technocrit

To me, it felt like waking up from the Matrix. The more I learned, the more I saw it everywhere. LA, I realized, is full of contradictions. We have density, but more often than not, it’s placed right along loud, dangerous, car-dominated corridors like Venice, La Brea, and Pico. We build apartments facing six-lane boulevards with no trees, no safe crossings, and nowhere to walk to. Meanwhile, the quiet, leafy streets just behind those corridors are protected, reserved almost exclusively for single-family homes and mansions. In LA, comfort and quiet are privatized. Everyone else gets noise and fumes.

I grew angry. Not just at the noise and fumes. But the systems that allowed this to be normalized. At a government that underfunds transit but widens highways. At a culture that treats cars as a birthright and housing as a commodity. At the way we’ve built a society that quietly inflicts violence on the most vulnerable people. Kids growing up with asthma, unhoused neighbors driven mad by all the traffic noise, families forced to trade safety and health for an affordable place to live.

I started to see the street not just as a place, but as a symptom. Of deeper choices. Of political cowardice. Of whose comfort we protect, and whose we sacrifice. And I can never unsee it. I didn’t just want to complain, I wanted to understand how we got here, and how we could get out of this.

Israel’s instrumentality in the decades-long civil war and state-sponsored genocide of the Indigenous Maya provides critical context for the genocide of Palestinians today.

Not only was Trump intimately close to Jeffrey Epstein, but there is a wealth of reporting tying the billionaire pedophile to intelligence circles. Trump is once again protecting the elites he claimed he would fight on the campaign trail.

Observing media coverage of the bombing of Iran, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a rerun of Iraq two decades ago. Mainstream outlets were all too happy to parrot the Trump and Netanyahu administrations’ line.

The documentary is a difficult but necessary watch: a thorough, objective, evidence-based exposure of crimes against the Palestinian population—and the conscious targeting of medics and healthcare workers in Gaza. Some 1,500 healthcare workers have been killed by Israeli forces and hundreds more detained, imprisoned and disappeared since October 2023.

It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.

The liberal establishment's war on the New York City mayoral candidate reflects panic over a growing left challenge to Zionist orthodoxy and the mainstreaming of Palestine solidarity

On Monday, 90 National Guard troops and dozens of federal agents descended on MacArthur Park in Los Angeles in a military-style operation that marks a turning point in the use of armed force against the American working class.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/23227345

Federal authorities descended on a park where children were playing in California on Monday to conduct enforcement operations.

Dozens of federal agents in tactical gear, heavily armed and dressed in military-style uniforms, staged what seemed to be an immigration enforcement action, drawing swift condemnation from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who rushed to the scene in response.