Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing.

  Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.

  If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.

  That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.

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  • maho@lemmy.funami.tech ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think your point of view would be more relatable before AI happened. I don’t see how it addresses AI problem anyhow. “Societal progress” isn’t something that has self-worth. I see that as a tool of improving QoL, but if it’s not only stopped improving QoL but actually started making it worse, than it’s not something to pursue, and actually something to actively sabotage.

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    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.

      LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion about mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days.

      yawn

      longish response, no pressure to read

      What scares me is the massive energy use of AI, it also doesn’t make money. If some AI scrapes all my stuff on the fediverse, ok that sucks but honestly that LLM they train off my posts is going to constantly complaining about corporations, AI bullshit hype and centralization of corporate power… yeah you can sanitize the data, they can profile me… yeah I know. I feel like that is already a threat enough and there is a tsunami like power that comes from reaching a public consensus through discussing things in public forums and putting our beliefs out there as a form of vulnerability. The more of us that do this, the more that people who disagree or agree can learn, the more we can establish conensus of shared values, the more we can build trust. The metaphor for our current late stage capitalist society on the afterburners of surveillance capitalism/mass dragnet surveillane and censorhsip is clearly the panopitcon en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon Image If you suspect you are in a panopticon, or in an environment that is threatening to collapse into an authoritarian panopticon type situation, than the best defense, because lets be honest if you are in this position you don’t have much power realistically do you? is to publically have conversations, share opinions, discuss honestly with people in a way that floods whatever commons that are left, whatever equivalent of yelling chants out of the prison bars to other prisoners… however you want to map the metaphor here… That is how we defend ourselves. The relevant question is whether you are in a situation where you can safely do that, if you can’t than take care of yourself, hide. Adopt good digital hygeine and help others out in an unjudgemental way how to do so themselves. If you feel at all that you can safely speak out, or honestly, if you feel like realistically you don’t have much to lose (because at the end of the day that is the position we are all existentially in, it is just a matter of who will suffer first and thus who has the right to want to delay that suffering the most) then the best defense here is to make as much as you can public through art, through any kind of discussion, because no matter how sophisticated and supercharged the methods of the oppressors are and no matter how overbearing false-consensuses become… …they still can’t ever really win in a moment to moment interaction with any half decent artist, any half decent person who knows their worth, any person willing to be vulnerable and say it how it is, and indeed really anyone that is willing to extend solidarity to strangers not because of some emotional need or ideological sense of superiority, but because it is something they try to do out of principle (and of course are imperfect at it). The nice thing is, we are talking about snowball effects here. One of the best drugs in life is doing a small good thing that ripples into a slightly bigger good thing all by itself, that takes a little life of its own. I don’t claim to be any kind of altruist, or someone who constantly does selfless acts but that isn’t the point. Most people feel a basic pleasure when it is easy to help, to help so long as it is simple and direct how to do so. Some don’t, so what.

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      • maho@lemmy.funami.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        While I agree with many of these takes, I believe there is more to this. For example, your point about defense from falling into panopticon by speaking publicly about things doesn’t actually require publicly speaking about anything other than politics. I mean, you can still hide all professional, creative or fun talk and still have the benefits you listed covered by only ever publicly talking about political issues. Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.

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