all 8 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

This should be pretty damn obvious by now to anyone old enough to remember what the world was like before the internet - if it wasn't for the internet, the majority of us would still be neatly swallowing the lies the liberals fed us about Israel, most of us would still believe Law & Order was some kind of documentary, and most of us would still believe climate change was some fringe theory only hippies and treehuggers cared about.

That is the whole point of AI - it's a weapon. And a weapon requires no ROI - the people who forlornly hope that that the so-called "AI bubble" bursting poses some kind of existential threat to the liberal socio-economic order is going to be waiting for a long, long time.

It's the internet itself that poses an existential threat to the liberal socio-economic order (no matter what self-congratulatory YT leftists tell everybody) - and AI is the only tool they have that's going to put it back in the box for them.

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 13 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    To expand on this point, which is correct:

    1. Collusion of the oligarchs: Data centers buy up all the hardware on the planet, companies stop manufacturing components for PCs, since “it’s no longer profitable”. Micron already killed Crucial, for example.
    2. all hardware now sold is locked down, walled garden tablets with minimal RAM and storage - you must stream everything from the cloud. They control the software choices and the encryption keys.
    3. AI agents review vast amounts of text, files, and communications, and surface any interesting anomalies. Dissident is silenced. News is censored.
    4. Your data is held hostage. If you step out of line, if you run into financial troubles, your personal affects and memories are deleted.

    It’s a prison. We let them get rich enough to imprison us with the tech we developed for them.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    It's a stupid comparison, but I always think of The Ways from The Wheel of Time books. https://wheeloftime.fandom.com/wiki/Ways

    It feels the closest in terms of fictional metaphor. We had this wondrous thing that let us connect to others and it was slowly corrupted and ultimately taken over by dark forces. Now using it you risk madness and the only people that truly see any benefits are those same dark forces that corrupted it.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago*

    I think it is obvious to most of us who have spent any significant time online in our life. To be clear, We've been seeing them try to control the internet since at least the late 2000s. It was only after about 2015 that capitalist interests controlled enough of the tech sector to actually start pushing with clear and tangible results.

    I don't have references. Just anecdotally lived experience from being chronically online and watching. The internet educated many of us on how the world really works.

    over the last two decades I have seen, in no particular order,

    • Bot nets pushing bad faith opinion online
    • Social media influencers being paid and supported to push disinformation
    • Payment processors and web hosts punishing websites that don't conform to certain narratives.
    • The rise of the algorithm and the suppression of certain ideas and facts
    • Social media going public and old guard champions who built the platforms either being outed or being absorbed into the capitalist machine.
    • Social media spaces being taken over by way of having old mods replaced for some TOS infractions that happened years ago.
    • weaponization of the legal system against third party platforms like TikTok that are outside of the US's control.
    • Search optimization
    • ID laws
    • Deeper Tracking of your online activity (currently just said to be used for ads but it's funny how often the Secret Service or FBI will show up at peoples doors in recent years when they say something online that was a little too spicy.

    AI is the crown jewel of censorship. All of this breaks my heart. It ties all of these things together and ultimately centralizes what was an decentralized ecosystem.

    importantly though, AI is the front end. It's the middleman to keep you from the information of the internet.

    The other side of the coin, The other threat, The one that your average user wouldn't understand is just the datacenters. Forcing everyone to keep their website on a VM on some data warehouse control of the hardware.

    Honestly, 20+ years of seeing this and I don't have a lot of hope that it can be stopped.

    I don't know how to explain all of this to the average person.

    The only thing that comes close is super childish. "They stole it." It's the only sentence that fits and it breaks my heart. It boggles my mind. The complexity of the systems, The power it gave us as people. They stole it.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Whatever happened to him 🤔

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    After he helped Trump win the U.S. election in 2016, it was extremely hard to take him seriously.

    "Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism ... she certainly should not become president of the United States."

    There’s more on Wikipedia, but I think it’s foolish to believe he has ever cared about anyone but himself.

    Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a "liberal war hawk"

    I’m don’t think a Trump presidency was inevitable without Julian Assange. He was the useful idiot.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 1 hour ago

    he regarded her as a “liberal war hawk”

    Okay... but where's the lie?

    This is a lie...

    Hillary lacks judgment

    Hillary is an apprentice of one of the US's most heinous war criminals, Henry Kissinger - unlike Trump, she's a thoroughly trained imperialist. She has plenty of judgement - and that made her far more dangerous to the world than Trump.

  • source
  • parent
  • 1 comment in c/progressivepolitics@lemmy.world view that post

    Great read. Densly packed with very good and equally fucked up quotes.

  • source