Social media has been evolving into another form of weaponry for school shooters. Schools now simply shut down when an anonymous account posts vaguely threatening messages, or pre-existing shooters are turned into figureheads within online communities. For every large group of people that see the shooters as beyond human, there’s a small number of people who see themselves. In its wake, we now are catching up to guidelines about how to report in the media responsibility, and to not infame shooters into what they want. But, the process is slow and the hidden internet communities where people lurk are numerous. We have to confront the fact that the cycle of violence is enabled more easily with technology. But, the solution might not lie there.

I’m doing something harder than restarting a company: forcing myself to take a break. Dreaming up technical diagrams could happen in my sleep, because that’s not the hard part to me. The true hard shit is knowing I have this immense desire that’s been burning since I was 13, and not seceding to it.

“Every day, the inner sanctums of humanity become more and more barren. More cruel, visceral, laced with torment and pain. Humans are animals, and no greater than any other animal at that. Yet, we live, thrive, and have spread everywhere. You know what else has? Orcas.”

“Back in the 2000’s, the internet stood for freedom of movement, speech, information, and access. Everything could be changed because everything on the internet was available. You wouldn’t have to go to school, or memorize multiplications tables, you would just simply learn things on the internet or go to it for answers. It’s 2024, so how is the dream of internet intellectual freedom holding up? Uh. Well, about that.”

“”

There is a certain brutality in creating a company. Business is not about economic transactions as much as it is a framework for making decisions. That framework is rather simple: get money, buy stuff that makes you money, sell the things, cut back on what you buy if you’re not making enough. It’s a framework that standalone makes sense, but it’s also a framework that when viewed in isolation leads to dehumanization. These are the perfect conditions that cause harm.

You know about them. Maybe you’ve been in some. These are the rooms where people talk to people and make decisions that affect the lives of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. I didn’t want power 3–4 years ago. I thought it was corrupting, self-aggrandizing, and a path to a seat at human reality I didn’t want to experience. Now, I still think all of those things. But I know I need it.

“”

“Similar to the US government, instead of making moves towards AI safety, Google has announced a roadmap to accomplish AI safety. There is a difference in between achieving something, and saying that you are doing things to achieve something. It is amazing we have tangible examples of frameworks. But it is also not enough.”

“”

“”

“But, a new consumer hardware startup in our time that truly creates something that is not just an off the shelf repackagable product is truly, something to behold. Even if it sucks. It shows that people can get past the hazing, get the money, and do the insane things the rest of us dream about doing in our rooms. Anyone can get rich sucking the teets of government contracts to build more weapons of war and surveillance. Very few people understand how terrible of a curse consumer products are and decide to build them anyways.”

“”

“”

“The pressure for companies to make money is reconfigured into the pressure to give data, to purchase, to consume content, to filter our face to attain beauty standards, to swipe continuously through engagement bait. Our desires are repackaged and sold to us in a digital candy wrapper, even more amplified, intense, and accessible than any way of doing things in the past was. The software we have is human nature, digitized, maximized, and monetized to the tits.”