When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “piracy”.
It broke my heart to see the prog left suddenly be in favor of copyright and I’m so grateful that for the few that have pushed back on that. Thank you so much for that. Copyright is bad and using it against ML is a bad argument.
But to add some nuance to this, I have sympathy for how messed up it is that it’s “copyright for me but not for thee”—in the RIAA era, big corporate used copyright to bludgeon the people and now in the LLM era big corporate is using disregard for copyright to bludgeon the people. It makes us feel helpless.
The bigger issue is how LLMs are centralized means of production and capital concentration on an unprecedented scale. We have an opportunity to usher in post-scarcity elements but instead we’re letting a handful of corporations wrest control over what’s poised to become vital infrastructure. Here in Sweden it’s been absolutely gross how hard it is to even be a citizen without being subjected to the oligarchy of Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
The tyranny of modern-day Russia originated when what was state-owned became oligarch-owned. We’ve let that happen here in Europe and America, with apps and now with LLMs. Unpopular opinion but I think LLMs could be so cool. They’re remix machines, they’re like a rhyzomatic library that’s cross-connected on the micro level. We loved mixtapes and RSS and wikis and fanfics—and LLMs could be the trajectory of that, but things have got to change quickly because as long as they’re privately owned we’re in trouble.
I grew up in an age where roads, phonelines, radio waves, waterworks were owned by the people, together, under control of the electorate. Then we built a new world online that was even freer—built on “rough consensus and running code”—until it was homesteaded and walled-in and lost and now its new owners are the most powerful people in the world since there’s more money in politics than ever. Pls fix