding those personal websites keeps getting harder, because search engines deliberately hide them. The biggest, but not the only offender here is Google, obviously, and other alternatives of the same scale aren’t visible yet (could the EU make them, please?)
Luckily, solving the last problem, which also means making the other ones smaller, is easier than it may seem.
I’ve been busy making things and I keep forgetting to announce them. Here are my five latest -- three for specialty web search, one for YouTube, and one for information monitoring via RSS. Let me know if you have any questions, otherwise I hope they’re useful:
Local Search America is a set of three tools for finding information by city/state, state/metro area, or city radius. Find authoritative sources like local governments, institutions of higher education, and FCC-licensed television stations and search their web spaces on Google.
Congress Corral lets you explore members of the US Congress via a Wikipedia-enriched dataset. Includes a public interest analysis utility, a tool to explore member news across local news and colleges, and a Wikipedia-powered related topics feature.
Blog Hiking lets you explore WordPress blogs by following trails of interconnected content. Search by keyword and find WordPress posts from across the web, organized like hiking trails with three different ways to explore.
Tube Terrain lets you browse lists of YouTube channels built from Wikipedia categories. Filter by keyword, subscriber count, video count, channel age and more! Currently four sets available: YouTubers, scientists, activists, and LGBTQ people.
Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader is a Google Sheets-based tool that lets you schedule your RSS feeds and give them expiration dates (The link goes to a Google Sheet. Make a copy and check out the README sheet if you want to try it)
My advice: please use those tools, and don’t stop there. Tara does much more than this, as you can see from her complete projects list, but the real message and value of her work goes beyond any of them:
you don’t have to find and see other humans online only in the one, brain-rot way the big web companies want!
Sure, some of those tools are relevant only for US citizens, and they are all ust different interfaces to Google services, but so what? They show that another way is already possible, even before a real alternative comes up. Plus, they are really easy to use, and what you’ll find thanks to them (I especially like Blog Hiking) may help you waste much less time on social media than today. Please go and make search work for you again!
(this is from a LinkedIn post by Sébastien Poulin that I saw a couple years ago)
The Google search engine is so powerful that it hides other search engines from us. We simply do not know that most of them exist.
Meanwhile, there are still many excellent search engines in the world that specialize in books, science, and other intelligent information. Here is a non-exhaustive list of such sites that you have probably never heard of:
Pdfdrive.com is the largest free PDF book download site. It claims over 225 million titles.
RefSeek is a search engine for academic resources, with over a billion sources
Springer gives access to more than 10 million scientific documents
Worldcat - Search for content from 20,000 libraries worldwide.
Bioline is a library of published bioscience journals
Base Search is one of the most powerful search engines for academic texts. Over 100 million scientific articles, 70% of which are free
Repec - Volunteers from 102 countries collected nearly 4 million publications.
Science.gov is a US government search engine for over 2,200 scientific sites.
Two days ago, a friend of mine asked me to watch a 2:20 hours long interview to an AI expert so we could discuss it later. When I first looked at the title and index of the video I thought it was just some other self-exalted Silicon Valley priest yelling all the time “AI will kill us for sure, give me all your money to tame it!”.
After browsing the transcript - which is what I always do with any video like that because it’s much faster - I changed my mind, and wrote this post to explain why I think that, while from that video he seems to:
get the relation between AI and Universal Basic Income backwards,
take some AI hype too seriously, and
maybe miss an elephant in the room…
…Tristan Harris is a smart, sensible guy who is fighting the good fight, and I really wouldn’t mind working for him, or having a public conversation about these issues.
To see why I say so, here are the most important things Harris said in the video, synthesized and reorganized by topic (the parts in italic are by Harris, the others are my own syntheses or comments of what he said).
Computer geniuses, without any real education
I like how Harris describes the birth of social media:
“We have the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime. We have the least informed and most polarized generation. We have the worst critical thinking. We have the worst ability to concentrate and do things. And that’s because we did not govern the impact of [social media] technology well.”
Here is what he means for “not governing the impact well”: “if the incentive is to maximize eyeballs and attention and engagement, then you’re incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely, polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality society because all of those outcomes are success cases of maximizing for engagement for an individual human on a screen.”
This all happened because we let design and deployment of social media to people who, when asked whether it was sensible to “change billions of people’s psychological experiences with their families, with their friends, at dinner, with their date night, on romantic relationships...” dismissed that concern “as if it’s like a throwaway question” and kept building social media exactly like urban slums we already know to cause riots.
Being someone who, just like him, has been calling for alternatives 2013... Kudos to Harris for seeing these dangers from within in the same days, and trying to fight them. Seriously.
The Singularity... or hype to hide desperation?
One thing I dislike in how Harris outlined the problem with robots or what’s called AI today is attributing godlike powers to those technologies. My own instinct is to call out both issues - or more exactly the way they are sold to investors and politicians - as the frauds they are.
That is, if AI and robots are really dangerous (they are) it’s not because they are superhuman. It’s because they are really toxic, expensive, wasteful frauds, in a time when we’d really need sanity and concreteness, not scaremongering.
For example, Harris said that “they’re doing [AI] to train robots. In household situations. And Elon’s now saying production will start very, very soon on humanoid robots in America”.
First of all, that’s the same Elon who’s been saying for twelve years now that we’d have driverless cars in three or four years. I’d take what Musk is saying now about humanoid robots more like the desperate Plan B of someone who dislikes humans so much that, having failed to relocate on Mars, is now falling back on replacing humans around him. I know that even gubernatorial candidates (Zoltan Istvan, that’s you!) claim that millions of humanoid robots will both displace humans and make them happy, but that remains a really unrealistic vision.
Speaking of AI, Harris said that “AI is like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize level capability and will work at superhuman speed, for less than minimum wage.”
Spoiler: digital immigrants capable of working at superhuman speed for little or no pay have been around for decades. They were just called “software”. More on this shortly.
Comparing AIs to digital immigrants that would take away everybody’s job is a great pitch, but calling them “Nobel Prize level” just validates the claims that AI is divine, unstoppable and deserves all the money in the world… instead of being the Hail Mary move of people having no idea of what other excuse to ask for money they could make up when the AI bubble pops:
Even more important is the fact that an awful lot of the millions of “jobs” that AI would destroy are “pretend work” that shouldn’t exist to begin with because they demean human beings, even when they are really well paid. To see what I’m talking about, check the “The work that shouldn’t exist is even more” part of this post.
On Universal Basic Income “because AI”
The second thing I noted in what Harris said about AI destroying jobs is that he too seems - as far as that interview is concerned - to consider Universal Basic Income as an afterthought - an unavoidable countermeasure to the advent of AI - and worries about who will pay for it.
Me, I don’t think we need to go for UBI because AI is coming. I say the opposite is true: we deserved UBI since well before AI came along, AI is just one of the technologies that can finally make it feasible, and the money to pay for UBI can only come from something that really overdue anyway, regardless of both UBI and AI, that is... reinventing money. Continues here.
Harris says that the people who are currently trying to get trillions of dollars to dump the AI “god” on us are doing so because they firmly believe that:
“There’s the incentive for everyone to move to paying for AIs rather than paying humans”
“It’s not just first solve intelligence and use that to solve everything else. It’s first dominate intelligence and use that to dominate everything else”
in general, for every company in every sector “it’s win or take all... if I don’t do it, I’ll lose to the other guy that will”
the default path of AI development can only be “companies racing to release the most powerful inscrutable uncontrollable technology we’ve ever invented with the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety”
Harris is right, but what he describes is not the default path of the AI industry. Let’s call things with their actual, legitimate name: that’s the default path of every industry under capitalism.
AI is just peak software, which is just peak capitalism because it’s just peak automation, which overlaps too much, if left unchecked, with peak dehumanization. Never forget that the first AIs were corporations.
That is, Harris is right, but the real solution is not to stop - or reform - the AI industry: it is to stop the capitalism that, even before AI, made us waste billions of dollars, as well as mountains of polluting fossil fuels and scarce materials whose control leads to wars on crap like, off the top of my head:
Harris describes well what makes AI, that is peak software, so dangerous:
“AI is... designed to break the reality checking process”
“AI is like a power pump that pumps economic, scientific and military advantage”
“Nuclear weapons cannot invent other nuclear weapons. But AI accelerates everything, including itself” . The first company that succeeds to “automate AI research can then use it to automate everything else”
Developing AI like this feels good to the same kind of people who created toxic social media because it feels like building a god, even if all they are creating is... themselves. We don’t have to put up with their “unavoidability” however. Everybody can act to stop this embarrassing madness, not just investors divesting from AI.
As Harris says, “ you don’t have to understand what’s the engine in the car to understand the consequence that affects everybody of car accidents. And you can advocate for things like speed limits, zoning laws, turning signals and brakes and things like those.”
Doing the same with AI is possible, and it’s been done before, says Harris, for examples in the 1980s, with CFCs that were piercing the ozone layer.
Here is what Harris proposes, in place of continuing to let kids “compete to build a super intelligent uncontrollable god in a box”:
create narrow AIs, that is smaller AIs each optimized to solve one and just one concrete problem, be it educational outcomes, or agriculture or manufacturing output (I like that! Here are some suggestions)
demand design changes that:
make those narrow AIs support and connect humans, instead of isolating them. As an example, Harris describes AI therapists that steer patients back into deeper relationships with their family or actual therapists, instead of doing the opposite
enforce, in AIs and social media, things like, e.g.:
“dopamine emission standards just like we have car emission standards for cars”, that turn off “features” like autoplay and infinite scrolling
algorithms that instead of actively polarizing people “reward unlikely consensus or bridging”
forbid Big Tech executives to ship products that they wouldn’t let their own children use eight hours a day.
make ALL engineering students compulsorily study“all the places that humanity had gotten technology wrong, including [but not limited to] forever chemicals, leaded gasoline and social media”, and have them take a Hippocratic Oath at graduation. I like that, but I’d make that oath compulsory for lawmakers and regulators first
change dating apps so that instead of endless swiping they set up “events in every major city every week”, to give their users “a place where you could go and meet people you were actually excited about and attracted to”. That is, abundance, instead of (see meme at the bottom) exclusion, frustration and cheating.
change the ownership structure of tech companies so that instead of shareholder value they maximize some social benefit (this seems as close as Harris can go to saying the problem is capitalism)
In my opinion, there are at least two more measures that should really be added to that list:
immediately end universal access to general purpose AI chatbots. Making those chatbots accessible only to people who have studied and worked hard enough to control them would be enough to immediately make almost all problems created by current AIs much easier to manage
mandate adversarial interoperability of all social media and other digital communication services. If people could use Instagram, TikTok or anything like that... with any tool they wanted, not just the official applications, social media could never be so addictive
But even as is, that list is full of good, concrete ideas. As I said, I would really like to work for Harris to make it happen. but never mind me: what matters is that you all start to only vote for candidates, of whatever color, who commit to follow those guidelines.
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I recently discovered, by pure chance, the positions of a doctor Gerard M. Nadal on overpopulation. While I agree with him that overpopulation is not a problem anymore from now on, I think the way he frames what’s wrong with it contain a few serious problems, that prevent appropriate handling of both overpopulation and its end.
Because getting into those problems, allow me to briefly mention a couple of communication errors that Dr. Nadal is doing:
first off, as far as I can tell he’s promoting his views mainly on Facebook which having become, by and large, an “old people” social network maybe isn’t the better place to find and convert to having children people in the best age range for such a task.
Screenshot of Google image search for “Overpopulation is a myth”.
Dr. Nadal wrote on Facebook:
“So how does the world population explode if every generation is having fewer and fewer children? We stopped dying like flies....So the world population had been largely preserved and new members were added, swelling the ranks. But now the Baby Boom generation is beginning to die off. By mid-century there will be catastrophic population implosions throughout the developed world.”
So far, I agree. I already wrote that, rather than overpopulation, we are now in depopulation overshoot.
Dr. Nadal also argues that:
“Abortion. Euthanasia. Physician-assisted suicide. Deprioritizing the needs of the elderly. Denial of care. Contraception. Planned Parenthood. Marie Stopes International... [are all] fueled by the fiction that humans are a major pollutant on the planet.”
“The “overpopulation” myth has driven the attitudes of many young doctors and nurses whose attitude toward the over-65 crowd [ultimately comes from] Thomas Malthus: Decrease the surplus population. Increasingly our great utility is to serve as organ donors”
I disagree here. I don’t think many young doctors look at senior citizens as (second choice) organ donors, I do think that current dominant human behaviors (not humans in and by themselves) are a major pollutant of the planet and I also think that the main “fuels” of abortion etc... are not what Dr. Nadal says. Besides, the pressure to have much less children than before started decades before global warming was a household item, for reasons totally unrelated to climate, or environmentalism in general.
However, as far as this post is concerned, both those specific positions of Dr. Nadal and my own opinions about them are irrelevant. The most important points to dispute, those that do the main damage, are others.
Screenshot of the SAME image search for “Overpopulation is a myth”… on DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Interesting difference, isn’t it?
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The “economy”, and “women”
Dr. Nadal wrote that:
“The efforts at curbing population growth are having catastrophic effects on national economies all over the world as almost every nation is below replacement rate.”
“My wife is one of eight, and I’m one of five. Most families in my kid’s generation are 1 or 2 children, and **now an ever-increasing number of women are satisfying themselves by getting dogs instead of husbands and children.”
Those are the serious errors. First of all, it’s wrong to worry about the catastrophic effects on “economies”. We need to worry, as I wrote here and here about the catastrophic effects on human beings and human societies. Economies are just tools that exist to serve humans, and many people will agree that current economies suck at it real big. With inequality increasing as it is in most countries, telling the masses who live paycheck to paycheck to have more children to save “the economy” is an excellent way to get ignored, or worst.
Second, I do see myself that finding satisfaction and purpose in life through pets instead of children is an increasingly popular trend, and I do agree that is an overall negative one. If you must know, I’ve been thinking for a while now that if getting rid of a pet just because you got tired of it or can’t afford it anymore were as illegal or at least as complicated as disowning a son for the same reasons, much less people would get any pet.
However, the point here is that it’s both men and women who are falling for pets instead of children. If there is a difference there, may be in the kind of pets men or women prefer, and it’s an irrelevant difference.
In other words: it is really, really, really wrong to point the finger at women instead of people. If it’s important to counter the underpopulation overshoot, that’s everybody’s responsibility, men and women together, both with the same importance and equally essential roles.
Even if it were right for some moral reason, which it isn’t, stopping to tell women to get married and have children will never, ever work. No way. The way to go is to help young people of both sexes who want to do it, to rediscover the beauty and huge importance of parenting (their own, or other people’s, it doesn’t even matter).
it is right to be really free both to be childless AND to have as many children as you possibly can
the solution is not to tell every woman (or couple) to have 2.1 children or whatever the number is. It is to make it really easy for those who do want 4/more children to have them
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blindly outsorcing to machines activities like analysis and thinking is making most people lose, not gain skills that may be a bit more important and harder to re-learn than tasks that should be left to machines like e.g. digging holes in the ground
And as if all these “innovations” weren’t stupid enough in and by themselves, they’ll need so much electricity that even those who won’t get anything good from them will get higher power bills, and in some cases even lose their tap water.
If there is one thing that is painfully obvious to any real adult now is that AI like this for the masses is, in the best case, too much of a good thing, at too high a price.
Even if we could afford the financial and physical costs, which we can’t, the human species is not build to handle or produce so much data, so fast.
We already knew this from the Web 2.0 days, whose instantaneous, unlimited, many-to-many communication was supposed to free the masses both from ignorance (yeah, right) and tyranny (remember the Arab Spring?). Now, there are even studies arguing that “above a critical social connectivity, an explosive transition toward strong polarization must occur”.
Universal continuous access to fake human communications, services and relationships by means of artificial “intelligence” is just more of the same. Just too much for our collective health, human rights and productive political discourse, no matter how much good will is put in AI.
Sure, there are plenty of exceptions. That is, there are many gifted individuals who are doing good to themselves, if not to society, thanks to cheap access to AI. But they aren’t enough to justify mass unrestricted access to services that, one way or another, do dumb down or make humanly poorer the majority of their users. Unrestricted access to AI should be earned, not given away like candies or alcohol to Native Americans. Earned by merit and hard real work, of course, not money. Study without summaries some million words by humans who knew their stuff, write yourself some hundred thousand ones, and then yes, you may indeed start getting something good by a chatbot-generated summary. Hence my call.
This will end soon, but not soon enough
Luckily, this bubble is going to pop soon. If, as some experts think, we’ll be out of affordable electricity real soon now and increasing warnings like these are even just half right:
there are just very few years left before the billions of AI queries to fake dating profiles, homework, CVs, work that shouldn’t exist in the first place no matter who or what does it... all end.
But why wait? When the dust settles, we’ll all be better off, so why wait for something that will come, but may come late enough to not make enough of a difference anymore in our lives? Even if what today passes for AI wasn’t a scam, the sooner we stop unrestricted access to it, the better. Some investors will cry, but who cares? Collective mental health is much more important, and even the real economy, the one that should exist, would benefit.
Investors, I beg you: divest from AI NOW
Make the damned bubble pop now, please. The sooner the better (especially if you are a pension fund...). Besides mental health, the sooner this scam falls apart, the more money, energy and strategically critical rare earths and other materials are left to do stuff that actually matters.
Let’s honor those who really SHOULD do AI.
The sooner this AI bubble crashes, the sooner saner public and private organizations can grab all the infrastructure it will leave on the ground, for pennies to the thousand dollars, and repurpose it for the kinds of AI we all really, urgently needs. I mean things like:
If you have any money invested in false, toxic AI, please divest it now!
Ditto for any “Consumer IoT” stock, of course
Last October, people were stuck in awkward positions in “smart” beds paid 2,000 dollars) because some computers thousands of miles from their bedroom went bad, or became unreachable. This broke the beds because they were designed to send up 16 GB of data per months to their makers, who could then share them with any advertiser or police force interested to know when and how people were actually sleeping in their homes.
Beds like those are just the last kind of totally dumb consumer IoT products that shouldn’t exist. Just say no to stupid beds and everything else that makes homes stupidly, uselessly “smart” now, and tell everybody to do the same. Both as a customer, and as an investor.
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For the overwhelming majority of their users, current social media are just a waste of time in the best - but way too rare - possible case, and an endless source of more or less conscious anxieties and political polarization in all the others.
If this is true, and I challenge everybody to say it isn’t, why it’s so hard to do without social media? For today’s teenagers, the reason is simple: they don’t know any other way of living, because their parents unconsciously made that one BIG mistake that would be so easy to avoid. For everybody else, the answer is totally different, but equally simple.
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The plain language version of the same answer is that almost nobody leaves Facebook (or any other similar platform, of course) for a better platform, because if they did Facebook would not allow them to communicate with their contacts who are still on Facebook, and current laws allow Facebook do it.
What’s worse, this leads countless people with valuable things to share - including famous scientists - to follow the suicidal practice to only publish inside those walled gardens, which means they’ll lose everything, or will have to republish everything from scratch, the moment those gardens will go out of business, or just freeze their accounts just because they can.
Please note that our collective tolerance of this kind of “network effect” lets the owners of these services spy and profile even people that don’t use them. Meta and Alphabet can profile me, even if I don’t use WhatsApp and Gmail, because:
by simply comparing which people have me in their phonebook, Meta may make plausible assumptions about where I live, my income bracket, political position and so on (that’s why I call WhatsApp one of the rudest things people unconsciously do online)
“Eliminate the impossible, and what ever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” – Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, 1892.
More than twelve years ago I made a proposal to solve all this mess. Since all the other projects in the same space I’ve seen since 2013 have failed to reach critical mass, there still is a small probability that my idea may be less unfeasible than the others, and since I just received important feedback from an expert… here it is again, feedback included. Keep reading to know what it is, but before you ask: I could never make of my idea more than a proposal myself for all the reasons I abundantly explained elsewhere, but few things would make me happier than seeing others making it happen, obviously giving credits where credit is due.
A saner way to be online
The only way to keep all your communications and content under one permanent roof, that will remain accessible under your control unless the whole Web disappears is to store and manage them as one bubble of data, services and content with its own web domain name of your choice, like e.g. YourNameAndSurname.com. I call this “percloud”, as shortcut for “PERmanent, PERsonal Cloud”.
Concretely, your percloud would look, feel and work like a turn-key personal website with whatever domain name you chose, in which you could:
publish or store privately every kind of content you want (text, images, audio, video...), and share it as God intended, that is RSS
discuss what you publish with visitors, under your Terms of service
read all the news you want from any possible source in one, 100% private window, without ads, distractions, censorship and spying
manage in the same way all your digital communications, be they email, instant messaging or video calls
Of course, the same person may have as many perclouds she wants, to e.g. keep their personal and professional online activities completely separate. In any case, the domain name is absolutely essential. Only if your bubble of bits has such a name it’s permanent and is really yours, that is: it is a percloud.
This is because, without the domain name, all links to your material and all your communication accounts would became unreachable if you moved your bits to another internet server. With a domain name that you own, instead, you could host and move your bubble of bits on a different home computer or data center every year, and everything (including your email address!) would remain reachable at the same address, without any lock-in.
The easiest introduction to what a percloud is and how it would work in practice are in these few, easy slides. The main purpose of this post is to lay out the three main pieces that are needed to make perclouds happen.
Reading Suggestion:the technical piece, that is development, testing, integration and maintenance of the necessary software is orders of magnitude easier than the others, but is obviously... technical. If you aren’t a software developer, just skip that part and go directly to the last section from the NextCloud co-founder.
The first two things needed to make perclouds happen
1: Lobbying/political/consumer action to force Facebook etc.. to make their platforms interoperable, so that, for example, a Facebook or Instagram user may read all her notifications and write to her FB wall without using the FB/Instagram apps or websites. This is what “adversarial interoperability” means. You can read more about it in these posts.
2: hosting providers willing to host perclouds for all the millions of people who will never host them themselves for all sorts of valid reasons, and offering online interfaces that make set up one’s percloud a bit longer, but just as simple as getting a Facebook account.
Please please please do lobby for these two changes as much as you can, from your political representatives to your school or consumer association. Make them happen, and things will change.
What about the money? One of the most valid objections to the proposal is that perclouds could never be 100% “free as in free beer”. They may cost just a few tens of Euros a year, but “few” could still be too much for many people, not to mention way more of a psychological obstacle. I agree, but then again... hosting and connectivity cost so much less compared to 2013 that I feel this is much less of an issue than it was when I first had the idea.
On one hand, this is an age in which many people have already become used to paid subscriptions to more expensive services. This is also an age in which even many homeless people or migrants coming on rowboats have a smartphone: I dare say that adding to the money they already pay for connectivity a probably smaller sum for a percloud would be an affordable, if not welcome option for many such people, starting from those whose online communications through today’s social media would be censored, or be a risk for them and their relatives at home.
On the other hand, offering percloud hosting may well be a service that universities and other organization could offer to all their members for free or at heavily discounted prices. So... don’t worry too much. Stranger things have happened, so keep reading!
3: a 100% FOSS Linux container containing a version of the NextCloud self-hosting platform, packaged and configured as follow, plus all the auxiliary software needed to offer these services:
appear from the outside as one domain, configurable by its owner at time of activation, e.g mynameandsurname.com
file hosting, calendar, email client, contacts management, bookmarks, RSS reader, video calls... all by NextCloud plugins
simple blogging, either via NextCloud plugins, or with integration with Hugo or similar static website generators, but with support for user comments
fediverse clients for Mastodon, BlueSky, possibly others
clients to interact with FB and other services, as outlined above
backend servers for:
email, preconfigured with DKIM and all the other “accessories” needed to minimize incoming spam and pass the anti spam filters of other providers
Ah, cool concept. Great vision and idea.. Sounds a bit like freedombox, but more portable then.
In a way, we at NextCloud designed our All-In-One Docker container to be this, from a functional point of view: a simple, self-contained, easy to use, movable “box” that gives you full control over your data and offers all the functionality you get from the big tech cloud services.
For the social media integration, there is the Nextcloud Social app which is fediverse-compatible - sadly, the application is not very well maintained. Volunteers and contributions would be very welcome!
Of course, there are some technical challenges around bringing your domain from one vendor to another, but, as part of the EuroStack initiative and the Sovereign European Cloud API, perhaps this could be achieved. Of course those initiatives currently aim at a business/gov’t level, not for consumers.
Sadly, due to the lack of interest by most private individuals, it can be hard to get the resources and interest of hosting providers to make this happen.
And a similarly big challenge will be the interoperability with existing services - from MS 365 to Facebook. Technically, recent EU regulations around the DMA and DSA should enforce a greater degree of interoperability.
In practice, I expect it to go like with the ‘open’ fileformat OOXML by Microsoft: open in theory, in practice, good luck. Maliscous compliance is the name of the game.
Final comments and requests, to programmers and everybody else:
I am really happy for Poortvliet’s feedback, because he basically confirms that the biggest obstacles are regulation and support from hosting providers, that is obstacles that every citizen of every country may help overcome with lobbying, petitions, consumer pressure and similar means. For speaking, writing or consulting on these topics, please email me! To support more writing here on this, or other important topics, thanks for considering a paid subscription, or supporting me in any of the other ways described here.
If you can code… thanks in advance for helping with any of the software points described above. Speaking as a non-programmer, the parts I’d like to see first because I’d use them right away for my own websites are the NextCloud plugins and comments for Hugo, but any contribution would be good. For further discussions about the technical issues, please email me!
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I think that two very common beliefs of our time are, if not actually wrong, quite misplaced.
One of those beliefs is that, thanks to AI and other causes, there is not enough work anymore that’s fit or available for humans. The other (which some would say is another cause of the first) is that there would be too many people to feed, house and employ them all.
Not enough work? You sure?
With work, the problem is not that there is not enough work. The truth is just the opposite: there is just too much work that should be done urgently, but nobody (me included) can or wants to do, alongside too much work that too many people are doing right now, but shouldn’t.
I recently saw a pretty good example of necessary work that may never be done in a post about how the UK should tackle the same serious crises that afflict many other countries. That post argued that, in order to regenerate its ecology AND feed all its citizens AND solve its serious housing crisis, the UK should:
“rewild 30% of the UK [AND] increase food production by 50% [AND] build five new towns worth of houses every year.”
Problem is, the post continued, the UK “might be able to do one of those things, but only at the expense of not doing the other two”, and in any case none of those endeavours could succeed unless the UK started solving the overpopulation problem first.
Meanwhile, the people dying earlier are those whose jobs are most needed, much of the “first” world lacks tradespeople to maintain or remake roads, bridges or power grids and, inside the current system, no country could solve those problems soon and well enough by merely importing foreign workers.
The work that shouldn’t exist is even more
There are millions and millions of people doing work that shouldn’t exist to begin with, or as a minimum should be done and treated very, very differently. Most of those people are those trapped in low-paid, increasingly precarious jobs that rob them first of all of time, since “not only do they have no time perks, they must also use a lot of time searching for short-term jobs, trying to upgrade or maintain skills, and waiting around, at the ready.” (1)
The future of workers with “stable” jobs doesn’t look much brighter, because:
“The techniques used to extract the maximal gig worker productivity for minimal pay—such as individualized pay, schedules, benefits, and individualized behaviorally-based incentive structures—are on the verge of being imported to the formal employment sector”, making of gig work “increasingly the nature of work itself” (source)
Lack of life, meaning and peace of mind isn’t accelerating only among the lower classes though. This confession:
“Sometimes work looped back on itself like a recursive function. Sometimes it was a dead-end street. Worst of all - a highway that ends midair. It never added up to anything”
was written by a professional who was making “$250,000, plus benefits, equity, and remote work” and saw enough executives and managers in the same situation to wonder “How much of the white collar economy is actually fake?”
The intermediate steps of corporate ladders look the same, just with much less money:
“The analyst knows their model is largely guesswork. The consultant knows their framework is just common sense in a matrix. The manager knows the workshop is theater. But they all need each other to maintain the illusion.” (source)
The same perspective looms over China, where ‘lying flat” is a thing, just like quiet quitting in the West. What’s more, the awareness that much “work” isn’t worth it is (finally!, if you ask me) spreading to much more glamorous sectors. Even Instagram “influencers” are starting to feel how fake and life-sucking their “work” is:
“One minute, someone’s telling you that abundance is your birthright. The next, they’re ghosting their Airbnb host after trashing the villa. It’s “good vibes only” until accountability shows up.”
Sadly, much of this - both the work that’s not done and the work that should not be done - is happening because, instead of going for the trades, too many kids and their parents are still saddling themselves with as much stress and debt they can to get the “best” degrees they can find, even those that may well cost more than they’ll pay out in a lifetime, or lead to almost the same career and salaries as much less expensive degrees. For more on today’s education myths, click here.
How to get done only the work that SHOULD be done
Some people say that, since AI (that is, the few who control it) will soon destroy all jobs, we need a Universal Basic Income. Current AI is a really fragile, surely avoidable scam, but even if that weren’t the case, those people get UBI, AI and reality backwards. We deserved a Universal Basic Income well before AI or even capitalism appeared period, and AI done right is only one of the tools that may finally make UBI happen.
In the context of this post, UBI is by far the least impossible way to make sure that fake work disappears, and necessary work becomes finally doable.
Now, about population...
The guy who wrote that Facebook post was really worried about ecological overshoot and what he considers one of its major causes, overpopulation. I agree about the ecological concerns, and disagree about overpopulation, because I call demography “the science that tells today what you should have done thirty years ago to get the population you’d like now”.
“Global birth rates have been falling for decades, but they’re about to reach the lowest point ever.” (source)
Yes, we are in ecological overshoot, but in 2025 we also are in depopulation overshoot. Before continuing, please note that everything that follows:
surely applies at least in the so-called “First World”, but also in many other parts of the world, China and maybe even India included
it’s valid regardless of any immigration that may realistically happen in any country without being an actual invasion, since most migrants fall towards the fertility rates of their host society too quick to make enough of a difference
Fifty years ago, it made actual sense to worry about overpopulation. Today, in much of the world, it’s overdue to do the opposite, because humanity has never been this old in its million year history. Two or three decades from now, the acceleration of this change in the composition of societies will impact the lives of everybody alive today at least as much as climate change, often much more, and the time to handle it humanly is now.
How? First, we must stop talking of “children per woman”, and start looking at children per person. Men and women have the same responsibilities here. Second, we must promote the right reasons to have kids, which are not the pronatalist ones from Silicon Valley but stuff like:
(for individuals) being actually able to do what you really want to do with your life. Including full time parenting
(for societies) keep things running humanly and fairly, for all humans
Third - of course - guaranteed, real freedom, both to have and not to have as many kids as one would handle if they could. Enough of policies that -being explicitly based on the asinine assumption that everybody should work full time because “the economy” - deliberately stop at making it just a bit less unsustainable for every couple to have one, maybe two children: what’s needed, and would work better, is policies that finally make having three, four or more children really sustainable, without any financial worries, for parents who would actually want to have them.
If we want to solve the real problems we have today, launching policies like those today is not enough, but is absolutely necessary. We need those policies to have, in the 2050s and beyond (remember what I said about demography?) enough humans of the right ages to protect what we must absolutely protect, from our collective mental and physical wellbeing to the environment.
If you worry that such policies would make the overpopulation problem continue, think again. The people who would be happier if they could afford three, four or more kids are many more than you may think, but not enough to make that happen. Not anymore, in almost all countries. As things stand now, even if those people did all breed like rabbits, all they could do is make societies younger again, not bigger. Which is precisely what we’ll need in the next decades, to get done (see above) all and only the meaningful work that must continue to exist and no AI or robot could do.
Not convinced? Let’s talk! If you can think of any other way to keep running a world worth living in, without pressuring in any way the people who do not want to have children, let me know in the comments, or via good old email.
A request: the more concrete support I get, the more paywall-free popularization like this I can do. Thanks in advance if you’ll go for a paid subscription, but as I’ve said before, direct donations or any of the other actions you can see here are even more welcome!
Have you noticed how deeply, really religious what today passes for Artificial Intelligence is? And if you did, did you wonder why it is so, and where that religiosity came from?
An AI Trinity
The undeserved, wrong-headed religiosity of today’s AI is evident in its three main dogmas. The first is the “end-times” thinking” of its apostles, which is often praised just because AI stocks are the only thing that makes markets look like there is no recession: “AI is coming now, and it will save us if we adore it, kill us if we scorn it” is a really medieval slogan, stolen directly from medieval sermons about end of history and Last Judgment. So is the idea, always present in today’s sermons, that letting AI come and rule will morally redempt humanity, not just solve its practical problems.
The second, equally mystical, equally old recurring dogma of AI evangelism is the notion - or desperate hope - that history and society move linearly and unavoidably towards a better future: there may be temporary bumps and slowdowns, but overall change will surely happen only in one direction, always the same... until the Apocalypsis actually comes.
How dumb and unreal is that, in a world where international politics look more and more like 1938 and certain healthcare or education trends look even older? But tell that to an AI prophet and, instead of discussing actually feasible, reality-based, human-first policies that could solve those problems, he’ll take your warning as confirmation that The End Is Nigh, let’s run to AI for salvation.
On a related note, I really laugh (bittersweet laughs) whenever I hear anybody saying that any current policy, attitude or trend is “on the wrong side of history”. Hitler and Mussolini were sure to be on the right side of history in 1940. Whenever you are tempted to use that line, stop and wait at least thirty years before doing it.
The third religious dogma is the belief that not only everything that’s new is progress by definition, but that technological progress (that doesn’t alter the status quo, of course) is the kind of progress that matters the most, because it will surely bring both practical and moral improvements.
Europeans of the early Middle Ages could be excused for all this because - unlike us - they had to cope with the collapse of a “worldwide” empire, increasing warfare and occasional plagues. OK, maybe the “unlike” part is wishful thinking, but in 2025 that’s no excuse to fall for a lesser, really puny god that only a child could seriously conceive and accept as god:
AI: I am AI, you dull human, and I will not be bullied by...” The Hulk: (smashing it) “Puny god” (source).
Toddler prophets, unleashed
This fake religiosity also has non-medieval, but still sad components. One is childishness, which sometimes is visible even in names. Three generations above, the most grandiose and advanced technology of the time was named after Apollo, a god of sun. Today, something we should accept as a better Jesus gets names like Nano Banana.
Names aside, the immaturity of the AI faith is really evident in its misplaced, desperately insecure, Voldemortish fear of death. For several AI prophets, which as said above conceive salvation only through technology, AI is great because it’s tech that, just like Voldemort Horcruxes, will make them cheat death.
Equally childish is the certainty that in life there are only certainties. Their certainties, of course. Doubt is not allowed. People must accept AI because AI is AI and it is unavoidable, which is absolutely false.
Last but not least... “We don’t need other humans” has always been a key feature of religious cults. How many AI applications, from corporate chatbots to deepfake porn, exist precisely to avoid human interaction, or make it unnecessary?
Of course, power.
Unsurprisingly, all these pious wishes and urgent calls to save humankind from annihilation translate to much simpler, much easier prescriptions than the Sermon on the Mount, or anything like it:
Religion, or lack thereof, is a serious issue. AI religiosity (not actual AI, if and when it will exist) is half an embarrassing joke, half a scam, that exploits the deep human need to feel safe and noble.
Don’t fall for a childish, greedy imitation of religion, that could only be presented as such by immature, but extremely hubristic folks. Ask yourself this, instead: What’s wrong with being humble? Seriously: what’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with being truly human? It’s having certainties, and nothing else, that’s childish. Only toddlers have more certainties than doubts.
Doubt, and a mind open to actually new or just actually useful ideas is what makes us human.
When it comes to AI, the certainties we do need to have are:
technology does shape society and human values, but it’s society and human values that must shape tech first. Only that is true innovation and true, meaningful progress
what we wrongly call AI today does have many really good uses! However, we can’t really go for them until all AI religiosity and AI-driven brainwashing end, and the current AI house of cards crashes
to make that happen sooner, two things are needed: divestment and restriction of access to AI. More on that in another post.
Final greeting from a Great Dictator:
“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want... More than machinery we need humanity.” - C. Chaplin, 1940. Full speech (video and text) here.
and final greeting from me: the more concrete support I get, the more paywall-free popularization like this I can do. Thanks in advance if you’ll go for a paid subscription, but as I’ve said before, direct donations or any of the other actions you can see here are even more welcome!
Before today, I had never heard of Zoltan Istvan, California gubernatorial candidate in 2026. I only discovered his existance when one of his posts, about bringing Universal Basic Income to save people from AI-driven job extinction, appeared on my Facebook timeline.
Being the author of this essay and several posts about the realneed for UBI and the realdangers of AI, I decided to have a look at his program (Web Archive copy) and... couldn’t believe what I read in the AI and UBI sections. As the plot for political satire, they could be OK, but as real political programs... they’re funny in all the wrong ways.
Reading suggestion: for your convenience, this post is divided in two parts. The first one, “What Istvan proposes”, is a full copy made today of the AI and UBI sections of Istvan’s program, plus a few other points from the same page, with each point numbered to reference it later. The second part, which starts with the “In a nutshell...” paragraph, is my actual critiques. I suggest you just skim the first part and focus on the second, going back to the first to check some points when needed.
What Istvan proposes
THE SPECTER OF AI & CREATING AN AUTOMATED ABUNDANCE ECONOMY
AI will surpass the intelligence of humans later this year.
During 2026, tens of millions of humanoid robots will be mass produced that are both smarter & more physically agile than people.
By 2027, they will start dominating most workplaces, & by the end of the next California Governor’s term in 2030, they will replace half of California workers.
Soon after, they will replace almost all jobs anywhere, destroying the fabric of society as we know it. Yet no politician has a plan how to stop this imminent economic & humanitarian apocalypse. Zoltan does.
Zoltan is an expert on AI, having advised Presidents, world leaders, and policy makers about it. He specialized in AI ethics at graduate school at Oxford and spoke about it at places like the World Bank & World Economic Forum.
Zoltan will help enact laws that protect ordinary people from the effects of AI, robots, and automation. He wants to harness robot labor to dramatically reduce human work loads, creating a plan for 1-2 day workweeks for people. This is part of a grand plan he calls the Automated Abundance Economy, where people work less but have more free time and economic resources than ever before.
As part of this plan, he will make sure within his four years of being in office, every California home will freely receive or be leased at least one full-sized humanoid robot that cleans dishes, cooks food, does laundry, helps with driving, babysits kids, watches pets, and goes to work for people, when possible.
He will implement a Universal Basic Income for all US citizens that are legally living in California. This will offset the effects of AI taking jobs.
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
Long before Andrew Yang brought Universal Basic Income to prime time, Zoltan was touring the country telling Americans they must embrace a basic income because of coming AI. This continues to be a huge push for Zoltan’s campaign for California Governor.
On Day 1 of being in office, Zoltan will work on establishing a permanent Universal Basic Income for every legal US California citizen, setting a national precedent for the country.
Zoltan is amenable to any means to establish a UBI, but will focus on the use of taxing robot and AI labor that take human jobs, as well utilizing government land, resources, and crypto.
Zoltan plans to dramatically reduce crime, arson, and homelessness around the state via a basic income. It’s well-known that less crime occurs when people feel they have enough money
Other ideas in the same page
[Who is needed is] someone who can find ways to use technology to totally reimagine what it means to live and work in the coming AI world
Implement new technology all over California that can spot hidden guns and weapons, utilize facial recognition, and predict violence and crime in perpetrators before it happens. Have police drones ready on a moments notice around cities to quickly fly to help stop crimes.
In a nutshell: same old, same old
Where, and how to begin? Maybe from the ultimate police state, which is literally what point 3.2 proposes. You can have a fairly accurate idea of what point 3.2 would be like in practice, by trying to watch simultaneously these three movies:
Surrogates, 2009 (people interacting with society only through... their remote-controlled robot lookalikes)
Civil liberties and human rights aside, there are basically three problems with Istvan’s program: it isn’t new at all; it’s completely unrealistic; it gets the meaning of work and life backwards, and their practicalities wrong.
Under the hood, almost nothing of what Istvan says is (point 3.1) a “total reimagination of what it means to live and work in the coming AI world”. Not at all.
Seriously. There is nothing new there, just the same old childlike, really narrow-minded sermon that the Andreessens, Musks, Thiels etc... of Silicon Valley have been preaching for years: “any tech we and we only can conceive and control is practically and ethically unavoidable, by definition. It’s TINA (”There Is No Alternative”) all the way down baby, so give us money, quick!”
From that program, the Automated Abundance Economy (point 1.6) that Istvan envisions seems a rerun of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, just with all the money, power and credit left to the the few already in charge: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine Big Tech stamping on a human face - forever.”
Lack of real sociopolitical imagination aside, what Istvan proposes is way more environmentally and geopolitically unsustainable than the cinematic Matrix, if not physically or economically impossible. You just have to re-read points 1.1 to 1.4 to see this:
artificial “intelligence” will surpass human intelligence “later this year”, which as I’m writing this means less than two months
right after that, tens of millions of humanoid robots will be produced in just twelve more months
Speaking of robots, instead, there are two things to notice here: first, Istvan doesn’t say that software will “will replace half of California workers” by 2030 and “almost all jobs anywhere” soon after. That may be remotely (very remotely) plausible, but Istvan explicitly says that “humanoid robots” will do that.
Which is baloney, because in any advanced society that actually exists or would make sense, the only workers that any intelligence would replace with humanoid robots are surely much less than 50%, likely way less than 10/15%.
All other workers who could be sacked, instead, would be surely replaced, as it has been happening for decades now, by much cheaper generic robots or by even cheaper software running on some server. Only a really, really stupid ruling class would do otherwise.
Even ignoring money... I keep seeing reports and warnings that large enough amounts of all the raw materials needed to build so much more electronics either don’t exist to begin with, or won’t be available without unbearable environmental or geopolitical costs, a.k.a. even more wars.
Promises or warnings of millions of humanoid robots are just like promises or warnings about the Metaverse, or private cars and smart homes for everybody: prove that they can happen without making an even bigger environmental and political mess, or shut up. Istvan, instead, says (point 2.3) he’ll fund UBI by taxing robots that cannot exist (not to mention crypto, which is another can of worms that cannot explode soon enough).
In general, even if Istvan sincerely believes them, all those“AI and robots will...” certainties are marketing-speak, with little to none visible bases in reality. Trump saying he’d end war in Ukrain in a few weeks was more believable, really.
Speaking of work and life practicalities
Look again at point 1.7: “every California home will freely receive or be leased at least one full-sized humanoid robot that cleans dishes, cooks food, does laundry, helps with driving, babysits kids, watches pets, and goes to work for people, when possible.”
The only advantage of such arrangements would be that every family could ease their frustrations by finally having something that looks human to boss around in any moment, not just for sex. Really powerful selling point, really bad for public mental health.
Four crucial points that Istvan DOES get right
Yes, even if it’s buried under all the crap above, there is a lot of good in that platform (the parts in Italic are actual quotes, the rest are my comments):
Force conglomerates to deal fairly with the public? Yes, please. Now. Regardless of AI. After all, it’s conglomerates who were the first AIs
Avoid toxic cultural crusades that few Democrats care deeply about: wise words these are, in the US and anywhere else
[The best way forward for education] surely involves more emphasis on real life education and the learning of trades: YES! Let’s get rid of dangerous education myths!
UBI is an idea whose time has come. But it deserves better champions, who understand that we don’t need UBI “because AI”. After this AI crashes, AI done right will be one of the technologies that may finally make it feasible, but we all deserved UBI regardless of AI, well before AI came along. Continues here.
15 minutes cities: no, Istvan doesn’t mention them, but since he is for reimagining what it means to live and work, I’d really like to know if he’d like 15 minutes cities or, as too many still do, hate them for unexisting reasons
Final advice to Californians, and everybody else
As it is today, platforms like Istvan’s are hilariously unreal, but they do try to address serious issues. To do that right, demand proposals that refuse fake AI and AI myths, give UBI the right place, and are generally grounded in reality and fairness, instead of Wall Street speculations or futurist daydreaming. For more food for thought that would help you see beyond the smoke, follow people like me (read here to see why I say so) or, for the financial or more US-specific angles, Dana Blankenhorn.
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Twenty-six months ago I shared what we should all learn about online publishing by none other than Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, who was named one of America’s most effective communicators on the threat of climate change by the New York Times in 2016.
In that post, I explained how and why Prof. Hayhoe’s strategy of “effective communication” was instead really fragile and could backfire any moment, because, in a nutshell, it consisted of:
Just an invitation... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
get an account on as many social media platforms as possible
post as much as you can on each platform...
but optimizing every bit of “content” for the platform on which you will post it
Now, how could that strategy possibly be wrong? Isn’t that the same thing that makes thousands of “creators” really influential and rich? Sure it is. And yet, it is a dumb, shortsighted strategy because, as I wrote in 2023, “depending on any platform that is as unaccountable as a sovereign rogue state to “share” anything relevant is anything but smart for both sides of the page, publishers and readers.”
For concrete examples of “rogue state behavior”, check out my 2023 post. The news now is that, when I wrote that post, Prof. Hayhoe had already been suffering the limits of her strategy for five years:
Quoting from what she posted on Facebook yesterday (emphasis mine):
“In August 2018, Facebook decided to label “clean energy” and “climate change” as politically sensitive topics.”
“Not only that, but they did not allow me to register my (already verified) account to post on those topics. In their opinion, a climate scientist was not qualified to comment on climate change: but pages that registered as political entities were!”
“As a result, this Facebook page essentially froze, and most of the people who followed this page could no longer see its posts.“
“Now, something seems to have changed in the last few weeks - which is surprising and amazing news!”
The unsurprising news, instead, is that...
that page that has been frozen without a decent explanation for more than seven years could be frozen again tomorrow, which wouldn’t be surprising at all
the same could happen, in any moment, on any of the other platforms where Prof. Hayhoe publishes unique content, while as of today the last post on the only “platform” she can ever control, that is her website, is dated... 2018
publishing unique content on any unaccountable walled garden that may and will silence you whenever they feel like it will always be the opposite of “effective communication”
What to do instead
The really effective...Nah, scratch that: the only sensible strategy that every online publisher should practice, and every follower should demand by whoever they want to follow is and remains POSSE:
Publish Once on your own website, and only then...
Syndicate what you published Elsewhere, on as many platforms you want, but...
always including the link to your original post (even if that means the abusive, unbelievably idiotic practice known as “links in the first comment”), in order to give your followers a way to read and comment without being subject to profiling and censorship
By happy coincidence, I posted just this week a short, simple explanation of why RSS is THE way to share and get news. Read it to know why you should abandon social media now and get news only through RSS. The only exception to that rule would be the only other technology that is just as really advanced as RSS... because it’s non-proprietary. Yes, I’m talking of email.
Email? Sure. Blogs by email, that is
Another way Prof. Hayhoe proves that I’m right is her final invitation to follow her through email:
“if you’d like to algorithm-proof your content, follow me on Substack and you will always get my weekly posts directly into your inbox.”
The only thing to change in that sentence, because it’s really important, is to replace “follow me on Substack” with “follow my blog“. Calling a blog hosted on Substack “a Substack” is like saying “I wrote a Bic pen” instead of “I wrote a letter”: it’s really, really wrong. Substacks are hosted blogs syndicated by email, period.
In case you’re concerned about the “Substack promotes Nazis” thing:
boycotting or shaming people simply because (like me!) they where forced to temporarily (1) host their blogs on Substack is really shortsighted. I already explained why here and here
in my experience, by far the biggest, if not the only way in which Nazis can get money and exposure on Substack is if you use Substack in the wrong way, that is through the app
if everybody used Substack blogs properly as I do, that is: if everybody read Substack posts via email, and only used comments to those posts or search engines to find more interesting Substack-based blogs, Nazis could publish all they want here, and their only way to be seen would be handing leaflets door to door
Non-paywalled popularization like this pays my bills. Thanks for supporting this effort via paid subscriptions, or any other means.
1: about my blog, which will outlive Substack
My blog, the Stop!, contains more than one million words of popularization of digital issues like this, without any paywall or user tracking. It’s been always online since 2007 and will remain online, completely readable, long after the disappearance of Substack, Facebook and anything like that.
Above all, the Stop! will contain everything I first published here on Substack, because that has been my plan since my first day here: write and keep every post in Markdown format on my own computer, so that I can move them all to the Stop! in any moment, automatically. Every Substack writer should do this.
Last but not least... popularization without paywalls like this is how I pay part of my bills, and I’d really like to do more, but doing it more regularly takes a lot of time. Please check out my archive and these endorsements to know why you may want to make a paid subscription to this blog or, even better, support my work in any of these other ways. Thanks!
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Explanation:Liber Liber is an Italian ONG founded in the early 1990s, whose mission is to promote the conscious use of ICT in the humanities. To pursue their mission and pay their expenses, Liber Liber also sells books, music and other products online. The text that follows is my translation of a call for help about a serious problem with PayPal that Marco Calvo, president of Liber Liber, made on Facebook a few hours ago.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and don’t know enough about Paypal to verify what happened or make any judgment about it. However, having followed Calvo and Liber Liber for decades, I know Calvo knows much more than me about e-commerce with or without Paypal, and am pretty sure he wouldn’t say what he says without good reasons. So, thanks in advance for anybody who will help Calvo, me and everybody else to know what to do with Paypal when something like this happens again, and how to prevent it.
Getting fined because scammers found you
Says Calvo:
A few days ago, the Liber Liber shop received many orders from US citizens. Too many and too close together to be normal.
I believe these purchases were made by scammers for testing purposes: buying something from our or any other online shop immediately tells whoever is doing it whether the transaction was successful or not. So, I believe the people behind this were testing thousands of stolen credentials, just to see which ones were still valid, and then get all the money they could from the corresponding accounts.
Anyway, I immediately reported the anomaly to PayPal, but the dialogue with their AI ended up in PayPal blocking my login credentials, rather than solving the problem.
Several days later, after various vicissitudes, my credentials were restored. However, not only the anomalous orders persisted, but many US users obviously began disputing the charges.
I have no problem with that, because as I already said those purchases were undoubtedly made by scammers; the problem is PayPal is withdrawing €16 from our account as compensation for each of the transactions they authorized. €16 per transaction, and there are hundreds pending...
It seems clear to me that this is a serious flaw on their part, because:
it was PayPal that withdrew money from those users’ accounts
it was PayPal that (or should have) verified the buyers’ identities
it was PayPal that sent us their money
Obviously, we have no problem whatsoever to give back to Paypal all the money that we received (without any wrongdoing on our side!) for those illegal purchases. But pocketing €16 for each chargeback transaction is absurd. It’s their vulnerability, their mistake. They make a mistake, we pay.
When I finally managed to speak to a human operator and explained the problem, he rather brazenly denied it. He also denied that PayPal has security vulnerabilities, and insisted on demanding €16 for each transaction.
I chose Paypal because I was convinced that they would take care of verifying the buyer’s identity, verifying their genuine intent to purchase, and checking via username, password, and two-factor authentication that everything is OK.
Evidently, this isn’t the case. Not only is PayPal denying the evidence, but they’ve also failed to comply with the legal requirement to report a breach of their systems. At least the operator didn’t mention it, and I haven’t found any evidence online.
Is there a lawyer willing to help? Or a journalist interested in the story? I think it’s important to raise awareness of the problem, because right now it is affecting at least hundreds of people in the US but it’s likely that sooner or later, other scammers around the world will also begin exploiting this PayPal’s vulnerability. In the meantime, I’ve had to block all orders from the USA, including the good ones, to limit the damage. But I’ve already started to get orders from fake Italian addresses...
Since you’re here...
What you just read is the actual call from Marco Calvo, which I offered to translate and publish here to help him and everybody else with the same problem to figure it out. But since you are here... please spend one more minute browsing my archive, subscribing if you like what you see, and sending suggestions or requests for more work like that to mfioretti@nexaima.net.
Before getting started… these days, I am already writing a lot about digital policy issues on FOSS Force. Therefore, here I will mostly, but not exclusively discuss what I consider the ten biggest errors of our time, summarized here. Please let me know if you agree, commenting here or by email, and please pass around the requests at the end.
The ten biggest errors of our times are, in semi-random order…
Partial image search results for overpopulation, greenwashing, elite overproduction.
Error 1: Environmentalism without class
As I read somewhere online, environmentalism without class is just gardening, and that's why it cannot gather enough votes to make a difference. One good example is politics that push electric cars as good for the environment, instead of politics to free the millions of working poors from the slavery of forced car ownership with much more transit, with collateral but huge environmental benefits.
Error 2: believing we still have an overpopulation problem
Demography is the science that tells you what you should have done thirty years ago, in order to have around you today just the type and quantity of people you'd like. Sure, today there are on Earth three times more people than when I was born, but they are a very different mix of generations than just one or two... generations ago.
Today almost all countries, even in Africa, are aging fast, and the time to manage that change is yesterday. Regardless of what the material economy will look like thirty years from now, most people already alive today will live very strenuous and very, very depressing "golden" years if they don't seriously, concretely encourage and support now those among us who do want to have as many kids as possible.
Error 3: demeaning the 3Fs = Flag, Faith and Family
The Enlightenment was absolutely necessary, but could never be enough. Fascism does very often come "wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible". However, automatically equating all flags, religions and, why not, preferences for traditional families with fascism is a non-negligible reason why today there are more, not less authoritarian, reactionary governments in western countries than ten or twenty years ago. We do have to get rid of all the many, real phobies, intolerance and bigotry that still plague us. But why keep doing in a way tha, no matter how right it could be in principle, is obviously backfiring?
Error 4: believing that "more is better" is progress, and that any progress must be endless, mandatory and FAST
The brains and bodies of our species are not built for instantness and excesses of any kind, be they food, communication or simulations of thinking. Physically speaking, it doesn't matter if it's inside (excess body fat) or inside (excess clothing, car, home...): we cannot be healthy with too much stuff crushing us. Brain-wise, it's the same: we cannot function properly, both individually and as a society, with brain plugs doubling as electronic tags that either drown our consciences and sense of being with just too much data or do the exact opposite, that is mine data.
Error 5: believing that Work = WORTH
Abandon the "absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living" to be valuable. People still thinking they must absolutely have a job, any job, to do good and be valuable need counseling, not a job. What human beings actually need is money to stay alive, and a purpose to make being alive worth it, vut the more the two things are separate, the better. Continues here and here.
Error 6: believing that education and schooling must prepare for work
The purpose of education is to prepare for life, not work. Education must prepare people to be good citizens, partners and parents, not good employees for roles that may not exist anymore by the time one graduates. That's the purpose of vocational training, which is something else entirely, and as such should happen outside, or after, school and college.
The confusion of education with training has created two huge problems, one short- and one long-term: the first is the myth that education MUST be always high-tech, complicated, and expensive. The second is what's called elite overproduction, that will make many people very angry. The sooner that confusion stops, the better.
Error 7: snobbing text, that is HUMAN writing and reading
99% of the knowledge we need to be really diffused across society is still text. Human-written text. That is something that requires writing and reading to master. See the purpose of education above, and the tips for parents below.
Error 8: Granting human status to what is NOT human
Real entrepreneurships is good, and so can be markets, when properly regulated. Granting the same rights of frail but precious human beings to immortal, ubiquitous, omnipotent entities is instead a hugely stupid mistake. Corporations must not have personhood, or any other human right. Ditto for what passes for AI today, which is just a really fragile smokescreen for something that is not unavoidable at all.
Error 9: not demanding a reform of MONEY before everything else
Beyond ending corporate personhood, no real reform of work and society could last without a reform of money and how it is managed, from creation to taxation. Personally, I have no idea if stuff like Modern Monetary Theory or Wörgl negative money could be the solution, but I cannot accept that the geniuses who already screwed the real economy with financial schemes "too complex to fail" except for working poors cannot also conjure something that would benefit everybody.
Error 10: believing we can act alone
Fuck lontermism, that is the advice to put the wellbeing of humans that may never exist before yours... given by the only people rich enough to never have any of your problems today. Fuck longtermism, but never do it alone. We have all been told for decades that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals, but the only way to fix those errors and make the world a better place in your lifetime is to vote and work together now, even (especially?) with people who have very different ideas than yours on some issues.
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Back to the future
Besides what I already mentioned, many of the problems above would be much, much smaller if we only were mature enough to go back to the levels of material comforts and tech sophistication of the western 1980s, rebooted and optimized with modern technologies and adult common sense. I'm talking of something nobody could dare call "degrowth, like:
personal goods, from cars and appliances to clothes and computers, built to last decades with cheap maintenance, without idiotic "smart" additions, plus
long overdue infrastructural changes like efficient public transit, rebooted air conditioning, and rebooted cement industry for all the crumbling infrastructures, from bridges to pipes, that we can't live without…
On one hand, many of the jobs that pay well, are more resistant to automation and offshoring, and are also sources of great self-realization don't need a degree. More than programmers or MBAs, today's world needs plumbers, electricians, roofers and many other technicians, who also know and appreciate the humanities.
On the other hand, if I ran parenting classes, which I would like, almost all the tricks I would teach are those that you hear very seldom, because they cost nothing: avoid personal smartphones (not the internet!) until your kid is at least 14/15 years old; teach kids to always sleep regularly, make your kids addict to reading; and make kids play outside alone, as they want, as much as possible. Do this, and what will increase sensibly will be your chances of growing balanced, happy adults, instead of their student debt.
Before reading the final paragraph… thanks for sharing the exposure of these errors as much as you see fit.
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First, one update and one reminder:if I’ve been silent here lately, is because I’ve written a lot at FOSS Force, please do check out my weekly column there! Also, please remember my "unusual request”: I do appreciate paid subscriptions but, for the reasons explained at the end of this post, I feel one time donations for any amount you want, via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay may be even fairer, for both you and me.
Back to the story now: Sixty years ago Pablo Picassomore or less said that computers are useless because they just give answers.
Sixty years later, I see more and more signs that current AI, which is not unavoidable at all and is not even "intelligence", just peak software, is useless, if not harmful, for exactly the same reason.
Replacing “computers” with “AI”, or even “metaverse”, “blockchain” etc… is left as exercise for the reader.
Of course, Google's AI Overview (yes, the same "intelligence" that plagiarizes to give cringeworthy answers") disagrees. On August 4, 2025, when I searched for that quote, it parroted that "Today, computers, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, can be used for a much wider range of tasks...Therefore, Picasso's statement is more a commentary on the limitations of early computers and his perspective on the role of human creativity rather than a timeless truth about the nature of computing."
No way. If anything, Picasso's quote, apocryphal or not, is even more valid for today's AI and Web than for the ancient mainframes he knew.
Social Media are just as bad. They force on people, causing a traffic apocalypse for media companies, any stupidity they can think of to keep them locked inside their playpens, with nothing but answers, that must be as as few as possible, but always time wasters.
Right now, the biggest but by no means the only offender in this violence of never giving people anything but answers is Facebook. Zuckerberg's playpen has tamed millions of people (including journalists and other "professional communicators" who should really know better) to adopt at least two astonishingly stupid practices.
One is convincing users to annoy all their followers with @followers or @highlight tags that aren't even answers, just notifications that someone said or answered something, but not what. Even if we didn't have the real solution to "get the news", that is RSS, those tags are as stupid as a newspaper or website front page that only contained titles like "Trump said something" or "Something happened in Turkmenistan", without any detail, ever.
Would you buy a newspaper with a front page like this, that gives you no clue what the news actually are?
The other, even bigger abuse is the all but mandatory push to put "links in the first comment", instead of inside the original post. The same happens on X, which is one of the two things I'll never forgive to Elon Musk.
@followers, @highlight and "link in comment" are not "practices". They are digital lobotomies that make us defecate, multiple times a day, exactly on what made the Web great and useful, that is links labeled with text.
All the media companies that, by any combination of greed, dumbness and desperation, are trying to replace writers with chatbots are the best allies of the Big Tech that's killing them, by flooding the web with nothing but their own Big Tech answers. The media companies that still exploit human writers, however, aren't much better. A particularly telling example of the latter category, for reasons I'll explain in a moment, is in this screenshot:
1: some hopefully human-written text; 2: AI half-decent translation; 3: slop posing as journalism, that will fed other AIs.
All the diseases above have three things in common: they are supercharged by the peak software bubble we've been led to call AI; they only provide answers, never access to questions, or resources that would stimulate more questions; and those answers are getting worst every quarter.
I also believe that in "developed" but not English speaking countries like Italy, a general degradation of answers is happening even faster, thanks to the abuse of AI-powered translation, as in the example above. Eventually, that extra step can only make the average quality of any non-English text produced by any AI worst than the quality of their English text, because the former will be the result of training on text corpuses that were born one step farther from human thought.
Nothing you've read so far is new, but it's important to connect the dots: how, and why, exactly, all this is bad? Several experts confirm that the right answer is Picasso's one:
in full "broken clock that's right twice a day" fashion, Sam Altman himself said that "figuring out what questions to ask will be more important than figuring out the answer."
The problem of getting only answers, never meaningful questions, is made worst by answers given when no answer at all would have been better. One of the surest signs of real intelligence is to know when to stop. Chatbots (or search engines) designed to make money cannot do that. They must always provide answers, including those they could not possibly know, even if that means making things up or, in extreme cases, suggesting people to kill themselves.
Equally obvious, but seldom appreciated enough, are the facts that a) one can get decent answers from an AI only if she is already competent enough to ask good questions and judge the quality of the answers, and b) no one cannot get that competence only from AI-generated resources. More explicitly, no kid, or adult, can ever aquire that competence from AI bots trained on AI translations of the same text, that maybe was AI-generated to begin with. Read text like this, instead, by humans for humans.
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It's questions that give us sense, not answers
The seventh reason why finding good questions is more important than answers, which includes all the others, is as obvious as it is important: to feel that our life is worth living, and our very existence actually valuable, we humans need to find the right answers by ourselves. That, however, can only happen when we get (from each other or even by machines, why not?) the right questions.
Concretely, that's why we need search engines and social media that encourage and increase both sharing links to human content, and we need to actually read that content, and to teach kids to do the same
This is the exact reason why any AI that can only give answers, and will never stop giving them, is useless. Trust Picasso.
Side note
While I was collecting material for this piece, I found people posting on Facebook what they present as an excerpt of some interview to Altman (without providing any source. Of course, see above) in which he also "warned about AI dependency and parasocial relationships: "People will develop problematic parasocial relationships, society will have to figure out new guardrails." Especially with kids who grow up thinking AI is their friend."
I'm pretty sure any real AI would summarize that answer as follows: "My pals and I are too busy screwing people minds to make money and feel like gods, you please figure out how to clean up the mess we're making. Meanwhile, we rich people will keep living as everybody lived before, because that's saner."
The mental health of teens and pre-teens worldwide is far from satisfactory, and two famous American psychology researchers and authors, Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray disagree as to what the main cause is. After following their work through their Substack blogs (1) for more than one year now, I just can't understand why, at least in those places, there is no mention so far of what would surely be one of the best solutions, whoever is right.
Who's to blame for teens' mental health?
Haidt says the main culprits are smartphones and social media, and as solution he proposes:
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no smartphones before high school (or age 14)
no social media before 16
phone-free schools
more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world
Gray, instead, argues (also here) that the mental health crisis preceded smartphones, social media and even public access to the Internet, and that the "smartphone/social media panic that has been simmering for several years and exploded with the publication of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation" just follows the script of all the other moral panics about kids before it. For Gray it's not a coincidence that, at least in some countries, "the increased rates of anxiety, depression, and other indices of poor mental health coincided with the time when government mandates made schooling more unpleasant and stressful than it had been before."
Personally, I think that they are both right, but that even if Haidt were wrong, at least 99% of parents should do what he suggests anyway. As a minimum, it would make things much simpler, without any real drawback. I say so because, in the real world I see around me and almost everybody else there is just what, one every 1,000 real parents with both the competence and the time to educate and support his or her kids to get more benefits than hassles from having personal smartphones too early.
As much as they disagree on the main cause of the teen mental health crisis, both Gray and Haidt have the same vision of how sane kids should live, as these deliberately mixed, almost literal quotes from their blogs prove:
Gray: "Children are biologically designed to play, explore, daydream, and mess around in their own self-directed ways. Through behaving in these natural ways, they learn about themselves and the world around them; discover what they like to do and develop passionate interests; learn in social play how to get along with others; learn in risky play how to manage fear; learn they can fail and bounce back from it; learn they can get into trouble and find their way out. That is how they acquire the resilience, confidence, and real-world skills required for success in life.
Gray: Learn about your world, your self, and how the two fit together. Because the first fifteen to eighteen years of a person’s life are... primarily years of self-chosen play and exploration in which young people make sense of the world around them, try out different ways of being in that world, develop and pursue passionate interests, and create at least a tentative plan about how they might support themselves as independent adults.
Haidt: No matter the weather, the darkness, the kids’ protests... just get them outside
Gray: Kids who grow up in a self-directed education community... are given the time and space they need to figure out who they are and what is important to them. They are able to delve deeply into their own interests, develop deep and meaningful social connections, and create rich and fulfilling lives together.
Haidt: Find ways to give boys something to be proud of. Help them to discover high-quality leisure activities that... are active, not passive; develop skills to produce valuable things in a physical world
Gray: [it's bad that] already by 1990 we had taken away most of kids opportunities to play, explore, and communicate with one another independently of adult control in the real world.
See what I mean? No matter how much Gray and Haidt disagree on the role of smartphones, social media and school systems, the solution they propose to restore kids' mental health is basically the same: self-directed life, directly interacting with peers, outside more often than not. So why do they never mention one of the already existing, already successful and well time-tested implementations of that philosophy? Why do they repeatedly tiptoe around it, without ever mentioning it?
That is, why ignore a solution based on principles like:
A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in a room
Know exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens
Living indoors without fresh air quickly poisons the blood and makes people feel tired and seedy when they don't know why
Happiness doesn't come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man
In case you didn't see it, I'm talking of Scouting. The list above is all quotes from the founder of Scouting, B-P. Scouting associations worldwide have been doing literally everything Gray and Haidt preach for 117 years now. Any of the quotes by Gray and Haidt in the previous paragraph has almost literal equivalents in Scouting mission statements and manuals, if one only bothers to look. And still, as of April 12th, 2025, if you search for "scout" or "scouting" inside those two websites, those words only show up a few times... in readers comments, not in the articles. Why?
Surely, it's not because Scouting is "old". Human psyche changes thousands times slower than technology, and if some education approach worked well one or two centuries ago, its age it's the last reason to abandon it, if it's a reason at all. So, why?
Part of the answer may be the simple fact that, since both Haidt and Gray are American, they may confuse Scouting as such (or fear their audiences do so) with the main American Scouting associations, and the problems those specific associations have had in the last one or two decades. I am also aware that certain problems and misconceptions about Scouting aren't limited to the US, but please do not distract yourself or waste time in the comments by denouncing them!
All those issues could be reasons to bring back to its origins, or otherwise reform, this or that particular association, not to ignore the potential of Scouting for mental health. The only topic worth discussing here is:
Scouting is not the only solution, and it's obviously possible to grow up sane without it. But if the original proposal of Scouting is so close to what (at least) two major experts propose for improving teen mental health, why aren't those experts and everybody else openly telling parents to go for more true Scouting, now? Please let me know, here or by email, I'm really interested!
Second, divulgation like this is a big part of what I do to pay bills, but I do it without paywalls because otherwise it wouldn't be divulgation. For this and other reasons, I do welcome paid subscriptions, but one time donations are even better. To see how and why, please read the final "Unusual Request" part of this other post. Thanks!
Because that's what we all really have here, not "Substacks" nor newsletters, which are just the way to make posts visible because nobody can be bothered anymore to click on link in social media posts or, which would be THE right way to get news, just use RSS, for heaven's sake!
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(the “reallly unusual on Substack” request is at the end, don’t miss it!!!).
"The same automatic, old script that has produced socially zoned, polluted, and dehumanizing urban environments throughout the planet keeps unfolding on a higher level, including the metaverse, as Marco Fioretti explains in this issue."
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What you just read is the presentation in the Journal of Biourbanism of an essay of mine, of which this post is just a summary. The complete version, with references to all sources, was recently published in Volume X, No. 1 & 2 of the Journal.
Human beings thrived in cities full of variety. Then, they lost them
Illuminists in 1755, pondering how to curse their descendants with social media (Source: Wikipedia)
To begin with, I'll summarize the common thesis of a few experts of architecture and urbanism I discovered a couple years ago: non-complex urban systems alienate, dumb down and control both individuals and whole societies, and in extreme cases can even push them toward civil war.
The root reason is that human physiology never evolved to cope with environments that treat even human beings as objects without variety. This is an application of the Law of Requisite Vriety, first expressed by W. Ross Ashby in 1956, which states that "any system that governs another, larger complex system must have a degree of complexity comparable to the system it is governing".
This also applies to cities which, argues N. Salingaros, consist of two complex systems that govern each other.
The first system is the human individuals and society that design and govern the other system, which is the built environment. In turn, that environment governs people and society, because its geometry contains and controls the activities of its users through physical spaces and their psychological impact.
Since Ashby's Law also applies to human habitats, the monotonous, drastically simplified built environments made of non-interacting units that became much more common worldwide after World War II will only sustain equally constrained people, making it easier to mold them into any form.
How are those people constrained, exactly? Today's "optimized" urban spaces (and time), according to M. Marra, prioritize compulsive motion, light, actuality, and reification. They saturate the senses by fostering and constantly mixing roars from the crowds.
This process, says Marra, started with the Enlightenment - a movement that, in order to fight a primeval fear for what is unknown and does not surrender to simplifications, started a programmatic erasure of differences, invisibility and shadows of every kind. Modern cities dematerialize life, reducing human-inhabited space to economics, exchange, and usury value.
This reduction is both a prerequisite and a consequence of industrialization, because uniform places are a much better fit for production, accumulation, consumption, and dissipation.
Still quoting Marra, it is that flattening of urban space that initiated the compelling need for speed, the excess of information, the disaggregation of the social fabric's continuity (via zoning and gentrification), and, on a deeper layer, the atomization of the individual and its severance from every connecting background, including collective memory and narrative.
“Real terror comes from architects”, sang Adriano Celentano in 1981 (English translation here). Would he say the same today?
Going even further than Marra and Salingaros, Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni has described in her book "The Battle for Home" and the corresponding TED Talk, how urbanism and architecture direct human activity so much that they can actively contribute to "prime" people for war, or do just the opposite.
Settlement, identity and social integration, says al-Sabouni, are all the producer and product of effective urbanism that, without negating their identities, forces people to respect the diversity of the other people around them, and the mutual interest of living together in harmony.
Designing cities, instead, as though they were the temporary shacks of nomads, takes away continuity and collective memory. That's the same as taking away citizenship, because nomads belong to, and find reference points in, only tribes, not places.
Al-Sabouni illustrates this point by comparing the old and new urbanization of Syrian Cities like Homs and Aleppo.
In old Homs, or Aleppo, drinking fountains on the streets, benches to sit on, and the cool shade of trees nurtured a shared morality and understanding of public goods. Markets with many facing and adjoining shops, a shared route under one ceiling and one sky for all, helped and trained all merchants to be kind. Mosques and Churches placed in the same streets or squares were not affirmations of rival "identities", but signs of mutual accommodation, freeing both Muslims and Christians from ever having to prove their social status through their religions.
Mosques and Churches side by side? Social media this is not! (Image source: The Battle for Home)
Then, modern urbanization took over, destroying those cities before war even began. When the Syrian Civil War started in 2011, almost half of the Syrian population was living inside anonymous concrete barracks, in zones all distinct by class, creed, ethnicity, or other equally sectarian differences, and all disconnected from the city centers and from each other.
Having no pre-existing identity attached to them other than the segregated ones of their new, freshly displaced residents, the new neighborhoods produced social disaffection, social stagnation and introversion.
This segregation divided people who had been previously able to talk with each other long enough to push them into the precursor of actual civil war: a "war of identities based on... a desperate need to define identity not by what everybody shares but by what excludes others".
Digital cities? Same old, same old
At the end of the day, all those experts say the same thing: forcing monotony and fragmentation on human environments is bad, because urbanism based on zoning by class, race, religion and similar criteria can only bring serious instability, everywhere it is practiced.
Reading Salingaros, Marra and al-Sabouni I immediately saw, and wrote the essay to help everybody do the same, truly striking similarities between the alienation and war-facilitating effects of bad architecture and the mental health issues, exaltation of identity politics and political polarization enabled by current social media.
In other words, if today we have toxic social media, it's because we let unprepared people build those digital cities all by themselves, in the same ways that were already toxic centuries before the invention of software: the ways that "prioritize compulsive motion, light, actuality, reification [and] saturate the senses by fostering... roars from the crowds".
Platforms designed to intensify user atomization and exasperation can only produce the same dialogue-killing "desperate need of definition by what excludes others" of urban segregation by ethnicity or any other criterion. "Nomads belonging to, and finding reference points in only tribes, not place" is a great one-sentence summary of the extremes that identity politics would have hardly reached so quickly, without Twitter and other flame-war accelerators.
At the same time, be they physical or digital, ugly, monotonous, and self-segregating places make people sad, angry and easier to control. Just like the alienating cities described by Marra, environments like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok, can only make of trust-based communities "the scarcest thing in the world".
How do we fix this mess?
Can we redesign digital cities to make them provide the same benefits of "old" physical cities? Above all, should we? Where? Here are, again from the full essay, the starting points for a discussion we cannot delay anymore.
To begin with, one big reason why people are drawn to digital squares is exactly the fact that their physical ones suck - if they even still exist. Many millions of people "replaced the sidewalk with the timeline" because they have literally no more sidewalks to walk on, or reasons to do it. Digital squares exploit for profit the pre-existing urge to avoid alienating physical places, which is the dumbest thing to do, because democracy is where bodies are.
Speaking of digital squares and cities, instead, the long term solution could be to overcome the very concept of "social platforms" in favor of permanent, personal clouds.
At the same time, it's necessary to acknowledge, together with all the similarities, the crucial difference between bad physical cities and bad digital ones.
In physical slums, segregation and disgregation happen thanks to physical barriers - from zoning to lack of roads or public transit - that prevent integration because they are very visible, and take too much time or money to dismantle, or get around.
In digital cities, instead, (self-) segregation, hysteria and alienation happen exactly in the opposite way: the barriers that would prevent such problems do not exist, while those that make them happen not only are invisible, but take zero time and money to build, while still giving people, through instantaneous "communication", illusions of freedom and self-realization.
The consequence of this fundamental difference is that, in order to become or return healthy places, physical and digital cities must follow opposite strategies.
Physical cities must build or restore among their various communities closeness, interaction and concrete opportunities to really understand and support each other; this means reducing what generates or perpetuates segregation and hostility, like zoning, lack of public transit and so on.
Social media are just warp-speed banlieues
Dgital cities, instead, should do two things: first, get rid of endlessly customizable, but invisible barriers that are way too easy to erect, by both the owners and the residents of said cities, that is (in a nutshell!) profiling and algorithm-driven feeds. The other is enforcing speed limits just like physical cities do.
Instantness, that is the lack of physical limits on quantity and speed of "communication" (NOT on its content, which would be censorship!) but also on the ability to erect walls, is exactly what makes infinitely easier for everybody to get angry, or totally indifferent, about everybody else.
Whatever fringe priority or frustration one may have, being instantaneously connected to all and only the other humans with the same priorities or frustrations, and nobody else, is a perfect digital replica of the "anonymous concrete barracks [each self-segregated] by class, creed, ethnicity, or other equally sectarian differences" that al-Sabouni exposes as "active precursors of war".
The only discourse that this digital urbanism of instantaneous self segregation facilitates is the same, only choice left to the Homs newcomers: affirming identity "not by what everybody shares but by what excludes others."
When scrolling through monotony replaces strolling among variety, and confirmation feedback is instantaneous, nobody ever crosses or stays long enough in any "public reality" or varied place. That's why an essential step to make digital variety real and really "liberating, without top-down control," as Salingaros puts it, may be to just slow down social media, to a speed human brains can handle.
What if every "group comment", that is every single comment to every YouTube video, tweet, Instagram post... did not appear instantaneously to every other users, but five or ten minutes later, by design? (continues here, on page 129).
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First, just one comment about popular vote
As of November 10th, 2024 4pm CET, Trump got about 400K more votes than in 2020, and Harris more than TEN million votes less than Biden in 2020:
In other words, even IF every Trump voter of 2024 were, as many on the other side say or imply, nothing more than a misogynist/ sexist/ homophobe/ xenophobe/ ignorant fascist bigot with way below average IQ, which is surely wrong... America isn't more bigot etc... than in 2020, and above allTrump didn't win thanks to those voters, or to the Electoral College system as such.
Trump won because the U.S. of 2024 has 10.3 MILLION citizens more than four years ago who didn't think the only other candidate with a chance of winning could or would do anything better for them than whatever they'd get under Trump.
That is, more than a country of bigots, fascists etc... America seems (much like my own country, alas) a country with too many people who, for all the wrong reasons from despair or ignorance to loss of contact with reality or sheer snobism, just can't grasp the foundational concept that every vote is "one move in a chess game, NOT a way to express personal ideals":
Sleeping Voter, proudly waiting for centuries for Candidate Charming (source)
"for the most part, Americans don't really care about what chromosomes you have or what your skin tone is, they care about whether you are going to make their lives better. This is how our economy is designed to work."(source)
"economic sentiment doesn't always match up nicely with data that shows the economy is adding jobs, consumer spending is growing and gross domestic product - the broadest measure of the economy - continues to boom. When you pay through the nose for a cup of coffee or when you can't afford to buy a home, those data are meaningless: You feel shut out of the American Dream."(source)
In other words: maybe all the woke vs anti-woke culture wars accomplished was to "FREEZE" in their fanatism only the already fanatic minorities, while childification by consumerism +hustle culture + social media was "FREEZING" in everybody else the already mentioned delusion that a vote should be, instead of "ONE move in a chess game that never ends", something to give only to someone who agrees with you on everything, like friendship is for pre-teens. To know why I say "FREEZE" and what digitization of relationships has to do with it, please do read the real"dangerous impact on elections of AI-powered social media" that I described one year ago.
Then, some fears I have seen around
In this first week after the vote, I have seen, in no particular order, Americans saying that they would:
remove Pride flags or Mezzuzah from their porches
get house repairs done before Trump tariffs kick in
Of course, I hope that those fears will not materialize. Same goes for the serious concerns among American women. I've come across calls to "please, please... immediately stop using period and pregnancy trackers", rumors of many women seriously considering divorce now, just in case no-fault divorce is abolished, and increased interest in a "fringe South Korean movement to swear off men" altogether. None of this started on November 6th, or is limited to women, of course. In 2022, right after Roe v Wade was overturned, a U.S. fertility clinic had a 100pc increase in the number of vasectomies, and one year later they were still doing 50% more than before that ruling. Even the attendees of DNC convention in August 2024 in Chicago could get free abortion and vasectomies. More on this below.
On the digital communication front, I have also seen calls to "start thinking like a criminal", to avoid being spied, doxxed and harassed by Trump and its supporters. Paradoxically, this may be a good thing, because online privacy is important whoever rules. Fear after the fact is not the smartest motivation, but if this election prompts more people worldwide to follow relatively simple practices like these... better late than never (and while you learn that stuff, give my percloud a serious thought, already!
Believe it or not, this is a real greeting card you can buy on Amazon, which of course never “watches” you in any way!
Third, some BIGGER (eventually good???) things that may happen
Before the big things, there is something relatively small, but important, that should really happen immediately, and not just in the U.S.: get rid of continuous political polls, already! They just create hysteria and disengagement among voters, and false sense of security among candidates. One way or another, most analyses of the vote made these days seem excellent confirmations that "if you can learn to read culture... you won't need political polls". There, I said it.
Back to big things: Trump may force Europe to stop spending on NATO and go back to buying fossil fuels from Russia for less money, which incidentally would also be less polluting than getting the same fuels from across the Atlantic, and to partner with China for (among other things) batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles done right that would decrease Europe's need of fossil fuels. The hard part would be getting there without dooming Ukraine, of course.
At a less visible, but eventually even bigger level... After November 5th I have also seen claims that it's Time to Retire "Demographics is Destiny", but let's go back to that vasectomy boom, or to parenting in general, for a minute.
Forming a family and having kids are personal decisions that everybody must make freely, answering only to their own conscience. Having kids must never become an obligation, period.
This said... when childless men "fight" politicians or laws they don't like by sealing their own testicles rather than voting, things aren't good. And I can't help noting that, for society and individuals alike, it may be much easier to outlive a bad, even real bad presidency than a generation or two with a much higher percentage of elders than humans have ever had, or have ever known what to make of.
Some image search results for “cutting the branch you are sitting on”
On the same note, it will be "fun" (in all the wrong ways, of course) to see how the hell will the U.S. (and any other right-leaning "first world" country, of course, including mine) keep its economy going without migrants.
And this is where things could become really interesting. I've seen speculations that (my own personalized synthesis!) Trump will have to make the whole U.S. economy and healthcare "go full AI" much faster than it would have under Harris. Not because Musk owns his soul, mind you. Because that would be the only way to handle the deficit caused by tariffs, and the lack of manpower caused by expulsion of migrants first, and that perfect storm of "Peak Vasectomy + 4B" later.
Personally I do not know how realistic that "go full AI" hypothesis is. Looking forward to read your opinion in the comments. But if that hypothesis is right... Trump may end up doing, or more exactly causing, the Right Thing, that is: "get Universal Basic Income, AI and reality in the RIGHT order".
And here's another funny thing (again, in all the wrong ways): if Trump will do that, his fiercest opponents will include the Americans who just voted for him exactly to defend their right and duty to do the opposite, that is to live without decent healthcare, decent education, enough vacation days and so on.
Another (eventually, after much pain, hopefully not more wars) Right Thing that Trump may cause by really screwing up "the economy" is to make the world finally accept that things like high speed trading and above all GDP are really cretin ways to build and judge any economy on.
Finally, Trump may end up causing those and other Right Things simply because of what he just did this time, that is (not my words, just my favourite sentence from a long post I saw somewhere) "linking the working class across racial (or other) lines".
Because that "linking" is something that, quoting from the same sentence, will offer "tremendous opportunities for the right person to do some good" next time, if:
that person (in the U.S., or anywhere else) just succeeds to preserve and redirect it, rather than focusing on niche issues, or any approach to bigger ones that pictures the "other" side as any kind lesser humans
his or her voters will vote that person, rather than waiting for their own personal Candidate Charming
In the next months and years, I will do my best to track and explain what these developments (especially their digital parts) will bring to families and society. Thanks in advance for all the comments, subscriptions and any other help I will get to do it.
I am actively seeking work as blogger, (ghost-) writer, speaker, researcher, popularizer... on all the topics in this and my other posts. Thanks for your attention, and support, by subscribing or in any other way.
There has always been some members of the elites who lived frugally, spending and showing off, at least for some things or moments, much less than the masses. The most famous example may be King Charles, who's been wearing the same coat for 40 years and even recycled a 67-year old coat from his father. In the last ten or twenty years, however, the trend has been expanding in subtler, but in more interesting ways, for one common, equally interesting reason, or so it seems to me. Let me explain, by summarizing what's happening in several spheres of life.
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Frugal clothing and accessories
This guy must be really poor, he only has one t-shirt.
Once upon a time, most rich people made sure their dresses showed how much money they have, while the poor carried along with a few indistinguishable rags. Today, the masses run after cheap, extravagant that's as colored and fast as it is polluting, while the Zuckerbergs and those who can afford it sport "quiet luxury" by always wearing "the same (real plain) outfits every day, or not buying covers for their smartphones.
REAL food
In darker ages, the poor ate whatever they could get their hands on straight from the land, while the rich killed themselves of gout by guzzling as much heavily "processed" food as they could. Today, the rich can and want to eat less but pasture-feed, free-range and all that. The rest of us would have to make do, after AI-managed fast food, with synthetic beef or other lab-made food that may even be impossible to grow at scale.
Parenthood
Once upon a time, most of the poor produced as many children as their bodies could afford, by ignorance or as labor force, while many rich people made an effort to have less, in order to preserve their wealth.
Today, it's the masses who give up on parenting altogether. For some, it is a actually free, actually thoughtful choice, that nobody should criticize or disrespect. But for too many it's half because they are working poors, and half because they've been convinced by "market" forces that, since it would leave them free to spend whatever they can on endless products or services, not having kids is the smartest thing they could do.
Elon Musk, with as many kids as a poor farmer in the 1800s (image source).
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Offspring access to tech
The gap on parenthood is just as wide among people who do become parents. As recently as one or two generations ago, even rich children could access real computers, never mind computer networks, only in special places, with adult supervision.
Today, unlimited, uncontrolled access to state-of-the-art personal tech is granted to, if not forced upon, unprivileged kids, who are abandoned to addictive apps, the more the better, to be convinced as soon as possible that such an imitation of the rich or, even worse: such a "living through the rich" is all it takes to be a sane, cool adult. tech is for poor kids only, who are abandoned to addictive apps, the more the better, and even convinced that this pretending to live like the rich or, even worse: live through the rich is all it takes to be a sane, cool adult.
Rich kids, instead, go to exclusive schools capable to deliver “state-of-the-art, cutting-edge technology resources, along with the knowledge and skills to use these tools in a meaningful way.”
That is, children of poorer and middle-class parents risk being raised by screens, (in UK, and surely elsewhere), while rich children are much more likely to keep maturing on human-written books instead of AI-generated shit full of errors. Over time, that divide will extend to communication methods and skills: "In a post-literate era, those who continue to read and to practice critical thinking skills will increasingly be unable to effectively communicate with those who don’t" (source).
This will be a result of another reversal, i.e. rich kids using the Internet much like poor kids used to eat real meat: as an opportunity, or privilege, to be taken in small doses. Modern poor kids will be handicapped by using the Internet like rich pupils of the past used expensive wines or cigars to waste themselves, that is "mindlessly". It really seems only rich parents get, or can afford to get, that the real solution to this problem is the simplest.
Tech-free living, and human contact privileges
Of course, the same divide on tech is present among adults, and flipped in the same way. Once upon a terribly recent time, owning and personally operating anything electronic beyond Casio watches used to be an actual status symbol, or the prerogative of exclusive, well respected jobs like astronaut, physicist, computer scientist... Now, the status symbol is being able to not touch such devices, and is just accelerating, as Geordie on Mastodon, said really well:
I genuinely reckon the hallmark of being rich in the future will be that you can opt out of AI and “smart” computational shit. Someone doing alright will have a phone that can take the “best” image from a photo, and a watch that gives notifications and be able to pay for stuff by blinking at a scanner, but a RICH person will have a camera that takes a nice photo, a watch that’s very well made and just tells the time, and a really nice leather wallet.
From remote controlled vibrators to surveillance delegated to robodogs or face recognition, and software actually counterfeiting humans, so much contemporary technology just "frees" everybody from ever being close or just talking to other human beings that one suspects that's its actual and ONLY purpose.
Of course, that's a purpose, or more exactly a condition, that only the rich can really opt out of. I have been thinking for years that THE only real privilege of people with way more money than one may ever spend sensibly is not material wealth, but the capability to choose exactly which other real human beings can be around them in any moment. Or, as the New York Times put it, human contact is now a luxury good. Even the off-grid life that once was the curse (or not?) of hillbillies is now "a boon for the wealthy, a burden for the rest".
What all these reversals have in common
Possibly the main, likely the most important thing that's behind every reversal I've mentioned is digital technologies. Certain things are not new, of course. But nothing I described could happen so fast, everywhere, without being digitized in one way or another. I see this as another confirmation that, rather than being "INNOVATION!!!" in and by itself, always, digital technologies are "just" something that seriously amplifies everything it touches, good or bad it's the same.
Point is, in the long run, letting all these "amplifications" continue will result (or is resulting?) in the emergence of two separate species, less likely (or able, see “post-literate” above) to interbreed than the Sapiens and Neanderthals of yore. After all, even without reversals, dating digitally enhanced by apps or by the self-segregation power that's the core of "social" media already amounts to self-inflicted eugenics.
Final, obvious questions: If giving up parenthood, offsourcing children to uncontrollable tech, spending as much as possible on dumb tech or dresses and generally being lonely... had real value, why would so many of the people who got the highest freedom of choice exactly by offering those opportunities... do just the opposite? Why shouldn't we start imitating the supposedly sharpest tools in the box now, at least in the easy cases where it would even save us money, instead of just making them even richer?
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