Important and necessary.

AI in Excel is simply a frightening idea.

Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.

If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.

And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.

Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals.

It is the departments’ choice to cancel subscriptions anytime and start publishing on their own terms. They are equally to blame when they esteem reputation above all, and measure reputation by publishing to these journals. Let’s not pretend that big-shot universities are simply taken hostage by a handful corrupt billionaires. They’re in on it.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Racket.

After comparing “transgenderism” to Nazi experiments and genital mutilation, they are pushing the emasculation analogy more and more, now to ridiculous lengths: Livestock castration! Now, that’s some “The Onion” material.

But I am still worried about the rabbit-hole loops these people are trapped inside. Some of them get so obviously insane they discredit themselves eventually, like Joanne Rowling and Nancy Mace. But there are so many more they just get more and more radicalized without giving up the facade of sanity. And they are in their majority Conservative Legislators.

This is the part that worries me the most.

Painful

During COVID I had structured my day with specific activities. Some hobbies, then some movies, then some book, then some games. A limited number of cigarettes per day. I went on long walks outside as much as possible, and got a couple online friends over Discord. It helped the time pass. It is not a long-term solution, but it is a start.

Another thing I came up with is the time factor. Or the pacing if you will. We have also received that from those other platforms. I have turned to reading e-books instead of scrolling and I have found my attention span has improved. It is the time factor that is internalized and doesn’t allow careful consideration of everything. Conflict and weaponization of sincerity might well be a side effect of this one.

You can fix a cigarette that broke in half. I know at least three ways. Now why isn’t big tech pouring the millions my way? Curious.

I think it was all over the repo.

The right bears a grudge to the modern world in its entirety, and it pours money and energy into something they call ideological realignment. They want to bring about a shift in Zeitgeist that will make basic rights as we understand them in the post-world-wars era, and constitutional democracies as we understand them since the French Revolution obsolete.

Trans rights are not “subculture dramas” or “identity politics” but an application of these rights to people who are non-cisgender. We have the right to live our life in peace, get medical treatment and not getting discriminated against because of who we are. There is a specific type of person who because they are deeply transphobic while not styling themselves as right-wing or fascist, they project their views on the “silent majority”, and dare tell us to shut up about democracy because our rights specifically are going “too far” in the democratic direction.

Guess what? There is not a “too far” in the inclusion and participation direction. Only in the opposite direction there is a “too far”, and we know what lurks there: Absolute barbarism. In fact trans rights have not been acquired by trans people themselves but with the solidarity of a critical mass of cisgender moderates, who stand in favor of constitutional rights and the rule of law. The transphobic voices were and are extremist, even if they have taken the power.

Mamdani’s win should settle this debate forever, as it is a big’ol’fat Fuck-You to the first category of people. The unscrupulus authoritarian who is effectively an alt-right adjacent, and prone to turn Nazi as soon as the political climate is favorable.

I don’t even know if it is about conflict per se, or the very notion that it is virtuous to engage with these media politically. Even these alternative platforms, because they are modeled after Twitter, Reddit, and the like, possess the same qualities, by making us react and respond to similar ways. I guess digital infrastructure for activist groups should be more similar to private infrastructures of orgs rather than corporate social media. And they should be community first, with a sophisticated take on the channels available to communicate to and from the organization and the rest of the community.

Until some time ago, I was still on the fence about Lemmy though. On the technical level it has some desirable attributes in the community structure and federation, that could possibly help. But the user culture, me included, is so fucked up that only with insane levels of moderation it could ever fulfill such a purpose. For this another medium should be considered in Lemmy’s place (I don’t think Mastodon is the one either), that would constrain antisocial and non-social user behavior on the technical level. So, this is a loose argument that Lemmy and Mastodon are not tools for social change, and should be abandoned as such.

I did not expect when I posted this that it would be a field trip on the very phenomena Cross is taking issue with.

You are not jumping with me anywhere. I invited people to comment on the quotes of another author.

Negligence of COVID prevention is important. To me, trans equality rights are important. And a score of other not only important but critical topics, from climate change to ableist structural eugenics.

But by dunking on each other in places like these, even if Lemmy / Mastodon is not corporate, achieves nothing. Your comment does nothing. My comment does nothing.

We had this mentality passed on from corporate social media, and it is just wrong to think that our posting achieves anything good the internet has to offer, to activism or otherwise. This is the true message of the quote, and not minimizing the importance of any macro-, structural, systemic topic.

That said, for those still grasping with the notion of weaponized sincerity, the above comment is the more fine specimen of it.

Some time ago there was a website where you could stream a whole collection of shows-within-other-shows. Like, you could have Itchy and Scratchy listed, just like in a streaming platform. I think it was called NESTflix.

But the worst people in the Valley also thrive on all the demobilizing disengagement that their platforms have slowly led us towards. They have alchemized activism into toxic Twitter beefs and seduced us into thinking that we’re one viral campaign away from solving some massive socio-structural problem, which makes it all the easier to devote our energies to pursuing these digital white whales in lieu of more tangible goals in our lives and communities.

First and foremost, one of the ugliest side effects of terminal COVID-posting that proliferated amongst the Extremely Online was a deepening mistrust of their fellow human being; every time they fell for outrage-bait about some wanker being a dick about not wearing a mask, their inevitable response was, “I don’t trust people anymore!” This is a neat fit for conservatives, whose entire movement is built on a notion of Original Sin, developed through two centuries of monarchism, fascism, nativism, and lesser varieties of know-nothingism, that treats strangers as essentially threats. But for anyone to the left of Mussolini, such contempt for your fellow human being, such unwillingness to reach out to one’s neighbour for fear they’ll be like That Bitch from Panera Bread I Saw on TikTok, is extraordinarily dangerous — and fatal to realizing the ideals we share, which are necessarily collective.

Well, many people are not aware of the link between their ChatGPT projects and the rise in their electricity bill, nor the foreshadowed electricity drought. Contrary to what corpos had people believe about their “individual responsibility via recycling” their individual contribution to these outcomes is now actively suppressed by the billionaire-owned media. Curious.

This myth of social media’s indispensability to our movements, not just as a tool but as the forum for change, is dangerous. If we internalize it too deeply, it actually demobilizes our movements, lulling us into mistaking quote-tweet wars and “clapbacks” for meaningful political action, seducing us into seeing nanoseconds of digital catharsis as an adequate substitute for change. It seduces us into mistaking the profitable content we generate for truly resistive speech — as well as tying our worth and our success, as people and activists, to the engagement metrics created by large tech corporations.

Social media is chock-a-block with political content, hashtag activism, and disinformation that turns grandparents into fascists. How could it be anti-political? Because it demobilizes and scatters the polity; it makes it much harder to come together, deliberate, and effect change in our communities. Worse, social media tricks us into thinking that that’s exactly what we’re doing. What results is a “public square” where real people can get hurt but nothing ever really changes.

Wow there is a lot packed into this comment, which I mostly agree with.

• Dumb collectible “ownership” fetishism
• Delusion epidemic due to AI addiction
• Decades-long Climate adaptation setback
• Devastating labor practices
• Cult doomsday syndrome reinforcing false beliefs
• Vaccine skepticism popularity and health outcomes

I am still baffled by how you managed to stuff the entirety of endstage capitalism dystopia into two short sentences. No wonder the word “fatigue” is featured in the username!

But I came here to point out that the last part is possible occurence of cognitive dissonance. When they have fucked up so badly, by commiting to such big evils, and especially sacrificing their kids health, yeah, there is no way back… Cognitive dissonance makes it impossible to admit the harm, so they are bound to reinforce the beliefs or face tremendous levels of guilt.