Max Simpson

"I don't understand why they're pushing AI so hard when we can all see it's making everything worse." That's because it's not being marketed to you; it's being marketed to governments and plutocrats. They're the real target audience for these products, not you. You are not receiving the real sales pitch for AI, because the real sales pitch would not appeal to your sensibilities. The real sales pitch for AI isn't "Hey check out this product, it makes some web searches slightly easier and it can maybe write your emails for you." The real sales pitch for AI is "This product allows you to surveil the entire population of your country. It can be built into autonomous surveillance drones and killing machines. It can allow you to monitor and control every aspect of your society. It can reverse the decentralization of information brought on by the internet age. It can take away the collective bargaining power of workers and give you the skilled services your company requires. It can nullify strikes, civil disobedience, and even full-scale revolutions, and lock humanity into your capitalist dystopia forever." That's the real sales pitch. It doesn't sound appealing to any normal person, but it makes sense when you remember who these technologies are really being sold to, and why.

That story about Google killing hundreds of thousands of trees in Finland for its data center project is such a perfect microcosm of what capitalism is doing to our world. Recent mass media headlines are saying the tech giant "illegally" cut down "250,000" trees, but both claims paint an inaccurate picture of what actually happened. Google killed 400,000 trees (250,000 near a town called Muhos and another 150,000 near the village of Otanmäki), and unless the company's executives actually wind up going to prison for this, their actions cannot properly be described as "illegal". I don't know who first coined the saying "If the penalty is a fine, then it's legal for rich people," but it certainly applies here. The Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority has reportedly ordered Google to suspend all “measures that significantly change the environment," saying it will "consider enforcement proceedings and fines" if the megacorporation does not comply. Google's parent company Alphabet has a net worth of around four trillion dollars. Whatever paltry penalties Finland might impose for these ecocidal actions, it won't have any meaningful effect on Google. Giant corporations do this shit all the time. They calculate that the fines incurred by their abusive actions will be dwarfed by the massive profits they generate, issue fake apologies as needed, and leave it to their armies of lawyers to minimize the damage. That's why the Sackler family is still worth billions despite all the fines Purdue Pharma was slapped with while creating the US opiate epidemic. A 2017 Harvard study titled “The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market" contains the following paragraph: "Although civil claims and criminal charges were brought against Purdue and its executives, the resulting penalties paled in comparison to extended-release oxycodone profits. In May 2007, the company and its president, chief counsel, and former chief medical officer pled guilty to falsely marketing extended-release oxycodone as 'less addictive, less subject to abuse and diversion, and less likely to cause tolerance and withdrawal than other pain medications.' As part of the plea bargain, Purdue agreed to pay the federal government $600 million and 27 states $20 million. The three executives agreed to $34.5 million in fines but avoided jailtime. By contrast, Purdue has earned an estimated $31 billion in total revenues from extended-release oxycodone since its launch. Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business." A cost of doing business. That's how things work under capitalism. The law primarily exists not to protect people or the environment, but to protect the interests of capital. If you destroyed a Google data center you'd probably be charged as a terrorist and spend decades in prison, but Google can destroy the natural world around you and get off with a finger wag and a symbolic fine. If you stole millions of dollars from your employer you'd go to prison for grand larceny, but if your employer steals millions from its employees you need to win a class action lawsuit to get back what they stole from you. Proponents of capitalism often pretend they support minimal government intervention in civilian affairs, but their entire model is at all times propped up by state power using force to protect the haves from the have-nots at every level of our society. Corporations are free to destroy the environment, destroy your health, rob you, exploit you, and manipulate your government to their advantage, and if you ever take action to stand up to this world-devouring onslaught, the state will lock you in a cage. In school we are taught that that the law exists to protect ordinary people from bad people, but that's not true at all. Under capitalism, the law exists to protect the very worst among us from everyone else. That's why we are seeing our planet being turned into dust and ashes for no reason other than shareholder profit. It's an insane system, and it needs to end. These freaks are feeding our entire biosphere into the woodchipper.

I can't get over what a massive admission this is. If we lived in a world where politicians and media cared about facts, THIS would be the headline story. "ANTI-ISRAEL ATTITUDES INCREASING, ZERO INCREASE IN ANTISEMITISM." The pro-Palestine movement has been so successful in separating opposition to Israeli atrocities from hatred toward Jews that there has been zero increase in public hatred toward Jews throughout three years of genocide. That's an incredibly impressive achievement in activism and education regarding a mass atrocity we're always told is a super duper complicated issue that's almost impossible to understand. This one fact, by itself, completely destroys just about every argument the hasbarists have ever made about the pro-Palestine movement. People who've been taking a stand against the Gaza holocaust have been absolutely impeccable with their messaging, taking great care to help the public understand the distinction between the religion of Judaism and the apartheid state of Israel. If mainstream pundits and politicians actually cared about truth and morality, they would be falling all over themselves to apologize and correct the record on the narrative they've been pushing that the pro-Palestine movement is responsible for a surging epidemic of antisemitism in our society. They would be telling everyone that it turns out there is in fact no epidemic of antisemitism, and the pro-Palestine movement has conducted itself with saintly meticulousness in ensuring that hatred toward the Jewish faith gains no purchase within their ranks or their message. But mainstream pundits and politicians do not care about truth or morality. They care about promoting the interests of a genocidal apartheid state, no matter how many lies they need to tell in order to do so. This is why instead of seeing headlines about the Bell review's finding that there has been zero increase of antisemitism among British people, we've been seeing headlines falsely claiming that British schoolchildren are evil antisemitic Nazis who must be brought to heel. People who support Israel are disgusting, manipulative liars, and the western political/media class are the very worst among them.