phiofx
The fakeness of #generativeAI output is shared with the fakeness of the #cryptocurrency, #nft "economies" and the datamined #adtech social "communities"
Cheap digital simulacra that parrots human reality in the gross, distorted way of a dystopic scifi nightmare
The real, increasingly dire problems of human society ignored, exacerbated. Wave upon wave of new fangled tech attacking, not helping the human condition
Old visions of empowerment and agency giving way to #bigtech dictatorships
phiofx
Reclaiming digital #tech from the sociopaths that are dominating is almost a pre-condition for solving real human problems.
Not because #technosolutionnism but many, many of our societal problems are deeply enmeshed with broken information flows.
Yet its nigh impossible when society's economic wiring simply does not reward what is in its own long-term benefit.
In terms of the (much derided) #esg taxonomy, #opensource, human-centric tech should be the darling of the S=social pillar.
datarama
@phiofx I have no idea how to even begin doing this.
I work as an embedded dev, on things that have very little to do with Big Tech. I am happy with my work, my coworkers, and the company I work for. But still, I am so fucking disgusted with those sociopaths that there's a big part of me that just wants nothing at all to do with tech anymore.
Big Tech is moving rapidly in the opposite direction of what I think a wise tech ecosystem would look like.
phiofx
@datarama in embedded systems you might be sitting closest to a sane tech architecture.
If we could reboot into a blank slate we'd probably want silicon to be very commoditized, distributed fairly evenly (not hoarded in apocalyptic datacenters mining "coin" when not mining people's souls), with lots of #opensource interoperability.
Tech as part of people's tools and furniture, with little drama. Support mostly localized (your friendly neighborhood geeks installing #fediverse upgrades etc).
phiofx
@datarama alas we never managed to grow a bicycles-for-the-mind industry.
the mobility analogy that has come to pass would be something like mega cruise ships, where hordes of people rent a small cabin and are "entertained" for the duration of the trip, being just a little bit more obese after it ends.
but there *are* some places where bikes are loved, pointing out that possibilities are always open. the flow of history is very capricious, doesn't fit rational expectations and projections.
datarama
@phiofx Although that particular dream has always been fundamentally tainted, a "techno-optimist" was something altogether different when that meant Steve Jobs talking about "bicycles for the mind" than when it means a bunch of fascistoid lunatics talking about "replacing the median human".
datarama
@phiofx I spend my Thursdays at a friendly local hackerspace, which - in a sense - represents to me another, saner approach to "tech enthusiasm". An explicit rejection of the cruise ship, because you can't repair a cruise ship yourself, you also can't make it *your* cruise ship, and no cruise ships are community projects. We make DIY pen plotters, refurbish C64's, code weird crap and build keyboards and modular synths.
But that's very much *the opposite* of where the industry went.
phiofx
@datarama tinkering and inventing is innate and enjoyable to many people. The challenge with digital tech is that there is now a huge cognitive gap that makes it inaccessible to most. Filling-in the intermediate abstractions that are needed to bridge this gap is not trivial and has always been subservient to business models. The open source community also guilty here.
Imagine if people could tinker with their smartphones instead of incessant swiping screens of hermetically closed devices.
datarama
@phiofx A long time ago, in what seems like a different lifetime now, I was hired to teach a little group of children on the autism spectrum (ages 11-13) some basic programming. We used Python, and had lots of fun. But there was one thing that struck me as very, very different from when I was a coding kid.
The games and demos I made were pretty shitty, but they weren't *much* shittier than what pros did. And the size differential was tiny: there's only so much you can put on a 170 KB floppy.
phiofx
@datarama i guess an objective data point that current tech industry objectives are misaligned with our digital welfare is the difficulty of using python to build games and other small apps on mobile.
There is #kivy and #beeware, so its in-principle doable but going against the grain of these platforms and their "preferred", "first class" stacks
Which is a pity. Given how stuffed mobiles are with sensors one could imagine all sorts of fun (if not useful) projects in the spirit of #raspberrypi
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