It's not agency for the individual, it's agency *for everyone*. The goal is to improve the agency of all. But the purpose is still about agency, so you *do* care about individuals, in that the entire point is that a person is able to be and define their best selves. So there's a push-pull effect.
It's imperfect, but it's how I think about things. It's just one lens of many, but it's the main one I think about things through, in terms of ethics.
Most of the non-paywalled web became unreadable about 2021.
Stuffed with bevel to bevel ads that even a #PiHole or #uBlock struggled to swat away, reading long-form content became a chore.
Just like television, where the volume on ads mysteriously doubled, web ads became shoutier, and animated, popping up over the real content payload, diverting reader attention, increasing cognitive load and raising blood pressure.
"Subscribe for an ad-free experience!", the sites beckoned. "We're really Nice Guys when you get to know us".
Except the subscriptions were still full of ads, just less shouty, and more targeted to the plus-addressed email you used to subscribe.
This had an unusual and unexpected effect.
It trained people to focus their attention on long-form content. Moulded their elastic, dopamine-addled brains to seek out the nuggets of pure and informational expression among the wasteland of attention-sucking weeds. Sharpening their retention, developing the stamina to persist while resisting distraction.
They were, unintentionally, growing grad student brains.
By 2026, doomscrollers had discovered arXiv, probably when WIRED stuffed one more ad in a profile of Martha Wells for the latest Murderbot and an Aussie sci-fi fan rage-tooted on the Fedi.
Suddenly, the Discourse shifted.
Why struggle through a 1000 word op ed with thirty seven ads for - I forget what they were because my brain ignored them - when you could read a 9k word review on the current state of #LLM evaluations, unencumbered by eyeball-seeking cruft?
Doomscrollers started on arXiv then instead of getting frustrated, moved to OpenReview, processing their thoughts on what they'd read not in the form of likes or emoji but as peer reviews.
The ad industry gasped one final choking breath, after having been denied access to arXiv or OpenReview.
By using a personal definition that is in contrast with the actual definition, and engineering that definition so it excludes most counter examples of poverty as "not real poverty according to my definition" is effectively the same thing... you are just defining what is real by manipulating the definition and letting it have an effect.
It is indistinguishable from no real scotsman fallacy IMO.
> By your definition, I pulled myself out of poverty a few times too. It's not relevant to a policy discussion.
It isnt **my** definition. It is the universal definition people who speak english use. And yes you pulled yourself out of poverty a few times then, how is that not relevant?
#covid update:
#Paxlovid is working. I'm not dizzy all the time, the way I was the first time around (Feb '23). Currently on Day 3.5 since symptoms onset & I feel less exhausted than I did yesterday.
Also, Pax leaves just as yucky a taste in your mouth as advertised. Except it doesn't actually leave a taste; the ritonavir in Pax activates the mouth's bitter taste receptors. Ritonavir was originally used in HIV meds, and the bitter taste was a known side effect.
It's yucky. I've had worse.
1/
@phiofx i would argue that you are probably inverting cause and effect.
It worked because there was tons of money that needed to *go somewhere*. So the financial industry created new product. Or more precisely, we could say they always tried but it only worked this time because there was so much money needing something to buy that everything stayed alive in these products.
@supernovae @mastodonmigration @jerry @jarm @kainoa @atomicpoet @stux @dansup @jessel @oliphant
Segregation? Don't be so ridiculous, people are free to come here. It's the corporation we are shunning, not the people currently forced to use it by the network effect.
It's about maintaing a social network that isn't controlled or influenced by Meta.
If you federate with Meta, you are encouraging people to stay on Meta. If you defederate, you're encouraging them to try other platforms.
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