Jesus yeah that’s a great point re:Musk/Twitter. I’m not sure that it’s true as you wrote it quite yet, but I would definitely agree that it’s, at the very least, an excellent prediction. It might very well be functionally true already as a matter of political economy, but it hasn’t been tested yet by a sufficiently big movement or financial crisis or whatever.

+1 to everything that you said about organizing. It seems that we’re coming to the same realization that many 19th century socialists already had. There are no shortcuts to building power, and that includes going viral on Twitter.

I’ve told this story on the fediverse before, but I have this memory from occupy of when a large news network interviewed my friend, an economist, but only used a few seconds of that interview, but did air the entirety of an interview with a guy who was obviously unwell and probably homeless. Like you, it took me a while after occupy to really unpack in my head what had happened in general, and I often think on that moment as an important microcosm. Not only was it grossly exploitative, but it is actually good that the occupy camps welcomed and fed people like him. That is how our society ought to work. To have it used as a cudgel to delegitimize the entire camp was cynical beyond my comprehension at the time. To this day, I think about that moment to sorta tune the cynicism of the reaction, even to such a frankly ineffectual and disorganized threat as occupy. A meaningful challenge to power had better be ready for one hell of a reaction.

Same, and thanks! We’re probably a similar age. My own political awakening was occupy, and I got interested in theory as I participated in more and more protest movements that just sorta fizzled.

I 100% agree re:Twitter. I am so tired of people pointing out that it has lost 80% of its value or whatever. Once you have a few billion, there’s nothing that more money can do to your material circumstances. Don’t get me wrong, Musk is a dumbass, but, in this specific case, I actually think that he came out on top. That says more about what you can do with infinite money than anything about his tactical genius, because it doesn’t exactly take the biggest brain to decide that you should buy something that seems important.

I actually also reviewed that one, except my review of it was extremely favorable. I’m so glad that you read it and I’d welcome your thoughts on my very friendly amendment to his analysis if you end up reading that post.

Glad to hear it!

Totally agreed. I didn’t mean to say that it’s a failure if it doesn’t properly encapsulate all complexity, but that the inability to do so has implications for design. In this specific case (as in many cases), the error they’re making is that they don’t realize the root of the problem that they’re trying to solve lies in that tension.

The platform and environment are something you can shape even without an established or physical community.

Again, couldn’t agree more! The platform is actually extremely powerful and can easily change behavior in undesirable ways for users, which is actually the core thesis of that longer write up that I linked. That’s a big part of where ghosting comes from in the first place. My concern is that thinking you can just bolt a new thing onto the existing model is to repeat the original error.

This app fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Your friend sets you up on a date. Are you going to treat that person horribly. Of course not. Why? First and foremost, because you’re not a dick. Your date is a human being who, like you, is worthy and deserving of basic respect and decency. Second, because your mutual friendship holds you accountable. Relationships in communities have an overlapping structure that mutually impact each other. Accountability is an emergent property of that structure, not something that can be implemented by an app. When you meet people via an app, you strip both the humanity and the community, and with it goes the individual and community accountability.

I’ve written about this tension before: As we use computers more and more to mediate human relationships, we’ll increasingly find that being human and doing human things is actually too complicated to be legible to computers, which need everything spelled out in mathematically precise detail. Human relationships, like dating, are particularly complicated, so to make them legible to computers, you necessarily lose some of the humanity.

Companies that try to whack-a-mole patch the problems with that will find that their patches are going to suffer from the same problem: Their accountability structure is a flat shallow version of genuine human accountability, and will itself result in pathological behavior. The problem is recursive.

Unfortunately, COP28 is taking it seriously, seen here with “both sides” reporting from the NYT.

This is a frustrating piece. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history knows that you can’t just report on what fascist movements say then fact check it (which is what WaPo is doing here). JD Vance doesn’t give a single shit about workers, and the facts don’t matter. It’s about aesthetics. The American fascist movement, like all such movements, is interested in appropriating the very real grievances of workers into a spectacle that serves power rather than challenges it. Walter Benjamin calls this the aestheticization of politics.

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper

Goldman Sachs researchers also say that

It’s not a research paper; it’s a report. They’re not researchers; they’re analysts at a bank. This may seem like a nit-pick, but journalists need to (re-)learn to carefully distinguish between the thing that scientists do and corporate R&D, even though we sometimes use the word “research” for both. The AI hype in particular has been absolutely terrible for this. Companies have learned that putting out AI “research” that’s just them poking at their own product but dressed up in a science-lookin’ paper leads to an avalanche of free press from lazy credulous morons gorging themselves on the hype. I’ve written about this problem a lot. For example, in this post, which is about how Google wrote a so-called paper about how their LLM does compared to doctors, only for the press to uncritically repeat (and embellish on) the results all over the internet. Had anyone in the press actually fucking bothered to read the paper critically, they would’ve noticed that it’s actually junk science.

Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

All these always do the same thing.

Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.

From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Yet here’s their conclusion :

The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.

It’s literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.

Haha I was actually paraphrasing myself from last year, but I’ve seen that because lots of readers sent me that article when it came out a few months later, for obvious reasons!

I completely and totally agree with the article that the attention economy in its current manifestation is in crisis, but I’m much less sanguine about the outcomes. The problem with the theory presented here, to me, is that it’s missing a theory of power. The attention economy isn’t an accident, but the result of the inherently political nature of society. Humans, being social animals, gain power by convincing other people of things. From David Graeber (who I’m always quoting lol):

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

In other words, just because algorithmic social media becomes uninteresting doesn’t mean the death of the attention economy as such, because the attention economy is something innate to humanity, in some form. Today its algorithmic feeds, but 500 years ago it was royal ownership of printing presses.

I think we already see the beginnings of the next round. As an example, the YouTuber Veritsasium has been doing educational videos about science for over a decade, and he’s by and large good and reliable. Recently, he did a video about self-driving cars, sponsored by Waymo, which was full of (what I’ll charitably call) problematic claims that were clearly written by Waymo, as fellow YouTuber Tom Nicholas pointed out. Veritasium is a human that makes good videos. People follow him directly, bypassing algorithmic shenanigans, but Waymo was able to leverage their resources to get into that trusted, no-algorithm space. We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

This has an analogy in our physical world. As more and more of our physical world looks the same, as a result of the homogenizing forces of capital (office parks, suburbia, generic blocky bulidings, etc.), the fewer and fewer remaining parts that are special, like say Venice, become too valuable for their own survival. They become “touristy,” which is itself a sort of ironically homogenized commodified authenticity.

edit: oops I got Tom’s name wrong lol fixed

Am alternative approach that may interest you: https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension

We need to set aside our petty differences and fight the true enemy: bloated IDEs.

I have worked at two different start ups where the boss explicitly didn’t want to hire anyone with kids and had to be informed that there are laws about that, so yes, definitely anti-parent. One of them also kept saying that they only wanted employees like our autistic coworker when we asked him why he had spent weeks rejecting every interviewee that we had liked. Don’t even get me started on people that the CEO wouldn’t have a beer with, and how often they just so happen to be women or foreigners! Just gross shit all around.

It’s very clear when you work closely with founders that they see their businesses as a moral good in the world, and as a result, they have a lot of entitlement about their relationship with labor. They view laws about it as inconveniences on their moral imperative to grow the startup.

This has been ramping up for years. The first time that I was asked to do “homework” for an interview was probably in 2014 or so. Since then, it’s gone from “make a quick prototype” to assignments that clearly take several full work days. The last time I job hunted, I’d politely accept the assignment and ask them if $120/hr is an acceptable rate, and if so, I can send over the contract and we can get started ASAP! If not, I refer them to my thousands upon thousands of lines of open source code.

My experience with these interactions is not that they’re looking for the most qualified applicants, but that they’re filtering for compliant workers who will unquestioningly accept the conditions offered in exchange for the generally lucrative salaries. It’s the kind of employees that they need to keep their internal corporate identity of being the good guys as tech goes from being universally beloved to generally reviled by society in general.

Whenever one of these stories come up, there’s always a lot of discussion about whether these suits are reasonable or fair or whether it’s really legally the companies’ fault and so on. If that’s your inclination, I propose that you consider it from the other side: Big companies use every tool in their arsenal to get what they want, regardless of whether it’s right or fair or good. If we want to take them on, we have to do the same. We call it a justice system, but in reality it’s just a fight over who gets to wield the state’s monopoly of violence to coerce other people into doing what they want, and any notions of justice or fairness are window dressing. That’s how power actually works. It doesn’t care about good faith vs bad faith arguments, and we can’t limit ourselves to only using our institutions within their veneer of rule of law when taking on powerful, exclusively self-interested, and completely antisocial institutions with no such scruples.

Parahprasing greatly here, but in her recent book, Naomi Klein pointed out that most Americans are pilled as fuck on neoliberalism, and because the pandemic is a naturally occurring and obvious contradiction to its fundamental tenets (individualism, meritocracy, competiton, etc.), the only way to square that circle was to go insane.

I find that framework very useful. These so called activists are pilled as hell on this fundamentally individualist concept of freedom that inundates us Americans from birth. It’s an almost entirely empty conception of freedom. Basically, we can say whatever we want while owning guns and generally being selfish. No one is entitled to be free of childhood disease though. That’s not freedom because it encroaches on others being selfish. If you genuinely believe in individual liberty above all, as Americans are taught from birth, then childhood vaccinations are wrong.

Unfortunately it’s a really fucking stupid way to run a society.