I love it. There’s a poll ongoing about whether folks would ban a Meta (Instagram/Facebook) instance and people are like “well, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.”
I really have no words.
Is it learned helplessness? Stockholm Syndrome? Masochism? Something else?
(A ‘startup’ is not just any new small business. It’s a temporary venture capital funded company that must either fail fast or exit. An exit is where you’re either bought by Big Tech or become Big Tech through an IPO. To understand this better, if you have a sustainable small company, a startup is what will put you out of business.)
Folks, apparently a Norwegian instance (snabelen.no) won’t be “associating with” me because of my position on not welcoming Meta and surveillance capitalists to the fediverse (https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110621068046632124)
Please feel free to consider whether you want to associate with them accordingly:
A bit of an overview and then I'll get into some of the more specific arguments in a thread:
This piece is in three parts:
First I trace the mutation of the liberatory ambitions of the #SemanticWeb into #KnowledgeGraphs, an underappreciated component in the architecture of #SurveillanceCapitalism. This mutation plays out against the backdrop of the broader platform capture of the web, rendering us as consumer-users of information services rather than empowered people communicating over informational protocols.
I then show how this platform logic influences two contemporary public information infrastructure projects: the NIH's Biomedical Data Translator and the NSF's Open Knowledge Network. I argue that projects like these, while well intentioned, demonstrate the fundamental limitations of platformatized public infrastructure and create new capacities for harm by their enmeshment in and inevitable capture by information conglomerates. The dream of a seamless "knowledge graph of everything" is unlikely to deliver on the utopian promises made by techno-solutionists, but they do create new opportunities for algorithmic oppression -- automated conversion therapy, predictive policing, abuse of bureacracy in "smart cities," etc. Given the framing of corporate knowledge graphs, these projects are poised to create facilitating technologies (that the info conglomerates write about needing themselves) for a new kind of interoperable corporate data infrastructure, where a gradient of public to private information is traded between "open" and quasi-proprietary knowledge graphs to power derivative platforms and services.
When approaching "AI" from the perspective of the semantic web and knowledge graphs, it becomes apparent that the new generation of #LLMs are intended to serve as interfaces to knowledge graphs. These "augmented language models" are joint systems that combine a language model as a means of interacting with some underlying knowledge graph, integrated in multiple places in the computing ecosystem: eg. mobile apps, assistants, search, and enterprise platforms. I concretize and extend prior criticism about the capacity for LLMs to concentrate power by capturing access to information in increasingly isolated platforms and expand surveillance by creating the demand for extended personalized data graphs across multiple systems from home surveillance to your workplace, medical, and governmental data.
I pose Vulgar Linked Data as an alternative to the infrastructural pattern I call the Cloud Orthodoxy: rather than platforms operated by an informational priesthood, reorienting our public infrastructure efforts to support vernacular expression across heterogeneous #p2p mediums. This piece extends a prior work of mine: Decentralized Infrastructure for (Neuro)science) which has more complete draft of what that might look like.
(I don't think you can pre-write threads on masto, so i'll post some thoughts as I write them under this) /1
🐘 Have you ever stopped to think about the extent of surveillance and data collection that happens every day? It's certainly a concerning issue. Imagine being constantly monitored by cameras, followed by employees, and having every action recorded.
A #gadgeteer is also the naive or careless person who wears these #gadgets and is either oblivious of the detrimental externalities of the tech to society, or criminally negligent of those (usually #trend-following hipsters).
"You cannot complain about Facebook collecting your life’s history, while at the same time complaining that diaspora* cannot find your former classmates. You cannot complain about WhatsApp collecting your address book, while at the same time stating you do not use eMail because exchanging addresses is too cumbersome. You either get a system that knows who you are or a system that does not."
#Privacy is in global danger by the oppression of the World's Elite having a pact with ruling politicians. This is the BIGGEST global threat yet to our freedom and free speech. Don't let yourself down.
We don't need to be China to be safe. They know it, just don't admit it.
I've seen lots of takes regarding threads.net starting federating and what that might imply for the #Fediverse lately (I'll link a few at the end of this thread).
I'd like to discuss and address some of the points that have been raised over and over in one single place:
for #Facebook/#Meta this is not really about us fedizens
Just got registered with a local GP in Ireland¹ and their first email states that all their staff are “formally trained in GDPR procedures and any information you give will be used in the strictest confidence.”
Their email address is @gmail.com
🤦♂️
¹ This, in and of itself, is a bloody miracle these days, apparently, and only happened because it’s a new practice that’s just opening up.
#LinkedIn be like "Oh, you fiddled with your notification settings? This is an opportunity for us to apply some #DeceptiveDesign and push every fart someone leaves on our network down your throat"
No, you are wrong LinkedIn. I wanted less notifications, not more. But what can you expect when you expose yourself to #SurveillanceCapitalism 🤷
You wouldn’t have McDonald’s teaching your kids about nutrition or Philip Morris teaching them about maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Why are you happy having a surveillance capitalist like Google or Facebook teaching them about technology?
If your best effort at regulating surveillance capitalists results in “give us €9.99/month not to see ads or use for ‘free’ with ads¹”, you should all probably resign and go hide your heads in shame.
And maybe watch my EU Parliament talk before you do: