I look at my macbook screen and realise, for the first time, I have no idea what resolution it is, how many pixels there are, or how much memory it requires. I knew on my Commodore 64. I knew on PAL and VGA. I no longer have any immediate idea of resolution; it also doesn’t really concern me that I don’t. The pixels are too small to worry about; they’re not marching ants, but clouds of bacteria.
While my research and interests see me swimming in the shit and effluvium of the web (and the data traces therein), it is always interesting to come back to the people at the other end of my power dynamic: unilateral national dictators. Forming their own cliques of power and relationships, grounded in mutual distrust, taken to amazing extremes of sanctifying their Precious Bodily Fluids from scrutiny. Firewalls of suitcases and trained personnel to scrub traces, removing bodily by-products and evidence of existence, a staff of human vacuflushes, virtual faecal networks of Grooms of the Stool.
I set this blog up to keep smaller chunks of writing on; like all online writing, which is interminably incomplete, I wait until I feel completely ready to start a piece completed. This piece, the latest in the Mourning for Reading genre, popped up through MetaFilter, a place that has always felt a web-literate place for readers. The text jumps around, taking on McLuhanist ideas of oral and visual cultures (which I think have legitimacy), but this winds up berating the smart phone, linking screen-size to conceptual capacity.
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.