the mellow tigger's musings

I don't know how to trust anything I read or see online any more.

Just a few days ago, I started reading an article talking about archive.org and how it stopped doing some sort of widespread page collection in 2024 around the time of their DDOS attack. The article also mentioned Google stopping its "cached page" collection as a related event, leaving us now without any easy and trustworthy reference to past online experiences. Actual published information can now simply be made to disappear... gaslighting anyone who thought they remembered it.

I think the article intended to tie this chain of thinking to our current control by a few plutocrats over our broadcast and online media, providing them ample opportunity to manipulate our societies and politics for their economic benefit. It was a very long article, and I stopped reading it halfway through, intending to come back to it later. Today, I can't even remember which website it was at. It was an important article, but I've lost it in the aether. I really need a convenient replacement for Pocket, which is what I used for a long time to store webpages into categories for easy recall.

With AI videos, audio, and images all being so realistic, I just don't know how anyone can know anything beyond what they see with their own eyes. And our brain's memory is itself famously faulty. There are important political events happening on the world stage, and it's difficult to know for sure where to direct one's attention.

The only option that I can see is for everybody to record everything around them at all times. Then any disputed event can be compared against multiple data sources for corroboration. But I see people online freaking out about any recording of anything because you didn't ask permission of everyone in field of view. I'm so tired of this obligate ownership of everything everywhere. Can we stop thinking in capitalist terms?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought. I know that somehow this topic is related to technological telepathy, in this dystopian world where we suffer the manipulation of reality by forced control over recording and recall of events. Once again, I advocate total freedom instead of compartmentalized "ownership" of any experience, perspective, or opinion. The one thing I argue against is lies... the presentation of one thing as something else that it is not.

I don't understand anything that's happening any more.

I vaguely remember (it was after high school graduation for me) Biden being laughed off the national stage the first time he ran for President in 1988, because he was shown to lie as needed to get what he wanted. Fast forward to the 2020 election, where the 2nd and 3rd place candidates for the Democrat nomination both bowed out so the 4th place candidate could take 1st place, a candidate who promised to run for only a single term. Surprise, that promise was a lie. In 2024, Biden insisted repeatedly for months that he would run again for the Presidency. Until suddenly he didn't, passing the coronation baton to the candidate who performed so poorly in 2020 that they dropped out because they couldn't even pass Biden in 4th place.

And now... here we are. With that washed out candidate supposedly the savior of the Democrat party and by extension the USA. Because of the extended political season of the USA and this late exit within that season, there will be no proper DNC conversation about potential candidates. Remember when the DNC said in court that they have no obligation to democratically select a Democrat candidate? It was that experience in particular that prompted me to declare that I am not a Democrat. They found a good political drama to hide their non-democratic process this time, I guess? I would like to think that the president who declared COVID over (and put children back in classrooms and workers back into offices) had a welcome-to-reality moment with his recent COVID case and finally understood that he doesn't have the stamina for 4 more years as president. I'm sure, though, that it came down to the mega-donors telling him what to do.

None of this makes any rational sense. We have existential crises to address. Instead, the deliberative process that should save us is all lies and money and power. I guess the rest of you can have fun with even more "You have to vote for Team A, otherwise Team B will win!" since that seems to be the only constant for nearly an entire generation already. I just don't understand why everyone keeps supporting this particular status quo.

Brian does not understand, and neither do I. Seriously, I do not understand anything that happens any more.