theluddite

Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.

It's not a solution, but as a mitigation, I'm trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here's the thesis statement from my write-up:

I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn't be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.

As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it's easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.

Software has more than its fair share of acronyms, which we often choose to say phonetically, like SQL gets said "sequel." We also have the TTY, and you often have to detach things from it. Depending on the context, best to spell that one out, or just substitute "terminal," but I've definitely been in meetings where someone said something about a process that needs to be detached from the titty.

I remember when I realized that the lawyers had taken over cybersecurity. It was 2018. I was in a meeting, looked around, and realized that I was the only person in the room who codes or has ever coded, and also the only person without formal certifications in security. 5 years earlier, security teams were full of people from all walks of life, who often got into security from (let's call it) "practical" experience.

Aww thanks so much friend 💖 I'm so glad to hear that!!

Yup!

Going to give a wide range of answers based on topic, so you can pick up what interests you. Happy to give more if none of these appeal to you.

If you work in tech, Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom. It's very short, accessible, and full of so many big ideas about what computers are for that it exposes the tech industry's absolute fucking poverty of vision.

If you're interested in deep dives on more technical topics, David Graeber's Debt. It's a fucking tome, but it's also amazing. So much of what we take for granted in our world is completely arbitrary and made up, but no less powerful, and there's nothing quite as arbitrary and powerful as the concept of debt.

If reading a cinder block based on an internet stranger's recommendation is too much for you, maybe try Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, or his The Utopia of Rules instead, depending on which topic interests you more. Graeber is a great place to start because he's accessible but also his mind isn't limited by the confines of capitalist realism in a very special way. He was truly one of our best.

If you want something that's extremely light and fiction, I recommend William Morris's News from Nowhere. It's extremely cringe in a way that only 100-year-old socialist utopian fiction could be. It's excessively sincere, even naive, in a way that rings hollow to our cynical modern selves, but it's such a short read, and it's so adorable. I like the way that he challenges the concept of work. I think that the modern left should revive that line of criticism. I also enjoyed that you can see early versions of things that we associate with more modern movements in his utopian vision, especially degrowth and reforestation/environmentalism, not just for "the environment," but with nature as a part of and inseparable from the human experience.

Finally, if you like philosophy, and you want in depth analyses of capitalism, and don't mind something that's maybe less accessible, I recommend Adorno and Horkheimer's essay The Culture Industry. It was written in the 1940s, and it reads prescient today. They saw the rise of capitalist mass media as more than just a threat to independent thought, but a pacifying, homogenizing, almost all-consuming force. If you want something longer than The Culture Industry, and probably slightly less accessible, I recommend their Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. He basically argues that capitalism, and more specifically what he calls "technical rationality," has conquered our culture and our very ability to reason, at scales big and small.

You can tell that technology is advancing rapidly because now you can type short-form text on the internet and everybody can read it. Truly innovative stuff.

The Nordic countries are also on Earth, which we are destroying. Some of their wealth comes directly from that destruction. Norway is the 5th and 3rd largest oil and natural gas exporter, respectively, making their happiness the result of good social policy that makes up for capitalist inequality which is directly funded by destroying the Earth and fueling capitalism elsewhere.

Even setting the climate aside (a ridiculous thing to do, really), the Nordic model isn't possible to sustainably replicate elsewhere on Earth on capitalism's own term, because we can't make every country a net exporter of the most desired commodities for obvious reasons, or the beneficiary of complex historical circumstances, like neutrality during ww2 (Sweden), or a long-time colonial power (Denmark).

Put another way, there is no Nordic model available for Bangladesh, whose workers work six days a week in factories to make the cheap clothing that happy Norwegians wear. Norways needs Bangladeshes to keep their standard of living.

In a previous job, I spent a good amount of time in a Bangladeshi garment factory. That specific factory in which I worked had been on strike a few years prior, requesting a raise to dozens of dollars per month. That's not a typo -- per month!. The police fired into their picket line, killing and wounding hundreds. This fall, Bangladeshi garment workers went on strike again, demanding a tripling of the minimum wage from its current ~75USD per month.

The urban poverty that makes my life possible, so far away, out of sight and out of mind, is an absolute fucking disgrace. We should talk about it daily. When they go on strike, as those garment workers are now, every single westerner ought to strike in solidarity, even if motivated by nothing but shame. Instead, we don't even know that it's happening, at least in the anglosphere.

I've since become convinced that there''s only one path to a just and verdant world -- international solidarity. Communists and anarchists have filled libraries with ideas for what that might look like. I've read some tiny sliver of that corpus. If you actually want to know why some of us want capitalism defeated (beyond the anecdote that I just relayed), or if you're curious how much better some of us think the world could be, I'd be happy to point you towards books that spoke to me.

This is a problem for the whole internet. I've made a long version of my argument here, but tl;dr as companies clutter the internet with cheaper and cheaper mass produced content, the valuable places will also get ruined. There's an analogy to our physical world: Because we build cheap and ugly cities that roughly look the same, the few places that are beautiful and unique are also ruined, because they're just too valuable; everyone wants to go there. I think that we're already seeing beginning, with pre-existing companies like Reddit that have high quality human-generated content walling themselves off more and more as that content becomes more valuable.

Yeah that's a great point! Taxis also drive different kinds of miles than typical human drivers, who probably normally drive at rush hour when it's more dangerous whereas I'd expect taxis to have disproportionately more miles during safer times.

If those same miles had been driven by typical human drivers in the same cities, we would have expected around 13 injury crashes.

I'm going to set aside my distrust at self reported safety statistics from tech companies for a sec to say two things:

First, I don't think that's the right comparison. You need to compare them to taxis.

Second, we need to know how often waymos employees intervene. From the NYT, cruise employed 1.5 staff-members per car, intervening to assist these not-so-self driving vehicles every 2.5 to 5 miles, making them actually less autonomous than regular cars.

Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7kw.o5Fq.5WLwCg2_ONB9&smid=url-share