taps the mic and leans forward to say hey uhhh guys treating queerness as somehow better, more interesting, more special, or more dramatic than not being queer is still being weird about queer people
I’m anti-genAI but here’s a reminder: “GenAI hurts the environment” because it uses data centers which require enormous amounts of land, energy, water, and materials to function. But do you know what else uses data centers and have been for years? Video and media streaming, blockchain and crypto mining, cloud services, machine learning, and virtual reality, among other things. Data centers existed before genAI. All of this was harmful before genAI. I’ve been an environmentalist for many, many years, and its frustrating to see the “genAI hurts the environment” argument without any extra context or how much everything that we do online (and our offline lives) that harms the environment and is never discussed. GenAI is part of an enormous, tangled web of problems that goes far beyond its use in video games (even though yes of course that is also problematic).
People are acting as though genAI has a gun to the planet’s heart. We pulled the trigger already, a long time ago. We can fix our planet if we want to but at least in my opinion, “genAI hurts the environment” is a vague, toothless argument that achieves very little beyond shaming people for using it. Shame is somewhat effective, but there are better ways to tackle the problem and move us in the right direction (people still smoke, for example, despite public backlash, health warnings, and shame). I personally hate video streaming. I think its extremely harmful not only to the environment but also to the movie industry. But its normalized now and no one cares anymore, even though some sources say that Netflix alone has a bigger carbon footprint than some countries!
I wish genAI would go away and billionaires would stop pushing it on us, but most likely it will always exist in some capacity. Even if we did ban it, the environment would still be in a crisis. And I wish that genAI and recent public interest in data centers would push us to take all of this Internet, tech oligarch, and wastefulness seriously, but so far I’ve seen very little actual pushback beyond shaming. And call me a doomer but I know that when Divinity comes out my entire feed will be full of people playing it despite the backlash Larian received recently for admitting to using genAI. Anyway, just some food for thought.
More info and a few sources under the cut
If you want to help the environment, here is a very short list of what we can do right now: We can continue to make genAI shameful and put the heat on studios and other organizations for using it; we can protest the development of data centers; stop media streaming; we can plant trees and volunteer for garbage clean up in local areas; push our governments to invest in renewable energy; push for UBI and healthcare and affordable education; protest wars; use libraries and borrow and share to combat consumerism; donate to conservation and environmental groups; use public transit/bicycle/etc whenever possible rather than a personal car; make corporations like Walmart install solar panels on their building roofs; install solar panels in parking lots; make companies install bird-safe glass for windows; phase out grass lawns and focus on local flora instead; reduce the use of pesticides and insecticides; reduce the usage of cloud services; reduce crypto/blockchain creation and use; etc etc etc. There is SO much we can do! And nothing exists in a vacuum. People need to be informed and healthy to make sound, responsible choices so we must invest in people and communities as well.
you don’t realize how important lunch is until you’re wandering around thinking about how unloveable and untalented and uniquely cursed you are and then it’s 4pm and you finally eat lunch and you go Oh. oh right.
i think one of the worst things the left wing internet ever did was push the idea that oppression is basically a virtue, and being oppressed is a sign of your morality. it has made it like…impossible for some of you to hold the idea that most people are privileged in some ways and oppressed in others. AND a lot of you seem to have it in your mind that terrible people cannot be oppressed, and that oppressed people cannot do terrible things, which is a dangerous rhetoric to hold imo.
[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over
crazy? i was crazy once @rubber-rats - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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