theluddite

theluddite, 4 months ago

I actually think that this is part of a larger phenomenon. It’s something that Adorno and Horkheimer identified all the way in the 1940s (in “Dialect of Enlightenment,” especially in the chapter “The Culture Industry”) that is now greatly accelerating because of computers. The result is what I call The Tyranny of Data. The essay isn’t that long and most of the length comes from examples, but I’ll try to do a super quick tl;dr of my argument. Here’s some Adorno and Horkheimer quotes that I cite:

For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.

and

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion[.]

Basically, modern society culturally values arguments presented in numbers, especially when expressed in units of currency. I argue that now that we have computers, aka a machine capable of turning everything into numbers very easily, we can easily collapse everything into units of currency. This is a homogenizing and conservative (as in change averse) force (quoting myself):

You can measure how people feel about another Marvel movie, or a politician they already know, or whether they prefer this version or that version of a product. It’s much harder to measure interest in a brand new movie idea, or an unknown politician, or a radically new invention. The bigger the change, the harder it is to measure.

Because it’s so easy to turn things into numbers now, and because we culturally value data-based arguments as superior to other kinds, like moral or ideological, our collective ability to think in other ways is atrophying. As a result, we struggle to take the necessarily irrational risks that we need to take to make real progress, be it social progress, artistic progress, or whatever.

I go through a bunch of examples, like Joe Biden, who I call “a statistically generated median in corporeal form. He’s literally a franchise reboot, the single most derivative but fiscally sound cultural product.” I specifically talk about digital media too:

When deciding how much to value websites or podcasts or any other online media, we simply add up the number of downloads. No one actually thinks that’s a good way to decide the value of art, writing, journalism, story-telling, lascivious true crime blogs, or reality TV rewatch podcasts. It’s just the first number that fell out of a computer. Just like that, a complex social situation was transmuted into a number.

theluddite, 4 months ago

Yes absolutely! Debord comes up a lot on my blog too. I fucking love the Situationists. A lot of these theorists that lived through the earlier days of mass media saw it with such clarity for exactly what it is in a way that those of us born later I think would struggle to see were it not for their writing, not that we bothered to heed their warnings.

theluddite, 4 months ago

Thanks! Plenty more like it

theluddite, 4 months ago

Whenever one of these stories come up, there’s always a lot of discussion about whether these suits are reasonable or fair or whether it’s really legally the companies’ fault and so on. If that’s your inclination, I propose that you consider it from the other side: Big companies use every tool in their arsenal to get what they want, regardless of whether it’s right or fair or good. If we want to take them on, we have to do the same. We call it a justice system, but in reality it’s just a fight over who gets to wield the state’s monopoly of violence to coerce other people into doing what they want, and any notions of justice or fairness are window dressing. That’s how power actually works. It doesn’t care about good faith vs bad faith arguments, and we can’t limit ourselves to only using our institutions within their veneer of rule of law when taking on powerful, exclusively self-interested, and completely antisocial institutions with no such scruples.

theluddite, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:

I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.

As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.

theluddite, 4 months ago

Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.

theluddite, 4 months ago

Software has more than its fair share of acronyms, which we often choose to say phonetically, like SQL gets said “sequel.” We also have the TTY, and you often have to detach things from it. Depending on the context, best to spell that one out, or just substitute “terminal,” but I’ve definitely been in meetings where someone said something about a process that needs to be detached from the titty.

theluddite, 4 months ago

I remember when I realized that the lawyers had taken over cybersecurity. It was 2018. I was in a meeting, looked around, and realized that I was the only person in the room who codes or has ever coded, and also the only person without formal certifications in security. 5 years earlier, security teams were full of people from all walks of life, who often got into security from (let’s call it) “practical” experience.

theluddite, 4 months ago

Haha, no worries, and totally agreed. I’m finding that more and more, not only is there no security engineering team, but the legal side of security has no concept of that whatsoever. They are the security team. Security, to them, is fundamentally a compliance process, which of course involves coordinating and working with the engineering team, but it isn’t really a technical practice so much as a managerial and administrative one.

theluddite, 4 months ago

The Nordic countries are also on Earth, which we are destroying. Some of their wealth comes directly from that destruction. Norway is the 5th and 3rd largest oil and natural gas exporter, respectively, making their happiness the result of good social policy that makes up for capitalist inequality which is directly funded by destroying the Earth and fueling capitalism elsewhere.

Even setting the climate aside (a ridiculous thing to do, really), the Nordic model isn’t possible to sustainably replicate elsewhere on Earth on capitalism’s own term, because we can’t make every country a net exporter of the most desired commodities for obvious reasons, or the beneficiary of complex historical circumstances, like neutrality during ww2 (Sweden), or a long-time colonial power (Denmark).

Put another way, there is no Nordic model available for Bangladesh, whose workers work six days a week in factories to make the cheap clothing that happy Norwegians wear. Norways needs Bangladeshes to keep their standard of living.

In a previous job, I spent a good amount of time in a Bangladeshi garment factory. That specific factory in which I worked had been on strike a few years prior, requesting a raise to dozens of dollars per month. That’s not a typo – per month!. The police fired into their picket line, killing and wounding hundreds. This fall, Bangladeshi garment workers went on strike again, demanding a tripling of the minimum wage from its current ~75USD per month.

The urban poverty that makes my life possible, so far away, out of sight and out of mind, is an absolute fucking disgrace. We should talk about it daily. When they go on strike, as those garment workers are now, every single westerner ought to strike in solidarity, even if motivated by nothing but shame. Instead, we don’t even know that it’s happening, at least in the anglosphere.

I’ve since become convinced that there’'s only one path to a just and verdant world – international solidarity. Communists and anarchists have filled libraries with ideas for what that might look like. I’ve read some tiny sliver of that corpus. If you actually want to know why some of us want capitalism defeated (beyond the anecdote that I just relayed), or if you’re curious how much better some of us think the world could be, I’d be happy to point you towards books that spoke to me.

theluddite, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Going to give a wide range of answers based on topic, so you can pick up what interests you. Happy to give more if none of these appeal to you.

If you work in tech, Stafford Beer’s Designing Freedom. It’s very short, accessible, and full of so many big ideas about what computers are for that it exposes the tech industry’s absolute fucking poverty of vision.

If you’re interested in deep dives on more technical topics, David Graeber’s Debt. It’s a fucking tome, but it’s also amazing. So much of what we take for granted in our world is completely arbitrary and made up, but no less powerful, and there’s nothing quite as arbitrary and powerful as the concept of debt.

If reading a cinder block based on an internet stranger’s recommendation is too much for you, maybe try Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, or his The Utopia of Rules instead, depending on which topic interests you more. Graeber is a great place to start because he’s accessible but also his mind isn’t limited by the confines of capitalist realism in a very special way. He was truly one of our best.

If you want something that’s extremely light and fiction, I recommend William Morris’s News from Nowhere. It’s extremely cringe in a way that only 100-year-old socialist utopian fiction could be. It’s excessively sincere, even naive, in a way that rings hollow to our cynical modern selves, but it’s such a short read, and it’s so adorable. I like the way that he challenges the concept of work. I think that the modern left should revive that line of criticism. I also enjoyed that you can see early versions of things that we associate with more modern movements in his utopian vision, especially degrowth and reforestation/environmentalism, not just for “the environment,” but with nature as a part of and inseparable from the human experience.

Finally, if you like philosophy, and you want in depth analyses of capitalism, and don’t mind something that’s maybe less accessible, I recommend Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay The Culture Industry. It was written in the 1940s, and it reads prescient today. They saw the rise of capitalist mass media as more than just a threat to independent thought, but a pacifying, homogenizing, almost all-consuming force. If you want something longer than The Culture Industry, and probably slightly less accessible, I recommend their Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. He basically argues that capitalism, and more specifically what he calls “technical rationality,” has conquered our culture and our very ability to reason, at scales big and small.

theluddite, 4 months ago

Yup!

theluddite, 4 months ago

Aww thanks so much friend 💖 I’m so glad to hear that!!

theluddite, 5 months ago

My beloved internet friend, thank you so, so much. I like duolingo for expanding my vocabulary, but the infantilizing gamification drives me nuts, to the point where when I run out of hearts, I just don’t use it for weeks. This little trick will make it so that I actually use it!

theluddite, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Gen Zers are increasingly looking for ways to prioritize quality of life over financial achievement at all costs. The TikTok trend of “soft life”—and its financial counterpart “soft saving”—is a stark departure from their millennial predecessors’ financial habits, which were rooted in toxic hustle culture and the “Girlboss” era.

“Soft savings” is, to my understanding, the opposite of savings – it’s about investing resources into making yourself happy now versus forever growing your savings for some future good time. It sounds ridiculous because they’re hitting on good critiques of capitailsm, but using the language of capitalism itself.

I think this really bolsters my argument that the self-diagnosis trend might be better understood as young people being critical of society, but their education system completely failed them. Since they lack access to critical, social, and political theory, they don’t have a vocabulary to express their critiques, so they’ve used the things we have taught them, like the language of mental health, to sorta make up their own critical theory. When mental health experts are super concerned and talk about how all these teens’ self-diagnoses are “wrong,” they’re missing the point. It’s a new theory using existing building blocks.

theluddite, 5 months ago

Thanks so much, friend. It genuinely means a lot when someone takes the time to say something nice.

theluddite, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

You can’t use an LLM this way in the real world. It’s not possible to make an LLM trade stocks by itself. Real human beings need to be involved. Stock brokers have to do mandatory regulatory trainings, and get licenses and fill out forms, and incorporate businesses, and get insurance, and do a bunch of human shit. There is no code you could write that would get ChatGPT liability insurance. All that is just the stock trading – we haven’t even discussed how an LLM would receive insider trading tips on its own. How would that even happen?

If you were to do this in the real world, you’d need a human being to set up a ton of stuff. That person is responsible for making sure it follows the rules, just like they are for any other computer system.

On top of that, you don’t need to do this research to understand that you should not let LLMs make decisions like this. You wouldn’t even let low-level employees make decisions like this! Like I said, we know how LLMs work, and that’s enough. For example, you don’t need to do an experiment to decide if flipping coins is a good way to determine whether or not you should give someone healthcare, because the coin-flipping mechanism is well understood, and the mechanism by which it works is not suitable to healthcare decisions. LLMs are more complicated than coin flips, but we still understand the underlying mechanism well enough to know that this isn’t a proper use for it.

theluddite, 5 months ago

Regardless of their conclusions, their methodology is still fundamentally flawed. If the coin-flipping experiment concluded that coin flips are a bad way to make health care decisions, it would still be bad science, even if that’s the right answer.

theluddite, 5 months ago

Thanks! There are tons of these studies, and they all drive me nuts because they’re just ontologically flawed. Reading them makes me understand why my school forced me to take philosophy and STS classes when I got my science degree.

theluddite, 5 months ago

Haha no that’s not complaining; it’s good feedback! I’ve been meaning to do that for a while but I’ll bump it up my priorities.