@festal@tldr.nettime.org
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

festal

@festal@tldr.nettime.org

Researcher, teacher, and activist at the intersection of culture, technology, and politics. Born at 324 PPM. Binary, so you don't have to be.

If you are on this instance, I won't follow you because I'll read all your posts in the local timeline. Why, because I want to get a sense of place as I'm currently one of the moderators of this instance.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

festal, to humanrights
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

#assange #humanrights #virtualprotest #pressfreedom The Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign is launching the first ever virtual political rally to prevent the WikiLeaks founder from being sent to the US where he could face a 175 year jail sentence for journalistic activities.

The event will be staged in a virtual auditorium looking like the Royal Courts of Justice in London where Assange is set to face his final appeal in the UK court system. The rally aims to build for a real life protest at the same venue when the court date is announced.

The virtual rally will be happening in the Wistaverse, the first platform dedicated to virtual protests, located in the Sandbox.

https://dontextraditeassange.com/events/assange-campaign-launches-first-ever-virtual-political-rally-2/

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Beyond the highly sanitized world of corporate AI, there is probably an AI trained for any possible fringe use. Of course, also for porn.

https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-porn-generative-artificial-intelligence

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

I started to listen to Evegeny Morozov's new podcast series "Santiago Boys" which takes a very expansive view of Allende's project Cybersin.

He interprets it in the light of today's struggle against big tech as a fight for an alternative understanding of technology's potential in society.

A path that was never allowed to be explored due to massive pressures and interventions from the state-corporate nexus of the US.

Highly recommended.

https://the-santiago-boys.com/

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

I'm looking for literature on #surveillance as #care (rather than control), ie. something that aims to increase the subject's ability to act, rather than restrict it.

Any pointers?

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Donna Haraway once remarked that we (in the technocultural present) "tend to describe everything as new, as revolutionary, as future-oriented, as a solution to problems of the past. The arrogance and ignorance of this attitude hardly need comment."

Would be nice to think of solutions from the past to problems of the future, ie those we currently create. Which might also lead to trying to avoid creating the problems in the first place.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Great exhibition on the pioneering Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari, particularly her work on locally-made, zero-carbon construction, focussing on women's spaces.

https://www.azw.at/en/event/yasmeen-lari/

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

I'm very happy, After 25 years (!) of moderation and other near-daily care-taking work by @tb and myself, the nettime mailing list has been taken over by a fresh crew. This in itself is amazing.

https://tldr.nettime.org/@bot/110848024697055904

Hosting is provided by our friends @servus.

it's hard to overstate how important the list has been for me, intellectually, but also professionally, personally, socially, and emotionally.

And still is, but now as a simple subscriber and occasional contributor to the list.

festal,
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

@evemassacre @tb @servus tx. The new team is probably not much more diverse, but there's string interest to change that. We have to see how that works out. It's not easy given the legacy.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

A rare example of 'US centrist' self-awareness, even if the moralizing remains annoying.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-meritocracy-educated.html

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Went to see a superblock in Barcelona. Given how much they feature as urbanism of the future, they are amazingly simple. Take an intersection, block traffic in all four directions and you have a square. Plant trees, add some tables and benches. That's basically it. Replace cars with trees and don't privatize the resulting space. All you need, and all that is usually missing, is political will.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

I think one of the most undertheorized political strategies is "ritual cruelty". Rather than improving conditions, other people are made to suffer more.

festal, to fediverse
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

I still haven't made up my mind about blocking Meta's , codenamed or , supposedly supporting , should it actually launch. As far as I can see, it's basically "keeping the evil surveillance corp. out" vs "avoiding nerdy self-marginalization".

Both are fair points. I guess, it depends. But on what? For the, the key point is if the Threads (or whatever its name) support easy migration (as Mastodon does). If that's the case, I would prefer not to block it, as it could be an offramp from the walled garden. If this feature is omitted, then i would be much more open to blocking.

But in the end, this should not be a decision by the admins, but a collective one by the users of the instance.

festal,
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

@tante I think we (Hometown instances) can to polls that are local-only. @darius

festal,
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

@tante @darius Ah, that is great. We'll put a vote up once the project is announced and we can see it. Before that, I feel the discussion is mainly virtue-signalling.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

There are, by now, two classes of data. One type is representational, with all the questions that representation generates (i.e. who/what is represented, what's the relationship between the representation and the underlying reality, etc).

The other type purely about statistical patterns in any kind of information. It refers to nothing but itself with all the questions that are typical to statistics knowledge (i.e. relationship between statistical and social relevance, etc).

The latter is data in the sense of "training data". The former data in the sense of "measurement".

The two types of data are so different it would make sense to to have two different words for it.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

"Die Gefahr ist nicht, dass “KI” so gut ist wie Menschen, die Gefahr ist, dass das deinem Boss egal ist." @tante

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LIvHF-IX9Y

tante, to random
@tante@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Perfect statement by @ryanbroderick : "Nothing any guy who pays for Twitter says in a thread about AI matters."

festal,
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

@tante @ryanbroderick unfortunately, nonsense often matters.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

This is not going well. Not for Google, not for us.

https://futurism.com/top-google-result-johannes-vermeer-ai-generated-knockoff

adfichter, to random German
@adfichter@chaos.social avatar

Welche Fragen würdet ihr der Präsidentin der Signal Foundation stellen? (wenn ihr die Möglichkeit dazu hättet 😉 )

festal,
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

@adfichter Frage sie mal, was das konkret bedeuten würde, wenn sie sich wegen Backdoor Vorschriften aus einem Markt (zb UK) zurück ziehen würden. Werden dann User in dort blockiert, oder ist die App einfach dann dort nicht mehr im App Store?

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

If I had to choose what's the worse risk to humanity, AI or oil companies, my choice would be clear: oil companies.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

James Baldwin, in Stranger in a Village, writes "the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."

While he obviously has other concerns, it is not a coincidence that it also offers a way to think about how AI, particularly LLMs, can exert domination. Irrespective of them being "intelligent" or "conscious".

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

I think one of the reasons that many of the AI people are so scared of AI is that they truly believe that there is no (or there will be no) difference between humans and machines. As all capacities of humans can be fully simulated, and then improved on, by machines.

This is not only a fundamentally mistaken and sad assumption, but most importantly a very dangerous one, creating lots of harm.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

It's hard to think of a clearer case revealing AI as a tool to automate labor and put pressure on workers.

That fact that it's an NGO that "decided to replace hotline workers with a chatbot ... four days after the workers unionized", only goes to show how deeply many NGOs are embedded in the neoliberal program.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7ezkm/eating-disorder-helpline-fires-staff-transitions-to-chatbot-after-unionization

festal, to ai
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Perhaps we could have thought of this already in the 1990s, when the term "creative industries" was introduced. Capital needs to find ways of automating labor, also in this new industrial process, as a way to asserting control in order to extract maximum surplus. De-skilling tilts the balance of power between capital and labor in favor of the former. Generative #AI does exactly that.

Rob Horning, in the lastest installment of his great substack, puts it this way:

"It’s perhaps clarifying to interpret generative AI as nothing more than an automation technology. Its purpose is to eradicate the perception that certain kinds of jobs require certain kinds of skills that workers possess, which give them potential leverage over their bosses, whose authority lies specifically in their lack of skill and their possession of capital."

...

"AI, then, appears as the current expression of capitalism’s “peculiar methodology,” the necessary form of “bourgeois science."

https://robhorning.substack.com/p/projects-of-fake-coherence

The arguments gets even better as it progresses. Well worth reading the entire thing.

festal, to random
@festal@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Learned a new acronym: TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) the seven horsemen of silicon valley thinking.

https://washingtonspectator.org/understanding-tescreal-silicon-valleys-rightward-turn/

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