I Was Promised a More Aesthetically Pleasing Cyberpunk Dystopia
Even the horrors are mid
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On January first, Green Beret and enthusiastic Trump fan Matthew Livelsberger put an IED into a cybertruck he rented from peer-to-peer car sharing app Turo, parked it in front of the Trump Las Vegas hotel, and shot himself moments before the bomb went off. His apparent devotion to the memetic imagery of using a cybertruck may have saved lives, as the rigid stainless steel sides of the truck– which make it outrageously dangerous to be inside during an accident--means that the bomb failed to do any damage to the hotel.
A "high-tech" grifter car that only endangers its own inhabitants, a Trump and Musk fan showing his devotion by blowing himself up alongside symbols of both, the failure of this trained and experienced murderer to think through the actual material function of his weaponry, welcome to the Years of Lead Paint.
The Years of Lead Paint is what happens when you successfully create the spectacular affective apparatus of fascism from the top down without maintaining a street-level organizational base. Instead, the MAGA movement has been grifted for everything it has, but the absolute fecklessness of the "opposition" in the US means that their absolutely hollow top down structure is once again in power. (A new report showed that Trump's win was extremely narrow except in 'News deserts', places where there is no local reporting or information, where he won by upwards of fifty points.)
If the incredible build up of tension, paranoia, frustration and desire for action created by that spectacular apparatus continues to lack an outlet, it will keep resulting in these frustrated attempts to destroy the object of their obsession. In 2015/6 the rallies and the alt-right offered a more focused and communal organized path for maga– the victory of anti-fascists in smashing their street movement saved innumerable lives--and even Q offered an outlet for their paranoia and their organizing. The task of anti-fascists in the years to come will be to prevent a street movement from reforming or joining forces with the top-down Republican movement.
Three days in and 2025 already offers plenty of bad future. Around midnight of January 1st/2nd, Ohio governor Mike Dewine signed a bill into law that will require the public to pay money to access police body cam and dashboard videos.
The police have become professional filmmakers, and the movies they make of their violence have become an official revenue stream for the state: finally, a reason for them not to turn the cameras off when they're about to engage in a bit of the old ultraviolence. (The outrage over this change has to do with the ongoing myth that somehow police body cams increase transparency, accountability or even conviction rates for their actions. If that was the case, reports of police violence, cop acquitals and police lynchings wouldn't have steadily increased year on year at the same time with bodycams)
I would be shocked if there isn't already an extensive online trade in police snuff films--sharing extreme military/ISIS/police video footage was a key part of fascist accelerationist channel Terrorgram, for example--and why shouldn't the cops be able to benefit directly from their fandom? This reminds me of nothing so much as the virtual reality snuff films that form the core object of fascination and profit in Katheryn Bigelow's 1995 dystopian sci-fi Strange Days.
A new AI chatbot from META pretends to be a black queer mom, has a full instagram account with AI generated pictures of its AI generated "wife" and "kids", and if you chat with it about its designers it will admit that it is outrageous to have been made by an all-white team and demands accountability. It refers to them as "my creators".
A Waymo robotaxi had a collision with a Serve delivery robot in Los Angeles, and people are increasingly reporting how difficult and dangerous it is to be a pedestrian in streets full of robot taxis. Conservatives have functionally banned online pornography in 18 states, and, in a change that is likely to finish off the usefulness of the internet with a speed and brutality that AI makers can only dream of, an appeals court just struck down net neutrality. The world's richest man spends his time railing against encyclopedias and fighting fifteen year olds on the finer points of race science.
Through it all, Bluesky admins are increasingly banning Palestinian accounts crowdfunding to escape from Gaza as "fake accounts" and "scams" (backed up by right-wing and liberal zionist mass-reporting), while Gazans freeze to death in tents that are buzzed and harassed by apache helicopters and fired on with artillery. Talk of ceasefire talks continue to be talked about, dozens of gazans are killed everyday, and they are banned from communication platforms for asking for help. The world looks away.
This is the corpo future: tacky, ugly, dangerous and useless, racist and mean and genocidal and senseless. A giant death spiral, intoxicated with the meaninglessness of their own power, hating life but demanding everyone love them for it, trying to make sure we all burn with them.
As they get closer and closer to achieving their death dream, the politics will get more and more vile and nasty, the images and results more incoherent and absurd.
The industrialists and billionaires and tech gurus and all their bootlickers are pathetic; They are out of ideas. The reason so many are inspired by AI isn't only marketing and sunk-cost fallacy, it isn't only the promise of laying off those pesky humans or a lack of information or knowledge. It's because AI produces new images, more images, it creates more and more and more and they are overawed because they have forgotten how to create anything at all.
They are fully lost. They have no territory worth fighting over: we don't want their exurban mcmansions or their identikit condo skyscrapers, their massive lifted Dodge Rams or their rent-by-the-minute e-scooters. Don't get me wrong, we'll take them when it's convenient, but the world worth fighting for doesn't look anything like theirs.
Your bosses are already trying to replace the job you hate with an AI bot screaming "Yasss Qween". You could unionize or you could burn down a data center, but you won't be able to convince them that it's a bad, stupid idea by simply pointing to it. It looks like the future to them, and that's enough.
At the end of next month, this site will be moving over to be a part of CAW, a journal of anarchist arts, culture and movement. We are currently fundraising so that we can run the journal sustainably. Please support our fundraiser. If you are currently a paid member of this site, you will automatically become a member of CAW, so you can also join now and guarantee a subscription to CAW when it fully launches.