#SiliconValley#BigTech#VCs#SocialMedia#Web#AI#Capitalism: "I believe we're at the end of the Rot-Com boom — the tech industry's hyper-growth cycle where there were so many lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative ideas that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth simply by throwing money at the problem.
It explains why so many tech products — YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on — feel like they’ve got tangibly worse. There’s no incentive to improve the things you’ve already built when you’re perpetually working on the next big thing.
This belief — that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement — is central to the core rot in the tech industry, and as these rapacious demands run into reality, the Rot-Com bubble has begun to deflate. As we speak, the tech industry is grappling with a mid-life crisis where it desperately searches for the next hyper-growth market, eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt technology that nobody asked for in the hopes that they can keep the Rot Economy alive."
Listening to Shu Yang Li, Alene Hahle and Kambale Musavuli at #pubconf24 I see that there are way bigger problems than the ones we are trying to solve in hosting the #Fediverse and making it better.
However, I do see things like #Mastodon#Pixelfed and #Loops as a solution to a lot of the problems they are showing.
Does anyone know of non-Western NGOs with a successful #Fediverse presence? I am planning a #workshop to share best practices for global civil society about how to break free from #BigTech social media.
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#BigTech: "When it comes to AI, the best defence is not to simply wrap ourselves in a protective legislative cocoon and demand another tough new law to preempt or repel every risk or act of harm.
Rather, it is about determining who has the power.
If we are going to embrace AI, let’s do so as active participants, not passive subjects. Let’s embed the notion of shared benefits with strong industrial guardrails. Let’s get AI out of the IT department and onto the shop floor. And let’s demand those driving the introduction of this technology do so with us, not to us; shaped by us, not shaping us; augmenting our labour, not automating it.
The lesson of the social media revolution has been that technology is neither innately good nor bad. What seemed like a positive tool to connect people on an open platform has become a threat to our collective wellbeing because of the underlying business model.
Approaching AI with this critical mindset, rather than naively embracing progress as a self-evident good, is the first step.
Thanks to scholars like Acemoglu and Johnson, we now have an economic argument to match the moral one: the adaptation of new technology can make us all richer and happier if we are given the chance to collectively design it and control it."
Giganci cyfrowi - Instagram / Facebook / Meta - pokazują swoim nieletnim użytkownikom treści, których na pewno nie powinny oglądać dzieci. W niektórych sytuacjach skutki bywają tragiczne. Co dzieje się w Zjednoczonym Królestwie w tej sprawie? O tym we wczorajszym artykule redakcyjnym "Guardiana":
I love that a multi-billion-dollar corporation like RedHat/IBM can ship an operating system with a broken screen reader in 2024 (it’s not just them, it’s true for basically every major Linux distribution today) and, when you point it out, the response is “it’s no one’s fault… it’s all free labour… it’s FOSS, man”. And then: oh, and this charity is paying for one person to work on accessibility support to be implemented now… Anyone else see how fucked up that is?
Why should it take @sovtechfund to fund accessibility work on the Linux distribution of a multi-billion-dollar corporation like IBM? Why the fuck isn’t IBM paying for it?