“Move fast and break things.”
The things:
- Human rights
- Our habitat
- Democracy
#BigTech#SiliconValley#ventureCapitalhttps://mastodon.social/@freakonometrics/114860155869573459
Is it possible to imagine a better future where we use less computation? The effects of AI hype almost demand it.
On #TechWontSaveUs, I spoke with @danmcquillan so he could lay out the concept of decomputing as a different way of assessing technology.
Listen to the full episode: https://techwontsave.us/episode/286_decomputing_for_a_better_future_w_dan_mcquillan
What is Donald Trump's plan for AI? @brianmerchant read his Action Plan and executive orders and watched his speech. Here's what he learned. "Broadly speaking, the plan is that the Trump administration will help Silicon Valley put the pedal down on AI, delivering customers, data centers and power, as long as it operates in accordance with Trump’s ideological frameworks; i.e., as long as the AI is anti-woke," Merchant writes for his Blood in the Machine newsletter. "It’s above all a blueprint for consolidated control, a vision where worker power withers, citizens become subservient to AI; to its corporate masters and federal overseers, where fossil fuels are ushered again into prominence at the height of the climate crisis, and democracy is sidelined in favor of automation technologies. It is, in summary, pretty grim!"
#Tech#Technology#ArtificialIntelligence#AI#TrumpAdministration#DonaldTrump#Politics#DEI#SiliconValley
This is the Silicon Valley “startup” model. Startups are not long-term sustainable businesses or small businesses. A startup is a temporary business designed to either grow exponentially and exit (sell) or to fail fast.
Tech billionaires are turning the world on its head. We must challenge their power, but we also need to be clear that the individuals aren’t the sole problem.
There are structural forces at play that would pressure anyone in their position to do much the same. They must be dismantled.
https://www.disconnect.blog/p/better-founders-wont-fix-silicon
File under: digital media literacy
The great @molly0xfff has a mini-thread up on Bluesky revealing how her Substack dashboard shows steady growth... despite the fact she stopped using that platform a year and a half ago: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3ltd6biesvk2r
Substack's "network effect" may be an illusion. More on this here: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3ltd6fud6jc2r
I'm really happy I left SS for Ghost in January 2024 and I never looked back... and yes, the abbreviation is not that coincidental
🔗: https://news.elenarossini.com/this-is-what-resistance-to-the-digital-coup-looks-like/
“The modern-day system of colonialism and sharecropping being constructed by the new East India Company that is Silicon Valley isn’t uncouth or stupid enough to put people in physical shackles. It doesn’t want to own your body, it is content with owning your simulation. And yet, as we have already seen, the more data they have about you – the higher the fidelity of your simulation – the closer they are to owning you.
…
If this doesn’t sound like democracy, it is because it is not. Surveillance Capitalism isn’t compatible with democracy.
The system we live in today can best be described as a corporatocracy; a feudalism of corporations.
Ours is a neo-colonial age of multinational monopolies.
A digital imperialism, if you will.”
– Me, The Nature of the Self in the Digital Age, 2016
https://ar.al/notes/the-nature-of-the-self-in-the-digital-age/
#BigTech #SiliconValley #colonialism #technology #feudalism #imperialism #corporatocracy #capitalism https://j12t.social/@j12t/114798595701343934
“International Business Machines, and its president Thomas J. Watson, committed genocide by any standard. It was never about the antisemitism. It was never about the National Socialism. It was always about the money. Business was their middle name.”
– Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust
The more things change…
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691
#IBM#Holocaust#BigTech#SiliconValley#Google#Microsoft #israel #genocide #apartheid#settlerColonialism #capitalism #neoliberalism #complicityhttps://infosec.exchange/@onrust/114779288628253881
At its core, #CCSignals is an attempt by Creative Commons, a Silicon Valley-based organisation, to legitimise the AI grifts of its donors – Google, Microsoft, and Meta (Zuckerberg).
Creative Commons was always a thinly-veiled attempt at enabling Big Tech data farmers to get more data (that’s why the whole “open data” realm is so well funded/popular – open as in “open for business” not free as in “freedom”) but at least their original licenses (non-commercial, share-alike, no derivatives, and yes, sometimes even just attribution) were genuinely useful for people as well as for corporations.
I like to think (perhaps naïvely, I don’t know) that Lawrence Lessig had his heart in the right place when he came up with it all. But I’m biased. I learned how to present from him (including how to use my presentation display) and we even presented a session together back in the day when I was running Open Source Flash. I’m also a big fan of his concept of “institutional corruption”. But I have no illusions that we see eye to eye on all things and I haven’t spoken to him in over a decade.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.
This is Creative Commons jumping the shark (is jumping the shark the original enshittification?) and destroying their credibility with a scheme that doesn’t benefit people, only their corporate donors.
Keep using the existing licenses, as they have value, but don’t help them legitimise this latest land grab by the same trillion-dollar corporations and billionaires who are busy destroying our habitat, human rights, and democracy.
In fact, if they go ahead with this, it might be an idea to fork the original Creative Commons licenses and publish them under a different name in an effort to counter the use of their legitimacy to whitewash Big AI.
#CreativeCommons#SiliconValley#BigTech#BigAI#AIhttps://mastodon.cloud/@raymondpert/114754532045016792
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
