https://twitter.com/TylerGlaiel/status/1706384660316774894
There's a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight, capital no longer had any reason to stay on the nicer end of the spectrum.
So in the terms of tech, this means that tech is no longer developed to just be useful/practical unless there's an exploitive monetization scheme attached or in the works. This is basically the enshittification cycle. Cool new functional thing that's cheap/free. But really it's just a ploy for market/platform capture via market share etc. So within short order, that useful tech gets bled of it's value proposition as it approaches monetization/enshittification. The profit motive has recuperated the development of tech completely. It's almost impossible to create something useful if it doesn't already have some profit/rent seeking mechanism embedded. And if you try to do a startup to challenge some market giant, they most likely just buy it out and bury it before it becomes a serious threat. Maybe if your lucky, some aspects will get ported into the existing product in some half-assed manner to appease the user base.
Sorry for the rambling rant, I had a few beers earlier.
Yeah, I know there's been a lot written on the USSR opening the floodgates for Capital, but I think it's time to abstract that out to "anti-enshittification anchors" that capital need to have to function, but that it is inherently hostile to and will seek to kill or co opt by any means necessary.
I don't mean like regulatory capture, I mean bodies that actively threaten capital's existence and by doing so force the concessions that ironically keep capitalism ticking over.
"anti-enshittification anchors" that capital need to have to function, but that it is inherently hostile to and will seek to kill or co opt by any means necessary
This just sounds like the mask-on progressive liberalism to me, but I'd appreciate more info if you can provide some readings or additional info.
There's a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight
I think collapse of the USSR was a symptom and not a cause
Average heights in the west started falling from 1970 onwards. Not just the US but all of europe too, so it had nothing to do with immigration
US wages have also been stagnant since 1973. IDK what the wage timeline is for europe
I agree, didn't mean to say it was the only thing that caused this shift. More so that capital no longer had as much resistance to its dominance globally as the USSRs influence in global consciousness waned. It's partly what leads into the neoliberal turn, end of history, irrational exuberance, believing their own propaganda, etc. There's no longer any real counter-narrative, only the marketplace of capitalist competition where the truth is up for bid. There's also other factors too. Global financialization and free trade agreements pushed via IMF and World Bank etc have aided the consolidation of capital to a point of concentration that's unprecedented to my knowledge. But this is still interrelated to 'no other option' ideology that propagated directly from the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.
I don't know enough about geopolitics in the 70s to point to more direct events or such. But it's pretty clear that once 68 failed to realize actual socialism, most labor power blocs start to decline in the face of cold war propaganda. The window of discourse in the west gets pulled further right until the 'greed is good' 80s anchors it on the right.
The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.
That's never what held back capitalist expansion, the direction of economic surplus towards the luxury of a tiny minority is a defining trait of feudal production that capitalism substantially reduced. It only played a role in technological progress back at a point when meaningful advancement was still achievable by kind of resources and directed effort of the eccentric and idle rich pursuing experimentation.
The stagnation we have isn't a result of a lack of possible gadgets for the 1%, it's us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive. Capitalist technological innovation has always been primarily about process improvements and expansion to/creation of new markets, with resources only directed where capital returns are reasonably expected; any scientific discovery is purely incidental. There's also the fact that most scientific advancement within capitalism has been state-backed, and neoliberalism has eroded the institutions involved.
There's also less incentive to do process improvements when there's cheap labor available. So the current arc of "development" is casting more and more people into greater and greater poverty.
Without the ballast of a proletarian state that prevents or fights capitalist expansion into new labor markets, the capitalist solution is to create death, destruction, and poverty to force people's surplus value out of them.
the real reason that AI will never catch on is that child labour is just cheaper
AI is catching on because it relies exclusively on unpaid (captcha) or underpaid (tagging) labor.
yeah but it also relies on paid labour to design it and they don't stay relevant that long. I'm not saying it isn't exploitative I'm saying it will never be cheaper than this other form of exploitation
Yeah, but the bulk of the labor involved in machine learning systems is training and tagging.
It's profitable right now because the average wage of someone doing the "data mining" required for training are making like $1 a day.
it's us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive
yea i think you nailed what i was reaching for much more succinctly here
Out of curiosity how old are you roughly
I'm asking because you have good sentence structure
Not because we’ve reached any sort of technological apex, but because we’ve perhaps reached a point where the capitalist mechanisms for innovation are sputtering.
It's the neoliberal mechanisms. The machine was doing OKAY for tech progress under Keynesian policy. Not better than socialism but it wasn't the crawl we're currently seeing.
The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.
They do want immortality.
(The following is the perspective of an outsider enthusiast, please disregard or correct me where needed)
Physics has plateaued somewhat, as well. Part of it is just the scale. It's difficult to learn things about particles that are smaller than the equipment you're using to measure things. It's also hard to justify the funding, too. "Hey, give us blempty hundred thousand dollars to disprove a hypothesis." Not quite as sexy or thrilling as the venture capitalists' pie in the sky.
...but... I also wonder if maybe... maybe we've gotten into a bit of a rut with established physics. Like for example, I don't understand wave-particle duality. The bit I specifically don't understand is the particle. Waves make sense, we can see interference patterns, light ever-so-slightly bends round corners, different wavelengths translate to different amounts of energy. But. The fuck is a particle. It really seams like it's just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
It really seams like it's just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
Part of what's weird about fundamental physics is that it is, in a sense, all just tricks to make the math easier. When you get below the level of non-relativistic QM (and even, arguably, at that level), the distinction between the mathematics of the theory and the theory itself starts to collapse. Some of this is probably just due to the fact that events and patterns at that scale are just so unfamiliar to us and our everyday experience: we can make intuitive sense of things like forces, acceleration, mass, and other stuff that's in the ontology of classical mechanics because we live in that world. Fields, Lie groups, fiber bundles, and other essential bits of the formalism at the QFT level are much harder for us to understand, because they can only roughly be mapped onto things that are familiar from our lived experience. This is part of why things like QFT, QED, and other candidate "fundamental" theories just seem like bags of mathematical tricks: in a very literal sense, those theories are telling us that the world just is a set of formal relationships and interdependent patterns. When you ask something like "well what is the theory really telling us, beyond the math?" for classical mechanics, I can give you a story--a narrative--about the world that maps the mathematics onto familiar concepts. When you ask the same question about QFT, there's no easily accessible metaphor or story: it's structure all the way down. Statements like "light sometimes behaves like a particle" means nothing more or less than "it's useful to think of light as being quantized in some contexts, because the mathematics seems to work that way."
I'm also an outsider and I find it helpful to see things in a similar way.
Everything can be divided up in different ways: relations of production, forces of production, social relations, means of production, mental conceptions, etc, etc. Science/technology is another one. They're all interconnected. Each one can develop even if the others stagnate. But there's a limit to how much anything can develop on its own. They either all develop or you reach a wall.
The hard sciences are near the wall. There's room for a little bit of development but nothing can flourish. Google '[discipline/science] funding' and have a look at what's required to secure research funding (or don't—it won't be fun lol). There is zero percent chance that any funder will knowingly pay a research team to conclude, 'capitalism must end'. There are research questions you're just not allowed to ask.
Not to mention that scientists are hemmed in on all sides by IP. Good luck advancing knowledge if you're not allowed to start at the most advanced point because some imperialist items the IP and keeps it locked away because reasons.
Researchers of all kinds know the system is terrible but without organisation none of them can do anything about it. And they're mostly labour aristocrats if they work in western research institutions, which means they are unwilling to even accept what the problem is beyond the surface detail of restrictive gatekeeping.
There's only so much even the best scientist can achieve in this system.
I feel like unless we figure out an extremely clever trick, we need just gigantic particle accelerators or quantum computers orders of magnitude better than we can currently conceive of to make substantial steps forward in physics anymore. Like, we're not even talking "Well, the USSR/China could do it because they weren't/aren't as beholden to the profit motive", we're talking particle accelerators the size of fucking countries, and helium liquid cooling on large scales to maintain quantum coherence unless we figure out more room-temperature shit.
String theory is a neat idea and I do genuinely find it interesting and have read books on it, but at the end of the day it's just a giant "so what" to me. Not "what's the point of making physics advancements" obviously, but "what's the point of creating these massive, complicated theories if we need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system to prove them right or wrong".
particle accelerators the size of countries would be trivial under international communism tho
there has been no fundamental progress aside from like, better smaller transisters and better materials science and technique, but nothing fundamental
An AI dominated future with no actual AI. It's gonna be so cursed. I hate that they got away with using AI as a marketing term for this shit.
Sadly black hat SEO isn't a "theory" let alone a conspiracy.
It is shit that has existed and thrived since 2006.
kids failing school and being forced through anyway, not knowing things that were basic knowledge 10 years ago
"it's okay they can just google it"
the google results
The internet died when capitalism got it's greasy paws into it and created web 2.0
I was under the impression that this federated network of self-hosted servers we're using to communicate right now was web 3.0
Web 3 was never anything but marketing nonsense. To be fair, that was true for Web 2.0 as well. Web 2.0 was always about rebranding the internet as a profitable thing for high finance to invest in following the 2000 dotcom crash. It had nothing to do with any particular technology, and O'Reilly's manifesto about Web 2.0 was filled with nothing but marketing slogans. After all, he was just a knock-off "Windows ME for Dummies" book publisher who stumbled on a con that San Francisco financiers loved to use. Almost 20 years later the crypto weirdos - who had been at their own con for the majority of the intervening years - thought that making a sequel of O'Reilly's Web 2.0 con would be an excellent idea. It's bullshit all the way down and always has been.
There'sn what, 100k active users on the entire lemmyverse? Our 1k active users are a significantly outsized proportion of all that traffic? We're very small.
Whatever eventually blows up in the coming future will retroactively call itself Web 3.0 when everything else dies to it.
brilliant. Just replace all information with nonsense
make it so if you want accurate information you need to go to the library like it was in the past
If you don't know what you're doing, the internet is already like that. The amount of people who have tried googling shit when I ask them a question and they regurgitate marketing spiel is unreal.
what I find annoying is when I google a word I want a definition for and a company with that name dominates the results. It's like when singers make songs out of phrases and ruin the phrase for everyone. Get all this capitalism out of my language I have to live in this language
I think that shit should be illegal. Like they should start arresting Google execs until they finally fix it so that googling a word without context doesn't assault you with information about some goddamn corporation using that word as their name
for me what kills me is that searching for 'home' used to always go to a map that showed me how to get home, now? and ad for home depot, every time.
I don't know how I became information literate and I don't know how to convey to other people how shallow their information gathering process is. So many people don't realize that the first 4+ results on every search are just ads and I frequently see them click uncritically. So many can't discern an internet equivalent of an infomercial from a real source. People OBVIOUSLY can't see when something right in front of them is naked propaganda just so long as it's labeled with the correct brand.
Like, I trained myself reflexively to not even look at ads, so now it's almost second nature to me, but I feel like that started as an instinctual yet active effort of small rebellion? I've no idea how to pass that instinct along
Never landed much with my 2 year associates in a scientific field, but it did teach me to research better as well as smell bullshit from a mile away.
the internet wouldn't be this way if Cybersyn/Allende survived and Brezhnev hadn't defunded OGAS
yeah but he didn't and he didn't. The world wouldn't be this way if no one founded the Roman empire but we live in the world where they did
The internet, like many great and terrible things, will not die quickly or cleanly. It's death throes will be horrible and inflict great suffering, and it's corpse will swell with unnatural life even more terrible than its forbear.
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
ShowWe have the oppressive and uncaring governments, the punk part is up to you.
nuking the internet with the math equivalent of xeroxes of xeroxes is a fantastic bit
Xeroxes of xeroxes of used blue copy paper found in the ruins of an office block that was set on fire. Someone had failed to clean a graffitied 'Mis' from a sign on the door that used to read, "CIA
MisInformation Archives".
Not to be too doomer, but if you have things you like on the internet, get an external hard drive and start saving. It's gonna be hard to find things soon
It's already gotten much harder for me to Google good sources of information that goes against the mainstream capitalist ideals compared to a few years ago
It's not just AI, the US state will also greatly expand their control on the flow of information as they continue to increase the need to suppress workers domestically and internationally
Use Yandex. I'm not joking, I have started to get better results on it and the image search is genuinely much better, in particular the reverse image search is waaaaay better.
quick yandex vs google test:
i searched "soviet union"
google gave me a state department history link on the first page of google
yandex didn't give me that same link until the 4th pageI already do
I should try switching over to it as my main search engine though. I've never tried their image or video search
Can't speak for video but even the interface for reverse image search is just massively and obviously better when you try it. Both finding the source and "similar images"
That's beautiful
Image reverse search definitely took a big step down when Google consolidated a bunch of image/camera shit into Google Lens
The CIA and other financial institutions already read books from leftist authors to find stats that they need to conceal - Super Imperialism — Michael Hudson
"Politicians in charge of national statistics encourage popular misunderstanding, but my statistical analysis tells a different story from what is widely believed. A few years ago I sought to update my calculations on the impact of U.S. military spending and foreign aid on the balance of payments. But the Commerce Department had changed Table 5 of its balance-of-payments report, dealing with foreign aid and other government programs, in a way that no longer reveals the extent to which foreign aid programs generate a transfer of dollars from foreign countries to the United States. I phoned the statistical division responsible for collecting these statistics, and in due course reached the technician responsible for the numbers. “We used to publish that data,” he explained, “but some joker published a report showing that the United States actually made money off the countries we were aiding. It caused such a stir that we changed the accounting format so that nobody can embarrass us like that again.”
I realized that I was the joker who was responsible for the present-day statistical concealment."
https://medium.com/@davi./super-imperialism-f7e92ba1f4f0
And:
"Well, I thought that this was going to be a warning to other countries. And indeed, there was a very quick Spanish translation and Japanese translation. But the main purchases, as we’ve talked about a year ago, were the CIA and the Defense Department.
Immediately Herman Kahn hired me to the Hudson Institute and gave a very large grant for me to explain to the government how imperialism was working. And the U.S. government used this as a how-to-do-it book."
https://michael-hudson.com/2021/10/we-make-the-rules/
Lol, I'm convinced a similar thing happened in my city. The local police department used to share the raw data from their "Community Survey", including the age of people who responded to their survey. Someone posted the police's official report to reddit a few years ago, and I shared a few comments pointing out that the raw data showed that less than 20% of their responses came from people 30 years or younger. There were literally more responses from people 70 years and older than people 30 years or younger. The average age of respondents was in the 60's,... And that's not to mention the survey gets sent out to homeowners. Of course, this survey showed that people wanted more police, that they feel safe around police, and that they see crime on the rise, but the pigs didn't want people to know this opinion survey was filled out overwhelmingly by geriatric landowners. The years since I pointed it that out on reddit (which people in my city know the police browse), they don't make that raw data available.
Google doesn't even want to help you find information anymore. 5 times a fucking day the thing gets pissed off that I'm rephrasing my searches, and makes me click the captcha box. It just wants you to click ads, buy shit, and fuck off- not find out information for free.
The antitrust case against Google right now is going to be huge. The actual chance of them losing isnt high, even though they should, but just the existence of the lawsuit is going to make them tamp down on their anticompetitive behavior until the smoke clears. Last time this happened, it happened to Microsoft. That's when we GOT Google in the first place, and a lot of other new kids on the block. We could see some actually amazing search tools appear in a few years because of this, especially if they actually lose
As someone that works with cleaning up after AI, nah don't worry, capitalism and climate change with keep it in a tight cage. Future peoples will be confused why capitalist Murica had such limited trite uses for AI similar to how the Imperialist Romans only used the steam engine for opening temple doors or similar stories.
To add, Chat gpt's answers are curated by people not given too long to QA select questions and areas, like the story of the mechanical Turkish chessplayer most of AI's brain power is still human-derived and these workers (esp non-imperial core) are very low paid and non experts in their fields.
I feel like eventually google (and other websites but especially google) will realize the extent of the damage and will have to rebuild their foundations to combat the endless, automated and financially incentivized math hallucinations, but I really wonder how bad the damage is going to get before we reach that point.
Probably a bunch of dead people tbh, see Ann Reardon's series on Litchenberg woodburning
I think it's an open question at this point if highly financialized western capitalism can undertake that kind of productive re-building. Personally I don't think it is capable.
aw that's sad. i assumed people knew better. This and Jacob's Ladders are the kind of thing where you set it up in one room, and you plug it in from the other room. That video of someone holding the HV end with their bare hands is nuts, I wouldn't even do that with line voltage. Same old story: people get acclimated to the danger, until one day they're working in the shop alone late at night and make a tiny mistake.
"we're talking 2000 volts here, we're not playing with tiny amounts of current"
aghh
Noticed this the other day when I got a Quora chat gpt answer telling me that it was dangerous to transform a 5V 2.4A electric current to a 12V 1A electric current, to supply electricity to a device needing a 12V 1A input current.
Yeah I'll just supply the device with over double the amperage it's designed for, along with an incorrect voltage, thanks Quora.
pretty rare to see a current sink device out there, I expect it'd be fine with any 12V supply with more than 1A available
