Christopher Ketcham: Eat, Pray, Pollute
Last edited Tue Oct 28, 2025, 02:51 AM - Edit history (1)
This is a bit of a personal rant because the personal is finally becoming political for me.
I went to school in the US, but live in the global south now. I have only one home. I am doing well enough, but not so well that I can weather my home and street potentially being open to swarms of the worst types of people -influencers, bike riding morons wanting selfies etc
There are warning signs of such nuisances encroaching even into quiet streets like mine thanks to poor data hygiene, the rise of worthless garbage tech (with no real products and services) now bleeding into the real world and despoiling not just nature but the working parts of human society.
It’s hard to detect by its nature since it merges with real human activity ranging from the normally annoying to routine to worthwhile.
This has become a personal issue for me. I am worried that after years of nuisance encroachment destroying anything working in my home or life, now it is aggressively ramping up.
To reiterate, the way these guys who operate in secrecy build things, it is hard to distinguish type 1 errors from ill-conceived lightweight rot (think anything Alex Pentland, Ariely, Gino, Haidt, Pinker, Kahneman, Harriri etc - the types of bogus academics those computer and explosions persons like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Musk etc like) from routine drivel from routine non drivel from anything truly cool.
I do not think that secrecy is about conspiracies. It’s a way to hide your incompetence and errors while deflecting attention to any protesters. (Harvey Weinstein had Black Cube and the NSO group try to dig up dirt on complainants).
And these guys try to browbeat and confuse the public into accepting sloppiness as normal while smearing honest public sector workers eg-normalize data leaks (Zuckerberg); celebrate rocket explosions! (Musk). As if that’s a good thing.
It’s not even self-consistent. Even their patron saint (presumably) Ayn Rand didn’t glorify stuff that atrocious. Those interchangeable men in her books were supposed to be competent. The whole point was that they didn’t have crap like exploding rockets and obvious ransomware loopholes etc in their portfolios. In her books incompetent business people would buy up regulators which she inanely used as an argument against regulation itself.
I don’t attack tech itself. I need a comp to work just not a lousy one crammed with adware and AI junk.
I wouldn’t mind AI that was say developed at Max Planck (assuming they haven’t gone all ChatGPT..afraid to check).
Rather it is consistently denying the Idiocracy where Brawndo takes over the state and then shutters its agencies.
I am a failed scientist . I failed in publicly funded hard science where the standards are rigorous, but all the way through. It moves slowly because you can’t go around dialing in important parts of the whole. The only real problem with most academic scientists is that communication is not something anyone enjoys. I am starting to wonder if it isn’t easier to bite the bullet and talk to people..no that wouldn’t work. It would be awkward. There’s really never anything to talk to the nicer scientists about except science. I mean usually get the gist of decency etc without long disquisitions.
I have been self correcting a paper for an absurdly long time with increasing concentration issues.
It’s so intangible it’s hard to know. But my impression always is that with anything that is working or worthwhile, for some reason something trashy and pointless keeps piling on as well. It really ruins the working stuff and it’s always attributed to the wrong sources.
Christopher Ketcham and Nandita Bajaj are two really cool people I found in the last year. I have been pleased to see this merging of the green and humanist left. Once we poach away enough scientists, doctors and technologists disgusted by the brain rot of rubbish tech killing anything worthwhile, that might actually be a coalition that learns from past mistakes and is robust against persistent sabotage.
One can hope.
While I have always been green and leftist sympathising (though not any dogmatic isms..I leave it vague on the specifics beyond can we agree this sucks and these are the reasons why? And not emulate the doers by having a hastily formulated theory and plan?), I myself have lame, white collar instincts.
I wouldn’t really know what to do at a protest other than stand around looking awkward and secretly wondering if this is actually going to go anywhere. It’s why I was such a Lina Khan fan. And the Humane League etc get how to change laws the slow hard way.
My own strategy is to try to go talk to public officials and the police where I live. I use marijuana medically. It helped me after I lost my mom in 2021. It is an example of something worthwhile that should not be joint at the hip with sleazy influencers and gamification and theatre. But it will take a while for it to get widespread acceptance and I at least have no intention of trying to placate the Reefer Madness morons.
I just don’t want an unpleasant surprise for me or anyone in my small network. I have dealt with sexual harassment and other nuisances. I don’t want my land to become an air bnb or a place for defense contracting profiteering etc.
My mom and I kept this a green space in an urban jungle for birds and wildlife, not ads and junk.
These last 14 years have been a strain. And academic science was never the culprit.
One tries to keep a low profile. But if you only ever talk when you lose your temper (after trying to ignore some awful and annoying nuisance) that is blending in with everything else, you end up sounding like a lunatic.
I am not ideal but I don’t have a distorted view of reality. I can’t pull off being a cranky scientist because I am a legitimately lousy scientist and that’s not improving my temper. And it’s making me crankier.
But I am planning to file a complaint about this encroaching worthless junk capitalism. This is a communist state, but they are just as corrupt and for junk growth and human overcrowding as your creeps over there.
I just want to finish a damn paper, organize my life and improve my memory and attention and not keep kayfabe involving really stupid crap alive. It’s not even political directly. These are people and things that most normal humans are unsympathetic towards. Especially when they get that this will destroy their spaces too.
It has nothing to do with being snooty etc. This is like the brain rotting stuff online. It has no value at all and it ruins stuff of value. It’s Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! world except even worse.
Anyway these essays get it (ignorant locals or sleazy people with their origins in this part of the world is my guess):
https://www.populationbalance.org/essays/eat-pray-pollute
https://www.christopherketcham.com/eat-pray-pollute-on-the-needed-death-of-tourism/
It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces The End of Tourism podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe, we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.”
Ketcham has written another awesome piece on the roadless rule that gets to the heart of why you want to in a separate context keep Zuckerberg’s rubbishy metaverse or bogus “art” off your streets.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/19/the-roading-of-the-last-wild-places/
A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It doesn’t matter if it’s paved or unpaved, though a paved road always brings more traffic. Then again, it doesn’t matter whether a road is heavily trafficked or lightly used. The very presence of a road alters the environment around it. This is especially true in high-altitude forested landscapes, such as the La Sals, as roads divert the natural downstream flow of precipitation, producing heavier runoff and more erosion that disrupts the hydrology and sedimentation of nearby waterways. Road runoff carries the poisons that automobiles drip from their chassis. The grinding engines and the sound of rattling metal terrify wildlife. From the tailpipes comes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, heavy metals. You get more roadkill. You get more hunting and poaching. Roads scare off the cougars and wolves and bears, who learn that death awaits on roads.
And it’s the challenge of the times. As with Sinclair Lewis’ quote about when fascism comes etc. When corporate capture takes over your streets it will use the language of bullshit populism from all sides.
This is a nuisance to people earning an honest living like the kids who deliver medicines, food etc on my street. Even if it’s that Bezos giant, at least when it is an actual service it’s one thing.
Whereas the pseudo populism in this state from all sides is bs.
It’s not art..unless it is of this disgraceful type:
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/sep/26/fake-street-art-sucks-perrier-replaces-williamsburgs-nelson-mandela-mural-with-huge-advertisement
But it will use the language of some sort of made up “woke” (an insult to anything actually progressive) as well as routine economic rubbish which treats growth..any growth..even of a junk heap or tumor as good while claiming that the things that don’t suck are the problem.
I have cynically noted language about “western imperialism and colonisation” popping up when a billionaire wants to have his way.
As if I am not from here just because I don’t like showbiz or theatre and lead a quiet life.
And confusion and chaos are how these guys operate. The introduction of more and more junk ai that can’t tell bags of chips from weapons is a problem. To a lesser extent it ruins social relations. I am not quibbling with commerce that has a simple point..we buy diabetes medications. I own a phone. The point is that this is real trash.
It’s like that 67, skibidi toilet shit and that rot (Zitron got it -it is the rot economy) bleeding into real life is atrocious.
Worst of all is the constant attempt to merge with real artists or protesters, people selling actually useful products and services like my small medical MJ company or the small pharmacy known to my family for over 20 years, my doctors and my small stable, sustainable, quiet network.
My dad is a military vet. But he doesn’t approve of defense contracting or spooks or sexist rubbish. He is no bleeding heart liberal and he can’t stand communists actually. But he is a basically honest person and can identify a bullshitter as a bullshitter in context.
I am well to the left but I am not a moron. I am trying to pay my dues to society quietly and I find it very annoying to see junk grow all around me.
That google traffic snarling artist is not a protester. He is an attention seeker. If you get approving pats from Google (a fraudulent enterprise if ever there was one) then that’s not a protester. That’s bs.
This is not machine synthesized rubbish. I should be working on my work right now. I always feel like an ass if I talk about stuff outside my field.
I dourly note how hard it is to say anything on any of the science stack exchanges versus the 1984 duckspeak that is increasingly common human or machine.
The gist is I am sick of this deliberate chaos that makes anything worthwhile indistinguishable from junk, as marketers and advertisers teach communication rather than teachers. Exploiting other people’s ideas and thoughts to make a point assumes that that thing will tacitly join your bullshit parade of non-work.
I don’t get kickbacks for this. I trash rubbish free of charge!
The reason Yasha Levine or Evgenia Kovda are some of the rare tech critics I admire is that they kill the cancer instead of exploiting it. I generally dislike the Jacobin, but as I have said many times, one of the few good articles in it acknowledged that the industry sprouting up around police brutality exploits it. That’s why the recent Salon Mag review of “The Perfect Neighbor” correctly trashed it as exploitation.
That’s the difference between an honest left and a product or politics. I just want this trash to not grow here and to go away.
The point is not drawing attention to drivel. It’s to stop the drivel before it entrenches itself even more. Or tries to turn the tables on you or drag you into some fatiguing stuff that makes the most boring scientific chore you ever had to do look good by comparison.
I have never had any serious mental issues.
But the constant growth of junk is a concern. I am self correcting my work on my own savings and those of my mom and dad. I am childfree and an only child and they were honest public servants with pensions. But it is so I can do worthwhile stuff not drivel.
This isn’t an ad for medical MJ. It’s a comment on the implicit v extortion when junk insists on piling on to tentative MJ legalization, science self correction etc.
In this period I have seen Roe v Wade get overturned. The legitimate points of all social movements get subsumed by the spectacle (hat tip to Yasha). I lost my mom was well. I had nursed her with her excellent oncologist and nurse. But the chaos and confusion of this makes everything worthwhile harder. She had almost recovered and then things went south as cancer isn’t a disease to mess with.
And manipulation of wildlife or humans as these morons would is not just tacky, it can have repercussions that you can’t foresee. A tacky local billionaire has this grotesque “wildlife refuge” which is an insult to the real thing. Further, Intelligent design and creationism are not science. Wildlife does not exist for the engineering of weapons or moronic fake alarm systems. And constant disinfo mixes actually concerning things with conspiracies. Which then are exploited by corporations to keep things at the edge of crisis of always. Instead of banning wet markets or phasing out factory farms we scramble for vaccines or ransomware patches at the last moment.
This is legitimate:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/noise-from-our-electronics-and-radio-signals-disorients-migratory-birds/
But then a “ufo researcher” on the always awful Facebook runs with it:
https://www.audubon.org/news/no-5g-radio-waves-do-not-kill-birds
Which then a libertarian could use to argue against any regulation as everything that brakes junk like growth is a conspiracy or inefficient.
It’s endlessly awful and it’s not doom and gloom to see how things are going.
Things have to retain their real meanings. Or it’s all just image and symbols and spectacles and no substance (;-/ you know what I mean).
Anyway I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there..
Encroachment by junk into not junk has to stop.