About
verbalprimate is an independent publication re-launched in August 2025 by Gilda Co.
Written by and including occasional photography by John Gilda, who is a cog in the Gilda Co machine.
John worked in the technology industry in consulting, managed services, system integration for almost 30 years. He left the technology industry in 2024 disillusioned and disgusted by the surveillance economy and rapacious data thieves from Silly Con Valley. The next-new-thing consulting crews are lemming-like jumping from desperate trend to desperate trend (such as Big Data to Metaverse to AI.)
He spends time in the woods hiking and building or fixing stuff. He is a n00b learning guitar and is lucky to have a patient teacher.
He enjoys reading and his current reading list includes:
If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Thanks for your interest!
Comment Rules
- Be respectful.
- Stay on topic.
- Don’t spam.
- Don’t harass people.
- Don’t respond to posts with your own post about the posted thing. Am interested in your opinions, but this is not the place for your links.
- Will delete/ban whoever for any reason, but for the most part it’ll be because you broke the other rules, or are horrible.
- Please keep your comments to one thread. Feel free to respond to OTHER people, however.
- Thanks to Ed Zitron and Where's Your Ed At for rule ideas and a contrarian voice on AI.
Wacky World - Obtuse Perspective
Its a seemingly wacky world and am happy to share a perspective. The tag line is whistling in the dark which won out over peeing in the wind. This is the second reincarnation of verbalprimate which faded away sometime ago.
Am publishing letters to our Federal representatives because it felt like the "contact me" maze is overly opaque.
Another interest is the commodification of information and communication technology. Silly Con Valley's and its "ecosystem's" self-delusion that AI is the "next wave" is wishing and hoping.
The tech gravy train is ending and the outsized profits and venture capital gains (pump and dump) will collapse because of commodification.
Am not a Luddite but we've created tech that is less than helpful in many cases and hurtful in other cases. The princes of tech (and yes princesses are somewhat the exception) seem arrogant, over compensated, and entitled. And increasing desperate to maintain obscene wealth.
Consumerism and capitalism and growth. It is a finite system. Counting on consumerism and scale to drive perpetual growth is a flawed paradigm.
Not sure where this all goes from here but suspect we'll see some contraction that injects reality. Us little people will feel outsized pain while the bunker boyz hunker down on their boats and islands.
Old fashioned? Still believe democracy is better than authoritarianism. Also believe that when push comes to shove enough people will do the right thing for each other for the species to remain human and humane.
© 2025 Gilda Co