Month: February 2025

Farewell to App-mediated Interaction

App-mediated interactions with people reachable in the real world are of very limited interest to me.

My first step in exiting from the app-mediated world and returning to the real world is the trashing my Facebook account, which I did on February 16.

This was not directly caused by, but was certainly accelerated by an increasing awareness of the crime promoted by and actively participated in by Zuckerberg on his Facebook platform, and by his total lack of a moral compass. His active selection of targets for criminal advertisers is obvious, unless you install an ad-blocker that enables you to pretend that it isn’t happening, although it will still be happening.

Another annoyance is the incessant unlawful publishing on Facebook of images stolen and published without permission from their owners. IP theft appears to have become the norm. Add to that the reality that the platform is flooded with meaningless AI-generated garbage, and the decision to bail out becomes a no-brainer.

Zuckerberg’s sucking up to Mango Mussolini who sits on his throne in the White House is an additional factor, but my move away from social media platforms was coming way before Zuckerberg openly joined the ranks of Trump-sycophantic scum.

As long as things like those plantation investment scams on LinkedIn don’t get totally out of hand, I might remain on that single social media platform.

That said, the missionaries for the Church of the Amazing AI on LinkedIn are increasingly annoying. My still being on that platform must be a demonstration of my tolerance for alien belief systems.

To Don’t Lists

Although I have often been fond of making “to do” lists with items I check off as I do them, I have recently come to see the value in making “to don’t” lists.

You simply make a list of things, including things that you should do, but that you know in your heart you will not do. Then you proceed not to do them. You can check them off as you don’t do them, but that is optional.

It is best to keep a record of your to undone to don’t items, because you will need to include these in your next to don’t list, thereby avoiding accidentally doing some of them. Consistency is a virtue.

This is an elegant solution to a longstanding problem. You enjoy a sense of achievement without having to expend any effort or spend any time.

Publishing of Intellectual Property without Permission: It’s unlawful in most places.

Publicly sharing a stolen image in a social media post that consists almost entirely of the stolen image is unlawful in most legal jurisdictions.

Adding credit to or citing the originator doesn’t make it lawful without first getting permission to publish, and many such “credits” just name (often by a meaningless pseudonym or platform name) the immediately previous thief who unlawfully published the image elsewhere.

All of this is a win for platform owners like Mark Zuckerberg and a loss for the universe of people still purporting to know right from wrong. Zuckerberg is guilty of countless violations of ethical common sense and doesn’t live in that universe. And his sucking up to and funding Mango Mussolini is another indication of a problem that needs fixing and is a reason I left his platform recently.

The Approaching Authentipause

The heliopause is the point in space, outside of our solar system, beyond which the solar wind from our heliosphere can no longer counteract the incoming flow of interstellar wind.

We can imagine an “authentipause”—somewhat similar to the concept of the heliopause—which is the point beyond which the flow of reality and facts flowing outward from our real world of carbon-based sentient beings—I will call it the “authentisphere”—can no longer successfully counteract the force of fake things flowing in from the outer sphere (the illusionosphere or fake-osphere), which is populated by AI and AI-generated illusions, essentially a world of fake nonsense generated by computer code running in silicon-based entities, but still, as of this writing, under the nominal control of their carbon-based owners. That might change sometime.

The authentipause is clearly moving inward at an accelerating pace, effectively shrinking the authentisphere we have become used to inhabiting and enveloping us in an environment in which fake overtakes real. That is already becoming the case in numerous online venues, and social media, a great promoter of fake AI-generated nonsense, is helping that happen.

The authentisphere. Enjoy while you can. Not too far in the future, we may look back on it fondly in the rear-view mirror.