Shadows Move In Where Faith Used to Be: Chinese Apps and the American People

There is so much to write about at this moment, it was rather hard to for me to narrow down a topic. Fortunately, in the past couple days, a new story hit the media out of nowhere that made the decision for me. All that being said: have you heard about DeepSeek?

It’s a Chinese generative AI app, based upon the same precepts as ChatGPT. Literally it was built using that software. The claim is that it took ~$6 million to make, compared to the running costs of about half a billion for the other generative AI models. Once this news hit the market, the blue chips crashed and shook the US tech world.

There are plenty of fun side topics that we’ll cover with this one. For the first part, I’ll go into two of my favorite things: schadenfreude and hubris. The past few weeks, schadenfreude has been getting me through the news cycle. I know it’s not a virtue, trust me. But I am only human, and with the depressing news we have lately, it’s sort of been a good feeling to see the people who made assumptions get wet-fish slapped with reality. You’ll notice, with the flurry of Executive Orders the American President has made lately, he didn’t manage to leave the Ukraine war in the first 24 hours as promised, nor has he done anything to lower the price of groceries, eggs, or gas. And, in fact, he has said he won’t (although he says he will lower drill restrictions in protected areas, that won’t drive gas costs down; though, if there was more competition from green initiatives that he’s cutting, it would). I just bring those specific topics up because the people who voted for him claimed it was due to those topics, and they are already dead on arrival. As the rest of us knew they would be. So seeing the inevitable happen, has been the spark of joy I’ve been taking from an overwhelmingly dark time.

The other bit, hubris, is aimed directly at the tech bro overlord douche cadre. I’ve always thought to be a billionaire is a sign of a personal failing; it means you didn’t take care of those around you on the way up. And if you continue to be a billionaire, it means that you still aren’t taking care of people like you should. They could use the excess of wealth to solve, or nearly solve, all issues we have. But they don’t. And now that we are in this new administration, they immediately bowed down, got in line, and showed us their true natures. Happy for years to stand quietly behind the scenes pulling strings, they have completely capitulated to our new system and tossed out equality or any other moral standing, in the hopes of favor and succor from above. And man, that really made me angry. They don’t even pretend to want to help society now. Google announced yesterday it’s changing its maps to show the Gulf of Mexico inaccurately renamed to Gulf of America, Facebook is going to stop trying to limit hate speech and disinformation at all, and Elon….well, look at that goose stepper up there. He’s just missing the mustache.

So when China announced DeepSeek, I immediately had two responses: wariness because I know why China is doing this, but then there was schadenfreude at the tech sector freaking out. These guys thought they were untouchable, they put themselves on pantheons and thought they finally made it. They could show us their matching Lex Luthor tattoos finally! They own everything and there’s nothing we can do about it!

And then…BAM. China, playing its long game of stealing and silence, tossed this embarrassing grenade right in their sausage fest. MUAHAHAHAHA! Their stocks tanked, billions were lost. The initiative they just announced last week for “AI dominance” suddenly looked, in the daylight, as though it had gotten dressed in a dark room and didn’t check the mirror on the way out. Wait, you all need half a trillion? They did it with 6 million! They kicked the stool out from under the American tech bros, and man was it nice to see them fall.

I also find it vindicating that there are huge moral quandaries with generative AI that haven’t been addressed at all by the government or the tech oligarchy: how they scrape the data of humans to create their content, but don’t compensate them for it. How their output is displacing the careers of real humans, without compensating the system it’s stealing from. How it takes a huge amount of power to run the systems. All of these issues may hit those dudes differently, now that China is wearing the shoes they’ve been sporting.

However…now that we’ve gotten past the flash of “weeeeee”, I’ll move on to my larger emotional response. If you’re American, this isn’t something to truly celebrate. It will be another vector for China to steal our ideas, code, and initiative; after all, that’s how they were able to make DeepSeek in the first place. There’s even evidence that they are using black market NVIDIA chips to make it, since they are restricted from buying them. This comes shortly after the revelations about the two 6th generation fighter jets they purport to have, which if the claims are true, means they have beat us to market. Again, this is based off of data that they stole from us (I remember they hacked the F-35 program while I worked there, and stole plans. And it certainly wasn’t the only time, or the only platform they did it with). They excel at taking other people’s ideas and building on them, and we are seeing those chickens come home to roost. For years, they have been thinking strategically about global markets, while we continued to only think tactically.

First we exported our manufacturing to them, hollowing out our middle class at the enrichment of the few. Trickle down economics somehow still hasn’t worked, in the 40 years since we started trying to get it to work. Any minute now, right? So our populace is unhappier and more tired, and broker, than ever before. China has executed extremely high levels of industrial espionage against us, and continues to do so, at a prolific scale. They’ve infiltrated our extremely sensitive government systems time and time again. And that doesn’t even include the actual spies that have infiltrated our universities, to pick our brains about our newest ideas.

So now, we have the results coming to market. 6th gen fighters, DeepSeek, and TikTok. I was going to write about the TikTok ban a few weeks ago, but wanted to see things play out. I’m now extremely happy I did, because it pairs perfectly with current events.

TikTok is a dangerous tool, as the government has been saying (and the American people ignoring), for years. It’s no coincidence that the version China allows its own citizens to use is far different from our own. It’s meant to dull us down and occupy our attention, so that we don’t accomplish anything with drive. It’s a time suck. It pushes disinformation. It ruins our attention span. It also gathers massive amounts of data on us. I personally predict that at some point, China will use that data to make digital AI agents to “befriend” users and then use PSYOPs on them to further degrade their loyalty to America and one another. I believe that they will use the data from DeepSeek to do the same; it gathers an incredible amount of data from the moment you download the app to your phone.

The TikTok ban, which Trump originally proposed (and I supported!) has now been stymied by Trump. He claims Microsoft are in talks to acquire the American arm of the business, and we shall see what comes of it. It’s been turned back on for American users. But what’s been fascinating to me has been watching the response online of the average user.

Overwhelmingly, I have seen Americans who use TikTok blatantly say, “So what if they have my data. American companies already have it all and sell it to anyone who wants it.” And you know what? Solid point.

This is a sign of the breech of trust between American government and its citizens. For many years now, I’ve been a vocal supporter of privacy laws like the EU has, and of harsh penalties for companies that fail to prevent security breaches. Neither has gained any traction in the US. Since the government believes its job is no longer to protect the average citizen, but instead to provide the opportunity to any sap who wants to bilk a buck from his neighbor the protection to do so, Americans are hugely data compromised.

Many times a year I am notified that some site or another has been breached. Companies are very poor custodians of customer data nearly across the board, and there is nearly no restriction on the data they can collect. There was just a huge data breach of an app schools use called “Powerschool”, announced last week. That data, among other things, included Social Security numbers of students and teachers, affected up to 70 million users, and was all achieved by one admin’s compromised credentials being used to login. As someone with software development and security experience, there are so many red flags here. Why was ONE lowly admin able to access the social security numbers of that many people? Why was no one alerted at that massive of a pull? Why were they stored in unencrypted areas, instead of being accessed individually with a key? And, why will nothing be done about it? This stuff is not rocket science; it’s lazy engineering because they companies don’t have the incentive.

If we made it so that there were fines and jail time for stolen data, security would improve immediately. Technically there are laws, but they aren’t harsh enough and aren’t enforced frequently enough. But they get away with it. If someone came in my house, and stole my social security card, they would face fines and jail time. Why should the digital data be any different? If a bank lost my money due to their poor security, I would be protected. Why is this different?

In my option, the American government has done a terrible job of protecting us from this. Part of that is they don’t feel the pressure; part of it is laziness; part of it is the fact that most of Congress has no clue how technology works because they are dinosaurs and lawyers. But I also think the tech sector has done a terrible job of being good citizens as well; they suck all our private informaion up and sell it to anyone who coughs up the cash, and then they put nothing back into the society they stole it all from. And now, guess what’s happened: They’ve both done such a bad job, that people think China has their interests at heart more than America. And for me, it’s hard to say they seem totally wrong. China certainly doesn’t have their interests at heart, not at all. But it’s getting harder to be convinced that our own country’s government cares about them, either, let alone American companies. And that is so dangerous.

In this moment, the users have the power, and they don’t realize it. We need to have people who understand current issues step up to the plate to protect us. We need to be on the same team again, and by that I mean ALL American citizens need to be protected, not just the rich. In this moment of chaos and terror, I’m not sure what will happen. But at some point, Trump used to be convinced that TikTok and China were dangerous. And he need to remember that they still are. We also need to stand with our true allies again, and make data and security standards with them. If we don’t stand with them, someone else will, and nature abhors a vacuum. I don’t like this isolationist stance we are moving toward; the world is too interconnected for it to be feasible. I have hope that this will be realized again at some point.

Please don’t download those apps. Please don’t give your data and your attention to bad actors. And while we’re at it, contact your Congress people and let them know your concerns about data, and about the overreach of our tech sector. And if you care about any of these topics, please consider helping do something to turn this around. Run for office, use your voice, speak up. We need people who care about change to make it; it’s happened before and the time is perfect for it to happen again.

As always, thanks for reading. Please add me to your RSS feed and share, and contact me if you like. I’d love to hear from you. Times are scary but not impossible. We are in it together. And, I hope you enjoy seeing the tech bro coalition with their bloody teeth this week (I sure am). Like Mike Tyson says,
”Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” Maybe they’ll realize they need to take care of Americans if they want Americans to take care of them. Or maybe we need to make them realize it.

The Emboldening of the Robber Baron Class in a Burning World

So much has happened since we last spoke. If you’ve kept an eye on recent events, perhaps you’ve seen that there are some pretty large shifts going on at large, and in our ruling class in particular.

So Donald Trump is going to be President again. After the shame of January 6, and all the evidence that it was indeed a planned event (which was immediately clear if you watched on that day), I’m amazed that we have found ourselves here again. Slowly it’s occurring to me that the general populace is one that I’m struggling to understand. And yes, this is definitely a political post. I hate to do it, but I’m too patriotic to just keep my silence while our democracy dies. And not just dies, but dies in a really stupid and tacky way. Hollywood had led me to believe that at least evil empires have good style.

At any rate, that catches us up. So I will now move on to one of the main points of this post, which is the behavior of our oligarchs…I mean, tech billionaires…since Donald Trump won the election. If you look at the donations for this inauguration, many of them are not only made by tech companies (notably those who are most likely attempting to curry favor to win the great AI battle that is being waged), but also by the richest individuals themselves. The people who have been siphoning off the money of the middle class and reveling in the huge wealth disparity that has only grown enormously since the pandemic, are now revealing their true selves. No longer content to manipulate our lives from behind the scenes, they are now openly moving to the right wing and showing their willingness to bribe and bully. It’s like the robber barons of the 19th century, only much more tedious, poorly dressed, and without leaving us at least beautiful libraries. I’m amazed at the boldness of it all, particularly the salvo being led by Elon Musk himself. I only hope that the power dynamic of the two largest narcissists on the planet quickly spins to its inevitable centripetal blast, but in the mean time we are stuck with what must be the most tedious boors in our country’s history, running amok over ever aspect of American life.

This is a literal photo taken yesterday, January 7, 2025. It looks apocalyptic. I remember growing up being told that extreme weather and wildfires would increase. Well, here we are. Can we stop pretending yet?

Clearly we need campaign funding reform, but with a Congress that openly embraces corruption now and has no desire to limit its own gleeful dance on the graves of American values, I am not holding my breath. With the 250 million+ that Elon donated to help Trump win, he insured himself his place as First Oligarch. All we are missing to complete this charade is gold embroidered military suits with DOGE medals dangling from the lapels.

I’ve been amazed to see the crumbling of morality for so many Christians in this country, who openly embraced the least Christ-like character that could be envisioned as their moral leader. The fact that so many embraced him as a clear mascot amazes me. Honestly, if you were to lay his traits out and compare it to biblical passages, I’m surprised that I haven’t heard many Christians accusing him of being the antichrist; he sure seems to embody a lot more of those traits than any of the other people I’ve seen haphazardly slapped with the label.

So now we have at least four more years of this. With so many people claiming to have voted the clown car into office due to economic reasons, I can only hope that their eyes are opened when the terrible economic policies put forward (such as tariffs, which historically lead to depressions) hit them in the only place they seem to feel these days. By which I mean their pocket books. But it’s such a cult, that I really just don’t know anymore.

We are at a precipice for AI development and its very much needed safeguards. With the party that probably wants to ban seatbelts next now owning all aspects of government, it’s safe to say that this won’t happen. There are already huge effects from AI running rampant (on a side note, if you want to both laugh and cry at the current AI bots that Facebook is making to manipulate its users and ad engagements, please read this fascinating article). I know that there are many who think that the fear of AI is well overblown, and there is truth to that. But there is also truth to the fact that historically, humans are awful at preemptively solving problems, and instead often do too little, too late (each year is now warmer than the year before for this reason). What’s been terrifying about the generative AI explosion of the last year or two has been that not only does it threaten jobs, but it threatens the jobs of the educated and trained workers: writers, artists, software developers. Of course there is the argument that these tools can be used to enhance the jobs of those workers, and that’s certainly true. But it’s MORE true that they are being used to replaced the workers who have college degrees (and likely matching undischargeable student loan debt that enabled them to have those careers. If androids dream of stealing your job, can you declare bankruptcy for those loans yet?). In 2016 I called for the need for new legislation to start planning for Universal Basic Income, since tech would end up displacing humans in jobs (you can read that post here if you like), and we have done nothing. I still believe we should tax companies that use AI instead of humans to help fund UBI, but again, no movement. I also believe that we should cap personal wealth at 2 billion and have further profits from those individuals go back to the society that they whipped the backs of to take all that capital….but with a country full of personally disadvantaged millionaires who have no empathy for other people (meanwhile, they don’t realize they themselves are the people they refuse to help), our society is going to continue to funnel all of our money to the top until the ultimate goal of the robber barons is reached: 4 people will stand on a miles high pile of money and corpses, gasping the last bits of oxygen left from the dregs of a dying and burning planet, toasting that they finally achieved it all.

Do I sound bitter, angry, and sad? You bet I do. Idiocy is winning, the world is burning, meanness is overtaking kindness, and we could solve nearly every problem humanity faces with technology we have now. Instead, we are regressing at a breakneck pace, and I think that’s why you see madness everywhere you look. On some level, I think nearly every human is aware that this is not the way our world should be right now. I think that’s why they are sticking their heads in the sand, depressed and unhealthy, and looking for a new avatar of “the Other” to blame. Some days that’s women (I’ll never get over the fact that our rights are being taken away as we speak), some days it’s other races. Some days it’s immigrants. The people who view the 1950s as the perfect bastion of society are blaming “wokeness” for taking away the standards that the boomers had and then robbed the future generations of; they don’t even realize that it was the policies that they embraced that took away unions and devalued the middle class. THOSE were why life was so good for the average person, and THOSE are what they see as another impediment. Reagan slashed and burned the social net we had been building, and the remains have been getting hit with machetes ever since. It’s maddening. So now we took away pensions and the boomers are retiring with underfunded 401ks, and whatever is left is going to our bloated and rotten medical system to continue to ensure those masked thieves are able to post record profits. Convincing the American people that our healthcare system is a “free market” is the greatest trick the devil has wrought. How can you freely negotiate if your life and pain are on the line?

In a world of 8 billion+ people, there is no such thing as a “rugged individualist”. Like it or not, we depend on thousands of people to live every day. To order more poorly made trash for our houses to fill our empty souls from Amazon takes roads and underpaid drivers and modern day slaves who aren’t allowed to use the bathroom without chastisement; and now that’s not bad enough, so people are further eroding it all by ordering from Temu. Just put a workshop in your backyard and be honest about it. The infrastructure that we hate to pay for, like clean water and utilities, takes thousands of people. We need to take care of one another, and lying to ourselves about how much an individual can achieve in a world of entrenched systems that just make it easier and easier to crush regular people needs to stop. We live in a surveillance state, and the only thing Brave New World and 1984 got wrong was they underestimated how much how much we would give away. If we had a Congress that worked and wasn’t run by corrupt Octogenerians (LITERALLY living in memory care now for some of them), they would step in and limit how much companies are willing to hoard our personal lives and date like Smaug writ large. But we don’t move the ball forward these days, only back.

We need so much change. Having an entrenched noble class in Congress (you don’t think they are? Well they have dynasties. They all come out rich. And they never leave their positions. It’s like Weekend at Bernie’s in those halls practically) is killing our country, and having a media diet of biased lies and editorial-as-fact has put blinders on so many people. It’s hard to face a world that is so dark, so many people flock to the venue that tells them it’s scary because of the Other and that they truly are supposed to be the chosen ones. I get it, it IS terrible to see what’s happening.

So, here’s what could help:

• Term limits. I know they won’t do it, but we need it.

• Bring back the Fairness Doctrine, and make it 2.0 Reagan eliminated it in the name of deregulation; the Fairness Doctrine made it so that if an opinion was shared, then the other side needed equal time. We need that again, and we need to also make it so that opinion is clearly labeled, and we need to limit 24 hour news stations on how much they can report that isn’t just facts. If they can’t fill that time, they can just make documentaries. A diet of hot air is good for no one. We also need to make it so that if an opinion is online and has reach, like YouTube videos or podcasts, these same rules apply. Stovepiping of information is insidious.

• Tax companies who replace real workers with AI to pay for UBI. Start a UBI program. Our country is moving towards either making us all automatons or destitute; this would give us the chance to give people the chance to get on their feet, and hopefully we would get meaningful art again out of it all.

• Campaign finance reform. Companies should not be able to bribe presidential candidates. Or any other politician.

• No higher office held after age 65 due to cognitive decline. If you can’t fly a passenger jet for that reason, you shouldn’t be able to run the country. Trump is losing his mind, likely due to the angry strain of dementia that runs in his family. Biden is having problems too. Both of those are situations we shouldn’t have had to deal with. Not only that, but I don’t think people should be able to make rules for a world they won’t live to see live with the consequences.

• Remove the restrictions from No Child Left Behind that are now making it so that our kids can’t even read anymore. Allow teachers to teach without penalizing them with paperwork.

• Give us a true medical system. Expand our healthcare act. I find it ironic that so many people I know who have Tricare oppose the very type of system they are using. The other 34 advanced countries have worked out, and seeing GoFundMes for childhood cancer is a national embarrassment.

• Make privacy legislation so that data brokers are no longer giving our lives away to line their pockets. Once personal data is out there, it never comes back.

• Put caps on how much the highest paid earner at a company can make, compared to the lowest. Income disparity is a farce now. If someone at the top makes money and wants more, great. They just have to boost the salaries of everyone else who is holding that ladder up behind them. Pulling up the ladder behind them needs to stop.

• Actually pursue racketeering charges. Data shows us that so much of the inflation we are seeing is due to corporate greed, with the same companies wringing their hands to customers about prices simultaneously crowing about record profits to shareholders.

• National time limit caps on access to social media. At this point, it’s wrecked our society. It can still be fixed, but we need to cut the rot out. There’s a reason that China engineered TikTok with more insidious rules for Americans than for the version it uses domestically, and it’s working. Social media divides us, wastes time, stifles innovation, and ruins our critical thinking and attention span.

What else can we do? Well, plant an oak tree in your yard. Insects and birds are going extinct at an incredibly depressing rate, and oak trees sustain hundreds of other species. Plus, they are strong, they grow well, and we need more shade in this world that is getting hotter. Then go read a freaking book.