Final Blog Post

 Final Blog (rant) Post

I'm going to touch a bit on that video first. First off, the art style reminds me a lot of this video. Secondly, I think part of it is very accurate and part of it isn't. The video was definitely not made at the same time the song came out, as I found the animator and he is literally 26. Secondly, that song wasn't even what was original with the video. The guy who you got the video from just put that song over it and re-uploaded it. It's obvious the animation is a satire of technology today. As much as the "technology bad" satire makes me roll my eyes, since that's what I had to grow up on, being born in the beginning of the technology boom, it's important to know where the important stuff is, and what matters to you, and to not let it get unhealthy. That's easier said than done.

So fast forward to December 9th. It's been almost 2 months since I opened this, and I'm in a pretty bad depressive episode right now so bear with me. 

My current relationship with technology is good for me, I have a lot of online friends, and I trust them more than a lot of these people in real life. Being a communication major is kind of lonely because I'm not in any cliques and I'm not like a stereotypical communication major here. I'm friends with psych majors and that's my minor and I'm way more comfortable there. 

That being said, where would I be without my online friends? Lonely, still feeling like I have to fit in a certain mold, probably less comfortable with my sexuality. Also, I'd probably be less versed on different people from different backgrounds. Having friends online has opened up my mind as well as theirs and it's pretty great. It's helped me to deal with stuff I might have to deal with in real life, like conflicts over petty things... or not-so petty things. It's helped me where I've been uncomfortable talking to my parents about stuff, like my past. These people are a lot less judgmental, and it's easier to open up about things to people who don't know you in your real life.

Politically, I think it's helped me to solidify my own beliefs. Where I'm from, it's all REPUBLICAN RED WOOO YEE HAW!!!! Like, very intensely Republican. Naturally, my beliefs as a kid were heavily influenced by that, but things never felt right. I felt confused and I didn't understand. I thought politicians were celebrities competing to run the country for an embarrassingly long time. I didn't understand policy, I didn't understand that where we were with human rights isn't where we could and should be. I didn't understand labor laws or corporations. I didn't understand WHY democrats were "so terrible". 

It was just all engrained in me that life worked a certain way. As I got more introduced to people online, it helped me to determine that there are many different kinds of people out there and to embrace everyone for who they are, and not for whatever stereotypical crap we were taught. It's taught me not to judge or assume too much based on how someone might be upfront. 

Literally, let's jump to another topic. Where I live, people very commonly get their news from Facebook or they go to some biased news source (they all have some bias) but they listen to one side of it. This is a problem on the left side as well. On top of that, they'll get some meme from Facebook or someone's inflammatory post and share it around and spread hate and misinformation. It's concerning as well how divisive media is.

 Politicians don't care about us, no matter how much they pretend to. We need to care about each other, but we don't. Some people don't listen to doctors and think they're all lying, while some people say people deserve to die if they don't take the vaccine. The people in group 2 deserve to have to stop at every stoplight. They suck. Group 1, however, seems to have been exposed to a LOT of misinformation. Then there's Qanon. Look at the subreddit r/Qanoncasualites. People lose their family members to this cult-like thing.

The problem is not about conservatives. I personally do disagree with conservative people about a lot of things, but as long as they live in reality, they're fine. We can argue our points and know we are dealing with an objective reality. We both may be objectively wrong about things, but we can still get along as people.

But this cult of misinformation is destroying relationships, families, communities. It's made me inherently distrust the Republican party, and it should definitely not be that way. But how can I talk to someone who thinks I'm a communist because I got vaccinated? How can I take someone seriously who thinks all democats are evil child molesters? It's not true conservatism, it's something else. There is absolutely nothing conservative about trying to overthrow democracy to make Trump some sort of dictator. It's all driven by lies.

But all conservatives definitely don't fit in that box. We have a two party system, which I disagree with the idea of a two party system because it places the normal people in with the people who do not think rationally, and it does this on both sides. We need actual conservative people to step up and shut down this Qanon crap.

 Blog 8 - Antiwar

Right, so I've looked at both sites. I'm not sure if it's because of the bad wifi, but the article on American Conservative you sent us doesn't actually work. I'll refresh and refresh and hit "load more" but there is nothing. I'm going to base this on just the sites in general. I'm going to try to go into this with an open mind, but as someone who does lean left, my thoughts might have unintentional bias. (Especially on one literally called "American Conservative")

So let's start with Antiwar. Right off the bat, it looks like it was created in 1997 and hasn't been updated since, design-wise. It's not aesthetically pleasing either, like some retro websites look cool, but the color palette on this with the fonts and the way it's haphazardly sorted makes me want to internally scream!

Getting over the utter dysfunctionality that is the main page, it's actually not the worst when it comes to sorting. You see things from a lot of countries on there, so it might be a good launch point for looking at international news.

They also have a nice tribute to fallen soldiers. It doesn't show their names, and the dead people are in caskets, but it is nice knowing that while they are anti-war, they're not anti-veteran or anti-soldier.

The number of sources they use is INSANE. A lot of what they send is links to articles for other sites. It isn't stuff that I generally see and it feels like I'm jumping into the middle of a chapter book. Like, I jump into chapter 10 and miss all of the exposition and I have no idea the meaning of the plot.

So now, I am going back onto the American Conservative and the first thing I see is about some dude named Abimael Guzman who apparently killed capitalists, but what really caught my eye was something about vaccine lotteries and how they failed. As someone who lives somewhere in Ohio where they did that, it sparked an interest and I clicked. Honestly, I felt like it wasn't the best way they could've done it. I got vaccinated pretty early on, but using taxpayer money for something that isn't going to inherently benefit everyone just seems like a waste. 

There has also been research done on how the lottery exploits lower-income households. It can come across as Mike DeWine exploiting poor people to take a vaccine that they may not want to take just so they can have the chance for money. 

Reading the article, I totally see where it comes from and this person seems to be looking at both sides of things. The only real confusing thing is how they want the government to take away the ability for corporations to enforce vaccine mandates, even though ... shouldn't republicans be not wanting the government to intervene? That's their whole basis, is it not? Granted, political parties are not just on a linear plane of left to right. There's a test you can take to see where you fall on the graph.

So, I lost my exact results in a depression purge of my pictures but I was around where it was on the left side when I took it last year. I probably should retake it because anyone who doesn't have character development in a year scares me and I'm sure I've changed a little bit.

So I wanted to find stuff on war since that's what you asked for. But as soon as I got onto the main page, I didn't see anything on war. It just seems like a bunch of social issues (and the article in the top right made me gag) I feel like a lot of conservatives do look at this because the interface doesn't make me want to scream and force whoever to take a design class. 

I clicked on another article and the way they seem to alienate people in California in the first couple of paragraphs speaks for itself. Grow up. It makes me think that articles are all written by different people and whoever wrote the vaccination lottery is definitely not who wrote this one. Only half the article didn't seem like a joke\slam on people in California.

But I FINALLY found war articles recommended. I clicked on the Poland one and honestly, it's so long that it lost my interest halfway through, but I skimmed anyways. There's literally nothing about invading Poland and it's all social issues. I'm not Polish so I don't care. That being said, this blog is supposed to be war and all this website happens to be is just conservative analysis. I want the basics of something and I don't get it, depending on whoever wrote it. I also see stuff about LGBTQ rights and I don't feel like reading about my own existence being debated upon so I will just stop there.

So overall, why do I think people don't read these? I actually think American Conservative gets a fair amount of traffic. As biased as some of it seems, people tend to like confirmation bias. The website also looks polished, professional, and good. It doesn't look like it hasn't been updated since 1997. 

I personally am someone who wants to understand why people think the way they do. As much as some of them dehumanize both myself and those I care about, I want to understand why. I want to understand how people have hatred in their hearts and how to prevent it if I were to ever have kids or someone I'm mentoring. 

I also don't think all conservatives are in the group above. I think a lot of people just think differently about how the government should be run and I think those dissenting opinions are very important. 

I think the current state of half of the country hating whoever's the president every 4 years isn't sustainable, and I think it will eventually get to a point of war. I don't want that. I think war is costly in lives, life, and money. For those who die, that's it. For those who survive, they have to deal with mental illnesses and loss of time doing what they love or furthering their careers. Their lives are put on pause. 

There's also the issue of us just not having money and using so much money on hurting other innocent people in other countries that have nothing to do with their government instead of helping us and our own citizens with money. War seems like a bartering of one's own citizens and it's wrong.

There's also foreign affairs, such as the fact that literally any time any Middle Easten country want to stop using USD for their oil, the US gets mad at them and targets them. It's because of the whole USD not being backed by anything physical so the government wants their currency to be backed by oil so other countries accept it. That being said, maybe fix your problems from within before yelling at others.

War is depressing. War is overwhelming. War is mentally taxing. This whole thing has made my mental health die inside. I think I've covered why people don't want to read about war. 

 Age Of A.I.

color to change to at end: #A8FFFC China's basic surveillance state is absolutely terrifying. My roommate from freshman year grew up in Shang-hai and it's really weird there. Their social media is all different, and I believe they all have social networks\chats specifically for the government to not watch them. The government watches literally everything they do or say, and if they do something really bad, they "disappear".It just seems like privacy, or even the illusion of privacy is a joke. At least in America, we have some semblance of privacy. A.I. is either nonexistent or less structured. 

Where I grew up, my town is small and old. Everyone there is also old and very conservative (I didn't fit in at all.) We do NOT use our tax money effectively at all and our town prioritises their anti-woman agenda over the kids in public schools. We would always have threats every year that "oh if the levy doesn't pass, we wont be able to do band!" But our levvies would always pass. Every year. Then the schools would do unnessicary things with the money like demolishing a bunch of perfectly good buildings to build new schools that were apparently just worse. (I say apparently because my younger friends were impacted by this and the class behind mine was the last class to not be.)
Why am I talking about this? The school didn't prioritise things well. My town was the same way. We took out random parking spaces to make a random crosswalk in the middle of the road to "appeal to old people," which ok, but you're making them park farther away and taking out parking spots for them. My town also did the most tasteless thing ever. They put in a bike trail that's supposed to help the people who live in the projects and might not have cars. The bike trail doesn't go to any stores, nor does it even reach the projects. It's a random bike trail that isn't even a mile long.It just seems preformative and gross.

I rambled a lot, but it's to prove the point that my town... they don't seem the kind to just have some kind of A.I. thing. We don't even have sensors on the traffic lights. In bigger places like NYC or LA, they might do some kind of A.I. thing, but I don't see it. There would be no way to document everyone in the country, especially with all the immigrants. China seems to be a lot more tightly knit on that sort of thing.

Speaking of China, the social credit thing seems so wrong to me.It's legitimately just a way for people to be rated on how well they fit in with the government agenda. 

When our founding fathers said "all men created equal," it really meant "if you're a white male with property, you're created equal." That is inherently unequal. Even now, not everyone is created equal in America and anyone who thinks everyone is created equally either grew up super privileged, lived under a rock, or are just that incredibly self absorbed\unaware\stupid. Literally if you have diabetes, you have to depend on medication that is so expensive that if you don't have money, you're forcing yourself to choose between that and food. If you get hurt, you're in debt for years because of the screwed up pricing at hospitals. Basically, if you are born poor, good luck. You're not going to get as much as someone who's not. If you're a woman, you tend to be taken less seriously, and if you're a BIPOC, you have to worry about the perceptions of others on you, including law enforcement. It sucks. This is like in China except there, this concept is knowingly reinforced and encouraged by the government.

Oh Facebook, Amazon, and their ability to stalk you. See, the fact that bots can see what you post and analyze it, the idea of it doesn't scare me much. Maybe it's just that I'm numb to a lot of things. That being said, the fact that Facebook influenced your mood by your feed and manipulates people really just annoys me. Something else is a bit annoying too. I'm gonna preface this with the fact that I lean left. That being said, while Facebook is a private company, they apparently hide republican ideas. Granted, I think if you're homophobic, you can post about it. Then people like me can come in and block you and your sad sad existence from our lives. 

I'm gonna be honest, my mental health has been really just bad this week and this Age of A.I. documentary really isn't helping and is in fact making it worse. So I'm just gonna stop here. Sorry there isn't a lot of pictures or anything, I just actively do not want to do this blog for my own sake. I just don't need to talk about the doom and gloom of the future because I really have no hope for it anyways. 

Blog 9 - EOTO 2

DeepFake 

So, what is a deepfake? That is a convincing (or less convincing) fake video made with A.I. It's something people can make with free software, and it isn't hard to do. Above here is a Nido deepfake. There are many ways to make them, as my partner, when making this, used code. There are also free sites you can use as well. Basically, you just need a Youtube video with a face present the whole time and a head-on shot of someone. You put them together and create funny little clips like these. 

So, unfortunately, there's a lot worse to this than good. I could take a video of a voice impersonator saying something inflammatory or untrue that could destroy someone's reputation, get a picture of someone, and then paste them together. For instance, someone made Obama say that Trump was a dipshit. Obama wouldn't say that publically, but if someone wanted to make people hate or like Obama or any other celebrity or politician on false pretenses, they could just make a deepfake.

There's also the problem of people using deepfakes to violate people online. Deepfakes are rarely consentual, but some people go farther and will paste someone's face on naked pictures and videos of other people. Helen Mort's nudes were leaked online, except she had never taken nudes. Someone had taken non-explicit photos from her private accounts, including some where she was underaged, and encouraged people to put them on naked videos. Helen felt understandably humiliated, and this can happen to literally anyone. It's likely more common with famous people. 

That being said, I think everyone remembers where they'd be in school, and some unhealthy relationship would end and nudes would get leaked. Literally, when I was trying to find a link to provide as an example for this, I found actual links to literal child porn. But deepfakes might be the new age of leaking people's nudes. It might not be enough to never send people your nudes. I know I've never sent nudes. (I'm not saying this because this is a school related thing. I genuinely have bad enough trust issues that in my head, those who love me could hate me overnight, and I rarely feel safe even opening up to someone) 

Literally, my high school had this creep, I believe his name was Brandon. Brandon was nothing short of a self-centered, self-righteous manchild who had the intelligence of a toothbrush. He was sexist, racist, and homophobic as well. 

He had gotten in trouble already when I recorded him tearing down GSA posters and when he sent me a video of "him" flushing them down the toilet, I was able to determine that he had a female accomplice based on the fact that there was a pad\tampon trashcan in the background of the shot, and she eventually got in trouble too. He ended up not being very happy with me and threatening me over Instagram and telling me to kill myself. When I blocked his account, he made 3 more to keep harassing me, and I'd just keep blocking him. Eventually, he went away, but he is the kind of dude who, if the technology was invented, and he had more brains than a rubber band would've totally done deepfakes on myself and other people as well. 

He was a senior and over 18 at the time, and this is when Snapchat was introducing geostories, and the perimeter was around the school. Everyone on Snapchat who went to the school could watch the story and post to the colossal bitchfest. He ended up posting on there about how "if you have nudes, add me and send them." No one took him seriously, but sure enough, the next day, I'm seeing a bunch of people's boobs, butts, and other bits. He ended up just posting them to the public story for everyone to see. Keep in mind, a lot of these people I knew were underaged. Needless to say, he actually got arrested that night and expelled. People are crazy.

Something that is also wildly harmful with deepfakes? The ability to manipulate international political discourse. Do you remember way back in the day when Kim Jong Un was talking about how he'd nuke us? Well, imagine if someone had made a deepfake of him or Obama saying they were sending nukes, it would start a war before anyone would analyze the clip and realize it was fake. 

Blog 7 - Technology taught to me by someone else

Technology Taught To Me By Another 

Right, so as a little kid, I'll be honest. I pretty much taught myself everything basic when it came to technology. We didn't have much money at the time (as you can see by this pretty basic setup in the "computer room".) I remember we had Windows 95 at first, as I remember the starting sound distinctly. My parents didn't know much about technology back in the day, and apparently, I figured out how to lock them out of the computer, and I would do it repeatedly. I was such a devious child.

 However, what we had for a lot of my early childhood was Windows XP. Being a little kid, I basically taught myself how to animate PowerPoint, how to download and play games, and even MS Paint. I was a huge player of MMOs until my favorite one shut down.

I even taught myself how to do art. MS Paint can produce good art, but it's hard to. It's extremely basic and your tool options are limited. The site I use is a free one called Pixlr. It's a lot like Adobe Photoshop except it's free. It's hard to get inspiration to draw these days because of my declining mental health, but here is an OC I drew to the right named Talia. My friend who graduated from college with an art degree said I'm good, so I guess I am? 

But this blog is supposed to be about things others taught me with technology. I have no idea if this is supposed to be about communication or just general technology. So I'll just do general tech. 

In high school, I took a class called music tech where I could make music electronically. I absolutely loved it. I worked with Ableton Live 9 and 10 when it came out. I used a little mixing thing called a Push. It was my first time working with macOS. It was amazing. I have ADHD and because my grades were so stellar, and I was able to mask really well, I was undiagnosed until early this year. This class was the only class where I could actually focus for the entire class. I had gone through a lot of trauma early on in high school, and this was at the point where I had still not told anyone, and it was hard going through that stuff completely alone and scared, but this class was something I looked forward to as an outlet. I could be creative. I could make music. I could learn and felt like I was actually achieving something, as opposed to my other classes where I would get excellent grades but barely remember the material down the line. In my other classes, I'd not be able to pay attention but I'd understand the material when I'd do homework, do well on the tests, make good grades in the class, and then forget everything I learned. I felt like an impostor, but here, I was actually learning by doing the thing and I could be creative as well. Unfortunately, all the stuff I made is saved on a hard drive at home and home is 8 hours away for me. I miss this class so much

Something else that helped me with technology, or more specifically, someone else is my partner. I'm generally attracted to girls, but sometimes, on the rare chance, I'll think of a guy as attractive, and now I'm dating one. This is his setup on the picture to the right. (Yes I bought him the neon lights hehehehehehe)

 Growing up, I was friends with the weird people and not generally the people who were good at technology, because the technology wizards were generally rude and had a lot of prejudice. Windows has come a long way from Windows XP and I hadn't realized how much it had. My partner, who is a computer science student showed me a lot. On top of gaming stuff looking cool, he educated me on the basic concepts of what a CPU (or processor) is, or a GPU, or RAM, and what it all means. I really don't have extensive knowledge of technology by any means, but think I know more than the average person. I know how to research better and not just buy the first thing I see because it's the cheapest, because cheap doesn't always mean a good deal for what you get. There are a lot of components that go into each thing, and it sometimes depends on the thing. I usually will still go to him just to check that I'm right, or about stuff that I don't know. The complexity of technology in computers has grown exponentially over the last 20 years, and much quicker in the last 10.

Blog 6 - Rodger being Rodger

 Rodger's Diffusion of Innovations

So basically, any idea or change to society, people have to adapt to it and get used to it. Eventually, it reaches saturation, and very few, if any changes ever truly reach 100%. This can be used with tangible objects, like the TV or a dishwasher. It can also be used with ideas, such as the internet, the mail system, and banking. All ideas come, and then they either evolve into something unrecognizable to it's creators, or it just goes away.

Relating to Twitch, I'd say the Innovators were Justin and the other people who helped him to develop the website. The early Adopters were anyone who started broadcasting when the site was called Justin.TV. Once it got a lot of users and renamed to Twitch, it got into the early majority. With websites, it's hard to see where we are in this chart, as the internet is forever, but if a website does something horrible, it can get taken down, or people could stop using it and another site takes all their customers. Sometimes sites just decide to shut down on their own. But I'd say we are likely in the early majority right now. We have a lot of creators and a lot of people using the site. It's still mostly gamers, as when I asked the class who uses Twitch, it was a bunch of dudes who I assume game, and not the majority of the class.

Wacky thing: I'm doing this in my marketing class (My professor was zooming through the slideshow, and I could neither see it well because she can't design well, or write down what i could see because she'd just click to the next slide so fast and it was frustrating, so I gave up) and my professor just mentioned Roger's Diffusion of Innovations, and she also is connecting it to technology, but she isn't using it for websites. (But she's using it to explain Tennis?) Companies are generally banking on people in the early adopters group to try to spread the word about the product. Here are some from Twitch.  So that's nifty, I would say. The initial people who promoted Twitch are also all wealthy, successful, and doing a job they love. I feel like being an early adapter in something successful is something we all want to be, wether we know it or not, because wether it's "I did this thing before it was cool" or "I get paid because I took advantage of x thing early."

I feel like this also relates to stocks, as people try to invest in a brand which they think will do well, and if it takes off, they get a huge return in their initial investment. For example, when Bitcoin (a cryptocurrency) was first coming out, it was less than a cent and people got on it, probably as a joke, and then it took off and they got wealthy. I remember when Dogecoin took off. I was on a voice call on Discord talking to my friend about stocks, and he had just convinced me that day to download Robinhood. I was still getting approved so I told him to check his phone to see what the price was. I bought $10 worth as soon as Robinhood approved me. To the right, you see my Robinhood investing (yeah I know it isn't a lot yet, but I'm trying to just figure it out.) but you see that it spiked when I first joined, and then it fell a little bit, and then really spiked again. (I was around $30, I think? My memory is horrible.) I'm hoping with Dogecoin, I'm an early investor and not that I failed to sell when I should've and that Dogecoin has peaked for all time. 

Blog 5 - Privacy

Privacy

I think everyone who uses the internet has a general understanding that privacy by corporations is a big joke. Most will go out and say that they sell your data to third-party companies, but no one knows what that means, and rarely does anyone actually go through and read the terms of service when signing up for something. 

I'm generally not someone who gets overly paranoid about that kind of thing. I already have very bad anxiety, and I know it isn't a real human looking at what I do, so I'm less scared. There are, however, a few examples of weird things happening with advertising and what I'm recommended. My freshman year roommate (she transferred) had lots of money and would buy expensive clothes a lot. I knew I couldn't afford what she could and our styles were drastically opposite (she's feminine and pink, and I prefer more androgynous stuff in darker colors) yet I started getting Gucci and Lululemon ads. I'm dating someone who is into Yu Gi Oh cards and I get ads on those, despite not really showing a huge interest in them. When I took French, I would get so many French ads. I also have a trans friend who has chest dyphoria and I tried to help her find stuff to help and long story short, I get rubber boobs ads now. I don't mind much considering I'm helping people I care about but... really?

It's almost shocking how much personal information we have online. I remember years ago, people got paranoid about FBI agents watching us through our webcams and people started putting up the little camera covers. My generation was largely unaffected by this and made memes because there's no way for everyone to be watched by a real person through their webcams at once. That would imply that half the world are actually FBI agents.

I do think it's important to know that your information isn't entirely private, but at the same time, saying that "everyone can see your emails" isn't true. I can't just go into my professor's email and see everything they send. If it's open, maybe, but it's not readily available for me to just search her up and find her stuff, unless the password somehow gets into a leaked password list by hackers. Bots can scan emails, but its not going to be available for those normal people who aren't looking to hack.