Don’t keep a system of oppression on life support in the hopes of returning to a “normal” that that led us here in the first place.

This empire is no longer sustainable. And like every colonial empire before it, it must and will fall. And, like every colonial empire before it, it’s lashing out with every bit of power it has left as those in power barricade themselves in its corpse.

I liked this little guy as a 12-year-old, even if it broke the family desktop. And that’s what everybody is using for everything now and it also destroys the environment now for some reason. If only we knew now what we knew then.

AI is sometimes unfairly compared to Microsoft’s Clippy, but there’s a much more one to one comparison. It’s just a reskinned Bonzi Buddy, but instead of a cute, fun gorilla, or even a bug-eyed paper clip, you just get a text version forced into every aspect of your life.

But if we just turn the Internet off, reboot it from its last non-corrupted save state, and lock out corporations, marketers, and governments this time, it’s a digital societal reset for the massively larger digital society we’ve become since they started breaking it decades ago.

AI isn’t a danger because it’s going to get “too good” at anything. It’s a danger because a bunch of dumb but effective snake oil salesmen convinced a bunch of people who either assumed they were smart or never understood technology anyway to put it into EVERYTHING. And none of them are IT guys.

All of this to say, I need you to trust me as someone who grew up with the internet. I don’t mean like I used the internet when I was a kid. I mean like the internet and I went to the same elementary school. We were buddies. AI is just a worse version of me and my buddy, the World Wide Web.

I can do some Google searches and then give you the gist of what I found. I’ve been using Google since their “I’m Feeling Lucky” button was a point of pride. They were so good, you could enter a search term, click “I’m feeling lucky,” skip the results, and go directly to the first hit, and it worked

Word. Excel. PowerPoint. Access. Outlook. I have a license that I had to pay money to get in high school that says that I am certified in all of that. “Advanced Knowledge Of All Microsoft Office Programs” under Special Skills as I was being forced into the rat race at 15. I’m your guy.

I could photoshop a weird picture for you. My teacher burned me a CD copy of the school’s PhotoShop program. I was great at it. I made cash money photoshopping pictures for classmates’ MySpace pages. I could write a story for you. Check out my story angel fire page and sign the guestbook.

I don’t need AI. AI is a spam bot, pop up ad, spyware turned mandatory technological overlay. It’s the kind of thing that would brick our family computer. Anything that you’re asking of AI is something I could have done for you, slower but better, as a teenager using technology from 20 years ago.

I coded websites in html on MS Notepad using pictures I made in MS Paint and would save all the files in a folder on one of my many floppy discs. The neon ones that were kinda see through were the coolest. I wasn’t one of the cool kids in high school. I was one of the “internet kids.”

I had my own GeoCity sites before middle school. I was family tech support as a child. I researched papers using the encyclopedia program on the computers at the library. I had situations in school where teachers refused to take papers that were typed and printed. I graduated certified in MS Office.