We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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The Children of Tomorrow and What They Will See (or, Obama-mania’s Future)
Reading Time
One of my friends on Facebook recently posted this on his profile:
I’m not going to give out his name in case he doesn’t want it to be any more public than his FB account. I initially wanted to respond straight to his post, but then decided I should say the following here (after the fold):
Imagine what the world looked like to African Americans pre-1865 or the years surrounding and leading up to the Civil Rights Movement in the south. Maybe it’s because we’re older and more aware of what’s going on around us, but the country is losing its damn mind again, for the second time in the last decade-ish. We went batshit on Muslims and look-alikes, and now we’re seriously entertaining buried racist ideology simply because Obama is one of those brown people, and just can’t possibly be one of us. But that’s not enough. The same people have to other him even more by making him the brown person who is also a socialist commie fascist pigdog, because once we accept that as the truth, we can do anything to him and feel no remorse.
This is the same rhetorical practice used to justify the Holocaust or the Gulags or slavery or the countless other racist and ideological evils that have been thrust upon humanity like a stain. It’s the same practice used to make it acceptable to murder homosexuals by dragging them by a rope behind a moving car or raping them with broom handles. It’s the same practice which everyday makes people afraid or irreparably damages families all over the country.
And in 20 or 30 years, or maybe 60, or 100, our children will look back, if indeed our children still exist, and they’ll wonder what was wrong with us. What unspeakable mental illness had befallen us as we continued to perpetrate great evil against humanity, against people who aren’t actually different, but are made different by arbitrary social “rules.” And if we’re still around, or more enlightened people are there to say something to those curious children, they might say we were infected with a festering hatred so buried into our blood that we couldn’t contain it…couldn’t hold back the tide of thousands of years of human bloodlust and fear, and in that brief little span of history we were weak, pathetic, and undeserving of the mountains luxuries and freedoms thrown at us like cheap magic tricks in a casino hotel. We were undeserving of the men and women who die on the battlefield at the behest of their country and honor.
Some of us will have to look into our children’s eyes and see that overwhelming childish confusion, much as many children today look at us when they ask us questions about slavery or, sometimes, even racism and sexism (though not so much the last of those great evils, because we still live in a world entwined in the old ideals of male superiority).
Personally, I dread that day. I wish I lived in a country where the future of my children would not be so fraught by what will undoubtedly appear to them as utter stupidity. But that’s not the future my children or your children will have. Maybe one day we’ll get it right, and the evils of everyday life will be relatively minor, dealt with on a case by case basis. The history of humanity, however, says otherwise, but I am always hopeful for a better tomorrow…
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
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2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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