The DU Lounge

Last edited Fri Dec 5, 2025, 05:47 AM - Edit history (4)

I can’t help what has already happened..and I am here since I want to protest awful shit not to garner clicks and attention and get my own creepy little podcast on some shitty tech creep platform or sell an atrocious book.

This all started because of my awful and sleazy former employer which is one of those awful places that would build the net or some such grotesque thing.

I keep trying to “predict” and preempt whatever hustle it is those douchebags think they can force on even the most crummy and mediocre publicly funded scientist who was doing that as a job because they liked the job not its joke version.

I saw this activist posted here a few weeks back Ezra Levine. He seemed like a real activist.
By contrast that entire movement of shills pretending to be “concerned” (Tristan Harris is one I saw recently. That guy is a douchebag and a fraud) scare me. Astroturf grifters..


If I am not American, I am still an ally and anyone who has friends or family or colleagues in the US is affected by Trump, but importantly also the technocrats who paved the way to Trump.

That can no longer be ignored. At this point in time when it is so much clearer now sleazy and awful these guys are, to go with a lame blah compromise would be unforgivable.

I think Obama himself sees it that way more. I do think Obama made a few mistakes by trusting people like Larry Summers and the technocreeps of Facebook and Google etc. There was never a goddamn serious liberal thing about those guys.

I started off in grad school in the US in an EECS dept and by and large the worldview is fiscally conservative with a superficial layer of social liberality and always zero concern for the environment. It’s all consumerism and pointless growth. They like edtech not education. They would heavily shill AI.

You can’t grab everyone in society and pretend they are crazy for not being daft enough to see where these things are headed.

And later the rot those creeps push works against social liberality after they trash the place economically.

The conservatives and libertarians in tech are a particularly nightmarish lot.

What they project as their fears of AI is a rohrshak test in a way. I think their AI will be buggy and useless like these damn worthless agents they peddle. They pretend those things will take over the world.

From everything I have seen of these guys the way they take over the world is far simpler and pretty low tech (unless you are impressed by those lame agents and LLMs).

I think people often don’t get what something means irl versus the bullshit picture that these technologists want to present. I have never signed any contract or NDA with such and wouldn’t. The only obligations I ever recognized were to the NIH or non profits that funded my research a long time back. It’s why I am finishing up a paper that has taken the back seat this year since Trump and reality are increasingly hard to balance with work.

This was Obama in 2020:

https://designingprogress.com/post/646482520653840384/obama-on-call-out-culture-thats-not-activism

I semi agree with him. But that’s only because of how I define woke versus “woke” capitalism. I consider the latter a noxious thing that conflicts with real woke. It is a system that has pissed off most people by now (insert obligatory “not all capitalists!” statement here).

Lately, I don’t spell out what should logically be clear if people are not disingenuous. I don’t mean “Fire everyone in the private sector and install Che Guevara’s reanimated body as King of all Realities!”.
That’s more the kind of stuff their kind of faux activist Justine Tunney would say. And manage to pull off.

And I live in a part of the world where I don’t trust any politicians. The communists here have never seen a creepy little business they wouldn’t shill and I would not trust them anymore than I trust the creeps out in Si Valley.

But I do say Lina Khan was a move in the right direction as opposed to more middle of the road bullshit. Always some lame compromise no matter how dire things get.

I used to shut up (relatively) not wanting to be mobbed and probably called a “milkshake duck”.
That’s the idiocy of the “viral video” style of popularity. First “awwwwww”..then “boooo”.

It is frivolous and shallow and has no depth and it is a punishment to trap an intelligent person with those damn morons shilling their Californian Ideology.

But if Russell Vought etc learnt from Trump 1.0, did they think the left would never learn? That viral shit doesn’t go anywhere. It’s for people with the attention span of a gnat and if i struggle with attention on a daily basis, not big picture.

What do they mean by trying to build these obscenities hijacking more and more space and time and thinking everyone can be hustled along?

I wrote this post four times by now snd each time something went wrong.

I used to think about the bs that is popular and think these are such trivial things and lousy priorities and then those douchebags, the IDW etc would pick them and go on and on as if that’s the real left.

As if the real left is entitled and vapid like the crap that those tech creep guys promote as the solution for everything. Limitless energy! Buy my creepy little phone!


And it’s so reprehensible. These guys are draconian with anyone who works in any worthwhile job and then they promote this collection of creeps and sleazebags.

These are people who want to “rehabilitate” Epstein (that’s the creepy Affectiva/SmartEye woman Picard..yeah no she’s not very Star Trek) or Elizabeth Holmes (Maha), but they make life hell for the average public sector worker or scientist who tries to really do their job.

That’s also not going to be a personality that is so lacking in awareness that we don’t feel uncomfortable about stuff that is lame and shallow and doesn’t go anywhere.

But I do think that once there is enough support people can organize and fight back and that’s what’s needed not more bloody clicks and likes.

This is not an income source. It’s a message I try to send and it’s not joke or game.

Alex Skopic or possibly Nathan Robinson wrote about how those IDW types don’t dare mess with serious activists. They attack the Beverly D’Angelo and Race2dinner crap and make it seem as if that’s what the left is about. That’s not the left. Those are corporate consultants or just bs.

Because what the IDW attacks is not even woke. It’s some randoms on the net. And that’s what sells because even I look at trainwrecks online.

But it did have the real effect of a very successful by now attack on everything that woke actually means. Just earlier this year I saw this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-federal-job-cuts-trump-musk-dei-middle-class-rcna191704

This is the real tragedy.

These are the jobs that those parasites of DOGE and that fucking ketamine addled moron with 50 kids and rockets exploding in his wake destroyed. I never liked Musk. He was never a liberal. His daughter is correct. He was always this guy.

Data miners who like clickbait and rage have managed to use capitalism to attack woke while shilling a very superficial thing that works against woke net.

I agreed with Obama where “woke” is Beyonce/Kim Kardashian “feminism”. I see it all the time. Someone bashes Kardashian and a useful idiot or a bot pipes up with “That’s sexist!”
And I think “No it’s not. It’s going to fuel sexism to pretend that nothing a woman does can ever be criticized and Kim Kardashian like Trump should be criticized. Ten years ago she was rightly derided for being a person famous for being famous and now she is a success story and “cares” about prison reform.” That is a broken society.

There is an awesome piece from Counterpunch earlier today that gets it.
It’s all The Spectacle Yasha Levine bashes . Or astroturf grift that no actual grassroots activist would take for the real thing.

I used to think that there is no slot for me in this society. I am not shilling some awful thing and never will.
So DU and Ezra Levine I guess jogged my brain. That’s what I can understand. Grassroots activism.

I was so dejected by this culture where whatever lousy crap happens gets resorbed into the hustle.

And it’s the most confusing thing in a way because who would be churlish about real anger and pain, petty or not petty? But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t notice the creepy technocrats who exploit that to get Trump elected risibly as a “populist”.

I’d be furious if the type of people who would sell their own bowel movements for attention or money or something foul, still failed to distinguish between just enough engagement to not drop out of society entirely..I tried that..unsurprisingly it didn’t work .
And engagement with a point.


I am myself annoyed when protests etc are filled with people who want attention or to shill something.
I never had an issue with impersonal politics but once it’s personal and that too in this reality.

It all comes down to why? Why would I do this?

No one who takes anything serious from publicly funded science to activism to journalism is so shallow that they string together a few threadbare concepts and then use that to scam everyone.

It’s what I hate about my work. The lack of expertise. But all around me are people who are making free with what is in no way their space or time and treating me like a crazy person (which is better than being a felon?).
I mean when you put it like that, how can I refuse?

And worst of all is that being another damn product or spectacle.

They can’t get away with hustling me. I moved half way around the world and spent 14 years in hell so angry about this bloody thing being built with so little public input.

I am so glad I have you guys. I can’t stand hustle culture and I refuse to be shoved into the loony bin again.

Thanks for saying it’s not incoherent (at least the first time) OldBaldy1701E. I couldn’t spell out what was upsetting me when I first saw all these systems start to get built with so little discussion.

I am taking the long route. They always have false equivalences and bullshit. These are people with serious delusions of grandeur and they think that have some damn self respect is grandiose?

I was pleased to see this:

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/02/get-out-of-the-way-obama-calls-on-old-folks-in-power-to-trust-young-activists-lawmakers/

(Well the headline anyway. Not the working together part. I have seen enough of how these guys work together and no.)
I am tired of being treated like a crazy person.

I am so angry. Now I can tell you guys here on DU. Some members will be less sympathetic. Some more.
But it’s not like being in a world of oblivious people to whom it would be impossible to explain and this collection of Tristan Harris AI critics, Kim Kardashian is a feminist types (that’s why I became a shut-in) and Si Valley will change the world!
Honestly felon seemed better. Crazy person seemed like the group verdict.

But well..once one is far from that damn cult, I can see options beyond felon, crazy person, some sort of sleazy damn attention seeker which is the most angering of the lot etc.

Thanks for reading. I do appreciate this forum. I can be honest here. Well increasingly more so.

Anyway in addition to my main daily unpaid work in my field, I have an open-ended unpaid activist task of a conflict I can at least openly acknowledge now. I am still young and healthy and I would only be paid for work in my field in publicly funded science if and when I found a good fit. It’s not for si valley or Pronatalists to designate who should ..as Vance would say “that’s the very point of the childfree woman! To be a pawn for some peopel who should be ashamed of themselves. Yeah you over there 🫵 I meant you. Back off.” Cribbing from MarineCombatEngineers post from yesterday.

I am glad you didn’t find the first post incoherent. It’s pretty straightforward, but I like Lina Khan because she was willing to go further and deeper. If Trump 2.0 isn’t the catalyst to get how serious a fight this is against the oligarchy and how we have been duped and herded against our interests by tech. The one culture they don’t like is public sector versus private.
I don’t say all private sector is bad blah blah. I am not the extremist here. My last employer was and they really shouldn’t have started a fight they can’t win. I’ll battle it out to the end.
I remember the last 14 years.

That shouldn’t happen to anyone. It was a strain on my family, my friends, my colleagues, my doctors and this culture of deregulation and no standards for those creeps and kleptocracy aimed at society won’t work and it shouldn’t spread to other democracies. PRC, Russia and Saudi Arabia etc are a better bet.
I have to go work but it will be a long, hard and bitter fight at every level.


I am so angry about having been treated like this. As if anyone can think about academic research like this. I will focus on my work because it should not be that only awful people can do stem work. And sans the worry that only some sort of awful Ellen Pao style litigation (probably the direction my creepy former employer thought it would go in), some lame lightweight (“Emotion Contagion Experiment!” I used to cope over the years with vicious in-jokes with myself about what my lousy, creepy former employer would shill next) study, some awful tacky new “VR Phone!” “Cognify Private Prisons!”

What I think is that I am okay with being draconian about science. But make sure you can handle it when you start these things because I wouldn’t cave. No one is looking for attention or riches but I got the implications of that shit will and they aren’t getting away with it. Get a grifter next time. Morons…
That was a long 14 years and two months.

I love Lina Khan. That’s the kind of lawyer needed to protect stem employment over any pretense that the things that were and are forced by Google/Facebook “left!” and Musk/Palantir Nazi Reich are acceptable.

I saw this a while back:

https://www.brandeis.edu/magazine/2024/summer/inquiry/contested-election.html

I know where this entire crew can shove their simulations etc. Yeah fuck these guys. And wherever they tried to rope anyone else in or pick up crap or try extortion..

If it savors of extortion/deception/fishing etc it’s not cooperation:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/game-theory-explains-how-cooperation-evolved-20150212/

Lina Khan is the type of lawyer who can think about fixes for this. My creepy employer is the last person I would trust on any damn thing.

I am (for me) “optimistic” finally that one can pushback forever more. The thing I feared was being sucked into another thing where “we are all friends”. No we aren’t and don’t expect anything easy after forcing needlessly draconian and exploitative shit. I am only worried when people cave…
I won’t after all this. When I think reasonable I think of people like Ezra Levine or that woman who writes The Contrarian who was a former Republican. Not people from tech who pull the equivalent of that Dell $250 marker account bs.

And well I fight for anonymity because I actually liked the people I worked for and with prior to that Si Valley shithole and wouldn’t want them dragged into anything. I generally think attention should be deflected away from people and things that don’t suck and targeted at those Google creeps, Musk etc. A concept Trump, Kim Kardashian and the “I want to go viral!” morons seem to not get.
You can’t not protest when you have to deal with something sucking your life away. But the balance of protesting enough to stop that rot and not more because then it is again the junk economy and not protesting or activism.

That’s what these tech creeps want. No more decent public sector jobs or regulation only internet drivel that has no point. These guys will seriously regret this.
Don’t start this shit with the wrong people.

I was only ever superficially a lame white collar worker. I get these things. And you are not getting eyeballs and clicks or doxing me you creeps. I should clean up this and every other post I wrote here at some point, but I have so much to do. These creeps won’t find this funny I promise.
You don’t really need muscle or money. Just the patience to wait out a different kind of shutdown that doesn’t harm anyone else but ends up being bait for the worst types of tech people ever. Did they seriously think no pushback would ever occur with their Google declaration bs and that once people who aren’t going to just repeat the credulous tech press and similar get dragged into these things simple and sleazy resolution is gonna happen?