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A new era begins! It’s time for the longer-form Improv course!

Oh, also there was a new president, and so the oligarch internetdecided hate-speech is cool again.

Me

Improv Restarts

I’m enjoying the new round of sessions at the improv group. Finally concentrating on more long-form activities.

Getting to make up some actual stories rather than just snippets and scenes and parlor games.

I find playing with and inventing narrative structure more interesting engaging and memorable than the short-form stuff. More room for story flow and slow build than the previous sessions.

Nice to have some of the folks from the previous sessions and the new players seem good and fun too.

I’m not really at my best at the moment for health reasons, but you barely notice that in the group situation anyway. Everyone supporting each other with the whole being more than the sum of it’s parts.

Off she went with a Trumpy Trump, Trump Trump Trump

A new president comes in swinging the chaos hammer hard.

Memecoin

The weekend before, some people were worried that Trump’s twitter had been hacked to announce a fake Trump crypto shitcoin scam!

But it turns out it’s a genuine Trump crypto shitcoin scam.

The crucial difference being which scammer gets the scam proceeds.

His meme-coin pumped up 10,000% and then dropped 70%in a classic pump-and-dump form. No signs of it beinglikely to ever come back.

TikTok

He rescued Tiktok! Saying he would like “the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture… Keep it in good hands… Without US approval there is no TikTok. With our approval, it’s worth hundreds of billions”

It’s exactly a kleptocract mafia protection racket.

Nice app you got there. Be a shame if we banned it. We might not ban it if we have 50%. Just half.

Hoped Bytedance tells him to go fuck himself, but they didn’t. Thanked him for the rescue instead.Now they’re saying the new US Sovereign Fundcould buy half. Literally owned by the government.

Pardon?

The Democrats were all pardoned by Biden, then Republicans all pardoned by Trump. Everyone gets a pardon!It’s a complete crime reset! A crime jubilee!

Well, except for the whistleblowers, obviously.

Nobody will pardon Snowden or Assange because in the corporate kleptocratic government the only real crime is reporting the crimes.

Elon

His minion Musk took a wrecking ball to government, suggesting a block-chain!?

I tell you what will really drive US government efficiency: A really slow redundant inefficient database!

I tell you what will really protect important government data: making it all public on a really slow redundant database!

What?

How do you even?

I can see a case for making government finance public, or for having a sign-off for every transaction, but there’s no reason at all to do that with any kind ofblockchain.

Madness from the so-called government-efficiency department.

Now they’ve broken into all the government finances database and cut off funding tomore or less everything. Some calling it a Coup!

Tariffs

He chaotically announced and then paused tariffson his neighbouring companies. The Maga crowd cheering him on and insisting that they make America strong and will force their opponents to capitulate sound exactly like the Brexiters did five years ago.

They are certain that their country imposing sanctions upon itself can only hurt the foreign countries and could in no way ever make their own country smaller, poorer, and it’s people more impoverished.

How could that be? After all punching yourself in the face is a show of strength! We are strong! 👊

They fantasize about Canada capitulating (to do what?) in the same way as the Brexiters fantasized about the German Car Industry forcing the EU to capitulate.

These things come in trends, tit for tat, soon all the countries will be punching themselves in the face to show strength. Then they’ll start punching each other.

Britain once again leading the world!

This time at autoimmolation.

Hatebook

With the new president, Mark Zuckerberg makes an announcement.

I was watching a news show and then suddenly, ugh, Zuck on the screen 🤢

He’s going on about how he’s not going to even try to moderate for truth any more and is going to move to Texas to be more like Twitter. 🤮

They have to stop trying to remove disinformation because all the AI spambots they intend to flood their network with have no concept of truth ofmeaning at all 😆 The bots will pretend to be black, or that they’re donating to charities, or have a family life, or whatever.

Just meaninglessness, everywhere, all the time.

That’s the future of corporate social.

So glad I’m out of that bollocks.

It was Frustrating listening to callers on JamesOBrien’s LBC show all saying how terrible Facebook and Twitter are and how they might all destroy the world. Then when asked “should we all leave then?” saying “oh, no, I still have accounts on all of them”

Or saying “Bluesky” thinking it’s somehow owned by the people instead of being owned by blockchain capital investment company.

🤷

Doomed.

One thing that’s interesting with Zuck and his ilk saying that you can say hate-speech on their platforms now, is that it’s not actually Zuck who decides what counts as hate-speech and what the punishment for doing hate-speech is.

National governments decide that.

Just coz Zuck won’t kick you off of Facebook for inciting violence against groups any more doesn’t make it legal.

So we can expect to see more people actually put in real jail for their posts now, instead of just being put in Facebook jail.

No doubt Zuck and his mate Elon will rail against governments, decrying that people are being jailed for tweets or imprisoned for Instagram images, and bemoaning the lack of freeze peach, but they will be railing fruitlessly.

Governments may be too afraid of the oligarchs to punish the oligarchs themselves, but they will not be afraid to put the users of the oligarch websites in jail for doing hate speech.

I like seeing all the “I deleted Facebook” posts though.

Some folks here seem to be all like “What took you so long?”, the prissy puritanical pricks.

I like it though. Seeing the reverse network effect gathering momentum. Every person that leaves is one less reason for others to stay.

Thanks for no longer holding your friends hostage! When those friends finally do leave, don’t ask them what took so long.

AI

In the AI world, “DeepSeek” from China was so goodthat when they released an app to allow you to talkto it the markets crashed!

Lots of folks spreading warnings: Oh, careful what you type into DeepSeek! It might be spying on you for the communist Chinese government.

But really, if someone is gonna be spying on me, would I rather it was:

  • the Chinese communist party who have essentially no affect or influence over my life at all and arebased half a world away or

  • western capitalist corporations who try to control everything I see and hear and push adverts in my face and bribe my government and affect my life in ways innumerable and uncountable?

⚖️

🤷

I mean I’d rather none of them were allowed or able to spy on me but if someone has to…

Meanwhile, the UK is going to “inject AI intoit’s veins”. Sadly, the UK’s veins are so atrophied from decades of mal-investment that main-lining AI into them will do nothing but shovel money into the bank accounts of shareholders of AI companies.

Free Our Feeds

A campaign called “Free Our Feeds” wants to raise millions of dollars to run a second instance on the Bluesky network.

But having a second massively centralized copy of the big index, that costs tens of millions of dollars to run, is not decentralization.Duh.It can’t be decentralized because it costs millions of dollars to run a node.#freeOurFeeds #bluesky #decentralization

Reeves Reset

Speaking of our government, this month saw yet another totally new reset of the Labour party,this time from Reeves, who is going for growth!

She delivered the speech from Siemens rather than to the commons, I guess because Business is the most important thing now?

She’s explained how she’ll make the economy grow.

She thinks thriving businesses create jobs for workers, rather than the workers creating wealth for the businesses.

So that’s a bad start.

Apparently as she wonders around the UK she finds our dying high streets optimistic! Because of AI and Deep Mind and Siemens.

All those other politicians before her have lacked courage and not prized growth, she thinks. 😕

So she wants:

  • Stability

Which means budget responsibility, fiscal rules, no taxing business, and thus no government spending.

There is No Alternative, apparently.

Growth though government spending to build state-owned infrastructure is unmentionable!

  • Reform to attract investment

Make it easier for business to borrow and trade and build. But NOT rejoining the common market of course, only a “reset”. 😆

It means improving our relationship with Trump instead. He’s all about free trade you see. 😖.

They’ll cut benefits to create jobs somehow??

And reduce immigration, because extra workers are notoriously bad for growth? 😖

Also let companies raid their pension funds more easily. 🤯

They’ll change the monopolies and mergers commission so it allows bigger more monopolistic business.

Planning reform, to streamline the process and reform environmental legislation to help business ride roughshod over local objections and build data-centers and nuclear power plants and airports and windfarms even if they’re environmentally unsound and bad for bats.

  • Get investment from abroad

Because the UK can’t print it’s own money to investwith I guess.

Expand investment schemes to bribe billionaires with lower taxes and more subsidies.

National wealth fund to give billions to companies to build private charging network, and a private metal refinery to build solar power panels.

Remove marine protections to allow building windfarms even if they kill the fishes.

Launch an “industrial strategy” to give money to billionaires so they will build AI data-centers and life-sciences labs and deliver a privately-ownedinfrastructure like a crossing at Dover owned by a private company.

New investment rule to allow counting government owned infrastructure as an asset (oh, a good one! 😃 )

Upgrade some railways especially in the north and so attract private business to build houses at the stations. (eh, okay, maybe some council-owned social housing too would be nice?)

Finally, she’s going to allow Heathrow to try and build a new runway, which definitely will not be a boondogle project that runs for years and costs billions because we don’t have the workers tobuild it, and ends up cancelled because it’s environmentally unconscionable.

–

So all in all, they are determined that they willseek private growth and billionaire investment in private enterprise and ignore almost all opportunity to grow government-owned infrastructure or enterprise.

Which means they will be nice to Billionaires and crack down on the sick people and the environment and state owned enterprise to achieve it.

Which also means they will fail, because in reality billionaires don’t cause growth, they are parasitic upon it. Growth comes from the workers, from a rich middle class proving the demand which the billionaires and businesses then exploit.

Not to mention that growth at the cost of the environment might end up dooming us all.

sigh

Releases

Wordcloud Tarot

Best Tarot show of the month was on the Hatebook announcement:

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will no longer fact-check. So I did a five minute tarot reading to investigate and find that Facebook was foundedwith the sole purpose to enrich it’s owners.

It’s engagement-tuned algorithms encouraged terror and despair, but this was balanced by a need to satisfy the moderating external forces ofgovernment and advertisers.

But with a new administration taking over, and fascism rising, the site will go back to it’s roots and to fill up anew with slander, deceit, conspiracy falsehoods and hate-speech.

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Watching

Watched “The Ark”, a SyFy show about a space-ship fleeing a doomed Earth, which is damaged by an accident killing half the crew as the rest come out of stasis in the opening scenes.

The science is, uh, not great. Worse than Trek even, just barely even making sense. It sure ain’t hard sci-fi.But its a fun space-opera. The story is pretty engaging and the characters are good archetypes.

Captain’s dead, everyone on-board seems to have a secret, and everyone’s fighting for control and to hide their past. Lots of betrayal and plotting and political manoeuvres.Watched the first two seasons. Seems like they are planning more but that’ll have to wait till after the summer presumably.

Links

Gary Stevenson is Back

His long holiday in Japan is overand Gary’s back to talk aboutinequality and campaign for fiscalequality.

In his first new youtube video, he doesn’t want to panic us, but says things which seem fairly panic-worthy anyway. When government interest payments are higher than economic growth plus inflation, debt spirals out of control.

And with recent interest rate rises (the rates market will pay for government debt) this is happening.

Two options he reckons: Emergency cuts, or emergency taxes.

He’s expecting emergency austerity and a continuing failure to tax the super rich.

He doesn’t mention what I think I’d be doing: Just mint new money and pay off the debt completely with it. Presumably that’d be even worse for some reason.

You can vote red, or vote blue, and you can have whichever bankrupt government you like, but a bankrupt government can’t do much. It turns politics into X-Factor. Listen. If your government has no resources it doesn’t matter who is in charge. We’ve given away the resources, the only way to get them back is taxation

The Oligarch Web

We can’t let Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos reshape our reality, and have to encourage every friend, relative, celebrity and institution to disconnect from them.

But 404Media ask, maybe we can take control instead of just logging off?

Zuckerberg, Musk, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were all in attendance at Trump’s inauguration Monday. There is now no major corporate-owned social media platform that is not aligned with Trump or beholden to him in some way, and nearly every American is on at least one of these platforms.

China Stole OpenAI Data?

Also from 404, on OpenAI complaining DeepSeek may have taken their data.

I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha.

It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.

Postcodes

Entertaing short video on postcodes from CGP Gray,You won’t believe what Ireland does.

more

————-That’s just the highlights this month,there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed

Around the Fediverse

As usual when the Oligarch-Controlled-Web does stupid anti-user things like explicitlyallowing hate-speech or banning people fordisliking the president, there’s a flurryof new users and activity in Fedi.

NodeBB federates

Node BB Federates!

Forum software NodeBB joins the fediverse!That’s a techcrunch article.

Pixelfed Kickstart

@pixelfed@pixelfed.social has a kickstarter:

Pixelfed is an app a bit like Instagram, but run asan open source project and distributed to be ownedby nobody/everybody. They gained a lot of new usersin a lot of instances this month with the Hatebookannouncement. They’re also raising money:

Our Kickstarter is live!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org has a long description of recent Fedi activities:

This is the most exciting week on the Fediverse since the beginning of November 2022. To be honest, not much happened in 2024.

…

The most shocking news: @Gargron is stepping down as CEO of Mastodon and transferring all trademarks and copyrights to the Mastodon nonprofit. That’s huge.

Pixelfed & Meta Drama

There’s been a rush to Pixelfed due to recent moderation changes at Meta. Meta got caught removing links to PixelFed on Instagram, sparking an uproar. This backlash even caused PixelFed to trend on BlueSky.

…

The final bombshell:

@dansup, the mind behind PixelFed, announced the website for loops.video will go live this week. I started using Loops today through TestFlight, and I’m blown away. It’s smooth, intuitive, and genuinely fun to use. Many were skeptical that a TikTok-like experience could work on an ActivityPub-enabled service, but I’m telling you: loops.video is amazing.

@lrhodes@merveilles.town gets away from toxicity:

Saw an interviewee talk about weighing the need to get off of a toxic social media platform against the importance of not abandoning it to the extreme right, and if that’s how you still think about social media, let me assure you: The best way you can counteract the societal effect of extremism on a platform that has stacked the deck in favor of extremists is to get the hell away from it.

Ad-Tech

@inthehands@hachyderm.io has a thread thinking about advertising:

A question:As Zeynep Tufekci remarked, we’ve built the machinery of an authoritarian dystopia to get more people to click on ads.

An astonishing percentage of our technology, our industry, our energy, our human inventiveness, our •lives• pour into this. Targeted advertising is now a dominant force in our world.

The question: Does this pay off for the advertisers?

Leaving aside all the social costs and the moral questions, did it •work•? Is advertising radically more effective than it used to be?

Defederating Facebook

@stux@mstdn.social reacts to the hatebook announcement:

He runs some of the largest masodon servers and says:

After close consideration we have come to the decision to block Threads.net instance wide on all related instances (mstdn.social, masto.ai, mastodon.coffee, pixey.org, gram.social)

The new Meta policy goes against much we stand for and we will not allow to let it spill over to the Fediverse

I just checked the numbers and it seems Threads is the biggest ’loser’ here

On all instances combined we lose just under 100 followers spread across all instances

Threads will lose over 13K total

@ianb@well.com remembers how FreeSpeech Meta is:

Mark Zuckerberg, free speech warrior, has so much form for suppressing the free speech of his employees. Here’s some free speech from 2020… https://gizmodo.com/free-speech-champion-mark-zuckerberg-announces-plan-to-1845097521

@Linux_Is_Best@misskey.de a Facebook employee says:

Anyone who goes through my post history, knows I work for Meta (Facebook). I am “Consumer Content Administrative Manager”. My primary duties include content appeals, account appeals, account reviews, and some peer review. It is no surprise that my job depends on people using Facebook.

Today, I am going to suggest, you not do so.

I can make that suggestion because we have a user base of billions, and I know most people would keep using Facebook even if the Devil ran the company.

People are strange.

But if you feel you can truly live without Facebook, do so. Internally, things are changing, and not for the better. You should especially consider leaving Meta if you are a minority, woman, LGBTQ+, trans, or identify as progressive, politically. If facts matter to you, and misinformation is something you do not want to be subject toward, you should especially consider leaving, Facebook. You have no privacy from Meta, while using Meta. None. I do not care if you # believe you disabled a “feature” or “opt out” of something. You only seem to have done so.

And even if you’re going to continue to use Meta, uninstall the app (all of them). We collect data on you, even when you’re not using the app.

Free Four Feeds

Bluesky has only one node in their wannabe"decentralized" network, and it costs millions ofdollars to run one. So how do you take it frombillionaires? Maybe raise the millions of dollarsand run one?

@pluralistic@mamot.fr has a long thread about the plan:

Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us wish we could leave them; and even those of us who’ve escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too….

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz has a criticism of that in a thread:

Technically speaking, it’s true to say that it’s not gravity that kills you when you fall. The sudden impact at the end does that.But, it’s equally true that if impact alone were the cause, jumping off a chair would kill you. The impact at the end of a long fall kills you only because gravity makes you accelerate as you fall. In other words, it’s both.

Coming back to Cory’s title, he’s quite right to say that VC funding of digital tech startups is not enough to cause enshittification, by itself.

In a society with strong labour movement, nuanced public regulations protecting our privacy and control over our data, and obliging interoperation between similar services (eg the EU’s DMA), VCs would be forced to invest differently. Aiming to make moderate returns from startups that compete to offer better services.

But it’s equally true that VC is essential to enshittification. If it wasn’t, then we’d expect to see enshittification of centralised services like Wikipedia, or Archive.org, even though they’re not-for-profit. After all, they’re just as hard to leave or replace as BlueSky.

We don’t see that. Therefore, centralisation, and the lack of labour, regulation and other constraints, are clearly not enough. Dying from a fall requires gravity, and enshittification requires VC.

@shellsharks@malici.ous.computer is critical of Cory’s reasoning:

His main argument is this –> yeah, Bluesky isn’t perfect, but it’s what’s fun and popular right now, and if we can billionaire-proof it, then we should, rather than getting people to adopt the existing, already proven, billionaire-proofed Fediverse ecosystem.

Okay, that’s fair I think. I have no objection to this on its face. The “Fediverse” has been around for a while and though it has never been more popular than it is now, it has struggled to really gain mainstream appeal.

…

He goes on to say that the answer is, as he puts it, “installing our own fire-exits in Bluesky”, or in other words, standing up a second Bluesky relay/infrastructure that “federates” or otherwise interoperates with the main Bluesky infrastructure

  • similar to how distinct Fediverse instances can communicate with each other.

…

Now here is where his argument starts to fall apart… First, “FreeOurFeeds” is asking for 30 million dollars to do this. Wow. That’s a lot, and doesn’t speak well to how easy it is to stand up and maintain a second instance of the entire bluesky infra.

Second, the FreeOurFeeds website speaks nothing of how they will keep that infra alive, i.e. pay for ongoing operating costs. Even the main Bluesky company doesn’t have a realistic monetization strategy, they are kept alive by VC money alone pretty much.

Finally, what Cory fails to address, and in my mind, the biggest issue with his whole argument is that having just ONE single other relay/instance of Bsky as a whole is not the robust “fire exit” he thinks it is. Let’s say FreeOurFeeds succeeds and they stand up a fully interoperable, yet fully isolated instance of Bluesky, and they manage to get a sizable portion of the existing Bluesky userbase to move over there. Like, 5 million of Blueskys ~30 mil or w/e.

Let’s say then that Bluesky sells out to Elon Musk or Bezos or whomever. This triggers another mass migration of 5 million, or 10 million or even everyone over to the FreeOurFeeds relay. (Though we all know that they’d be lucky to get half of regular people to figure out how to “Switch” relay providers).

Now they are RIGHT BACK to where they were to begin with. A single provider, just as vulnerable to hostile takeover or enshittification as the original Bluesky was.

….

Anarchy and Ownership

@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social has a great thread on ownership:

Bill Gates is very wealthy. Bill Gates owns nearly 250,000 acres of farmland in the US—the largest private owner of farmland in the country.

But what does it mean to say that Gates “has” that land? He doesn’t occupy that land himself. He doesn’t farm it or even guard it himself. It is not “in his possession” in any meaningful sense.

What Gates has is a claim to the land—he can use it or sell it as he pleases—and, more importantly, a claim to the labor or people who do use that land productively. They have to give him, the owner, a share of the value of whatever they produce on “his” land.

….

Craft

@flashingjanet@leds.social has made a great LED pillow:

Video demo of my new light up pillow

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