Terminator agrees… (534)

I decided to go full dystopia in the last blog of 2025 albeit the cringe Hollywood type.

This is a logical progression from the previous two posts and also letters I’ve had published this year on the subject of our at-risk humanity – as increasingly a majority ‘choose’ to hand over their lives, their privacy, information and even biometric data their very selves in minute detail to the tech oligarchy.

The dehumanisation of humanity by tech is a long running theme on this blog – check out – post 147 More Less-Contact Is Making Us Horrible

The jury is no longer out on whether social media is robbing us of our creativity and empathy. Its no longer out on whether the use of screens is robbing our children of the ability to concentrate and there’s no longer any doubt whether the use of AI is dimming human intellect.

SO – I refer to the Terminator films. Things I’ve always regarded as popcorn viewing at best.

RE-watching a 20p DVD over the weekend of the one I considered the weakest, I was struck by a quote from the character Kyle Reese when faced with the Cyborg version of John Connor. (So – no - I’m not doing the obvious one from Terminator 3 The Rise of The Machines “Skynet IS the virus”

It’s from the 2015 Terminator; Genisys and it relates to the way all human IT devices become connected, interactive and therefore easily under the control of the tech behemoths. And the juxtaposition of reality and fiction causes it to make sense.

Those who control the real AI systems are themselves malformed humans lacking decency, empathy and those things that in the past we valued about humanity. No need to lay out the current hideous examples.

Kyle Reese says something I’ve said in many forms many times about the current human willingness to give up autonomy, individuality and humanity…

“These people re inviting their own extinction in through the front door and they don’t even know it…”

And – of course when I’m in dystopian mood – I’ll recommend books of mine that I always do on such occasions.

The novella Zero One Zero Two

The calmer and more hopeful audio book/narrative poem - Casey & the Surfmen

Merry Christmas.

OUTSIDE (534)

 This month - a poem. I've not done one in a while - topical, reflective or humorous - and it occurred to me that considering the previous post there'd be - if incomplete, at least sufficient context. 

OUTSIDE

On the outside I remained

Perceiving those contained

Legitimacy feigned

Truth strangled cold constrained

Expression ever reigned

In

From the outside I observe

Absence of verve

Survive dodge swerve

The good lose their nerve

From the fight they always curve

Away

Yes it’s strange out here

But it’s painfully clear

The front’s the same as the rear

The driver – always fear

No 5^th gear to

Escape

This dreary gilded age

Of complicity not rage

Lives made of beige

The self constructed cage

Your soul for a wage

Slip

All-new pay-to-die

Pretty vapes your lungs fry

Mine the earth pollute the sky

Accept some Netanyahu lie

The end is nigh

Not just an old guy with a cardboard placard

So why not chuck it all away

And come outside

With me...

Slaves To The Machines & The 21st Century Choice Delusion... (533)

Admittedly, I’m that Luddite who’s rejected everything from TV (since last century), the nonsense of time-saving devices like dish-washers and microwaves up to and including the ubiquitous smartphone (what a euphemism). I’ve never had credit cards and returned the contactless payment card to my bank. I’d never requested one. Many forms of payment now require contactless cards including the means of getting around used by us Luddites the most - public transport.

In 2025, choice is a marketing illusion boiling down to comply or bye bye.

Increasingly – all that matters to the tiny percentage at the top of the unstable socio-economic pyramid – is how efficiently the masses can be separated from their money.

Meanwhile the inconvenient truth of the vulnerability of overwhelmingly automated systems is entirely ignored.

And – as a quick aside – while we’re tricked by the idea of choice. Did anyone ask for this? Did anyone vote for it? But no one resists…

I am still aghast when I have to have THAT debate in the supermarket because I’m forced to use the self-service tills I was assured would be optional. Occasionally the response is aggressive/ sneering/irritated when I insist on a human-served till. This from the very people who are seeing their colleagues made redundant - their stores employing fewer staff. The ones who are employed, do more mindless work – with little human interaction – often just standing near the self-service checkouts watching for shoplifting or to jump in when something goes wrong.

Slaves to the machines.

Human fail-safes have been gouged out. ‘Customer care/service’ is history, now just part of marketing speak. Try submitting a complaint (there is rarely a phone number with a human on the end) you’ll get nothing or an auto reply; your issue is ‘important’ and has been ‘passed to the relevant department’ as I recently had from LNER. It isn’t and it hasn’t. Its in the cyber bin.

Yesterday while waiting the dreaded 5 hour window for an internet engineer I got a text, obviously automated, telling me they were ‘outside my house’ They were not. In fact even after waiting 6 hours - still no one. Well done Openreach, arm of BT, our biggest communications company...

Meanwhile, hacking is a global unresolved problem. In the UK recently, companies as diverse as Jaguar Land Rover and a private nursery – were hacked out of action – to add to the airports, shops, banks, hospitals etc. that have been paralysed.

We are constantly lied to that the issues of online abuse, and predation are insurmountable. One huge step would be to stop anonymity. From racism to child sexploitation – the person behind the vileness having their name right there – would alter things significantly. Social media moguls will not do this because the rabidness on these sites is their bread and butter. Governments will not call for this because they are scared of the tech giants.

Here in the UK – in his ugly attempts to out-Farage Farage – Starmer has started banging on about digital ID cards in relation to tackling migration. Of course – whipped-up fear of foreigners is always a good way to push through stupid things - like BREXIT.

The man Starmer emulates in so many unfortunate ways – the old war criminal Tony Blair - suggested this during his unfortunate tenure. It was rejected wholeheartedly by the public. Now, however, when most folk unthinkingly give their most intimate personal and biometric data to faceless multinationals for free through their digital interfaces (facial recognition, thumbprint, voice ID) it’s caused only the slightest ripple.

NHS data – the patient records of millions going back decades (in England at any rate) is available for sale. Are NHS patients happy with this? Do they understand what it means? No one knows. No one cares.

Mass personal detail harvesting by the data vampires and our naïve over-reliance on faceless, fearsome tech and the billionaires who thrust it randomly on the world without our say so, is foolhardy. They know everything about us, we know almost nothing about them.

Yet we stumble towards AI domination with – of all people – Elon Musk one of its architects…

Apart from greater chaos, mass global unemployment, endemic poverty, further dehumanisation, societal disintegration and more rabid extremism – what could possibly go wrong?

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Not being part of the social media jungle, never having dated a celebrity or had a public ‘accidental’ wardrobe mishap – I’ve no means to promote my stuff in the over-heated 21^st century – however, as always, I still link some of my books. See below. And while Amazon bought the publishing platform used for some of my work (of course they did) these publications are avail on wider distribution which means if you like anything (Ella & the Knot Fairies for Christmas?) you can buy via other good online book sellers. Click HERE to view.

Thank you.

BANDCAMP Friday 3rd October

 

And - yes - they sent some wee funky graphics this time. So, just a reminder - Bandcamp run this scheme to support artists and in fact BC got a special mention my previous post re the mad Trump tariffs. 

On Bandcamp Fridays - artists receive un-docked revenues. SO that could be as much as 20p extra for me for a story I wrote over a period of a decade - 

Casey & the Surfmen

This mythical environmental piece is composed in verse and available to download as a 25 minute audio from BC (click on the title above).

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Also - if you are already thinking about the C word - my illustrated children's book about mixed race families, mother love and the knotty issue of hair - Ella & the Knot Fairies is on offer so you can check out the the e-book and think about buying some copies for presents from any good online book store. Just click on the title.

Cheers 

Amanda

Trump; ‘Rotting Old Fart Trashes Everything.’ What’s new? It may be too late in humanity’s day to fix this… (532)

 

A frenzy over the temporary disappearance of Trump from his permanent spot in front of a slavering media, ended all too soon with a golf-course sighting - of course.

As Trump’s authoritarianism takes root in America ‘Rotting Old Fart Trashes Everything’ is hardly a new phenomenon but no one as completely stupid has done it as brashly, and with such naked connivance of people who should know better.

The carnage wrought on Britain by the Brexit lunatics is as nothing compared to the US national and global collateral damage since January of this year.

Some Trump supporters are bleating – this isn’t what they wanted. Many – now being thrown off basic healthcare. To them I say – as it’s phrased here in Scotland - ‘get tae f--k’, they did this.

Trump was never subtle. Not sensing the latent now blatant authoritarianism is to be so naïve you should be in nappies (like Trump). Or its wilful ignorance because of a blind addiction to bigotry.

Britain’s weevil Trump, Nigel Farage is also successfully enriching his privileged self while targeting migrants. Note the ugly protests outside migrant facilities, ostensibly because folk are ‘worried about their women’. Meanwhile no protests outside police stations despite the problem Britain has with sexual abuse of women by serving police officers. No protests outside the BBC despite their terrible record of shielding sexual predators (e.g. Jimmy Saville) etc, etc.

My personal teeny tiny trigger this week was an email from an old site I inhabit Bandcamp, popular mainly with musicians but also a few of us poets who do (did) performance poetry, poetry stories and spoken word - click here Casey & the Surfmen (audio)

Bandcamp provides a platform for the sorts of artists who used to be able to get by at the lower end of things and who now find it almost impossible to break through the solid celebrity crust that has formed over both the arts and entertainment industry. Like much else in life – its ALL or NOTHING now, no middle ground. Success has less and less to do with talent and more to do with have you managed that relentless social media frenzy or have you shagged someone who’s been on the telly.

Tariffs – just one part of Trumps wrecking ball approach – reached their poisonous tentacles into my tiny corner of existence this week with Bandcamp having to explaining to artists (mainly musicians) how to suspend sales of merchandise to the US so that they/their fans are not caught in the hideous tariff trap. Until when? Who knows.

Newspapers reported gleefully that last Friday a US appeals court ruled that many of Trump’s tariffs are ‘illegal’. Er – yeah – because the 32x convicted felon and multiple sexual abuser and CLOSE pals of one of the worst known paedophiles in recent US history really cares about the law...

Many artists – including me – find imaginative ways to pay our bills so that we can continue to do what we love / are driven to do. It was hard before covid to make a living from creative endeavours. And in the post-covid, more reactionary, right-wing world – no one in power wants creative, critical thinkers clogging up the route to riches by seeing, saying, singing or sonnetising their truth.

For myself I’ve done cleaning jobs – including public toilets. Currently I work minimum-wage zero-hours contract agency work (the very type I’ve written and cartooned about on this blog) to pay my bills because to go back to Law would mean giving up writing, creative thinking, political examination and all that I value.

So, on behalf of my fellow artists – especially the ones, unlike me, who do the merch thing, while it may not be edifying or subtle - to those who follow, support or supported the rabid wreckers of this world, because they couldn’t resist the gross bigotry, even if it meant the destruction of everything good, they are a massive pile of fewmets who can yes ‘get tae f--k’.

R.O.F.T.E is not a new phenomenon – it’s just spread faster, stinks worse plus – as per my previous post - it may be too late in humanity’s day to fix this time...

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NB; this was a pre-post as I’m busy Tues so – I was picking up on poor economic news Sunday and of course there is always Ukraine, Gaza, starvation, environmental catastrophe so if the world ended between Sunday and Tuesday – SOZ.

* And – because I’ve not said it in a while and folk are asking again – I am NOT on any social media, never have been, do not have a smartphone – in effect I do not exist other than in the fading ‘real’ world… but you can check out my very obscure old scribblings here My BOOKS and my environmental story poem audio on Bandcamp - above.

Throwing it all away... (531)

At the end of the hugely under-viewed 2021 film Don’t Look Up – the character played by Leonardo Di Caprio says this line

“The thing of it is… we really did have everything didn’t we”

But its importance is far more than a memorable ending. What the character is saying is that we threw it all away. You’ll find similar lines in other dystopian and post apocalyptic films and books. The main protagonist, played by Denzel Washington in The Book of Eli says “We threw away things people kill each other for now…”

And that is exactly what we’re doing.

It seems to epitomise what we have done for decades and are doing faster now than at any time in human history – even including the world wars that left human and infrastructure carnage across the globe. We are throwing away everything we have, everything we think we value and more importantly – everything we need.

The US under Trump continues to throw away the economic stability clawed back by Obama during his 8 year tenure, its international credibility along with its global influence and it is literally throwing away the lives of desperate children and the ordinary workers of America – with the cuts to US AID and Medicaid.

Here in the UK – after the dreadfully hard-won and only briefly enjoyed gains secured for ordinary people after the sacrifices of WWII – the ‘throwing away’ begun with Thatcher, has not stopped.

Everything that was in public hands has been privatised. As a predictable and oft predicted result – services have plummeted in availability and quality and prices have sky-rocketed. The wealth gap in this country has widened exponentially and in poorer areas longevity has fallen for the first time since these things were monitored by The Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Wages have fallen in real time and – the same horror who gave us the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, with all its grotesque and ongoing consequences, introduced university tuition fees in a country where higher education had previously been free. So, having decimated an entire country on the other side of the world, Tony Blair can also take credit for economically crippling the lives of generations of young folk in his own bit of the globe.

And talking of Blair, the Bush/Blair fiasco in Iraq threw away the chance for stability in the Middle East. Its tempting, if you listen to the drone of Western legacy media, to imagine that, for example, ISIS sprang out of thin air rather than growing rapidly in the Petri dishes of the illegal invasion of Iraq and the disturbing events in Guantanamo Bay.

OF course now we have the genocide in Gaza, also facilitated by the UK/US.

We’ve been throwing away our planetary resources at an ever-increasing rate. Consumerism is out of control but the beast of late stage Capitalism needs to be fed. The more it feeds the more it hungers and the more we feed it. Chucking our resources down its dark deep endless maw until we’re cannibalising ourselves.

As humans, its often seemed to me that we are throwing away one of our most precious traits – empathy. Empathy, broadly speaking, is what makes us human. It developed with our ability to communicate, store information and accumulate knowledge and understanding. Empathy allows us to function as civilised beings. (Check out post 308 Get your face out of your phone.)

The unfettered invasion of technology and remote, robotic interactions in our lives seems to be driving empathy out. Now, regular readers of this blog may have an eye-roll. They may recall I am a Luddite. No smartphone – no social media. No TV since last century. No car, no microwave/dishwasher, no flying abroad for over 20 years. Etc. What does she know? Well, I still live in the world. A world where I am in an increasing minority (can minority increase?) A world where eye-contact seems rarer, children pointed in the direction of screens from babyhood struggle with language and concentration. I see it.

(Oh and the phenomenon of the childish tech-titan lunatic is beautifully dealt with also in Don’t Look Up.)

Is it this reduced empathy that allows us – in a world where we cannot not know how others suffer, to nevertheless ignore the traumas of our fellow human beings and carry on shopping, consuming, throwing away?

Our governments have increasingly thrown out the idea of regulation. That thing that protected ordinary people from the worst excesses of the Greed monster and the consumerism that is eating us. (check out blog post 383 Regulation is not a dirty word)

Recent examples of the devastating effects or the shunning by the rich and powerful of protective regulations are all around us but perhaps the best/worst example in recent living memory is the financial crash of 2008. In a nutshell – a catastrophic global financial failure brought about by rapacious avarice and the ability of the rich to pass the results of their failed risk taking down to those at the bottom of the economic food chain in secretive unregulated market practices.

Many parts of the world and many towns in the US where Wall St kicked off, for one example, the sub-prime nightmare, have not recovered to this day. Peoples futures were torn and thrown away as the Future’s markets grew fangs.

In fact, as the crash of 2008 is the main global economic trauma of my life-time, despite the ever available lessons of the 1929 Wall St crash and Great Depression, it feels as if even reality was thrown away.

Just consider that then Treasury Secretary Paulson in the Bush administration, gathered the heads of the richest US banks together and handed over a total $125bn as part of their self-induced-crisis bail-out while the victims – those who lost jobs and homes - got nothing. The final bill was $180bn and that is on top of the trillions those banks were borrowing from the Federal Reserve.

The top financial/social trauma this side of the pond recently was the 2016 self-harm of Brexit. Arguably as much to do with the desire of the wealthy for de-regulation as it was about rampant xenophobia. What throwing away our embedded and successful economic ties, educational, cultural, intelligence and research relationship to our closest block trading partner actually led to, was a massive hit to GDP and loss of global credibility. What we could show in return – even when we had the hideous splinter Jacob Rees-Mogg as Minister for Brexit Benefits - was a different coloured passport!

In 2016 we also seemed to throw out the notion that leaders should be even vaguely competent and at least apparently decent. That was when we got Trump I in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil and here in the UK, hopeless Theresa May who paved the way for the even more disastrous chancer Johnson.

Despite the film quoted in this piece and as we’ve just had the hottest year on record, its worth remembering, as per blog post 364, in reality Armageddon will not be televised.

But soon – very soon – there will not only be nothing left to throw away...

Things Fall Apart… (530)

...or do they?

Ask Macbeth.

Chinua Achebe’s seminal and brilliant 1958 work Things Fall Apart has the sound of inevitability, fate, destiny. And yet – the thread of this intricate African fable is more subtle. In fact, at every turn it is the choices of the central character Okonkwo, a successful man, famed in his younger days for his wrestling prowess but haunted by the spectre of the father he deemed a failure, that triggers many of the tragedies that befall him, his family and his village.

And that encapsulates the most important lesson we never learn.

Its a lesson that is known on one level. It is set deep in cultural understanding and psychological examinations of human nature; is evident in famous Shakespearian anti-heroes.

In one of the many notable soliloquies in the Scottish play, Macbeth begins his pre-regicide speech by acknowledging the here and now “here on this bank and shoal of time” as he contemplates the consequences of his actions. Still in Act 1, Macbeth hopes that “its surcease were its success”. He is hoping that in fact there will be no consequences from killing King Duncan even though he almost immediately acknowledges that “in these cases we still have judgement here”.

In Things Fall Apart there are also – as with Macbeth’s witches – ethereal and terrestrial forces that proclaim, predict and influence actions. Most obviously, Okonkwo is subject to and a clear victim – as is his village and culture – of the abomination of colonialism in its mundane brutality. It is the choices made by the men on both sides that create the endless tragedies.

And if we step swiftly sideways into the less prosaic, real contemporary world – this is a lesson we reject – however many times and however many examples of destruction are laid out in human history – often repeats of repeats of repeats.

Despite the horrors of wars currently raging or brewing around the globe and the appalling losses of innocent lives – it is still the case – that the greatest and most imminent threat facing humanity is the destruction of the environment.

This is something we are doing. We know we are doing it. We choose – if not to keep doing it at least to not do anything about the doing of it. Same thing.

And do we have any examples of the catastrophic effect of similar actions. Well – you could say too many to mention. But let us take Australia. Not somewhere I’ve ever been.

Today 70% of this continent country is arid. And its getting worse.

Aboriginal peoples lived ‘down under’ for 40,000 years without decimating the land which was verdant and fertile.

It was European settlers who – as well as abusing the Aboriginals and corrupting their ways of life – destroyed the natural world there with farming methods unsuitable to the region, plant and animal species that were not native and which debased the land. In particular cattle rearing, which has turned whole swathes of the land into irretrievable desert. Australian cattle farming – one of the most environmentally harmful on the planet – goes on apace today.

Here in Britain – something I have written about endlessly – is how the post war gains aimed at improving the lives of ordinary people after the human sacrifice and slaughter of WWII, were systematically unpicked from the early 80s when Margaret Thatcher (PM 1979 - 1990) began her cruel policies and a programme of privatisation which, when completed this century, put most of what had been in public ownership back into private hands where profit rules and we see the devastation of society all around us in crumbling and dysfunctional, old and worn infrastructure that fails so many. Sewage in the water and in prepping itself for private profit - the Post Office created one of the worst mass miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

A decade and a half of Tory rule this century added to the misery with an austerity programme that led to decreased longevity in some poor areas and an increase in child poverty. In-between Thatcher’s horrors and Cameron/Osborne’s austerity social cataclysm we had – of course – Tony Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq. Another ‘choice’ albeit made directly against the clearly expressed will of the majority of the British public and the evidence. The repercussions of that miserable adventure are with us today.

Somehow given the choice between what is the right thing to do and obvious self destruct there is something about human nature – at least for some – and sadly often those in power, that leads them to make the obviously bad choice. Tony Blair’s give-away for when he knew he was making the wrong choice was to talk about ‘difficult decisions’ It became, in my view, shorthand for – crapping things up.

But we do it en masse too. Not just individually. The UK (though not, I’m proud to say, the people here in Scotland) voted for the self-destruct of Brexit. It is acknowledged as such by economists and all sentient beings and yet the main architect of this – media darling Nigel Farage – rises ever higher in popularity where he was put but the media that still platforms him.

America voted for Donald Trump not once but twice. And you’d have to have been living under a rock not to know how horribly that is playing out.

If humanity doesn’t start pulling away from obvious bad choices soon; if we as humans simply hope, like Macbeth, that the obvious consequences just wont happen when they obviously will and if we don’t curb the men with Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition” then things, everything, will fall apart.

But things don’t fall apart all by themselves.

Things Fall Apart because we break them.

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Do check out My BOOKS and as the summer hols are upon us - remember all the poems in Fun Poems For Children are performed by me on youtube I put these put for the grandkids during covid but they're now public.

Plus why not have a read of an early relevant post

 Armageddon Will Not Be Televised

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Finally - as folk keep asking - just a reminder - I've never been on any social media and still do not have a smartphone 😊 so no need to waste time searching.

Bye for the summer, see you in September.