I actually think AI is fun and good. It’s just that if we don’t solve the problems it’s not worth it (if the problems will destroy us all).
It’s like cars. I oppose cars but I actually love riding in the shotgun seat on the open road bopping to that hecking song that goes “and all that I can see is just another lemon tree”. Yeah, yeah, I get motion sick on small bumpy country roads but being in transit, being on the way between places, feels good somehow. And that joy of course pales in comparison to all the good cars do, what they enable, all the problems that cars solved.
It’s just… We only have one planet and so many ways to mess it up.
Humans, like other eusocial species, have a tendency to create systems and structures larger than themselves. We create these runaway processes like whoops we invented the stock market (or it emerged, rather) and now corporations sort of kinda metaphorically are alive and are trying to kill us. So not only are direct fossil extraction and burnination bad, other runaway systems are also risky AF because look at where we are with these billionaires and corrupt policy processes. Yeah, yeah, maybe the solution will also come in the form of a runaway process but let’s make sure we fix the problems before we wreck ourselves here.
People (including me) make fun of young Earth creationism (that has got to be an exonym, right? Because whaddayamean “young” when in their world view the Earth is literally the oldest thing that exists) but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how even though the actual Earth is super old and it’s in a universe that’s even older, and hominids like us have existed for many hundred thousands of years, the world of writing is actually pretty young. Only a few thousand years.
We’ve managed to destroy the planet in an embarrassingly short time. That to me really goes to show that we’re doing something fundamentally wrong and that wrong thing is called fossil fuels so leave it in the ground. And our entire protcol for resource and task distribution thrives on exploitation loops widening wealth gaps and destroying the environment in many ways.
I’m writing this a few years before Bitcoin’s twentieth anniversary as one of humanity’s biggest mistakes.
Bitcoin is three things:
I’ll try to be brief on why the token thing is bad.
Y’all know I think a post-scarcity, pay-it-forward mindset can be explosively productive in the digital world. Sharing is caring. Introducing a limited, scarce resource—whether it’s an artificially created one or not—into that mix does a lot more harm than good.
The blockchain ledger exists just to enforce the contracts that emulate those money-like tokens. That is why the ledger was invented and the tokens named the project.
Money is bad and I’ve spent the past twenty-five years arguing against market capitalism. The tokens share all the drawbacks of money and add a whole bunch of new ones.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that either you actually like the token thing, and/or that you’ve found other valuable uses for the ledger, so we can get into where Bitcoin really messed up:
The ledger is built on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. If you’re an Xennial like me you’re thinking “that’s awesome! P2p is great!” with fond memories of things like BitTorrent. Hold your horses for three seconds because BitTorrent becomes better the more reciprocators are connected. That’s actually a problem that PeerTube is struggling with; that so many of the clients and federation approaches don’t connect to the WebTorrent part of it and just hotlink the upstream copy of the video, leaving the servers overloaded.
Bitcoin’s not like that. Bitcoin becomes worse the more people are connected. So much worse. It provides the same block rate and transaction speed whether the entire network ran off one dinky li’l pocket computer as it does now when it’s over 70000 nodes, but the more nodes that connect and “help”, the more energy the whole thing uses.
Because they’re not helping, they’re competing. Instead of just making the network more resilient or better, they are racing each other, distrusting each other. The pool that burns the most gets the most rewards.
I know that humanity has a long history of creating systems that reward and exacerbate greed and injustice but this one is a doozy.
Other proof-of-work schemes like the “hashcash” anti-spam proposal and the new “Anubis” website blockers are really bad and I hate them (it’s not fun when my dinky li’l e-reader hangs for five rapidly battery-draining minutes just because I wanna look up a Dominion game card. If you wanna put a penalty or payment for connecting I’m not stoked that that payment is going directly down the drain. It’s like putting a toll sign on a bridge saying “burn a dollar bill in front of the camera in order to pass the bridge”) but at least they have constant difficulty rates that are manually settable by admins. Bitcoin’s difficulty scale is managed by a computer (and increases automatically so that the block rate is constant) which has led to it increasing to 150 trillions times higher.
“It’s not waste, it’s worth it because of the benef—” It is waste. It’s a penalty for participating. It’s a deliberate deterrent as an attempt to mitigate the “Sybil” attack (the risk of someone starting a bunch of extra nodes to overwhelm the network in order to falsify transactions). So in the infinite unwisdom of Bitcoin’s founders, they put in both a deterrent for participating (the recklessly limitlessly scaling “proof-of-work” hashing) and a reward for participating (the “mining” rewards that will be gradually metered out for over a hundred years, if there’s still a civilization then).
So in our “burn a dollar on camera in order to pass the bridge example from earlier, it’s like if on the other side of that dollar-burning-bridge there’s a two-dollar-payout. So lots of money burnery in order to make money. Destructivity that the clumsy invisible hand of the market can’t distinguish from productivity so it runs amok. Instead of creating good and useful products or services it’s pure destruction (repeating myself a bit but the purported “benefits” aren’t increased).
Except it’s even worse than the dollar-burning-bridge for two reasons. First is that instead of one dollar vs two dollars, it’s about 70 k on either side of the equation (margins are pretty tight—that’s how economics work) so it’s a rich man’s game, and the second reason is that dollar burning was an environmental disaster. It’s as if it was a poison dollar that killed birds and even humans as it burned because energy externalities is an unsolved and urgent problem.
“But (setting aside that almost half of it is dirty energy), when we use renewables, it’s making use of extra energy during peak hou—” It’d actually be less bad if that extra energy from solar and wind were wasted than it going into Bitcoin’s ASIC e-waste poison mill because you’re not helping by mining. You’re only increasing the difficulty scale for those dirty coal-fueled Bitcoin miners out there.
Bitcoin is a runaway train, a headless constrictor, a gray goo apocalypse, and it’s incredibly difficult to fight. Some approaches to stop it involve regulating energy externalities (which we need to do anyway in order to stop climate change) or tanking the value of BTC by making it harder to interface it with other goods and currencies.
The other day, someone told me that “Discord is a good product”. And I’m grateful for that phrasing because it helps me explain why I’m having such a cow about Discord.
Because it’s not a good product. The worst part about it is how mandatory it is. As an analogy, let’s take some soda… what’s a really gross one? Pepsi? Pepsi has a lot of problems but it would be a heck of a lot worse if it was a “mandatory” product. If everytime you went past a grocery store you would loose all control over your hand and it’d drag you into the store and grab a bottle and you’d physically be forced to get it, even though you have water at home—or you’ll lose your friends or not be able to access product support or an event or even in some cases housing.
While normal, free, common-sense alternatives like email, IRC, XMPP and Fediverse are “products” in some senses of the word (they are produced things that exist and you can use them; and this goes extra for commercial but FOSS-friendly forums like Discourse or Vanilla), they’re products the same way breathable air is a product. If someone were to take away your lungs in order to sell you bottled oxygen that’d not be a product I’d be a happy customer of. I might be buying but I’d be pretty sad about what they took away.
In one way it’s even worse than heroin—not in all or even most ways, and not to make light of the opiate crisis, (stay in school, kids!) but with dope there’s at least multiple vendors.
That’s what Discord did. We have free ways to talk to each other, but they made a way that they own.
With Discord you have to make an account with this one company.
There are no other “products” like this, “mandatory” products, outside of the internet. It’s even illegal. Antitrust laws date back to the Roman Empire. But we tolerate it online for some reason (and that reason is that we have to because it’s mandatory).
You might’ve heard this slogan before, but with Discord’s business model, “you are the product”. We’ve known about this stuff since 1973 but people still get sucked in (because they have to).
While the people who participate in a forum on Discord don’t have much of a choice, the people who start the forums do. If you are a community organizer, don’t choose Discord. At least not only Discord. The normal, classic internet tools like email, IRC, Fediverse or XMPP still exist.
And if you’re a lawmaker, a policy-maker, it’s time for you to step up.
I get this a lot from people who have a bad client for email or IRC or XMPP or whatever it might be. Yes, there are bad ones. But there are also good ones.
There are situations where the word “NIMBY” applies. It’s short for “Not in my backyard”, like someone might think needle exchanges and refugee housing are great but don’t want them in their own neighborhoods (FWIW, I used to live in a neighborhood that had both and it was great). When something is good for everyone including the people who live there but the people who live there are squeamish for bad-faith reasons, NIMBY has been a pretty appropriate slag on them.
But it can also be completely misapplied. If the Galactic Empire wants to excavate your entire planet to death in search of kalkite for its Death Star, and you protest that, it’s not really fair to trot out the old “NIMBY” slag as you’re under the boot.
I’m not saying I know all the ins and out of each situation. I was pretty surprised when Thunberg protested a wind power installation—I thought wind power was good?—but I’m not fully read up so I’ll hold off on coming to a conclusion on that. Similarly, lots of communities here have been protesting uranium mining. Since I’m pretty sure nuclear isn’t the solution we’re looking for, I’m leaning in their favor even more than the wind power thing.
To my surprise, an acquaintance of mine said something like “Oh, what NIMBYs they are!” and it made my jaw drop. “Calling NIMBY” seemed like fair game as long as it was between peers. Like “Oh, stop being such a NIMBY, we both live in this neighborhood and I think we should shoulder this responsibility for good the entire city” or, at the very least, although distantly second-tier, something like “Oh, stop being such a NIMBY, we both live in equivalent neighborhoods and if my neighborhood had been selected to have to have the garbage burning plant, I would’ve gladly said yes, it’s my duty for our city”. (Bringing to mind the old “two cows” joke: “If you had two farms would you give one of them up for the motherland?” “Yes, of course!” “And if you had two cows?” “…” “Why do you hesitate?” “Because I have two cows!”)
But if I’m part of the oppressor/exploiter class, there’s no way I’m gonna call someone under my boot “a NIMBY”! That’s one thousand percent impolite and inappropes!
Now, I know I usually like to zoom out and take the holistic “whole-forest-rather-than-a-single-leaf” approach in these essays so I’d better call out that this time, I’m not doing that. This isn’t me making a final judgment call on the whole “uranium mining yes or no” situation. I’m leaning no on nuclear, it’s just a really inefficient and destructive non-solution as far as I can tell, but the fossil-burning situation is a desperately urgent emergency and if we doom the whole in quest of preserving every part, all parts will die anyway. So a lean no on the uranium thing but a decisive no on the whole NIMBY shaming of these folks. That was strong “let them eat cake” vibes as you sat in your palace fueled by what they had and your class took from them.
Let’s say a land wanted to make burglary illegal. They notice that a lot of people who do breaking and entering wear shoes when doing so. So they make wearing shoes illegal.
That’s sort of how many EU laws are.
I’m getting a li’l frustrated with how my particular headphones and DAC and app combo I can’t hear anything except at the highest volumes. But every once in a while the audio will cut out entirely and I have to fish out the LP3 from deep inside the bag and fiddle with the volumes and up pops the legally mandated volume warning dialog. This is really frustrating and also pretty dangerous if it happens when I’m outside. I don’t want to stop and fiddle with this stuff on the sidewalk or an escalator. I get that it’s well-intentioned to not have people blast their own ears off but the phone can’t know the decibels from a particular DAC/headphone combo so this isn’t really a vector of regulation that works in real life.
There’s also the whole “Do you love cookies? yes/sure/yep/legitimate/accept” click maze on websites. They should’ve made tracking ads illegal instead. This is an even better example than the headphone thing since here they didn’t even criminalize the end. It’s as if in the burglary analogy, they only criminalized the shoes, not the actual theft.
This is also the problem with “Chat Control”. Unlike some very frustrating and self-foot-shooting and frankly gross and horrific anti-Chat-Control ad campaigns here in Sweden, I don’t have a problem with the EU going after abusers. I’m glad that those ends are criminalized. CSAM is actually bad as much as that might come as news to some. I only have a problem with how they do it, by undermining all e2ee which is only enforcable through super dubious methods.
Sweden disastrously had the biggest year-over-year CO₂E emissions increase since 1990 as a direct and immediate consequence of our elected government’s policies—it’s proven that their diesel pricing was the culprit. When people tell me “We’re such a tiny country, we don’t need to do anything” that’s so wrong because:
“Everyone aboard the boat needs to stop drilling holes in the hull” “Okay but we the shuffleboard club isn’t gonna stop because we’re just one eighth of a percent of all the passengers on this boat and we’ve seen other people drilling too! 🎼🎵 Drill drill drill 🎶” “But you’re among the ones drilling the most! Not as much as the dining club and you’re not as numerous as the dance club but– wait, what, you’re increasing your drilling in the middle of this conversation!?” “🎵 Drill drill drill 🎶”
On a fundamental level the designation of this group as “the shuffleboard club” is arbitrary. We went and talked to someone in the dance club who was a real drillmaniac and she said “uhm we with shoesize 37.293 doesn’t need to stop drilling, we’re just one percent of a percent of the passengers, why are you going after us shoesize 37.293 folks? It doesn’t matter what we do, we are so few”.
There is a “clever” personality type, I’ve had several in my life, that become more susceptible to propaganda and myths when they are presented as some kind of secret insider knowledge or a way to get a leg up on what the general public knows.
Like our climate discussion group in my old hometown fell apart when one of the more driving members suddenly switched overnight to the “well actually it’s not gonna be a problem because peak oil is coming soon and that’s gonna be a bigger problem” myth. That was 20 years ago and no, climate change by far was the way bigger driver of calamities during those two decades. Keeeping his focus on that would’ve been much more important and saved more lives and also the solution to climate change includes leaving it in the ground which includes becoming less oil-dependent which also addresses peak oil automatically whereas the peak oil hysteria didn’t come with a solution beyond sky-is-falling hysteria fueling a carter-doctrine style “oil interests” panic grab at immense cost in human lives.
When a lie is being presented as an obvious truth, it can still fool a lot of folks. But to a certain “clever” kind of personality, a lie that’s presented as a secret truth becomes much more convincing. When it’s wrapped in “well actually” trivia. When it’s “if you memorize this fact you’ll know something most people don’t know”, that becomes tasty to them even when that fact is an outright lie.
It’s disheartening that a lot of the things we get (rightly!) upset about in US politics we are just numb to and cowed under when it happens here in Sweden. ICE raids, shutdowns of BLM protests, profiled stop-and-frisk, political leaders mocking climate activists, fossil lobbying, deforestation, ocean exploitation and pollution, abuse of indigenous groups, propping up tyrannical and genocidal regimes abroad, union busting, increasing poverty, worsening wealth gaps, climate recklessness, fossil industry subsidies, factory farms, segregationist politics, huge military industrial complex, overfull prisons, racist “fair and balanced” right-wing media, and an appified society propping up the network effect overlords.
S, the biggest party on the so-called left has long been fiscally blairite; unwilling to undo the ratchet effect horrors of the fiscally thatcherite right. Selling out what we had built together. Now as the right wing (currently in charge but slightly behind in the polls ahead of the 2026 election) is taking a speedrun into racism, they’re eager to dive right in on that. When the stop&frisk “zones” were first introduced there was some mild oh-no-that’s-wrong naysaying from S which quickly shifted to a “we would’ve made the zones even bigger and crueler” song you could barely make out for the proverbial bloom in their mouths.
That’s not to say I suggest voting for the right wing block as if they were a lesser evil version of themselves. That’s an illusion created by S’ eagerness to get dragged all the way through the Overton window. But ultimately the villains doing that dragging are the right-wing parties and they’ll go even further if they get reelected.
Arguably a lot of the problem rests with the electorate, with the general public. Media has a big responsibility there. People have long been subject to racist flimflam and climate downplaying and self-righteous hypocritical nationbuilding. Things that are absolutely hecked up mad world have been normalized.
Last night I dreamed that I traveled far and wide through many distant lands. What did I see there? A scientist named Professor Meme and his friend, who went by Joe or Jake or if it was Robert—you know how dreams can get fuzzy—and their buddies, a couple of clown comics of yesteryear.
They explained to me that “Everyone in this land is sorted into one of two categories. Evans, who have an even number of teeth (usually 28, 30, or 32), and Prims, who have a prime number of teeth (usually 29 or 31).
Evans have higher salaries and love vanilla and comedy and yellow clothes. Prims do all the housework and love chocolate and drama and orange clothes.”
Through the life-changing magic of dreams I had been granted the super power of “vector space analysis” (which is how I knew it was a dream because in real life I can’t do those things) so I traversed their realm and saw that yeah, for the most part, those traits did cluster together. Usually. But there were plenty of chocolate lovers who told me in confidence that they wouldn’t mind a good comedy every once in a while. And the whole thing about lower salaries turned out to be a pretty big point of contention! There were a lot of traditionally-minded folks clad in orange who said they were glad to do the housework, they were better at it than their yellow-draped companion who always left the butter out anyway and broke plates.
Because yes. Prims and Evans were usually paired up in constellations of one of each. That had actually been the largest political issue of all time just one generation ago; whether two Prims could shack up together, or an Evan with an Evan. And why always groups of two? That’s what you get with dream logic… I found a trove of old newspaper articles that proclaimed the collapse of society if two Evans were to partner up, and to vote for the Traditional Constellation Party that would protect everyone from that (the same party that incidentally also wanted to steal from the poor and give to the rich) or the proverbial sky would fall.
That battle had been lost and in some areas of the land I did meet some Orange+Orange couples and some Yellow+Yellow ones too.
Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert didn’t seem to mind that as much as they were fighting a “new” menace: people who didn’t neatly fit in these two categories.
Actually… talking to them about it was quite confusing in that dream way where things tend to shift and morph, because when I said that the salary/housework thing seemed a little unfair, they said “of course! We fight for the rights of Prims, and these reactionary category straddlers are muddying that issue with their performative housework and parodic chocolate-gobbling. It’s disgusting!” In all my stay in this faraway land I never saw them actually talk about the rights of the Prims; in fact, time and again I saw them side with factions that wanted to constrain Prims even further, even lower salaries for Prims, even more housework. “Don’t you see?” they said angrily. “We’re prioritizing their right to even be a Prim. Isn’t that the most fundamental of all Prim rights? And now all of a sudden it’s under attack after being completely static throughout history.” (I actually saw in museums there that a couple of hundred years ago, everyone was wearing orange regardless of which ice-cream flavor they were eating. I also saw that the vanilla-eaters were all strictly wearing velcro shoes and all the chocolate-eaters were strictly wearing laced shoes, and I saw that when the first chocolate-eaters had dared to put on velcros just a few decades prior, they had been fined and jailed, but these days I saw all kinds of people—including Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert—wearing velcro shoes with completely no reaction from anyone because it was completely normal now. But each younger generation thinks they’re the epitome of punk and each older generation thinks they’re the sentinels of eternity.)
There were three kinds of people that this duo and their clown comic hangers-on hated. The first were those who blurred the lines. A vanilla-eater who loved drama. A comedy watcher clad in orange. This was the worst thing. “No! No! You’ve got to stick to your tooth-given lane!”
The other kind where those who sought (or provided) dental care. Pulling of wisdom teeth, dentures, fixing cavities, repairing crowns. People who had after dental care ended up with a different quantity and/or quality of teeth, and reregistered as such in the National Dentist Registry and applied for a new passport. This was also the worst thing. Whether or not they then sought to associate with the traits associated with their new dental parity group or not. Dental care was called “mutilation” and “grooming” and several laws were on the docket to outlaw it.
So one of the most confusing parts of the dream was how they hated the some of the “cluster transgressors” for being too visible and they’d yell “we can always tell”. They hated others for being too invisible and they’d yell “stop confusing us, put on your orange clothes, you’re being deceitful”. There was no winning with them. You’d think sticking rigidly to a thin line between these two ends would’ve made them happy but those who tried that ended up getting both kinds of hate since those hatreds overlapped by quite a margin.
Looking back through the history of the land had told me that while
conflicts between the orange-clad and yellow-draped had been an issue
for ten thousand years, this latest batch of category-separation
hysteria had started out as quite a minority, an issue only a few
people had known about or cared about.
That’s when they came up with their stroke of genius:
Sports.
They brought up how in some sports like championship flossing, the 300-yard brush stroke, and pie eating contests, different teeth were likely to perform differently, and they then generalized that to all sports like long-distance running or Omaha hold’em. And this did become popular! Even the emperor of the land would as a complete non-sequitur bring up how ridiculous he thought the idea was of an Evan participating in the Prim sports category. Of course, this emperor was a strong proponent of the steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich politics that the dental parity traditionalists like Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert had sided with so he saw a chance to make hay while the sun shone.
And what started in sports soon extended to all facets of society. Going to the restaurant, going to the grocery store, even going to the powder room! Leaving your apartment in any way would induce scrutiny and accusations and paranoia, for everyone. All for the greater good of the Olympics!
This sudden sports-mania ushered in a new law: you shall be categorized as Prim or Evan at birth. I know, I know, babies don’t have teeth. And neither do old people. That’s just how crazy this dream was! The doctors (the few remaining doctors, since dental care was under legal attack) would just take their best guess. And that was the parity category you would stick to for the rest of your entire life. Problem solved easily and perfectly.
That created a third kind of people for our diligent duo to hate on. For example, there was a boxer… or maybe it was a runner. The doctors had categorized them as Prim at birth. Which they were happy with. They loved orange. They loved chocolate. They loved drama. All was well. Until they won. Didn’t their mouth look kind of even on TV? Something about the cheeks, the way they moved… an invasive dental counting procedure was promptly ordered and it turned out they had… I forget if they had two teeth (both prime and even) or 27 teeth (neither prime nor even) but out came the hate, long before the mouthcount. That’s how it was in this land. They hate you if you transgress your medically assigned dental parity cluster and they hate you if you stick to it. They hated everyone until there was no-one left and darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
You see, they were scientific and rational.
And in their rationality and science-mindedness, they had come up with all manners of slags and mocking names to apply to everyone who didn’t stick to their lane. “Oh, so you’re stick-to-your-laners?” I asked, and they boiled over with anger. “How dare you utter such a slur?!” they screamed, “We’re just normal people!”
After a few years of this, they came up with the term “cluster-critical” for themselves. I thought that didn’t make any sense. Weren’t they the ones who were more strongly than anyone else trying to really enshrine these societal clusters of traits into two immutable granite-carved groups, and erase all outliers and overlappers? How is that being cluster-critical? They slapped me with a splintered ruler and said “You dolt! You clod!” and explained that the whole idea of speaking more generally about the two groups as being mere “clusters of traits” was “propaganda of the cluster movement” which they opposed, which they saw as denying the biological tooth of dental parity, denying how almost everyone has either an even amount of teeth or a prime amount of teeth. How that’s a natural fact. (Question marks on how that 27-denying factoid, even if it had been true, would apply to ice cream flavors, clothes color, or TV genres.)
I asked them if is this what they spent all their time fighting about? What about climate change? It has already killed millions of people. They just looked at me stubbornly, and started to explain, once more, from the top, something about the delicate flavors of vanilla.
You would think that in this land, everything would’ve been teeth-forward. Everything would’ve been all teeth teeth teeth on billboards and t-shirts and mugs. But actually no. Teeth were a very private thing and had been so throughout the ages. Ogling teeth was considered vulgar, and was sometimes done in an exploitative way. You’d see a poster with teeth in a workshop or a pair of rubber dentures hanging off the back of a truck, for shock value, but normally people covered their mouths when they ate. When a movie scene featured bare teeth, usually a “tooth stunt double” subbed in for the actor, or dentures were worn. Asking each other about their teeth was a big taboo.
Under a mossy stone in the deep, dark wood, I found a file showing that before they came up with this teeth-counting business, they had been counting people’s nose hairs. Everything had been all about the nose hairs. Until they discovered that the teeth thing had a three percent stronger correlation with the socially created cluster roles.
So if you’ve ever wondered why some wear yellow and others wear orange, now you know.
I saw a docu about a nun who’d spent 25 years in a Carmel cloister. Which for Sweden is unusual. Obv I was fishing for info about digital minimalism but the docu didn’t deliver what I wanted in that regard. She says at one point “We don’t have radio, TV, or newspapers, and we use internet very sparingly”. I was like “Internet?! Deets please! Exactly how many times a day do you refresh Antenna or sync your newsgroups? What’s your IRC bouncer, how’s your milter pipeline?” to no avail.
And while for her that’s a 25-years-and-counting journey, for the lady next to me in the theatre even the 100 min runtime was too long to forgo checking socials apparently. I don’t blame her; that’s just a sign of how addictive these apps actually are. (Okay, I do blame her a little but I try not to.)
So while the movie was slim pickings for my monomaniacal obsession with offline living (which for me has become increasingly theoretical since I got tablets to suck me back online after switching to dumbphone eight years ago), the devotional side of it was more rewarding. I love “The Interior Castle” and have read it a couple of times. But at the same time these are the folks (and her fam def belonged to the most reactionary faction) that fight against reproductive autonomy and affirming care—not just for themselves but in legislative chambers around the world. That subtext stayed sub, glossed over, unexamined in this film. Overall a worthwhile watch if you can complement it with your own political awareness and ability to recognize efforts to bind the outgroup.
coffeetree: the chatbot paradigm is literally an infinite feed
baconlad: hard disagree on this. Its not feeding you content.
coffeetree: That’s like saying “I only use this one tiny feature of Facebook, and no other features, and no other platforms, and I handle that paradigm just fine.”
And some people do say that. I think both sides are right here in that yes it is a useful tool and you get to avoid a lot of the bad parts of the web, but also, it is addictive and like how many silo social media sites it adapts to you to keep you hooked, and also, the environmental and economic impact is huge. The increased wealth gaps and increased concentration of ownership of means of production is an undeniable ginormous downside of the current slate of LLM and ANN tech. Our economy was already a broken buggy system even before the gigaton wrench thrown into it by ML. 😭
They in some very real semiotic senses are different, yes. But the similarites are that they are these huge data center machines that take all the input from what people post online and chew it up and push it back to you in a way that they control and can profit from. AI is in someways even worse, an even more purely distilled version of the idea of The Algorithm.
Now, that’s social media in the sense of algorithmic silo socials like TikTok, X, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and similar. Not all social media is algorithmic (Discord isn’t, although it is a silo) nor is all social media even silos; email and fedi are examples of non-silo socials.
And by “algorithm” we mean specifically recommendation/discovery algorithm; obviously all computer stuff uses running code i.e. “algorithms” in a much broader and gentler sense. Even a 1980s BBS “had algorithm” since it used computer programs to work but in a more specific sense of “algorithm”, we mean the reco engine. The hideous world-wrecking reco engine. And AI chatbots keep that part, the bad part. They just remove the part of it that were your friends.
The comparison of “chatbot as the ultimate social media feed” (in a negative sense) is stretched but insightful and I appreciated it.
That said, one very real difference is that while there is some amount of vendor lock-in, it doesn’t hold your friendships hostage the way silo socials do.
Gerrymandering is a fancy word for redrawing the voting districts in your favor.
In “area control” board games (games where you win a region by having the most representation there, and you win the game by winning most regions) the tension is usually to not overcommit where you are already winning and to recognize where you’re definitively gonna lose and don’t commit anything there. By conserving your resources in those two ways you can win as many regions as possible.
Through gerrymandering, political elections can be won this way. You create many regions where you’re either juuuust winning (but unambiguously winning) by also creating a few regions where you get totally clobbered, making your opponents wastefully overconcentrated in those regions.
Now, political representation isn’t meant to be a game, let alone one that can be cheated this way, so gerrymandering is rightly seen as a problem.
It makes me want to change the system entirely so that representation isn’t as geographic. A lot of issues in modern politics are based on other types of divides. So that’s the promised titular solution: just don’t have the game work this way. Now, exactly how to set it up instead so that representation isn’t based on these manipulative group sizes is another issue entirely. But here in Sweden we don’t have gerrymandering. If I vote green that vote is gonna be good for green no matter where I live.
That’s also because we have proportional representation but even in a one-winner-takes-all system there’s not really a reason why in this day and age not to aggregate vote results in a more fine-grained way.
So if the question is “how do we draw the districts in a fair way” maybe the better answer is to zoom out and change the system to one that’s not as sensitive to that.
Virtue signaling is great actually.
Clearly communicating our values can prevent a lot of grief and help stand up for what’s right.
Early on before I started writing more explicitly about politics I got a couple of “I love your blog but why don’t you write more about the supremacy of the Aryan Race?” and I’m like oh no, down the line something went wrong and I’d better make it more clear how I feel about the world and why. Everyone is welcome to read and since I have a lot of opinions on everything, some of them wrong, I don’t expect anyone to agree on everything but if I can make someone see the world a li’l differently that’s great.
In discourse lately I’m seeing a gap where on the one hand we have straight up apology for evil, excuses for abuse, for sexism, for racism, and DARVO attacks on “woke” and on “virtue signaling”. On the opposing hand we have self-proclaimed saints who have never (or at least never since they proverbially woke up) had a kyriarchal or jealous or problematic thought or notion. And when these saints fall they fall very far and very fast.
What’s missing is a way to cultivate awareness of our shortcomings and in order to better ourselves. I’d trust “I sometimes have racist thoughts that I try to catch and see through and examine and not get fooled by” over either “I’ve never been problematic (or I haven’t since I became a born-again intersectional feminist)” or, worse, “here’s a 39 chapter book on why racism is good actually and anything else is virtue signaling woketry”.
The former camp, intersectional social justice, y’all know I love you and this isn’t a slag on you but what I wanna add to that worldview is a bit of solution-orientedness and awareness practice. I have thought, said, and even done things I would wanna cancel myself over but treating each other right is a process.
I think this one example of this that’s easy to understand just for how ridiculous it is, is how sometimes new vegans can forget how up until three months ago they themselves were among the meat-eaters they now attack.
We’ve all been there, so I don’t blame them, it’s just illustrative of how sometimes it’s so easy to see the motes in our fellow humans’ eyes while we ourselves are so deep in timberland we don’t even notice the forest.
That’s not an apology for bad things; it’s a reveille against bad things, against the bad things in us all.
Shaun’s Palestine video from 1½ years ago encapsulates one of the best arguments against digital minimalism.
Evil foreign policy and arms shipments (along with climate denial and queerphobia) can go unchecked in a world where we just suddenly take away all phones without building other communication networks and approaches.
I could thrive as a phone-hater because when I walked away from phone it was after setting up other robust forms of communication:
So yes, throw away your glowyglowy but be careful about taking it away from others before they’ve set up another way of living.
Even then, to say I was “thriving” phoneless is an exaggeration because I quickly got pretty isolated when the pandemic first hit and slowly rebuilding a life has been pretty hard and some of the tools to fix that have been digital.
In hacking there’s this idea of “bootstraps” from the old joke about how you can’t lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your bootstrap. For example, if you wanna build a new OS, you’re working on an existing OS while you’re doing that, and if you’re making a new language compiler, you’re using an existing language compiler to do that usually.
Same goes for building a meaningful offline life.
So my version of the Omelas story would have a city, not especially utopian but comfy enough for the top sixth or so. The other five sixths are working their knuckles to the bone to support the comfy ones. Even among the comfy ones the wealth gaps are intense with one guy having many times as the others combined and then similar ratios all the way down to the edge of comfort.
And then in the story it’s revealed that even this level of comfort is fueled by a big old machine under the city that eats time, that warps into the future versions of the city, and eats their comfort and sends it back here. And disproportionately so, like, to have one day of comfort in the here and now, it’ll eat three days of comfort off the end of the calendar. And it’s been eating and it’s been eating and it’s been eating. It started at the edge of the calendar and it’s been getting closer and closer to the present day. And accelerating at a pace that’s faster than even the doomsaying eggheads originally warned us about. Jor-El stumbling out of bed with one slipper on and a piece of toast in his mouth.
The “walking away from” part of this story would be bittersweet as heck because even those who did walk away and tried to build a new village together without the comfort machine, they’d lay awake in their beds at night knowing that the gnawing thresher over in the Comfort City was still running at faster and faster speeds.
So that’s why my politics are never going to be popular. Everyone’s quality-of-life would decrease since we’d turn off that comfort machine. Gradually but it could’ve been a heck of a lot more gradual if we had started the shutdown process a lot earlier. And maybe the quality-of-life decrease would be set up so that Mr. super comfy eloi Lex Luthor at the top would see the biggest hit. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires would sober up.
This is also why fixing the climate shouldn’t be a thing we vote on. People aren’t gonna vote for it because it’s gonna suck for them. It just is. But we’ve got to do it.
I really oppose market capitalism and it’s up to its defenders to patch the bugs, for example by acquiescing to environmental regulation (like an ETS) and labor laws. And I’ve proposed banning the network effect and ending copyright.
Of course, there are those who want to replace market capitalism entirely and I’m among them. But whenever I criticize the infamous “Unknown Ideal”, out from the woodwork crawl the self-appointed defenders of capitalism and lovers of privately owned MoP and labor exploitation. To them I say “Patch the bugs, patch the bugs!” It is a duty that comes with the mantle they draped themselves in.
Capitalism massively rewards exploiting its bugs and loopholes. Whether that’s fossil fuel’s underaccounted environmental costs, the network effect’s mandatorialization, or the human suffering under labor value-add extraction. So the capital owners themselves are not going to do it. But their mouth pieces, demagogues, think tanks, lobbyists, ideologues, and policy wonks are on the hook for this and need to be held accountable.
I might come across as half a century too late with this stuff because “capitalism is good actually and tax is theft” might on a discourse level seem like a dying political idea (replaced by blatant xenophobia) but it lives on in policy where the owners and haves are still on their never-ending crusade to loot the public coffers in the name of tax breaks for the richest.
In the past few decades we’ve rapidly seen corporations exploiting the network externality become the most powerful entities in the history of the Earth.
“Join our app and keep using it. Or lose your friends, job, housing access.” From frivolities like playlist sharing and comment section through social media through actual job and house tools. Even your own legal identity in some countries.
We are being drowned by these corporations but most people don’t see the water or question if they should be legal. Dagny Taggart and Francisco d’Anconia crawled back out of hell up on the throne and are chaining us all with their freedom.
Make it illegal. Network effect applications (whether it’s software, hardware, or services) can’t be proprietary.
It’s not gonna get any easier in the future if Meta, Alphabet, and Apple continue to grow. Fixing this sooner is better than later.
The EU’s belatedly and slowly turning the proverbial boat around on Israel’s war is kind of hard to come to grips with mentally. I felt something similar when the pandemic was taken so seriously, that if they ever take climate change this seriously I’m gonna be like “What are they thinking? A stitch in time would’ve saved ninety-nine!”
If they were gonna act anyway, which, do not get me wrong, it’s great that they are, then they should’ve earlier because it would’ve saved so many lives.
It’s like you see the adult in the room go into the fridge and grab a bottle of tomato juice and just pour pour pour it on grandma’s best rug and as you say “please stop doing that” they just put on Entombed and turn the volume to eleven and drown you out and keep pouring and when the third bottle is nearly emptied they’re like “someone should stop pouring. This is going to be a bitch to clean out” you’re like 🤯🤯🤯🫠 I do not understand this world.
And that’s just Europe. In the US where some of those who spoke up were career-ended or expelled or arrested or deported, that metaphor is inadequately woeful and would’ve have to have been unspeakably horrible to accurately reflect the mess, which then in turn becomes a nothingness compared to all the lives destroyed in the actual war.
I oppose political violence and it’s easy to build a consistent philosophical take against it.
But.
Political violence in favor of bad things happen on the daily. The government we voted in and trust sell weapons to warring nations and invest in settler colonialism and wreck the planet with their gasoline. Tyranny in protection of wealth is endorsed and loved by them.
The solution isn’t to pick up the blade. Never a fighter.
But it’s to call out their hypocrisy.
Not only do we need to find a way to live without fossil fuels. We also need to figure out life without plastics.
Hopefully it’s gonna be easier since we’ve used plastic for less than a hundred years. Fossil fuels have been used for more than two hundred years (not counting peat which is also bad and has been used for four thousand years).
Why are all these enviornmental problems popping up all at once, you might ask? It’s because we started using a capitalist market system where environmental effects are unaccounted for in transactions. Anyone who loves capitalism should push for regulation. Or we’ll have to replace the entire thing with some odonian Bookchin thing.
So get down with the green wave, capitalist pundits and thinktanks, and lay off this bull where you put oil shills on a fake EPA and DOE, or you’ll dig your own grave (and everyone else’s grave with it).