The Hipcrime Vocab: A Retrospective 2011-2023.

Looking back at the old blog posts.

I've been over at the old blogs knocking down the walls, pulling up the floorboards, tearing out the insulation, yanking the copper wire and tubing out of the walls, and carefully putting aside the cabinetry and plumbing fixtures in preparation for the final tear down. Just like an actual building, I think much of the material can be reconfigured and reused in some way, so look for that in the coming months. If you follow me on Substack Notes, you've already been seeing the results of that effort over the past several weeks. An intellectual version of Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, if you will.

The reasons why are pretty simple. The fact is, vast majority of internet is behind paywalls now. Creeping normality means that we hardly noticed while everything slowly became inaccessible and locked up behind walls. I would estimate that 95 percent of links in old posts are paywalled, with much of remainder simply dead, meaning that almost everything I posted during their years has become obsolete.

While there are still some workarounds, I'm not interested in constantly having to resort to those (or assume they will continue to work). I don't make any money from blogging, and never have, so there is no way I'm paying for multiple subscriptions. What use is being informed when you have no ability to affect anything anyway? For most of us, it's best to hold onto what little money you have in order to survive in an increasingly desperate, brutal and hostile society.

And, as a related, note, I feel like much of the internet itself has become simply unusable. Paywalls, subscriptions, required logins, relentless popups/popovers, intrusive ads, videos, spyware, dark patterns and the like have made the internet so incredibly user-hostile that it’s basically useless, not to mention aggravating. And that's not an exaggeration. I use an adblocker at home, which is the only thing that makes the Internet viable at all. I don't have this on my work computer, so a huge amount of sites are literally impossible to access/read/use, with the rest extremely difficult and/or frustrating. This site conveys what it’s like:

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/

I tend to subscribe to a lite version of the dead internet theory, which says that the majority of the internet today is just bots talking to other bots talking to other bots. Machines interacting in the void. And this is before the coming AI apocalypse which is already well under way. Automated garbage along with frauds, scams, grifts and outright theft will become so ubiquitous that any normal human will turn away in disgust. No one will be able to tell what’s real and what’s fake. Plus, we already have a mountain of evidence for the harm that the internet is causing to our brains which we just sort of ignore like an ugly family secret that no one talks about—everything from ADHD, to rising depression, to political polarization exacerbated by an almost infinite supply of domestic and foreign bad actors.

It's sad to see, but I would go so far as to argue that the modern Web is a complete and utter failure. Greed and fraud have ruined it. It's shocking to contrast the utopian dreams bandied about in the nineties with what is has become today. It may still be convenient for some practical uses like email, shopping, paying bills, booking travel and whatnot, but I feel like more and more people will simply walk away from the online “conversation” for their own mental health.

The end result? I think the internet will mostly be abandoned by people. Bold prediction, but I guess we'll see.

I feel the Web as currently configured is an awful place, and I plan to spend as little time interacting with it as I can. This isn't an "I'm leaving the internet forever!" tantrum, which would be silly. But I do feel that it no longer contributes as much to my life as before and has become more of a time sink. The online discussion is less intelligent and stimulating than it used to be. I'm biased of course, but I think Substack and podcasts are probably the most worthwhile of what remains at this point (if you avoid all the culture war nonsense).

Another reason is that, back in the old days, I became increasingly concerned with what I saw as the co-option of legitimate disgust and disillusionment with the status quo by what I perceived to be far-right reactionary and libertarian forces. A lot of people still seem to believe that these complaints are made in good faith rather than a cynical ploy to court the disaffected as a means to gain power. What can I say, I disagree. I feel that a lot of bad actors were (and are) peddling collapse narratives as a way of making people sympathetic to a quasi-fascist political agenda. I don’t think it’s productive to peddle fear.

After 2016, it seems like a lot of the peak oil commentariat became "red-pilled" and leaped onto the MAGA bandwagon, spending all their time and energy complaining about “the woke mind virus” rather than serious issues and embracing all sorts of wacky conspiracy theories blaming shadowy villains for all of society’s ills. And it's not just them—many of the sources I used to follow in those days have become essentially indistinguishable from the paranoid far-right. Some sites I used to read regularly have been unmasked as obvious Russian fronts thanks to the Ukraine invasion. A lot of people who I never thought would be sympathetic to those views seem to have embraced them wholeheartedly.

A lot people have become radicalized while insisting they have not changed at all or are just middle-of-the-road moderates (see: Musk, Elon). It's always the people who think they are too smart to fall for propaganda who are the most vulnerable to it. It also seems to be my tribe of "cis-hetero white males" who have given in the most to radicalization. I won't name names, but I think many readers can guess who I'm talking about.

I guess I was hoping for a drift towards localism and away from free market fundamentalism as solutions to our problems. Basically, more of a pro-socialist agenda. Instead, the strongest forms of populism appear to be the far-right variety. That’s not the direction I was hoping we would go in.

So I became disillusioned and walked away. I wanted nothing to do with any of that. In fact, I'm kind of ashamed at some of the sources I used back then.

So, tearing it all down brick by brick gives me the opportunity to look back and reflect on what I wrote back in those days.

1. Automation

One of the most consistent themes over the entire course of those blogs was writing about the effects of automation. A lot of that was spent debunking the mainstream narratives surrounding automation, which argued that automation always creates more jobs than it destroys, and that there was nothing to worry about—full stop. In other words, that there were no effects on the job market, whatsoever. Economists cited made-up concepts like the "lump of labor fallacy" and called anyone who disagreed with them a “Luddite.”

This belies the reality of the job market since 2000, as well as centuries of prior history. The Luddites' generation had, in fact, been devastated by the loss of their livelihoods. Moreover, providing enough employment for people has always been a major concern of leaders and politicians ever since the dawn of industrialization. Mass unemployment has been specter haunting industrial economies the world over, and in the past has led to wars and social breakdown. It’s hard not witness the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt over the past half century and conclude nothing has changed, whether you want to place the primary blame automation or outsourcing.

So here we are in 2023, and ChatGPT and other language learning models have reignited the debate all over again. But the tenor of discussion is very different this time, because the software is threatening to eliminate white collar workers instead of just blue collar workers who have been considered disposable since the rise of neoliberalism.

In the previous decade, people were mostly concerned about self-driving trucks taking away all the trucking jobs. Andrew Yang based his quixotic presidential campaign around that idea and called for a Universal Basic Income. I guess that technological hype didn't pan out (no surprise) but once again, the same discussions are once again being prompted by the latest technological breakthroughs which threaten to displace a significant chunk of the workforce. Recently, the Wall Street Journal wrote about the “Disappearing White Collar Job” (paywalled, of course) with the Atlantic chiming in, "Here's How AI will Take Your Job." It's déjà-vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.

What Are People Good For? (2011)

Some Concluding Remarks About Automation (2013)

Automation and the Future of Work: It's Already Happened (2016)

2. Shorter work hours

Another recurring theme was the idea that increased productivity should lead to working less, not more.

And, once again, a lot of this discussion has come back (sense a pattern?). Recently I've seen more and more articles about the possibility of having shorter work weeks. And I do mean shorter work weeks, not cramming the same number of hours into fewer days so you wind up completely exhausted and mentally drained at the end of a ten hour workday. Frequently, you will see references to John Maynard Keynes’ essay, "Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren".

It will never happen, of course. Over the course of my lifetime, the plight of the American worker has never, ever gotten better, only worse. There is simply no way working people in this country will ever get a break, and I wish people would stop talking about it—it's just a cocktease at this point. There may be hope for workers outside the United States, however. As Franz Kafka said, there is hope—but not for us.

Modern Work Patterns Make No Sense (2015)

Of course we should be working less hours, which would help ameliorate a number of issues from stress to pollution. The 40-hour work week was established a time when commutes were shorter and only one worker was required to support a household, not two full-time workers and a lengthy commute like today. As usual, I expect mainstream economists to try and convince us that this is impossible or undesirable, which is their job, after all.

3. Population crash

Another thing I was ahead of the curve on was the effect of a shrinking population on the workforce. I coined the term "The Depopulation Bomb" all the way back in 2012! I continued to write about this issue up until 2020.

The Depopulation Bomb (2012)

The Depopulation Bomb Goes Off At Home (2012)

Demographics, Redux (2020)

Now we're seeing breathless articles practically on a daily basis in the media talking about how a shrinking workforce will supposedly lead to economic Armageddon.

What seems to have happened is that the shrinking workforce due to retirement and demographics has led to people moving up the job ladder for the fist time since the Boomers entered the workforce. People will take the best offer on the table, which has led to a hollowing-out of the low-wage labor force exacerbated by declining immigration. This has given workers more bargaining power than they've had in ages, along with increasing solidarity—one of the few bright spots.

This has led to a predictable backlash by the capital-holding class. Raising interest rates and trying to induce a recession have been their principle reactions so far to try and shift power back to them. Cynics have pointed out that attempts to roll back child labor laws and the banning of abortion are even more extreme ploys to ensure a consistent supply of desperate and exploitable labor in the future to keep capital's profits high in the face of increasing worker power.

Of course, I'm sure my readers are aware that worker shortages in the wake of the Black Death led to higher living standards for the masses and a decline of aristocratic power.

Looking at old posts, I saw that hand-wringing over Japan's falling birthrate is nothing new—people were obsessing over that ten years ago already. In the intervening years, the same consternation is now being applied to South Korea and China, both of which have also seen declining birthrates.

Half of unmarried people under 30 in Japan do not want kids: Report (Reddit)

Since then, that hysteria over declining populations has spread to Europe and the United States, with headlines like this:

MSU study confirms: 1 in 5 adults don’t want children –– and they don’t regret it later (Reddit)

In one of the first series of articles I wrote, I speculated that Japan would be the vanguard of a post-growth future. Japan, I said, could show the world how to deal with a shrinking society while still maintaining a high standard of living, if only we would heed its lessons. I’d like to think that idea has held up in the decade since.

Is Japan the Future? (part 1) (2011)

This is also why the housing crisis is so baffling to me. Looking at the data, you would have realistically predicted a major housing crisis when the demographic bulge of the Baby Boom hit the housing market, but somehow it never came. We were mostly able to accommodate this massive bulge with little problem, despite a decade of high inflation during those years. Yet after nearly five decades of suppressed birthrates and low inflation, people can't find a place to live and are spending over half their income on shelter! It's insane!!!

(Of course, this is growth rate, not absolute population numbers, but the point still holds)

4. Disease

While I can't claim to have predicted Covid-19, I did speculate about the potential return of communicable diseases. I focused mainly on increasing antibiotic resistance, although I did mention respiratory diseases like MERS. Covid is, of course, a variant of Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

Trend for 2012: Disease makes a comeback (I was eight years too early!!!)

By the way, in a post entitled Things Covid-19 Has Proven Are True (2020), I noted the following which I stand behind:

• The stock market is not the economy.

• Health care should not be tied to employment.

• Taxes do not fund government spending.

• There is no shortage of money.

• Globalized, just-in-time supply chains are fragile.

• A lot of the work we do is nonessential.

• "Small government" is not an inherent virtue.

• A functional social safety net is actually good for business.

5. Social Breakdown

What can I say, things were bad back then and they've been continually getting worse ever since. Society is clearly breaking down around us, and I haven't changed my opinion of that one iota. How many times can you say the same thing over and over? It becomes redundant. In the intervening years, though, I feel like it's become more ingrained in the public consciousness.

I feel like it's ramped up since the pandemic and society is under more stress than ever before. People with cardboard signs are fixtures on every street corner and off-ramp. The Target near me installed bollards across the entrance to stop cars (usually stolen Kias) from ramming into the entrance. I've personally seen cars driving on the sidewalk and spinning out on major streets. I pass by auto accidents or debris from accidents virtually on a daily basis. While less obvious than some cities, I can tell you exactly where the homeless people in my neighborhood pitch their tents (the KK River Parkway just east of Sixth street).

One of the things I'm proud of is that fact that, while 99 percent of the media you consume comes from wealthy, privileged people who live in exclusive enclaves, I live in the real world and report what I see. I’ve noticed a trend toward trying to convince us that “it’s all in our head”—that if only we stop “doomscrolling” we’ll realize everything is actually pretty great and getting better. Put down your phone and go outside, they tell us. Well, I barely use my phone and when I go outside I see evidence of a collapsing society everywhere I look.

The Gift of Poverty (2013)

6. The Rightward Shift

Another thing I noted was that the ongoing deterioration of American society and American living standards was moving the country politically further and further to the right. And I wrote this as far back as 2012 long before anyone knew Donald Trump as anything more than a shady real estate developer, failing casino owner and reality TV blowhard.

The Crisis Is Moving The World Rightward (2012)

The hardening of America's heart (2013)

I have long said that Republicans have morphed from being merely a political party to a far-right authoritarian movement intent on seizing total control and the elimination of their enemies and other assorted "undesirables." I think that's become pretty apparent by now. They want to remake society. It's shocking the extent they've accumulated unitary power, and the extent to which a large portion of the electorate has gone right along with them. This leads to my pessimism that America will probably cease to be a democracy (which it barely is now) and become a true fascist state within the next ten to twelve years.

7. Bitcoin

I hadn’t realized I had written a couple posts about bitcoin on the old blog. Thankfully, I was a Bitcoin skeptic from the start. This was at a time when it seemed like everyone was proclaiming that Bitcoin would break the power of the banking cartel forever and usher in a new "decentralized" world of anarchy and freedom for everyone!!!

To me, it all sounded like nonsense. It seemed like a scam promoted by goldbugs and libertarians obscured by complex, utopian technobabble that no one really understood in order to bamboozle suckers. All supporters did when you pointed out the numerous flaws with the concept was wave their hands and appeal to FOMO, or insist that “you just didn’t get it.”

I'd like to think that I've been proven correct in the intervening years. Bitcoin has been unmasked as basically Ponzi scheme in the most fundamental definition of the term.

Bitcoin myths and realities. (2014)

Bitcoin and other oddities (2013)

I continue to promote a true and accurate understanding of the current monetary system which I think will be more effective in the long run than trying to seek out technofixes. We don’t need technofixes, we need societal change. Which brings up my next point:

8. Contra Technofixes

Perhaps my most consistent criticism was aimed at technofixes which were constantly trotted out in the media as the solution to our problems during those years. The subtext of all these "solutions" was that we didn’t have to change our lifestyles at all. As the years have gone by, we can now see whether or not my criticism of these technologies was on point, or whether these techno-miracles really did save us after all.

Vertical Farms and Lab-Grown Meat: Have We Lost Our Minds? (2012)

Against Techno-Fetishism (2012)

One popular proposal in those days involved using robot bees to pollinate crops after we eliminated all the real ones due to pesticide poisoning (which we would continue to use, of course). I haven't heard so much about that lately. A Google search turns up a few recent articles (mostly paywalled, naturally), but there doesn't seem to be much movement on that front.

A lot of attention was showered on a 24-year-old entrepreneurial boy-wonder named Boylan Slat who was going to "save the world" by inventing a machine that would suck up all the plastic pollution from the world's oceans. No need to, you know, actually regulate plastic production or disposal. Problem solved!

Well, here's the latest on that effort: Why so many of us wanted to believe in an ocean cleanup system that just broke (The Verge)

And I didn't have to wait very long for "Solar Freakin’ Roadways!!!" to turn out to be a farce. I distinctly recall a commenter arguing with me and telling me that I just didn't get it. Back then I thought that driving over solar panels may not be the best use for them with all the wear and tear—especially in cold climates with lots of snow and salt where even concrete roads deteriorate rapidly—and, sure enough, the experiment didn't pan out so great:

French Solar Roadway Declared "A Complete Flop" (Treehugger)

The world's first solar road has turned out to be a colossal failure that's falling apart and doesn't generate enough energy, according to a report (Business Insider)

And, finally, there’s vertical farming. Having spent my entire career in building construction and having a good idea of the effort, time and money it takes to construct even a simple building, the idea of erecting skyscrapers around the world to grow herbs and lettuce seemed particularly absurd to me, especially since I could easily do it in my garden and most urban areas have tons of unused land (as well as rooftops). Well, every technofix always has no shortage of investors lining up behind it—especially in Silicon Valley where burning through money is a pastime—but it doesn't always work out so well thanks to, well, reality:

Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business. “We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex,” the founders announced. (Just Food.com)

The vertical farming bubble is finally popping. Climate change might make growing produce indoors a necessity. But despite taking in more than a billion dollars in venture capital investment, most companies in the industry seem to be withering, unable to turn a profit on lettuce. (Fast Company). I especially enjoyed this comment: "how did investors think that they could find Silicon Valley-style returns in . . . lettuce?"

And I'm pretty sure I could dig up some footage of Elon Musk from those years promising that we'd be living on Mars by 2025—now only two years away. That doesn't look very promising, especially given that his last rocket literally blew up in the sky shortly after takeoff.

So I think that subsequent history has mostly validated my opinions.

That's not to say that there aren’t any good ideas. For example, putting solar panels on unusable farmland so growers can earn extra money, or putting them over reservoirs to prevent evaporation, are both worthwhile ideas that make sense. And concepts like agroforestry and silvopasture may not be sexy, but will go a lot further in helping mitigate climate change than technofixes like mechanical carbon sequestration and pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to blot out the sun. As I’ve written in the past, if an inventor developed a technology that could sequester carbon and purify the air while producing food and fuel, she would be declared a genius, even though we already have something called a tree which does those things. And there’s already a working fusion reactor, it’s just up in the sky orbiting the planet.

I've come to see a consistent subtext in a lot of these articles about renewable energy, new technology, and so forth. It’s what I call the myth of techno-substutition. It basically says that society in the future will basically be identical to today. All we have to do are two steps: 1.) electrify everything (transportation, home heating, cooking, etc.) and, 2.) swap fossil fuels with solar panels and windmills, and we can continue to run our endless growth society at our current level of complexity with no major interruptions. This is the unstated assumption behind every breathless story in the press. But I'm not so sure. I’m skeptical that we can simply plug in new energy sources into our existing social arrangements and keep everything exactly the same, even if we wanted to.

9. Adopting Pessimism

On a more foundational note, I feel like more and more people have come around to my way of seeing things (although I’m a bit biased, lol). There seems to have been a subtle but definite change in mood over the past few years from the boundless techno-optimism of the previous decade to an increasing sense of despair about what the future will be like if we continue on our current trajectory. Instead of excitement, it now feels like every new technological development is greeted with dread.

This change was illustrated by a remarkable discussion on the r/Futurology subreddit. Back in those days, the Futurology sub was an endless fountain of techno-optimism, where every new invention was greeted with enthusiasm and touted as either saving the world or ushering in an imminent utopia. Then, somewhere along the line, the tone changed, prompting one user in 2023 to proclaim in a now-deleted comment, "This Sub has Become one of the most Catastrophizing Forums on Reddit”

That prompted a number of thoughtful responses. Currently the most popular one is this by Stealthy_Snow_Elf (my emphasis):

The reason they’ve gotten closer [the Collapse and Futurology subs] is because as time has gone on, all the concerns have happened. The first applications for robots is heavily skewed towards military, and those applications are far ahead of their commercial sector counterparts.

The technology that allows us to grow plants, food, in a much higher capacity in any environment has not been implemented because there’s more of a profit incentive to continue using traditional farming methods.

Genetic engineering, and hyper specific targeted medicine, was priced out to only be available to those with wealth. As we speak governments are arguing with private companies over their desire to skyrocket prices on mere mRNA vaccines, of which multiple governments contributed majority funding and research (mRNA research for covid vaccines actually came off of decades long HIV/AIDS research in addition to genetic engineering).

AI, again being used more for surveillance, eliminating jobs, military applications, and hyper targeted ads than improving the average human being’s life.

In short, every concern the people at futurology had a decade ago, which the people at r/collapse believed inevitable, has come to fruition. It wasn’t inevitable, but it was incredibly likely given the system is designed for people not to resist much of anything. Its the casino in percy jackson, it’s the simulation of the matrix, it’s whatever metaphor/allegory/analogy you need to understand that all of this is just to keep people satisfied enough not to notice how little power or choice they’re going to have in the grand scheme of things.

Before in human history if the people didn’t want it, then they would feel it and resist. Now? Now they’re distracted with toys and cheap gimmicks while the fate of the world is directed by a relative few. A few who do not care what happens to the earth because they know by the time things get awful enough to affect them their new age tech will pull an ex machina and save them, and only them.

That’s my take. We can talk, philosophically, about how it pushes the bounds. But you would have to have been living in a cave for the last twenty years to not see in practice often the benefits of advancement is kept among the few and only granted to the many when it’s outdated and/or, most importantly, a more powerful counter exists.

And here's another top comment by Saxon2060 (my emphasis):

I'm 33 and always liked to stay well-informed and was optimistic about the future. In about 2 years or so I've swung dramatically towards blocking out the news and feeling quite strongly that things are getting worse and will continue to do so without a hard shift away from "socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor." And I only see that accelerating, fastest in America, followed by Europe. The pandemic was significant. The acts of humanity were grossly overshadowed by how much government corruption and incompetence it laid bare, how little people cared about that, and how on a macro scale it showed that the majority of us absolutely do not care about each other. At all.

Those of us who have become pessimistic are looking at the world around us, we haven't just decided to be sad.

It's not a "conspiracy" that the 6 wealthiest men in the world are "worth" the same as the bottom half of the global population. It's not a "conspiracy" that in the "developed world" the earnings of the CEO class have exploded within a few decades and wages of ordinary people have virtually stagnated. It's not a "conspiracy theory" that corporation's buy politicians... Well, they all ARE conspiracies in the truest sense of the word. But they're not only believed by "depraved conspiracists". They're true.

Perhaps one of the biggest things in the last couple of years is what we know about tech billionaires. Less than a decade ago perhaps we thought Amazon was just making everything better. Everything I could want or need delivered to me IMMEDIATELY BY ROBOTS! :D ... and then it became widely known about the Amazon warehouse piss bottles and slave-driving work trackers and we know that Jeff Bezos (and his leadership team) doesn't have a soul. Less than a decade ago we thought "holy shit! Soon-to-be-affordable electric performance cars! The possibility of ME going to space in my life time!" And then Elon Musk openly states he thinks indentured servitude on Mars would be very cool.

It is now EVIDENT. That the miracles of the digital age and the robotic age have been, are being, and will be reaped by the 1%. Yeah I'll get my pizza delivered by a robot. If I haven't been replaced by one and can afford a pizza. Welcome to the future. At least I might have an electric car that I can't work on, sell, or use the radio in if I don't pay a subscription. Suddenly Teslas seem much more shitty than they did 10 years ago now we know they'll code some bullshit to squeeze even MORE money from you once you've bought their car. And give you no choice.

Imagine if the difference in productivity, of output, since 1900 to now was shared anywhere near equally...Lol, nope. That's not how unfettered capitalism works. The capital class owns the machines. They get ALL of the gains in productivity. ALL OF THEM.

We now know that the people who have been changing the world the last 20 years and were producing prime futurology material are... Evil. Literally evil. They will never have enough. They are psychopaths. Where does that leave us?

And sometimes it's just the little things, you know? My wife and I earn about 2x what we did when we left university (career advancement, sure as fuck not pay rises). This year for the first time we started just deciding to "be cold" instead of turning the heating on to save money. But British Gas tripled its profits this year. Cool.

And this is from the Futurology sub!!!

That post was crossposted to the Collapse subreddit, which is often seen as the philosophical antithesis of Futurology. The strange convergence of opinion after so many years of ideological antagonism prompted a number of interesting comments such as this one from NomadicScribe (my emphasis):

It's far easier for futurism to line up with collapse when we're no longer being sold an optimistic future. The very concept of "the future" is not what it was even a couple of decades ago.

At various points in the past we've been sold this idea that someday, in "the future", everything will be better. Maybe it was flying cars, or the end of disease, or the end of climate change and anthropogenic extinction. There was just this assumption that someday, eventually, we'd have it all figured out.

When it came to promoting new technologies, there used to be at least the pretense of "improving lives". Somehow, we'd find a way to be more free and more equitable. Live longer, happier, and more at peace.

Now, the future being hyped is some kind of depressing techno-feudalist alchemy of web3, NFTs, crypto, metaverse, neuralink, force-fed advertising, and other garbage that nobody really wants, it's just what we're being told is inevitable. Technologies that don't address any problems, don't even pretend to help anybody at all, except for investors and executives in the finance and tech.

This is bleak as hell, and anyone that hasn't bought into some kind of libertarian pyramid scheme is going to see straight through it.

And this is a Hacker News comment answering the question of why people want to tear the current system down:

It stopped working for many people. Not many people can afford rent or a house anymore. We just got done fighting 2 long wars that we didn't win, mostly for the benefit of warmongers, who cashed out like bandits; others involved were scarred, maimed, mentally anguished, or outright killed. Good jobs are difficult to come by if you don't have a college degree. And who would want a degree with the ruinous undischargable debt it comes with? The ever more expensive food and water seems laced with poison or trace amounts of drugs, and when it causes people to get sick, few can afford healthcare.

Would you want to tear that system down?

Okay, so it's one obscure corner of the internet. But you'll forgive me for thinking that perhaps my editorial stance in those days has since become accepted by an increasingly large share of the population based on this information. More and more people are realizing that technology won't solve everything and that we need to rethink many of the fundamental bases of our society, including capitalism, individualism, and endless growth. We also have a chance to pull back from where we were headed and make things better for all of us instead of a tiny slice of sociopaths.

Not that I had anything to do with that, of course. I was just a bit ahead of the curve. My work here is done ;-)

10. On a lighter note…

Two of my favorites with a humorous twist:

Movie Review: Tomorrowland and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) I had a lot of fun writing this.

Trump Appoints Bane to National Security Council (2017) This Onion-style article combines actual quotes from Bane and Steve Bannon. Reading it now, I’m not even sure which is which.