I used to work in a waffle shop,
now I just waffle.

Welcome to my website!

My name is Umberto Schramm and I’m a writer, journalist in training and author of the non-fiction book The Happy Prisoner.

Apart from prison reform, four topics that interest me in particular and that I see as our greatest current societal challenges are:

• The rise of the far right and normalisation of racism

The goal of figures like Elon Musk, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Stephen Lennon aka Tommy Robinson is to make racism and the discrimination of minorities to be acceptable and commonplace in society.

Their ideal society involves abolishing human rights and equality, freedom of speech, the free press, an independent judiciary and the rule of law, as well as rejecting the principles of science and the existence of an objective truth.
And they are winning: A wave of support for hard- right views is sweeping across the Western World.

In Germany, less than a century after the worst atrocities in human history committed under the Nazi regime, nearly a third of the population according to some recent polls want the fascist AfD, led by Hitler- admirers, to form the next government. This is not just unbelievable, utterly shocking and extremely worrying; it is also the normalisation of what would been seen as disgusting and unacceptable in German society just a decade ago. I’m hearing more and more Germans – even friends and family- defend and minimise the AfD, claiming they’re not actually as extreme and dangerous as they are, which makes me feel like I’m in some strange Twilight Zone.

In the UK, leading politicians of the Conservative party are openly expressing xenophobic lies that would have once been the reserve of the British National Party. And they do so without shame and receive little backlash from the media and the public.

In a recent poll, 36% of the British public have stated that they consider only those born in Britain truly British. This in practice means that if you move to the UK, regardless of how well you integrate and how long you live here, you can never be fully accepted as British. This is not just deeply hurtful and damaging to community cohesion; it also makes millions of people who make this country great unwelcome. It also completely ignores the fact that absolutely nobody is originally from Britain – all humans are originally from Africa if you want to be precise.
The fact that just two years ago 81% of people stated that being British meant more than just being born here, shows how much of a negative influence the rise of extreme right has on public opinion and on society.

The reasons why people drift to the far right are complex but ultimately boil down to the same problem everywhere: Life is getting worse and harder for 99% of us. We have to work harder in order to afford less. Whereas once a full-time job guaranteed a certain standard of living, this is not the case anymore. People feel (rightly) let down by the main parties, who have overseen this drop in living standards over the last few decades.

The tragedy is then that the parties that voters flock to out of protest will make things considerably worse. The reason all our lives are getting worse is because of unprecedented wealth inequality (see below). There is plenty of money – more than ever- the problem is just that it is more and more concentrated in the hands of the 0.5% richest, at the expense of public finances and everyone else.

Voting for hard- right parties, rather than being the solution to people’s problems, will make things considerably worse. Farage in the UK – backed by billionaire donors- would further cut taxes for the richest, whilst cutting public spending, benefits and trying to dismantle the NHS. Trump with this Big Disgraceful Bill, is giving ever more tax cuts to multi-billionaires, whilst making the lives of millions of lower-income Americans worse by cutting access to Medicaid, food banks and other benefits.  To further understand what drives people to support the far right and what can be done against this worrying trend, the work of Hope Not Hate is invaluable. Have a look at my review of Nick Lowle’s book: “How to Defeat the Far Right”.

• The deceitful promise of AI and increasing influence of the tech oligarchy

“I can do evil shit today because the future that I’m imagining will be so wonderful.”

We are being fed the lie that AI will be the solution to all our problems. All we have to do is to give more money and power to tech companies like OpenAI and we’re on the way to a wonderful utopia where all the miniscule problems of the present such as environmental destruction, global heating, poverty, famine, disease, endless wars, you name it; will fade away.

But wait, there is of course the alignment problem: What if this AI becomes so powerful – and isn’t actually aligned with human interests and morals – that it will see humanity as a cancer and destroy it for the betterment of the planet (or its own advancement) in a scenario well known to everyone from sci-fi stories such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

The solution to this entirely fictional problem would of course NOT BE to stop all development of AI. No, it would be to monitor and control all ‘dangerous and bad’ agents of AI whilst trusting the ‘good guys’ to solve the problem for humanity by giving them more influence and power.

And who would these ‘good guys’ be? You guessed it correctly; they’re the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans of the world, the saviours of mankind.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the development of AI is causing some actually existing problems. There’s the environmental footprint and enormous water usage of massive data centres that are being built everywhere. The loss of jobs – especially entry-level jobs- being replaced by AI, as well as the enshittification of the work place as companies think they can get away with hiring fewer people and paying them less for the same amount of work. The ultimate goal for many companies of using AI is to replace as many workers as possible and thereby increase profits whilst reducing costs (and the nuisance of having to deal with such things as workers’ rights).
The large scale plagiarism of artistic and intellectual property used to train AI models. Artists are being made redundant by the very programs that have stolen their work in the first place.
Apart from that there is the systemic gender and racial bias baked into these algorithms, leading to disastrous consequences for minorites in criminal justice or evn healthcare where these programs are applied. (As an example, facial recognition software is vastly more inaccurate identifying black faces compared to white ones.)

And then there is the fact that the only thing that makes the LLM models already developed even remotely economical (even though they lose vast sums of money) is the large-scale exploitation of workers from poor countries, mostly in Africa, where people are paid a dollar an hour or less to train models or to moderate content, often resulting in significant trauma and lasting damage to mental health.
In rich countries, however, people seem to put a bizarre amount of trust into programs like ChatGPT and use them as confidante, therapist or doctor, often with disastrous consequences to mental health that can lead as far as suicide.

We’ve already seen the devastating impact that social media has had on the health on a whole generation of young people and we will see the same with programs such as ChatGPT.

But of course, all these issues are miniscule, inconsequential bumps on the road that will be all worth it once AI has ushered in a new paradise on Earth and magically eliminated all these problems.
 

We have to call out this bullshit and expose people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman for what they really are: Megalomaniacs who have no interest in anything other than their own advancement.
Elon Musk only wants to save humanity if he is the one who can be our saviour and lead us to Mars. If it can’t be him, then he’d rather we go to hell. 

To understand how the utter crackpot ideas of the tech elite – all lovingly summarised in the acronym TESCREAL – came to dominate the world, read my article or my review of: “More Everything Forever” by Adam Becker.

• Unprecedented wealth inequality and resulting erosion of democracy