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   Possibly a Dog (possibledog@beige.party)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 03:11:52 JST Possibly a Dog

   • Cory Doctorow
   • Brian Merchant

   Big Tech is anti-technology.

   Musk and Zuck are anti-creative: their “next big thing”s are boring parodies lifted from 25-year-old cyberpunk dystopian fiction.

   Monopolies are anti-innovation.

   Predictive/generative #AI is inherently conservative: its best idea of the future is a statistical average of the past.

   _Frankenstein_, the first science fiction novel, is a Luddite parable. And we are all Luddites now (or should be).

   This podcast is kinda long and kinda brutal but highly engaging and enraging and **optimistic** (really!), and everyone who can should listen to it, the sooner the better.

   [Ed Zitron interviews @pluralistic and @brianmerchant about how plutocrats who don’t love tech stole our tech utopia from us out of greed and stupidity and collusion]

   https://www.iheart.com/podcast/139-better-offline-150284547/episode/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-203193589/

   #AI #enshittification #tech

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 03:11:51 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦

     @possibledog @paezha minor nit: the golden age of dystopian cyberpunk fiction was 1975-85, so more like 40-50 year old than 25! Neil Stephenson rang the curtain down on cyberpunk in "Snow Crash" (1992). This shit is OLD.

   • Embed this notice
     Possibly a Dog (possibledog@beige.party)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 03:52:19 JST Possibly a Dog

     in reply to

     • Cory Doctorow
     • Charlie Stross
     • Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦

     @cstross @paezha

     Cory (40:30) : ( @pluralistic )

     "And the irony here, and I say this as a fully paid up member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and science fiction novelist. The irony here is how many of these torment-nexus-building weirdos read cyberpunk as a suggestion instead of a warning, and defend what they're doing as carrying on the visionary tradition of science fiction. The first science fiction novel ever was Frankenstein, and it was a novel about why you shouldn't just build whatever goddamn machine you feel like!"

     https://www.iheart.com/podcast/139-better-offline-150284547/episode/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-203193589/

   • Embed this notice
     Possibly a Dog (possibledog@beige.party)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 03:52:20 JST Possibly a Dog

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦

     @cstross @paezha yeah, totally! the point is that these anti-nerds are fundamentally uncreative

     -- I was quoting the 'casters pointing out that the Cybertruck is from Blade Runner (1985) and the Metaverse is Ready Player One (2011) so I guess that "25" was Cory causally splitting the difference :-)

     ---

     **Speaker 1** (42:02):
     That's this is just what Corey was just talking about,
     right is. It speaks to the conservatism of the a
     lot of these the detection once they've built a company
     that's big enough to where you know, you're casting around
     for your next thing because you don't actually want to
     do any you know, real innovating yourself.

     **Speaker 3** (42:17):
     You you you outsource it to a sci fi novel.

     **Speaker 1** (42:20):
     That's why we've seen this this sort of generation of
     of sort of wish lists from cyberpunk from the metaverse.
     I mean that was just Mark Zuckerberg saying, hey, uh yeah,
     let's let's let my next My next thing is the metaverse.

     **Speaker 3** (42:36):
     Then that comes from your your future is being a legless, sexless,
     low polygon heavily surveyed cartoon character in a virtual world.
     I stole from a twenty five year old dystopian cyberpunk novel.

     Robert Link repeated this.