#Internet#InternetFreedom#DigitalRights#AI#SiliconValley: "There can only be one conclusion from all of this: the digital revolution has failed. The initial promise was a deception to lay the foundation for another corporate value-creation scheme, but the benefits that emerged from it have been so deeply eroded by commercial imperatives that the drawbacks far outweigh the remaining redeeming qualities — and that only gets worse with every day generative AI tools are allowed to keep flooding the web with synthetic material.
The time for tinkering around the edges has passed, and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the only hope to be found today is in seeking to tear down the edifice the tech industry has erected and to build new foundations for a different kind of internet that isn’t poisoned by the requirement to produce obscene and ever-increasing profits to fill the overflowing coffers of a narrow segment of the population.
There were many networks before the internet, and there can be new networks that follow it. We don’t have to be locked into the digital dystopia Silicon Valley has created in a network where there was once so much hope for something else entirely. The ongoing erosion already seems to be sending people fleeing by ditching smartphones (or at least trying to reduce how much they use them), pulling back from the mess that social media has become, and ditching the algorithmic soup of streaming services.
Personal rejection is a welcome development, but as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within. We also can’t fall for any attempt to cast a libertarian “declaration of independence” as a truly liberatory future for everyone."
California Forever, the billionaire-backed effort to create a new community from scratch in Solano County, has begun collecting signatures to try to put its initiative on the November ballot. Here’s our look at the promises by the company, and how they would affect county and state taxpayers.
I've been away from the platform for a while because I felt overwhelmed, though I'm not even sure by what. It was just a period filled with events, and I couldn't handle it, I guess. I've been away from not just the platform, but many things that matter to me: chats with friends I care about, online projects—everything felt utterly beyond my reach. I could only focus on surviving. This evening, I'm feeling different and I hope to remain in this state for the months ahead.
‘The Devil in Silicon Valley
Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans’ by Stephen J. Pitti. This book covers the history of racism against Mexican-Americans within #siliconvalley in #california from the Gold Rush to the #tech industry of today. #exploitation#latino#chicano@bookstodon
#OpenAI clapped back at #ElonMusk in its first public response to his lawsuit, publishing a blog post w/ old emails showing that the billionaire lobbied to merge the #AI lab w/ #Tesla & use the car company as a “CashCow.” #Musk’s lawsuit accuses OpenAI, which he helped found, of abandoning its original #nonprofit mission of making advanced AI beneficial to humanity.
#Musk’s complaint, filed last wk in SF Superior Court, alleged that #OpenAI violated its founding agreement by becoming a #ForProfit co, raising funds from #Microsoft & becoming more secretive.
The msgs shared by OpenAI shed light on one of the most closely-scrutinized founding stories in #SiliconValley history. Industry insiders immediately pored over the emails…w/some attempting to use the latest #AI tools to un-redact sentences.
#Journalism#Media#News#TechJournalism#BigTech#SiliconValley: "In the end, Burn Book is the story of one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent access journalists who took a page from the billionaires she covered and created her own narrative to see and present herself as something else entirely. The story Swisher is trying to tell helps to distance herself from the decades she spent boosting companies that have now been “disastrous,” as she herself admits, but it also works for the industry. Letting Swisher present herself as a tough reporter allows Silicon Valley to pretend it was being held to account this whole time — when really Swisher was along for the ride and bought into the tech determinist worldview guiding the industry.
Swisher is a great example of what went wrong in tech reporting through Silicon Valley’s long boom, from the starting gun of internet privatization to the post-Trump techlash. Journalists like Swisher got far too close to the people they covered and bought into the lies they were weaving as the money rushed in and everyone got rich. They got too absorbed in the deceptive story the industry told itself to question whether it all made sense, even as they helped sell the narrative of tech’s promise and inevitability to the public. Now we’re all dealing with the fallout of that period, and while some have admitted they got it wrong, far too many are trying to pretend they were asking the hard questions the whole time." https://disconnect.blog/kara-swishers-reality-distortion-field/
Oh, by the way, since the optimisations I made on the bundle size, it now takes ~3.61 seconds to download and install Kitten¹ on my machine and ~1 second to update it (the initial install takes longer as Kitten downloads its own Node.js runtime and that takes the bulk of the time).
Every second you don’t spend waiting for something is a second you can spend doing something else 🤓
Rebecca Solnit wrote: “I don’t know whether these #billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 & used their wealth to undermine its diversity & affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets & push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.
By producing such extremes of wealth, tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s #ElonMusk, the world’s richest person, who invited in misinformation, disinformation & hate, providing a platform for extreme right-wingers, racists & #conspiracy theorists, while also using his #Starlink#satellite technology first for & then against the Ukrainian military in their conflict with #Russia. ” #SanFrancisco#SiliconValley
In @parismarx latest Disconnect update he highlights Chris Person's two questions people should be asking everytime the Silicon Valely techbro people churn out the latest "greatest" thing, like that shiteous video stuff: " how much energy is used to churn out this sludge (my words) and what dataset is the model trained on" #ai#SiliconValley
Apple has very publicly told you to go fuck yourselves with its malicious compliance. What you do next will decide whether malicious compliance is acceptable in the EU or not.
@noondlyt
Me neither.
But this is where we are now.
Also, without looking it up:
@timnitGebru had a thread some months ago about #SiliconValley finance and how you needed to be in the #TECREAL community to get any real founding--and a white male "bro."
I'm not sure if was in here article or another, but it seems that only one tech woman ever made it into that billionaires' club by her own merit and not through marriage.
"Let's not fuck around here. Tech is powered by bullshit. It's the only sustainable energy source Silicon Valley's would-be elite have successfully harnessed. It’s a world rife with exaggerated claims, wealth inequality, and workaholism wearing a mask of passion."
#FediBlock snarfed.org and brid.gy for bridging fediverse folks to Bluesky against their will (and in likely contravention of GDPR in the EU) with typical Silicon Valley techbro sense of entitlement:
“[O]pt in results in far fewer users, and users are critical for a bridge to be useful.”¹
PS. I just suspended (domain blocked) both snarfed.org and brid.gy from my personal fediverse instance and saw that there was already one account from one and eleven accounts on the other so my account was apparently already being bridged without my consent.
Those links are now severed and they never should have existed without my knowledge or approval to begin with.
'There seems to be a prevailing thought in the tech world that, with an idea good enough, the internet can be fixed. Everyone appears to truly believe they can create the perfect app to rival Instagram or TikTok or become the new Twitter. But they must be stopped.'
A mountain of research has linked loneliness to an increased risk of dementia, depression, anxiety, heart disease, stroke and early death. The Board of Supervisors of San Mateo county, which includes part of Silicon Valley, passed a resolution on Tuesday that declared loneliness a public health crisis and pledged to explore...
Silicon Valley county becomes first in U.S. to declare loneliness a health emergency (www.nbcnews.com)
A mountain of research has linked loneliness to an increased risk of dementia, depression, anxiety, heart disease, stroke and early death. The Board of Supervisors of San Mateo county, which includes part of Silicon Valley, passed a resolution on Tuesday that declared loneliness a public health crisis and pledged to explore...