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SURVEILLANCE REPORT #4891

SUBJECT: American Social Media Behavioral Analysis
DATE: 01/22/2025
AGENT: Chen Wei

I continue to monitor American social media trends on TikTok to identify opportunities for ideological influence and assess potential threats to collectivist ideals. Below are my findings on key creators of interest.

@corporatebestie

A twenty-eight-year-old marketing coordinator living in a major metropolitan area, simultaneously critiquing and participating in late-stage capitalism. Her content primarily revolves around “day in the life” videos and career advice.

January 27, 2025 Heterogenius Why and How to Stop Dividing People into Us and Them By Alfie Kohn How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future? – Audre Lorde Even as a child I was puzzled by people who wanted to hang out only with those who were very much like themselves. I ... Read More

The post Heterogenius: Why & How to Stop Dividing People into Us & Them appeared first on Alfie Kohn.

So, a Chinese financial firm (not even a software or computer company) has put out an open source AI model which is 50 times more efficient than Chat-GPT or any other American AI. It’s so simple you can run it on some phones, it doesn’t have to call home.

The sound you hear is Sam Altman screaming at the Devil as he realizes he sold his soul to become the world’s richest man, and it ain’t gonna happen.

(Faintly, in the background, the devil laughing his ass off.)

Absolutely hilarious. Oh, and they did it with a tiny team for hardly any money. Didn’t take billions. Doesn’t require massive amounts of energy.

And that whole open source thing matters: everyone else can build off their model. Deepseek, being Chinese, has some censorship in it (type Xi Jingping’s name to see it in action), but you can build your own without the censorship.

Hear echoes of the Victorian age, captured in some of the world’s first audio recordings, in this video essay on the phonograph

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

As a psychoanalyst, I’ve seen how reflecting on the emotional symbolism of hair loss can be therapeutic for many men

- by Tom Wooldridge

Read at Psyche

The case of Mexico shows that, despite a proliferating discourse that it is over, neoliberalism is as relentless as ever

- by Inés Escobar González

Read at Aeon

The world's richest man is amplifying a series of often extreme Alt Right voices bent on radically reshaping our politics

This blog post is a long time in gestation and I could have written in 2009 which is the relevant year of the events that I will document in this two-part series. My conversations with government officials during my working trip to the Philippines last week highlighted several things, including their sheer terror of IMF…

You’ll be fine Progressives are allowed to have their advocates too. I’m very sorry if that offends the right wingers who are supported by just about every business on the planet (and believe me they are losing their shit over this ad) but that’s how it is.

The Australian parliament has legislated what’s commonly described as as “social media ban” for people under 16. More precisely, it will require selected social media platforms to implement (unspecified) age verification technology for people wishing to create accounts. This measure was rushed through at the end of last year, at the expense of proposed legislation […]

Was there ever any doubt? From Leigh Ann Caldwell at Puck: Last weekend, before his inauguration, Trump floated in conversations the notion of redirecting funds from the $370 billion Inflation Reduction Act, the massive infrastructure bill with a hilariously disingenuous name, to projects he wants to underwrite. The idea also came up earlier this week when he met with Republican congressional leaders, according to a person who received a rundown of the meeting. Rep. Sam Graves, the new chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told me that’s not an immediate priority, but will happen “later in the year.” Graves said it would be part of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill, which funds highways and, well, surface transportation projects, which will begin to come into focus in the second half of the year. Or, Trump could ignore the Impoundment Act, the law that requires the administration to spend money on what Congress legislated, as his allies have suggested for a host of issues. Someone needs to ask Russ Vought what he plans to do on this. I don’t think it was in any of their plans to be spending money on this stuff.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

And so it begins After President Petro of Colombia denied entry of two US repatriation flights of Colombian migrants, President Trump has announced these retaliatory measures. Petro said he wouldn’t allow the flights in until Trump establishes a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants. The NY Times reports: The move reflects how Mr. Trump is making an example out of Colombia as countries around the world are grappling with how to prepare for the mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants that he has threatened. […] Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, said earlier Sunday in a series of social media posts that Colombia would not accept military deportation flights from the United States until the Trump administration provided a process to treat Colombian migrants with “dignity and respect.” Mr. Petro also said that Colombia had already turned away military planes carrying Colombian deportees. While other countries in Latin America have raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s sweeping deportation plans, Colombia appears to be among the first to explicitly refuse to cooperate.

It came upon a midnight clear, a vision both complete and quite specific — not from any of those “angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold,” as in the Christmas carol, but from a long line of trucks on the Indiana Toll Road. On that cold winter’s night about five years ago, the 18-wheelers were playing their usual game to stay awake, passing each other endlessly and slowing me down to 60 miles an hour when I wanted to do 70 or, I’ll admit it, 75. When I pulled into a rest stop to gas up, about 50 of those big rigs were parked there. Their drivers were taking the federal government’s mandatory 11- or 12-hour... Read more

Source: Detroit’s Death Spiral? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

I wrote about Tate last week a criminal sex-trafficker and alleged good friend of … Barron Trump? I guess it does figure I posted this a year and a half ago, pointing out that Donald Trump was consorting with some truly vile, fringe figures, among them Paul Ingrassia, now working for the White House: Amanda Marcotte has written a fascinating deep dive report on online radicalization for Salon that I highly recommend. I’ll just excerpt this piece of it: The same rabbit-hole phenomenon that can draw social media users deeper into the world of eating disorders or suicidal ideation also appears to be a factor in online radicalization. Lisa Sugiura notes that many of the men she interviewed while researching the “incel” community were first drawn into that world through unrelated or apolitical online material, before the algorithm turned their heads toward darker stuff.

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This post by attorney Tor Ekeland has been making the rounds on Blue Sky and I think it’s worth sharing: My dad was tortured by the Gestapo for 4 days and thrown in a concentration camp for being in the Norwegian Resistance. Growing up, he would tell me things he learned in the Resistance. I thought, I’m never going to need this stuff. Here’s some of those things #Thread First, you’re never going to win a head on battle with an adversary that’s got you outgunned. That’s not the point of the Resistance. The point is to create friction, make it hard for your adversary to operate, to increase transaction costs. Second, resistance doesn’t have to be a dramatic act. It can be a small act, like losing a sheet of paper, taking your time processing something, not serving someone in a restaurant. Small acts taken by thousands have big effects. Third, use your privilege and access if you’ve got it. He and his buddies stole weapons from the Nazis by driving up with a truck to the weapons depot, speaking German, acting like it was a routine pick up, and driving away.

Low rating TV host Andrew Bolt has boasted of the turn out for his Australia Day BBQ, after all 6 of his viewers turned up. ”It was a great day full of vigorous discussion, a little merlot and a lot... Read More ›

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 26, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

The Trump “Litmus Test” 

Scott Ritter [via Naked Capitalism 01-25-2025]

…I’ll take this moment to remind President Trump that one of the “crimes” I was accused of committing by the Ukrainian government which put me on their State Department-funded death lists, was to claim that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was a direct result of NATO expansion.

Which is, of course, the same assessment put forward by President Trump.

If you were an average American citizen, Mr. President, your name would be on that list.