Summer thoughts

My city chokes. I've stopped counting the waves, I've stopped counting the days. I'm getting off easy: my place caps out at 27C. On workdays I only use one screen to reduce waste heat. On rest days I do nothing but survive: eat, drink, piss, sleep. Humans were always animals.

I give up on cooking dinner and go fetch food outside. I see people - mostly Black and brown - sitting outside close to the few trees this town has. I doubt their places cap out at 27C. It's 11PM and the heat is still cloying. There isn't a hint of wind. At least there's no forest nearby that could burn.

What a dull, weirdly normal apocalypse this is.

My fellow AI haters are back from vacation. Thank goodness because it was getting lonely out there. My city chokes and men I'm supposed to respect say the ecological impact isn't that bad. The brick buildings I adore turn into ovens. My favorite museum closes its doors for days at a time, its glazed sawtooth roofs - sheds in English-inflected textile French - turned from light wells to death traps.

My city chokes and I attempt once more to bring up externalities in yet another polite-through-gritted-teeth thread. Apparently "genAI" does not include coding tools. My question was not that, it was whether people were ready to argue those semantics when faced with angry gamers.

I've yet to ever get a straight answer in one of those conversations. Infinite nuance becomes another way of stalling for time. The experiment was supposed to end a while back. It didn't.

I ache for honesty. I crave a mask-off moment: "Even if the impact is bad, I think it's worth it". Just say it. Just admit it, please. Instead the goalposts always move.

At best I get a confession of conflicted feelings, almost a call for forgiveness. I am still not the goddamn pope. Surely you can just stop. Some of us never started. But it seems like you can't just stop. Is this an addiction, then? Is our CTO encouraging addiction?

I suppose the game industry did always have an employer-sponsored drinking problem.

A trans woman I respect publishes a post about using LLMs to write a Cool New Tool. I know the cities in her country are choking too. I won't link to it - if you know you know and if you don't know then I refuse to encourage mobbing. She opens stating she hates them and finds them unethical. She says she'll continue using them anyway. On one hand I get it but on the other I don't.

I recall a conversation in the ever-excellent Critical Distance Discord server. Really it was more than one conversation. It was about Aftermath and Forza, about BDS and people refusing to understand that it's a specific tools with specific goals. It was about Giant Bomb and Crazy Taxi, about refusing generative AI in games only until the product looks appealing enough.

It was about commitment to principles often disappearing the moment people have to sacrifice something they want. Anyway I'm in year 7 of sacrificing my social life so I don't sacrifice my health. Did you know it's really fucking hard to combine airborne infection prevention and heat wave resilience? I think of my friend with severe ME and their airless concrete box of an apartment.

My city chokes and I briefly switch to Texinov duckbills respirators because they're lighter and more bearable in this heat. Do you realize how bad things have to get for me to wear white? My friends go wide-eyed. "Recession indicator", I joke as we set up for the trans support meet-up.

A friend from Mexico admonishes me for failing to focus more on the climate apocalypse when leading a critical generative AI conversation. I apologize without reserve. He's right. He too has switched to Texinov duckbills. White masks reduce the probability of racist violence.

My city chokes and I refresh the Leroy Merlin shop page. The pricier AC I have been eyeing for two months - more efficient, quieter, portable, compatible with renting - is still out of stock. I briefly wonder why the State has money to pour into sovereign AI but none to make hospitals and schools and housing compatible with human life. Trees. Sunscreens. AC. Air filtration. Anything to account for this hell world of unchecked airborne pandemics and climate change.

How about another data center instead?