theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml

I write about technology at theluddite.org

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2 yr. ago

I'm so, so glad to see Cybersyn getting some attention. Modern technologists have fully internalized capitalism. Beyond it, they have no vision or dream. Cyberneticians like Stafford Beer are the complete opposite -- they dreamt big dreams. Personally, I'm super cybenetics-pilled (and cybersyn-pilled), but you don't have to be to recognize how much bigger and better their dreams were 50 years ago than Silicon Valley's are today.

I developed something like this, so maybe I can answer. It was a browser extension that let people bypass the old twitter login wall. It had many thousands of users until Twitter started walling themselves off this summer.

I was inspired to make it in the most American way possible -- someone I know was in a school that got locked down due to a shooter threat (ended up being a false alarm). The police and news agencies were live-tweeting the updates, and their partner didn't have a twitter and couldn't read them without making a fucking account that very moment, wondering if their partner was even alive. I directed them to nitter, but they're not very into tech, and replacing the URL was just intimidating for them at the moment.

I found the whole experience so grotesque that that very evening I made an extension that lets you press a button to dismiss the login modal and keep scrolling (just a few css changes, or about 30 lines of code).

My two cents: Though I don't personally use it, the fact is Twitter does have a lot of valuable stuff on it. Same goes for other large platforms -- google results are now worthless without adding "reddit" to the search, for example. These companies are bad, but there's so, so many things to care about, and people can't care about all of them. Tactically, that makes consumer-driven change very difficult.

I'm not sure what kind of organizing we need to start doing to take back the internet from these big platforms, but whatever it is, I think it has to reckon with our past mistake of giving a few companies ownership of most of the internet, which means it has to go beyond just stopping to use them. These few platforms have the last 10 years of the internet currently walled-off, and they plan on charging rent on that forever. That's shitty. We should try to stop them from doing that, if we can.

I literally have no idea what the rules are so any further meaning is purely a happy coincidence for which I can't take credit.

Haha thank you. Tbh I'm not much of a Harry Potter fan, so I'm not really sure where that came from.

I get the point they're making, and I agree with most of the piece, but I'm not sure I'd frame it as Musk's "mistakes," because he literally won the game. He became the richest person on earth. By our society's standards, that's like the very definition of success.

Our economy is like quidditch. There are all these rules for complicated gameplay, but it doesn't actually matter, because catching the snitch is the entire game. Musk is very, very bad at all the parts of the economy except for being a charlatan and a liar, which is capitalism's version of the seeker. Somehow, he's very good at that, and so he wins, even though he has literally no idea how to do anything else.

edit: fix typo!

edit2: since this struck a chord, here's my theory of Elon Musk. Tl;dr: I think his success comes from offering magical technical solutions to our political and social problems, allowing us to continue living an untenable status quo.

Well, that was like 2 paragraphs and didn't really make much of a point.

If that left you wanting, I wrote a much longer thing about this exact topic: The Crucible of Mediocrity: Lessons from the Physical World for the AI-Generated Internet

Humans are capable of assessing and addressing the obstruction; meanwhile these cars are permanently disabled without outside assistance.

Capitalists have become so good at using clever accounting techniques to evade tax collectors and regulators that they are now using them in the hopes that they can trick the earth itself.

Yet another example of how capitalism uses computers backwards.

It will never cease to amaze me how obsessed with and addicted to Twitter these journalists are. When Elmo trolled NPR by labeling them "state-affiliated media," NPR itself ran indignant and breathless coverage of it for days -- they just couldn't help themselves.

Extremely based.

Waymo was less enthusiastic about the practice. A spokesperson said that the cone protest reflects a lack of understanding of how autonomous vehicles work and is "vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways." Waymo says it will call the police on anyone caught interfering with its fleet of robotaxis.

You can tell the cops work for capital because Uber has made a fortune operating illegal taxis throughout the entire country and cops have never done a goddamn thing about it, but put one fucking cone on a car and Waymo feels confident the cops would use violence to stop it from happening again.

If Waymo gets its way, the roads are just going to be fully of buggy, barely-functioning autonomous cars, and every time they hit a pedestrian, the cops will arrest the pedestrian for being "disrespectful."

edit: the more I think about it, the funnier it is. Waymo is supposedly "testing" their technology. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how testing works. If your car can't handle real-world conditions, you don't get to call the cops on the real-world conditions. Putting a cone on the hood of the car is actually a great example of the kinds of weird, one-off things that happen to drivers all the time, often called the "pogo stick" problem. A serious engineering organization would realize that, realize how good humans would be at responding to this anomalous situation, and take it for the humbling experience it should be.

It didn't really occur to me to consider an interpretation of "emissions" that excludes CO2. Had they stuck with the word "pollutant," then sure, but what they said was "emissions."

There's probably some reasonable interpretation of these findings that's productive and useful, but I think whoever wrote this is playing a bit fast and loose.

Most of the combustion products from gas are ‘clean’ - water and CO2. They don’t contribute to particulate air pollution.

Yea totally, that's why I suggested the rewrite that I did. It seems a bit nuts to exclude CO2 from the phrase:

In California, sources other than tailpipes are the dominating source of traffic emissions"

... when CO2 emissions are like ending life on earth as we know it.

edit: replies have pointed out that they probably mean "particulate pollution" throughout the piece, and are maybe being a little loose with using synonyms like "emissions" to mean the same thing. Fair enough I suppose. The whole climate change destroying the earth thing, and the well-funded denial machine that has come with it, has maybe left me a bit sensitive, but I think people should be pretty damn careful with their words when writing things like this in the Washington Post:

In California, sources other than tailpipes are the dominating source of traffic emissions. A lot of pollution comes from road dust, kicked up from cars driving along the road. In recent years, particulate emissions from brakes and tires are starting to grow as well, even outweighing those from tailpipes in some locations.

This analysis seems wrong.

In one study, Jung and his colleagues looked at car emission sources along two highways in Long Beach and Anaheim in January and February 2020. In Anaheim, they found brake and tires constituted 30 percent of PM 2.5, whereas exhaust emissions linked to gasoline and diesel constituted 19 percent. In Long Beach, brake and tires constituted 15 percent of PM 2.5 pollution, which was the same as pollution from gas and diesel.

So they are collecting air samples near highways and figuring out where it came from? Okay that seems a reasonable thing to do, but that experimental design does not seem to actually support this claim from the preceding paragraph:

In California, sources other than tailpipes are the dominating source of traffic emissions.

It must mean that tire and brakes emissions stick around longer, which is very plausible, but a different thing. It cannot be that they are dominating emissions, because that would mean they've found experimental evidence against the conservation of mass. You burn a gallon of gas every ~15 miles. That doesn't just disappear; it creates a similar amount of emissions. Whereas you lose at most a couple gallons of material on a tire over the course of its entire life, and brake pads even less so -- you probably don't go through a gallon of brake pad material in a car's lifetime. A single tank of gas is probably as much matter as all four tires will lose in their lifetime.

We're talking orders of magnitude here. This interpretation of the results seems misleading. Maybe the editorial writer here should be saying something like: Study suggests tire and brake dust lingers longer than tailpipe emissions, and could have a bigger effect on the local population.

Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries.

It's the story of Project Cybersyn, Allende's government's project to democratically plan the Chilean economy using cybernetics and computers. Eden Medina did a great job putting it together, and it's hard to imagine someone better suited to the task -- she is bilingual, an engineer, and a clear communicator.

It's such an important story, and more people need to know about it. It often feels like we on the left have ceded digital technology to capitalists. We criticize the tech industry, but we rarely offer a concrete vision for an alternative. And there must be one, because it's plainly obvious how useful computers are. Cyberneticians like Stafford Beer (who features prominently in the book) had that vision. It's the path computer technology didn't take, and we should reclaim it.

I'm going to take a different tack than some others are here. Instead of giving you classics, I'm going to recommend mostly things from the "other" direction, mostly critiques of our current world written by leftists, or histories of leftist ideas. These will probably be more familiar to you, but will introduce you to new ideas as you go, which you can dig into as you get deeper.

I don't know what kind of interests you have, but here's a few:

• Utopia of Rules: A collection of 3-4 essays about bureaucracy. Everyone hates bureaucracy, but somehow the right has monopolized hating bureaucracy in American politics. A nice place to start that will resonate with most people.
• The People's Republic of Walmart: A relatively concise history of socialist planning (as opposed to market economies), which includes the simple yet no less profound insight that megafirms like walmart already do major economic planning on the scale of countries, and it works. A nice book, though fair warning, the prose can be a bit tedious sometimes. Not too technical, but technical enough that it could pique your interest if you are inclined towards those kinds of things as I am.
• Cybernetic Revolutionaries: If you like history, this one might be for you. It's the story of Allende's government's Cybersyn project. Eden Medina did a wonderful job interweaving the concepts of cybernetics, politics, and the history in a really important way, and one that contradicts the trend in our world to separate "politics" from everything.

Happy to recommend something else if none of these are to your liking.