theluddite

It’s all good that we say, let’s do this, but it’s how we get there. How do we topple the systems of inequality which prop up capitalism, because it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign.

We learn and we organize. Speaking for myself, I started a worker cooperative and work in international human rights. I'm a member of many socialist organizations, some local and some international. I've joined more picket lines than I can count. I go to conferences, where I network with other socialists to start other projects and support each other. I've been part of local efforts against evictions, expanded police budgets, and so on, some of which actually won. It's not a mystery, but it is hard, and we have to keep showing up and doing it.

Also, if I may probe, I think that your dismissive comment ("it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign"), which clearly implies that I'm not doing anything serious, is telling. I think that you're being defensive. Zizek (I think in "Sublime Object" but it could be in something else) notes that ideology, as he defines it, is something that we don't see in our day to day life, but being forced to see it is a painful process, and we often respond defensively to having it challenged. Your current worldview seems to take for granted that no one (at least, no one serious) is doing anything meaningful to change the status quo, or even has a plan for how to change it, but that's actually not true, so we end up in this strange situation where you think that saying the most superficial thing about the current state of the world is somehow explaining something to me.

If you're actually interested in that question that you asked, and not just using it rhetorically, I have approximately ten thousand reading suggestions for you. I've already mentioned Gramsci and Zizek, but they can be a bit esoteric. There are also very good and very practical theorists of revolutionary change, many of which were themselves practicing revolutionaries.

What exactly does "practical" mean to you? To me, it's just a manifestation of what Gramsci called "common sense" ("senso comune" in his Italian), which is itself part of what he called hegemony, or the mainstream intellectual/cultural ideas that justify the current regime. He argued that this common sense is the sort of popular philosophy that always surrounds us, which will always be uncritical of existing power, and that it's the job of leftists to reject capitalism's own notion of practicality because it cannot ever be practical to go up against the people who are deciding what is practical, by definition. Instead, we need to write our own version of practicality, because if we go around repeating the existing one, as you're doing now, then we're doing the work of entrenching it instead of opposing it.

So, for Gramsci, this feeling that you feel doesn't mean that it can't be done; it means that you're suggesting something that would threaten the people in charge, because they're the ones who get to define "practical." It means nothing more or less.

There is nothing more impractical than destroying the only home for life as we know it. We literally have nowhere else to go. Banning single use plastics and nationalizing oil companies is so unbelievably convenient compared to the alternative.

In fact, revolutionary change is not just possible, but inevitable. It's a question of whether we're going to do it proactively, mitigating the harm that we've already done in the most just way that we can, or do it reactively. Either way, the day that enough of us wake up and decide to stop doing capitalism -- and that day will come -- it'll stop, because labor wakes up every single day and makes capitalism happen.

"One thing that I immediately realized about the team is how passionate they are."

🙄

This is an ad for a for-profit, publicly traded company that claims to have the solution for plastic waste, but also holds patents for said solution. Either they've found the solution, in which case, they should open source that shit because we're in a global ecological crisis, or they're exaggerating their claims and this absolute handjob of a video is uncritically repeating every single thing that the company's PR is feeding them, without consulting a single other person.

Plastic waste already has a solution, and it's a political solution. We could start by nationalizing all oil companies and banning single use plastics. Instead, we invest in a "solution" that, if it works as advertised, actually entrenches a perverse incentive for more plastic waste. Were this company to become hugely successful, they would lobby heavily against any bans of single use plastics, since it would ruin them.

This is what I call a technological antisolution:

We are asked to marvel at the shiny innovations brought to us by our technological superiors, and while we wait for them to solve climate change for us [or, in this case, plastic waste], we are given strategies to cope with the stress. Climate Change is thus transformed – or perhaps reduced – from a political problem to a technological one. I propose we name these kinds of technologies Technological Antisolutions.

A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work. This does not mean that we should stop doing R&D. A technology that is worth pursuing can become a technological antisolution depending on its social and political context. [...] Technological Antisolutions are everywhere because they allow us to continue living an untenable status quo. Their true product is not the technology itself, but the outsourcing of our social problems. They alleviate our anxiety and guilt about not being active participants in political change, and for their trouble, founders and investors are richly rewarded.

Totally agreed. Bevins does a great job with exactly that.

I have this extremely radicalizing memory of being at Occupy with a friend, who was an accomplished, award-winning economist (who has since passed; drink a toast to an old and missed friend for me). A national news network spoke to him for some time, and told us that the segment would air at a certain time. We all tuned in to watch it, only for them to give him some 10 seconds of air time, and play the entire interview that they did with a probably homeless guy who was quite unwell, who was at the camp for free food, and, to the camp's credit, was being fed and taken care of there. Not only was it grossly exploitative of that guy, but it was so dishonest as to the reality that I was witnessing on the ground. I'll never forget how they portrayed that guy, as a representative of the protest and complete lunatic, rather than as someone society had tossed aside who was, for once, being taken in somewhere.

From his book:

To sum up the dynamic at work here—in Egypt, in Turkey, and indeed across the mass protest decade—Tuğal paraphrased one of Marx’s most famous lines, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented.”

All these always do the same thing.

Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.

From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Yet here's their conclusion :

The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.

It's literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.

AI chatbots are the only possible answer: Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots

Oops nevermind that paper is a complete fucking fraud.

The purpose of a system is what it does

According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

The AI is "supposed" to identify targets, but in reality, the system's purpose is to justify indiscriminate murder.

Props to her, and this is intended as a friendly comment between people on the same side, but I think this can be dangerous.

Chomsky famously noted that brevity is inherently conservative, and that's actually a pretty profound observation. Any time that you are brief to an audience that doesn't have much context, your message is going to pick up conservative baggage. Just imagine debating someone on how American imperialism is bad in front of a crowd that has never questioned USA as the bastion of freedom and democracy in the world. Your opponent just has to say "freedom" and "support the troops" and "9/11" as pre-canned concepts with a lot of power and imagery, whereas you're going to have to spend a ton of words unpacking all that. Any time that you say freedom, you're going to have to explain what you mean, or the audience will interpret it as the canned American concept of Freedom(tm). This is something that the 19th and earliest 20th century anarchists and communists understood intuitively and talked about quite a lot, even if they didn't articulate it quite as succinctly (lol) as Chomsky did. It's everywhere in their revolutionary theories.

So, while I do think that it's important to create effective and engaging short-form agitation and propaganda materials, they should be part of a larger messaging apparatus that leads you to some sort of more profound relationship with politics. Getting the entirety of your politics from short form video will necessarily lead to a shallow and mostly aesthetic understanding of politics, easily exploitable by reactionaries. It's how you end up with the Red Scare podcast, or MAGA communism, or any of these other aesthetically pseudo-leftist but actually deeply conservative discombobulated ideologies.

edit: also meant to say that it was not a great interview lol.

Other people have already posted good answers so I just want to add a couple things.

If you want a very simple, concrete example: Healthcare. It depends on how you count, but more than half the world's countries have some sort of free or low cost public healthcare, whereas in the US, the richest country in the history of countries, that's presented as radical left wing kooky unrealistic communist Bernie idea. This isn't an example of a left-wing policy that we won't adopt, but of what in much of the world is a normal public service that we can't adopt because anti-socialism in this country is so malignant and metastasized that it can be weaponized against things that are just considered normal public services almost like roads in other countries.

A true left wing would support not just things like healthcare, but advocate for an economic system in which workers have control over their jobs, not the bosses. That is completely absent.

Also, this meme:

It's glib, but it's not wrong. Both parties routinely support American militarism abroad. Antimilitarism in favor of internationalism has been a corner stone for the left since the left began.

Haha I was actually paraphrasing myself from last year, but I've seen that because lots of readers sent me that article when it came out a few months later, for obvious reasons!

I completely and totally agree with the article that the attention economy in its current manifestation is in crisis, but I'm much less sanguine about the outcomes. The problem with the theory presented here, to me, is that it's missing a theory of power. The attention economy isn't an accident, but the result of the inherently political nature of society. Humans, being social animals, gain power by convincing other people of things. From David Graeber (who I'm always quoting lol):

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

In other words, just because algorithmic social media becomes uninteresting doesn't mean the death of the attention economy as such, because the attention economy is something innate to humanity, in some form. Today its algorithmic feeds, but 500 years ago it was royal ownership of printing presses.

I think we already see the beginnings of the next round. As an example, the YouTuber Veritsasium has been doing educational videos about science for over a decade, and he's by and large good and reliable. Recently, he did a video about self-driving cars, sponsored by Waymo, which was full of (what I'll charitably call) problematic claims that were clearly written by Waymo, as fellow YouTuber Tom Nicholas pointed out. Veritasium is a human that makes good videos. People follow him directly, bypassing algorithmic shenanigans, but Waymo was able to leverage their resources to get into that trusted, no-algorithm space. We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

This has an analogy in our physical world. As more and more of our physical world looks the same, as a result of the homogenizing forces of capital (office parks, suburbia, generic blocky bulidings, etc.), the fewer and fewer remaining parts that are special, like say Venice, become too valuable for their own survival. They become "touristy," which is itself a sort of ironically homogenized commodified authenticity.

edit: oops I got Tom's name wrong lol fixed