Graeme Lipschitz

I am where technology, creativity and entrepreneurship go to have a baby. Served with a side of sarcasm.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

Right, I'm finally leaving this hellscape. I've been on Twitter for 16 years, it's been my favourite social media platform over that time but the time has come to say goodbye. I'm on the same handle on Bluesky. See you there.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@robstokes NOAA too: https://t.co/jiUqSayy3y

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@robstokes Scientific American must be wrong then: https://t.co/pqPOYQI0qp

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@HighwaysSWEST Thank you so much to our guardian angels Chris and Jackie for saving us from the side of the M25 and getting us to Cobham Services where we are warm and fed.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@ElSatanico Only got to 27 seconds and then I died of cringe.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@justinspratt That's because it still doesn't exist.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@alexdunsdon Well, I've done a philosophy degree, so I'm good on the existential stuff. Although I'm concerned about your capacity for critical thinking when you're asking Twitter if things are real or not. Perhaps do your homework first and post facts?

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

So humans don't feel sad now?

[Alex Patrascu @maxescu]

We have crossed the uncanny valley.

These are real people with AI emotions. It's indistinguishable from real footage.

Made possible by @Hailuo_AI

[Dean Burnett (@drdeanburnett everywhere) @drdeanburnett]

When you remember that Musk hates anyone who isn't himself or his bootlickers having rights or autonomy, his push to make everything (cars, spaceships, social media, actual brains) dependent on tech *he* controls:

A) Makes a lot more sense

B) Becomes even more sinister

[Ottilia Anna MaSibanda @MaS1banda]

In 12 months over 40 000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, Occupied Palestine.
34 000 of them have been identified and named.

This video by @AJEnglish lists them by age.
The first person over 17 years of age appears 19:30 in.

Unconscionable.
Yet, real.
💔

[Richard McNeil-Willson @mcneilwillson]

This is Beirut now. Just like the West Bank a few hours ago. Just like Gaza every night.

This is not “counterterrorism”

This is not “self defence”

This is colonial violence, done across the Middle East with the support of western governments, and should be called out as such.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

I'm so glad you didn't mess with the time space continuum, Reid.

[Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman]

What would you say to your younger self at pivotal moments in your career? I used AI to create a younger Reid AI—from 2004!—so we could talk about pitching LinkedIn's Series B deck to investors.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@alexdunsdon Is it true that you think Trump is a serious person?

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@dougscott Nope. Most of the time I'm aggressive aggressive - like adopting a black child and reverse colonising the UK. All's fair in love and war.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The west is a dystopian wasteland of moral degeneracy.

Usually when you hear a white person talk about moral decay it's some wingnut denouncing LGBTQ rights or women's reproductive rights or whatever, but that's not what I mean. I'm talking about real things here.

The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world's most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution.

The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal.

Being born into western civilization is like waking up in the middle of a massive lynch mob. Something terrible is happening, and everyone's going along with it and telling you it's fine and it's normal, and even if you're able to figure out that what they're doing is wrong in all the chaos and confusion you find yourself powerless to stop them, because the whole thing has so much momentum already and there are far too many people blindly caught up in the frenzy of bloodlust for you to make everyone change course. Even just continuing to live among them makes you complicit in their actions in many ways, but you have nowhere else to go besides this lynch mob town you were born into. So you just move to the fringes of the mob and share your objections with the few people who will listen to you.

Our civilization is cruel and savage, but we compartmentalize away from its cruelty and savagery and laugh at our sitcoms and vapid comedians and make believe the worst things happening politically in our society are the mainstream culture war wedge issues that pundits and politicians prefer to keep us talking about. We live out our lives sedated by entertainment and social media and food and pharmaceuticals while genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and ecocide unfold all around us, thinking ourselves good and virtuous if we are kind to our pets and hold the correct opinions about racial justice and vaccines.

If we as a society were actually good, none of this would be happening. Moral clarity would find all this intolerable, and would reject it and eject it by any means necessary. Which is why the powerful pour so much energy into keeping us all sedated and confused. A lot of power and wealth rides on our lack of moral clarity.

There is much wealth to be gained by exploiting labor and extracting resources around the world. There is much power to be secured by murdering, starving and terrorizing any population which refuses to bow to the interests of the western empire. This is why the western empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised: because so much wealth and power depends on ensuring the west remains in a state of moral degeneracy, and that westerners do not regard the citizenry of the global south as fully human.

I personally reject religion, not because I'm some fedora-wearing wanker who makes fun of people for believing in God, but because I reject all aspects of the profoundly sick culture I was born into. Because I don't resonate with religion I often feel myself pulling away from religious-sounding jargon framing the actions of the western empire as "demonic" or calling the US "the great Satan" — but at the same time I completely understand it. When I see the inside of a child's skull for the hundredth time next to video footage of IDF soldiers mockingly dressed in the clothes of dead or displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead or displaced children while western podium pontiffs pretend to believe the military they're arming has done nothing wrong, I do struggle to find adjectives strong enough to describe what I am looking at. Maybe "demonic" is as close as you can get, even if you don't believe in actual biblical demons.

That's what I'm talking about when I say the west is a wasteland of moral degeneracy. The type of civilization which would allow its government to do things like this necessarily has a collective conscience that has been so warped and twisted by propaganda and self-interest that it's the same as not having a conscience at all. If you can't regard the vast majority of the population of this planet as fully human and equal to yourself, then morally speaking you're no better than the perpetrators of slavery and genocide we've been taught to judge negatively in history class.

And that's the norm here. It's what we were born into. It's what we spend all our lives being trained to accept as normal.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@dougscott For a supposedly smart person, a heck of a lot of things go over your head. Willfully ignorant.

[Graeme Lipschitz @Wallfish]

@nicharry May I suggest some of those magic no-tie elastic lace vibes? You just slip your foot in and go.

[Adrian Wooldridge @adwooldridge]

Musk's argument for free speech absolutism is flawed because the incentives on X are to spread sensationalism rather than truth and division rather than debate, https://t.co/R5FRfn9blD via @opinion