Notices by Scott Matter (scottmatter@aus.social)

@wwahammy @bodhipaksa @Brad_Rosenheim

Fwiw, really enjoyed this read on the epistemological situation we’re in:
https://www.publicbooks.org/the-encyclopedia-project-or-how-to-know-in-the-age-of-ai/

@louis

JFC. Privacy is only one problem with advertising.

The fundamental problem with it, and the source of my opposition / resistance to advertising is that it is almost 100% a tool of capitalism, almost 100% designed, refined, and intended to compel people to make bad decisions and drive increasing consumption and commercial activity.

It’s a plague.

@dogzilla @stib @louis

On the first part, it seems like two embedded questions: would they and should they? Looking around at consumer capitalist culture, the “should” is a much more important question. Just because products / services exist and we take them for granted doesn’t mean they serve our fundamental needs or do so in sustainable and equitable ways (and most of advertising seems designed to discourage us from asking these critical questions).

On the second, sure let’s do that. But more broadly, let’s build alternatives to the commercial-financial paradigm that seeks to measure everything by money alone and assumes that transaction is the only mechanism for co-creating and transferring value. The obsession with finance makes wonder what medicine would be like if doctors only cared about and worked on blood.

@dogzilla

I worked for a few years in a legacy media company as we tried to “invent the future of digital publishing”. The business was pretty wedded to advertising, in a similar kind of way that many of our politicians are wedded to coal and oil.

There are alternative models, some of them work reasonably well, some of them are arguably non-capitalist (eg the Guardian, the ABC)

In the end, this particular company opted for “sell to a bigger corporation” as their solution, which then led to doubling-down on advertising as revenue, and (imho) a further decline in the quality of news reporting.

@alex

This bit:

“Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not--they'll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges? Will they be continued to be kicked down the road? To 2050? To 2075? Likely to some time which is too little, too late.”

Reminds me of what fossil fuel corps and governments seem to be stuck on: all this identified “resource” in the ground, would be a shame to just leave it there… and so we go smashing through promises about 1.5C.

In both cases, it’s not because this stuff served people’s needs or because we can’t live without it but because capital can’t grow without it and growing capital is really all they care about

@ntnsndr

Was thinking of these as I went through the ReadMe, so glad to see them there:

“Kudos distribution may disproportionately reward or harm a certain students
Kudos distribution may reflect conscious or unconscious biases
Should perhaps disincentivize excessive concentration of distribution
May encourage perverse incentives, e.g., crowd-pleasing over intellectual honesty”

Keen to hear how you go in addressing these.

@aral

Paraphrasing from the field of research, there’s no such thing as apolitical, everyone’s got a political position whether we acknowledge it or state it explicitly or not. The opposite of politics isn’t “no politics” it’s bad politics.

@mekkaokereke @stux

How much better would America be if folks like this collected guitars instead of guns…

@abolisyonista

I think of it as much more than a political position.

Degrowth is about decolonizing our cultures and value-systems.

Maybe concepts like “well-being” and “sufficiency” frame it more positively, but they’re also easy to co-opt without the explicit anti-growth framing, as has happened with sustainability

@Radical_EgoCom

“Abolish” is a messy word. Brings to mind authoritarian rule.

@paninid @Radical_EgoCom

I mean, Capitalism itself is an absurdity built on a delusion. The core of it is a magical black box that claims to always and only output more than the input. It claims - and demands - infinite exponential growth to keep running.

Capitalists try to run as much as they can through that black box, while also keeping control of the box and attempting to hoard as much of the output in the fewest hands possible. They also use the wealth and influence their black box affords them to put as much of the waste and burden of running the box as possible on other people.

There’s no place for this deadly machine in a sustainable, survivable future on Earth.

@RadicalAnthro

Sending your remains to space is the ultimate manifestation of culture:nature dualism. Imagine wanting to be permanently separated from the rest of the living planet.

We need more examples of what lives can be like through #degrowth

Here’s one story:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2023/dec/23/jonathan-cornford-interview-low-income-family-rich-life

@aral

Oddly reminds me of the Dylan tune, “with god on our side”

Electronic mail is so confusing. Why do I need to choose a provider and how do I even decide? And once I have an address, how do I find my friends’ addresses and send them letters? Will I only be able to send letters to people using the same provider?