Make Your Damn Bed

The future is unwritten, and most of us have access to our respective pens. Pick that shit up and make your mark. We have an affect regardless of what we do.  Film ICE when you see them. Call your representatives. IT WORKS. When you get overwhelmed with information? Go do something with it. Anything. Action is the remedy. Ben Sheehan's Substack PBS Civics Made Easy Huffington Post on what we...

We don’t hear about the wins, because that would motivate you to go out and make your own.  " Because here is nothing more dangerous to a regime predicated on lies than witnesses who capture the truth." Jon Stewart When you get overwhelmed with information? Go do something with it. Anything. Action is the remedy. My lighthouses: Dutch on Tiktok Dasia Does it on Youtube Struthless on Youtube R...

The churches aren't safe, the schools aren't safe, the streets aren't safe. The government is running a terrorist organization making our streets volatile and terrifying. The federal government is using their overreach to spy on you and me, so they can more easily kidnap innocent human beings. Though the full impact of the technology is still being assessed, its usage and reach are expanding rapid...

Who the hell is ICE hiring? What if the enforcers of the law are the ones who break it? Who polices the police? ONLY 5% of those detained by ICE have a violent conviction, 73% never had a single conviction in their life. Yet, ICE is constantly hiring criminals who don't pass basic background checks. Read about Deportation Industrial Complex from Brennan Law Center. Read the Slate article about get...

(content warning: sexual violence) ONLY 5% of those detained by ice have a violent conviction, 73% never had a damned Conviction in their life, and those that did have prior convictions, a majority of those were traffic + paperwork issues, because they WERE on the damned books, and trying to immigrate legally when the government went and changed the rules on them.  In episode 1344 , I debunke...

In episode 1344 , I debunked some immigration myths, in 1345 I shared some resources about the rights that immigrants have in this country, and as much as I would like to never talk about these assholes again, it feels like it’s past time to talk about the nightmare in the room. ICE itself.  FACTS: Olivia Rodrigo is older than ICE. When ICE was founded they were given 3 billion of our tax dol...

Access the original source . We often treat metrics like a mission, which leads us to focus on the wrong things. Leaving our values behind in exchange for numbers on a screen. This can lead us to abandon ourselves and our values more and more, until we've actually become our own worst enemy. We must be careful what we wish for and pay attention to how we are measuring success. How has our creativi...

Access the original source . We often treat metrics like a mission, which leads us to focus on the wrong things. Leaving our values behind in exchange for numbers on a screen. This can lead us to abandon ourselves and our values more and more, until we've actually become our own worst enemy. Take the Hanoi Rat Massacre , for example. We must be careful what we wish for and pay attention to how we...

The six tenets of humane technology are: Sensitive to Human Nature:  Technology should work in harmony with human vulnerabilities and biases, rather than exploiting them to grab attention. Minimize Harmful Consequences:  Product teams must account for and minimize the negative, unintended, or downstream consequences of their technology. Center on Values:  Technology should be design...

How do we fight the very system we’re stuck in? If every road we end up on bottlenecks to the same hole they want us stuck in, should we even bother? There’s a place for all of us in the systemic fight, and it’s a matter of filling needs that you can fill, as they arise.  Some of us will need to stay in the bottle, but we can keep flooding the neck of the bottle from the inside, and because i...

Knowing is half the battle, but what about the other half? We'll never be free of all bias, perception, and susceptibility to manipulation. It feels like we should be able to control what we understand, but unfortunately that's not the case. As we learn consequences in real time, we have to be willing to recognize our personal vulnerabilities so we can avoid being exploited by persuasive technolog...

Social media + persuasive technologies exploit our brain's vulnerabilities to ensure we stay engaged with their apps. Creating a sense of urgency, Encouraging constant seeking, Comparing ourselves to others, Engaging with negative content, Isolating us in bubbles. To combat this, slow the fuck down. The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their lesson on "persuasive technolog...

Weird how I can spend two hours on Instagram reels or tiktok and not feel bad about not cleaning my house, but when I sit to watch a movie? I am riddled with guilt and shame. Slow content leaves room for thinking and autonomy. Fast-pased content led by algorithms, leave no room for independent thought or action. The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their lesson on "persuas...

The data brokers found out we can't look away from a car crash, so they made all of our available content a series of car crashes. This has convinced a lot of us that the world is simply, ALL car crashes. It's not. They're prioritizing profits + growth at the expense of the whole. "We are on a path to a technology environment where we are surrounded by powerful technology that’s competing to track...

The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their lesson on "persuasive technology" and how we can push back against it, to reclaim what is ours. Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog . SUPPORT JULIE (and the show!) DONATE to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund AND THE Sudan Relief Fund GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.com TUNE IN ON I...

The Khan Academy offers free courses, today I speed through their lesson on "the attention economy" and how we can push back against it, to reclaim what is ours. Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog . SUPPORT JULIE (and the show!) DONATE to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund AND THE Sudan Relief Fund GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.com TUNE IN ON INS...

I've been using the term "machiavellian" for years. Recently, I looked it up. Today, I'm sharing what I found. Machiavelli was a teacher of "evil". He believed virtues were a waste of time. He said successful founders and supporters of government must be violent murderers to sustain control. Fear is a more powerful motivator than fear, so he encouraged brute force and violence as a means to an end...

This isn't about disagreeing about policies or politics, anymore. We currently live in a world with a sizable minority of people are disagreeing about reality itself. We cannot allow those who disagree with reality to create a new one. What do we do when we're forced to tolerate people who support authoritarianism? How does a pluralistic democracy deal with people who threaten the existence of suc...

There's an Arabic saying, "لايدرك كله لا يترك كله" or "What cannot be achieved in its entirety should not be abandoned completely." Until death, failure is psychological.  Little Miss Sunshine the grandpa reminds her she’s not a loser for failing, he explains that losers are the people who are too afraid to win, so they never try.  Very Well Mind's " What happens after I die? " Maya Ange...

My family has never been one to talk about death, we pretend it doesn't exist until it blindsides us and ruins our lives. But building this wall around the inevitable has created a feeling of deep fear around the entire subject. So, as I get older, and I am forced to face this reality more and more, I am beginning to realize that it's never been about my fear of "mortality" in and of itself, but m...

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin "Whatever goes up must come down." And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have...

You cannot imagine what it would be like to be dead, because death is an absence of existence. There is, literally, nothing to imagine – because nothingness itself cannot be imagined. There is no perspective, no view from nothingness, nothing to which it can be approximated. So that is the first recommendation: realise that being dead isn’t an experience. Death itself isn’t really a  thing &n...

Read this today's original source, here . "When you’re overwhelmed with information, you don’t think deeply about it; you have to process it very quickly. So, you tend to process it through existing biases, and that encourages people to form groups in tension with other groups." - Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart  Nicholas Carr Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Bl...

If the internet is an AYCE buffet of unlimited, endless options, there’s bound to be items you find disgusting, that will make you physically ill. There’s also bound to be items you find delicious AND nourishing and can’t get enough of. But a majority of that buffet will be… fine.  It will be mediocre filler foods that you don’t remember eating at all. You may even fill yourself up on the “ju...

I accidentally ritualized something that is typically mundane, and that, in itself, is a magical and empowering act. Now, as much as I want to push society towards more “analog” and “slow” options because I genuinely think it would be good for us all to get off of these algorithms for good, it’s not the only way to opt into more conscious consumption. “Consciously consuming” as a ritual, instead o...