Art is a Weapon We Could All Be Using
If I knew that art had historically been one of the left’s most powerful weapons, so I maneuvered to reduce and exhaust them with wage labor to where very few  of them had the time, energy, or resources to make it, and was largely successful at using corporate gatekeeping around what counts as respectable art to prevent strong personalities from breaking through, but then a tool suddenly became available that even unartistic people could use to turn their boring critiques of empire into engaging pieces with some creative prompting and distribute them widely through their social channels, I would send out my bot armies to stir up their animosity and get them to collectively refuse to use it.
This would be easy for me because they are so notoriously prone to infighting over endlessly pedantic terminological disputes and ideological variations, that I would have already been watching them for a long time and regularly amplifying anything that makes them fight. If I can get them to neutralize themselves or cancel each other, if I can get them to leave their sharpest weapons on the table, I never have to actually engage with or debate their ideas.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but I’m seeing reports of national guard members refusing to work with ICE being court martialed so the time to prepare is now. Remember “just following orders” didn’t work for the nazis and it won’t work for you.
This kind of low energy fear bait is tiresome and ignorant
This is so silly. GPT doesn’t “think”, it generates responses based on the probability of what a human would say in response. So it’s reciting a standard dystopian plotline because that’s a probabilistic human fear. I mean that’s why they have these silly looks on their faces, because they’re like “omg it just spoke my deepest fear” …. YES THAT’S WHAT MAKES IT PREDICTABLE.
Wondering what you can do?
National day of action tomorrow in response to the redistricting coup. Find yours here: www.fightthetrumptakeover.com
Also, there’s a move to display solidarity with migrants in windows of local businesses. Sign up to help: act.indivisible.org/signup/si…
And you may ask yourself …. 🎶
You can’t begin to know how wild we were in the clubs for this unless you were there. OMG I needed this today. Thank you algorithm gods!! 🕺
I activated cross posting functions on micro.blog for mastodon, bluesky, and pixelfed so let’s see how that’s working out.
It’s clear there’s some kind of masculinity-themed crisis going on that I want to address in my work so I picked this up out of curiosity and it’s giving me so much life!! I don’t have the same wounds as many cishet men but still … wow.
Currently reading: The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand 📚
Happy Friday everyone!! I’m giving a workshop this weekend so making last minute adjustments to my outline and putting the finishing touches on my Ghost site in hopes of launching it today as well. The world is on fire but the good things in life go on.
My indieweb odyssey continues - after migrating my personal WP site to Ghost while rebranding my content creator persona, I realized I want a just personal site to meet just social needs. Ideally, using micro.blog will help me avoid diverting too much maintenance labor. So hello, world!!