Handmaid's tale premiere broke the internet
Hulu went briefly down this am. have not watched yet, saving for this evening.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I’m under strict orders not to watch it until my wife returns home Thursday 
I believe there will be 10 episodes in April and May, then it's done.
I watched a couple of seasons. But I was and am dealing with systemic sexism on a scale I had never seen before (starting from the Fall of 2011).
This is a bit of a personal rant. But it is the Feminists’ forum.
Our societies consistently fail at being on the right side of history except with 20/20 hindsight*. In spite of all the performative hashtags- “Girls in Science!” -when it is toothless and defanged enough, in real time, the common sense decency to acknowledge serious issues with male skewed fields like data science/ai having no serious oversight is a bridge too far apparently.
It is not paranoia or Reefer Madness if elementary connections are drawn between the poor data hygiene deployed at scale by Google, Facebook etc and the scale of creepiness MeToo shined a light on.
In combination, those arguably constitute a hostile living or working situation for women and worsen structural and systemic sexism.
And the solution is not yet again creepily scrambling to somehow rear cover or litigate. I don’t know how these societies will adapt to serious pushback. But it isnt really my problem. I am clear on what is right and what is wrong and it is time at last. Just lame…
Somehow attacking a woman’s sanity or credibilty (using often illicitly and stalkerishly gathered and strategically exploited data) still works. Or even funnier insisting that complainants are bots to stalk further to verify.
Frustratingly sleazy..well whatever. Good..I never had any sympathy for people engaged in this large scale theft and snapping to feels good.
If I was never into Handmaid’s Tale, by contrast, I always loved “Promising Young Woman”. I love the part where she goes from slurring her words and being out of it to sitting up and saying in a clear voice “Hey, what are you doing?”
I have never deliberately pretended to be out of it. I was furiously ranting and then trying to sound mild to compensate, which gives the general impression of some kind of issue 
.
But it took a while for the nightmarish tech environment (which is everywhere now) to start getting as much condemnation and from non Trumpers. I am not fair and balanced (except in a hostage situation), which was what the last 15 years felt like. So I just ignore conservatives.
But I didn’t find neoliberals much better. There isn’t any unspoken sympathy and never was. I have unspoken sympathy with the left and normal, decent humans. Not the kinds of people who infest these parasitic spook and corporate enterprises.
The left (the real left, not our creepy state capitalists or any others here) have bought balm to my weary head. I don’t trust randoms. But I trust specifically Current Affairs or Yasha Levine/Evgenia Kovda etc. to actually be on the right side of history rather than opportunistically champion whatever happens to be convenient.
I have listed it over and over in my journal-the left media I found helpful in this bleak era. That left is more humanist and feminist in any real sense. So now I feel more ..as the ai creeps say, “aligned!” And ready to file complaints as soon as I finish off some chores and focus.
I am just appalled at the stuff people try to get away with. But I won’t be holding back wrt complaints. I will have to file them though. I am sick of other people taking decisions affecting me.
Any more of the kind of creepy rot I saw encroaching into my street, yard or onto my devices will escalate a bad situation from which I am not backing down.
Malfeasance at scale.
But my head feels better as the formal decision to escalate and initiate complaints (strictly anonymously- I have no wish to “tell my story” etc. except to you guys here on DU somebody. Self commodification/self-tabloidization is essentially joining this creepy economic model. I am reading two excellent books -one by Sam Miller MacDonald and the other by Adam Becker, both of which strike me as such excellent theses on this shit reality).
I can now just tune out anything corrupt/illicit that people would try to legitimize (based on human behavior in our decadent yet bleak time) like more privacy or space invasions, unsolicited and confusing “information”/shit stirring..basically gaslighting plus exploitation of plausible deniability.
I have no use for The Omelas or Three Trolley Problems. These are simple things..it is irresponsibility, greed and hubris. This Trumpian Nazi reich is a nuisance, but there is no way those guys won’t hang themselves. They are almost too stupid to even be uhh effective fascists.
But it should not just be them. This is broadly a problem with tech and its enablers. Lina Khan was a move in the right direction (though it was nauseating how JD Vance, Matt Gaetz etc tried to latch on to her popularity. I respect Matt Stoller, this progressive writer/economist, but he can go a bit overboard. Movement conservatives are not like normal humans. They are part of a regressive vision).
All people who engage in unpardonably inhumane and corrupt things should be held accountable.
Anyway, it is all quite disappointing and sleazy.
Shrug..At least I have some left media to console me, which is better than trying to see people with broken politics as normal.
*: I am reading two books by Adam Becker-one on politics and another about an area of physics I never understood at all - quantum physics. And yes I am biased in that I am for left politics. But one thing I notice about neoliberals is that they don’t so much want to be on the right side of history as ensure that whatever positions they had or have are inevitably the direction of history. So you never get slowed down by errors or question yourself in any semi serious way..no matter what. It works because there is always someone crazier like this American Nazi Party, i.e. the GOP with its anti-vaxxers, anti abortion morons, racists, sexists, theocrats. This crew exists everywhere in the world but the backwardness and theocracy are usually also aligned with this junk capitalist worldview. Compared to those guys, basically just breathing makes you civilized and then you can shill for policies that are materially the same and also fairly regressive. Because it never stops. These people keep going more and more into denial and using every new crisis in our permacrisis to justify each creepy decision or bogus prediction they made.
That would be the politics of the last institution I “worked” at. I really just stumbled through the place in stupefaction that anything could suck that much and be that divorced from any reality which isn’t about some elite douchebag or such a douchebag’s sycophants or completely clueless mass movement (nothing to do with immigration. But everything to do with Silicon Valley being both sleazy and stupid).
I felt bad for my mentor. He was the least like that. But he is joint at the hip with that hell and that would skew your worldview. I still support him (though not the rest of the flotsam and jetsam in that place..what sort of person knowingly goes there?) because places like those want to isolate their loathsome regressive rapaciousness to make it seem as if it is a one-off and blame the people who are least offensive. But the school should go down in science history as analogous to IBM wrt IBM’s collusion with nazis. Same wrt similar creeps here continuing to shill rubbish that will ensure that it gets worse.