Anyone else deeply get why people want to cognitively offload everything they can to AI?

The world is So Much right now. We're all juggling a thousand tasks and chores. Why is my tablet not charging? Why wasn't my prescription filled yesterday? Gotta pay my quarterly estimated taxes, find a new trimmer for the parts of the lawn the mower can't reach, make a dentist appointment cause I'm grinding my teeth at night.

New technologies and productivity gains never lead to real ease in our lives. Capitalism greedily gobbles up the difference. It sells us new tools "oh this will make things easier" and we do it because we need it, we're hovering on the edge of burn out, but the end result is we drift further from each other. We replace the resilience of relationships with the fragility of a tool, an app.

The problem isn't people. Please don't shame folks for trying to get by. Shame only adds to the overwhelm and sense of isolation. It perpetuates the system, it doesn't dismantle it.

Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.

if you think the users are stupid, then you are letting your own arrogance reduce your own ability to analyze the problem space fully.

users do things that make sense to them in the moment. failure to understand the context where an action -makes sense- and is thus the correct action to choose is a skill issue on your part.

The UK government's plan to teach 10 million British children how to use VPNs may be one of the most ambitious IT education projects ever launched. Experts have praised the scheme, saying that a deft combination of incentives and peer education make it more likely to succeed than other, comparable initiatives.

"With the rise of autocratic governments worldwide, VPN-literacy is more essential than ever.” said one expert, “This bold project definitely comes at the right time.”

#UKSocialMediaBan

I dont like the term “digital sovereignty” because of the pronounced nationalist and authoritarian connotations that it carries, regardless of what the actual intentions of its particular users are.

I propose that as hackers, we reframe the core concept (independence of US-centric cloud operators) as “digital autonomy”. I think this carries the same core idea while being less about who rules the digital realm, and more about the freedoms we all have within it.

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You don't like it when people delegate their thinking to the technofascist torment nexus slop bots?

When they burn down a forest, drain a lake, and poison poor people in datacentre neighborhoods to be told that there are three Rs in apple?

Well then, Trump, Starmer, and Carney think you're a terrorist.

Technofascism Survival Guide exists to prepare you and your family to survive.

Last week for late pledges! $12 USD. Late pledges pay my rent and buy groceries!

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kimcrawley/technofascism-survival-guide/