Notes
-
The fact that the EFF still uncritically publish it on their website is a sign of where they really are politically. It’s a fucking disgrace and they should annotate it with the subsequent critiques that show how it is not worth the electrical current powering the pixels on your screen. (I refuse to link to it). ↩︎
Counting the days until the first Apple Watch Siri AI-induced feminicide.
I guess it’s move fast and (break things) kill people, now.
It doesn’t feel like this technology has been fully thought through, and coupling this with another firm’s “innovation” to stifle the audible alerts from AitTags, in what can only be described as a wet dream for stalkers, it shows that something is clearly very wrong in technosolutionist land.
Reading is a pleasure I developed several decades ago, when at a fairly young age, I was commuting to and from work for around four hours per day, and needed something to occupy myself besides the music from my portable tape player.
I’d had a bad experience at school with English, and hadn’t really enjoyed the subjects and the methods of teaching, let alone the teachers themselves. It left me feeling that I was a little stupid and unable to read or write well for my age. I’d started reading long before school, but school did its best to knock that pleasure out of me. So I was glad to get back into reading during the train and two bus rides, morning and evening.
The Internet came along and bizarrely accomplished the same thing that the school teachers seemed to be paid to do. I started off buying books through the Internet, to eventually only reading on the Internet, forgoing a wealth of good works and learning opportunities in the process.
Over the last few years I have made a concerted effort to read more books. I always read a lot, but not structured books with a narrative or a story to tell. I was reading news articles, pithy (and ultimately, calorie-free) posts on a couple of social media sites.
But that changed a few years ago as I constantly had the feeling of being undernourished and hyper-needy for the ‘latest’ take on something that was ultimately useless for my life.
I still read a lot on the Internet, but I have carefully curated what when and how I read. I mostly read through my RSS reader, which brings the articles to me and formats them as I please, not as intended by the site that ruins the text with overly intrusive ads and other decals of surveillance. Although I make exceptions for crafted blogs that have a look and feel that is positively for the reader’s pleasure.
I can’t recommend enough the effort and the reward of doing this. Continue your (un)social media if you like, I’m not going to judge too hard, but seriously consider reading books and physical magazines in its place. You’ll feel much better for it.
I’ve been buying books for a while and whilst this is always a good thing, I thought that it would be enjoyable, and useful, to revisit or to read for the first time, some of the classic novels and books that are made available on the free ebook site like Standard Books or Project Gutenberg.
Recently I downloaded an ebook of short fiction by E. M. Forster with the intent to read The Machine Stops. Which I did in very short time.
Given this was published in 1909, and despite its failure to see some of the inventions that followed its publication over the decades, it is eerily prescient in its presentation of a dystopian vision of being run by “the machine”. When you consider the current oligarchy, the surveillance capitalism, and the concentration of power of the everyday lives of billions exerted by a handful of individuals with no elected authority or accountability (beyond losing a few dollars on the share) it is food for thought.
And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. “Beware of firsthand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.
“Offload your thinking for the machine to do, and free your mind to think other things.”
Those that do end up not thinking anything.
Trickle-down economics was just Trickle-down fascism.
I hope you can see that now.
Everyone is a grifter now. And I fucking hate it.
If it’s not “merch”, it’s “Buy my course” (… on how to grift). It is “Go to my Patreon to get exclusive ‘content’”, who gives a fuck?
Have you seen the tidal wave of videos on YouTube (and other video services) that basically lie to your face about what they are?
“This one thing changes everything.” No, it doesn’t.
“Hilarious …” (mildly amusing).
“The truth about …” That’s a lie.
“The genius morning routine that changed my life”. No, it didn’t.
“First time hearing …”. No, it isn’t you liar.
“Game changing …”. Slight improvement on something inconsequential.
“… DESTROYS …”. Grow up, you fucking child.
“World’s best EDC setup”. Scouts is for kids (and trainee perverts).
Content creator has to be one of the most odious lies people tell themselves when putting out stuff on the Internet. You’re not a “content creator”. You’re not even a creator. You’re a cog in a machine that atomises and devalues you, your art, and all the people that might interact with you.
I fucking hate it.
Just when you thought that Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t possibly become a more odious specimen than he currently is…
Zuckerberg wants Meta to launch its own prediction market, report says
Prediction markets are the worst form of gambling that not only deliberately and systematically hide the consequences, funnel winnings to the top, buy they actively incentivise poor behaviour at the highest levels, with deathly consequences, creating self-fulfilling prophecies that have absolutely nothing to do with “prediction”.1 I doubt they are legal in Europe. But I also doubt we are not doing enough to ensure their cancerous nature is not expanding in Europe, which is already polluted (beyond repair?) by irresponsible and dangerous gambling sites.
We are in very dangerous times.
If you’re offloading meeting transcriptions to your ai of choice, you’d better be hyper-vigilant of the output generated, as it will inevitably attribute something it made up as your speech, and if it goes down in record you’re going to have a hard time walking that back.
It could cost you dearly.
The low-level anxiety that today’s tech causes is a problem that we should all be mindful of, and put in place strategies to deal with.
I used to be enthusiastic when a new tech product was announced.
Now I am immediately sceptical, looking for how it is going to lock me in, sell my personal information, trick me into ever-increasing payments, threaten me with DCMA if I dare to ‘modify’ it to my uses, … The list goes on.
The irony of the Meta (née Facebook) employee’s outcry at being surveilled by their employer is fascinating.
What did you think you were building?
“… And then they came for me
And there was no one left
…”
Just wait and see. Once the current era of political turmoil in the US is over, the Cyberlibertarians will use the authoritarian bent of this government as a ‘proof’ that governments should stay away from them, using the same sleight of hand of that idiotic Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace “… I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”1
But they are hoping that you forget that they themselves were the biggest enablers of an authoritarian and neofascist government. Don’t let them. Call them out at every opportunity. Laugh in their faces at their abject stupidity. Castrate them financially. Actively boycott anything that they are involved in. They deserve worse, but we can only exercise the legal tools we have at our disposal.
Never forget.