u/larryleggs

You know how in like 2015, gaming became this whole culture war thing, and suddenly every gamer was pushing right-wing politics? They were all up in the forums, you know, in the discussion boards, review-bombing games, making this cultural imprint into the space, right? They turned every comment section into a recruitment zone and now the entire medium has normalized their beliefs. The only discussion about the new God of War is about how you play as a woman. The first post to go viral when the GTA covergirl was revealed was an AI generated image making her white. Gaming is, as a medium, absolutely culturally fascist. That playbook worked so well that they've been exporting it to literally every other digital and physical space since.

And the reason they keep winning is brutally simple. One, most spaces are positioned as businesses first, communities second. Profit is the only real metric, period. Two, pushing back against fascism makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Most people will choose temporary social comfort over the exhausting work of confrontation. It really is that basic.

For every person you see in a Patriot Front mask openly spouting white supremacy, there's another one sitting in your local scene, sharing racist memes on Instagram and telling you it's not that deep, bro, just a joke. But it is that deep. The narrative that this is all just jokes, irony, or trolling is exactly how this garbage gets normalized. That's the camouflage. Call him out for those joke posts, and you'll be the one banned from that space. The justification is always the same: you're creating conflict. Extrapolate that dynamic to a societal level, and the fascists gradually assume control. They're welcome anywhere as long as they keep spending, while the people who actually resist them are systematically shown the door.

Take a local venue as a case study. A performer posts racist George Floyd memes on his public Instagram and sells shirts with his face on it. He pays the venue fee and brings a crowd of other little racist trolls who buy drinks and merchandise. You point out what he does online, and the venue owner tells you it's not that deep. Then he bans you. For life. Because you don't want to serve the racist. Because you tell everyone else what he's posting online. Because you created conflict, it doesn't matter if 6 months before hand you helped organize a pro-Palestine, anti-ICE fundraiser show. The owner doesn't care about that, the owner cares that hosting events like that launders an image. For one of you it was about ethics, principles, community, for the other it was always about profit. The sign on the wall that says we have a zero tolerance policy for racism turns out to be a lie. The real policy is zero tolerance for conflict. Even if other patrons bring that information to the owner directly, he doesn't care, because the performer paid and brought paying customers. The platforming of a racist isn't a big deal to 95% of the customers, even the ones who sided with you calling the performer out. You get banned. People still support the small business because a small business is always morally correct under Amerikan fascism. The transaction is complete.

Here's the larger problem, right? Most people moving through the world don't have strong feelings about any of this one way or the other. They're not ideologues. The average person can't even define fascism or authoritarianism beyond a vague, ominous vibe. They know it feels bad, but they can't tell you what it actually looks like in practice. So they default to what they already know and who they already trust. If the local small business owner, who's culturally validated as a hero and the ultimate symbol of American freedom, tells them it's not that deep, they believe him. This is mass lie politics in action. In a proto-fascist state, the overwhelming majority either have no problem with fascism as long as it doesn't affect their daily routine, or they willingly turn a blind eye as long as it keeps money flowing into their pockets.

And the venue owner might LARP as a progressive. He might talk about safe spaces, display queer-friendly stickers, and mask his entire personality behind Burning Man aesthetics and bohemian posturing. Might have nasty, sludge-stink dreadlocks, might be rich but not shower, a privilege for him but a dehumanizing fact of life for those in poverty. But he's no less authoritarian than any other fascist the moment his revenue is threatened. Come between him and his bottom line, and that's where the performative progressivism stops. That's where the buck always stops.

Or the sound guy, the long time friend who "does such important work". He might even call himself a libertarian and insist he's still one of the good ones, the progressive kinda libertarian that's in his 40s but somehow still only hangs out with 19 year old women. But then a weird pattern emerges. He might be the one quietly accumulating sexual assault allegations from people who worked at or attended the venue. When that reality surfaces, who goes to bat for him? Who crafts the narrative to defend him or at least obscure the truth? The deadheaded, burning man hippie owner. Because if you start to think that guy could have done it, then you start to think about why the venue kept him on board for so long, all while calling themselves a safe space. Other small business owners do, because their entire motivation is financial symbiosis. They protect their own. How dirty will you feel defending a space that continually allows for such incidents because you foolishly believe that them letting you set up a community pantry there is worthwhile?

Are you too stupid to realize that the community pantry is a marketing device laundering a reputation to a petit-bourgeoisie class enemy? Are you so blinded by your "go out and do good" mentality that you cannot see when you are being played as a fool? Being taken advantage of? You're getting paid $30 for being at their cafe's food stand for 12 hours, under the table, and you're so utterly unawake that you think doing that "benefits the community"? You're being exploited, because of your class position, because the business owner would never stand in a parking lot for 12 hours grinding. How pathetic is it to have your kindness made weakness? Don't get made into a fool thinking you had community but really you had unpaid labor and no respect. Right now at my job I get paid to clean up all the cigarette buds outside, in the sitting areas, by the pool. Why was I doing that for free, for this cafe, out of some sense "community respect"? Because I didn't want """"my"""" space to be filthy? But it was never "my" space, it was never "the community's space", it was always the owner's space.

These owners don't care about the subculture they're vulturing over. It doesn't matter if it's a punk show, a hip-hop night, or a church gathering. They only care about extracting money from whatever scene happens to be profitable at the moment. If it wasn't about profit, they'd be running a co-op, a non-profit or an actual community owned space. They aren't, and any excuse about paperwork or "business sense" shouldn't be taken in good faith. They're middlemen, not stewards. That's why they use terms like safe space, queer-friendly, and no bigotry zone as marketing copy, not as structural commitments. They have no actual desire to uphold those beliefs in any meaningful way, because upholding them structurally would require turning away paying customers and denying themselves profit.

Their stated principles and their material class position are in permanent, irreconcilable contradiction. Why do you think every single small business felt the need to put out a statement telling us they WON'T be participating in the 3 day minneapolis ICE Out! General Strike? Every one of them had an excuse. "We can't afford a day of losses!" "Stop in and buy a drink to support the community." My mind floats to Stalin's parable of the cobbler who finds themselves proletarianized. The greatest fear of a small business owner is having to clock in like the worker's they exploit. All wage slavery is exploitation, the refusal for solidarity with striking workers paints the perfect picture of who it is we oppose.

The worship of small business owners and the contradiction between their control and the desire for community is one of the primary reasons fascism continues to win ground in America. If you actually want to beat it, you have to stop worshiping small business owners as folk heroes or natural allies. They're not on your side. In fact, their class interests almost always align them with the very forces that want to erase you. The petite bourgeoisie are in a natural class position to support fascism, because fascism offers order, hierarchy, and the protection of private commerce. I was foolish enough to believe otherwise for a long time. I didn't want to see it. I wanted to believe that community could exist beyond the commodity, beyond the consumption, beyond who owns the cafe. I had to learn this lesson the hard way, through direct experience. And now I know better to be such a fool.

Party's over. What you're living through is an anniversary of mediocrity. It is the anniversary of a country that never truly followed its principles, a country that never truly sat down with the vision that it claimed to support. The good times have come, and they've gone.

America in 2026, 250 years after its founding, feels much like a crack house at 7:30 a.m. The birds are chirping. All the people have either left, blacked out, or somehow managed to will their bodies awake to do more crack. It's a desperate scene, not unlike the sort you can see in every city in this never-so-great nation.

The man who wrote to the king about how all people are created equal wrote those lines after raping a slave girl. Her mother was a slave. Her father was a slave. Her bondage was permanent. His rule was law. Epstein would have fit in nicely with many of the founders.

Hypocrisy has been the name of the American game since day one. We take a whole bunch of lofty ideas and principles, talk the talk, but never walk the walk. Because if you have to walk the walk, how are you going to make the money?

It's unfortunate, isn't it? This is a nation that has produced such significant amounts of culture. It is the birthplace of jazz. It gave us the moving picture, the vinyl record, vaudeville, and the spectacle that drives it all. And yet, nothing but malaise. Nothing but dread.

The attempts to recreate the World's Fair through the great national county fair were laughable. Do you think they were going to have a jazz performance? No, they had a Fox News booth, though. Rupert Murdoch's America was on full display. It is bleak. It is pathetic. It is sad. It's like walking into a McDonald's today having not been in one since 1993. You're going to be disappointed.

A race to the bottom. Enshittification. Capitalist profit-seeking has destroyed an empire. Their own empire, destroyed by their own hand, their own greed, their own televangelist call for quick cash.

How sad is it to have a golden era and only have it for one generation? How many hundreds of years did Pax Romana last? America's golden age gave us the boomers. That's it.

Did American exceptionalism die when they stopped doing McDonald's birthday parties? Can you deal with the cognitive dissonance that haunts the American psyche?

Can you deal with the news pundit? Her buccal fat removed from her face. Her lips extra plump. Her Botox perfectly placed. Her hair bleached blonde as she speaks about freedom and equality and the vision of America. That same woman, not hours ago, cheered and celebrated as more and more people are taken to concentration camps by ICE agents. Ten thousand people disappeared in five days. And those are just the ones we know about.

Lofty ideas sold from the mouth of a hypocrite. Snake oil salesmen hawking cure-alls to the downtrodden. That is the American way.

What is freedom for someone who is trapped in an ICE concentration camp? What is July 4th to a slave? Frederick Douglass wrote that one.

There's no need to retread water. If you've been around the block, it's all been said. Everything that could be said about this nation has been said. It's amazing how a place like this has produced so many writers and thinkers and activists and revolutionaries. All of them seeking to simply force this bastard America to live by the lofty principles it advertises.

They say that most doctors smoke Camels. Well, goddammit, we want to see the doctor smoke a Camel. Maybe a pack. Maybe even a carton. We want freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness for all people that live within this land.

It hasn't happened, and it will not happen until capitalism is rebuked so thoroughly that you ever wonder why anyone allowed it to propagate in the first place. Until then, all of the lofty ideas and the waxing poetically about liberty will fall on deaf ears. Those ears are smothered in the concrete of a concentration camp.

I can't deal with the cognitive dissonance anymore. This empire is collapsing. There are Dachaus and Auschwitzes all throughout America. Companies like GEO Group profit hand and foot, literally kidnapping people off the streets to force them to work in these concentration camps. They will work until they die or until they are deported. These are people who came here for a better life.

The lofty ideas of the Statue of Liberty have been reduced down to an episode of Ghetto Gaggers. That's July 4th on the 250th anniversary of this bastard nation.

We are committing genocide against the Hispanic population of this land. We are funding Israel to commit genocide against those on the lands of occupied Palestine. Lofty ideas act as a smoke screen for imperialist, capitalist plunder, for enslavement, for necropolitics, for private property, police and profit.

I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I can be monitored by a FLOCK camera and reported for having my illicit press zines in a box. And when they find it, when they find that box of zines, I'll say, what about the First Amendment? What about the freedom of the press?

All those lofty ideas will be melted away as they give me 70 years. A 70-year sentence that in a moment killed any and all notions of reform. It killed any and all notions of appealing to the capitalist with the ideas he uses to market to us our own exploitation.

Seventy years for standing against the forced enslavement and genocide of a people. Of neighbors. Of community members. Simply for the color of their skin.

Every American that has ever espoused the beliefs that actually underline the heart of our national character has been killed by those who control the nation. Whether it's John Brown hung or Fred Hampton shot.

Happy 250 to a bastard America. Two hundred and fifty years of capitalist rule, of private property, of land development, of genocide, of enslavement. But those lofty ideas, those principles of liberty and freedom, they are eternal ideas. They can only be brought forth by the destruction of the capitalist system that has ruled us for the last 250 years.

I'm anti-AI mostly for social reasons. If you're an artist or a writer and you experiment with AI, it's pretty much the easiest way to get your work never read by anyone ever again. So it's just for the best to not use it in any way, shape, or form.

That said, I have basically ignored this technology for the last two years because what purpose would I have to use it given those circumstances? But then I see headlines talking about the cybersecurity risks of Claude or the progression of DeepSeek, and I get kind of confused because this technology is the slop-generating technology. It's what everyone uses to make the piss-yellow, dogshit-looking flyers that populate my feed and keep me from getting my $30 commissions to make event flyers.

I guess the one of the fundamental issues I have with the anti-AI camp is the intellectual property argument. The argument being that it's illegitimate to use AI because they were built off of all this data and artistic input, and doing so is effectively no different than stealing that work. It's plagiarism. My issue with this is that the bulk of my own artistic output is collage-based. One of the big things I enjoy doing is sampling public domain imagery. Why does the public domain exist in the form that it exists in? Because Disney lobbied as hard as they could to keep Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain. That's why it's 90 years plus the life of the author. I don't agree with Disney's perspective on intellectual property, and I, in fact, don't think intellectual property should exist at all.

This seems to be one of the strongest positions that the anti-AI camp can take because other issues, such as the environmental issues or the land usage of data centers, can be resolved through technological advancements. For example, from what I've been reading, models like DeepSeek can be run locally for a significantly lower footprint and cost. The issues of data centers and land usage and water rights, they're the same issues that we have with warehouses being constructed. I'm currently actively involved in an anti-data center campaign, and lo and behold, there's no outcry when Amazon builds a massive warehouse, but there is for a data center, despite the fact that the ecological footprint is very similar for both, and the noise pollution is very similar for both. Logically, if you're anti-data center, you would need to be anti-warehouse, but the outcry hasn't materialized for those projects in nearly the same way. This is a material challenge when it comes to organizing.

I guess my perspectives on AI boil down to the problem being capitalism, and a lack of a planned economy, and a lack of consideration for the people who are losing their jobs. No social safety net. I used to work as a system administrator, and I get paid currently less than half what I was getting paid two years ago because that field was gutted by AI. That's not a problem with the technology, that's a problem with the system of capitalism. (Sidenote: If I was publishing this, I would rewrite that line, "it's not X, it's Y is an AI tell, but I wrote this whole thing without AI!) And shifting the blame to a piece of technology as a sort of middleman makes for a great piece of propaganda if you're the capitalist. It wasn't the capitalist that took your job and forced you into a lower standard of living, it was the AI.

The same could be said about the use of AI in military programs. There's been this whole debacle with the 200 schoolgirls that were killed in a strike because, well, we don't know what AI system did it, we don't know why the AI went wrong with it, but in reality, none of these systems exist without a human input. At some point, at some point, a human being had to make a call to send that missile. So it doesn't matter if it was AI or if it was a pen and paper or if it was punch cards, a human being had to make a decision. And the use of AI in this debacle is purely a propaganda tool designed to obfuscate the realities of brutal imperialist war and genocide.

So, all of the arguments that I've seen presented on why the use of AI is a fundamentally immoral and unacceptable choice from, is not really selling me on it. And especially when the strongest argument that they have is this intellectual property argument, which I don't agree with on a fundamental basis, and I have a hard time understanding why so many people who are supposedly against the existence of private property would then double down on an ideology that espouses the support of intellectual property. How can you really own an idea? If anything the destruction of intellectual property seems to be historically progressive leading towards the abolishment of private property and hopefully wage slavery!

I guess I worry because there's an entire technology that I've completely ignored on the basis that I thought it was just a slop image generator, and that seems to be what most people think of it as. And then I see headlines talking about how you can do all types of ridiculous cybersecurity exploits with this AI. So either it's just a slop image generator or this technology has legitimate power. And if it has legitimate power, then it doesn't really make sense for us to just ignore it and be like, well, I'm against this because it's fundamentally wrong to not be against it. Because ultimately, that's why I'm against AI. I'm against AI because everyone else is against AI. And if I even make any sort of comment about it, the wagons will circle and you'll get canceled. Like, even this discussion, even posting this, I am deeply concerned that that is going to happen.

I also worry about AI from a chilling effect perspective. For example, at a certain point, I stopped writing with the em dash. I still write with the em dash, but before I publish anything, I remove it because people think that that's the AI tell. I've seen posts talking about how using metaphors is an AI tell. Landscape descriptions too. Well, if we have to remove specific punctuation marks or rewrite certain things to not sound like AI, I feel like that's damaging to our overall human creative process, and pairs well with our accelerating literacy crisis. It also becomes cognitively exhausting to care.

For example, I found a Castlevania fan game. Someone had ported a JavaScript phone Castlevania game to the Game Boy Color, and it looked pretty cool, so I shared it in a group chat. And the first response was, "Hey, it looks like the cover art might have used AI. Do you know if it used AI?" No, I don't know, because I wasn't paying attention to that. I was only paying attention to the fact that it's a cool-looking fucking game port. And I would have much preferred the first comment be, "Wow, look at this cool Castlevania fan game. What an interesting way to experience a pretty shoddy Java mobile game on an actual console. I'm glad this person put in all this work to do that." It becomes cognitively exhausting for every image and everything you interact with to just be, "Is this AI? Is this AI? Is that AI? Well, it looks like, let me zoom in, let me check the pixels." Does it matter? Most of the time, it really doesn't.

And maybe that's just me being lazy, but it didn't matter to me that the image may or may not have been AI generated. In fact, I don't know if it was. I don't want to have to spend mental energy caring for every single instance. It's not disinformation so why should I need to make a moral judgement about the thumbnail image for a Castlevania fan game? Someone just said it was an AI image, and then the discussion turned into that, and the fact that this fan game was made becomes null and void. It's just slop. But then we circle back to the intellectual property argument. Why does it matter if the picture of Simon Belmont on the cover of the game is upscaled with AI, when you don't own the rights to the Castlevania license? You don't own that intellectual property. The fan game shouldn't exist at all under this logic. It's one of the reasons why I'm anti-copyright.