Russia, the social group - eh, schoolteachers

Their views were in general along the lines that there are poor people and there are rich people. Poor people owe nobody nothing (including respect to property rights, personal space, privacy and so on), and are owed everything. Rich people vice versa, it’s them paying with rights for their asocial riches.

Now who’s poor is not absolute, it’s who owns less than deserved, and what’s deserved is big for their friends and similar-minded people. And who’s rich is the same, but owning more than deserved, and if they don’t like you, you deserve less.

It’s the kind of people who love Stalin.

Oh, we are being enthusiastic about the state boot again.

I mean, since corps are already using it to their ends, then it’d be probably a good thing to stomp them right back with that boot.

But I’d like a clean humanist solution more.

That’d involve, for example, commissioning a FOSS P2P post-Web system which would replace Google’s and Facebook’s and others’ services. A few dozens of nation states, not poorest on Earth, could do that.

That system would be simpler and cheaper than their missiles and jet planes and drones, while so tremendously useful to kill once and for all this particular threat.

Like those Locutus and ghost keys things, which are not a working thing yet, but very promising.

There is an opinion that this is what allows corporate and other power to exist legally. Otherwise it’d just all go Al Capone again, not vanish nor diminish.

Not in Retroshare or Freenet or I2P. They do have such people, of course.

My free speech absolutism would be in separating community moderation from actual physical instances.

Say, a P2P system where you subscribe to a community (somehow identified) and the “deleted” comments and “banned” users are that because of there being a “delete” record signed by that community.

With distributed storage, but storage a user contributes being used only by communities they subscribe to, so not like Freenet with every user probably storing one or two blocks of CP files.

EDIT: That would allow everyone to verify moderators’ honesty and fairness, which would be beneficial to moderators themselves, but at the same time in practice you’d have easy moderation.

I’ve had people clueless about tech tell me that:

using Linux and not buying Windows I rob MS’s developers,

not doing things the way big corporations want I deprive them of profits and thus rob their workers,

using your own device the way you want it is a crime if you have to bypass what the vendor does,

GPL and BSD licenses are not real sovereign citizen stuff, and if I’m not paying someone for software, I’m robbing the working class,

repairing things yourself in your house is robbing people working in those trades,

reading things in the Web is robbing university professors and book store workers and publishers,

having to learn a particular technology while doing my task at work means I’m a fraud and rob my employer or our clients, because apparently I have to keep all the today’s tech in my head before needing any of it,

if I don’t know some single thing another person knows, they are obviously better qualified than me (say, that other person can write Windows device drivers, while the job is about systems integration),

…

and I don’t remember more stupid shit from those people and I don’t want to, but generally being not a dumb ape in today’s world is considered suspicious apparently.

After that wonderful experience I might be silent about my views with people usually, but really I’ll never stop being anarchist (whatever kind of anarchism that is).

Nothing worth feeling bad for will collapse.

People are not willing to get ads into every orifice, just nobody’s asking them. Ad blockers are reactive.

Bigger businesses will feel more pain, I can promise you that. Smaller businesses do not benefit from this ecosystem, quite the opposite - it heats up those who pay more for advertising, or those who are partners with those doing advertising.

As of payments again - when you are getting ads into your face with a message that you can pay to use something without them, you naturally feel against it.

I haven’t yet read the article, but it may well be a comparison for which Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris can be united under the Unix umbrella as systems with monolithic kernels and similar conventions. Of course FreeBSD is much cooler than Linux and Solaris is much cooler than FreeBSD, but we get what we get.

Also ndisgen under FreeBSD. MS could have been nice for a difference and not broken compatibility.

Ban any advertising unasked for, even better.

Things were better because people would “go to a different brand” and sue morons more often. They’d also be more confident of their own knowledge in various technical things.

Things becoming more complex was used to gaslight a lot of people into questioning their own knowledge about what they need. Such gaslighting first and foremost works via people being ashamed to be stupid and pretending they know it all.

Most (even technical) people are like this - they feel that they don’t understand the world around them, it’s stressing, spying, rigged, chaotic in the wrong places and ordered in the wrong places, - but they are ashamed and pretend. And what they pretend to think specifically and what they try to follow is communicated to them via ads, via movies, via corporate bullshit. Because they have nothing else to turn to.

It’s a bit similar to the way some autistic people do imitation - they too imitate ads and movies more than people around them (well, maybe also imitate people they are romantically attracted to, or those they consider cool).

Or to the way state propaganda works in atomized societies - people don’t have good horizontal ties, but pretend to have them, while taking the material from what they hear on TV.

20 years ago would you use something like an Android phone with no buttons or would you crush it with a hammer? Would you use something like Windows 10 or would you ignore that crap? Would you buy a car that spies after you?

1. You’d open one only when you wanted it.

2. A database with various characteristics being the main component and the advertising text not being that is better, yes.

No, advertising is not necessary when a user can search a catalogue with multiple optional constraints, as we did in the olden days of printed catalogues.

Advertising is harmful - it’s somebody trying to persuade you that you need to buy a thing. First, you’ll usually know when you need something. Second, the salesman is not someone you’d believe normally.

It’s an interaction which normally should be initiated by you, not by sellers. Which makes advertising utterly useless immediately.

In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.

Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).

That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.

Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.

It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.

That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.

People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.

It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.

You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?

I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.

Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.

I regularly think and post conspiracy theory thoughts about why the “AI” is such a hype. And in line with them a certain kind of people seem to think that reality doesn’t matter, because those who control the present control the past and the future. That is, they think that controlling the discourse can replace controlling the reality. The issue with that is that whether a bomb is set, whether a boat is sea-worthy, whether a bridge will fall is not defined by discourse.

I’ve written something vague in another place in this thread which seemed a good enough argument. But I didn’t expect that someone is going to link a literal scientific publication in the same very direction. Thank you, sometimes arguing in the Web is not a waste of time.

EDIT: Have finished reading it. Started thinking it was the same argument, in the middle got confused, in the end realized that yes, it’s the same argument, but explained well by a smarter person. A very cool article, and fully understandable for a random Lemming at that.

It’s not about stages. It’s about the Achilles and tortoise problem.

There’s extrapolation inside the same level of abstraction as the data given and there’s extrapolation of new levels of abstraction.

But frankly far smarter people than me are working on all that. Maybe they’ll deliver.