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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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NSFW AI-art project Unstable Diffusion has been axed by Kickstarter, despite already hitting their funding goal. This one isn't too suprising, as KS doesnt allow NSFW and a DIY pornomaker probably was never gonna slip by that filter even if it didn't ship with visible nipples.

Kickstarter took it a step further, however, formally amending their ToS and affirming that "Kickstarter must, and will always be, on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work."

It now appears that Unstable Diffusion is being driven off Patreon too, who dont have a no-NSFW excuse. Almost certain to follow the same pattern, at this point; there are too many established artists on that platform who are willing to boycott.

The twitterati taking responsibility for the bannings are targetting payment processor Stripe next. Seems like a textbook swarm governance action.

Ks:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unstablediffusion/unstable-diffusion-unrestricted-ai-art-powered-by-the-crowd/community

Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/unstablediffusion

Current fallback:

https://equilibriumai.com/index.html

Seeing all of these progressives turn into luddites in this instance, and free speech advocates after the Musk journalist bans in another, I think it's fair to say that there are no principles. There is no political theory of friend/enemy anymore. It's a law. And anyone who pretends to, in any instance, be above that law or exist outside its scope is just, through the act, a self described moron.

I get that abstract principles are having a tough time right now, I'm curious what goes into identifying friend vs. enemy. It's certainly not as simple as demographics, so it's not like we've gone directly from principles to its crudest opposite.

I want to say something like egregore-fueled "essences" or something. Resistance to AI art can be tied to a tech bro "essence" of some kind, which actually does make it somewhat demographically-informed. But at any time a good tech bro may be identified, because it's short-term politically useful. That time-dependent aspect is linked to the egregore dimension.

My two theories:

-the fine arts are extremely Blue Tribe-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is presumptively a Red-Tribe action.(even when it's pretty clearly a Grey tribe thing)

-the fine arts are (more weakly) female-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is inherently anti-feminist.

Either way, 'this means war'.

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