Building work. gig, and tech enshitification - September 2023
The building-work is basically done and I saw a nice gig. Meanwhile the internet continued to enshitify, and the UK sank further into being a hilarious farce of a country.
Me
Personal
Oh man, I thought the new extractor-fan they fitted was going to be annoying because it basically never turned off.
Turns out that was just a high-humidity situation.
Also turns out that if the humidity is more or less exactly 70%, it keeps flipping on and off.
Each time with the Whir of the vent-gate closing/opening.
At random times, all day and all night.
Whir. whir. Whir. Whir.
Oh well. I thought maybe it was broken and just stuck on.
At least it’s not broken. Yet…. 🔨 👀
Still they have finally taken the scaffold down!
Hurray.
Now I will have light again, just in time for the clocks to change and to have no light again.
My company accounts were due. The company has made minus four thousand pounds in the last year.
Though it has some product stock of undermined value to show for it.
There is no tax to pay.
I also went to see the Blue Aeroplanes at the electric ballroom.
The amount of noise that four guitars and a sax can make is immense, and when they’re all coherent with some suited dude wearing sunglasses talking over it, it can sound pretty amazing.
They have a dancer who has been with the band since the start. It seems cruel to keep this man in his 60s at least, maybe 70s, sweating and jumping up and down, but maybe it’d be more cruel to stop him.
Corporate Enshitification
“Data is the new oil” is a thing people used to say.
You might think that means that it’s toxic for human well-being, dangerous to hold in any quantity, and absolutely disastrous when there’s a leak.
And you’d be right.
But the people saying it don’t generally think that, they think of it as meaning data is valuable like money.
A terrible mistake, which leads people and companies to hoard the data instead of trying to quickly and safely dispose of it to avoid responsibility for it like they really would if they understood the metaphor.
And thus there are leaks and toxic data spilling all the way through the network.
There are three main ways tech and the internet got worse this month:
Law
the Internet Safety Bill passed, and on the BBC they were saying things like “It’s a step forwards” and “We have to make young people safe” and “The internet is an addiction” and “children need to be protected by this bill” and “this bill will make the online world safer”
They have found space for nobody saying anything bad about this bill at all.
What a load of blatant crazy people talking crazy stuff.
The bill is a terrible awful law which will do nothing to protect anyone while being onerous on service providers. It it unenforceable, poorly defined, will drive internet business outside the UK where we have less control of it, and will expose people to more dangers online.
If you use the internet from the UK you better be prepared to be more spied upon by business and stalked by the state than ever before. Maybe get your ID out every time you wanna leave Facebook.
If you run an internet business in the UK you better be prepared to move abroad. Though not to the US or the EU, they have similar terrible awful plans.
But you would not get that impression watching the BBC at all.
Corporate Ownership - Bandcamp
After having owned it for only around a year, and with it on the brink of recognising a union, Epic Games sold their company “BandCamp” instead of dealing with organized labour.
Bandcamp is a group enterprise which is constructed out of the work of around 60 people or so.
None of those employees actually *own* the enterprise though, the enterprise’s ownership is abstracted away from membership of the group of people that make Bandcamp work.
Which means the owners, without consulting with the members of the group, can sell the group to other owners.
And that is indeed what has happened.
The new owners of the group are likely to insist that the members of the group enshitify their service and impoverish themselves and their customers.
This is capitalism: The abstraction of the ownership and control of a group enterprise to make it separate from membership of the group itself.
The boss’s bosses ain’t in the group, and they don’t care about the mission or the music or the bands.
They only care about return on investment.
The only way to prevent capital from selling out your group enterprise is to never let capital own the group enterprise in the first place.
Try to work for co-ops, and if you are a worker or musician using Bandcamp, maybe just quit and start something that isn’t owned by money.
Corporate Ownership - Unity3D
A few months ago the game-making software “Unity3D” was bought by an advertising network.
This month the new combined company announced changes to enshitify their business: Their users, game-making studios, will have to pay the advertising company even if they give their games away for free. (unless you distribute the spy-ware advertising system too. Maybe.)
I use Unity.
A few months ago when it was bought I checked out a Free Software competitor called Godot, and it didn’t seem ready for my needs really.
But upon this further news, I checked it out again now that Version 4 is out, and someone told me about Monado - an open-source VR system.
And it turns out that in fact using Godot and Monado can be done in Linux now better than it could be done even on windows with Unity/SteamVR.
I am so much happier with the entire project now I know it can have a fully open entire-stack. And I might never have to boot into Windows again!
And the software I’m writing is better not only because anything is better 2nd time around, but also because Godot actually is better in some ways that requires now fewer horrible hacks and workarounds.
Boycott Capitalism is a thing we can actually do in the software world at least.
But the people who can’t just take a few months to rewrite everything in a new system will still have to deal with their own tech stack getting shitter to drain them of money.
Politics
Misogynistic Media
The country’s fall into a right-wing parody was propelled forward by Tory Conference.
In the run up to that, an illustrative story : TV Misogynists chat on TV about how some female journalist is so awful they wouldn’t even wanna screw her.
Which at least causes a bit of a fuss.
Enough so that another TV show invites on a lefty journalist woman to debate some right wing dude on whether there’s really a patriarchy and if misogyny exists.
The dude lets it slip that they’re paying him to do so, which takes a few seconds to sink in.
You can see the outrage on her face as it dawns on her that he’s getting paid and she isn’t.
To talk about whether there’s really any culture of misogyny.
Watch Novara talk about that in their video.
Rishi bravely cancels made up woke policy
Gosh, Rishi is so brave! Look at him making the difficult decisions. He’s so committed to doing the right thing regardless of how it looks!
See how he bravely capitulates to every demand of the oil and gas industry.
See how he’s bravely doing the right thing by stoking the culture war and promising never to do woke things that neither the government nor opposition was ever going to do anyway.
See how he’s bravely doing the right thing, by valiantly chasing the votes of climate-change-deniers and other angry gammon.
Look, as he bravely throws the actual planet under the bus to try and defend the power of the party of capital.
How brave he is.
Seven-bins Sunnak loves speed and cars. He likes the noise that children’s bones make as they break under the wheels, and the gasping coughing sound of them trying to breathe through poisoned air.
Sunack’s speech summary: For the last 30 years all the governments that I’ve been in were rubbish, we need change!
The old opposition was a monster! Grr! Scary!
He wanted change! And the new leader is probably the same.
They are too much change!
Vote for the incumbent to get the exact proper amount change you need!
Tory Health System Logic
Oh no, closing all the hospitals and cutting the doctors staffing means there’s hundreds of thousands of people off work awaiting treatment.
I know how to fix it: We’ll cut unemployment befits and starve the sick workers back to work! That’ll learn ’em.
HS2
The uk used to be able to achieve things like world domination and now they can’t even build a railway track.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
I did a reading to find out why the UK pays 10 times more per mile to build a railway than anyone else.
I find that collusion and foolish government ideology lead to a confluence of opportunity in which rapacious capitalist villains can scam and skim profit from subcontracting ten layers deep.
more ranting details in the five minute show
Reading
Read a couple of books by Annalee Newitz, some sci-fi novels.
The Terraformers
“The Terraformers” is about the fight for community and solidarity over corporatism during the construction of whole private planets.
Many animals are engineered to talk, but the corporation makes them with limiters to stop them getting too smart.
Should they be part of the community and get solidarity too?
What’s it like to be a talking moose that can only use one syllable words?
It was good and engaging and thoughtful stuff.
Train-people and cat-people can fall in love it seems.
“Autonomous” is about a copyright pirate liberating drugs from their corporate restrictions and giving them to all the people, and fixing it when it goes wrong.
It has robots with human brains that aren’t that person, and sex with military battle-robots, and themes on freedom of will.
It was also good mind-bending scifi.
The books describe love between exotic consciousnesses, portrayed sympathetically.
Watching
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2
I watched season two of Strange New Worlds.
It’s beautifully shot, nice stories with themes appropriately woke.
The remade Gorn are cool and scary.
I expected to like the musical one since the Buffy musical episode was possibly the best hour of TV ever made, but the songs were boring operatic dirges and the plot pointless and the dancing all yawn.
Worst episode of the season.
Only song with anything to it was Chapel’s one.
The other gimmick one with the carton Lower Decks crossover was brilliant. Boimler looked like a cartoon character even in real life and the two Lower Decks characters bounced off each other brilliantly.
Nurse Chapel in general the whole series is incredible.
That white hair, that suit, those black eyebrows against the pale round face. She’s badass and caring and brilliant and the most striking and attractive Trek woman of them all.
Fitting that Spock should decide to cut out all emotion after she leaves him. Probably the logical thing to do.
The ship looks so polished and yet so 60s.
Nicely done all round. Most top telly of the year.
Links
What’s going on on the internet?
AI
AI/Neural-Network paper on how networks can learn: “memorising circuits become more inefficient with larger training datasets while generalising circuits do not, suggesting there is a critical dataset size at which memorisation and generalisation are equally efficient.”
Pretty nice and very well illustrated description in the ft of how AI systems use Transformers and training to produce large language models like chat gpt. Great visualisations.
AI Skymap generator.
Seems like it could be useful for VR backdrops, but I’d have to check the T&Cs and copyright issues.
Well that’s creepy and weird: Lex interviews Zuck as both avatars in virtual space.
Climate & Media
Media Lens: “One hundred thousand deaths per year from terror attacks would not merely generate occasional reports on the latest disaster; journalists and politicians would be screaming ‘WORLD WAR THREE!’ from every screen, newspaper and magazine, 24/7, without a pause. It would be massive news on the scale of 9/11 and WW2. This is obvious and indisputable. - Is this what we’re getting on climate change? Absolutely not.”
Media-lens also reported on the complete none-reporting of other past wars: “A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power….”
Climate doom from The Nation: “each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland’s case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.”
Internet Enshitification
Cory Doctorow at DEF CON talking about why the internet is all shitty now, but he actually has a plan on what we can do about it.
cartoons
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XKCD on the spirit of Halloween. 😆 Sometimes Randal still got it.
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Cyriak has animated a goose Very strange, weird.
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
Oh, you’re staying on Facebook and Twitter? Cool!… Have fun staying surveilled!
And good luck against the adversarial advertising models that they are training against you, based on your every interactions!
I’m sure that will be a very profitable interaction… For them. Nice…
But. Did you know about the railroad?
The underground railroad that leads out of there?
It’s like a portal to freedom!?
No? Not ready?
Oh well. When you *are* ready, we’ll be here. On the free-web. Away from the corporations.
Just denying the capital ownership of our commons.
Our data is ours! It is not yours to sell. It was never yours to sell.
Here’s some stuff on the network this month:
Moderation Stories
Dan has a fun story about when he put a friends-list into his game and chaos ensued until he took it out.
“Of course we didn’t think too much about this, we were just adding social features because everybody else was doing it and making loads of money in the process, so we spent like three weeks writing a really nice Friends List feature and stuck it online and then took it offline again not even 12 hours later.For a brief, glowing moment, Improbable Island had all the social weirdness of facebook, without the context in which one might be accustomed to facebook’s various weirdnesses; the nebulous “Is this person my friend?” question wasn’t allowed to have its answer evolve gradually and normally over time, it became a binary, yes or no, are you my friend or aren’t you, you must answer right now and if I think you’re my friend and you don’t then what happens to us then, and what even is a friend in this context anyway
Fediverse Expands
“Mastodon 4.2 is rolling out across the social web! On our quest to make Mastodon more delightful and easy to use, we’ve overhauled search, sign-ups, cross-server interactions and a whole lot more: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/
Wordpress activates it’s Activitypub gateway!
“We just released version 1.0.0 of the #WordPress #ActivityPub plugin! 🎉This is the first release under the umbrella of #Automattic!Thanks to Automattic and all the fantastic people who helped with this great release!@mattwiebe for the amazing new blocks!@mediaformat for the http-signatures@jeremy for several Jetpack compatibilities@nuriapenya for the design of the settings and blocks@donnacavalier for all the texts and documentation@alex for a lot of big and small contributions
Open Data At Supermarkets
BadLogic tells about the software they developed using open data to compare supermarket prices and prove they collude and lie, and how the government picked it up.
Online Safety
Neil is a lawyer and he is sad the online safety bill passed: “If you provide online services to people in the UK, which let them interact with each other, especially if you have a link to the UK yourself, I guess you might want to either:a) prepare to attempt to block access by people in the UK; orb) settle in for a sizeable legal advice bill.”
Culture
“…What’s replaced subculture is microculture driven by Internet communities. And big media companies never acknowledge microculture. They’re too tiny and small—too risky to invest in…”
Ryan visits the tech release show so you don’t have to: “with Updates from the Virtual Event Livestream”
Chrome Vs Firefox
“Chrome: We’re automatically opting you in to a new feature that sends your home address to advertisers but puts little asterisks over parts of it, and we’re calling it Ultimate Privacy Protection”
“Firefox: We’re encrypting every step of the DNS and HTTP connection process so nobody on the planet can know what you’re doing online, because fuck anyone who would want to know”
“These two are not the same and should not be regarded as equals”