The DU Lounge

DU has been very instrumental to my well-being. We exchanged remarks a few months ago when I posted a thread about Marc Andreessen and you correctly called this article this article vomitous:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man

Andreessen wrote a long and delusional screed last year to widespread derision. I was tempted to read it, but then thought it would anger me far too much.

One reason I post here and am filing these complaints is out of genuine goodwill towards America and Americans. I learnt what science I know there and I was largely happy and genuinely liked most people I met.

I never even met the people who made life so awful and it was my first exposure to these opaque automated systems that ruin lives and hope you are stupid enough to blame the messenger than attribute it to the worldview of guys like Andreessen.

We are shaped by our personal experiences. Both the liberal white collar academics and the rural, white working class people (probably Maga) I met were decent. Like most people here in India. I have a tolerant view of my fellow humans outside of this Andreessen type.

I am Indian and returned permanently home to India in the December of 2011 (and came back briefly in 2013 with a boarding foil to get a replacement greencard just I could abandon it. I had lost it in my hurried return in 2012) after this academic job in Si Valley in 2011. Because I was shocked at what I saw bts, which looked like an implementation of the Sidewalks Lab sans any press or public comment.

I guess I was an early guinea pig. Toronto was wise enough to shut that down. I returned to India as it looked like an unviable and unacceptable direction to go in. The scientists, like my mentor trying to damage control for these creeps seemed overworked and overextended. But they were definitely doing what they could to ameliorate the damage and I applaud and support them for it, though like factory farmed animals bite each others’ tails and peck at each other, I have at times been annoyed. But it is superficial. They were unambiguously committed to doing the decent thing, against lousy odds.

I saw a few years ago that Palantir was buying up a lot of real estate in that shady city I was in, which tracks based on everything I have seen of Alex Karp and Palantir.

But then it started getting implemented in my
communist run state here which has a very corrupt and uneducated CM. So selling out is the key. And Alex Pentland, this sleazy Epstein associated MIT Media Lab guy was one of the architects of India’s digital id program. So it is all shady surveillance as the sole output types.

President Biden really angered this type by appointing Lina Khan and being too labor and ecofriendly for these assholes.

I could not explain to anyone then since it was so new. It was 2011 and I had a blackberry and a flip phone just two years before.

But when this recent election happened and this ramped up, I was shocked at how reminiscent it was of what I saw in 2011.

I am not even conspiracy minded, but I definitely felt I was and am seeing a coup attempt by these tech bros that probably has its seed in the Bush era patriot act/NSA scandals (which I was reminded of when revisiting Colbert’s WH correspondence dinner from 2006).

My guess is it picked up steam as Google and Facebook got entrenched as in their societal role as shady surveillance and defense contracting giants normalizing copious needless data collection at scale with none of the outrage of the NSA scandal years as people got habituated and resistance to shocking levels of privacy violations got eroded in favor of temporary conveniences. And now look where we are. Total frog in boiling water situation.

That is why so many of my posts target the tech bros as I see them as a major part of this fifth column inside America that has no affection or respect for their own country or fellow Americans - really humans broadly.

And wherever I can pitch in to expose this by now global backdoor attack on the very foundations of democracy, any meaningful definition of women’s rights, civil rights broadly and civil society, I will. At the cost of being more conspicuous than I like. It is about personal and group survival.

The tech bros would love to tie these things around the necks of the various Dr.Faucis, other scientists, doctors, military officers, cybersecurity professionals, any humans who pick up after them or random groups they pit against each other to game democracy as they destroy journalism via people like Bari Weiss.

An unscrupulous and shameless crowd. I returned to DU in 2020 and used to vaguely allude to it in rants, but till recently it would not have made as much sense.

I remember these two news stories which disgusted me:

https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334356/larry-page-wants-to-set-aside-a-part-of-the-world-for-experimentation

(Page has gone missing after he was subpoenaed over the Epstein scandal in 2023).

https://www.dailygrail.com/2025/02/the-bizarre-2014-petition-that-seems-to-have-predicted-america-in-2025/

Justine Tunney is imo a sign that left wing movements are infiltrated by bad actors.

This was a pretty decent piece by Park MacDougald, who is not even left, but a thinking human being still:

https://www.theawl.com/2015/09/the-darkness-before-the-right/

I used to find some comfort in reading that and this on how corrupt firms operate and indeed Facebook for instance is known for having a cultish work culture:

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=public_integrity

So yeah, I do feel this is an alarming acceleration and a make or break point in human history with this ramped up ai push.
We don’t really get what is motivating these senseless things - I mean the GOP is largely a fifth column as far back as I can remember. The Iraq war took place while I was a grad student in the US. Between the GOP and the tech bros, it is all alarming and spreading.

Which is why I am engaged in what piddly efforts I can make by sounding an alarm and gearing up to follow through with several misconduct in human subject research and malpractice allegations, since I feel we all kinda are.

I was just an early test specimen. The real world as a (corrupt) lab sans any IRB or safety nets. I was lucky to have a stable, comfortable home and a loving and supportive family to return to and a circle of friends and colleagues, such as my ex-husband (who is a committed democrat - he has a dormant account here) and main mentor.

My ex was very supportive throughout - we were incompatible romantically, but we are family and I am always worried about him and his mom, whom I am very close to. Fortunately they are both okay financially, but this is all so destabilising.

Not everyone is as fortunate as I was in having not just some resources, but also luck wrt the humans I have mostly met of importance in my life.

And in spite of generally being a fairly fortunate person, based on my experiences, I would not want this for other humans (especially other women or struggling people generally) or earth.