A Serious Post
Last edited Wed Dec 24, 2025, 07:09 AM - Edit history (8)
Hi DU,
This is somewhat different from most standard posts here. I wanted to share something with you guys here (the posters I see a lot/any others and EarlG/elad/if he is around still Skinner).
You may have noticed some strange posts in my journal this last year. To cut to the chase, I don’t have any mental issues. I never did.
Long story short, I am going to file allegations of misconduct in human subject research and malpractice in psychiatry against my former employer - a truly loathsome data mining and defense contracting giant, as well as its close partner Google. I have felt like a completely non voluntary subject in a large scale human experiment for the past 14.5 years.
I also plan to sue for RTI wrt anything relevant locally where I now live unless some reasonably democratic and civilized system handles this faster than this.
No monetary compensation or anything of that type. Just doing my duty by society - a concept alien to those douchebags. Sounds a bit pompous, but it’s true ;-/.
This is appalling and driven by corporations not anything like the NIH labs I knew.
That should send a warning to other “researchers” and companies (both here in my country as well as over there) who think that atrociously exploitative methodologies and the gross malpractice acceptable right now are going to go unchallenged. I will also probably file some harassment complaints locally.
I am posting this here, because I am not going to pretend that this is politically neutral. While I disapprove of some of the bogus technocratic and corporate malfeasance permitted by any administration, the Trump administration and MAGA are a joke even by Republican standards. And I never understood that worldview anyway.
So I don’t trust a Trump administration to handle such complaints (except in ways that would be useful to their cronies). I was a publicly funded scientist when I was in the US and politics aside, no part of Trumpian ways strikes me as remotely acceptable.
But it is worse than Trump. This overreach by corporations (largely in this one overhyped and junk filled field - computer science and from a few tacky schools like my sleazy and morally bankrupt former employer) using flawed economic models is taking over everything using bullshit about ai and other laughably manipulative rot. That garbage is replacing what used to be good science and better governance. They are basically the reason the POTUS is a petty tyrant like Trump whose main skill is reality TV rating manipulation and whose sycophants are toad eating toad eaters. They must not rehabilitate themselves after this.
Regarding that entire collection of creeps (Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Bezos, the Palantir creeps, Marc Andreessen, Alex Pentland) -those creeps are morons not brilliant and any society daft enough to keep their myth going because of cowardice or greed among the genuinely elite/general confusion is bound to be ..how did we say it back in the day over here (bot or not! Not a bot I promise ;-/ ) screwn. lol..
I am a flawed scientist and human myself. But I am not a fool and I have seen enough. I have never been corrupt or sleazy, whatever my other faults ( 
;-/ ) and I am tired of this.
I liked my actual colleagues/people at the NIH very much (even the ones at the loathsome institution..brilliant institution of choice though guys) and generally respect physicians and that was the only reason I endured this completely worthless and pointless nuisance this long.
Edit: I really hope my mentor at my last institution gets that I held off for this long because I respect his work/family. But at this point, I feel his work would actually in the long run be better with some pushback against his school. My main mentor was pretty awesome, but not burdened by a sleazy corporation tricked out as a school.
Thanks a lot a DU. Along with some very valuable sources like Current Affairs magazine and Yasha Levine, you guys have helped me in my extracurricular thinking. I do mean it.
Edit: I should also add in: Evgenia Kovda, Nandita Bajaj, Christopher Ketcham and last but not least Adam Becker (he is pretty awesome - a scientist and a rabble rouser).
Trust me, any DU member would agree with this decision. This is about some of the worst offenders in the war on democracy/information etc that is ongoing.
I have to go finish a paper. I shall be back after that, blending in and trying to act normal 
.
I prize my anonymity since I have no wish to ever do anything but science at a very modest level and lead a quiet and dull life.
I really have appreciated DU. I couldn’t have used one of those noxious forms of media like FB,Twitter, TikTok etc. I have valued the presence of MIRT/EarlG/elad in a world of vanishing standards and mercenary transactionalism.
I have been embarassed by the writing in my own posts here, which I can rarely stand to go back and read because they sound like Trump’s “weave”.
But this was something that should have been in the annals of some sort of honest system and instead it is spilling out on the web. The only reason it is not objectionable is that this is an explicitly lefty website with underground in its damn name ffs.
It’s not “Democrats-who-want-to-be-on-teeveeee!!!.com.
It’s not yet another sad damn Mr.Beast stunt or something like that. Which would be my former employer’s style - loud and conspicuous, unless they were doing something sleazy like the scurrying beetle-like men from 1984. James Buchanan’s concept of “zealotry”. Why would anyone do anything that was not motivated by the crassest, sleaziest possible motivations?
Only someone as daft as Elon Musk would insist that Greta Thunberg has a “brand”. And these are the morons shaping perceptions of reality.
It has grated on me since I don’t consider this web based communication democratisation, but tabloidisation. That is not brainless snobbery. The same sleazy companies (Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/TikTok) destroying the public sector/public TV and regulatory bodies, want to take over the functions that were carried out and far better by experts of the right kind. Even sans ai it is not cool when it is a damn reality TV adjacent abomination.
HR professionals or other public sector experts of the best calibre can’t be replaced by online theatrics.
Even my loathsome employer had a decent the postdoc counselor. Had she been a Dean Walker type (Promising Young Woman ref), it would have made my abject humiliation worse. But they don’t let anyone decent help employees.
They are libertarian morons who want a YouTube version of Sesame Street, Mr Blippi. They hump RetractionWatch as it only attacks publicly funded science, but has no problems with the parasitic methods of data mining giants. Any sane take on psychiatry should have rejected as a joke the notion that a hellhole in bed with Google can be expected to honestly psychiatrically evaluate anyone.
If they ever acknowledge an error (but with a trashy new product - a musical!), who gives a shit? It’s like those apologies 200 years after the people they applied to are gone.
Google or Facebook’s methods in healthcare and education, deployed at scale are grossly exploitative.
Oh no no. Ioannidis is a truth teller and contrarian! Eric Schmidt is not totally sleazy! One should attack doctors and publicly funded scientists, but sports billionaire fueled “police reform”-totally credible! Google and mental health-awesome! Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal and Facebook’s stalkerish engineers..pfffft ..paranoia…What sane woman could object to a surveillance start-up run by Andy Rubin?
I can and do self-police and RetractionWatch can go fuck itself. I always took the responsibility of publicly funded science seriously, but I owe no explanations to hyper capitalist kayfabe.
Free market bro! Everything is then politically “neutral”. In this world, you don’t have to take every damn issue up, but there is no such thing as “politically neutral”.
This was not a sudden thing. I have enough “data”, after the 2022 overturn of Roe v Wade and Trump 2.0, the humiliation of public sector workers/federal employees by those brainless parasites of DOGE, anything Trump/JD Vance/Musk/Pichai etc. I can’t do much, but I can ensure that I finish this paper and file a seriois complaint against my former employer. I don’t see how that wouldn’t net be in the interest of everything decent if I can at some point find a lawyer similar in instincts Alec Karakatsanis or Lina Khan. They are among other things legit like Yasha Levine etc as they are also “zealots” not doing stuff for power, control, money or their “brands”.
I was not exactly Che Guevara myself..I was and am lame..But I found this one job that does least harm within the constraints of the world we live in-publicly funded science.
And I was plodding away at it with my signature mediocrity, but unlike Vance at least I am aware of it. Brainless pseudo-populist, Nazi jackass. But there comes a line where you go-this is too much.
I cut my teeth in a lousy EECS dept so I am very familiar with the superficial politics and very limited understanding of science and reality resulting when economics and computer science are all you get and the concept of even “okay this worthless piece of junk makes money but does it have any fucking actual value aside from that?” eludes you.
Oh no problem! We have checks, balances and discipline! Like private virtual prisons funded by Andreessen! They even have their own (tonedeaf) musicals!
It’s why most tech or ai criticism is a fraudulent humblebrag or gate-kept drivel. Props to Ed Zitron. I left him out, but he also attacks the creeps the right way unlike the humblebrag rot.
Prior to the take over of reality by Google and Facebook etc, I faced no real racism or sexism personally even in a red state..It is not that those things didn’t exist, but this nightmarish technofascist corporatist strategy is amplifying the worst things with bandaids in place of real fixes. Vaccines aren’t enough, wet markets and factory farms should be banned. Ransomware and ai leak patches aren’t enough-these methods must go away instead of cleaning product ads being the fix. This was an insult on a scale that requires as much real pushback as a lame random can cobble together. I just have to work out the actual details of that 
. I won’t be making a career of this.
I’ll tell you more about it later - if it is good for DU and for me. I have to go offline now. Haven’t enjoyed science in forever and that’s never good. These guys’ rubbishy products are not addictive. They are just a nuisance. Ai is rubbish (at least the rot these creeps are peddling) but the muscular use of force is real. Fuck those guys.
Also, chin up..it could get better..and I am notoriously pessimistic.. Awkward group hug ..but I mean it if that counts ;-/..we are a community ..hah..
I wanted to thank you all by handle, since you have shaped my worldview and in ways I support at any rate. But I would forget someone and so I didn’t ;-/.
I had also initially written a post supporting my former colleagues, but they know or should. This isn’t really my style overall, but as you guys here get, this isn’t a normal time and it hasn’t been for at least 15 years for me and finally I have seen enough to challenge rubbish about being a crazy stoned catlady.
Thanks,
jfz9580m
Final Edit: And misogyny or at least extreme sexism. How could I forget the defining feature of the whole thing whether it is the creepy methods or anything else? Thanks to the temporary abeyance of the noise that was bogus hustle culture “feminism”, I can reclaim the label of feminist and that school is unfit to assess the mental health of anyone but some sort of tradwife-girlboss. I’ll do what I can for women’s rights, civil rights, publicly funded science and medical research by filing complaints and taking action while not eschewing any responsibilities I have. I have no quarrel with good science, but the methods must truly be up to spec and not Googley.
I owe Promising Young Woman and the Scum Manifesto for scrubbing away the taste of lean-in feminism my sleazy former school stank of. And the Scum Manifesto is satire. It has only one line on prejudice (under Prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious etc)), but I bet she cared. Don’t like clunky hasty crap to check a box about stuff that matters. Again I am posting on a site with underground in its name. Unlike my sleazy employer if I am more delicate with immigration or race, it’s because I don’t like anything that sounds mechanical and thoughtless. I myself am sick of feeling like my brain is churned by a rusty fork. My last mentor used to get a little annoyed by my looking for “theories of everything” wrt a relatively simple model system..that problem hasn’t improved once my canvas has become “how technofascists are ruining reality” but with my limited and superficial (my brand!) understanding. Anyway, it has to benefit everyone if those bastards are seriously stopped rather than more jokey predicted fallouts. I hope my mentor is in a good position because he is probably in the same position as Yan LeCun..useful to those corporate parasites who run the place, but kept on a tight leash. They really are horrible people. Anyway I must go wrap up my work.
See you guys on the other side. I am making a clean break from this lousy period of my life. I’ll only be back plus paper. I want to couple forward movement in science with the explicit decision to file allegations against Google, that school and any similar entities here like that (e.g.: that creepy guy Alex Pentland’s sleazy little surveillance industries, small creepy defense contracting cos here if any. The one sexual harasser I came across here was with such a firm and he had a Lockheed Martin contract at some point).
Thanks you guys here on DU. You were a huge help..at least I hope that cheers you up a bit as you navigate this hard time. Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.
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