I think it was all over the repo.

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.

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.

The notion of a marketplace of ideas selecting the best ideas and rejecting the worse ones is interesting. It suggests that marketplaces always select for quality, especially the more unregulated they are, which is not something I’ve noticed to be true about how any actual marketplaces operate.

The idea that Nazi “ideas” need to be defeated in open debate, which will cause them to lose power, is also interesting. It presupposes that debates are always won by the most correct idea, which I’ve noticed is often the opposite of how debate works.

It also suggest that the Nazis’ plan is to participate in bloodless debate over their ideas, and accept the outcome if their ideas are rejected, which is not a plan I think Nazis have ever pursued, or the sort of arena in which they have ever admitted—much less accepted—defeat.

It also suggests that what Nazis have are “ideas,” when we know that what they actually have are intentions, and those intentions always create real-life violence toward marginalized communities along racial, ethnic, religious, and other lines of bigotry—and they do so the more effectively Nazis are able to gather and organize and promote their “ideas” into the mainstream.

Source: https://www.the-reframe.com/questions-for-substack/

Also, I find the very definition of your “zero point” as a self-contained bad faith argument. It is quite close to notions of “snowflakes needing safe spaces” or sth, but real life anti-nazi tactics are, and should be, more militant. To this bad-faith zero point my position is either a -10, or on another axis entirely lmao.

to let a generic phrase be forever attached to a political movement in any setting is a bit much

ahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

BTW this is a prolonged ‘Aha moment’, not a typesetting symbolism of laughter.

“Living space”, like? Displacing other peoples to provide an ideal amount of population density to your own people is still not OK. Or it should be anyway.

Good, but the way the developer spells “nazy” makes me to follow the quoted advice on my own brain process:

if you want to change the wallpaper during runtime, you must pkill the daemon, and then start it again

The first name of the project was “The Final Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Worries”. The developer reports he was unaware of the connotation until the Ukraine war happened.

Is this the reverse Turing test? It can be used to gauge if hominid hype followers can “really” think…

Wow, you keep acting like you have the high ground in this pitiful position you are. Are you chastising me for allegedly making light of bigotry? This is ridiculous. I know bigotry first hand, and I wouldn’t think the same of you based on your attitude on this topic. Should I have you in front of me right now I would kick you all the way down a cliff, because you are a sad little bastard. Now, if you want me to clarify things, for anyone following this that is not at your level of bad faith and self-righteousness:

The pattern of thinking resembles that of bigots. Specifically transphobic bigots.

Did I call anti-ai sentiment a bigotry? No. I said in a HYPOTHETICAL FUTURE where artificial sentient being are around, these arguments would be the exact belief set that transphobes have now.

Does this make light of here-and-now bigotry? No.

Does the rest of my rhetoric amount to anything less than subverting oppression be it class, race, or gender? Also no.

So I don’t know what the fuck you are trying to accomplish here you little troll, but if you know all the ways I could doxx you and fuck you up in real life you just wouldn’t, so shut the fuck up right now asshole. Is that clear to you mf?

AI itself IS a structurally enforced power imbalance

I don’t disagree. But since you decide to cut short the discussion by calling me:

you sound like asshole

I don’t feel particularly obliged to word how this also stands true. I never said sth to the effect you seem to be projecting here. In fact, I enjoy the notion that “AI is fascism”. But at the same time, I think that those parroting the statistical more likely response for an ML user have the exact brain structure I see daily in bigots.

Congratulations on curtailing a possibly interesting discussion because my idea was shocking for your synapse.

I know how it sounds. I am half serious though. If androids are to be in the future, people denying them rights will use this exact set of arguments. The stubbornness over a small set of ill-understood premises also resembles transphobia quite a lot. So yes, under a certain perspective, the belief structure of Lemmy’s anti-ai sentiment does resemble some form of bigotries.

Since I follow other places outside the Fediverse, I agree that the disapproval of genAi in Lemmy is monolithic and repetitive. Mastodon also has a lot of AI-criticism, but perhaps it is more sophisticated, backed up by articles and the like. In other places, there is active research and adoption. For instance, a cybersecurity firm showed that hypnotic suggestion is a very effective jaibreaking tactic against Language Models. https://www.securityweek.com/red-teams-breach-gpt-5-with-ease-warn-its-nearly-unusable-for-enterprise/ Try explaining this to an ML user. Ai-enhanced code editors are big right now, and I have met lots of tech people that are virtually inseparable from their chatbots.

But I rarely use it, unless I have a specific type of situation where search engines are a dead end, I need to provide more context etc. This is a recent post I think provides a more informed view https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/ . More broadly, every single time I read sth about AI on Lemmy, I feel I am witnessing the birth of anti-android rhetoric depicted in Detroit Becoming Human or even Bladerunner. It seems to me like a form of bigotry, and it was a thing that convinced me that the userbase of Lemmy is not exactly healthy. Especially ML. There must be a few of them with multiple socket puppet accounts, or they are all just parroting the same points. Ironic how they are the biggest fans of a (poorly understood) stochastic parrot theory, when they are the same people who have been persuaded that Signal is not a “really private” messenger. There is a couple topics where you see how brain dead these people are, AI is one.

If your threat model involves all these, then you can only be one person, and he has already been arrested due to stylistics. /joking

BTW your advice to use AI against writing style fingerprinting is not what I have heard, and some people don’t want to use AI, especially OpenAI. You should at least make your remedy about local models, but those are not as good as the commercial ones.

The correct response here is: style guides.

Style guides are specifically designed to make multiple staff writers to all sound the same. There are tools like back-and-forth translation and reading level analyzers that you can use offline to minimize peculiarities in your writing.

But is is all very cumbersome and error prone, and for low threat scenarios just mimicking another person at a lower reading level than yourself is the most accessible method.

Think of it a bit like being in a dark room. You can sorta see other people (or their silhouettes), but if someone turns on a torch, then you can definetly see the torch.

IIRC recent studies show that this method can identify individuals with higher specificity than you describe here. The OP didn’t specify threat models, but provided general privacy advice. Moving around town with a jammer is a physical parallel of fingerprinting an anonymous browser (It’s this mysterious user again).

But if your threat model requires you are not placed in a specific place at a specific time, then just having the jammer on in this place will not identify you on its own. Then it also depends on how many people are also using jammers. If only spies used Tor, it would be very easy to smoke them out, but the rest of Tor users serve as decoy for the spies.

So the dark room analogy is not a good fit here, and it is potentially dangerous for people under certain threat models. Just setting the record gay, with all due respect.