Erik Zermeño

Pintor, historietista, ilustrador, GIFS, stopmotions, desarrollo de narrativas.

[indi.ca @indica]

They're really doing Whitey's on the Moon while children get bitten by rats in Gaza. They're doing the Gil Scott-Heron poem

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.
Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.
Here's a list of sites you may have never heard of!
https://t.co/hLHSvB1Joo - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
https://t.co/tzsXqbrCJD - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://t.co/Fm78bG5hyH - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
https://t.co/JvTczb6j6o is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
https://t.co/ZtsaKUl9Jy - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
https://t.co/aBLUtUW6a8 is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
https://t.co/IAzkF2ErNt is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
https://t.co/6ujFPDG4AQ
Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that plants and protects trees. By dedicating 100% of its profits to the planet, Ecosia has planted over 214,229,374 million trees since its founding in December 2009
https://t.co/ZrIBFqf207
Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, we have delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services.
https://t.co/Duwc39PTkx
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks
https://t.co/hOuRZFcDao
“Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind. Get our browser on all your devices.
Search and browse with the DuckDuckGo browser for more protection. Unlike Chrome and other browsers, we don't track you.”
https://t.co/hIAOHavGYB
Presearch is a community-powered, decentralized search engine that provides better results while protecting your privacy and rewarding you when you search.
https://t.co/BoWNlciH7N
Reliable information for all kinds of research
https://t.co/tPY4FcMJDR
Startpage is a global privacy technology company built around the principle of always putting privacy first. Our suite of easy-to-use privacy products helps anyone around the world to protect their personal data online.
from Christopher Seymore

[Straight Talk Turncoat @GAonMyMind99]

@RealCandaceO

[The Golden Age @thegoldenaged]

Ghibli food 🍜

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

So it turns out Israel’s mistake was starting its genocide right after Palestinians gained the ability to quickly share video footage of what’s happening in Gaza, but right before the moment when any video footage shared online could easily be dismissed as AI.

Just today I saw two viral tweets that had received Community Notes from Twitter users warning that the posts featured AI-generated videos. Both were shared by right wing accounts with large followings, and both were used to spread Islamophobia.

The first was shared by Israeli-American pundit Emily Schrader, who has 194,000 followers on Twitter. The tweet features a fake CCTV video of a man in Muslim garb approaching a non-Muslim woman on the street in a way that’s meant to look intimidating before getting attacked by a house cat. As of this writing Schrader’s tweet has more than 612,000 views, and carries a Community Note that reads “AI generated. Time at top is a telltale sign. Also she starts off with a white and black bag then only black.”

The second was from a right wing British account called Basil the Great, which has over 210,000 followers. Their tweet features a fake video of an English-speaking teacher showing white children how to pray a Muslim prayer, captioned “I‘ve been sent this footage twice today. It shows a Muslim Teacher instructing British children in the ways of Islam in school. I hope it’s fake but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was real. In fact the left will probably say they don’t see anything wrong with this.”

It is not real. As of this writing the tweet carries a Community Note which reads “Video is AI generated. The teacher ‘sits’ on an invisible chair at the end of the video, which was not there at the beginning.” The video has had 1.7 million views.

This is Twitter, not Facebook, which had already been ravaged by fake AI content that’s been duping older users for nearly two years now.

Fake AI videos are now getting so good that they’re able to fool younger people who are much more aware of what’s out there. Australia’s ABC recently ran a segment where they showed different video clips to teens and asked them to determine which ones were real and which ones were AI, and they couldn’t do much better than randomly guessing.

For decades, video footage was the gold standard for evidence that something had occurred. For a few sweet years there was a period when anything significant that happened in public would usually be recorded on video, because in any group there was bound to be a few people with a smartphone in their pocket, and then those videos could be shared with the world as evidence that the significant thing had occurred. Now whenever there’s footage of a crime, or an act of government tyranny, or just a famous person doing something ridiculous in public, people aren’t going to believe it happened unless it’s corroborated by eyewitness testimony.

So in that sense we’ve sort of backslid to where we were before the invention of photography, when eyewitness reports were the only thing we had to go by. A video can help illustrate what the eyewitness is talking about, but without a physical witness willing to attest to its veracity, it’s often not going to be worth much in terms of proving that something happened.

Which of course serves the powerful just fine. Videos of genocidal atrocities, police brutality, and authoritarian abuses have been causing a lot of headaches for our rulers these past few years, so they’ll be happy to see the information ecosystem entering a new era where inconvenient video footage can be dismissed with a scoff.

Generative AI is making everything dumber. It’s crippling people’s ability to write, research, think critically and create art for themselves. It’s making it harder for us to discern truth from falsehood. It’s causing people to become divorced from their own humanity in weirder and weirder ways.

It’s getting harder and harder to know what’s real on the internet. That photo could be fake. That video could be fake. That song could have been made without any actual artist behind it. That essay could have been written by a chatbot. That social media account you’re interacting with could be a chatbot themselves. This is going to have a massively alienating effect on networking technologies whose initial promise was to help bring us all together.

When the internet first showed up people rejoiced at their ability to connect with others around the world who had the same interests and passions, saying “At long last, I’m not alone!” When AI showed up people started logging on to the internet and wondering, “Uhh… am I alone?”

Because you can’t be sure there’s anyone in there.

It reminds me of a passage from Charlotte Joko Beck’s “Everyday Zen”:

“Suppose we are out on a lake and it’s a bit foggy — not too foggy, but a bit foggy — and we’re rowing along in our little boat having a good time. And then, all of a sudden, coming out of the fog, there’s this other rowboat and it’s heading right at us. And…crash! Well, for a second we’re really angry — what is that fool doing? I just painted my boat! And here he comes — crash! — right into it. And then suddenly we notice that the rowboat is empty. What happens to our anger? Well, the anger collapses…I’ll just have to paint my boat again, that’s all. But if that rowboat that hit ours had another person in it, how would we react? You know what would happen!”

Beck is touching on the Buddhist doctrine of no-self here, which is a discussion for another day, but this parable has so many layers that say so much about humanity and human connection. The only reason we put so much mental energy and attention into our day-to-day interactions and relationships is because we assume we’re relating to other human beings like ourselves. We assume there’s somebody in the other rowboat.

Nearly all of the love, lust, anger, hatred, shame, guilt, passion, enthusiasm, attraction, aversion, delight and disgust we feel from moment to moment throughout this human adventure has to do with other humans. We don’t experience those big feelings toward inanimate objects like rowboats, cars or shopping carts, because we know there’s nobody in them. There’s no real connection to be had with them. Our big feelings come from our meetings with real people, real family, real lovers, real enemies, and real art from real artists.

AI is an empty rowboat, and the more it takes over the internet, the emptier it’s going to feel. People won’t feel like they can find the connection they’re craving in any of the areas that are dominated by artificial intelligence, and they’re going to go looking for it elsewhere. Maybe they’ll start going looking for it in places where there are physical people in physical bodies they can touch and make eye contact with, who they know for a fact are real people with real feelings and hopes and dreams like themselves.

And maybe that would be a good thing. Humanity is becoming too disconnected and dissociated as it is. We could all benefit from digging our roots into reality a bit deeper.

There are some technological developments where as an individual you have to draw a line for yourself. Modern civilization has made it possible to work from home and eat ten thousand calories a day without ever exercising or leaving your apartment, but most of us have the good sense not to do this because we know it would be very bad for our health. We’re going to have to start looking at AI the same way we look at McDonald’s: sure it’s there, but that doesn’t mean you have to consume it, because it’s really not good for you.

[Citas De Libros @LibrosEnCitas]

"No os canséis de ser buenos. Aunque no sirva para mucho, sirve para no arrepentirse de uno mismo".

José Mujica

[Josué Sánchez - @jstapetillo.bsky.social @JSTapetillo]

La alcaldesa @VeroDelgadilloG dice que en su gobierno hicieron "... lo que le corresponde al municipio en término de inundaciones...". Esto muestra desconocimiento del tema, por negligencia o conveniencia, de los gobiernos municipales. Hilo. (1/10)

https://t.co/tbKzVhTXQk

[タケウマ @StudioTakeuma]

複数の見開きで描いたスケッチといえば昔描いたこれも。

[Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE]

🔴 THE REAL SCAM BEHIND THE NEW TWO-STATE SOLUTION EXPLAINED

Dive into this eye-opening breakdown of the new two-state solution and discover why the Gaza Strip is being 'West Bankified’. Curious about the real political game behind the headlines? This clip exposes the hidden control tactics and negotiation tricks that keep the conflict unresolved.

🔔 FYI - WE ARE HEAVILY SHADOWBANNED ON YOUTUBE - HELP US BEAT THEIR ALGORITHM - PLEASE LIKE & SUB. HERE:
https://t.co/IvCxJmN8Ms

Segment aired on August 1, 2025
https://t.co/OI37Ft9vRt

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

Why is the US, and the West overall, seeing this crisis? Well, what happened after 1990? The USSR was overthrown, the first cold war ended, and the capitalist class went on the offensive in the West, dismantling the welfare states that they had only allowed because they feared the systemic alternatives represented by the Soviet-led socialist bloc, as well as by the socialist-led revolutionary anti-colonial national-liberation struggles across the Global South (in Angola, Burkina Faso, Cuba, Grenada, Indonesia, Korea, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Vietnam, etc.).

In the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberalism was ruthlessly imposed as bipartisan dogma. Clinton and Blair continued where Reagan and Thatcher left off.

Wall Street was deregulated. Glass–Steagall was repealed, accelerating the financialization of the US economy -- and setting the stage for financial crises like the Great Recession of 2008. Houses became speculative assets for investors, not places to live in. Homelessness skyrocketed as investors bought up homes across the country, hoping to make capital gains.

The housing bubble temporarily popped in 2008-09, but the US government only reinflated it after, with easy monetary policy, super low interest rates, and Fed quantitative easing. Today the housing bubble is even bigger than it was before the 2008 crash!

It is not a coincidence that the "golden era" of Western social democracy, especially in Europe, but also the weaker US welfare state, coincided with the height of the first cold war, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Western capitalists were genuinely afraid of a socialist revolution, so they made significant concessions to workers and allowed higher rates of taxation and stronger social services as an alternative. (The possibility of revolutionary change was even higher in Europe, as the labor movement and left-wing parties were stronger, which is why their ruling classes made more concessions and allowed a stronger welfare state.)

Today, the rise of China is forcing some Western ruling classes to debate if they should make some more concessions again, but the Western labor movement and left are much weaker, and China has a strict non-interventionist foreign policy and does not export revolution like the Soviet Union did. Moreover, there are not nearly as many global revolutionary movements today as there were during the national-liberation struggles of the 1950s-'70s (with a few noble exceptions).

Finally, the Western systems of bourgeois "democracy" are in severe crisis, with lots of infighting in the ruling class, and a far-right, fascistic segment of the capitalist class is gaining more power (represented by oligarchs like Peter Thiel), which thinks that they should simply dispel with the illusion of bourgeois liberal "democracy" and give capital total authoritarian control over society. Instead of making concessions to labor, like capitalists did during the first cold war, they want to take away the few remaining rights of labor. That fascistic faction of the ruling class is currently winning the internecine war.

[Víctor Suárez 🇲🇽🇵🇸 @victor_suarez]

Imperdible este artículo de William Robinson en @lajornadaonline @PAgraria

[Ruptura 🔻 @ruptura_rpt]

La receta para la privatización está en marcha, no nos dejemos engañar necesitamos democratizar al SIAPA, no hacer que pase a los cuates de Lemus.

@rmartinmar

[Rogelio Campos @CamposRogelio]

El director del @siapagdl contrató a Lady Siapa; orquestó una sesión para aumentar las tarifas sin que el gobernador estuviera enterado.
Que más tiene que hacer para que lo separen del cargo.
O acaso todos los funcionarios pueden hacer lo mismo y como si nada.

[redpillbot @redpillb0t]

Nobody is trying to fix the problems we have in the world.

Everyone is just trying to make enough money so the problems don't apply to them anymore.

[Nate Bear @NateB_Panic]

Antisemitism used to be when you denied a holocaust. Now it's when you don't support one

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The mass atrocity in Gaza is a genocide, obviously, and is an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

But it's also a lot more than that.

It's an experiment — to see what kinds of abuses the public will accept without causing significant disruption to the imperial status quo.

It's a psychological operation — to push out the boundaries of what's normal and acceptable in our minds so that we will consent to even more horrific abuses in the future.

It's a symptom — of Zionism, of colonialism, of militarism, of capitalism, of western supremacism, of empire-building, of propaganda, of ignorance, of apathy, of delusion, of ego.

It's a manifestation — of violent racist, supremacist and xenophobic belief systems that have always been there but were previously restrained, meeting with the unwholesome nature of alliances that have long been in place but have been aggressively normalized.

It's a disclosure — showing us what the western empire we live under really is underneath its fake plastic mask of liberal democracy and righteous humanitarianism.

It's a revelation — showing us who among us really stands for truth and justice and who has been deceiving us about themselves and their motives this entire time.

It's a catalyst — a galvanizing force and a rallying cry for all who realize that the murderous power structures we live under can no longer be allowed to stand, and a blaring alarm clock opening more and more snoozing eyes to the need for revolutionary change.

It's a test — of who we are as a species and what we are made of, and of whether we can transcend the destructive patterning that is driving humanity to its doom.

It's a question — asking us what kind of world we want to live in going forward, and what kind of people we want to be.

It's an invitation — to become something better than what we are now.