Bullshit

16:14 Monday, 27 July 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 80.51°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 3.83mph
Words: 358

I'm in kind of a cranky mood. If there's anything I'm less interested in reading about or listening to than AI-anything, it's critiques of The Odyssey. As if this was a cherished childhood story that everyone knows and loves and "woke Hollywood" had done violence to it.

And while I'm happy to not be on social media, I nevertheless do encounter social media commentary about it, which reminds me why I'm not on social media. So many precious performers offering their killer takedowns about all the defects and deficiencies of the movie.

Bullshit.

But that's not the reason for this post.

Once again I have the throbbing vein in the temple and I must vent my spleen over a privileged old white guy (not Christopher Nolan) offering a vision of the future that is totally divorced from the reality of the present.

We really could be headed for a dystopia right now. There is a greater than zero chance it could happen in our lifetimes. But obviously we should not aim for it. However, if utopia is also not a possible future, then what kind of future should we hope and plan for?

Kevin Kelly is five years older than me. How does he not understand that we are living in a dystopia right now?

This guy is wedded to the notion that technology is the solution to everything. He's blind to reality.

It's the solution to nothing.

At best, technology is a temporary band-aid to the problems of modernity. An ugly hack. Another pitch in the Ponzi Scheme of "progress."

It's like Doc and his "MyTerms." (Which doesn't even merit a Wikipedia entry?) It's another tech protocol band-aid that will be routed around, gamed, cheated and ignored into irrelevance.

All of our problems stem from the "first principles." We have created a world that rewards selfishness and cheating and theft and calls it "success." A world that seems to locate the meaning of life in material wealth and status and "power."

There is no path to "Protopia" that doesn't pass through the destruction of the pernicious notions that are the foundation of this civilization.

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