+1 taterhole
meta’s charter is to be the “world’s town square”, google / youtube routinely dodges monopoly cases by asserting they're an ads company instead of a search or video company, beyond just collecting a lot of data about users these platforms are designed to captivate a large number of users to farm a large amount of data about
beyond the effect that has on their recommendation algorithms that makes them so much more potent than print or word-of-mouth in terms of “conversions”; it makes them *where* you go to look at / for your interests. the mass of these platforms pulls every single one of us to them, and has so severely neutralized alternatives that every single person active on the social internet is either entirely or primarily “influenced” by the social internet. only *then* are the hypereffective recommendations pointed at us show us stuff that would be a safe bet we’d be inclined towards so (maybe) we buy it
and maybe we do bc what’s the alternative, magazines?
Jan 17, 2025
Related Recs
Linked is a little article from The Verge… “The Perfect Webpage: How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms — and into a world where websites look the same.“
I’m expecting stagflation to hit soon and that the influencer and advertising bubbles are going to catastrophically burst which would dramatically alter the way online news, entertainment, social media, and other content is created/functions so here’s hoping that we’ll be able to rebuild something better in the place of the current online landscape that isn’t centered entirely around profit
Nov 16, 2024
i think that large language models like chatgpt are effectively a neat trick we’ve taught computers to do that just so happen to be *really* helpful as a replacement for search engines; instead of indexing sources with the knowledge you’re interested in finding, it just indexes the knowledge itself. i think that there are a lot of conversations around how we can make information more “accessible” (both in terms of accessing paywalled knowledge and that knowledge’s presentation being intentionally obtuse and only easily parseable by other academics), but there are very little actual conversations about how llms could be implemented to easily address both kinds of accessibility.
because there isn’t a profit incentive to do so.
llms (and before them, blockchains - but that’s a separate convo) are just tools; but in the current economic landscape a tool isn’t useful if it can’t make money, so there’s this inverse law of the instrument happening where the owning class’s insistence that we only have nails in turn means we only build hammers. any new, hot, technological framework has to either slash costs for businesses by replacing human labor (like automating who sees what ads when and where), or drive a massive consumer adoption craze (like buying crypto or an oculus or an iphone.) with llms, it’s an arms race to build tools for businesses to reduce headcount by training base models on hyperspecific knowledge. it also excuses the ethical transgression of training these models on stolen knowledge / stolen art, because when has ethics ever stood in the way of making money?
the other big piece is tech literacy; there’s an incentive for founders and vcs to obscure (or just lie) about what a technology is actually capable of to increase the value of the product. the metaverse could “supplant the physical world.” crypto could “supplant our economic systems.” now llms are going to “supplant human labor and intelligence.” these are enticing stories for the owning class, because it gives them a New Thing that will enable them to own even more. but none of this tech can actually do that shit, which is why the booms around them bust in 6-18 months like clockwork. llms are a perfect implementation of [searle’s chinese room](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/) but sam altman et al *insist* that artificial general intelligence is possible and the upper crust of silicon valley are doing moral panic at each other about how “ai” is either paramount to or catastrophic for human flourishing, *when all it can do is echo back the information that humans have already amassed over the course of the last ~600 years.* but most people (including the people funding the technology and ceo types attempting to adopt it en masse) don’t know how it works under the hood, so it’s easy to pilot the ship in whatever direction fulfills a profit incentive because we can’t meaningfully imagine how to use something we don’t effectively understand.
Mar 24, 2024
piece that explores our collective relationship with algorithmically driven platforms and theorizing why non-algorithmically driven platforms haven't caught on yet (PI.FYI mentioned ‼️). some of the references and moments in the writing style makes this article feel hollow and generic, but the overall conceit is engaging. also this article (and the general public alike) keep saying tumblr is dead but tumblr is very alive for me personally.
"Just kidding. There is no pure place: we crave the end because it seems cleaner on the other side. We all live,and have always lived, in the muck—even and especially after death. Download the niche app, participate in the empty-ish forum. Labor to make the experience you want. Labor to animate a human internet."
Mar 6, 2024
Top Recs from @alaiyo
Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024
