Notices by Michael Halila 🏳️‍⚧️ (mhalila@mastodontti.fi), page 2

Several people have replied to this post without reading it, and at least two have started mansplaining what I said to me. And you people said this platform couldn't replace Twitter!

"AI is going to take your job!"

Like hell it is. Try:

"A super-rich capitalist has invested billions of dollars into replacing human creative work with a shitty computer program, so he can pocket more of the profits."

When you stop intentionally obscuring who is doing things and who is benefiting from them, the world starts looking very different indeed.

What they're trying to sell to us is the idea that somehow, this technology just appeared on its own, and now we have to adjust to it. A notion of technology as an inevitable force of nature.

A large portion of the world's journalists are helping them pull the scam off by constantly writing about technology as if it just shows up and does things on its own. As if people weren't constantly making choices on how to develop and deploy it.

The whole "AI", i.e. content generator, spectacle is such a perfect example of why the idea that technology is neutral is such garbage.

There are so many damn things we could be doing with all this processing power and money, and what the people making the decisions are choosing to do is line their own pockets and destroy the livelihoods of the people they call "creatives". Stealing other people's work and repackaging it as computer-generated swill. The stupidity of it is infuriating.

Twelve years ago today, a Norwegian neo-nazi murdered 77 people in Oslo and Utøya. His youngest victim was 14 years old.

A month ago, one of the racist bloggers he cited as an inspiration was elected speaker of the parliament of Finland. His party is in government.

In the years since the massacre, we've embraced its ideology.

Last week, Finnish police announced they're holding four neo-nazis who were 3D-printing firearms in order to start a "race war".

We saw Utøya, and decided we want more.

If people now think Substack is good because the twitter idiot is pissed at them, can I remind everyone that one of the keystones of the Substack business model is transphobia? They're a garbage company who have been actively working for years to create the transphobic moral panic currently engulfing the US. https://gen.medium.com/substack-is-not-a-neutral-platform-8fc5bdf8e5f2

The great thing about having a culture war that's based on nothing except the deranged tantrums of conservative men is that absolutely anything can be roped into it. Like remote work.

I didn't know I work for several "woke" employers, but here we are. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/21/jacob-rees-mogg-alan-sugar-daily-mail-home-working-woke

Can we also take a moment to note that "woke", as used here, was originally a Black American term for being aware of systemic racism, and in just a few years, the US right turned it into a totally content-free sneer? And the entire English-speaking media basically just ran with it, to the extent that you now hear it used in _Finnish_?

Because that's white supremacy for you. Criticism, even awareness, of the racist power structure will not be tolerated.