Finished reading: Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher 📚
80 pages of great critique, dedicated to say get fucked OFSTED
Finished reading: Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher 📚
80 pages of great critique, dedicated to say get fucked OFSTED
There really is nothing else to do other than make short-term sacrifices of the few to prevent the losses of the far greater, longer-term majority: Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future - Avoiding a Ghastly Future
Preaching to the choir, but can’t agree more that RSS is our way out of shitty platforms, and how deeply I mourn for what FriendFeed could have been, before it was Zuckerberged.
Things are getting rocky at Reddit. They’ve weathered numerous protests, community ownership challenged, threats from moderators, and pretty much gotten away with them all. Two quite challenging elements are coming to a head, right now; one a victim of regulation outside their control, the other a mess they’re complicit with. As one of the largest commercial entities both platformising the web, while deeply dependant on it, it’s in an odd place; the gorilla of AI data extraction and looms over this in the NY Magazine piece(via); people still using Google are adding ‘reddit’ to the search terms to avoid the SEO and AI slop Google has both been encouraging and funding over the years; but it is also turning Reddit into a space that will now attract those same bottom-feeders, stuffing it with more fake reviews and comments, making more cyborg and bot marketing accounts, as it (like Facebook and Twitter before it) replaces the web with itself for casual users of ‘Google’, the real front page of the internet, where people search ‘google’ for ‘google’, like once they did with Yahoo.
developing software on github can be telling Developing software in public repositories on github shows what a good Open fellow you are; the tyranny of self-imposed transparency showing there is nothing to hide. But sometimes, there are things implied, suggesting the elbow and the posterior truly are different departments. Though I technically do not write exclusively of my justified disdain for musk, this commit from the MechaHitler days spoke volumes: not of what was explicitly done, but about the nature of the training data Grok was ingesting.
Shit in, shit out. This can only be corporate performance art.
The mere existence of LLMs generating text now means all text must be evaluated in its shadow, whether we use it - or hate it - or not. Already online threads are full of accusations of others being LLMs - the m-dash being an early casualty of typography, commonly understood as a tell. the verge finds studies confirming people are responding to how llms have entered language, while others anticipate we will engage in an arms race of avoiding LLM likeness as they learn the same techniques.
Finished reading: Infocracy by Byung-Chul Han 📚
Well, this is a fun and timely book. Calling on old favourites McLuhan, Habermas, Plato et al, Han charts the end of politics through the accelerationism of a digitally-mediated public realm where feelings and the sensorium has structurally vanquished slower, older forms of researched and consensually-derived knowledge. A series of chapters each address stages of this, from the impact on the individual, the nature of discourse, how we understand truth and its position in time, to the political and spectacular, ending on Trump and COVID conspiracy theories. Inevitably with Han there feels judgement throughout, (perhaps this is the German to English translation) though while tracing the route from pre-digital existence to the now, the sense of inevitable determinism pushes us through. It is not a work that dwells on alternatives, rather brings up the consequences of where we find ourselves.
Well done, you driving, meat-eating, fly everywhere, cunts!
Now, it is too late. I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc. There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them — the ozone layer — and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockström says we have five years to get out of the danger zone. If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven! And, if you look at those boundaries, like the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions. We’re on our way to more than a three-degree temperature rise by the end of this century, and scientists agree we shouldn’t rise above one and half degrees.
Those hoarding wealth and power should be fearing for their lives. Everyone else should be taking responsibility for yielding to them, with their blameless consumerism; you gave them that power.
I find a 2cm long lump of plastic inside some falafel from Tesco. I go to email them to provide reference details for the item and batch, along with photographs. Do they have an email address for this on their website? No. They have ‘help pages’ which send you in loops of ‘not what you’re looking for? Click here’ links. Do they have, at least, a lousy HTML form? No. They have links to Instagram and Twitter. I sign in to Twitter for the first time in years to notify them of their production problems and an asked to provide Name, Email, Clubcard Number by direct message. So they expect me to put personal details into a platform run by a known liar and Nazi to stop a corporate choking hazard? I do so in a manner that requires human intervention then a presented by a menu system. They’ve done everything they can to squeeze human intervention out on their end, in a way that inconveniences someone trying to help them. It’s remarkable how insulated they have made themselves at the cost of making anyone who needs to raise a problem with them legitimately have to compromise and give personal information to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, both US-based digital robber barons implicated in corruption and genocide through their platforms.
But at least Tesco don’t have to deal with junk mail now, eh?