I’m afraid the rot has spread much farther than that. Yes, without a violent upheaval of some sort, the U.S. is fucked but the problem had long since broken containment…

In the Borderlands in-game universe, there’s references to historical “corporate wars”, when the corporations seized political power and promptly began to duke it out to see who was going to be on top of the pile. At least that’s how I imagine it in my head. But fuck if it doesn’t look like that’s the most likely future coming our way.

Oh, I hear ya. And although obviously inspired by RPGs, I do conceptualize my wacky theory more in the context of string theory and related ideas.

Unfortunately of course such hypotheses are extraordinarily difficult to actually test. However intuitively I do kind of like where you’re coming from. I’ve always been fascinated by how everything that we conceptually are aware of has a sorta polar opposite that we kind of define it by.

I guess on a similar note, my own wacky theory is that our dimension can be affected at any given time by up to 13 other dimensions, but which 13 can change amongst a potentially infinite number. I imagine certain dimensions would more likely be co-terminus (I term I believe I’m borrowing from a Dungeons and Dragons type source) with ours than others but who knows.

I just translate AI to Anti-Intelligence. 😎

I doubt it. There’s a lot of money in surveillance capitalism and I don’t buy for a minute that Apple are too good to do that or any stupid excuses.

Okay that gave me a good chuckle. But really with FOSS software it’s important to be aware of biases the developers might have. Sure if it’s an open source project, in theory I can audit the code but realistically not so much. If the lead developer is a known bad actor, then there’s reason to be paranoid about vulnerabilities or backdoors being injected into the codebase.