The ability to create dispassionate political systems is, in nature, a uniquely human ability. Wolves and ants have political systems, but the systems rely on direct and intentional involvement, at least as much as anything an ant does can be intentional.

Ants don’t have recessions, or gas chambers, or nuclear bombs, or greenhouse gas pollution, or strip mining, or seafloor dragging. That’s a human invention.

What about drones? (The latex kind)

One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville? I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. “Gimme five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…

Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that’s a good thing. In my country there’s a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that’s because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say “we don’t have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it”. You know how many homeless we’d have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don’t have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can’t pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.

Shy people are dangerous. I learned my lesson from too many friendships with shy people who were abusive. Now I only make friends with assertive people who can proactively problem solve and be honest about their feelings.

I’m pretty sure Mastodon has algorithms. All internet infrastructure runs on algorithms, except for weird experimental AI stuff.