I want to build a castle for you, and I want it to be good. I want you to love my castle, and I want you to love me for building it. I want to walk around proudly, knowing that I have created something beautiful, and that I have earned love. I want to be proud and loved.

I want to be proud.

Are you loving my castle?

Are you sure you are loving my castle?

Are you really really sure you are loving my castle?

Yes, it’s great, and it’s mine.

Look at it. Look at the walls, look at the windows, look at the little boy who has worked hard to create it, and now his creation is standing on top of a hill, magnificent and real.

Look, look, don’t turn away, it’s me who built it. The little boy, me.

My castle, my woman, my genius.

Maybe, I am God.

When you say that it’s just a castle, you are hurting me.

You need to change.

When you look away from our castle, it makes me anxious. Please don’t. Don’t. Don’t Don’t. Don’t tell me about the beach where we used to go. Going to the beach is a sin… that’s right, it’s a sin.

Listen to me, I have a new religion for us. A religion that is as perfect as my castle. Repeat after me, it’s a sin to go the beach. Amen.

You, a woman who likes the wilderness of the beach, can’t understand. You are too primitive to understand the beauty of a manmade creation. You need to change for me and be perfect. Like my castle. Like my dreams. Like our religion.

I will turn your wild beach into more castles. My castles. My woman. Mine.

Listen, woman, what do you know about my dreams? In my dreams, I don’t have to prove anything. In my dreams, I am forgiven. In my dreams, I am eternal. But then I wake up, you don’t love me, and I am going to die.

But I have a plan.

One day, I will give you a brain implant, and you’ll be perfect… For me. Maybe we’ll even live forever.

Listen, baby. I built a castle for you. I want you to love my castle, and I want you to love me for building it.

And if you don’t, I will destroy you, and I will destroy the world in which you don’t love me.

You know that I can. I know that it’s not my fault. I did not sign up for rejection.

Look at me, baby. Do you love me and my castle?

_____

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It’s Not #Metoo, It’s the Algorithm! Plus, a Giant Non-Robotic Feminist Tangent

_____

The post Lovers, Missionaries and Technology: A Story of a Passionate Little Boy appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

I admit to not liking Google. Google aspires to control everything in the world. Google lobbies and sometimes bullies the government more than you can imagine. Google spies on regular people. Google frivolously and maliciously portrays life outside of its tentacles as old-fashioned folly. Google invests into biotech today, and plans to build futuristic nano-robo-zombies-humans within three hundred years from now (I kid you not, links and references are at the bottom of this article). Google mercilessly profits from music piracy even though it pretends to be against it. Google calls music “content”, and strong-arms independent artists. Google loves algorithms, and it doesn’t love humans at all.

Like a selfish spouse, when it doesn’t get you, it tries to morph you into something more palatable (our brains get literally rewired from following computer-friendly algorithmic suggestions too much; neuroscientists concur).

As a very irregularly-shaped human with zero Google-readable nanoparticles running through my bloodstream and no desire to put Google in charge of my immune system ever, I have no reason to be excited about their idea of my future, and no reason to buy into their carefully worded, self-serving publicity bullshit.

To me, the pseudo-optimistic, predatory religion of Google is a proposal for domination of a particular psychological type. It doesn’t allow for diversity. You see those people in marketing meetings a lot. They are dudes and gals who take everything literally, who don’t have it in them to understand me, who are somehow bothered by my freedom, and who have the itch to redefine and explain my world to me just to feel better, and then monetize the fuck out of me.

Their perfect world does not allow for mysterious, unmonitored complexity. In their perfect world, I am simply a number, a blueprint for their big (data) dream. I don’t like that. They are robots. They are the legion. They want to eat me, and for that reason, we don’t get along.

But wait, to quote Hunter S. Thompson, there’s also a negative side.

An even bigger problem is that Google is almost immune to common criticism. Because, context. Because, “don’t be evil”.

A little bit of subjectivity: I am a Soviet expat. When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, people at the wheel were, of course, crooks, motherfuckers and assholes. But everybody knew that. In public, grown-ups repeated incredible lies all the time, but everybody knew it was theater. It was a ritual that all had agreed to participate in, but nobody believed.

Here, in America, in 2015, it’s different. You can say the truth, and you can keep saying the truth till your lips turn blue, but it almost doesn’t matter. Nobody has the attention span to understand what you are saying. Posting cat pictures is cozier.

You can say whatever you want because even when people quote you, they see you as a symbol, not as a real human being.

Your life is a great excuse to tweet. Your life is externalized and gamified. Conversations about important things routinely fall into the abyss of “meta”. Matters of life or death weigh as much as cute secretarial chatter in the big boys meeting room. I feel it with my skin. It hurts.

And God, yes. One is absolutely free to write a book packed with hard facts proving unequivocally that Google is out to get us, use us, squeeze us, eat us, and tell us that we asked for it–but even if every word in the book is verifiable, the conversation about it will be steered in the direction of small talk. “Meta” is the only format that is socially acceptable, the only format that grown-ups can safely practice without the fear of being ridiculed. As if we are spectators of our own lives. As if it is our social responsibility to castrate and downplay our irregularly-shaped selves.

There is a small-talkalizer running on everything.

“What, we may all die from an ecological disaster? People getting cancer? Wow, that’s so sad… what’s for dinner? Whoa, check out that dude’s abs, he is ripped!”

In Google’s perfect world, nothing is real.

But everything is real.

It just is.

Links and references:

“The ultimate search engines are as smart as people–or smarter”
~Larry Page
(Academy of Achievement, “Interview: Larry Page”)

“Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”
~Sergey Brin
(Steven Levy, “All Eyes on Google,” Newsweek, April 12, 2004)

“Now hopefully, [ultimate search engine] would never have a bug like HAL did where he killed the occupants of the spaceship. But that’s what we’re striving for, and I think we’ve made it part of the way there.”
~Sergey Brin
(Spencer Michels, “This Search Engine That Could,” NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, November, 2002)

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage. Automation and Us
#WeBelieveTheCellist: Google Smears @zoecello and All Independent Artists – Trichordist
Google’s Larry Page: The most ambitious CEO in the universe – Fortune.com
Blind justice: Google lawsuit silences elected state prosecutor – The Register
Are Google and Facebook Just Pretending They Want Limits on NSA Surveillance – Vice.com
Piracy for profit-YouTube’s dirty secret – Copyright Alliance
Why the Modern World Is Bad for Your Brain – The Guardian
Viacom vs. YouTube/Google: A Piracy Case in Their Own Words – Daily Finance
European Parliament to call for breakup of Google, report says – CNET
Google Spent Even More on Lobbying Than Comcast in 2014 – TIME
Google faces antitrust allegations over its ad-buying network – Yahoo! Finance
Cellist Zoe Keating Opens Up on Her YouTube Battle: ‘There’s a Lot of Fear Out There’ – Billboard
The Dark Side Of YouTube – Zack Hemsey
Plug and Pray – Hulu (documentary about Joseph Weizenbaum)

The post Unloved: Why Google Is Undeserving of My Love appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

To keep my humanity, I consistently ran away from systems. Early on, I ran away from the academia even though I was promised a very bright and secure career. I then ran away from the corporate labyrinth because my soul was dying in there. I kept my heart, and because I did, I have immediate and vibrant answers to some of the big questions that Systems People are asking in their high-end keynote speeches. I have peasant senses that make it very easy to grasp the degree of murder that modern systems bring upon the soul – and it’s a Catch 22.

I have functional answers because I ran away from the machine. But because I ran away from the machine, I am not accredited by the machine, and Systems People are skeptical about the answers that come from a Non-Systems person. The things I have to say are not familiar.

It is a classic interface incompatibility problem: Questions and answers live in different dimensions, and if my answers travel to the dimension where the keynote speeches live, they will lose their heart. Real answers about happiness and humanity are humbling, they don’t help anybody’s career-building ambitions, they are so beautiful you can’t describe it, they lie in mystery, and they leave no room for pointless glitter.

But simple, peasant humility is uncharted territory for a self-respecting urban educated mind!

When I talk to self-respecting educated minds about this (the famed self-respecting educated minds, the demographic that I used to be a part of – but then I ran away), I hear the following:

‘We will gladly pontificate about lost innocence and we will buy expensive retreats – but we are not going to touch the real thing.’

‘We want answers but we don’t want to change our idea about ourselves and our self-aggrandizing intellectual paradigms’

The tragedy.

Here is the real problem. The machine annihilates the senses that we are born with, the senses that allow us to find happiness, to be fully present in the primordial state. The Machine beats up and chews up and covers up the context. The soul-eating Machine runs on broken language because language, imperfect as it is, is meant to reflect reality. If our everyday language were straightened out to be more consistent with eternal nature and our physical reality, the Machine would explode. So it keeps blocking us from expressing ourselves like children, from being free–and in the meanwhile, people who were born to be happy, keep getting together at conferences and jerking off about systems.

Fuck!

The ability to find the solution depends on trashing the interface entirely. And that is not an easy thing to do.

_____

I am an outsider with a heart, a brain, and a memory of home.

I am the little guy who spent a lot of time unlearning the very qualities that make one palatable in a Systems Society.

I know a thing or two about being happy, and I know with absolute, piercing certainty that it has zero to do with what most influencers and futurologists are saying to the masses (using uplifting, accessible language). It has nothing to do with gadgets, slogans, space ships, collective affirmation chanting, pseudo-intellectualism, ’science,’ or ‘technology.’

The future is the same as the present. You are born, you bring with you a magical connection to the universe, your unique feeling that you vividly remember when you are a kid–and then forget–your purpose, your unique sound, your version of love.

You are born, like a song of uttermost beauty – and then the people who have been traumatized before you, try to shame you out of remembering your song. Most of them are not bad human beings, they simply forgot, and they want you to be an important practical goose, for your own good.

Your song that exists for your happiness, doesn’t help the Machine. If you are to remember your song, you will know with absolute, piercing certainly, just like I do, that most of what the influencers and the futurologists are telling you, is a mix of wishful thinking and ego. From A to Z, ego. It adds nothing to happiness except it maybe teaches you how to navigate the labyrinth filled from wall to wall with distorted mirrors and sad, important practical geese.

And branding?

I whisper, from the bottom of my heart: ‘I am waiting for the day when people will see branding for what it is (psychic warfare), when goods and services will go back to being just goods and services, and when marketing messages will get the hell out of the sacred space.’

I know it won’t happen for a very long time–but I keep whispering, because I am right.

‘A spiritual message driven by commercial interest dies immediately. They don’t live together, they don’t eat at the same table, don’t you know?’

But it’s hard to blame the practical geese. The Machine is brutal.

The problem is that everything is driven by money. The Machine has figured out how to repurpose our in-born desire of being respected to feed itself, and how to make us do unnatural things, to chase the feeling of being important.

It’s a grinder.

Nobody – not the janitor, not the president, and sadly, not even the artist – is free to say what she knows in her heart of hearts, as long as she cares about having a social status of any sort, and a source of income.

Blessed be the ones who don’t think too much about any of it.

It’s a grinder, yo.

People at the bottom of society have more freedom to talk and have dissenting opinions – but that’s only because there is almost nowhere to fall from where they already are.

If you own stock, if you are looking for a job, if you want to keep a job, if you want to get published, if you want to get a prestigious interview, and sometimes if you want to stay alive – you have to say just the right thing, palatable enough, harmless enough so as not to alert the gatekeepers of the Machine to your inadequacy or your sudden uncontrollable freedom. And it would be just fine if people with ears knew that you are using your mouth in jest, that you are just doing what you have to do, if they sympathized with your unfreedom… Unfortunately, most people with ears are trained to take the spectacle literally.

Blessed be the ones who don’t think too much about any of it.

When the words that are coming out people’s mouths are polluted with self-preservation (be it basic bread or a high social status), the words are going to be distorted.

We all follow our instincts, and self-preservation takes over. When we are under pressure, we are all practical geese.

It’s a grinder.

Alas, in a world driven by financial self-preservation, truth-telling is a commercial affair. You can tell the truth – but only from a media-friendly angle, and only in a way that doesn’t piss off the sponsor, the donor, and the advertiser – and that meets the linguistic habits of your target demographic, of your very own echo chamber that feeds you. Truth, the edited version, hello.

Hello.

Can you hear me crying?

Fuck, I am an outsider.

I am married to my song, and the world is beautiful but ill.

I am an outsider.

I ran away from every machine, even though it gave me nice grades. But I can’t be running anymore. My brothers and sisters are all in here.

I was an outsider.

I was an outsider, and I still have a heart.

The post I am an Outsider: A Story of Freedom appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

A scream of anger and grief.

The lies and the abuse by the corporatchiks are worse than Pravda.

Still screaming.

Pravda? Why?

Because I remember how Pravda reported the news, and I resent the resurrection of its reporting style in today’s allegedly democratic American media. This insults my senses tremendously. It shouldn’t be! It’s been established three decades ago that Pravda’s approach to reporting was lame and toxic, so who brought it back?!! I feel like I need to take a shower every time I accidentally intake it. The robo-tone! The exaggeration! The blatant propaganda! Yikes. It’s like a creepy time machine.

I grew up in Moscow at the ruins of the Soviet Union, in-between empires, in the middle of what at the time felt like a sacred collective song of freedom (and what in reality was the soundtrack of western corporations moving in and clearing up the space with fuzzy words). But even though Western multinationals were full of it and the local oligarchs were cruel, the people actually craved a liberation. After seventy years of marching to the lying algorithm, the people wanted honesty. Pravda with all its angular hype, its robotic outrage, and the absoluteness of its every sentence was unapologetically laughed out of the room by my peers who were hungry for spiritual and political freedom.

The act of laughing propaganda out of the room shaped me profoundly. I am liberal in the most primal, apolitical sense of it. I am an artist. I believe that people can choose to think whatever they please, and that the authorities should keep out of people’s faces based on the fact that the authorities are never honest. I believe in sovereignty and sincerity. I understand the low value and the high cost of the establishment manufactured notion of “public good.” I feel that sustainable solutions are spiritual in essence and come from training the senses to grasp complexity and wisdom—and that algorithmic fixes suck. I believe that every human being has a unique and important purpose, and that respect for every individual’s free will is a precondition for having a harmonious society. I also believe that the “collective” boot and the “commercial” boot are two faces of the same boot, just painted in different colors. Or maybe just left and right?

So let’s look at left and right.

As an immigrant, I have never internalized any side of the American political divide—both sides have always felt more or less the same to me—war-loving, money-minded, working for overlapping sets of corporate sponsors—but based on language, aesthetics and my overall demographics, I have been identifying as a “democrat.” The language and the symbols used by democrats appealed to me more than the other side. Plus, most of my friends are democrats. Plus, I have always felt sad and disappointed every time a “conservative” friend, in the middle of a perfectly interesting conversation, would suddenly break into an ideological rant, using vulgar, primitive words to describe their perceived enemy. I’d be, like, seriously man, I love you but my brain! Then inevitably, they would explain to me why my softness was incorrect, and how the enemies were plotting against America and needed to be squashed, etc. etc. And I would feel very, very lonely.

But in the past four years—and especially in the past few months—I have been living with a tremendous cognitive dissonance as “my people” have become more right wing than right-wingers themselves. I get along with people individually regardless of their politics–and there are always common grounds—but as far as ideology, the sense of sanity is gone.

Like, gone, completely out of the window, gone.

Let me be blunt: Russiagate was bad–but the pandemic narrative is from another planet. It’s like every aspiration of the dystopian surveillance state is now “public good,” no questions are allowed. How about no?

The science is crying in the corner while its effigy is weaponized–surreally–to justify whatever needs to be justified by the establishment on a given day. And stunningly, although the measures march in a lockstep with what’s been envisioned by tech billionaires for a while, and although the official narrative keeps changing every day except the part that urges us to be extremely afraid–in profitable ways–the educated folks don’t become extremely suspicious and even look down on the ones who do!! It is as if the senses have been murdered by abuse!

There is this world in which everything is relatively normal and logical, and the government, however corrupt, is mostly functional. In this world, the biggest and the most egregious problem is the horror that is Trump—and his evil international buddies. In this world, the deadliest virus of all times showed up and hit us hard, and the good people in the government are doing their damnest best to contain it and to save us, while Trump is being his usual unfitting, incompetent self—trying to kill us all with greed—and for that reason, we are doing horribly. So what we need to do is clench our teeth, don our masks, and vote him out—and then, life will be good again.

There is this world in which important leaders do not make disturbing pacts with important entrepreneurs to enrich themselves and their families. In this world, eugenics was an ugly fad, Hitler was an anomaly from another era, and if we lived in Germany back then, we would have surely spoken out because that situation was obviously different from today, unless we are talking Trump.

There is this world… except there isn’t. Just like there wasn’t a Germany in which the Führer was trying to build a better Europe. It’s our order-seeking brains projecting it while under a barrage of severe and ongoing emotional abuse.

Like frogs hanging out in a pan of warming water, we are supposed to listen to the experts and sheepishly obey.

Don’t wear mask. Wear a mask. Don’t touch other people. Don’t kiss when having sex, and don’t forget your mask. Don’t leave the house. But leave the house to protest racism. But don’t leave the house otherwise. Wait for the you know what. But the you know what is actually not going to be that effective so you’ll have to continue to social-distance and cover your face. For how long? Oh I don’t know. A couple of years? An eternity? You don’t want to kill the grandma, do you?

Still screaming.

This is abuse.

Our feudal masters are not reacting to the pandemic. They are reacting exclusively to the color green—meaning money, not “sustainability,” although the latter is often used deceptively to invite more of the former into their pockets.

“Manifest Destiny” or “Great Reset,” the deceptive use of language is abysmal.

All throughout modern history, phrases like “public good” and “democracy” have been used by power addicts to fuel their coups and market grabs. Good language means nothing in the mouth of the establishment.

Talking about public good does not make anyone a liberal.

In fact, forcing one’s idea of public good upon others against their will makes anyone who tries it a totalitarian. Yes, including you, you scared goody two-shoes with a hammer.

I am sorry. But please. I am human, too.

This Earth is yours and mine, in equal measures. And liberty is not synonymous with making everyone convert to your religion, even if in your head, your religion is an epitome of public good.

Enough.

The post Frogs in Warming Water: Abuse Is Abuse Is Abuse appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

Human feelings don’t matter
Unless bringing them up
Suits the invisible man.
Then it’s okay —
And even encouraged.

Human sickness
Is collateral damage
Unless transformed
Into selling points
For the invisible man.

Poisoned rivers, stolen soil, tarnished souls, broken spirits,
Talking points, talking points, talking points, talking points…

Nothing’s real—
Unless it’s marked for consumption
By the…

Expel the invisible man.
Expel the invisible man.
Expel the invisible man.

Subversion of dignity: A condemnation of propagandists

I see two things happening at the same time.

On the one hand, a lot of people, tired of invisibility and exhausted by the lockdown—regardless of their intellectual take on it—are liberating their intimate feelings spontaneously and powerfully, creating ritual spaces together with others to express a raw and urgent longing for truth, acceptance, and dignity. This coming together is beautiful.

On the other hand, individual opportunists—as well as influential state and corporate actors with preexisting agendas—are latching onto authentic human longings and deeply rooted dissatisfactions to peddle their shallow, cynical, egotistical points.

The two couldn’t be more different from each other but the propagandists are very good at mimicking the language of “authenticity” and “community values,” and they are doing it without shame or restraint. They are capitalizing on all existing crises and inventing non-existing ones. They are hijacking the raw hunger for respect and empathy—a sacred, gut-level feeling that burns in every human being—and they are claiming brand ownership of it as if it’s possible for any “brand” to exclusively own a universal human emotion. (Oh how aligned this is with the trend of cataloguing all nature and living beings!)

The propagandists are messing with our neuronal pathways by creating novel emotional associations based on their suggestions of what should make us sad, happy, or angry on a given day (see also the CIA torture manual). As we sit at an important civilizational crossroads, they are derailing the narrative of healing. They are insisting that in order to be righteous, we need to feel what the newspaper tells us to feel and to never accept other people’s right to walking their unique spiritual path we may not understand. They are lionizing aggressive immaturity and mocking sincerity and depth. They are discrediting life experience and elevating malleability and “irreverence.” They are attacking our most powerful weapon against the soullessness of the machine—our ability to relate, to learn from each other, and to love. Their methods are indeed similar to torture manuals as well as to how institutional religion once claimed ownership of human sexuality and ruled through organized enforcement of frustration, envy, and self-betrayal. It is that thing again, only upgraded for the 21st century (wink, wink).

Meanwhile in the media, the winning style is as shallow as it has even been. The winner’s script might be different every day but the tone is still of an impatient teenager—one hundred percent projected confidence, zero percent nuance. It doesn’t matter what the talking points are. Be it Trump or a newly minted activist, the idea is to be unapologetically right on every front and propped by thousands of unanimous followers—with the opponent being inexcusably wrong on every front, ridiculous, and hopefully alone and in tears. The winner’s every waking moment is a picture-perfect courtroom scene in which his total domination is righteous, and the end justifies the means. According to both the old and the new normals, good people are allowed to be jerks.

To make things even sadder, the propagandists—as they’ve done a million times throughout history—recruit and groom fervent supervisors of the “new normal” du jour from the ranks of the unhealed and the extra ambitious. They seduce the most “viral” individuals with a prospect of personal visibility and a sense of impact—delivered through soundbites that have a ring of new authority, change, and redemption to them. The exact ratio of naïveté and calculated ambition in each case is unknown.

“Power to the people! Land to the peasants! Factory to the workers!” said the affluent, capitalist-funded leaders of the bolshevik movement in 1917. History repeats.

Trauma, revenge, and healing: What do we want? Who do we listen to?

Psychologically and emotionally, nations function much like individuals—with an added layer of complexity and greatly prolonged lifespans. Whenever there is an injustice or a significant imbalance, the feeling of being wronged can be temporarily swallowed by the belittled party—benefiting the winner’s standing—but it never goes away in earnest until the situation is resolved. The heavy, bothersome feeling can be relieved through an internal decision to place trust in the universe and focus on doing one’s best in the moment, through an act of revenge that tilts the balance the other way or—if there is such luck—through dialogue between the offending and offended parties that inspires new understanding, righting the wrongs, healing the wounds, and moving forward, renewed and pure. It is all about subjectivity, free will, and timing.

But if the injustice is not addressed at all, the suppressed feeling of being violated gets passed down the generations where it pops up in increasingly destructive and self-destructive ways—like a person getting sick from stress—until the imbalance is dealt with in earnest. For people, this process can last a lifetime. For nations, this process can take decades or even centuries—but the laws of emotional physics never cease to work.

Sadly, our nation established its dominance on the global map by intrigue and bullying. If America were a person, we would be a terrorist fugitive who begs a stranger to let him in and help him, then robs and murders the “stupid” hospitable host, rapes his daughters, enslaves his entire grieving household, and builds up his financial independence and military advantage from the stolen fort filled with terrified captive servants. And yes, he then invites his friends over and throws magnificent parties while the servants are locked in the back!

In this allegory, a question logically arises as to why the members of the household did not rebel and kick the scoundrel out—and maybe it is because he first threatened them with violence and broke someone’s leg, and then put them against each other, playing the betrayal card? Maybe he tapped into some old rivalry among the family members? Maybe he favored some of them over others, making sudden allies among them? Maybe he told everyone that the other one insulted them? Maybe he bribed the neighbors and installed them as supervisors? Maybe all of the above? In any case, America is not the only “person” who has aspired to fight for global dominance in this way, but it is probably the most successful aggressor of the past few centuries, and a big part of the secret sauce is fragmentation of interests, also known as “divide and conquer.”

This style of victory—greedy mobster style—sets the scene for a future vendetta as soon as the previously humiliated party feels strong enough to fight back—or a series of back-and-forth vendettas that continue until everybody on every side dies in the war or the descendants decide to start a difficult journey toward healing and reconciliation, for the sake of everyone’s sanity and survival. And at every step of the way, there are subjective choices and different psychological types with different emotional and practical needs. There are those interested in righting the wrongs and moving on with a sense of renewal, those interested in winning big on behalf of their side, and those interested in stealing from everyone—as everyone is busy going at each other’s throats—which is what I think is happening right now in broad daylight.

From the standpoint of emotional physics, America has been long overdue for a balancing. Our collective past involves numerous atrocities inflicted upon innocent people as well as many broken promises to the original people of this land. Our collective present is neurotic and stressful because there is no love, only the pressure to perform. From an early age, we are integrated into an unloving, quickly accelerating conveyor in which we are faceless numbers who are only given incessant attention if our bills are overdue or if someone suspects us of a crime. Even a high social status—the most important American value and the best protection from indignity—does not guarantee lasting peace.

Some of us are born with or develop a good support system that keeps us grounded as we navigate this dysfunctional machine—and find very comfortable nooks inside of it. Some of us are disadvantaged from birth—either financially or emotionally or both—and thus perpetually zoomed in on the predatory teeth of the machine. Lately though, many of us have been feeling squeezed as the proven American formula for comfort has stopped working in the old way and—squeezed—we are growling at each other because we feel endangered for all sorts of good reasons and need to to relieve the frustration somehow. Meanwhile, our leaders don’t mind it if we keep fighting with each other for the leftovers from their table and for basic dignity—and their hired opinion makers direct our efforts accordingly.

Thus, we have two big problems: One problem is that our civilization is wobbly. The other problem is that the psychological type of a leader traditionally favored and elevated by our civilization is not even remotely qualified to get us out of this mess, regardless of the flavor of the talking points.

To start on a much needed collective journey toward healing, we need spiritually grounded leaders like Nelson Mandela or Vandana Shiva, not egomaniacs like, well, most of our captains. We would benefit from listening to traditional indigenous elders—but the system doesn’t favor wisdom, it mocks and attacks it. Even in our own everyday choices we often tend to support bullies and charmers “fighting for our cause” over “boring” even-headedness. There is even a word to reprimand even-headedness: “bothsidism.” It’s almost as if the purpose of the system is the ongoing vendetta, with no healing in sight.

The dictatorship of the unhealed

There used to be a time in America when consumption became accessible to many, and it became the American dream. As Europe lay in ruins after World War II, America saw a beginning of a new economic boom. Of course, if one were to lift up the curtain, things were not that great in those olden days—DDT and smoking were good for you, DuPont was selling poison to Americans and dumping poison into water, the Jim Crow laws were in place until 1965, American foreign policy served primarily the munition manufacturers, and the original people of this land didn’t even have the legal right to practice their traditions until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978!! Yet the national consumption was on the rise, and it defined the era. That era lasted for about fifty years—but once the new century started, the mood and the slogans have changed.

Perhaps the people sitting on top of the machine started losing their minds for real, and their insatiable addiction to power overflowed. Perhaps, science and technology—or the perception of thereof—have gotten to where it became easy for the overlords to think “globally,” and they became worried about what would happen to their throne if the planet stopped providing for them at the usual accelerating rate due to the pesky procreating peasants and their “first world” standards of living. Perhaps, they have come up with a different pyramid scheme than the one they were using before. In any case, prosperity in exchange for “hard work” is no longer being advertised to the masses. Instead, we are swinging between the fairy tale of a technoutopian paradise and a push for austerity. Austerity now, paradise later.

To introduce austerity and lower individual expectations, our overlords—whoever they are—are pushing the bar down. To do so, they play people against each other and, among other things, invest heavily into the idea of “privilege,” a notion that only impacts inter-peasant relations leaving the position of the overlords intact.

The word “privilege” is a genius invention of the proverbial overlords’ marketing department because it uses a strong emotion tied to a real problem to create a lever out of guilt and shaming, which is used to lower the bar for everybody, without actually fixing the problem or giving away anything of their own! “What,” says the hurting person, “You didn’t get beaten senseless by a cop for sitting in the car and doing nothing? Look at your fat smirking privileged face, you son of a bitch, you. What do you know about life?!” “And you, kissing in public? I haven’t been near another human being for months, how dare you be so selfish? Pig.”

I understand the emotion. I am not immune to it, and there have been times when I felt it in myself and had to fight it off knowing that it’s poison. Because I know it in myself, I recognize it in others, and I am not going to take the bait. For example, in this now famous New York Times op-ed, Chad Sanders recommends that white people should inform their loved ones that they “will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.” I have never met Chad. I don’t know what he has been through, and I wish him the sweetest life possible, obviously (not as a privileged person but as a person who has been hungry,  locked up in “immigration detention,” assaulted, and wronged on more than one occasion).  I passionately relate to some of the things he describes—the emotional cluelessness of an unscarred middle-class individual from a first-world country can be frustrating—but refusing to talk to family members, during a pandemic none the less, unless they protest or donate?!! I understand that it is an opinion piece and a commercialized screenshot of an emotional moment but family ties are foundational to one’s mental health, and one really can—and should— “forgive” one’s mom or one’s uncle for not being politically active or even for practicing wrong politics. Suggesting otherwise is insane. Letting the unhealed energy dictate the rules instead of initiating and supporting the healing process is irresponsible on behalf of any leader.

However, what our corporate captains in all camps are doing—by ignorance or on purpose—is unleashing the pain of the unhealed upon target groups or the general crowd to lower the standards for all peasants. They—unhealed themselves—are encouraging indiscriminate resentment because it helps them clear up the stage for “the new” and creates an impression that calls for austerity come “from the people.” It is so dishonest, it makes me want to scream. They are using both the pain and the  protective instincts to block actual improvement and meaningful solutions—and this is as cynical as climate.com, a misleadingly named agtech platform for the takeover of the land and the food industry by the “new” industrial agriculture.

Here’s what any remotely decent human being in a position of power would do: deal with facts, talk to the people and represent their best interests, respect the human spirit, and invest in righting the wrongs. They would repeal the racist “war on drugs” policy designed to fill private prisons with poor people and secure free labor, they woud ensure that the police are properly trained and kept accountable, they would invest in high quality human education and healthcare and the arts, they would cut down the pollution that is currently disproportionately affectsing poor communities, and so on—but instead of doing all that, the 0.001% are supporting low-level chaos because it helps them keep us looking the other way. Without a doubt, “human rights” will be tossed out of the window the moment their “great reset” is finalized—but for now, “power to the people” is cool. And of course, the 0.001% are happy to pretend to support the plight of the unhealed because it costs them nothing! And not only does it not cost them anything, it actually helps them dismantle the old pyramid scheme and erect a new, AI-centered one.

A civilizational crisis

My job is Poison Distributor.
My condition is
Hatred of Biological Forms.
They call me deranged
But I am the sanest of all.
They call me a merciless killer,
A sadist, a robot, a king.
But I am just a perfectionist.

My job is Poison Distributor.
My religion is
Hatred of Unpredictable Shapes.
My poison will find you
In words,
In the water you drink,
My poison will find you
In food,
In the air your breathe,
This way or another,
It’ll find you.

My job is Poison Distributor.
A very practical job.
You are welcome.

I believe that we are at a civilization crossroads. Again, we have two problems. One problem is that our civilization has created a lot of messes, and they finally need to be addressed. The other problem is that the same psychological type that brought the issues about, is pointing fingers at them and using them to sell us solutions that are likely to make things even worse.

I have a big picture theory that goes something like this: The seed of our current crisis was probably thrown into the ground centuries ago when then-leaders ordered and enforced an emotional separation from nature that disrupted the way we lived and felt since time immemorial. It broke something in the sensory circuits, and it’s been making us increasingly more lonely, proud and insane (with a disclaimer that we are resilient and adaptive, so we have managed to create beauty and joy at every step of the way, no matter the circumstances). Perhaps it started as an experiment in uprooted creativity. Like a teenager throwing a tantrum based on the desire to self-express and be loved for it, the human kind decided to walk away from the familiar and “innovate.”

Each subsequent “innovation” (from mandatory monotheistic theology to war on sexuality to commodification of nature through industrialization, etc.) has created new sensory distortions, new suffering, and new beauty. It’s been going on for centuries but now, seemingly, the chicken have come home to roost. We are at a point where our expansion-based economic models applied to a finite planet can no longer satisfy the needs of our masters. Hence, the masters are very nervous and acting increasingly like addicts losing control. Maybe they think they are going to start living forever like any minute now. Maybe they are simply scared of the prospect of having to share with the entitled peasants. But in any case, they seem to be going after a system of total control, while not forgetting to monetize the process of getting there. They feel the need to organize their inventory—water, minerals, plants, animals, and us—and allocate and distribute their resources efficiently. Maybe trim some. Maybe replace some with robots. As long as they stay on top of the machine, any new managerial technique is worth it. The peasants are disposable—but they are a part of the inventory, and they should be catalogued and kept on a digital leash for better management.

The question that is unclear is the quality of the leashes. Will the leashes only limit our freedom (something that we kind of already don’t have), or will they also make us sick and kill us? Will there be beautiful silk leashes for the select few, or will everybody be downgraded to the status of a warehouse worker, via a hard reset and a financial meltdown? Will their “sustainable” model from hell (GMOs, agtech, “green” nuclear reactors, interactive surveillance, insane levels of electromagnetic pollution, pre-crime, AI medicine, post-truth media, etc.) lead us to the brink of mass insanity and possible extinction? These are the questions that are impossible to answer but what seems clear is that we are in the middle of an undemocratic attempt to mechanically dismantle the existing system and assemble a new one with much tighter controls, “for our own good.”

I, for one, don’t like the return of the cheerful totalitarian language that was forced on me in my early childhood. Somehow, I don’t think that JPMorgan Chase or the Ford Foundation are looking to transfer the power to the people.

Community
By Identity.

Celebrity
By Proximity.

Affinity
By Virality.

And Dignity?
Yes, Dignity?

Power to the people: Expel the invisible man

This moment in time is strange, and it came too fast.

I don’t have a clear-cut answer; however, believing social engineers isn’t one because whether they are well-intended or blatantly evil, they are insane—and they don’t care about us.

Maybe we can imagine what our bravest ancestors would have done. Maybe we can take the advice of the indigenous elders and put out minds at the service of our hearts and see where it leads us.

Whatever we choose, may our souls find purpose, and may our gifts be accepted and celebrated by the community.  Amen.

The post Civilization at a Crossroads: Feelings, Words, and a Power Grab appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

I am voicing a very strong objection to politicizing our intimate reactions to the pandemic.

We are all dealing with an existential crisis, and adding partisan agitation to this—on any side—is neither humane nor helpful.

First, let me point at the elephant in the room: The establishment media coverage of this pandemic has been abysmal. It’s like WMD all over again, but this time around it’s impacting everyone, including traditionally privileged Americans who are experiencing a life-shattering geopolitical event for the first time in their lives. 

Television is telling people that we are all going to die unless we freeze. Many managerial talking heads are strangely stuck in the never-ending act of unTrumping—despite the fact the actual issue is much deeper than Trump or his equally cartoonish on-screen foes.

A long time ago, we have collectively cut our ties with nature and the mystery of life, and it could be the beginning of our civilizational reckoning time, the time when bullshit falls off. As a nation, we have forever refused to deal with the fact that life is not a set of mechanical transactions—but a mysterious act that requires full existential participation. As a civilization, we have chosen to not invest in individual wisdom and  balance—but to instead place our faith in rules and algorithms that are supposed to protect us and keep us “safe.”

The centuries-old tradition of “going by the letter” is cracking. It is not just some “ism” that is cracking, it is the entire practice of living while disconnected from nature and our innate senses. The math of infinite economic expansion is bust, there is nowhere to go. Our skies and rivers are poisoned by the byproducts of that infinite expansion, and so are our minds and bodies. The machine is trying to regroup so that it can continue violating the laws of physics, smoke is starting to come out of its every orifice, and we can now smell it. The smell is not pleasant, and to the previously sheltered passengers, checking under the hood feels too creepy and unsafe.  “Do NOT look under the hood,” the rule book says. “Bad things cannot happen to us unless Trump causes them.” Thus, it becomes about unTrumping America, as if removing one symbol of corruption is going to keep the smoking hood sealed forever. 

Let me repeat, the media coverage of the pandemic has been abysmal—myopic and Pravda-like. So what if in my home city, the world’s center of the pandemic, the governor betrayed the elderly and mandated nursing homes to take COVID patients, thus putting thousands of lives at risk—and then made nursing home execs, his donors, immune to lawsuits, while also cutting Medicaid? A hero.

So what if many people died tragically and unnecessarily due to the flaws in our profit-driven, litigious medical system that resulted in sticking to unfitting ventilator protocols? “Interesting,” in the words of Anthony Fauci.

So what if many poisons in our bodies—from air pollution, from bad food, and from overly chemical medicine—made many people weaker and more vulnerable to the virus? Doesn’t matter, poison is profitable.

So what if the conversation about treatments has been criminally tainted with greed, myopic politics, and colonial arrogance (here and here), depriving human beings of treatment options that could have saved them? “But Trump!”

So what if big hospitals already were chaotic even before the pandemic, with several hundred thousand people dying every year from harms associated with hospital care? NOT a national emergency.

So what if drastic policies were triggered by poorly designed models by a scientist with an abysmal track record of accuracy and tight connections to the pharmaceutical industry, and that the concept of “social distancing” in its algorithmic form is a frivolous social experiment that was born fourteen years ago out of a teenager’s school project and curiosity of a bureaucrat?

So what if there is an unscientific push for any dissenting voices to disappear or be discredited, as our leaders are making deals with tech billionaires whose vision for our future is basically insane?

American billionaires have gotten $434 billion dollars richer during the lockdown, and left and right—literally—our leaders are making deals that are good for them, not so good for us—and the more terrified we are to look under the hood, the stronger the chance that the dystopia might come for us. Our fear is their bread.

Now, I don’t like politics but if I had to choose my politics, I would be left-leaning, My relationship with nature is one of love, awe, and gratitude. I am strongly against environmental or human rights abuses of all kinds. I am pro indigenous rights and against fossil fuels. And with that, I absolutely disagree with the screaming soundbites coming from the managers of my demographic. There are too many glaring omissions in their narrative, too much sensationalist bias, too much Pravda-like attacks on opponents. But most importantly, the idea that we can possibly avoid the physical world and other human beings, beyond some basic common sense precautions, is absurd and rooted in the same fantasy that has gotten our ailing civilization where it is right now. Fantasy is fantasy no matter anything else. We can’t avoid the physical world. We are not designed to live in individual bubbles, and there are not enough dignifying bubbles for everybody anyway, so in the real world, most bubbles would be prison cells.

Without a doubt, is a lot of suffering all around—but the conflict is not between “science” and “humanity” on the left and “greed” on the right. The conflict is between those of us across the entire spectrum who are trying to genuinely understand what’s going on and to act in accordance with our individual conscience—and those across the entire spectrum who are cynically and enthusiastically monetizing every drop of everyone’s pain and suffering. 

The science on almost every aspect of the pandemic is all over the place, and the amount of greed is obscene among the power players in both camps. Sure, some of them like fossil fuels, and some like nuclear energy. Some are racist via their Twitter, and some are racist via their colonial “philanthropy.” Some seek to prop their standing and their bottom line by opening up the existing economy and boosting oil, and some seek to prop theirs by using an artificially created paralysis of the world economy to restructure  energy markets, agriculture, healthcare, and education in a way that abuses the planet innovatively.  But how is abuse—old or new—normal? Why can’t we make our decisions not based on what Trump said or didn’t say and not based on any book but based on our personal sacred relationship with the world?

The conflict is not between the left and the right but between the people and the metaphorical vampires.

Soundbites are not going to save us at this point. We have the mystery of life to deal with.

A personal story: A few weeks ago, I was very sick and then recovered. For a little while, I was so overtaken by the temporary physical suffering that it made most of the bullshit fall off. The intensity of the physical suffering set my heart free. I realized that life is magical and wonderful, and that the never-ending noise of media gossip and fear-mongering is poison.

I command the poison to go away.

Let the zombies eat each other.

The post Not Feeding Zombies During Pandemic: Politics Got Nothing to Do With It appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

It is very hard for me to write this.

It’s hard because a part of me is scared of sticking out and wants to hide, hoping that somebody smarter and braver than me will fix this world, while I watch. It’s hard because I hate arguments, and I like to keep my private opinions to myself while maintaining a pleasant, non-abrasive presence and fighting my clean, safe, clearly defined public battles in a separate battle space. It’s hard because I can’t find meaningful enough words to say to anyone whose fear is real, and I don’t believe that any argument or even undeniable facts have ever convinced anyone who had not already been ready to investigate reality head on.

But I am even more scared of dying a coward. I was very sick, and I came out of it more honest and much hungrier for life and joy.    

My mind keeps coming back to a disturbing thought: What if people in the early Nazi Germany also closed their eyes and ears, while their brains were unable to process the dark reality? What if the representatives of their educated class kept saying, “Oh no, stop with the conspiracy, listen to experts, your rumors are simply ridiculous!” until the darkness settled in and became the only normal thing that was allowed to be, and then the senses succumbed to it? What if this is happening again, on a larger scale?

What if my voice was given to me so that I could speak? And what if I don’t speak, I will live and die in shame as I will be complicit in what the future generations will know as a long era of heavy, joyless darkness? What if I don’t need the permission to speak because the respectable deranged who are trying to steal the natural world from us are not going to give me the permission—drowning us in paid for “expert opinion” until there is no more life in anyone’s eyes—and I need to give permission to myself? What if I need to do it now?

For years, as an artist and a curious person with an academic background, I have been keeping my finger on the pulse, observing the trends, connecting the dots, and forewarning my friends that based on my observations and logic, our civilization was heading in a bleak and dangerous direction. My gut was telling me that we were making a habit- and fatigue-based collective choice to mute our innate instincts and outsource our thinking and decision-making to the algorithm (literal or figurative) and its corrupt representatives—who are far less competent, sane, or well-intended than what we give them credit for.

The dire situation I was observing was exacerbated and simultaneously masked by extreme fragmentation. Every small fragment of the slippery trajectory could be explained and justified in clean and respectable terms—and it was—but if you put all the small pieces together and looked at the big picture, the big picture was undoubtedly of bleak, all-seeing, dignity-defying, nature-stomping technological fascism.

While it was still a conversation over a glass of wine, it was almost titillating, like oh wow, how interesting and strange, we’ll see what happens.

And OMG holy fuck … is it what we see?   

The news looks insane, some of my friends are mourning loved ones who passed away in overwhelmed hospitals, the borders are closed, the global supply food is in a free fall, the physical world is deemed “non-essential” (despite the fact that it’s the only world we have, however good or bad), it’s barely legal to hug a friend, the ED of the prestigious World Health Organization says out of his actual mouth that they “need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them” (yes I’ve check the official transcript), physical contact is scary, sex is impossible, the future is uncertain, technology is here to replace the world as we know it, and no one really knows what’s going on. And somehow, this is actually happening on my home planet, in my lifetime, and I am not dreaming.

What’s even darker and harder to think about is the overall psychoeconomic framework that is being pushed forward to save us from the virus has been in the works for years if not decades: written about, funded (see this brilliant video by the environmental activist Vandana Shiva), discussed by state power players, and presented at TED talks. The pandemic is undoubtedly hurting us terribly—and that is tragic and painful—but the Manifest Destiny-like technological fascism staring in our faces and requiring that we denounce the physical world and do everything through digital interfaces until the physical world is fully pre-equipped with senors and monitoring devices—is not a caring reaction to the pandemic. It’s a preexisting, almost religious blueprint that has its emotional roots in the centuries-old missionary confrontation with nature. It is an ideology that competes in its maniacal madness with colonial pursuits, Hitler, and Great Inquisition—all of which, by the way, were based on “fine” reasoning that sounded perfectly sensible to many at the time.

The planet will survive anything we do. But we may end up suffering terribly, if we even live. Bottom line: The physical world is only one we have. Technology managed by people whose hearts are a mess, is not going to save us. We already have more technology than what our bodies can handle. It is eating up our brain space and our planet. If we hush our hearts and only listen to our computer-like brains, if we walk off the cliff with the maniacs, off the cliff we go.  

PAUSE.

When the pandemic became big news in March, I didn’t think it would last. Then I became addicted to Twitter and freaked out, worrying about my hand hygiene and total uncertainty of everything at the same time. Then I got sick. Then unbearably sicker. Then I recovered. And in the process of dealing with sickness, something cleared up inside of me. When I was overtaken by pain, I lost my tolerance for the spectacle and for the lying bastards who sell meaningless noise to us, as they suck our energy. Regardless of where we are in life and where we live, we are children of nature, not cyborgs. It is from our connection to nature and to each other—including tactile connection—that we get our strength and joy. What our psychotic, scared leaders are trying to do—whatever the proclaimed intention—is to break our spirits by disconnecting us from the life force itself (which by the way is not unprecedented as this was how the Europeans tried to “conquer” the indigenous).

I am not dreaming. Something terrible is happening to us, and it is not a drill. It is very complex and very trivial. It is imminent and cumulative. Every small fragment of the disaster can be explained in a respectable way, but the big picture is terrifying. We’ve given up our senses and our ancient instincts, but our leaders have no heads. We are not in good hands. We are shackled to a broken algorithm. We are on our own, and the sooner we realize it, the better our chance of surviving.

FACTS, POSSIBILITIES, LOGIC, AND LOGISTICS

Before I get to facts and logistics, I want to say what inspired me (this) and to make one crucial philosophical statement: This crisis made it abundantly clear that our world is a lot closer to the corrupt and violent middle ages than it is to a tech utopian paradise—and that the effect of continuing to believe in the rosy algorithmic myth (maintained by people who are literally insane) could actually kill us.

Now, let me go over some of the logistical things I’ve thought about over the past couple of months. These are my thoughts as of this second, based on what I have read, observed, and experienced recently and over the years.

The virus origin

For obvious reasons, I have no way of knowing where the virus came from. It could have come from anywhere: the market, the lab, whatever. Frustratingly, the respectable news has long stopped to even pretend to speak truth to power, being instead a dealer of curated emotional experiences. So I may never know the truth (and I am fine with it, I pick my battles). Did it come from a lab like some “conspiracy theories” suggest? All I know is that various scientists were working on exactly that (i.e. here, here, here)—and in Hollywood movies, such experiences never end well—but did it actually happen in real life? I most certainly have no idea.  

What is a virus, anyway?

Another surprising uncertainty is the definition of a virus. Up until three weeks ago, I assumed that the scientists have long figured it out, and that my fifth grade biology textbook had the correct and final answer. But as I dug deeper, I was humbly reminded of the fact that true science is in a flux, that researches don’t understand the human body or the universe perfectly well, that medical protocols are based on “good enough for now” arbitrary conventions, and that even today, not all scientists agree on the virus theory (some doctors argue that the recent groundbreaking research on exosomes offers an alternative explanation), on specific viruses (see the inventor of the PCR technique used in virus testing and a Nobel laureate, Kary Mullis, go at it), or even on the widely accepted methods of diagnostics. Very prominent scientists argue with each other about fundamental concepts and call each other names—and we, laymen, cannot possibly figure it out, and have to operate on faith. Science evolves, sometimes the laughing stock hypothesis of today becomes the genius discovery of tomorrow—and sometimes it doesn’t. We can only wonder.   

Yet, having gone down the layman virology rabbit hole, I was reminded not only of the fact that nature is a great mystery, and but also of the fact that the shiny temple of science is a busy marketplace (of ideas and of money). Having grown up around doctors and medical research, I was not particularly shocked to discover traces of intricate politics and great corruption in American science—but I was none the less reinforced in my understanding that we entrust our lives to the medical procedures based on winning scientific concepts—and sometimes we are lucky and it works great—but in reality, victory in science is about relationships, personal power, and money as much as it is about understanding nature or serving a higher purpose. There is no algorithmic safe space with final answers except the one we create in our head to explain the world to ourselves in words that we understand. We have to deal with it.

UPDATE: A must-see, classy and serious video that sheds light on corruption

Can we trust the algorithm?

Data’s rotten,
Tests are toast.
News is sullen,
Coast to coast.

Feudal darkness
Here and now!
To the masters
Peasants bow.

Facts are fiction,
Love is screen.
Gossip’s trending,
Trends are mean.

Hear, hear,
Where’s the joy?
Ask Alexa.
She’ll annoy.

Years ago, Nicholas Carr raised an alarm about the impact of automation on our ability to make good decisions. His worry was based on the fact that as we outsource our logic and our decision-making processes to computers and procedures, our natural ability to make good decisions will atrophy, much like unused muscles—with potentially devastating consequences. Furthermore, as legal frameworks form around the automated processes, even the most experienced and creative human beings will be forced to go against their senses and their hard-earned professional experience in situations that are less than trivial. Seems like his predictions are coming true quickly.

1. Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model has been “credited with prompting the government to impose the lockdown.” In a saner world in which human beings are in touch with their senses, a model is just a model, a game. It is observations and life experience that dictate actions, not so much a black box computer model. In case of Ferguson though, relying on his models is especially puzzling since his past models have been drastically off. In 2002, he predicted that as many as 150,000 people could die from the mad cow disease. And in 2005, he predicted that 200,000,000 people could die from the bird flu. So what then, given his record, inspired very important adults from the World Health Organization and various governments to take his COVID-19 model seriously and choose to turn life on Earth upside down in a completely unprecedented way? Incompetence? Fear? Something else? Another thing I don’t know.

2. Like any other New Yorker reading the news, I was heartbroken by the reports from the hospitals where the resources were lacking, and doctors and nurses were working around the clock, and yet people were dying. First, it turned out that the lack of much sought after ventilators—in the richest country in the world—was due to corporate corruption. Then one New York’s ICU doctor posted a YouTube video suggesting that ventilators seemed to be causing more harm then good, and that the protocols used by the doctors to treat COVID patients did not seem to fit. His act of courage broke the ice and inspired an honest conversation in the medical community. Shortly after, this New York Times article came out. It seemed like the things started moving in a better direction—but one fact mentioned there made me scream: for an entire month, helping the patients who had difficulty breathing into positions that made breathing easier was not a part of the protocol, so the doctors weren’t doing that, instead sedating them and putting them on ventilators, while on their backs—and the patients were mostly dying from it. When read it, I was terrified: that was the face of a man-killing algorithm, wrapped in an ordinary, everyday wrapper. If you have ever had a loved one in a hospital and if you had to fight against robotic and sometimes counter-intuitive procedures—every step of the way, for the fear of your loved one’s life—you know exactly the feeling of terror I am talking about. Helplessness.

UPDATE: It may still be logistically difficult to get away from the existing ventilator protocols, although alternative treatments have been very promising.

3. The tests—a very significant part of the puzzle—have allegedly been very unreliable, with a lot of false negatives and false positives. Whether it can be explained by the contaminated labs or not, I don’t know. But I do know that Google managed to quickly insert itself into the situation and opportunistically collect a ton of people’s health data, something they have been trying to do for a long time to train their AI.

There has also been an account of testing negatively multiple times in a row while having symptoms, then testing positively.

Even Snopes, which in itself is a blackbox fact checker that cannot be trusted blindly, states that tests are unreliable—which begs the peasant question: what is the point of testing if the probability of error is so high? It reminds me of trust of the mysterious object from Space Odyssey. We throw around words like “science” or “data” but the devil is always in the detail of the black box.

The antibody tests that came out more recently (reliable? not reliable? don’t ask me!) show that a lot more people than previously thought have had the virus and recovered (New York, California). I was very happy to see those reports because it means that the virus is less dangerous than initially thought. After I saw the New York study, I officially stopped freaking out. I can’t control the entire world but I can control my choices and pick the ones that make the most internal sense.

4. The overall stats have been all over the place, too. (I think we are starting to see a trend.) First off, if the tests were inaccurate (at least initially), then the data from that time period is trash, there is no way around it. Allegedly the mortality data has been inaccurate as well. On the one hand, many cases in the U.S. at least were registered as COVID semi-arbitrarily for a variety of reasons (from CDC guidelines to allegedly financial incentives pushed for by hospital administrators…. and let’s not forget the corner stone, the tests themselves!). On the other hand, there has been a report of a great number of people dying for unknown reasons in different countries. There is no way one can interpret the latter in a definitive way, by I think it’s not illogical to assume that extreme stress levels due to fear and uncertainty, disruption of life, and lack of treatment for other conditions (either because hospitals stopped accepting them or because people were too scared to go to the hospital), could have contributed to the tragic situation. What I have noticed in that study is that Sweden, the country that did not have a lockdown (and hence the least disruption of community ties), had the lowest relative increase. I don’t know if it means anything but it’s there.

WHAT NOW?

Pain is all I feel.
Muzzle on,
Feelings off.
Muzzle off,
Feelings on.
Outside,
Moving my hips
Like it’s spring.

There’s lots more to say about the data, and the daily updates, and the ongoing conversation about treatments, and the rumors, and the guesses. But what’s straight in my face is two things: one is that there is an aggressively “correct” narrative that comes with a whip and a moral judgement (which historically has never been a sign of good political intentions or a positive human outcome), and the other is that we are all losing our minds. I’ve noticed it in myself, as much as I am resisting it. I am starting to feel suspicious of other people, as if they are somehow “dirty” (while they feel the same way about me, I am sure).

The latter really concerns me the most because I know that long-term stress is very effective in turning off human ability to think straight—I’ve been there before and I know how it works from the inside. Once we’ve been battered for a long enough time, our sensory patterns will be damaged sufficiently, and we’ll be so exhausted and hungry for any semblance of joy that we’ll accept anything to be allowed to do basic things in the world. To breathe. To laugh. To be a little bit alive. To be a little bit free, no matter how short the digital leash. We are like frogs in a pot of water that is warming up. We are getting used to it.

Now, I am not afraid of the plague like I was before. My sanity requires, well, sanity, and the numbers and perspectives of a few outspoken scientists (however dissenting) warrant caution but not a total interruption of life. But even more importantly than the subjective call for sanity is the objective fact that the physical world is the only one we have, and we simply can’t avoid it and replace it with screens. They are now talking about seasonality, about not going back to “normal” until 2022…. so are we now going to freeze for another two years? Can you imagine what’s going to happen to our brains, our bodies, and our lives?

And I am not even going into the question of the economy because it is obvious to my senses that what is happening behind the scenes is a major restructuring of the market. The power players don’t care about the tiny spots of blood where the little guys were. We are nothing but cells in an excel spreadsheet. They have a lot at stake, our very damaged messiahs.

OUR VERY DAMAGED MESSIAHS

Citizens are
Enemies of the state
Or children.

Rulers are
Crazy parents
Or slaves
To $.

Television has long gone dark
But the lips keep moving.

Somebody’s helpless hand
Etching the hashtag sign
In the poisoned sand…

Unfortunately, regardless of the origin of this epidemic and of the ratio between randomness, accident, incompetence and bad intentions, we are at a major crossroads, and I am positive that time to be fully human—not cyborg—is now.

In the words of King James I who notoriously said, “By God’s visitation, reigned a wonderful plague,” the aspiring managers of humanity (i.e. human beings whose job descriptions and bank accounts allow them to make high-level decisions that have a global impact) are using the crisis to attempt forcing a bleak and dangerous world upon us. There is nothing conspiratorial about the fact that some human beings are addicted to power while simultaneously insane: it’s been this way for centuries, and it is their insanity that helped them climb to the top. Throughout history, we’ve had cruel and destructive religious and political leaders, inquisition, slavery, wars on the indigenous, eugenics, GULAG, labor camps—and every time, there was some respectable theory explaining and justifying atrocities in terms of “inevitable progress” and “public good.”

And now? The technology has grown powerful. Everything is done on a global scale, at the expense of local sovereignty—for systems management’s sake and for systems managers’ peace of mind. Independent and local solutions are consistently described as undesirable in reports (I’ve personally read) from various important people meetings. Since the planet is finite and there is no other place to expand into, the physics-defying infinite expansion economic model of the past few centuries is about to fall on its head. It seems logical that the people who are used to being in control are trying to save their place on top of the food chain in an economic model that is barely holding together. There are so many of us—and only one, clearly finite, planet. The power addicts are worried that there’s not enough for them and that, God forbid, without total control and monitoring of everything and everybody they won’t be able to stay in charge—and that people may dare interact with nature directly and benefit from all the good things she has to offer without giving them a fat cut.

Addiction to power is an addiction. If you know anything about addiction, people who suffer from it don’t always act rationally and can often be self-destructive.  That what we are dealing with—very scared addicts who have a lot of money and influence.

There is also nothing conspiratorial about the fact that for years now, there has been much talk about “the future” and many a big meeting in which our fellow human beings—scared of losing their power— have been planning for a world in which, first and foremost, they remain in control, whatever it takes. In that world, things are run by interconnected computers—as people are not very trustworthy—and every animate or inanimate object has a digital interface that sends data to the mothership (coincidentally, after I started writing the article, I stumbled upon this reporting, which made me want to vomit). In that world, shamelessly misnamed “sustainable agriculture” looks like climate.com or any other AgTech framework in which not the farmers but the software owned by large corporations decide what to grow and how to grow it. In that world, soil and seeds (2017, 2016, 2015) need to be purchased from sudden owners of nature, and food is grown in a lab—again, something that is not accessible to the small guy. In that world, everything is wirelessly connected and tracked, and living beings are equipped with sensors, “for their own good,” and nudged by AI, 24/7.

I don’t want to live like this. Living like this is not life. I don’t want any nanoparticles in my bloodstream, I don’t want the cells of my body to be bombarded by excessive electromagnetic pollution, I don’t want AI to know mood or my heart rate, and I don’t want to report to the mothership if I had an orgasm. Not now, not down the line, never.

We are being rapidly “guided” toward an unbearably painful state in which we are spiritually eaten into, where the sole purpose of being alive is performing a mechanical function, where joy is constantly interrupted unless it is a monetized activity that only mimics joy and leaves you unsatisfied, where being sedated is almost desirable because it is the only thing that temporarily stops the feeling that something is horribly, horribly wrong.

This is not a drill.

It is happening.

Small farmers are reporting being pushed out of the game as I am typing this, under the pretext of the pandemic lockdown (historic context). Once this is over and we have a new world, guess who is going to volunteer to “save” the world from hunger—it is going to be all the familiar faces speaking on behalf of AgTech.

Education is moved online.

Medicine is moved online.

It is now being done in the name of safety but it’s been a strategic goal of the tech surveillance apparatus for years.

The physical world is being cancelled (until allegedly the moment in time when our deranged overlords stick sensors in everything and everybody, and sign off on the world, proclaiming it as relatively safe). Which at this point is very much a fairy tale because the world will never be completely safe.   

We are being rapidly “guided” toward an unbearably painful state in which we are spiritually eaten into, where the sole purpose of being alive is performing a mechanical function, where joy is constantly interrupted unless it is a monetized activity that only mimics joy but doesn’t actually deliver it, where being sedated is almost desirable because it is the only thing that temporarily stops the feeling that something is horribly, horribly wrong.

There is no savior coming.

It’s you.

The post The Physical World Is the Only World We Have appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

Now imagine freedom, stretching your spirit, being in control of your time and doing things your way.

The pressure of the mechanical clock turns mysterious but achievable happiness into an evasive aim that keeps disappearing, leaving one with a perpetual feeling of frustration and stressful unfreedom. The pressure of the mechanical clock tricks us out of our natural state in which we own our time and our souls. Quantified time is a civilized version of the master’s whip. 

When we live by the subjective and animated time as it flows in nature, it somehow works with our internal rhythms, energizing us in response to our efforts.  When we live by the robotic clock, we spend a lot of our energy fighting the invisible master who wants us to be mechanically organized according to its robotic senses. We spend a lot of time simply trying to avoid pains and chains—and just because we are used to it, it doesn’t mean we don’t pay the price. If we are not vigilant or lucky, by the time we are old, living our lives on the defense exhausts our spirits and our immune systems.

Free people answer to their senses, to their consciousness, to their relationship with the natural surroundings and mysteries of the universe, and to the people they choose to love. Slaves answer to entities that don’t love them or care about them. Free people live their lives as art. Slaves react, react, react.

Alas, in today’s world, we are slaves of the clock, trying to escape.

In today’s “developed” world, the poor are often at the bottom of the ladder, getting squeezed first—and the more well-off are to a large extent driven by their being acutely aware of the fact that we need money to buy free time. 

Now, let’s dig deeper and look at the relationship between time and money.

When a free medieval craftsman took his time to make a one-of-a-kind wooden table by hand, every moment of his work was an act of artistic expression, an extension of his soul. He would still have to sell or barter the table to provide for himself but for the table to be beautiful—and marketable—he had to make it on his internal time, it wouldn’t work otherwise. One table could take him longer than another, and his client would respect it since art is a mystery. The number of tables he would make in his lifetime couldn’t possibly compete with the industrial conveyor—but Ford was not born yet, and our craftsman was not competing with robots.

When a farmer in an old remote village touched the soil with his hands or planted seeds, as slowly as he found it fit, it was a creative act, not a mechanical reaction. His relationship with nature was one of a junior family member, not one of a slave or master. The farmer’s life was not necessarily easy or comfortable by today’s aristocratic standards—but it was animated, not mechanical. That animated feeling of mystery and creativity is, in fact, happiness.

An economist would say that neither the craftsman nor the farmer produced enough to create the famous surplus—but the practical need for surplus was not what it is today. In our  imaginary, back-in-time world, you could be dignified and free without a surplus. In today’s world, in many ways, you are either rich or enslaved (although you could be both).

When the conveyor belt entered the scene, industrialists performed many tricks to rearrange the social landscape in such a way that independent craftsmen and farmers would end up displaced and consequently forced  to toil on the conveyor, on the mechanical clock, to enrich the master. It wasn’t the first time that the social balance was disturbed in favor of a generally dysfunctional arrangement—but it was an important one.

When somebody buys your time, it’s not the time they buy, it’s your creative energy that is strangely quantized, flopping its wings from inside the cage. If the work you do on the clock is creative and you have the freedom to make meaningful choices, it is tolerable to a modern person because the cage is loose—but if the work lacks agency or choice, one ends up losing one’s mind because a human being cannot be sane without freedom. 

If one has to move too fast, based on the mechanical clock, it sooner or later breaks one’s spirit. To some degree, we all have to participate and adjust to this dysfunctional framework, but some do it better than others. Like vampires, the DuPonts and the Bezoses of the world leech onto the creative energy of the financially desperate and turn their souls into dry money—and when the desperate crash, the masters toss out the empty shells and replace them with fresher and younger “workforce.”

But even the most conscientious ones have no choice but to occasionally delegate their own frustrations with the clock or push them down the food chain for the sake of survival. No human being can be squeezed infinitely.

Now imagine freedom, stretching your spirit, being in control of your time and doing things your way. Does it feel good?

Photo by Augusto Navarro/Unsplash

The post The Speedup appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

We exist in a world defined by a set of conventions—a world whose contour and features we collectively agree upon. Our collectively perceived reality may or may not reflect the physical reality lying underneath—but in each moment of time, it is that verbal agreement on “facts” that defines our framework for decision-making and social interactions.

How many people throughout history have believed that sex before marriage, divorce or masturbation were ungodly—and thus had to be banned or punished? How many people have felt inadequate based on that collective perception? How many paid with their lives? In each moment of decision-making, did it matter that the agreed upon “reality” was nothing but a prejudice? The collective agreement was enough to celebrate the majority opinion and to punish the wrongdoers.  And who is to say that today’s obviously correct rational understanding of the world will not puzzle the future generations as obviously super incorrect or even toxic?

And so we exist, day in and day out, in our imaginary world that we have collectively agreed upon. In this world, up until recently, God hated joy, and it was sinful to be gay, have premarital sex, or masturbate. In this world, today, we pray to the allegedly omnipotent AI and institutional science, and look to brands, systems, and law & order to save us or at least fix us for now.

We worship the soundbites and the memes that make us feel more powerful—and condemn the soundbites and the memes that feel foreign or intrusive. We loooove our soundbites and project our affection onto their human hosts and carriers. We don’t have the energy to look beyond our chosen heroes’ empowering slogans—until our heroes stop being useful to the machine and their luck changes—sometimes overnight—which is when we become “disappointed” in them and swap them for brand new heroes; and then the exciting movie plays again.

We float in the air, our feet not touching the loving ground, our air and lungs poisoned, our hands grasping for something to hold on to—if not a friend or a lover then at least a smartphone.

We are lonely and proud.

Our soundbites are our digital drugs.

We are proud and lonely.

When the symbols of our empowerment are questioned, we fight for them because our pride is the only thing we have left. And no, it’s not us who has an addiction problem. It’s them.

As I watch my adopted homeland plunge into the abyss of addiction to slogans, I can only hope that through trial and error, our senses will lead us out of this mess, even if it takes a thousand years.

Photo by Aaron Sebastian/Unsplash

The post Facts, Soundbites, Disinfo: Who Decides What’s Real? appeared first on Tessa Fights Robots.

I became an American citizen a long time ago and yet, I have been navigating my life in America as a Russian woman on the run from our mandatory martyrdom—and that it my story. My experience with Rob is a peculiar but insignificant part of it.

Growing up in Moscow, I didn’t know any relaxed, happy women. For years, that fact didn’t even register in my mind that as an anomaly. It just proved to me—at the time—that adults were hopelessly broken. For some strange reason, adults seemed to be fatalistically accepting of their brokenness and the general dim character of their lives. It seemed like they were choosing to be defeated, almost as if the society viewed honest, uninhibited happiness as a pathological condition, if not a punishable act of arrogance. Wanting to be happy, struggling to be happy was fine—just not actually getting there. As long as you were caught up in a struggle, you were legit. But if you were walking around like a crazy ray of sunshine, naturally impenetrable to shaming, you were an oddity, and you deserved more shaming for not carrying your share of the burden. Even those who loved you and wanted you to thrive, expected you to obey the rules that by the laws of emotional physics, would not permit anyone to relax and actually thrive as their own free self.

The bulldozer of “behavioral modification by the village” seemed to be hitting both men and women, but with different outcomes. A lot of adult men—not all but many—rebelled by “checking out.” They just withdrew from any worries of survival or any commercial accomplishment. For matters related to comfortable existence, they relied on moms, wives, and chance. They found solace in tinkering with tools, in television, in bragging about male superiority, or in drinking. They shied away from emotional complexity and practical ambition. They invested their energy in abstract pursuits or in passive television watching. But women—although they participated in intellectual and professional activities on a par with men—as bright and accomplished equals—turned into heroic, smart, fierce, asexual working machines that were busy at all times making sure that all irresponsible members of the family were kept clean, tidy and well-fed. Yelled at, constantly corrected—yes—but safe, tidy and well-fed.

It seemed as though the men weren’t strong enough to deal with the cross-generational pressure denying human beings their right to joy, while the women managed to maneuver the oppressive condition as active participants, while leaving behind their sexuality and transforming into joyless, tireless, overworked mid-level family managers. The dysfunctional emotional symbiosis was palpable. Women would work, buy food on the way home, cook, clean, wipe the needy noses, nag, sleep a little, and then repeat. Their husbands would insist on their right to watching the TV in peace (dammit). No one was happy but the wheels kept turning. Post-honeymoon married couples seemed to be in a constant dance of survival, getting through the day, getting by, filling their time together with petty arguments and mutual dissatisfaction that created the plot of their lives. At the same time, popular literature promoted female strength, the woman’s intrinsic role of a “support beam,” and stories of women being almost inevitably let down by weaker, more capricious and less responsible men.

Perhaps the imbalance was owed, at least in part, to the legacy of World War Two. It took a heavy toll on the generation of my grandparents. It stole away millions of lives, widowed countless women, and forced many of them to toughen up—out of cruel necessity. The women of the WWII generation have survived hardship, hunger, and extreme poverty. Many raised children by themselves. Many lost husbands very young and never remarried, committing themselves to sexless lives filled with austerity, caring for the family, and hard work. The women of the WWII generation became fiercely resourceful and tough, but the intrinsic joy of being alive didn’t survive the grinder, and their children grew up in an atmosphere of self-sacrifice and strict limitations.

Or perhaps the feeling of perpetual hopelessness went deeper, tracing back to the time eleven centuries ago when my people’s original indigenous culture was obliterated for political gains of a powerful “centralized state,” with the help of then just formed Russian Orthodox church and its man-made war on joy and nature—the war that by the time I was around, had long been rebranded and repackaged by the Soviet authorities for their own political purposes.

In any case, struggle was the default way of looking at life—as it has been for centuries—and inner freedom was not viewed as anything good.  

And then capitalism stormed in, blowing the wind (smoke?) of change, and suddenly, everything flipped. New movies featured underground music, total brokenness of everything, and women craving lacy lingerie, abundant supermarkets, and a rich foreign husband. The traditional, honest, low maintenance Soviet man—his television, his worn-out sweatpants, his lazy retorts—have all been condemned. The successful entrepreneur was obviously harder to please and more likely to leave—but it didn’t matter, he was the new media darling prince, the new pie in the sky (in a white Mercedes, perhaps). For a rich man, a woman was to dress up, to diet, and to tell him that she had forgotten to wear panties. In order catch him, she was to be pretty, easy-going, and a little smart—but not too smart or opinionated. She had to know when to talk. Know how to talk. Know when to shut up. In other words, be a good reflection of what the capricious and emotionally unavailable successful man wants, according to popular mythology and soap operas. 

Given my opinionated personality and my love of philosophy, I was like, but why?! The newly minted Russian entrepreneurs I knew personally were obsessed with money, intellectually primitive, and physically unattractive. The ones I randomly ran into were plain scary. My tutor, an adamant adopter of Western capitalism and a proud business owner, yelled at his wife so loudly in front of me and their kids that even I felt uncomfortable. A friend of mine, a poetic soul hosting artsy parties downtown Moscow, got involved in a high-end pyramid scheme and at some point literally tortured another poetic friend by tying him to a hot radiator, to extort money. An obscenely wealthy married mobster, a friend of a friend who offered me translating work, kept calling me with romantic propositions, and I jumped in my chair in pangs of anxiety every time the phone rang. My BFF’s extremely successful American boyfriend was the most charming and cultured of them all—but despite the love that they felt for each other and the fact that their relationship was good enough for them to get married, she seemed to always have to shut up and listen to him.

Something about it was rigged. I was not observing much of what attracted me in life. What I was observing—although years would pass before I could verbalize it— was that the character of the low energy Soviet man was replaced by the character of the high energy Western entrepreneur—but “woman” was still a supporting role, perhaps even more so than it was before. She used to be a tireless workhorse, and now she was an irresistible product.

I didn’t like either option. I didn’t want to be a workhorse in a dull world, and I didn’t want to be a sidekick of a rich man. I wanted to be me, to see the world and to do great things—and so I moved to America.

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