is a helluva drug

Dance Dance Soviet Revolution

To libertarians, yes.

It’s wild how we went from…

“Crypto is an energy hog and its main use case is a convulted pyramid scheme”

“Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”

…to…

“AI is an energy hog and its main use case is a convoluted labor exploitation scheme”

“Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”

Convincing the working class that tools the system creates are free of the system’s agenda may be an even greater achievement.

Conspiring to jack up rent prices is exploitative when people do it. Is it any different when the RealPage algorithm does it indirectly?

I don’t see any value in saying that human behavior is the problem but then specifically carving out an exception for the automated agents we create to amplify specific behaviors.

When RedBubble ganks art and sells it on t-shirts, how is that different from when Stability ganks art and sells it at a text prompt?

So why take the heat off of AI, as if profiting from mass plagiarism is different when it has an API instead of flesh and bone?

Right, but the technology has the system’s philosophy baked into it. All inventions encourage a certain way of seeing the world. It’s not a coincidence that agriculture yields land ownership, mass production yields wage labor, or in this case fuzzy plagiarism machines yield a transhuman death cult.

Considering most new technology these days is merely a distilation of the ethos of the big corporations, how do you distinguish?

That’s probably the least of your worries, tbh. It’d be like missing the bottom screen of a 3DS.

We probably wouldn’t name them until they had reached a certain age

Added some links to my original comment.

It’s not instead of central currency, but in addition to it.

The advantage is that businesses can transact with less conventional liquidity so they don’t have to rely on bank loans. This allows them to charge less to customers who use the local currency.

In the long term, this makes money [in general – both kinds] move slightly faster within the local market, which makes the money [both kinds] more valuable [within the community]. And since the money [again, both kinds] is staying in the local market, the community’s wealth is less likely to be drained by external speculators.

I think Rushkoff’s notion was that new local currencies would be in addition to central currency. It just allows businesses to give a discount to transactions that will keep the wealth inside the community.

It’s a neat idea, I just don’t know how you would protect it from financial services turning it into yet another abstract tradable asset that undermines the original purpose.

Doug Rushkoff had a talk where he called out local currency as a thing he’d like to bring back from the medieval.

Exclusive to the community, and only valid for a short period of time, so you can’t hoard it or siphon the wealth to another community.

Are they all naked?

Or maybe an abbreviated hash of the text of their specifications?

Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.

If Miyamoto is succeeded by someone with Gabe’s pro-consumer philosophy, Nintendo could dominate.

Sony and Microsoft are too busy doing the private equity playbook.

It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.

If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.

For some reason people in art believe they don’t have to compete like every other individual creating a business

If you think art is about selling a product, what’s the point of being alive?

I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can’t help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.

You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.

Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say “Well… it’s complicated.” And if it’s complicated – if it’s not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil – then it must not be genocide.