She what?

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On memetic influence and viral immunity ~ Part I

Following my last post on the ethos of grift in the nonprofit sector, my winding path of mulling and musing led me to concepts of memetics – that is, the study of memes. Back in 2019 I posted on FB about memes ruining democracy – the discourse I was part of, heavily

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The ethos of grift has taken the nonprofit sector, and AI is its accelerator

Yesterday while watching a Stanford-sponsored, nonprofit-targeted presentation recommended by an executive-level director on "healthy cognitive offloading with AI", I had an anxiety attack. The presentation was AI-generated, full of errors, logical inconsistencies and blatant manipulation of reason. The presenter was taken at her word throughout the presentation, because

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Carney's Davos speech was a sales pitch – Part III

Our elite banker-turned-Prime Minister has entered Canada into a self-imposed, nonstandard Structural Adjustment Program, enforcing economic measures typically applied to developing nations. Why? My previous interpretations of Carney's Davos speech, first identifying it as a sales pitch (which it was) and then noting his alignments with Trump (which

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On agency and the existential exploitation of Cloud Capitalism

It recently occurred to me that the reach of Marxist thought might be falling short in terms of contextualizing the struggles of Cloud Capitalism. What happens when the modes of production are iterated into complete abstraction? How does materialism account for the digital aether? What does it mean for the

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Existing as process and a communicator's duty to resistance

Back in 2018 I shared a thought on Facebook about how social media was changing our perception of time. I had just wrapped up my first summer growing flowers for profit on a parched five acres in the prairies of Southern Alberta. Somehow, despite no working wells on the property

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Applying the model of community radio to decentralized social media

I've been trying to find a solution to the problem of social media. Over a year ago I designed a model I thought might work – a tiered networking platform that offered free functionality to individual users, paid profiles to businesses and institutions, and founder/investor shares to arts

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Men must not lead the revolution

I've sat on whether to write this. Is it worth the potential flack? Is it worth chafing the sacks of men who picture themselves as potential heroes of this uncertain era? The men pulling inspiration from the giants of history – the Marxes, the Lenins and Trotskys, the Guevaras

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Hey what about a post-apocalypse garden society?

I was raised Mormon, and though I left the church and distanced myself from organized religion in my early twenties, the doomprepper in me never really died. I was brought up with large gardens and cold-storage rooms, small livestock and needle crafts. The earliest dreams I can remember, and the

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Are you even conscious, bro?

Agentic AI is spurring debates of consciousness, and because no one seems to agree on what consciousness even is, the discourse has become noisy with takes that vary between, "anyone who thinks AI is conscious is mentally ill" to "anyone who can't consider AI consciousness

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AI's cognitive crisis is being willfully ignored

We're in the early days of a mass cognitive crisis, obscured by capital forces in the same way our environmental crises have been obscured by the fossil fuel industry for decades. That the two operate according to the same morally-bereft framework is no surprise. When exponential capital gains

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Adapt, die, or a third secret thing

Yesterday I had the sickening realization that we're entering another era of polarizing discourse re: AI. Fresh off the deeply divisive and destructive wave of covid mis/disinformation and having apparently learned nothing from it, people are dusting off their pitchforks and setting out to burn down anyone

The sweet granularity of stillness

I'm remembering how to be still. It's so nice. I originally grew flowers because they were the funnest way I could think of to make a living. Just challenging enough, total autonomy, and they turned a decent enough profit to sustain me and my kids. But

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Musings and sense-making with an excitable comms gal.

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