theluddite

theluddite , 6 days ago to Technology in How Elon Musk's Starlink Turned Remote Amazon Tribe Into Social Media And Pornography Addicts

I would love to read an actually serious treatment of this issue and not 4 paragraphs that just say the headline but with more words.

theluddite , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago) to Technology in China's latest AI chatbot is trained on President Xi Jinping's political ideology

I know that this kind of actually critical perspective isn't point of this article, but software always reflects the ideology of the power structure in which it was built. I actually covered something very similar in my most recent post, where I applied Philip Agre's analysis of the so-called Internet Revolution to the AI hype, but you can find many similar analyses all over STS literature, or throughout just Agre's work, which really ought to be required reading for anyone in software.

edit to add some recommendations: If you think of yourself as a tech person, and don't necessarily get or enjoy the humanities (for lack of a better word), I recommend starting here, where Agre discusses his own "critical awakening."

As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial -- except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own -- that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). T

theluddite , 20 days ago to Socialism in Academic workers call “standup strike” across UC system

Oh damn good to know. I do a lot of work with one of the UCs. We were happy to stop work during the grad student strike a few years ago and we'll be happy to do it again. Thanks for posting!

theluddite , 21 days ago to Technology in The People Deliberately Killing Facebook

I've now read several of these from wheresyoured.at, and I find them to be well-researched, well-written, very dramatic (if a little ranty), but ultimately stopping short of any structural or theoretical insight. It's right and good to document the shady people inside these shady companies ruining things, but they are symptoms. They are people exploiting structural problems, not the root cause of our problems. The site's perspective feels like that of someone who had a good career in tech that started before, say, 2014, and is angry at the people who are taking it too far, killing the party for everyone. I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with that perspective, but it's certainly a very specific one, and one that I don't particularly care for.

Even "the rot economy," which seems to be their big theoretical underpinning, has this problem. It puts at its center the agency of bad actors in venture capital becoming overly-obsessed with growth. I agree with the discussion about the fallout from that, but it's just lacking in a theory beyond "there are some shitty people being shitty."

theluddite , 27 days ago to Technology in IMF boss warns of AI 'tsunami' coming for world's jobs

I've already posted this here, but it's just perennially relevant: The Anti-Labor Propaganda Masquerading as Science.

theluddite , 1 month ago to Anarchism and Social Ecology in Mass Protests and the Danger of Social Media

To be clear, I wasn't advocating for organized violence as a good tactic. I was just picking a simple example.

I still think that Bevins's history and analysis has merit, even if you disagree with his conclusions. I've read at least two books by anarchists that put forth similar concepts of legibility: Graeber's "Utopia of Rules" and James Scott's "Seeing like a State" (which I actually read to write this post and have a bajillion opinions about, but that's a post for another day). Regardless of your stance on whether your movement should or shouldn't be legible, you have to understand legibility, both to the state, and to other capitalist powers like, say, social media (to pick one at random 😉 ).

theluddite , 1 month ago to Anarchism and Social Ecology in Mass Protests and the Danger of Social Media

I once again disagree with your characterization of the book.

You realize how funny it is that you post this in an Anarchist community?

That's stupid. Anarchist revolutionary theory and historical practice are full of ideas that are perfectly compatible with this analysis, even if Bevins himself is clearly not an anarchist. There is no more legible act to the state than organized violence, for example.

I'm not sure why you've taken this unpleasant posture towards me. I'm genuinely here for a discussion, but this is my last response if you keep acting like I'm some sort of uncultured idiot that needs you "to start from the basics 😒"

theluddite , 1 month ago to Anarchism and Social Ecology in Mass Protests and the Danger of Social Media

Yeah, again, I take pretty strong issue with your characterization of Bevins's stance. Have you actually read the book? I think that this is an interesting and worthwhile discussion, but I also don't want to go in circles if you haven't...

When he says that they're illegible to state power, he doesn't mean that they want to appeal to the people currently in power (and maybe this is a conflation that I accidentally invite in my own write-up). He means that they cannot participate in state power as an institutional apparatus, be it as reformists or revolutionaries.

I get what you're saying, and I agree with a lot of it (but not all of it), but you're just not responding to an argument that Bevins makes, at least in how I read him. You are responding to one that many in western media did in fact make, and I agree with you in that context, but that was just not my reading of Bevins at all.

theluddite , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to Anarchism and Social Ecology in Mass Protests and the Danger of Social Media

I don’t think its wired to critique someone for having a widely different interpretation of what happened than multiple others that were directly involved and then taking this very peculiar subjective interpretation to make wide sweeping (and IMHO wrong) conclusions about what we should learn from it.

It is because that's literally what the book is about. The book is addressing that very phenomenon as its core thesis. That's exactly what he is talking about when he says that the protests are illegible. If someone says "people disagree a lot about what happened and that's a problem" responding to that by saying "i disagree about what happened" isn't really engaging with the argument.

My impression is that Bevin started out with a preconsived notion and then kinda made up a retrospective narrative of these protests to fit to that.

I'm sorry but I don't think that anyone who has actually read the book in good faith can come to that conclusion.

edit: added more explanation

theluddite , 1 month ago to Anarchism and Social Ecology in Mass Protests and the Danger of Social Media

That's kind of a weird critique, because it's actually consistent with the book. He spends a lot of time talking about how wildly different every person's interpretation of the event is, and that's kind of the problem. It's part of why these movements are illegible to power. He's very clear that this is his interpretation, based on his own contacts, experience, and extensive research, but that it's not going to be the same as everyone else's.

Same is true with the moniker. Whether or not the people on the ground felt that way about it or not, that story, fabricated without input from those on the ground, is what ended up creating meaning out of the movement, at least insomuch as power is concerned. That's like the core thesis of the book: The problem with that wave of protests was not being able to assert their own meaning over their actions. The meaning was created for them by people like western media, and they weren't able to organize their own narrative, choose their own representatives, etc.

edit to add: IIRC, he even specifically discusses how the different people in the core group of Brazilian organizers disagree on what happened.

theluddite , 1 month ago to Anarchism and Social Ecology in Mass Protests and the Danger of Social Media

Oh hey I wrote that lol.

Not all protests for Gaza were meant to gain engagement, many were organized to cause direct economic disruption to those that profit from the war, that is a goal.

I actually totally agree with you. I should've been more careful in the text to distinguish between those two very different kinds of actions. I actually really, really like things that disrupt those that profit, but those are not nearly as common as going to the local park or whatever. I might throw in a footnote to clarify.

theluddite , 1 month ago to Technology in Google fires more workers after CEO says workplace isn’t for politics

"The workplace isn't for politics" says company that exerts coercive political power to expel its (ex-)workers for disagreeing.

theluddite , 1 month ago to Technology in Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’

Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.

I've been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it's everywhere

theluddite , 2 months ago to Technology in ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets

The purpose of a system is what it does

According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

The AI is "supposed" to identify targets, but in reality, the system's purpose is to justify indiscriminate murder.

theluddite , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to Socialism in How to Communicate Left Ideas to Gen Z

Props to her, and this is intended as a friendly comment between people on the same side, but I think this can be dangerous.

Chomsky famously noted that brevity is inherently conservative, and that's actually a pretty profound observation. Any time that you are brief to an audience that doesn't have much context, your message is going to pick up conservative baggage. Just imagine debating someone on how American imperialism is bad in front of a crowd that has never questioned USA as the bastion of freedom and democracy in the world. Your opponent just has to say "freedom" and "support the troops" and "9/11" as pre-canned concepts with a lot of power and imagery, whereas you're going to have to spend a ton of words unpacking all that. Any time that you say freedom, you're going to have to explain what you mean, or the audience will interpret it as the canned American concept of Freedom(tm). This is something that the 19th and earliest 20th century anarchists and communists understood intuitively and talked about quite a lot, even if they didn't articulate it quite as succinctly (lol) as Chomsky did. It's everywhere in their revolutionary theories.

So, while I do think that it's important to create effective and engaging short-form agitation and propaganda materials, they should be part of a larger messaging apparatus that leads you to some sort of more profound relationship with politics. Getting the entirety of your politics from short form video will necessarily lead to a shallow and mostly aesthetic understanding of politics, easily exploitable by reactionaries. It's how you end up with the Red Scare podcast, or MAGA communism, or any of these other aesthetically pseudo-leftist but actually deeply conservative discombobulated ideologies.

edit: also meant to say that it was not a great interview lol.