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@mekkaokereke this is where I have to say yes and, as Latour said, technology is society made durable.
Current technology is a problem because it embodies sociopathic politics. You can have a different technology and it might adapt currently dominant technology, but that requires politics and intention.
@mekkaokereke
I can understand the urge to blame capitalism, given that so many of the problems facing the masses right now can be traced to the wealth concentration made inevitable by unregulated capitalism.
And unfortunately, even when you regulate capitalism enough to prevent things like this, they will use their vast wealth to tirelessly corrupt the government until they can have unregulated capitalism again.
AI and social media are in a special category, I think.
AI greatly amplifies the problems of wealth concentration by giving the wealthy access to expertise while denying experts access to wealth (to borrow a meme for my argument). While there are useful applications of this tech, right now, it is doing enormous harm on many fronts.
As for social media, decentralized social media solves some of it, but most of the power and influence is still in the hands of a few billionaires. I am sure I don't have to remind you that the controversy with the Cambridge Analytica incident was that CA used data they did not pay to have access to. What they did with the data was exactly what most social media platforms are designed to do; they just shocked everyone because they did it to influence an election instead of purchasing decisions about dish detergent or graphics cards.
Sorry to interject. I otherwise agree with everything. My apologies if I misread or misinterpreted anything. I'm super tired right now.
We've talked about Cambridge Analytica before. People greatly exaggerated its effect. It was a convenient boogie man to try to justify how many many white Americans would vote for open racism and fascism.
The percent of white people that consistently choose the most racist candidates on the ballot, has not changed in 80+ years. There was no significant increase before, during or after the existence of Cambridge Analytica. 🤷🏿♂️
@mekkaokereke 100% agree w you.
How genAI was built, how it was trained, how it is being powered, how it is being forced into every single niche whether it makes sense, how it is being championed by the worst humans alive and being embraced by the most oppressive governments in the world are all symptoms.
Social media was cool and good until it became about literally addicting its users so the Epstein Class could extract wealth through ads, data harvesting, surveillance, and algorithmically driven radicalization.
@mekkaokereke
There is some nuance in this reply, as in are you disagreeing with the post or the video.
If it is the post, then:
"Tech companies are destroying social structures" does not equal Technology.
I would argue by calling out the tech companies, the poster is agreeing with your point that the #EpsteinClass is hell bent on #Genocide and #Slavery for the proles.
I'm disagreeing with both, and making the explicit point that "tech companies" is an unclear term that hides the real point. It's not tech companies.
Because most tech companies don't act like this. It's a tiny fraction of tech companies, that just so happen to overlap with the ones run by people that write papers and blog posts like "👴🏻I hate society, and my own employees, and my own children, and people I don't even know thousands of miles away in Africa, and also, you!🤡"
Most tech companies don't do this. Most are relatively normal.
Eg Mastodon is a tech company.
Every solo Indy game dev is a tech company.
Every self-employed software engineer is a tech company.
Etc.
The distinction is important, because this extends well beyond tech companies.
I think when someone says something like the original statement about "tech companies" we know which ones they mean
It _is_ the dominant ones, who one mustn't openly criticize unless one wishes to risk career opportunities.
It is the household names.
It is most of the 10 most valuable tech companies.
It is the tech companies who are most profoundly affecting the world today.
If we rush to "not all technology companies" are we not dodging the issue?
👴🏻 People that wear capes turn into bats, and drink people's blood! Therefore we must ban capes!
👩🏼Um... I think you mean vampires? Vampires drink blood.
👴🏻 That's what I mean! Vampires wear capes! In conclusion, we can stop townspeople from going missing by banning capes! 🤡
🧛🏻♂️*slowly removes cape* I agree! Ban capes to save lives!
👩🏼He just took his cape off! He's still a vampire!
===
And regarding "Not all tech companies," White people are often reluctant to interrogate racism and fascism head on, and sometimes try to use the language of marginalization against Black people and women like this. No, this is not like "not all white people," this is like, "Yes, all genocidal, anti-democracy, pro-fascist people." The list of companies under my definition is significantly greater than the weaker definition of "tech companies." Stops people from doing silly things like telling all the towns people to remove their capes.
I, and many Black people, told y'all before Cambridge Analytica had disappeared, that getting rid of Cambridge Analytica would change absolutely nothing. And we were right. The percent of white people that support Trump did not change at all. Y'all are focusing on the wrong things.
@mekkaokereke A bit too Messias like but basically right. In the end, isn't he explaining what everybody already knows?
Some people think that venture capital is a fundamentally evil business structure. I disagree.
Thought experiment:
If you could press a button tomorrow, that would cause 50% of the entire population of the continent of Africa to die within 5 years😮, but would 50X your profits and create dozens of trillion dollar companies, and help humanity become interplanetary 10 years earlier, would you press it?
If you're on this weird little Mastodon thing reading this, then you are most likely:
1) A technologist of some sort
2) Not a genocidal maniac
So you would of course say no.
Some of you suspect that I'm going to *imply* that many VCs would say yes. But I'm not going to imply anything. I don't have to. Because many of these VCs have written papers and blog posts under their real names, celebrating the fact that they believe that it's wrong *not* to press that button.🤦🏿♂️
The problem with VC is neither the profit motive, nor the business structure.
The problem is that the vast majority of the funds that our entire society uses to solve hard problems, are controlled and allocated by people that believe that it is their duty to create new buttons like the one above, and then mash it repeatedly.
@mekkaokereke I guess the question for me is: do people become VCs because they’re genocidal maniacs, or do they become genocidal maniacs because they’re VCs? I tend to think it’s the latter: it seems like all that money somehow creates sociopathy. If that’s the case, I would say that there’s something evil about VC itself - it somehow structurally creates sociopaths. (I have no evidence here, this is just a thing I feel and might be very wrong.)
No. Absolutely not. Money doesn't turn people like this. That's cope.
You can literally read what most of these anti-democracy, anti-DEI, pro-acceleration VCs had to say before they became VCs. They haven't changed.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110019017853932523
Name a person who think "turned weird recently," and people can show you them having the same trash opinions 20 years ago, and no one listening to Black people about it.
If I give you a billion dollars right now, you wouldn't turn into Peter Thiel. You'd more likely turn into Mackenzie Scott.
Everyone watched the TV show Breaking Bad, but missed the central premise and the title of the show. A person doesn't just Break Bad. They were always like this.
@mekkaokereke of course in the real world, the dead people are pretty much guaranteed and the 50x profit is a possibility rather than a guarantee.
The problem with the VCs you're talking about are that they don't see the former as a problem. Some have clearly stated that it would be a good thing. Just like the slave traders, Klan members and robber barons they're descended from (or for those born outside USA, the appropriate colonial structures in those countries).
@mekkaokereke i think it’s performative puritanism. Tech solves no problems… only my preferred purity does
@mekkaokereke
Agreed. Capitalism is just a tool, like a hammer. You can use it to build a house or hit someone over the head with it.
The problem is that those starting with the wealth were the slave owners, who effectively stole wealth from Black people (free slave labor is stolen income. It’s not free for the Black person).
They had a choice between feeling shit about themselves or dehumanising people so they don’t have to feel anything. You know what they chose and in doing so built the system where people like them would prosper.
As long as there is racism favoring whites anywhere, we (white people) have privilege regardless of wealth.
There was a Dean Koontz book which had a plot revolving roughly around "Either someone you love or a random stranger has to die tomorrow: you choose which one."
So I know I'm not as nice a person as I like to pretend.
I think part of the problem is around the remoteness of consequences from actions. As a for instance, a number of people in the current US administration who view waging war as little more than a video game- the consequences don't impact them personally, therefore they don't matter.
All I'm saying is that if you believe that your problems are caused by:
"1) technologists, 2) that are genocidal maniacs, 3) and that allocate most of society's resources"
then maybe focus on the "genocidal maniac" part, or the "most of society's resources" part, before the technology part.
@mekkaokereke this is where I have to say yes and, as Latour said, technology is society made durable.
Current technology is a problem because it embodies sociopathic politics. You can have a different technology and it might adapt currently dominant technology, but that requires politics and intention.
@MichaelTBacon @mekkaokereke
Wow. Um. That's good stuff.
@mekkaokereke Yeah, the problem though is even if you focus on taking the bad people out of the equation the self-perpetuating systems of harm remain, so at that point the “tech” is corrupted as well, at least until it falls into disrepair and someone tries to extract its core without the harmful elements, if such a thing is even possible. And then there’s also public perception around the tech.
So at that point the tech has become harmful, and the technologists perpetuate that harm.
I see policing having a similar issue, though its origins were clearly incredibly evil, racist and harmful to begin with.
And then there’s the ubiquity of tech people trying to solve every social problem with tech, it’s this kind of naive optimism that focuses on a pet interest of the person but tries to do it within the framework we are all indoctrinated into from birth, capitalism, and thus produces something structurally harmful.
Plus, I think people CAN become fascist via social osmosis, so when you work in an industry involved in structural evil it can change you, the same way wealth fucks up people’s brains and makes them self focused to the point of apathy for all other life. And look at the tech industry right now.
I don’t think that’s preordained, I think it is learned, and can be at any stage of life.
But again, I don't think extreme wealth cooks people's brains. I know for a fact that many of the examples people cite for this, had these same exact thoughts when they were broke or just moderately rich.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110019017853932523
I think that having a brain poached to that degree, in US society and in the American economy, and if you are white and moderately wealthy so that you can afford to fail a few times and have the privilege of access to capital, gives you better odds at becoming extremely wealthy.
@mekkaokereke I don’t totally understand. It’s definitely a problem genocidal maniacs have this kind of power. But I feel like the problem is that we allow anyone to have that kind of power. Because there will always be a few genocidal maniacs in the mix, and they’ll always be the most adept at exploiting paths to power—cause the rest of us just don’t want it as much.
So shouldn’t we be focused on the structure that concentrates power?
I guess I’m making a big assumption that there will always be genocidal power hungry maniacs…but it seems true given my lived experience.
@minmi @mekkaokereke Any system that allows the accumulation of excessive wealth and therefore power will at least weakly filter for genocidal maniacs. Because if you are one, you are more inclined to make the kind of exploitative decisions that make it easier to accumulate huge amounts of wealth.
I don't think there is any way to reliably prevent this without putting some sort of de facto cap on wealth accumulation.
And even that is probably only a necessary step but not a sufficient one.
I agree with your points! That's what I meant by the "most of society's resources" part.
#socialMedia didn't invent #bigotry, but it turbocharged it
1. a bigot can be their true selves online with few consequences
2. moderation is a cost. say "freeze peach," gut the mod dept, and save $
3. "don't feed the trolls"? outrage means clicks and eyeballs, good engagement metrics. for-profit social media is incentivized to push bigotry
so fuck social media?
nope
clean it the fuck up
luddite mental gymnastics won't make social media disappear
the problem
is bigotry
Yup. With one clarification: social media objectively, unequivocally, reduced bigotry.
I'm a nerd. I went to a fancy prep school, then a fancy liberal arts college, then work with computers. I'm a classic nerdy jock. I don't do hard drugs, I don't steal I don't get in trouble. I didn't even drink in high school. Super square!
But I started getting pulled over and harassed by cops starting from age 12, because I'm a Black boy.
Before social media, no one that wasn't Black believed me about my experiences. Now, after social media, people believe it.
Before social media, no one believed Black people when we said how often cops lie and plant evidence. Now, after social media, people believe it.
No one believed Black people about how many evil, racist, white ladies there are, being racist and attacking Black people and kids, and trying to get us killed by cop or vigilante. Now, after social media, people believe it.
Elon bought Twitter, in large part because racists are mad at how effective social media is at calling racists out on their nonsense.
@mekkaokereke the problem is, as always, crapitalism
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