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the panopticon of government surveillance is not terribly effective at altering behavior. It's great at cracking down on people, ala the movie Brazil, if you happen to be adjacent to something unsavory, they can crush you like a bug using the full breadth of your recorded life.

but I think the panopticon of government and corporate surveillance is less meaningful to peoples lives than the surveillance we willingly participate in against ourselves and others.

I will sound very corny in saying this, but I think "cancel culture" getting discarded by thinking people as a silly right wing boogeyman will go down as one of the most destructive mistakes of the 21st century.

I really think that on a lot of cultural issues, conservatives have a type of horse sense, that is, they may be incorrect about the specifics and waht to do about something, but they are able to recognize something is wrong when more intellectual and ideologically minded people cannot.

we have created a world where you are expected to submit a carefully curated self to the world through text, photos, videos, media consumption, so that any random person seeing anything you say or do outside of context will give you a passing grade on "is this a good person."

and you are expected to comb through millions of snapshots of people a month and make the same judgement.

The physical world, the waking world, required effort to mind someone elses business. If you saw a person who was perhaps a little uncouth, you would have to get your happy ass up, walk over, and say something if you thought it was a problem. You had to expose yourself to some modicum of danger or discomfort.

you can now be a cop for free for everyone for everything as a part of your free time.

We have created the opportunity for everyone to engage in the kinds of obsessive moral policing that was previously used primarily on racialized minorities in colonial and racist societies. and even then! That policing ended when the whites weren't around. For a white person to mind black peoples business in the way people do for everyone now, it would require EFFORT. It required RISK.

I am now able to have my shrill moral sensibilities (ill shaped by a life spent atrophying indoors alone) incited to attack by just tapping some buttons. I can engage in social warfare over nothing while taking a shit.

this is madness! this is utter and complete madness!

even in the worst and most repressive pre internet societies this would be considered soul shredding misery.

you are under constant surveillance not by an imagined state surveyor, or by a god thats up for interpretation, but by real actual people, and you are conditioned to provide the evidence against yourself!

god in heaven!

blow up the fucking internet. blow up the fucking internet. blow up the fucking internet.

stjohnstarling

The reason most indie novels are written like the author is terrified of doing something wrong is because the overwhelming majority of indie novelists get their start by networking in the violent panopticon of the social media indie publishing community, which favours the people who are able to win at the social policing game.

hyperions-fate

The Stalinist revival online is one of the stranger turns in leftist political culture. Bizarre as it may seem, it performs largely the same function as American Satanism did in the early 2000s when Christian fundamentalism was at its peak. That is, it's the assertion of a purely aesthetic opposition, without material engagement, against a political and cultural context that seems to foreclose any alternative. More satisfying to romanticise the NKVD (never mind Spain!), denounce any heterodox Communist as a CIA agent, and invoke the symbolism of Stalin's pro-Zionist 'anti-imperialism' than to make the effort to understand and exploit the ruptures of the capitalist order as it exists today. It is a stultified response to a stultifying era.

unfortunately a lot of people DO in fact identify as leftists because they are workshy parasites who have such soft as babyshit moral sensibilities they don't want to believe that the economy is real and don't want to have to pay anyone for the products of their labor. Your dad was right about that one. The real numbers and charts guys are not really posting on social media. They are either so deeply unemployed you cannot find them or so deeply employed they also will not be found. tragic.

almost universally, revolutions only gain any momentum for change when people are doing BETTER than they had previously, not when they are starving to death.

Getting the boot off your neck even an inch gives breath to ask for more.

The idea that people only fight when things get worse and worse is capitalist, it's protestant, fighting is difficult and requires a great deal of confidence to engage in why would you presume that people need to be starved before they can rise up? That makes it more difficult.

From the anti colonial revolutions of the 50s and 60s, to the russian revolution, to the western revolts of the 60s and 70s to civil rights, the common denominator was not people at the abject end of their rope, but people who HAD been at the end of their rope, started to get a leg up, then were stymied.

the social democratic safety nets of the post war era made the 60s student revolutions in france possible. even though Black americans were intentionally kept out of good housing and jobs, the prosperity of the post war boom and the stability of new deal policies still gave enough material security for people to organize effectively.

the slackening of colonial oppression during the first and then during the second world wars saw unrest in european colonies, people gained their liberties in leaps and bounds, then hit a wall and began to more violently resist their captors.

people say "it will need to get so much worse in america before anyone revolts" because they are mentally and spiritually capitalist protestant devils. Why would being hungrier and less fit and less stable make people want to rock the boat? It will certainly lead to lots more unorganized outbursts of adventurist violence! That'll definitely happen! but a revolution? Mass protest? No.

Only filling the stomachs of the poor, giving women childcare and better working conditions, will give people the strength to fight for more.

why would weakening the poor make them stronger? Idiot?

morlock-holmes

Why everyone hates AI

I work in the service industry, I'm not in a technical field and I don't have anything except the most cursory knowledge of programming.

But I'm acquainted with a lot of technical people through this blog, so every so often I ask,

"Okay, AI has gotten a lot better over the last year, are any of the tools actually useful for a person like me?"

And the answer, and this has been true of every time I asked including up to a week or two ago, is,

"Well, some of them are kind of fun toys, but other than that no, nothing on the market is useful to you."

And I was just thinking, boy that means that every company in the space is a demonstrable liar.

Public facing AI features are everywhere. Our booking software has an absolutely useless AI summary.

It is really difficult and expensive to buy GPUs and RAM for things I would actually use right now, because of the incredible investment in AI tools marketed towards me which are not at all useful.

Which means all these companies are lying to themselves and others.

And it makes ordinary people doubtful about all the promises that, gosh, it's just about to transform everything and you'd better get on board now.

Almost any tech company making that claim is demonstrably both lying and delusional about the technology, because they are flogging products that visibly don't work.

They are also, by this same principle, directly working against my interests.

Why, then, would I be excited and hyped up for the supposedly imminent time when these same hostile, lying companies take over the entire economy?

foolishmeowing

AI companies lie, and the things they promise are not an appropriate benchmark. AI is a technology, not a corporate brand, its existence doesn't depend on the "AI bubble," and neither its usefulness nor its problems are bound to obnoxious Facebook feed content.

The form of AI we're dealing with right now was invented yesterday, so there hasn't been any time for you to go through cycles of waiting for promises to be fulfilled and endlessly coming back empty-handed. Attention Is All You Need was published in 2017, which was Literally Yesterday. ChatGPT-3 was released at the very end of 2022, and Claude was released in 2023, which was Literally Yesterday. These cycles have to occur over periods of time, it is a basic ontological requirement, so a narrative of disappointment like you're trying to present cannot be possible. The fact that "just a week or two ago" people started saying nice things is rapid evidence against your argument.

As is the current infosec situation, which is not ambiguous about the consequences of better-than-human-intelligence coming out of these things. Like. You cannot maintain your stance. It's over.

AI is significant because it is now general intelligence, capable of adapting to arbitrary situations and methods with abstract nonsyntactical conceptual analysis of new topics and situations, just like you, and it will be able to do anything we can do because what we can do evolved on a system that was rolling around in the bushes, which means cultivating the conditions for general intelligence to evolve again is not a supernatural ask.

morlock-holmes

"Come on, you can't actually expect the entire global economy to sell products that actually do something, that's crazy, everybody knows that tech involves fleecing people by selling useless products until the scam brings in enough money to produce something viable."

I think that's a... Peculiar perspective.

This is not a response to what I wrote up there; it's a stock response to a stock piece someone else wrote about whether AI is "general intelligence" which is, at best, tangentially related to the points above.

Like, the fact that so much "hype" also amounts to, "It's like Confucious said, you might as well lay back and enjoy it" is a big reason why nobody likes this shit.

notaaronsroommate

i think a part of why otherwise quite rational fellow travelers have gotten in on AI is this feeling that it is part of a long straightforward tradition of linear technological progress. Rejecting AI means rejecting the enlightenment ideals of anti religion, it means siding with yokels and artists against pure materialism.

and i mean, aside from the fact that progress isn't real and isn't linear, and also my own personal belief in quite non materialist things aside...

There are quite a few technologies that got hyped as the world changing thing that turned out to either suck, not be that big of a deal, or be a fraud. The thing that is unique about AI as it is presented by its proponents is that not only does its byproduct downsides suck, the thing it seeks to do when working perfectly also sucks.

Like, say what you will about nuclear energy, the upside is at least nothing to sneeze at. If it works exactly like its most bullish proponents describe, nuclear energy fucking whips ass. Sure sure, nuclear meltdowns and nuclear waste and nuclear weapon proliferation, but near unlimited nuclear power that's too cheap to meter!

at present, LLM's are like if nuclear powers great advantage was generating nuclear waste and its downside was nuclear waste.

I don't even want this stuff when it's working right.

sure, AI isn't as big of an impact on climate change as cars and electricity production.

it's still AN impact on climate change for something that sucks both coming and going.

if all the stuff we call AI was being used for was picking cancer cells out of biopsies to create better cancer detection software or something, nobody would have a problem with it.

people routinely try to invert orientalist fiction to try and prove how bad it would be like "oh, you think white guy learns karate and becomes the spiritual karate badass in asia is ok? well what if a billionaire from a tier one chinese city crash landed in north dakota and became chosen as spirit cowboy by jesus christ?" and like, what if we did reverse Lawrence of Arabia, and the thing is man it always slaps. Ok, what if we had an arab muslim become the king of being a 1950s greaser? yeah it would kick ass so severely.

if you made a movie where Hou Ming Hao was granted the blood of christ to become the greatest rodeo gun slinger texas had ever seen every single white maoist would fucking kill themselves because that movie would become the highest grossing film of all time after like a third of Chinas population pays to see the movie three times. CPC party members are posting up photo shoots of them in rhinestone chinese civil war era cavalry officer uniforms with cross draw guns akimbo mauser broomhandles with mother of pearl grips, drinking tsingtao out of red solo cups, they're smoking ribs in Szechuan. White american communists would cope and seethe so hard they would all have a brain aneurysm and die.

because this type of "ok, let me invent the coolest fucking shit ever, wouldn't that suck" isn't actually demonstrating what is wrong with orientalist fantasies of mr honky becomes the kung fu master. the problem is that those stories suck and aren't actually that interested in the meat and potatoes of those cultures. T.E. Lawrence may have been a weird freak pervert, but the thing is he was able to hang out in the tea shop and after everyone got over his terrifying blue eyes and him being insanely faggot coded, they were like oh shit this whiteboy can hang.

All these orientalist isekai fantasies are so boring because it's people that want to be the Lawrence of Arabia whiteboy orders shwarma in perfect vernacular Arabic, whole country rebels against the Ottoman Empire, but they never put in the sheer autistic homo effort to truly become arabic the way a T.E. Lawrence, they lack the humility and sense of wonder. They do not have the love.

squeakitties

still thinking about the apparent 2006-2007 epidemic of rabid swarms of wii remotes descending on helpless televisions like locusts

estrogenesis-vaporeongelion

wii sports was invented by nefarious television manufacturers to break people's televisions

puppygirllaika

What a very funny joke that definitely did not happen because Nintendo definitely did not buy up almost a third of the shares of the top five TV manufacturers in the time between the announcement and release of the Wii, shares which definitely didn't skyrocket in value over the next two years due to an increase in flatscreen sales, nearly half of which independent analysts attributed to people replacing damaged TVs with newer, more expensive models from electronics stores that relied on high-pressure sales tactics to upsell people and get them to buy more expensive models on credit which they couldn't actually afford.

voxsymphonia

what the fuck

val-3-val

did you read the article? it gets even worse

somnolentbibliophile

IT'S TIME, Y'ALL ❤️‍🔥

notaaronsroommate

ryan gosling is exactly the kind of freak needed for this role. Like, he is genuinely gods most accursed man because he is bizarre little skittering martian cockroach in spirit, he WANTS to do fucked up psychological freaks, he just has the curse of being shockingly beautiful and sexy and has a lightness of spirit that makes people like him.

But within him is a gremlin. I pray that they let him be a gremlin in this film. Maybe if he can convince them to put him in the flaming skull for most of the movie he can really shine.

He's like the light karma version of Jared Leto.

dogpuppy

innerchildabortionclinic

i'll never stop holding the opinion that systemic subjugation of women and children under patriarchy is not a result of degenerate sexuality or "urges" out of control btw. there's a reason ted bundy (yes, the serial killer) jumped at the opportunity to tell the religious right in an interview that he was corrupted by pornographic magazines. in fact i've seen the right increasingly cling to this perspective precisely because they feel it absolves them

notaaronsroommate

the recent ban on choking in pornography by the UK parliment was lead by radfem political interests. and the reasoning behind it within the hoi polloi of radfem thought is, and I am not shitting you in any way, that choking of women in pornography is a way to effectively brainwash men into abusing women via strangulation and to convince women to enjoy choking which cuts off oxygen and reduces brain function making women dumber and more pliable and able to be controlled by patriarchy.

Rather than doing anything about anything, instead the radical feminist tradition within the UK has decided that actually women are being psyoped into liking a hand round the neck during coitus by Big Porno as a means of creating docile abuse victims.

So. Nothing to be done about funding for womens shelters, nothing to be done about education, nothing to be done about financial independence, nothing to be done about how men are encouraged to get blackout drunk and get violently enraged over sports, nothing to be done about the housing crisis or insulation crisis or the housing stocks low quality in the UK. all of these things being material issues directly affecting women and being a fundamental part of women's oppression.

nope. it's the porno.

Because especially in the UK, but indeed all over the world, the radfem tendency is infinitely more concerned that someone might be experiencing sexuality in a way which might upset some neurotic shrew than they are with basically anything else. It's why the most materially effective anti trans and anti sex worker legislation in the anglophone world always comes from a radfem background than it does from a religious conservative background. They are far better able to organize and get things passed in industrialized nations by using the feminist credential within terfs swerfs and other radfems to whitewash whatever bullshit.

animal life is not worth as much as human life. And while I think we ought to strive towards eliminating animal cruelty by improving conditions for meat animals and by people trying to reduce their meat consumption, I have found time and time again that if someone is vegan/ vegetarian for ideological reasons (i.e. reasons besides health or mere preference) due to thinking about animal labor exploitation and such, it is almost always a sort of moral scrupulosity that can be and often is incredibly dangerous and racist.

unless you are an Asian Buddhist or Hindu who is a vegetarian for ideological reasons, in which case those people are almost always exceedingly normal. This is not about you and I respect your convictions greatly.

nothing I hate more than a bird brained woman. nothing I hate more than a woman who's decided to become a gibbering incompetent mess. Women fought and died to be taken seriously and you're reverting to the kind of idiot child they tried to mold you in to.

whatever is going on with the figure of Elvis Presley in the timeline of fallout new vegas is insane.

not The Kings dressing up as Elvis for their gang theme, frankly that's not unusual. If Gwars ever got a museum or a training school and then the world blew up I would frankly be shocked if people didn't make a weird misunderstood Gwar cult or gang or something. Good clean fun.

but, ok. the fallout timeline.

Let's set aside the doylian stuff here that fallout 1 and 2 were written pretty firmly in a style where people weren't expecting there to be wikis detailing all the shit and the style and timeline wasn't fully banged out yet.

what the fuck is the timeline.

We're made to understand that there is some manner of change sometime in the 60s to how US culture progresses, something about the rockers getting arrested, the culture of big band and wearing suits out to party is still kicking somehow. We kind of surmise that there was some authoritarian crackdown.

because otherwise it simply isn't possible that the twentieth and twenty first centuries remain in 50s land without some enforcement. and I cannot in any way believe (as some youtubers [idiots] have suggested) that the world progressed artistically more or less as normal and then due to the tensions with China we went back to 50s land. You are fucking high if you think we had Prince and Michael Jackson or someone like them and then anyone decided to go back to this abject honkyshit. If that happened, if people were convinced to go from like, having Barry White to everyone having to listen to Bing Crosby, every pre war note would read "damn, remember when we decided like 20 years ago that everyone's pussy is just gonna be dry forever and ever?"

anyway. so. Elvis. problem.

It's reasonable to assume that even in a situation where lets say Nixon gets a third term and we assassinate John Lennon and band the hippies and enforce a cultural mandates around the midcentury modern and art deco and googie, that Elvis might survive that purge.

The early rockers and boppers seem to exist in fallouts musical canon, that style is allowed. And Elvis is a fairly patriotic guy, has an in with the feds despite being surprisingly pro black in ways people don't talk about.

SO I can see Elvis and co. being treated as kind of like safe edge. the greasers are the tolerated form of being a hoodlum menace to society.

so what the fuck is specifically Elvis Presly in 2077? The guy has been dead for damn near a century by that point depending on how he goes out in this timeline.

It's hard to believe you can fully enforce a cultural mandate around musical expression into the 21st century, but its even harder to believe that you can enforce a state designated antagonist.

Like, I cannot imagine that this figure could remain as the "safe" societal opposition music that old people complain about for a full century.

so in 2077 what in the fuck does an elvis impersonator school mean? in our own world, the year 2077 will mark a century since elvis' death. He will at that point have gone far past being something your grandparents liked and will have become as old fashioned to them as music from 1900 is to us now. Is anyone listening to Scott Joplin in 2026? Maybe so, maybe you're a being at peace with yourself and so you just appreciate the music. But I cannot imagine feeling the same feelings about Scott Joplin in 2026 as people did in 1900. It's not novel or edgy.

and in the fallout timeline, I'm so insistent that Elvis and people of that sort would be put up as designated antagonists, controlled opposition, heel's, because if there are state enforced cultural mandates for what is pro social, then there must be the same for what is anti social. You HAVE to enforce shit. If rock music is allowed to just do whatever and be whatever, and it's not officially held as kinda edgy kinda dangerous, then rock and roll does what it did in our own timeline, utterly bulldozes all other musical genres from before.

So, that's why I figure they have to keep Elvis around as a figure of acceptable ill repute. You've got your big band and schmultz and then the edgy rock n roll which is that pussy ass buddy holly shit.

and after more than a fucking century, you've got an impersonation school in las vegas what in the FUCK was going on there before the bombs dropped?

We are dedicated to a figure whose stylistic choices the government upholds as very dangerous, he made music over a century prior to this, and people apparently come from all over the country to pretend to be this guy or get photos taken with people who pretend to be this guy.

it's madness it is fucking madness and I'm running myself around in a circle trying to figure out what in the sam hell fuck shit to do with it. it's like trying to untangle what the fuck Mr. house's whole deal was to people pre war.

Did howard hughes just not exist at all, or are people watching him in his tower being a weird freak and thinking to themselves "weird, is he doing a howard hughes bit? Howard Hughes, this reclusive film maker executive and recluse from more than a century ago, he did basically this whole thing of becoming a germaphobic shutin who bought las vegas and fancied himself as some kind of king. He's doing howard hughes for some reason???"

it's pretty crazy that the podcast Blowback went from being a rehash of the Iraq war by people who had their head screwed on when it started, to citing alex jones race based bioweapons conspiracy when talking about the Korean war.

Like, people who I otherwise admire really enjoy it, and I understand that everyone has developed a kneejerk dismissal of the term "tankie" but blowback is like TEXTBOOK tankie shit. cite ten billion sources regardless of quality then say something that isn't really supported by most of the sources and by none of the credible ones.

Their work on the korean war is DPRK in the way of like, if this was the tone used to talk about america it would be saying that a bunch of flawed but goodhearted men who agreed on freedom liberty and free kittens rallied the entire north american continent to kick out the british while george washington walked on water across the delaware and also all the indians graciously moved away to make room for the settlers. If your knowledge of Korean independence came from Blowback you would think that every single Korean resistance fighter was a communist, you would be shocked that there were people who opposed the DPRK who weren't cartoon villains, and you would think everyone in the RoK is a brainwashed goon.

the coverage Blowback did of Korea was so bad that if I hadn't lived through the Iraq war while it happened I may begin to question if a man named Sadaam Hussein ever even existed.

anyway, cannot wait for them to become Berlin Airlift denialists next year.

weiszklee

Being an individualism fan is like one of my biggest contentions with a lot of the left. Y'all need to aim higher. Generations of leftists fought for your right to be an individual. A good chunk of the problems of the modern world are down to people being content with disappearing behind group identities instead of asserting their individuality.

notaaronsroommate

people feel the need to talk about individualism as a great evil because they think we have to disprove ayn rand.

we super don't that shit was all very stupid and lame. people aren't polluting water ways and failing to put the shopping carts back because of any deep ontallogical issue it's just cos they're cunts.

Between the weird objectivist fetishism of the sovereign individual and the weird communist fetish of philosophizing until the basic idea of working together to make stuff more gooder turns into making Polacks into dogfood because they farm weird, i think a middle path is best.

man if you ever see the latex outfits without the lady's titty in them it just looks like just fuck off what do you even do with that what even shape is all this.

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