damn they got the algorithm wrong.
969 karma · joined January 26, 2021
-
Beckman is the last name one of my favorite authors: Dutch author Thea Beckman ('Kinderen van moeder aarde'/Thule trilogy, as well as 'Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek'/'Crusade in Jeans')
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039983
if it's:
> those leaders essentially committed mass-murder from a distance
are you condoning drone strikes? (serious question). i believe people (including elected bourgeois leaders) should be held accountable. the US govt. are accusing Snowden and Assange of being "high-tech terrorists" (Biden [1]), so why cannot i refer to these people as murderers?
> US propertied class
this is merely a fact. the people in power are predominantly those who own property or intellectual property. a lot of people do not own their homes and have to rent, neither do they own IP so they have to work for their money (receive a wage). i am referring to these power structures based on my own beliefs ("be ruthless to systems, be kind to people").
> US propertied class' illegitimate 'war on terror'
at this point i'm pretty sure not many are claiming it is was a legitimate war... are you?
was the flagging because of something else? if yes, please share.
it just feels dishonest to censor stuff you don't personally agree with, especially since it received a bunch of upvotes. a 'don't make it political' stance seems naive to me because of course no system is (or ever can be) neutral, since there always many voices at the table.
i don't think it's fun to write this, i just want to call you out on what i perceive are a few double standards you have. i appreciate the moderation and the space to discuss the role of tech in society, and it just surprises me when things get censored or the host party decides to interfere (especially a comment that isn't downvoted to hell or actively harmful to someone (or misogynistic, racist, homophobic or transphobic)). until we have a more distributed web a la ActivityPub, SSB, DAT, IPFS, holochain etc., we all have to make the most of this centralized tech.
anyways, please could you restore my comment?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-t...
> but
please stop gatekeeping
> motivated to learn about command line interfaces in order to use powerful software
many people never get basic tech literacy. i think we’d benefit from not simply assuming others have (or could have) access to the same resources, time and patience that we had. i think you probably mean well but your statement, which sort of implies that people say “I am choosing not to learn the important skill of using the command line!”, just comes across as ignorant and naive to me
you might like http://mikorizal.org and http://holochain.org
> you're combining them so you can be outraged.
no, you're going to an ad hominem by trying to point to my supposed emotionality ("outraged").
serious question: how do you justify this in your mind?
i think you're willfully misinterpreting here to try to somehow discredit them or 'get' them, without actually offering any meaningful counterarguments. it's easy to understand what that person means.
> if someone only takes far right positions on the topic of brown people they aren't far right - they are something complicated that needs more description.
please would you elaborate? i haven't seen that before.
i doesn’t really matter if he supported those things individually. look at Reagan proclaiming he is fighting for everyone (including the black community), yet then behind closed doors he refers to black people as “monkeys” (that famous call with Nixon) [1]. so it doesn’t matter if Pim held those beliefs, it matters what policies the party overall pursues, with whom they ally themselves, and what actions come after their stated political aims/programs. when we take a look at similar political parties that came before it does not look good.
my point is: pursuing certain xenophobic ideas and pushing for far-right change nearly always ultimately means you end up forfeiting these ‘smaller’ standpoints when push comes to shove.
e.g. from Pim’s wikipedia page (under 'Political career') it is well-described how he had already journeyed from being a marxist to becoming a free-market neo-liberal. if he hadn’t been killed i’m sure he would’ve further completed this arc and becoming a far-right neo-conservative populist politician like the Trumps, Baudets and Wilders of today.
> I'm arguing that "right" and "left" are a linear one-dimensional approximation of complex multi-dimensional beliefs.
did you mean “aren’t” instead of “are”? i’ll assume so, because it seems to make the most sense to me from your other arguments (if not then i am not following you at all)
you are trying to redefine the right to left political spectrum to a ‘both sides’ centrist view. this is a dangerous right-wing strategy that aims to reframe a debate on it's own terms; a deflection and distraction away from important systemic critiques (which ultimately leads to a continuation of a systemically violent status quo).
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-rea... (archive version - https://archive.md/OdpeR), direct link to call audio https://soundcloud.com/user-154380542/nixon-013-008-630-650/...
well you succeeded, here we are talking about your 'neutral' picture
> He was also openly gay
you can be gay and be far-right. those are not somehow mutually exclusive. another example off the top of my head: Milo Yiannopoulos and Dave Rubin are both openly gay and far-right.
> This kind of black-and-white thinking
no. the issue here is doublespeak and misdefining commonly used words. like on that wikipedia page i linked to his far-right views are laid out in detail, yet it also notes that he asserted that these far-right ideas are not far-right.
i mean, unless you're arguing that islamophobia and anti-immigration aren't right-wing?
Fortuyn was far-right.
"Fortuyn's beliefs began to shift to the right in the 1990s, especially related to the immigration policies of the Netherlands. Fortuyn criticised multiculturalism, immigration and Islam in the Netherlands. He called Islam "a backward culture", and was quoted as saying that if it were legally possible, he would close the borders for Muslim immigrants."
> I've noticed relying on my friends to vent just sours relationships. As much as people gloat about support systems, it's mainly a farce. People will only tolerate hearing so much of your internal dissonance, concerns, and stressors.
i resonate with this a lot. have you heard of the author Francis Weller?
“At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
this a great conversation with Weller that i seem to return to about once a year: https://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story...
humans can produce environments conducive environments for the discovering, developing and researching of science and technology, without having a profit motive, or having society split up in owners and non-owners. i'm not sure about you, but today's world is hell-ish to me. i hate the inequity i see today.
note: i'm a bit tired so excuse the long quotes and links.
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.
Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide." [1]
> What's the incentive to make things extremely efficient? There'd be no centralized entity skimming off the top, but at the same time there might be an efficiency cost which is even bigger. So I'm skeptical.
incentives are built into the universe, the process of discovery with colleagues is the reward/incentive. getting credit and therefore being trusted further with more democratically awarded scarce material resources could be the reward. the returns that capitalist firms supposedly need to get 'back' is not legitimate because nearly all of those inventions were made possible due to publicly funded research grants and loans. in our future socialist system with a distributed socialist version of a google/search-engine/global-index, we wouldn't need to manipulate people to buy new products ('advertising'), and everyone could use the latest inventions in a modular fashion (that is, only upgrade various components. goodbye planned obsolescence and single use hardware/products). another perspective: it's important to remember that today capital dictates what tech is popular and useful, not actual popularity or effectiveness. abolishing Silicon Valley and the global north IP regime is the only strategy that cuts at the root of this problem. besides that, the most important point is that the waged (non-property owning) knowledge workers are the ones providing the value, not the executives and property-owners (in this case intellectual property).
"In Mazzucato’s account of the enormous success of federal scientific and technical research as the foundation of the most revolutionary of today’s technologies, the most telling example is how dependent Steve Jobs’s Apple was on government-funded breakthroughs. Apple’s earliest innovations in computers were themselves dependent on government research. But by the 1990s, sales of its traditional laptops were flagging. The launch of the iPod in 2001, which displaced the once-popular but more limited Sony Walkman, and in 2007 of the touch-screen systems of the new iPhone and iPad, turned the company into the electronic powerhouse of our time. From that point, its global sales almost quintupled and its stock price rose from roughly $100 to more than $700 a share at its high.
These later breakthroughs were almost completely dependent on government-sponsored research. “While the products owe their beautiful design and slick integration to the genius of Jobs and his large team,” writes Mazzucato,
'nearly every state-of-the-art technology found in the iPod, iPhone and iPad is an often overlooked and ignored achievement of the research efforts and funding support of the government and military.'
A major government-funded discovery known as giant magnetoresistance, which won its two European inventors a Nobel Prize in physics, is a telling example of such support. The process enlarges the storage capacity of computers and more recent electronic devices. In a speech at the Nobel ceremony, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science explained that this breakthrough made the iPod possible. Other major developments by Apple also had their “roots” in federal research, among them, Mazzucato writes, the global positioning system of the iPhone and Siri, its voice-activated personal assistant.
Apple is only one of many such stories. In the early 1980s, the federal government formed the often-forgotten Sematech, the Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology consortium, a research partnership of US semiconductor companies designed to combat Japan’s growing lead in chip technologies. The US provided $100 million a year to encourage private companies to join the effort, including the innovative giant Intel, whose pioneering work on microprocessors in the 1970s had been central to the electronics explosion.
Virtually all experts acknowledged that Sematech reestablished the US competitiveness in microprocessors and memory chips, leading to a sharp reduction in costs and radical miniaturization. The tiny integrated circuits with huge memories that resulted are the core of most electronic products today, long exploited by major companies like Microsoft and Apple. Their development was critically aided by military purchases in their early stages when commercial possibilities were still in their infancy." [2]
i think we're stopped from seeing the above truths because we are now so embedded in this inorganic hyper-commoditized and highly-privatized society. it has gotten to the point where education itself has been turned into an 'experience' commodity, something only for the wealthiest members of society, despite self-directed schools starting to show us that children are innately curious. every child is born wonderfully curious, yet meeting walls instead of bridges sets the boundaries.
> expensive drugs are because of the government (or because of lobbying)
the framing of 'Govt. vs. Private sector/corporations' misses the point that both solely benefit (and are directed by) the propertied class. we live in a bourgeois democracy. there is no democracy for the working class when it comes to e.g. money creation, or the many laws and economic agreements that are lauded as the emancipatory backbones of a supposed 'end-of-history' [3] democratic society.
these are some of the sources and authors that helped me earlier on my journey to understand the dynamics i describe:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/32603498
[1] Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
[2] Mariana Mazzucato, https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.c...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
-
have you seen the latest Einstein blog post? it's hot https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
the underlying strategy here is about starving or buying out competitors until one brand name becomes a literal verb. that is to say: the usage of a proprietary product or service becomes so ubiquitous that we are conditioned to rely on the profit-seeking monopolizing Silicon Valley/Wall Street juggernauts in every aspect of our daily lives. so it's no longer "i'm getting a taxi to your place", it's now "i'm Ubering to your place". or "i'm going to search the internet using a search engine" has now become ”i'm going to google".
so to use tech platforms as an example: the client-server software paradigm obscures and hides all algorithms, protocols, and personal data behind a black box server/software/system. in another article, Wendy Liu writes:
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us." [1]
the most exciting emergent project where i am starting to see the development of fully distributed protocols/software become a reality is the holochain framework. the team behind this open source library are aiming to make it as simple to use as Ruby on Rails was to make centralized apps. other projects in the dweb space that i'm following are activitypub, DAT and SSB. i've heard the above described shift referred to with different names: platform cooperativism, protocol cooperativism, platform socialism, protocol socialism and more. i am personally most excited about the holochain framework, because of the way it uniquely combines proven existing tech: Git, DHT's, etc.
[1] https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...
Except it's a lie that the real innovators are those in the private sector, and that they need to recoup their investment through the intellectual property regime. Nearly all discoveries are made through public sector funding. [1] Your worshipping of supposed individual inventors is part of the great man theory adopted by Silicon Valley [2] and which is spouted by Global North and American bourgeois media/stories/movies.
Research and development is a team sport. The lone genius myth will die.
[1] Mariana Mazzucato, https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.c...
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...
Zuck, is that you? (i'm joking. surely Zuck has better things to do than hang out on online forums...)
it's interesting how you engage with only a small portion of my comment. it seems you didn't bother clicking through to the deeper critiques of the tech industry that i referenced (Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley Tribune article/essay). you casually dismiss serious in-depth critiques of today's system with anecdotal information ("I can access whatever I want, discuss whatever I want"); also by suggesting that i yearn to feel a sense of elitism or be a part of some sort of 'in-group'; that i don't have a facebook account, and that i live inside of an echo-chamber, all without actually engaging with the material and any of the arguments.
would you consider that maybe it is you who is living inside the Silicon Valley echo-chamber? your blanket statements and straw man arguments are suspiciously echo-chamber -like [1]
anyway, hope you're having fun up there on Elysium
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...
> The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment firm that specializes in building technology companies from the ground up. DSV will recruit scientists to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If they come up with viable concepts, Stripe will be their first customer.
why not focus on implementing already existing ecologically sustainable inventions and strategies?
what i read here: rent-seeking tech founders aim to funnel profits they collected from the taxing of economic activity [1] towards a privately-funded lottery of hoped-for future tech.
the techno-fix is dangerous because it 1) ignores existing systemic dysfunction:
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for [trade secrets,] copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [2]
and 2) it covertly wields the lone genius myth [3], that supposedly the Stripe brothers are intellectually superior and can make better funding decisions compared to a democratic body of scientists.
check out this awesome video of just one ecological solution: Life in Syntropy with Ernst Gotsch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
the work of Million Belay of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is also impressive and worth checking out: https://afsafrica.org/
and this video narrated by Jeremy Irons, and with Vandana Shiva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-bK8X2s1kI
and this book by her: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43890614-oneness-vs-the-...
this is what global north capitalists are doing instead, Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas by Joakim Demmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isiYYVmvn2U
[1] Rent-seeking as a service by Wendy Liu, https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86
[2] Peer-to-peer economy and new civilization centered around the sustenance of the commons, http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...
[3] The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato, https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state
there is no hardware interoperability, modularity and repairability. it's just obfuscated single-use hardware with parasitic economic rents through and through.
"What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity." [1]
> Can you elaborate on how mobile and cloud destroyed your family and friends?
'cloud' SaaSS social media firms are soul-sucking culture-destroying black-boxes optimized for 'engagement' - i.e. highlighting the worst of humanity (while ignoring the magic). it exploits people's insecurities, their shame, their grief, their desire to belong. it's one of the most destructive homogenizing forces that exist today.
what i want to see is the abolishing of the intellectual property system and the abolishing of silicon valley [2]. what if we had a world wide web that was inherently dedicated to lifelong learning and growth for all? universal access to our techno-scientific inheritance? all i see today are walls instead of bridges. instead we need open protocols and open standards from the top to the bottom of the stack.
I wrote: “you need privileged access to humanity’s techno-scientific inheritance.”
So no, that’s not what I'm telling you.
For cultural media/products it’s different. If the working class need for affordable housing was respected, and we didn’t have parasitic Wall Street housing-financializers like Blackstone sucking out our life energy, then songwriters wouldn’t need to extract endless royalties from cultural products like songs to pay for their housing rents. Instead they could live off live performances or use some sort of societal reputational framework to measure their joy-bringing cultural contribution (e.g. by using the number of plays or similar metrics).
Rent extraction and monopolization of our techno-scientific has a grossly underexplored compounding cancer-like effect on the social organism. Today's property relations (the state letting individuals 'own' bits of science) are literally pushing us towards climate genocide.
I care about growing radical universal access to our techno-scientific inheritance because we live in an age where scientific discoveries, which are all individually part of a larger web of interconnected collective feedback loops revealed when painstakingly reverse engineering various phenomena on our planet, are increasingly being commoditized, with little public awareness of the destructiveness and insidiousness of that shift.
> “…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy
> Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as [trade secrets], patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.“
> Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
No. First you need privileged access to humanity’s techno-scientific inheritance. New discoveries and their negative research are increasingly being monopolized through trade secret protection (which, unlike patents, means that some discoveries can be forever monopolized).
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...
Yes I agree this isn’t the best source so if you have a good source that explains it better, please share?
the united nations also promises the right to affordable housing... where's my fucking house Blackstone?
i believe he drinks his own kool-aid.
> What those people are missing is that private profits is a really good instrument for allocating resources and performing quality control efficiently in many sectors.
Such a ‘whole economy’ system was being built by Allende’s socialist government in Chile in the form of project Cybersyn (with the help of a well known British cyberneticist). This was before the Chilean bourgeoisie, backed by US imperialist forces, coup-ed Chile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
An exciting project called http://valueflo.ws is being developed by http://mikorizal.org and others that reminds me a lot of Cybersyn.
do you know what this “cloud storage internet/web browsing” data looks like?
did they though? couldn't this be a small (artificial delay) library injected server side by some higher ups at Google?
wow i love when Silicon Valley literally throws away people's time. imagine the cumulative total time being wasted by this artificial delay...