Tuesday 2/25/25
I wake up hours before sunrise and the first thing I often do before getting to the desk is take a quick look at the latest horrors of this horrifying world. This makes for a strange juxtaposition: To go from seeing that to working on what I work on.
It floors me (though it shouldn't), frightens me, depresses me, to see all of these people who are not smart enough to understand something--anything--for what it is, no matter how simple that thing is and how obvious it should be. Fewer and fewer people are now able to understand anything. We are fodder for propaganda. Sub-person beings waiting to be controlled and taken over.
Elon Musk (who I think is crazy--I don't mean that euphemistically and also likely a drug addict) as the head of DOGE sent out this sloppy, bootleg email to federal employees asking them to bullet-point five things they did last week or else be fired.
That is so amateur, so absurd, that if you saw an email like that in isolation you'd think it was spam, the way you get emails from, like, Bank of Americca rather than Bank of America. Anyone receiving that email would think, "This isn't my boss, this isn't my employer, this isn't anyone familiar with my job or the workings and goals of the outfit of which I'm a part." They'd ask how this would be read, by whom it would be read. They'd have no idea what was best to address, focus on. No idea how long the response should be. That's because what it really is is an exercise in power and fear mongering.
But then you have all of these people saying what's the big deal, accountability--as if hardly anyone in the world right now is truly accountable for anything--is great, etc.
This isn't accountability. DOGE is not that federal employee's boss. Many people are also sufficiently unthinking and conditioned to blast of news that they can't conceive of those employees already having to report to supervisors and bosses as part of their job. The blast of news replaces reason and logic; the blast of news holds dominion. It cancels out all else. The blast of news usurps.
"If people are being told to be accountable in writing now, they must have never had to be accountable in writing before," is the conclusion many will draw.
This is like someone in another workplace meeting with HR, giving reports to their boss, whatever it is, and then receiving a sloppy, amateur email--which is really a threat--from an outside party asking for a formless accounting of tasks completed.
But even that's not explicit. It's subjective, open to interpretation. Length. Prose style. It's closer to a second grade "What I did on my summer vacation" assignment than it is an undertaking of the adult workplace.
When someone leads with a threat, they're not trying to ensure accountability. They're trying to hurt. To intimidate. They're trying to break someone down.
It's a near-accidental--but shopworn all the same--strategy of conquer via chaos, which is a happy--for these people--offshoot of their own incompetence, lack of a plan, lack of discipline, lack of compassion, lack of decency which both demands and has a goal of mental servility and obeisance.
This is immoral, unprofessional, stupid. You have millions of these employees. None of these words are going to be read by a human. They'll be "checked" by AI. What AI represents is the end of humanity and humans. It's the single biggest threat to us in our history. It means the end of humanness. It's happening fast and it doesn't have to take long.
So then the lives of these people and their families--things like the food they can buy, the medical care they can get, and so on--may be negatively impacted by an AI scanner that looks for whatever--certain words, phrase patterns, sentence lengths. That's why someone's kid isn't getting the help she needs? That's why the older woman can't grocery shop?
Many people aren't capable of thinking that these federal employees were already subject to evaluation simply because this mentally ill, insecure tyrant with the impoverished-to-nonexistent soul got high on cocaine or whatever he is on and fired off this email because he needed attention and another rush.
I think maybe ten people in the world actually have focus and vision and work hard by what would be my standards for those things, so I'm not the person who believes everyone does the best they can or more than like two percent. But wrong is wrong.
Should your bullet points go on for 2700 words? Is that better? Or should you try and be tidy with 150? Is that better?
It's caprice. Whim. Pettiness. Then dropping an ax blade potentially because of what AI spits out in return. It's just being run through the computer. For word combos and the like.
You can't control the computer's end of things. It has nothing to do with how serious or not you are about your job and how well you do it.
It's meant to debase people. To make them do something degrading because someone can. It's what you'd do to make people quit. To want to leave. To be miserable regarding their work, or at least this aspect of it and have them contend with fear, with uncertainty, that they could be gone any moment through no fault of their own.
Musk wants people to live that way. Because he thinks he can do it to them.This is a bad, not-all-there guy. The shades on the stage, the chainsaw? It's mind-blowing that this could be the state of government if it was our earliest, pre-Republic days in the woods. But now, when it's all out in the open--covered--for all to see? How can this happen?
Well, we've made ourselves vulnerable to it happening because we're idiots now who are increasingly bereft of self. We can't think, we're less human than ever before. We can't read. We can't communicate. We can't write. Can't reach each other. Can't face things. We have swapped out reality for fantasy. We've gotten ridden of what is for what is virtual. In doing so, we've become weaker, less brave, less able to deal with that which must be dealt with.
We are sitting ducks for technocrats and our own demise. And you know what technology is? It's not progress. Or the vital progress, I should say. There is only one real form of that: Human progress. The progress that comes from within, both for the individual and across the collective.
A rocket ship. Stop it. You can have all of the rocket ships you want, all of the interplanetary travel, it can be fucking Star Wars, but we are only going as far as our humanness takes us.
Nothing matters more than the should-be sacrosanct quality of humanness. You vitiate it, break it down, take it for granted, don't help to grow it, keep it from developing, rape it, impoverish it, you get what this world has become and it will only continue and get worse and worse and worse. There will be no joy. There will be no fullness. There will be no knowledge. There will be no wisdom. There will be no individuality. There will be no originality. There will be no self-awareness. No strength. No mental health. There will be no connection. There will be no growth. There will be no happiness. There will be no love. We're already well done that path.
We are here for one thing in which everything of importance and substance stems from and can be found within: And that is to be as fully human as possible. In this is all. Anything else is nothing, and ultimately doesn't matter for humans, save that they can make it the means which essentially ends them in all but name--that is, you have a pulse, so you're technically there.
Musk has no interest in efficiency. He doesn't care about staffers at Yosemite or the Bunker Hill Monument. He wants to hurt people. He wants to subjugate them. He wants to rule and have people cow before him and worship him, even if he has to make them do so by punishing them for things they haven't done, buying them, commanding them, starving them, just so you'll say, "Yes, sir," and "Thank you, sir" to him.
He would buy love via the coin of fear even if the people saying the words hated him, because that's who he is. A loveless, unloving, unlovable man who will break others to try to force them to say the words. He's like someone who will beat their kid to make their kid tell him that they love him. He wants to get those words out of the mouth, even if they're said to stop the belt from coming down on the skin again.
When you are like that, you're less a person than you are a void. And the person who is more like the void chucks whatever it can reach into itself. Nothing gets filled, and it just chucks and chucks and chucks.
And these people who are like, "You should have to be accountable, nothing wrong here," are as stupid as Musk is bad. I'm sure that the person who unclogs drains for a living and reports to their boss Frankie who owns the company would love to get an email from a coke-addled third party demanding five-bullet points about what they achieved on the job last week or else be fired, with their response then getting processed by AI, but ha ha ha, what are you upset about, it's not about your response--so said Musk subsequently--but whether you have enough of a pulse and a brain to answer an email, so you're just really being fucked with and insulted because this asshole thinks he can. I'm sure that drain unclogger would love that and be like, "Well, as I always say, accountability is vital, happy to do this in addition to Frankie keeping his tabs on me with a big smile on my face--love you, mean it--just like Elon wants."
Comentarios