My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
The darkest timeline would be we have made contact with three-tiddied aliens but they were only interested in contacting high ranking officials in shadowy, sketchy U.S. government agencies like the CIA and military. That is what a lot of conspiracy minded people would have me believe and honestly if that was true those would be some lame af aliens. Like… all of all the people on earth to establish first contact with, you chose those losers?
When they said you couldn’t make contact with the rest of humanity you were just like yup seems like these dipshits have the authority to decide that for the rest of humanity?
Those would be some lame aliens and THAT would be the darkest timeline.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
The layoffs are largely because of the class war going on, they are a part of essentially a broader collective threat to labor from the ruling class, but also I think the video game industry is blatantly trying to do what the movie industry tried to do with AI it is just there isn’t an industry union to fight it. The execs are saying “we can train AI on all the past and present labor of our artists and then just fire the artists!”. They aren’t stupid enough to commit fully to this strategy so soon after the labor strikes in the movie industry, but mark my words this is just testing the waters.
I think they can particularly get away with this because gamers tend to be the kind of people who will scream “skill issue” or naively parrot a talking point at you if you bring up the political consequences of AI being used to consolidate power in the ruling class. As a result there is almost zero actual solidarity between fans and creators in this industry.
Either workers in the video game industry will lose a historic amount of power (and thus benefits, job security, pay etc…) in the next couple of years or there will be a historic amount of labor organizing. Those are the two possibilities. It doesn’t really matter if the AI actually functions as a replacement for the artists for this happen, the narrative not the truth is the important part in undercutting the quality of life of video game industry workers. Once the damage is done companies will say that they maybe oversold the potential of AI to replace artists to their investors but even when they do they will never reverse the cuts they made to their workers. It will just become the new norm.
Even if in the best case for workers, using AI ends up being a frustrating waste of time for video game development, massive video game companies will force their workers to use shitty AI tools as part of their development process in order to jam reality into fitting the narrative they used to justify cutting investment into their workers. That is a small price to pay for the opportunity to fundamentally change the power dynamics between video game industry workers and the owners of the companies.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don’t agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don’t have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
…I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can’t stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn’t it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can’t argue it isn’t a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs…
My drivers ed class in new england pretty much focused only on educating teenagers about how brutally dangerous drunk driving is. It was frustrating at the time because I felt like I didn’t even learn how to drive but given how where I grew up as a teenager you had to go drink in sketch places which usually involved driving (what a dumb way to structure society ughh) because of the car hellscape I grew up in…. I honestly think those drivers ed teachers spent their time well.
Driving a car isn’t so hard so long as you take the perspective that you have one rule, don’t hit other people and always remind yourself that you can’t assume other drivers will do anything they should on the road. Drunk driving was VERY hard not to do as a bored teenager trying to hang out with other bored teenagers. I could have died, my friends could have died. Idk, so I can’t be too upset at my drivers ed class in retrospect.
Yeah, let me go ask my DJ friends I totally know and are also a Californian who enjoys South African Deep House and Prog House, or post rock, but not post metal.
Do you know how many people exist that can do that for me? Exactly zero.
Hmm, let’s see if I google “South African Deep House DJ Mix”
First result: https://m.soundcloud.com/deephouse_sa
This is what drives me up a wall, people WANT to believe that only robots can help them with their super specific artistic tastes because they are too niche even if it means ignoring tons of artists and curators out there who’s passion it is to collect and share that specific type of music.
We have been sold AI curation as a way of placing a corporation between you and the communities of listeners and curators who share and find the types of music you like so art can further be corporatized and divorced from the artists who actually create the art. A corporation isn’t going to promote humans sharing music they have collected with humans because if that human gets popular they could just go somewhere else with their fans, i.e. there is a community and corporations see that as a threat compared to an algorithm they own and can manipulate any way they want.
I am not saying never use algorithmic recommendation, but it is depressing how the vast majority of people seem to have utterly abandoned the idea of being interested in communities of humans collecting music and sharing it in artistically arranged mixes.
The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don’t think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse.
Right and this is really all that even needs to be said. There is nothing meta can do or say that will make this not true and there is no possibility that overtime meta won’t make decisions according to this power relation.
The future fediverse we all day dream about when we are in an optimistic mood is literally a catastrophic fail state for a corporate social media company like meta. We see the plot of a happy uplifting family action movie, meta sees a horrific slasher movie.
People in support of federating with threads keep saying we don’t need to worry about meta trying to extend, embrace and extinguish the fediverse because the software and architecture of the fediverse makes it impervious. In other words, technology will defend us from politics, money and power.
It is a categorical error in logic to think that a technology can solve problems of the type: politics, money or power.
WE have to solve those problems by understanding how history repeats itself and how large corporations fundamentally relate to publicly shared resources irrespective of what the CEOs say or even think themselves. We have to realize you can’t write a computer function that will stop a massive corporation from corrupting a collective human endeavor. Only humans can do that by organizing to collectively reject the membership of the massive corporation from the community around the collective human endeavor. As soon as you let meta in the door, you have lost a very important ideological power struggle over the fediverse’s identity.
To those of you who argue that being against federating with meta/threads is elitist and comes from a desire of not wanting to let “normies” in who will dilute fediverse culture… I don’t want to let massive corporations in precisely because I think it fosters an environment where a diversity of people, specifically minorities, are not made to feel safe or welcome. Most of the cool people worth actually talking to on the fediverse came here because they didn’t feel safe or welcome on a corporate social network owned by a massive corporation.
If your response to that is well but what about all the normies that the massive corporation could rope into the fediverse that the tiny, pathetic fediverse will never reach? I return to my original point. This isn’t a struggle over programs, code, software… it is a struggle of politics, money and power and we have to relate to it that way. To let a massive corporation into the fediverse that basically has the resources of an entire rich nation and think it won’t utterly exploit and derail the future of the fediverse is absurd. If a company is publicly traded on the stockmarket, it is essentially obligated legally to do so in the pursuit of potential profit for its investors. We can’t get the reach a massive corporation could give us without also fundamentally giving up what makes the fediverse a better alternative than corporate social media. It is a deal with the devil no matter what way you spin it.
Very cool
Neither do I, which is why I support not allowing hate speech because the end goal is always violence or the threat of violence whether the people spewing it are conscious of it or not. The lame hateful racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic jokes that punch down at stereotypes are an advertisement for an ideology of hate (like a lightbulb for moths) and a test to see if that hate will be allowed to flourish in a community.
Ok but what if someone figured out where you lived, doxed you and got a mob of angry racists to threaten your family? Maybe it was a joke, but given the amount of extremist angry conservatives these days maybe that threat of violence is real.
Do you think that is ok? What if so many people were hate messaging you that it utterly overwhelmed your ability to even go on your favorite social network? What if you woke up one day and one of those internet users drove by your house and left a note threatening your life on your door?
These aren’t hypothetical questions, this is what awful people do when you don’t curtail hate speech (and actively support it like musk does). There are REAL WORLD violent consequences for it and if you have never felt the fear from being targeted by a mob of irrationally angry strangers that want to hurt you than you just don’t really have any meaningful perspective to talk about “free speech” like you are.
Sure some of the hypotheticals I brought up are also illegal, but there is always a throbbing tumor of bigots spewing hate speech at each other at the heart of this kind of thing that these actions grow out of. These people need to be isolated, shamed and alienated from normal social circles for their behavior or things become dangerous for real human beings. You don’t negotiate with these people, you show them the door when they start spewing hate speech.
gleefully punches block button
I am not talking about having to go anywhere to listen to DJs.
Ok, Mixcloud
facepalm no, DJs often put mixes up for you to listen to. Again mixcloud is a good example.
I hate the radio, I’m not talking about radio DJs unless it is the very occasional weird college radio station that is fun just for the curveballs.
I’m talking about all the other DJs, real life human beings who for fun spend hours hunting down the kind of music you listen to and arrange it into mixes. Like a recommendation algorithm but a human! There are plenty of them, you might not know of one that exists for your specific niche, but rest assured they definitely exist.
They play sets for bars and stuff with music they have collected in whatever genre they are into, it is a whole thing.
I don’t know why I am explaining the concept of a DJ.
Ok, but why not find a human that curates the kind of music you like? They are called DJs.
I don’t understand why we need to get rid of human DJs that seems like the last job we need to replace.
edit why do y’all think I am talking about radio DJs? You…. know there are wayyyyyyy more DJs out there than just radio DJs right?..…right?
….like y’all know mixes exist right? Like mixcloud or whatever?
Have fun trying to build the future by yourself! I hope some people walk by in the distance that you can yell at so you can get your rocks off once in awhile :)
Not really vibing with calling people retards bruh.
I understand being upset and wanting it all to burn down but this is the best chance we have.
It is also about the philosophy of many people who are focused on fusion as the future. If we just had unlimited cheap power that would solve alllll of our problems…. which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is really the crisis here.