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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8374 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.

I'd love to see the look on my younger self's face as I agree with this sentiment, but I think you're on to something. Still, I think this is bad politics. The last 8 years has clearly shown there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke. The woke are more than happy to use Big Tech's capabilities to track and censor dissent from it's ideology, and Big Tech is more than happy to provide it. I agree that utilitarian techbroism needs to be countered, but that can only be done by sponsoring groups that are actually opposed to utilitarianism and tech-accelerationism, not just another outgrowth of modernism.

Internet is enormously beneficial to people solving technical problems.

Asked someone I know who worked as a software developer before and after internet. She thinks it's at least an order of magnitude difference in efficiency/ output.

I would assume that having better access to relevant coworker knowledge and relevant information networks improved the efficiency.

Internet was a net good imo. But it would be healthier if it were more holistically filtered by use case without the human having to be the one to not habitually click the social media button while trying to work.

Instead the thing is designed to making your attention move in ways that make people money. And it's so normalized... it's just natural to blast all citizens with adverts for things that they do not need or ways to empty my savings account into a black hole. If prosthelytizers acted like adds, coming back every single day with no option to make them leave except with the help of an external service? I don't think we would put up with this.

To be fair, we don't. That's what addblock is for. But now we have to keep up that arms race. You know what would fix this? banning adds.

Half of all websites would crash. And this would be fine. because 90% of them were junk designed to factory farm human attention for money that now serve no purpose. We'd get the things we need to work up and running again. And the remaining sites would be the ones people terminally valued enough to preserve for no personal gain.

Look, I'm a Luddite, it's not that I don't see the increases in efficiency, it's that I question whether they're good for us in the long term.

Having lived through the same period and worked in the same field, I agree the Internet was a game changer in many ways. There's a world of difference between looking up info in a book, like a barbarian, and just checking Stack Overflow. But I also see the effect it had on me - for example I notice I'm way more frustrated when I have to read a longer explanation, and don't just get served the goddamn code snippet. I also wonder what effect the rise of video tutorials / documentation is going to have on people. I find it frustrating, but just from how common it is, I guess a lot of people have to like it, and I wonder if it doesn't mess with people's heads in a similar way that Stack Overflow messed with mine.

there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke.

Yeah. If I had written a longer post I would have gone into more nuance, but, the relationship between big tech and woke is very complex. One of my principle criticisms (but certainly not the only one) of big tech is, indeed, their complicity as a vehicle for the dissemination of wokeness.

Unfortunately we do have to be constrained by reality to some extent in terms of political strategizing. I’d like to just say “I’ll support the Good People, where the Good People are the ones who would just do whatever I would do if I was the God King”. But there’s no guarantee that there will be any organized constituency that matches those exact values. So we have to make do with what we have.

All I'm saying is that your plan to counter Big Tech may just end up giving the Woke (even more) control over it.

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