Notices by Alistair Davidson (moh_kohn@mastodon.scot)

My wife has a complaint about the Time Bandits TV series. In the last episode they travel to Bingley in 1996 and visit a goth party. She says there were only 5 goths in Bingley in 1996, she was one of them, and they didn't have parties.

@liztai Not sure what you mean exactly - there has been some rioting by the far right this week. Some of it was pretty scary and violent. There is a broader level of anger abroad and looking for an outlet after 14 years of continuous austerity, the far-right are trying to harness that.

I am currently fascinated by internet capitalism. Specifically, data as a commodity and as capital. It is all over the business press but massively undertheorised in economics as far as I can see. Usually that means something is ideologically inconvenient.

Google makes like £140bn a year from advertising which is clearly a really big deal but it's odd because what is actually being produced?

🧵

Varoufakis says position in Google and Amazon searches is like commercial real estate; they are charging a rent for a shop front. Consumer data certainly enhances the "land value" ("search position value"?)

Does that mean that when we search and like and so on we are performing labour? Creating this search position value?

One consequence of all this data collection is piles of data that companies don't really know what to do with. Hence "AI".

@anildash imagine writing "Decentralized technologies from the blockchain/crypto/web3 ecosystem will create a fairer, more inclusive economy" in December 2023

@ntnsndr Adding surveillance absolutely balloons costs. See also Mastodon Vs twitter.

@emilygorcenski $10 a month! For *facebook*!

BBC: "Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried's big gamble"

No, lots of us called crypto out from the very start. I was reading accurate critiques of bitcoin in 2012.

Journalists and financiers and politicians got duped or didn't care about the truth when there was money to be made.

Now you're trying to pretend nobody warned you? Get fucked.

@anildash hits right in the feels with this one - the death and return of the open web

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9wbRUW57sc

Speaking to mate who is a meterologist on the railways and what is happening in the north east of Scotland right now is absolutely off the scale. Way beyond what climate scientists were projecting. By that I don't mean that global warming is happening faster than expected, just that the impacts are proving way more dramatic than expected. The weather is spikier, if you like.

Saw grognards in youtube comments explaining to the younger generation that in very old school D&D you would bring a stack of character sheets and attempt a dungeon again and again.

"Oh like a roguelike? Roguelike D&D would be cool."

Human culture and language is so amazing - they know what a roguelike is, but not that Rogue was essentially a computer game version of old school D&D!