Online communities are real communities. People have met future spouses, weathered difficult life events, organized politically, raised money to help each other all through the panoply of social websites.
Often community rules and culture are guided by moderators, who almost always work for free.
Despite all of this we generally accept that these are not the people who own the website or the ones who control its fate.
Over and over this creates heartache and disappointment.
What would a doctrine of squatter's rights look like for digital places?
I don't really think this is realistic. It would be nice if there were provisions to more easily turn a website over to collective ownership. Leave it to the users to keep the server coffers full. There are places that work in this manner but in a legal sense they aren't really governed this way. Almost always there are 1 or 2 people who could simply shut the place down. Or let it slowly fall apart neglecting software.
Part of me feels like Twitter should have belonged to the employees and the people who used the site and made it fun.
Reddit should belong to the users and mods.
Drawception, diaryland, one hour one life, tumblr, livejournal... on and on ...
We've really leaned into the idea that creating a framework for content is the only route to ownership, but when these places fall apart? It feels like an unjust eviction.
Before we got to the point where the news just made us despondent and listless a screen writer/director friend of mine and I contemplated writing a comedy about Nero/Trump. (Though, after doing my research on Nero, I think I like him better, and they are rather different.)
This photo feels like something I'd write in one of the sketches. Yes yes he stole the military secrets and hid them in an ugly bathroom!
But, this isn't funny... it will be an inset in history books.
Alt text: Chris tucker (actor) with a backwards baseball cap on his head - looks incredulous, despondently lowers his head into the palm of his hand, covering his face. Looks back up and shakes his head.
Reading “Jonathan Strange” again and thinking about how good it is at grounding fantasy in ways that make it all the more compelling. Wondering if it might make sense to start “The Planet of the Ants” … on earth. Post-doc with academic ambitions is denied their first choice for an exchange assignment (what could the first choice be?) and assigned instead to go into cold freeze and be sent halfway across the galaxy to Myrmecos: The Ant World. And she wonders if this is a dead end for her career!
She studies the origins of life. Why is life on so many worlds? Why is much of it so similar? The ants have long recognized that it is ants that are found on every world without exception: Some with space-faring civilization, others simple creatures as on earth. Six legs, a eusocial society, antennae and mandibles, a prodigious gaster all seem ideal to the ants and everything else is just a near miss on perfection.
Humans have paid this ant-theory no attention: but what if it is correct?
:: Timothy was one of the city’s myrmecophilous beetles. He elected to remain in larval from well beyond his post-graduate years. When I first met him he was reading: he held one book with two short front limbs near his mouth, eating, and a second book with his longer, more dexterous middle limbs, reading. His head was broad & white with three small eyes on either side. Spectacles encircled each eye, the lenses on the two largest eyes offered several magnification options on a rotary system.
@futurebird Mantis Pride Shrimp is GREAT!
and fully deserving of the love shown.
I think I should recognize the writing system MPS is using, what is it?
Why does the wild fire smoke seem to get worse over the course of the day… then reset over night?
The mornings have been OK but 3pm in NYC yesterday?? It was like the end of the world. My students said “this is so apocalyptic!” And they thought we should go upstate and have class in a bunker.
Fire would burn more easily in higher temperatures, and regular city pollution increases over the day since more energy is being used… is that why it gets worse?
@futurebird Some of it is a moisture thing. Particles will tend to settle under more humid conditions and therefore not disperse as well in the air (ie: at night when the cooler temperatures raise the water content of the air). As the humidity drops over the course of the day particles move more easily in the air and you get worse air quality.
*It's why if you get really desperate for clean indoor air you can run a humidifier along with an air filter.
Like ants, humans make significant, often multi-generational investments in building structures. From highways to nests, infrastructure is a social glue. You use many buildings and transportation systems every day— what have you done personally to make these things?
Mass agriculture is another kind of infrastructure, though we don’t always see it in this way. If we can build buildings that last for centuries the same should be true of the systems that produce food.
Absolutely, but generational food production requires maintenance and preserved knowledge that is easily disrupted through colonial and corporate actions.
The composition of Amazonian ‘food forests’ and development of terra preta are both examples of generational anthropogenic food infrastructure.
@futurebird I think in Asia and in Europe there are systems that have produced food for centuries, depending on your definition of system. The Americas (mostly) don't have such long-lasting systems due to colonialism.
When I took a philosophy course in college I encountered a philosopher who said something like "language is required for intelligence" and we had this very frustrating debate about if it would be possible for a person to think at all without language.
It seemed obvious to me that a person could think and reason logically without anything like language. Then we got muddled in what we meant by language and undergrads do--
One guy decided that if it was logical reasoning then it had to be language --even if it wasn't anything like spoken words or sign language, or math etc.
To him things like implications, isomorphism, etc. were language. To me they are "logical reasoning"
-- but, I'm getting far from my real point which is about LLMs.
I think a danger in seeing language as required for intelligence is the risk of seeing anything that uses language as intelligent.
There was a time when people were really impressed with robots. The more "life like" they became the more people wondered if they might come alive or be alive. This even happened with mechanical contraptions of clockwork...
I don't think people see things moving around in the same way. Even the fancy Boston dynamics murder dogs. We have experiences with such contraptions. We know they just follow a script.
And this happened with early chatbots for a moment too.
I always feel a bit awkward pointing out things like "this victim of racist violence didn't have a criminal record" or "they were well-educated and upstanding or whatever"
Since this shouldn't matter in how we view these stories-- AND YET I still feel the need to mention it since I think some Black Professionals(TM) think we have some kind of anti-racism insulation-
The thing is it isn't true.
So that's why I say things like "She was a STEM major"
It's happened again. Ajike Owens was shot through the closed locked door when she went to ask about an ipad that her neighbor, a 58 year-old white woman named Susan, refused to return.
Susan has not be arrested or charged as the police wonder if "stand your ground" applies.
The local sherif described the neighbors as "in a feud." Ajike's family were taken aback by this and they are very frustrated and hurt.
When Ajike was shot her son was standing right beside her.
What is less easy to decide is if this is the desired result? With lynchings the chaotic disproportionate random nature was part of the point. Never relax this isn’t your country.
These would-be stand your ground murders only differ from lynchings in that the mass participation in the violence happens after the fact, online, and in conservative media, through celebration and support for murderers who kill the “right” victims.