Forget the Future! Fuck Our Actual Current Dystopia Today!

The BBQ Pit
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Your space for general bitching about modern fuckery.

This is not a space to shake your fist at clouds or rail against “this new thing they go now”. No, to keep us all on track:

Dystopia: A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control.

Except we don’t have to wait to see it, it’s here, in the world now.

I’ll give you an example.

Dogs at craft breweries make me hate our world.

I love dogs, I have no problem with animals of all manner walking around bars or even restaurants as long as it’s hygienic. No, my problem is that craft brewery needed a lot of space and wanted low rent so they set up shop in essentially a pole barn in the 'burbs. They still want customers so they need to make it friendly to the hipsters who are up and coming family makers so…‘Dogs Welcome’.

I get it.

The issue is that no one walked to this craft brewery or bar or restaurant because no one can. It’s all too far from any residence to walk because everything is. Our cities (this is all American bitching, by the by, Europeans feel clever for having this figured out but I know it’s because their cities were designed when people HAD To walk.) are only made for cars.

So we live, work and play going about our lives in our personal convenience pods. But dogs don’t want anything to do with any of it. They want the sun, the wind, the rain, the smells, the WALK. Owners recognize this and want to get their animals outside and doing something they enjoy as well.

And this would all be great if it the business was on a bike path or walking town center or whatever.

But where I live its just a series of public places where you are allowed to be outside, but have no way of getting to any of them without a car. And nothing paints that so clear for me as when you see animals sad they have to watch us waste ourselves.

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Well, the Chinese are using AI to totally control their society by completely keeping track of virtually every citizen they have. They know where they live, who they know, what they say, and where they go physically and cybernetically. They control what opportunities are available to them based on precise analysis of all the data they have. They can’t even get Internet access without first having to submit themselves to facial recognition. It’s more Orwellian than Orwell.

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But I DO want to shake my fist at the clouds! Specifically, these damned SMOKE clouds smothering so many cities and towns right now. Damn you clouds! Damn you!

Holy crap, I remember reading dystopia SF in the 1970’s talking about people having to purify the air in their houses and not going outside without masks on and laughing thinking, naw, never in a million years…!

Not laughing now.

Yeah, industrial-prompted climate change. What a swell outcome. But CAPITALISM IS GOD! amiright?

Have to go out later for more N95’s…

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I was just talking about this with a friend. How I was hoping that all the smoke and heatwaves might convince people that climate change is real.

But then I thought, “COVID…sigh”. We’re really fucked when so many people can’t see what’s clearly going on right in front of them.

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Yep, my local NextDoor forum is discussing this and about 1 in 5 people are conspiracy theorists, making everything political, and one lady is screeching that she’s in her 60’s with asthma and COPD but SHE"s fine and SHE doesn’t smell anything and she will DIE before she ever puts on a mask again!!!

And we’re like… OK, wonderful you feel fine, no one is asking you to mask up, feel free to do what you’re doing…

And then she’s all screeching again about government energy weapons, lies, more lies, and SHE’S NEVER WEARING A MASK AGAIN!!!

I think she’s talking to that strange person in the mirror… she doesn’t seem to be registering what anyone else is saying.

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I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been riding on a bike path and had to slam on the brakes because some clueless moron was walking on one side of the path, their dog on the other, and the leash stretched in between. They should have children first to see if they’re mature enough to handle the responsibility of owning a dog.

Dogs on the bike path; are you trying to get me killed?

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Paging @slicedalone; you might enjoy this thread.

When someone listens / watches a lot of professional propaganda where the presenters are simply spewing at the world, pretty soon they learn that the way to communicate is to spew at the world.

The problem is that those professional propagandists are mostly talking to people who share their beliefs as a direct result of the propaganda. So the audience is lapping up this spew. It’s a positive feedback loop.

So now when one of the True Believers in the audience wants in turn to communicate their Truth to the world, one-way spew mode is all they know. The difference now is that the rest of the world (or even the rest of your e.g. NextDoor community) is not quite so self-selected as to listen in rapt attention to all her spew and agree with it whole-heartedly.

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Meh, some of her fellow rabbit-hole dwellers are also on the bandwagon, but most of the rest of us are just talking around her. I have no idea if she finds it annoying or if she even notices.

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I’m fed the fuck up with having to prove to web sites that I’m not a robot. Not doing it anymore. I deleted a long time bookmark today, and will do it again.

Although I’m not a member of any Costco-like store, I would also be infuriated by having to show my receipt at the door after making a purchase.

I feel like, more and more, I’m under suspicion by our technology and the methodologies of our time. I’m not up to something - but stop making me prove it.

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That’s just what a secret robot would say.

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Cry me a river. At least you’re a llama.

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Now I wonder how often the “I am not a robot” thing gets tested against updated AI…

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I was just wondering that myself after choosing all the pictures of fire hydrants.

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Now, I’m seeing three boxes-

I am not a robot

I am a robot

I am a millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht

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What gets me about those is does that tiny sliver of the saddlebag count as part of the motorcycle?
And there seems to be no rhyme or reason in whether it takes one picture or a series of 3-5 to decide I’m not a robot.

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Consider getting a bicycle bell. The bike path around here is called a biking/hiking trail, and one of the use rules is an audible warning when you overtake someone.

I walk on it and I’m appalled by the percentage of bikers who are too…unconscious…to call out “on your left”, or wherever. Lots of folks walk their dogs and they seem to always reel Rover in when they know someone is approaching. I mean, an audible signal is common sense and common courtesy, right? Well, perhaps not as common as we could wish.

Dan

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I had a bell for a while. People complained.

I now say “on your left.” People with dogs will reel them in once they hear me, but by then I’ve had to kill all my momentum. So it probably won’t kill me, but it’s still kind of a drag.

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This.

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I believe in capitalism and free markets. But I’m getting more and more pissed that everything seems more and more about generating more and more revenue.

Our dog died this weekend. His body was literally still warm when the sweet girl from the desk came in and asked if we’d like to get a paw print for $40. Never mind that his emergency treatment and euthanasia was setting us back nearly two grand – they just had to try to wring that extra $40 bucks out of us.

And then, of course, we became a lead for the company tasked with disposing of his body. Texts, calls and emails started hitting me within hours offering us our own dog’s ashes along with any number of attractive urns and other keepsakes.

Do people really feel good about themselves for taking advantage of other people’s grief? Never mind, I know the answer.

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Of course what we’re really doing is providing training data for free for the companies trying to perfect self-driving cars.

The rhyme or reason is usually that they’ve delivered the same set of pix to a couple dozen humans all at once and they look at the collective “opinion” of all the humans. If the choices are all over the map, they didn’t get usable training data. Bad humans! Try again on this other motorcycle, and this time get it right so we can sell your results! Lather rinse repeat until the chosen pic has low-enough ambiguity that we all agree these squares are a motorcycle and those squares are not.

We are Mechanical Turk. Just unpaid.