*krshhkk* I interrupt my broadcast

This isn't an anime post despite the tangent I am about to go on, so no pictures, please bear with me.

or skip the paragraph. It's just a mental association and not the point of all this

I have been keeping up with Witch Hat Atelier recently - a wonderfully heartfelt series, about the potential for beauty in magic and the world at large, and the power of a kindhearted wish for humanity, which seems to hang on a precipice threatening to snuff it out with the very same power. The recent anime arc starts up centering on Richeh, a stubborn young apprentice mage with a trauma of being forced to give up her passions, her identity, her own personal magic, which is so intimately tied to things she has loved and lost in life. Her struggle to adapt to new experiences, choosing to refine only herself in private, seems to be balancing some lesson about understanding the world around you to strengthen your own individuality rather than to change yourself.

Your regularly scheduled cynicism

This is on the mind as I think about the world around us today, the motivations and intentional fabricationlying, excuses, buried ledes of what is and isn't created for the good of all. In the real world we are inundated with this as capitalists learn to mock the language of humanityWe believe in making things Right for You, that they may twist it to serve an additional - if not wholly alternate - purpose of self-gain and perpetuation. The idea of controlling culture to create fertile ground for propagating the idea of your product as passive reputational incomeimmortality for chuds comes part and parcel with competing in a game where worth is but one vanishingly small factor of success.

And in this world where we are still afforded the space to express our humanity, through art and writing and speech, there was an untapped opportunity to corrupt. In 2026 it's impossible not to know what I meanI said it earlier too. It's AI, and at the pit of my soul it blackens my heart to even consider recording it in a space I call my own, such is the hate it inspires. And it is in this I understand the characterRicheh of someone unwilling to change, despite protestsYou still believe all that?, commandsCut it out. It's for your own good., threats of obsolescenceYou'll be left behind again. and posturing superiority. That you could do so much more, so much better than you would ever be capable of on your own, were you only to shed a crumb of principle, give only an inch up to a monster that razes forests, and boils lakes, and disintegrates, distorts, and disfigures the voices and likenesses of your fellows even now.

Trade offer:

You've heard of these, right?

You are given a button. If you press it, you gain $1000, but someone in the world is subject to unrelenting torment.

A demon presents a choice. You will live in comfort for the rest of your life, but you can never have an original thought again.

A man in a suit offers you fame and accolades, but you have to kill your closest friend.

The question is never whether you accept, but when you will press the button, when you will give up yourself, when you will betray your humanity to the highest bidder?

I think everyone gives in to some compromises in their life. Nothing is ever gained without a price, no matter how we mask it. But just as well, everyone has to take a stand and decide what they won't ever accept. We're at a cultural crossroads where many have welcomed the machine as an unstoppable force they must side with or become crushed beneath, and it has split communities of all stripes as it strikes directly at the heart of the last bastion of creative expression, a place once thought to be a safe haven all could reside, now fenced and drawn over with artificial lines of allegience.

Salting the Earth

Whenever something changes, it isn't ever destroyed, but reshaped. The new final frontier is as ever one that rebukes externalities to live freely, without restrictions, without a quota, resilient to the blight that passes it over and ever threatens to shrink its borders. As I see it, accepting that AI is something to indulge in as a curious experimenter, as a cutting edge entrepeneur, as a cog unwilling to be replaced, is still declaring oneself to be a cog, a capitalist, complicit in harm for selfish gain. The language of creativity denies all that this is no matter how it may trivially replicate what one might consider unnecessary - a goalpost which encroaches inward as yesterday's necessity becomes tomorrow's obsolete.

A complicit artist sees speech and code as trivialitiesMy art will speak for itself, just generate some nice words for me and code a website to put it in to supplement their creativity.

A complicit programmer sees art and writing as trivialitiesMy code is superior, just generate some art and dialogue for this game I made to supplement their work.

A complicit writer sees programming and art as trivialitiesMy words will speak for themselves, just give me some interactive visuals to make it pop to supplement their expression.

In pitting us against each other, they reveal a truth they would only say in the confidence of a shareholder meeting: that in the end, nobody is ever needed for a product, which exists for the fame and fortune of its owner. It's really never made more sense to simply replace the need for additional credit. To concern-troll that one might be left behind as progress marches ever onward, to fall short of the new standard for humanity's ability to Generate Product, is nothing but the latest attempt to claim stake on cultural territory that stubbornly remains true and free.

It is a disease that claims even those you called allies just yesterday. Fellow curious minds caught in the trap, struggling peers who could not turn down the promise of a better life if they just press the button. Its very existence rips us from each other, forces us to watch as they imbibe the poison and forever distance themselves from where they are meant to be. And yet I can't simply hate them for it. That was my neighbor. Those were my friends, my family, perhaps unaware of the insidiousness of it all or blithely desensitized to it, tired of resisting as they bang on our walls and windows demanding we learn to accept that the world isn't perfect, to give up on this childish naivety that we can be who we want to be forever.

...Taking a breath before the manifesto part.

...I wonder how Richeh's arc will resolve. Will she learn that it's okay to change, to recognize that clinging to your beliefs only gets in the way of your full potential? Or will she learn that you never need to follow the same path that others urge you toward, so long as you never close your mind to the world around you? I've read enough manga to know how it will go, though I apologize to her and the author for finding it a convenient vessel for my own gripes. But it all seems so silly that I struggled so much to find my resolve when a fictional story I am following is already paving the way.

I would bid a fond farewell to those I may never respect againThey needn't know.. To people whose doors are forever closed to me, even if we may still speak through the wallsWe'll never agree.. To corners of my world I have slashed and burned and sealed away, an ever shrinking living space I am determined to live and die withinfor it is infinitely vast.. Grief for the loss of future friends as I cross off one more sign of irreconcilable differenceNo hard feelings. No feelings at all.. I have decided this is my enemy, in my heart and soul. This black hole of infinite greed, the zombies that have cast off their flesh in service of the cultural singularity. I have no intentions to take the fight to the masses, nor do I have any need to prove my worth without them, but I will guard my territorymyself, my loved ones, my passions for the rest of my life from their honeyed words.

I've found strength in this loneliness, even as many around me make similar declarations. It has only become easier to recognize that we all drift along with infinite divergence, chance crossings so rarely able to cling together in the sea of time, and others hopelessly out of reach as we never see truly eye to eye - but if everyone in the world should pass me by, at least I know I was once in good company.