Learn to Garden.
No seriously.
AI represents the pinnacle of consumerism.
The culmination of a system where Humans produce nothing for their own consumption.
Fractured communities of isolated and desperate consumer-workers who cannot survive outside the system they were born into.
To undermine this system requires not just attacking it’s foundation, but digging beneath to the fundament, usurping it through a grass roots refusal to participate.
Beneath the foundations of consumerism, capitalism, and every society we can remember is agriculture.
Stop participating in the high price of groceries.
Start producing your own food, feeding, and growing your community.
You don’t have to make everything from scratch to reject the Door Dash Fast Food Overnight Delivery system that exists entirely to extract profit from the human need to eat.
Use capitalism to your advantage. Buy hydroponics and lights to grow indoors year round. Buy hoop houses to extend outdoor seasons. Buy seeds. Grow seedlings and give them away.
Learn to harvest seeds from the plants you grow.
Cook and preserve food. Fill a pantry/freezer and EAT what’s in it!
Work together with your friends/neighbours to support local farmers and grocers.
Learn about plant Hardiness and what crops will remain/become viable in your region.
Then take this concept and apply it to every other aspect of human existence that’s been coopted to fund a system that ultimately results in AI slop.
I have a slightly different but similar take. The real human superpower is community, and we’ve lost so much of that through the Internet, or at least have lost our grasp on how to handle it. We are at our strongest, in fact pretty much unstoppable, when we come together as a group, when we help each other and support each other without being transactional. Our collective goals unite us but individual diversity is our strength.
It’s not just about food, but food is a great example. If you’ve ever been part of a friendly community with a farmer or even a gardener, you’ll know they frequently give away food to anyone who wants it, because they frequently end up with more than they need, and even you will end up with more than you need. They grow or harvest stuff you don’t, and they do a great job at it, with a few different connections you’ll have a supermarket worth of groceries knocking on your door. And in return, in the words of Letterkenny, “When a friend [or neighbor] asks for help, you help them.” This is how communities work. We give when we can, share when we can, we ask for help when we can’t, we work together as a group but remain individuals. Granted some people will only ever ask for help, won’t share anything and will take and take and take and that can be draining, toxic, and truly ruinous if you can’t figure out anything you appreciate about them. But they are the minority, and they don’t find themselves welcome in most communities. Most people share and share-alike, most people provide something to the community in their own way, and if you find the right group of people and community and look at it with the right attitude that’s all you’ll find.
There’s always going to be drama and conflict too, that’s also very deeply human. But we need to stay connected to our friends and neighbors and communities anyway. We need to be strong enough to tolerate that, and endure it and live with it, in exchange for the many, many benefits we get from the community we gain as a result. We are social creatures, and our social drive has been stolen and sabotaged and twisted into some horrible network of global toxicity for profit. We need to reclaim it, take it back for ourselves and start reconnecting to other human beings on a human level again, start re-knitting the fabric of our communities. This is how we’ll become resilient enough to survive the future. Our history is a history of struggle and endurance and community. And that’s not going to change because of any amount of technology or natural disaster or self-inflicted disaster. We will still struggle and endure and build communities.
It’s what we do.
I find it hard to build community when the majority of people around me are likely maga nutheads that are one conversation away from saying they want to kill Trans people and enslave blacks.
So I pretty much keep to myself. Can’t trust people.
I don’t know who the people around you are. I won’t tell you you’re wrong to be afraid of interacting with them.
But I do know that social media is designed to make you feel that way.
Social media algorithms find the angriest, the most hateful, the most radical, content on all sides and feed it to you. So you’re going to see people on your side saying the other side wants to kill you, and you’re going to see people on the other side saying they want to kill you, and you’re not going to see the vast majority of people who don’t actually want to kill you.
Because the more afraid you are of your actual human neighbors, the more time you’ll spend on social media watching ads and being force-fed algorithmic slop. And that slop makes you even more afraid of your neighbors, so you spend even more time online, and so on and so forth.
So I’d ask you to ask yourself: if you believe people in your community want to kill trans people and enslave blacks, how much of that belief comes from what people in your community have actually said and done, and how much of that belief comes from stuff you’ve heard online?
Sound advice. We should be mindful of how social media polarizes us. but I must push back a little on one aspect.
So I’d ask you to ask yourself: if you believe people in your community want to kill trans people and enslave blacks, how much of that belief comes from what people in your community have actually said and done
The difference between wanting to kill people and remaining silent among the calls for violence is negligible.
“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”
- Naomi Shulman
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Still working on that. I’ll DM you.
That position mostly comes from looking at what politicians say and do, and looking at who supports them.
Building your community doesn’t preclude your right to establish healthy boundaries.
You can give your MAGA neighbour a potted plant without inviting them to the potlatch. (I think Americans call them block parties?)
Build it for those that will contribute positively.
There are communities out there you can trust, that will both support you and find you very useful, you’ve just got to find them, which isn’t necessarily easy. Like I said, the whole social system has been sabotaged and what we have access to is designed to keep people divided and disconnected from each other. There are a lot of obstacles. Physical proximity is definitely very helpful as a way of getting around many of those obstacles and systems, but it’s not explicitly required. If you can find a community that would fit you and that you need, they may not be close to you. But if you make it a priority, you find a way to either bring yourself to the community or bring some of that community to yourself, whichever turns out to be the more practical option. Or do neither because physical proximity is still not strictly required, it just makes things a lot easier. If it’s easier to stay where you are instead of making it easier to connect with some beneficial form of community then you can do that too (but it’s probably not actually easier, we just become convinced we are stuck when we fail to see any way out).
We need to reclaim it, take it back for ourselves and start reconnecting to other human beings on a human level again, start re-knitting the fabric of our communities.
Fully agree.
Community is built on communal experiences. Food, music, culture, they’re really all just biproducts of sharing the human experience that is survival.
I do grow weed, does that…?
We call those “transferable skills”, it counts!
100%
The level of knowledge and equipment required to grow good cannabis is massive overkill for growing veg.
nice
So like whenever your trays aren’t full of cannabis seedlings you could germinate herbs and give them away to people.
Fresh herbs can make or break some of those simpler recipes. IMO shaker herbs clog your nose pallet so that you’re desensitized to the flavours of your own cooking when you eat it.
Obviously if the food doesn’t taste good people will lose their motivation to cook it.
Nice try, Ball canning jar corporation ;)
Kidding. Yes. Learn to can. I dont like it but still do it
lol
Dried goods as well tho!
Flour, Rice, Beans, dried herbs and spices.
Trying to plan a garden for next year. First time in my life I’m actually fully doing it. Just 2 4x2 beds but if I do well with those I’ll expand. Planning a salsa garden as we go through so much of that, lol.
That sounds awesome. Great work on finally getting it going! May I suggest a guacamole garden and perhaps a tortilla orchard to follow?
lmao you had me in the first half. Was literally gonna comment how difficult avocado tree’s are to crop.
Nice! This is exactly what people need to be doing!
If you want your first year to be as successful as possible take the time to learn about soil conditions. Get a soil meter that tests moisture and ph and make sure it’s appropriate for what you want to grow.
Also learn what Hardiness Zone you’re in.
I am extremely lucky to live in a place with a long growing season and no frost most years. I live in an apartment, and most of my 5ft by 10ft balcony is occupied by garden plants.
In the spring and fall, i can almost completely feed myself and my partner off what i grow. in the summer and winter i lose lots of crops, probably mostly from inexperience.
We still need the grocery store year-round, but it’s very nice when we get to skip a visit because we’ve been harvesting from the balcony. Turns out if you pick the right crops and get good, you can do a lot with very little
5ft by 10ft balcony
I have a similar setup. In the 2nd year now. Next spring (zone 6a) gonna be running the full gambit of onions, beans, and summer veg etc.
We’d been using those delivery meal kits (to help SO learn to cook) so I’ve tailored next years crop plan to what I know we’ll use.
Would love to hear any tips or suggestions you might have.
What I’ve seen about AI is that it has been presented itself as a souped-up meme or quote generator except it’s built on top of accumulated training data from thousands if not millions of sources it takes without consent nor compensation.
Any institution of education should be teaching about the arts but also fostering real creativity and encouraging active imagination instead of expecting students to finish only for the diploma then dropped in like a cog inside a vast machine.
127.0.0.1 chatgpt.comtraining data from thousands if not millions of sources it takes without consent nor compensation.
You know how Karl Marx said the workers need to seize the means of production? AI, from the perspective of the shareholder class, represents the opportunity to “seize the means of the worker.” The way I see it, our only way off this ride is to stop participating in the consumerism that funds it. No matter how you slice it, that means food. People don’t need to become subsistence farmers, but if we switched from buying premade food to making our own we’d be defunding the machine while rebuilding our communities.
Introduce Bob Marley to your life
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the timeDo you want to get rid off your hobbies, so you can get “organic onions”? I did gardening because of a conspiracy theorist stepmother, stop romanticizing it!
She really did a number on you didn’t she? Like you realize that’s a massive false dichotomy right?
AI is a parasite. It can’t come up with anything a human didn’t create first. It eats our thoughts and regurgitates them.
We kill AI by limiting our use of the Internet, renouncing social media in particular (and yes, I recognize the hypocrisy), and communicating with actual human beings through encrypted messenger apps that AI can’t scrape for new training material.
Think of AI like an online troll. Don’t feed it, don’t engage with it, and it will be irrelevant to you until it finally gives up and dies.
But the social media machine wants you not to talk to actual human beings, it wants you to be lonely and isolated, so you’ll consume its product - and AI is just a part of that machine, making you lonely and then providing you with the illusion of a real person to talk to.
Gardening is a great way to fight that, especially community gardening, because you literally have to be out there in person with your hands in the dirt talking to other gardeners.
So I agree with this post and strongly recommend anybody who doesn’t have space to garden go looking for a community garden, or volunteer at a food bank (which often have ties to community gardens and can point you at opportunities), or help at a Food Not Bombs event, or otherwise get yourself involved in the real live in-person work of feeding human beings, and reclaim your brain from the social media algorithm feeding you AI slop.
anybody who doesn’t have space to garden
If you have space you can grow. Literally any shelf, any deck, any yard you can grow something.
The sustainability element is that most grocery produce is infertile… meaning that when global food supply chains collapse due to climate change, many places will have very few viable seeds to begin local production.
Growing herb seedlings is an excellent and rewarding project for even a “book shelf” gardener.
https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemma-ai-cancer-therapy-discovery/
is this not a novel thing that a human didn’t create?
AI is a parasite.
Bruh I just rewatched this shit last night.
https://youtu.be/GjOWdF1flYE?t=135
You’re so right!
Groceries are not expensive. At least not in my area. And especially fruits and veggies.
Also I don’t understand what one has to do with the other? If I start gardening, is AI going to stop polluting the planet with greenhouse gases? Will it stop our archives from being filled with nonsense? Will it stop them from DDoS’ing the entire internet? Will it stop replacing jobs? Will it stop being used to write lazy code? Or hallucinating court cases? What does AI have to do with Door Dash or food delivery?
You wrote like 8 paragraphs and I don’t understand what any of it has to do with AI.
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Learn to garden and you’ll find out.
Ok so you can’t explain it then?
I ain’t your chat bot. Use your brain. Do your own research or accept my Trust Me bro.
Thanks for the confirmation.
Stop sucking on that gpt teat bub.
It’s not that I can’t. It’s that explaining things to flippant people like you is not worth the effort.
