Here's the first "real" post of the Miniblog! I'd appreciate if anyone out there could hear what I want to say, but if not, I understand; This post is definitely a long one. I have a lot I need to get out, and it has been stressing me out for a while now.

This post in particular talks about society's obsession with perfection and power.

Exploitation of Power

First, I'll start off with the obvious: people are horribly obsessed with power and control. Ever since we first invented the knife, we've been desiring more. This unhealthy craving, when combined with lack of self-control and malice, leads to horrible things. For as long as we've been desiring power, we've also been exploiting it. Over only a year, I've seen countless examples of the corrupt abusing their status for sickening things. For brevity, I'll talk about AI as my prime example. AI technology has become the new nuclear physics. On one hand, you can power cities and homes with unmatched efficiency, and on the other, you can wipe an entire country with a single bomb. With AI, we can create models that can detect disease, analyze the enviroment, create helpful automations for laborious tasks, and that's only scratching the surface. AI can also unemploy millions in already competitive markets, mimic humans to manipulate social media, and more. However, the dark side is unfortunately what greedy schemers are more attracted to. As mentioned, Artists, voice actors, and writers are having their already poor job security threatened by greedy corporations who won't hesitate to replace real humans with mindless automations, and Meta has admitted to considering flooding their platforms with AI mimicries of people. With that kind of power though, they could easily manipulate public perception and thought, as well as trying to get people addicted to their platform with false friends who are nothing more than Meta's puppets.

Other things I've seen include other greedy moves from corporations, Celebrities abusing their fame to manipulate their audience, and of course, wars between countries that inflict needless bloodshed.

Cancerous Growth

Back to our lust for power, I've noticed that a lot of people, corporations, and so on have tried to grow their wealth and influence like a tumor. A tumor cares about nothing but expansion for the sake of expansion. It hardly needs to expand, consume, and kill its host, but yet it does. Corporations smother their webpages in ads, popups, and poorly designed interfaces to suck every last dollar they can. Anti-consumer practices also include shady terms, horrid subscriptions, overmonetization and invasive spyware. Adobe has shady terms roughly stating "We may or may not shove your hard work into a soulless machine!" as well as being notorious for their overpriced and exceptionally hard to cancel subscriptions. Various companies have been trying to push subscription models only for it to backfire miserably. Many AAA game studios are infamous for needlessly monetizing their games, adding tons of cosmetics, DLCs, lootboxes, and pay-to-win mechanics. All of the "Big 5" tech companies also collect so much private data, that it might as well give a horror movie stalker the creeps. None of these companies have any obvious reason to expand. Do they need resources for a big project? Not really. Are they struggling financially? Not always. It doesn't matter if they need the money or not, they keep undergoing cancer-like growth to satisfy equally as greedy shareholders.

Chains of Expectations and Order

Our endless chase for perfection and power has both freed, but also chained us as well. In today's world, people are expected to be orderly, predictable, and to abide by many systems no matter how cruel, unjust, or criticized they are. I find these expectations incredibly chaining. I want to love my imperfect, feeling, unpredictable human nature, but the world characterizies such things as evil or weak. Crying is seen as weak, Yelling is seen as malicious, criticizing the systems we live in is seen as futile, and individuality is seen as weird. When it comes to our systems, it's far easier to charge theft than it is to weight the morality of both parties. It's far easier to overwork people to death and call them weak for criticism than to make a better work enviroment to improve the mental health of the company and even the surronding community. It's far easier to shut down little Timmy's lemonade stand because of potential danger than to let him have some fun. Sometimes people are also just expected to follow the law, even if it's not a option or hurts them.