The trouble I’d have to go through to build a dumb fridge would bother me more than people talking shit about me building or owning one.

People can talk shit all they want, don’t mean I’m gonna listen.

Not completely, but more and more I find peace of mind in analog and offline spaces. Physical books feel better than e-books, a real bike is more fun than a Peleton (cheaper too), and cooking my own food is better than GrubHub.

I have an educational background in IT, but I’ve worked as a mechanic for most of my adult life. I’m a tool using primate. Tech is a tool. If a new tool improves on the old and makes life easier, I use it. If it doesn’t, it’s not worth having around. When your job is fixing things, “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” makes a lot of sense.

I’m not going to bend over backwards for tech that I don’t need just because a rich CEO tells me it’s revolutionary. I can flip a light switch, lock my doors, make a grocery list without the help of an AI fridge, and write my own emails.

The Satanic Panic was around long before D&D and heavy metal music and it never really left. It just moved on to new targets. Someone, somewhere has always been doing something satanic as a plot, it’s just easier to find people talking about it in the age of social media.

Same with conspiracy theories. The alt-right never invented anything new, they just recycled things that wingnuts and cranks have been spouting for centuries and adapted them to modern settings. Look at the parallels between “Hillary tortures children and drinks their blood to stay young” and the old Blood Libel conspiracy for example.

I go back and forth as to why I think this kind of thing is so enduring. Either people need to believe in some kind of evil because it allows them to feel good about being on the “right” side of something. It could make them feel smart to find “secrets” that people won’t openly admit (because they aren’t true). Or they feel some kind of cognitive dissonance if they don’t have an enemy and invent one to quiet it. Or maybe it’s just a convoluted effort to take control over something they aren’t comfortable with in a “he who can destroy a thing, controls the thing” sort of way. Maybe all of them even.

I dunno, like you said, people are goddamn stupid and fucking nuts sometimes. Shame they’re so often dangerous because of it.

One thing that gives me hope is that these chucklefucks will happily eat each other alive over the smallest imagined things. If they don’t have a “big evil thing” to organize against they’re just one giant fucking bucket of crabs, man.

Got pissed at corporate social media for the way they’ve accelerated the damage being done to our already degraded public discourse but I still needed somewhere to doomscroll and find… gifs… of… nothing in particular…