theincompetencetheorist
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User ID: 1270
My skepticism to the "propaganda chatocalypse" is that is that it operates on a flawed model of how humans operate. That are humans view of the world is hopelessly tied to cultural consumption, media and so on. So our inputs from culture and media needs to be controlled at all costs so we don't end up making the world worse by being exposed to dangerous ideas cultural and/or media content. This is the quintessential post-modernistic thought process that if they stuff the "the message" in everything it will create a better world. But we already did this experiment with the totalitarian states of the 20th century and people still thought differently even when they were force fed with their culture and media with the right way of thinking. It didn't work and it is not going to work this time either even if we have more powerful tools.
One of the interesting and kind of worrying aspects of this though is that our media is overrun by these postmodernists that are hell bent on anthropomorphising various artifacts also. Based on that the simulacra of the human form(whether it is in characters in text, images/film, robots, simulation in games or chat AI) is somehow interchangeable with humans and somehow bestows them some rights because that real humans have them. The whole debacle around the chatbot lamda being sentient is based on this. But what about the campaign against sex robots that casually excludes the male form of robots from the campaign. The whole thing around postmodern critique of videogames, movies and books, where they try to give fictional identities inalienable rights. All of these receiving mainstream media time and not listening to anyone going like "hang on a minute, we are not talking about real humans here!". This is at the fringes and I seem to be the only who notices this...
I haven't listened to the whole conversation but what I've heard and seen I have question. When did Autistic Catastrophizing become accepted by the mainstream? We got Greta Thunberg and now we have the "Big Yud" getting his opinion in the Time.
How do I become mainstream with my Catastrophizing that the combination of attention grabbing AI that subvert our lives with knowledge of behavioral psychology and the combination with generative AI giving us personalized content just massaging our brains just right? Imagine people trapped in a pleasure cube just watching personal generated colors and sounds that only has meaning to them....
theincompetencetheorist
9mo ago
Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time.
So how do we know that these are actual fans? I.e. How do we know that these people aren't online activists just claiming to be fans? Dare I say that there might be people making money of the fact that shilling the movie to actual fans, that Disney have their own 50 Cent army sitting in /r/IndianaJones?
I remember back in the day that there was this whole thing about how "fans gatekeeping fandoms is a bad thing!" as a part of the culture war. But gatekeeping served a purpose in my view and it is shame that good fans bought into the reasoning of not gatekeeping anymore do their own detriment.
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
The more I think of it and evolve my position on this whole reddit debacle: One of the greatest ironies of this whole situation is that, if you peel away the layers of this situation reddit has encouraged people to latch on causes and browbeating anyone who try to excercise independendent thought. Well they got a bunch of people who latch on to causes without thinking. Spez is all like "I <3 passive nihilists!" and being all surprised when they act like "passive nihilists".
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?
“Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”
― George Carlin
DEI is the tool that is used to scare you into obidience of due to its arbitrariness. DEI is based on something that rebukes objective reality and stacks arbitrary relativistic moral values which you can't predict logically.
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
The one riling the masses up are the powerusers who don't use the current modern version of the website and detest the official app. They see the unorganic and inauthentic from algorithms presented in the official site/app and tolerate it. With this change of the API is killing the customized experience of the powerusers and forcing a different reddit on them which they don't use but they are aware off. With this policy change is that they are being forced into using the official and it is not what they signed up for. The powerusers are able to rile up the regular Reddit users with ease because they know the sentiment and meta of the subreddits. And for all intents and purposes moderators are powerusers and can't work with the officlal mod tools, they have always relied on third party tools and those are about to be killed to.
The problem here is that the core of the protest is that we have a bunch of corporations that don't understand that regular people want something authentic if they can afford it. It is almost like all of the corporate college educated management read themselves stupid on Baudrillard and how the hyperreal supplant reality and how we can force the masses accept the new. Reddit is about to find out if they can force the new experience on everyone and keep the most profilic users and if they are truly important for regular users.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.
As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.
I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
The Police themselves know how to fight it, but it is the politicization of the police that is causing problems. Political interest on describing the problem like you did with "pre-modern" isn't always accurate. There is organized crime from former Yugoslavian countries, there are organized crime related to Turkish families, family networks from Lebanon(that was fairly modern before sectarian civil war started) are also still active.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Isn't the point of representative democracy to get an agent that is informed politically on your behalf? This is the simplest idea ever, since it takes a bunch of time, energy and resources to be informed you pay money(taxes) to a person to represent you and you keep informed of what (s)he does and if that truly represents you. If it doesn't you communicate with that person that you think it is wrong... and if they don't listen you don't vote for them next time.
It looks naive when you try to put it succintly. But that is the problem with the modern political landscape, that everything is corrupt to the core including the people that are supposed to expose the corruption.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum.
Because it is from random online arguments that they learned it from and apply it to academic discourse. My personal belief: It marks the end for the US hegemony as an academic power and there is little chance to undo it. My prediction: this will leak into other sciences and cause Lysenkoism 2.0 with mass causalities.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Well I have to out myself as a Swede then. Yes, the situation is dire and nobody is equipped to deal with the problem because everyone is talking that somehow the identity of the perpetrators is a factor. Somehow the problem is being framed by either this is phenomena that is because they are immigrants and can't integrate in the society so we should send them back where they come from (Sweden Democrats). The left is explaining everything with that society is the blame that they can't be integrated because systemic racism against immigrants. The leftists are running around the schools teaching the kids about the 'pyramid of discrimination and violence'. https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofsocialsciencesandinternationalstudies/research/interventioninitiative/resources/PyramidDiscriminationViolence.pdf They are teaching kids at risk it is because of microaggression people are getting shot.
The worst part is that the fight against gun violence is so fucking political that when the police show up in an interview and uses the words "clan based networks" for describing the family based organized crime that is running rampant, he gets so much shit for the wording he used instead of having politicians going like "you mean that this is like the mafia?". Because that is exactly what is happening and the politics is blaming it that the violence is somehow linked that they are immigrants have more melanin in their complexion or a different religion.
theincompetencetheorist
3mo ago
To sum up, this is essentially a rehash of the year-old ethical kerfuffle around Stable Diffusion, as well a direct remake of an earlier crackdown on AI Dungeon along the same lines, so technically there’s nothing new under the AI-generated sun. Still, with the seedy undercurrent getting more and more noticed, I thought I could post some notes from the underground, plus I'm curious to know the opinions of people (probably) less exposed to this stuff on the latest coomer tech possible harms of generative AI in general.
I haven't been following this particular development, but in general that there is very little counter arguments has been made to the critical theory wielding elites when it comes to this type of discussion. I already noticed it with Campaign against sex robots back in 2015, where it was totally okay with arguments that sexual activities with inanimate woman shaped artifacts is akin to rape (but assfucking a adult male shaped artifacts seems to be OK according to them, but I digress). But from my point of view it is inability by these people to see the difference in fantasy and reality, why would we have these people decide on how we interact with these artifacts?
This whole line of thought go back to ELIZA a chat bot from 1967 when people are tricked into thinking that the machine has human qualities. People who that chatted with with it sometimes were asking to be left alone for a therapy session. It is a magic trick and even when people were told how it worked they still anthropomorphised it. Now we have ELIZA on steroids with LLMs and people still do the same stupid mistake of treating it like a human and attributing some real world harm if I'm allowed to talk dirty with it.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Well the big problem with the whole Piracy discussion is to transcend the discussion around ethics and get to the discussion of how much democracy we are willing to sacrifice in protection of Disneys profits... Personally I don't mind the concept of Intellectual Property but if the enforcement of that concept means that I can't have a private encrypted conversation online under the guise of I might be sharing a copy of digital work that someone should be profiting off, then we are going to have a problem!
The whole notion of that my internet connections should be disconnected if it is probable that I engage in piracy shows up in a "free trade agreement" like ACTA is not because Lars Ulrich is a greedy whiny bitch, it is to protect corporate profits of media companies like Disney and Warner. No thanks.
The most worrying thing is the convergence of people that are interested in disallowing private encrypted telecommunication guise of that I might be a kiddie fiddler(EU:s suggested chat control) or subverting US interests online(The Restrict Act). They are essentially reheating the piracy arguments with really morally reprehensible people in hopes of disallowing the plebs of discussing in private on Signal that might be a threat to the Elites power. But hey that Bud Light controversy was awfully conveniently timed to distract the Zeitgeist around Restrict Act.
Note to the reader: I don't have time to write better since I'm pressed for time hopefully I'll get time to give good replies.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
She just simply follows the science? So what part of that IPCC report says that climate change stole her childhood?
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Yes, you are touching on the worst aspect of modern media in general. Everything is being desconstructed and reconstructed on a flawed model on how humans work. It is inauthentic in the attempt to entertain, it is a lecture instead.
My personal pet hypothesis is that postmodern thinking has come to the conclusion is that no one can escape Plato's cave https://yale.learningu.org/download/ca778ca3-7e93-4fa6-a03f-471e6f15028f/H2664_Allegory%20of%20the%20Cave%20.pdf or enough people can escape to create change. So to change the power dynamics of the world we must reform the shadows and what we name shadows to make change in the world. The more I look into Focault, Derrida, Horkheimer and Baudrillard. It gives the impression that the human perception of reality is only programmed by the powers that run society and it has an unwavering belief that it can perception can be reprogrammed somehow to affect reality. It is the ultimate in the blank slate since it is not only the human mind but also reality is a blank slate. We can redefine reality by controlling the shadow puppeteers and what we name the shadows in the cave from the allegory. Like western canon is what defines the modern power structures in the postmodern view of the world, so if we redefine the canon we redefine how power works in the world.
Maybe it was the release of the conversation between Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk? Who knows except Elon himself?
The machinations of this deal are probably going to be unknown for us unless we get a memoir/autobiography in two decades in the future or something. As for what will happen after he takes over only the future will tell. But as for the 'bot' problem I never thought it was only that, the issue here is a media wanted to spin it to that but the issue you could infer from the court filings that there was something strange with the actual "eyeball-time", I've tried to comment on it in different places but they can't seem to get past the idea that is in reporting that it is only bots. I was actually slightly excited if they had an argument that Twitter misrepresented actual usage of the service, because it could have had an effect on the valuation of ad-driven Silicon Valley companies.
Edit to amend: I just stumbled upon the messages from discovery related to the Elon vs. Twitter trial https://www.scribd.com/document/598550927/Musk-Messages It might sway my opinion on this issue a little.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
But I disagree that the capitalist’s goal is to destroy identities.
Rightfully so the destruction of identities is a Marxist project.
To quote https://europeanconservative.com/reviews/the-great-awakening-vs-the-great-reset/
In 1960, Leo Strauss lectured on Marx at the University of Chicago. https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs-public/pdf/transcript/Marx-1960.pdf He stated the following argument. “If the division of labor is rooted ultimately in the bisexuality of man [i.e., our division into male and female sexes]…and the division of labor is to be overcome, let’s get rid of the bisexuality.” In other words, Strauss saw that the implication of Marxist egalitarianism was overcoming the sexual difference between man and woman as the source of the division of labor and therefore inequality. The class laughed at the preposterous notion. “Don’t laugh,” Strauss replied, “I mean, it is silly but it is a very serious problem… Marx’s position describes itself as humanism. How can there be a humanism if there is no relevant essential difference between men and brutes, and therefore if there is no relevant essence of man? No humanism without a fixed nature of man which may undergo any changes but which retains its identity within the change.”
theincompetencetheorist
9mo ago
Both sides see themselves as righteous oppressed victims fighting against the evil empire of the other side, but for both it is less a Star Wars vision than a Terminator vision. War machines running over skulls at night-time, death and lasers.
The footsoldiers of the culture war are passive nihilists screaming other peoples ideas hoping for attention by the algorithms of big tech. Big tech are the arms dealers of this war.
But at the end of the day the modern culture war is just a continuation of Yellow Journalism which was transfered trough the age of television and now is on Youtube, Twitter and so on. But it is still the same thing. Having passive nihilists fighting each other over stuff that isn't relevant in their lives so they give up a tiny percentage of their income and get their consent on political projects that goes against the publics interests.
Maybe it is possible to move in some orthogonal direction and flank this whole conflict from a side that has the breath of fresh air behind it?
Don't consume the content that is designed to have you worried about problems you don't have. It is the simplest way of finding fresh air. Who knows maybe you will start creating that fresh air after you found it.
theincompetencetheorist
9mo ago
If this Twitter change is permanent the 'Terminally Online' are going to be in for interesting times. Between Youtube experimenting with banning adblockers and Reddit apps closing has the potential of creating a dead sea like effect on the platforms. It will be a shift in internet culture and the online portion of the culture war, how that looks I wouldn't know how to start to speculate about.
OK, I'll bite.
How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents?
Do people that latch on to causes because they don't like to think and challenge their assumption of the world know that they have done so? At least instinctively because what I've seen is that they don't like to debate! But do you truly understand that given your own position that you have taken in this post means that you are a mere memetic agent in the culture war. Do you know that it is possible to transcend it with thinking and challenging assumptions?
(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)
Destroying a 12-year old girls eyes to change its pigmentation and removing 13-year old girls breasts to make them a boy because of junk science is equally foul in my world. But you don't seem to think that.
I draw heavy parallels from enshittification to Meditations on Moloch . It is a process which is not unique to capitalism which Doctorow readily lays down blame to why it happens. The most succinct way I can think of this concept without making it about capitalism is: it is when you optimize for something and you lean in to a local maxima, but if everyone leans into to the same maxima the whole system collapses.
The solution is decentralization and resilient diversification. If see that a bunch of people have been trapped by the molochian forces you move away from them because you know there is disruption, abrupt chaos and collapse about to happen. We are watching this happening with Reddit because they are trying to IPO and we are seeing it with New York because Leftism induced bureaucracy. It isn't capitalism it is moloch.
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
um, interesting claim that endocrine disruptors are "everywhere to be found" in our daily lives, and that because they can sexually feminize frogs, they must be responsible for the apparent explosion of gender dysphoria and transgender identity that has taken place over the last 5-10 years.
Not to peddle a conspiracy theory here and claim any kind of knowledge here. Also I haven't watched the podcast either. Is it plausible that chemical companies that produce endocrine disruptors could be funding trans activism to supress any narrative that gender dysphoria can be because of environmental factors? Is it plausible that research into endocrine disruptors has been defunded at universitys because the line of research is deemed "transphobic"?
To reiterate, I'm not claiming that I have documents/references to any kind of evidence that this is happening. I'm just entertaining the thought that it is possible that it is something that is happening. This is just an idea knowing how the tobacco industry behaved when a link between smoking and lungcancer showed up and how much hard work they put in to discredit any research into it.
Well one thing that you need to recognize is that sometimes your ideological opponent is not actually an ideological opponent. You are describing people that are playing status games with various accusations, akin to status games that adolescent girls play in high school. You can't win with people that haven't matured beyond that. You can't politely reveal any idiocy to people who only care about status and latch on to high status peoples stupid ideas.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Of course nobody remembers that railway workers tried to go out on a strike in December and an arcane law, Biden and Congress went and stopped it. Nobody remembers what the workers were complaining about and how any safety concern were dismissed as a hyperbole. And then this goes and happens... of course the media avoids the subject like the plague to not remind that the would be strikers concerns might have been real, so better not remind the public of what happened in December.
Recently I've tried to stay away from the culture war topics just for my personal sanity. It is a part of me not trying to be 'Terminally Online' so I've even given up on using Reddit(killed my user after bulk deleting all my comments) too so I wasn't aware that they had an outage recently. So they posted a post-mortem of the outage. As it turns out it is a casualty of the Culture War.
The "master eradication activism" is the cause not Kubernetes node labels.
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