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Maybe I'm irritated
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It was another whirlwind of a week and by Tuesday, I felt like it was Friday. Time is strange right now. It might be because I'm not used to having this much work on in January, it might be because I feel like I'm responsible for things I'm definitely not. I care too much, etc etc. But I've been mindful and meditating, taking walks and telling my ruminating brain to STFU.
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Sleep has been tricky though, and so I'm writing from a place of imposter syndrome and "who gives a toss"ism. Still, I'm writing to you. I'm still writing to you.
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My through-line seems to be advocacy, and my work at the moment is supporting that through-line. We're doing community work around better privacy and security habits, supporting an activist organisation on participatory learning, building a training programme for another activist organisation, advocating for open principles and trying to move educational mountains with advocacy in open recognition. Then there's noodling around the principles of cooperatives and building our society as humanists instead of outright capitalists.
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These things are a confluence of my interests, and I am privileged to do work I'm mostly interested in.
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So imagine how irritated I am at the recent security breaches in multiple password managers (Bitwarden, LastPass, Keepass), OpenAI having nothing to do with open source and Exxon's 54.9 billion in profit.
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Maybe I'm human
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Remember last year about this time when crypto and NFTs were the hypedy hype? The same thing is happening with sophisticated AI. Pull back the curtain though and you see people being enslaved, open washing and a whole lot of fear mongering. AI is already part of our lives, pervasive, persistent. It regulates things in your home. It's in your TV and your car.
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I find myself wondering how our global issues in labour / climate / civic action / anti-corporate human systems are going to get better when we're training AI on this broken world. At the same time, I find myself thinking about how the bad behaviour in the world has little to do with AI.
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It's people who lack the self awareness to not start and spread narratives that are damaging. It's people who are bamboozled by these false narratives. It's people who follow the path that others are following because it's so terrifying to be unique. It's people who do the wrong things because they're told to.
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We don't have time for it. Collectively, we just don't have time.
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Maybe I need help?
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Sometimes I write as if my entire identity is "cynical pessimist", an anagram of which is "cacti smiles spiny". FWIW that's more me.
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Thanks to the readers who write me back randomly – you share good insights and good links ;)
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