unbibium

When I was growing up in the 1990s I called BBSes and they had these text files describing how to build strange hacking devices and programs, how to hack the phone system, and other interesting things of varying legality. Sometimes it was just ideas for pranks and exploitation at K-Mart or McDonald's. See textfiles.com for examples, if it's still up.

In the 2000s, there was a cable channel called TechTV, and a show called The Screen Savers which was basically about emerging technology and online culture, hosted by Leo Laporte. And there was a young employee of the show named Kevin Rose whose first big segment was about the port 139 exploit in Windows. He gained a reputation as "the Dark Tipper", with the kind of stuff we used to see in BBSes. And this was how I knew him for many years, as he expanded his role on the show, as the Screen Savers was replaced with Attack of the Show with him as host, and as he and his AotS co-host Alex Albrecht hosted the video podcast known as diggnation, despite Rose living in SF and Albrecht living in LA at the time.

As his career progressed he tapered off the "Dark Tipper" stuff despite the demand from the likes of me. He hosted a more explicitly underground show called thebroken with co-host Dan Huard. The intro had this kind of campy cyberpunk "heroes on the run" thing. He started the show with him and his co-host each opening a 40. They started strong with a street segment where they hacked WiFi and even broke first-generation WEP encryption. Then they had this weird segment where Ramzi, a "hacker" correspondent, just downloads Bonzi Buddy over KaZaa while crazy foreign music plays in the background. And after that, they describe how to get a free pizza by trailing a walk-in customer, writing down their name and order, and impersonating that customer over the phone while complaining to the manager.

man, what a scummy show in retrospect. But it was all stuff that '00s me was happy to let slide. Why shouldn't we all just break into encrypted WiFi? Why shouldn't we laugh at funny foreign man doing bad acting? Why not lie to minimum wage employees and franchise owners to steal pizza? Indeed, I was able to wash my hands of all this because I was too lazy to actually try this stuff.

His heart wasn't in it anyway, and he made two more episodes: a short "oops, all Ramzi" episode and an interview with Kevin Mitnick. For years, people clamored for him to keep the show going, and he always gave excuses like they couldn't get Ramzi back.

Eventually they put out episode 4, and their way of apologizing for the long wait was a two-minute sketch where both hosts stumble are incapacitated by marijuana. The rest of the show continued the theme of tacky fratboy culture. The campy cyberpunk intro had a strip club scene now, and strip club scenes are scattered throughout to break up the long technical segments. The first segment was completely illegal cell phone jamming with a "don't do this in America" fig-leaf disclaimer. After another Ramzi bit about removing DRM, they do a bit about hacking the X-Box 360 to play backups, which includes this part where they stand outside of a Blockbuster, in Blockbuster uniforms, and tell their audience send pirated DVDs back to Blockbuster's DVD-by-mail service as revenge for getting "fisted" by the brock-and-mortar stores. Boy that aged like milk didn't it. There were credits, and then 5 minutes of bloopers where they showed how hard it was to make the funny foreign man say "dat ass".

Rose and Huard also put out a serious tech show with none of the GTA shit called Systm, which I think only had one or two episodes. I can't find it on YouTube, but I remember they had a circuit diagram with a debouncer on the first episode. I may still have a T-shirt I bought to support the show. His production company, Revision 3 Studios, would go on to make other stuff.

At some point, Kevin Rose got on the cover of BusinessWeek in shabby clothes for a "dot-com kid gets rich" story about Digg. Rose hated the cover, and Digg's fortunes didn't last.

I lost track, but at some point, Kevin Rose resurfaced an "angel investor"... and he'd still appear on This Week In Tech every so often.

and then, I heard Kevin Rose did the Joe Rogan podcast. this was back when Rogan was just a comedian with a super popular podcast, a lot of MMA expertise, a few ill-considered opinions, but was still many years away from becoming a full-fledged tool of the alt-right.

And he spent the first twenty minutes talking about keto.

I don't know why that felt like a revelation, or what it revealed, but I knew that I was no longer one of what Kevin Rose was. The geek species had diverged, into nerds like me, and tech bros like him.

All the TechTV alums were early adopters of bitcoin, but most fell by the wayside, as it became known how impractical it was as a currency, how wrought with fraud and crime the industry was. A few years in, Leo Laporte lost the password to his wallet, and it became apparent that his story was more common than the successful cash-out. But Rose stuck with it, to the point that Laporte doesn't want to give him airtime right now.

and I wonder, was Kevin Rose really a cyberpunk gray-hat hero who stuck it to the Man, only to become one of the Man's tools of financial dominance? Or do his old thebroken episodes betray ethical blind spots that were always there, and society has just disintegrated enough that our latest generation of capitalist sociopaths can exploit them? Are those ethical blind spots endemic to tech culture, ever since those 1980s text files telling us how to steal services from phone companies and mess with K-Mart employees?

why did women ever associate with us in the first place? even before all this bullshit, men have always been totally gross. There's been a lot of dudes whining about "why does HE deserve a girlfriend but not ME" but i pose the question, do any of us deserve anyone? have any of us ever? has all of heterosexuality just been a bunch of trickery and manipulation?

Politifact: "Why it's not grooming: what research says about gender and sexuality in schools."

oh look it's a fact that thinks it matters.

The word "Grooming" isn't used in claims of facts; it's a weapon. It's being used to guard territory.

It's used for the same reason as "indoctrination" was used to describe kids who mentioned Obama's name once in some song on-stage: it's vague, so it can be used against any communication you can think of; all you have to do is invent a way that it might influence them, and describe it in a sinister way. This word's especially effective because it invokes that taboo against sexualizing children we make so much noise about, which makes it a thought-terminator as well. And it's something the public has been made vigilant about for generations, so there's a serious implicit threat against any liberals in a child's family or neighborhood that might try to side-step the schools -- those sex offender registries are permanent, you know.

"Five Nights at Freddy's" is a horror game that came out years ago, The player has to work security in a Chuck E. Cheese type pizza place where, broadly, the animatronic band comes to life at night and stalks you. And apparently, somehow its biggest fan base is... the same kids as Chuck E. Cheese's target audience, maybe slightly older.

And now there's a whole genre of survival horror games for kids where the premise is that something they're actually into at that age is sinister and dangerous: "Baldi's Basics" is educational software that tries to kill you, "Bendy and the Ink Machine" is an old-timey cartoon that tries to kill you, "Poppy Playtime" is a toy factory that tries to kill you -- if you've seen a blue plushie with a super-creepy smile for sale at mall kiosks, that's Poppy.

Is this anything new, or i

So, is this just the modern version of when my brother and his friends got super into R-rated horror movies when they were 10? These games are usually rated "T for Teen" because they use jump scares instead of blood.

Or, is everything so fake that even young kids are starting to get suspicious of anything that's too friendly?

Or, are they just unironically drawn to the cute characters on a surface level and asking "why don't they build a Freddie Fazbear's in real life?"

Or, is it all three? because about five years after Cabbage Patch Kids took the country by storm, all the kids my age were passing around Garbage Pail Kids stickers, and they even made a movie about them.

everyone I know is sicker than me so it's probably up to me to fix everything. but my brain is on fire and i can't fathom what we're up against.

indeed this entire city shouldn't exist. my ancestors founded a tiny desert town around a river crossing, then around the 1950s they thought it'd be a good idea to build 200 square miles of concrete around it. and all that asphalt and the giant steel boxes we all need to traverse it... that's what we're all up against. And destroying it wouldn't even help because so many people are already here and already can't get housing.

well, people who look like my ancestors. People who wouldn't give my actual ancestors the time of day. but still

I've been hearing about "the Left's war on masculinity" for a long time, but, it's more like the Right has been occupying masculinity, and the Left have been retreating from it.

It's more like, the Right is occupying masculinity, and dictating terms for how men are to behave: aggression over negotiation, competition before cooperation, seeking power over all else, commanding obedience from women, measuring self-worth by sexual prowess and career position. Hierarchies are to be respected, you may jockey for position within one, but never tear one down. Pain is a badge of honor. Make loud noises, stake out territory, get in people's way. Eating meat is mandatory, and killing animals is a noble sport. The ultimate virtue of masculinity is dominance, and you demonstrate it by intimidating, obstructing, or even hurting people who are beneath you. Basically, to be a man, you have to be heartless. Any man who doesn't meet these standards is a pussy, and any man who fights these standards is pussifying their culture.

The center and left is opposed to a lot of these things, and coined the term "toxic masculinity" to describe it so that we can talk about it, and we all know how that can be misread. And usually men who take it on just chip away at these standards one at a time. But most of them buy into the frame that conservatives have set up, that to become less conservative is to become less masculine, and anyone who really wants justice and equality will just have to be OK with being less masculine. We have to accept a lower score in the game they designed. We're all just renting our penises from the Right, and if you vote Democrat they get to keep the cleaning deposit.

Like many of the things they steal and then rent back to us, the Right says the Left wants to steal our penises. And this message seems to work well enough that they keep going back to it.

I don't want to blame anyone, or suggest that anyone involved should have done anything different, but I want to breach the subject of how many leftist YouTubers are trans-feminine. Not all of them, or even most, but more than seems statistically representative. And mostly in the male-to-female direction. Is there any other community or industry where two prominent established personalities, on the scale of 800K-subscriber YouTubers, came out as trans in the same month? As a good skeptic, I know that correlation does not equal causation. But, as a human being who sees patterns and feels emotions, I can't bring myself to completely ignore this.

I'm still grieving for Abigail Thorn's previous persona. For those who don't know her, she hosts the Philosophy Tube channel and it's been the gold standard of video essays for a few years. Its creator had been living as a man, at least in public, through most of it, and that's when I found the channel. You can still see old videos starring a big handsome dude with a beard who talked about self-driving cars and antifascism and Hegelian dialectics and data harvesting and fucking the Queen. The production values were outstanding, and the content was well-researched, painstakingly cited, and entertaining. The quality of the content has never faltered since, but during the pandemic, the beard disappeared, and the hair got longer...

She came out in the beginning of 2021 with a video titled "Identity", the first half of which is narrated by a male actor playing her old iconic persona, reading a script. As she writes it, at live events, men would come up to her and talk about she was their masculine role model because of the wholesome and non-toxic model of masculinity she was giving the world. The video covers what it felt to hear that, but, nobody asked why did those men pick those words? Do you think that's what guys say when they meet Tom Hanks? Leonard Nimoy? Alton Brown? Jon Stewart? I think people who say that are describing a specific need being addressed. I think that men who are trying to be wholesome and non-toxic need to know that that effort doesn't come at the cost of our masculinity or our identity. We need to know that we don't have to rent our penises from the Right, we can grow our own. Her old persona served that role, once upon a time.

Another thing she said in her coming-out video was that presenting as a man felt like trench warfare. That's an apt metaphor, because I felt like I was one of the people she was fighting for. One of her pre-transition videos was titled "Men Abuse Trauma" and covered the unique problems that men face in abusive relationships, drawing from her own experience. Up to then, every story of abuse I'd heard was from a woman's point of view, and I thought that my lesson was supposed to be "don't abuse women, you male piece of shit." And I'd heard of hen-pecked husbands but that was framed as a norm, fodder for "wife bad" boomer humor. But seeing that story of an (apparent) man suffering an abusive girlfriend, I remembered a certain experience I had straight out of college, a few months where someone turned my virtues against me, used my desire to control me, and put ideas into my head that I'm still trying to excise. The video even takes a brief moment, about 10 minutes in, to take on Jordan Peterson directly, reading a passage from "12 Rules for Life" about how people who stay in unhealthy relationships are just weak-willed and playing the victim. well, Peterson's army is on the other side of that trench, and now there's one less soldier between me and them.

Maybe YouTube anarchist Thought Slime will be the hero we all need. This male personality came out as non-binary during the She-Ra video but has made the bold choice of "any/all" pronouns. I shall choose "they/them" to illustrate that I too am so young and hip that I drink my yogurt from a tube, but they're about 90% dude. They did a video 10 months ago called "You Can Date, a non-toxic guide, mostly for hetero-dudes" which contained all the information that would have saved me when I was 25. Back then, all my friends were telling me bullshit like "be yourself" and "just stop looking and it'll happen automatically," and the sex pest industry was trying to teach me how to neg. But Mx Slime covers how to "become a good good dater, while also fulfilling your responsibility not to be a creep, sex weirdo, or girl-botherer." The information in the video is succinct, practical, credible, entertaining, and dare I say, vital.

A few months later, they took on "The WAR on TRADITIONAL MASCULINITY", that thing this post is about, that thing the Right insists they're defending us from! I can think of nobody better suited to dismantle this frame! It starts strong with some angry reactions to clips of right-wing pundits, mostly talking about the culture of cis men being under attack because all those standards I described at the top there were being challenged. They respond more fully with some logic about how the only way that the concept of "feminized" can be a thing is if gender's a social construct to begin with. Then they go a bit deeper into trans stuff for some reason, but come back to describing the tyranny of male conformity. I expected them to wrap it up in a way that reassured dudes that we can defend our gender without becoming fascists, and also inspired us to improve solidarity with the other genders, and indeed they did... Pretty good video. But, it stung, just a little, that that video was the one where they officially announced that they're going by "Mildred" for a while.

The right's thesis is "the left will steal your penis." The left's response seems to be "what? penises? who needs those?" Well, I do. I need one.

I'm a man without much gender stuff. I have no urge to change my name or gender, grammatically or otherwise. Growing up, I saw girl stuff as alien. I'm fine with men's clothes, and I dress for comfort. For every weather pattern common to Phoenix, I have several outfits that are the same but with different colors. I've found some color schemes that seem to work well. I pee standing up unless I'm at home and I want to bring electronics in there. I don't have any appreciable feminine traits, but I do fail to perform certain stereotypically masculine obligations. I don't watch sports. I don't play first-person shooters. And I became sexually active very late in life, and didn't remain so.

and I live in fear that there will be a knock on my door, and it'll be the masculinity inspector, and he'll find out I've never played beer pong and confiscate my pronouns. I think that's how my friend from junior high lost theirs.

It seems like an exaggeration, but I think if I posted that shit to any random Discord server, someone would tell me I might be agender or gray-gender or demi-boy. And they might not realize that when they say that, what I hear is "you have failed to be a man, maybe if you search hard enough you'll find a gender you can be good at."

I suppose the thing I'm trying to fight here is, the notion that being a man is something I have to "be good at".

And indeed, being good at masculinity would prove nothing. Look again at Abigail Thorn. She got so good at being a man that fans would compliment her on that very performance. But looking at her videos now, she's gotten just as good at being a woman. Who cares about that anyway; the trans women I know in person are mostly in STEM jobs, and basically wear T-shirts and jeans mostly. I didn't know you could go through all that just to wear different-shaped versions of the same clothing items. They did, and it never occurred to me that they could be criticized on that point.

Abigail named her coming-out video "Identity", and what I took away from that video is that one's identity isn't a self-contained thing. Parts of it are external. We negotiate who we are with the rest of the world. And every trans person who comes out must learn who they are and convince the rest of the world. And the right wants to do the reverse of this process to men: when we say who we are, they want to decide what that means.

I can understand how the sanctions are supposed to put pressure on the economic interests of Russia which then puts pressure on Putin to stop the war to get the money flowing in again... and we already know they'll foist as much of the pain on the Russian people as they can. but, cutting off their Internet will only make them more dependent on Russian state media for information. And also, cutting off Netflix seems unnecessary to the cause.

One of Zelenskyy's latest speeches was very fiery and warned the officers that were shelling Ukraine's cities that they would never be forgiven, and there would be no quiet place but the grave. Indeed, the people who decided to attack civilian targets shouldn't get to just walk away from this. But, remembering how many of the Russian soldiers are conscripts, running out of food, and were lied to about their mission... it's not that hard to get the word out that Ukrainian POW facilities will probably treat them better than their own army, so long as that actually remains true. That reputation probably benefited America at the beginning of the 2nd Iraq war, though the horrors of Abu Ghraib put an end to that.

so I thought I'd order Chipotle tonight. nothing special, one burrito, tip extra because it's a holiday.
So I get a knock on my door, I go out and shout "thanks" to the already-departing driver, remarking how we're still doing contactless... and then I pick up the bag and notice it's heavier than usual... in fact it's huge. I look at the side, and my name is on the label, but so is this gigantic order of tacos, burritos, chips, a kid's quesadilla, a kid's chocolate milk... inside the bag, there's lots of other people's names on each item, none of them are mine.

so, I scramble with my phone to try and get the driver on the line, but I ordered through Chipotle so I don't have the corresponding DoorDash order to chat under. I call the support line and start a chat with the chatbot simultaneously. and they both do the usual thing where they just refund my order.
Great, so now I have someone else's food but it's free, and I have no idea what went wrong, but because The Algorithm is everyone's boss now I imagine the wrong people got reprimanded somewhere. and the best case scenario for that family is that it was a pickup order, and someone just had to wait while some hapless employee re-made all this stuff. Just as likely, someone dropped off my single burrito on their porch and ruined what was supposed to be a relaxing evening. One of the entrees was labeled "Mom" and that's probably who's scrambling to throw together something for the kid that wanted this tiny box of chocolate milk.

I ruined a bunch of people's new year with a thoughtless order and I'm helpless to do anything about it.

it's giving me flashbacks to Christmas morning.

my mom was about to have some coffee and I didn't want to bother her but I did want to have some eggs for breakfast, so I wouldn't ravenously devour cookies all day. I asked if I could make some eggs myself, I just needed to know where the pans are, I could find everything else and nobody needed to get up. And my mother just threw down her coffee and announced that she can't have a moment's peace as she got up to clear the kitchen so I could make the eggs. I had tried to be self-sufficient and she insisted on crucifying herself.

is it any wonder I'm afraid to ask for anything?

I've noticed another pattern in the propaganda that keeps showing up in my Facebook "suggestions". I keep seeing memes that highlight that some injustice is happening, but they're vague, and withhold the nature of the injustice. Very vague, they could be as vague as "things are bad and we're angry." Indeed, things are bad. And I am angry quite often now. What could be the harm in clicking "Like" on something like that?
For example, I just spotted a two-panel scene taken from the Simpsons episode where Selma is trying to adopt a baby in China. In the first panel, Homer Simpson says "wow, the fortune cookies here really are more accurate," and in the second panel, the fortune cookie's text is replaced with "The longer you comply with their tyranny, the worse this is going to get." How ominous!
Whose tyranny? Well, if you forget to think about that, and click "Like", then "Truth Facts" has its foot in your door and will probably tell you, over and over, in the coming months. Vague messages like that are meant to gather the audience that will be receptive to the specific message later. They're most effective when they put them in an angry frame of mind that supersedes critical thinking.
The meme also fits a multi-panel format that I've seen many variants of. The first panels talk about how the last panel is going to be "accurate," or "great wisdom," or "bitter but undeniable truth." The last panel is a blank space where the author drops their steaming hot take, not necessarily political. I won't claim that people are more likely to take the message to heart just because Homer Simpson vouched for its accuracy. But I do remember seeing Homer Simpson's familiar image, stopping to read the comic, expecting a punchline, and getting vague agitprop instead. Putting it into a narrative context ramps up the emotional stakes of the opinion presented; see Selma crying next to him? One way or another, it goads the audience into engaging.
And if we do click on "like", what other "Truth Facts" are we likely to see? I can guess what we won't see. In my experience, when someone is promoting labor rights, tenants' rights, voting rights, a living wage, environmental issues, or police reform, they aren't usually so coy about the issue they're trying to address.

for fuck's sake, I started hiding those stupid quizzes and as revenge I'm getting flooded with conservative propaganda in random "suggested for you" posts.

funny thing is, in the preceding months, there's a bunch of further-left actual-socialist stuff suggested in my feed. And when it does make sense, I've usually been afraid to click "like" on any of it because I've been worried about what gets attached to my name on this thing.

Funnier thing is, most of the rightist stuff is telling us which people are bad (Biden, AOC, Fauci, the CDC) and which people are good (only Trump and cops). It's just there to isolate conservatives from information sources, and to prevent cooperation with the enemy, and to the extent that Facebook allows, to prolong the pandemic.

But none of the far-left stuff is about which politicians are bad. it's all actual statements like "the system that keeps people homeless is unjust" and "we only have a weekend because of the labor movement" and "cops do constant and demonstrable harm to civil rights protestors". It's stuff that's as true today as it was in any other time – I've seen a lot of cartoon panels that claim to be from the 1920s. If anyone's being called "bad" then it's usually a kind of profession that they deem to be keeping the working class down, like investors, landlords, or cops. If anyone's being called "good" then it's usually a historical figure who won some right that we enjoy today.

The most hostile left-wing content I've seen on Facebook has been in the Star Trek meme groups I'm in. Every few months I see a big cluster of "throw TERFs out the airlock" memes. Even the LGBT people in my feed never post revenge fantasies like that. As a cis man, I can't really comment "hey that's a little hostile innit?" without getting called out, and that feels stifling. Indeed, if I were of a more paranoid mindset, I'd wonder if that was the point: to post something problematic that's pro-LGBT, and make cis people think "I wish I could criticize that," and thus make us open to the right's "the queers are censoring you" narrative.

anyway I gotta get off that hellsite but it's 75% of my social life, please send help.