Actively Hostile To Human Life (an explanation for my beliefs)
I live in the United (as of 1/7/2026) States. Off to a bad start, I know. I'm mentally ill and if I can't afford my meds, living is a nightmare. I dream of moving to Canada where they do the bare minimum to treat its citizens like human beings; something America will never do, and the UK can't afford to do.
It gets worse. As of right now, I live in a small town in Northern Virginia, which is currently run by a mob of Patrick Bateman style tech-bros, and the geriatric oil barons that worship them, and the old folks are usually the Fathers of those Batemans. This can be used to describe a lot of towns in Northern Virginia, but in a different category there's some towns that are also too poor to have anything done to make it better. This is usually where they install the government buildings close enough to DC because the land is so cheap.
The place I live is a mix of both, with sprinkles of sickly horses on dying farmland, data centers, and a lack of sidewalks. From my house, it WOULD take an hour to get to the closest store (a Wal-Mart of course) if you could even walk there, but you can't. There's no sidewalk and there's a 6 lane road with a 70MPH speed limit. Henry Ford would be proud, but this would not be the last time the town bent over for Nazis.
My Mom told me about the time she overheard 2 redneck construction workers telling each other about the Israeli website hosting service SquareSpace. Quite positively I might add. At the time, in a neighboring county, they wouldn't talk like that. Rednecks shouldn't speak to each other like that. Hell, rednecks generally shouldn't even be as racist as they are now. My Mom assured me this happened, and the reason I know she isn't making this up is because I hear people in the schools I went to talk like this all the time. Whether they listen to country music or yacht rock, they speak the same language. They speak like advertisements. People in other countries have assured me this wasn't normal, until it became disgustingly normal across the United States.
I believe Northern Virginia is ground zero for the technobabble we hear constantly. We were some of the first crypto-bros. The first ever Apple Store opened in Tysons. Some of the first ever AI data centers were installed right by my goddamn house. NoVA in its entirety is essentially the East Coast Bay Area with about the same nightmarish shit not even William Gibson could come up with, and the scariest part is that our physical reach into DC got us into the nightmare you see today.
What does my tiny town have to do with this? Nothing, except for the fact that I was far enough away from the bullshit to think we were immune to it, but a celebrity guest appearance at a town hall meeting changed everything. I promise you I'm not making this up.
Award winning actor, Robert Duvall, came to a town hall meeting to protest either an Amazon warehouse or yet another data center being right next to his semi-retirement home right here in the town (because those bastards have the balls to do it right in front of an artist). If you watch the video of this town hall meeting, you'll notice he's being quite polite considering these guys would kill his horses if it meant they could make a few dollars, and you can kinda tell that the actor in his 90s is probably too old to say "I HOPE YOU FASCIST MOTHERFUCKERS EAT SHIT AND DIE" loud enough to be scary. It was a rather heartfelt and urgent speech. You'd think they'd give him some mercy considering the old folks probably remember seeing The Godfather in theaters.
They ended up building it anyways. Right by the house of the artist they will never be. I'm reminded of the Patton Oswalt Audible special (yes I'm aware they're owned by Amazon) where he mentioned that the people who created AI are boring people with expensive things, and they got so mad at the artists who make an honest living that they want to feel their money is worth friendship. So they ruined art for everybody, and used surveillance technologies on the people who make it.
Robert Duvall is going to spend the last days of his accomplished life watching his horses die, and selling his Oscars on eBay to pay for his electricity bill. Disgusting. I wish my Dad didn't work for these people. Actively hostile to human life.