Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Welcome to my Saturday #linkdump, the third in an occasional series that may or may not be restricted to Saturdays, but which will ever be a celebration of olde-timey #linkblogging of the sort practiced by our blogfathers, blogmothers, and assorted other blogparents:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

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linkdump – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Any fule kno that Saturday is #Caturday, and today's woke felinism comes from Dr #EleanorJanega, the earthiest of all the Medivelist Bloggers, author of the superb *Once and Future Sex*, all about dirty dirty medieval people and their filthy filthy habits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/17/ren-faire/#going-medieval

One of Janega's winningest formulas is "Find a dopey thing about medieval people racing around social media and then set the ignorant straight in a world-beating, *extremely* well-informed rant."

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Pluralistic: Eleanor Janega’s “Once and Future Sex” (17 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

See, for example, "I assure you, medieval people bathed":

https://going-medieval.com/2019/08/02/i-assure-you-medieval-people-bathed/

This week, Janega addresses herself to the burning question, "Did 14th C religious leaders label cats evil, precipitating a mass European cull of poor moggies?"

The answer, you will not be surprised to learn, is: "No."

https://going-medieval.com/2023/05/16/on-cats/

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I assure you, medieval people bathed.

I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath a…

Going Medieval

Rather, medieval people - including those in the 14th century - just *adored* cats. That goes double for the religious leaders, as is evidenced by all the cats monks drew in the margins of religious manuscripts. Janega also reproduces painstakingly inked manuscripts crisscrossed by pawprints left by a cat that did the medieval version of walking back and forth over your keyboard while you're trying to enter your password.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

There's also a manuscript with a large blotch that is labeled by a monk who identifies it as a piss-stain left behind by a cat (presumably a cat that wanted to go out and was tired of the monk not taking the walking-back-and-forth-over-the-manuscript hint).

In case there's any doubt about how monks felt about cats, there's a freaking *adorable* manuscript margin-doodle of cat in a little monk's outfit.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

There's doodles of cats with nuns, illustrations of cats hanging out with 14th century monks, and of course, drawings of working cats keeping down the rats in the barns and kitchens of the day.

As if that wasn't enough, Janega closes with this banger: 14th century didn't kill all their cats in a witch panic, because "*witch panics are not a feature of medieval society.*"

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

> Indeed, medieval people didn’t really believe in the concept at all. Even in the fifteenth century when the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, a witch-hunting guide was written it had to justify its very existence because no one believed that ol’ Heinrich Kramer was right about witches existing.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

> When people think that the Middle Ages is a place full of superstitious backwards religious fanatics it allows them to think they can just ignore over 1000 years of history because all you are gonna see is disease and cat murder. This then allows stupid ideas like this to perpetuate and exacerbates the problem further. Suddenly the only people paying attention to medieval history are weirdo trad people who can bend the truth to suit their own aims, and baby, we can't have that.
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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Happy caturday all, and especially to Dr Janega, may her quill never blunt.

Caturday - even a caturday about people being Very Wrong About Cats - is a reminder that the internet is often great, and not a cesspit of awful. Here is one way in which that is true: #MohitBhoite builds tiny, perfect electronic sculptures that are both gorgeous little artworks and supremely functional exemplars of the hardware hacker's noble art:

https://www.bhoite.com/sculptures/

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Sculptures – MOHIT BHOITE

Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Oh. My. God. These are so great. The tiny temperature monitor with the 7-seg digital display:

https://www.bhoite.com/sculptures/tiny-temp-monitor/

This stunning 7-seg counter:

https://www.bhoite.com/sculptures/seven-segment-counter/

This 555 Demux, with its delicate tracery of chassis and pins:

https://www.bhoite.com/sculptures/555-bcd-demux/

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Tiny Temp Monitor – MOHIT BHOITE

Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Each one a delightful morsel, made seemingly for the artist's own pleasure and self-expression. I'm slightly disappointed that these aren't for sale (because I want *all of them*), but even happier that these pure works of art, unsullied by commerce.

An important note about Bhoite's sculptures is that they're built on #OpenSourceHardware, notably kits from Adafruit, often based on #Arduinos and other open designs.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

This openness leads to "#generativity," the ability of follow-on creators and inventors to make new things based on existing things.

Generativity is the heart of the early explosive growth of the internet. From "#ViewSource" teaching millions of us to make the web to the #LAMP stack (#Linux, #Apache, #Mysql and #python/#perl) forming the substrate for billions of projects, the generative internet was - and is - the creative internet.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Despite a decade of energetic commons-enclosing, some of the staunchest bastions of openness and generativity continue to thrive, like #Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that isn't just #FreeAsInBeer, it's also #FreeAsInSpeech - free to mix and remix as you choose.

Here's a whole passel of delightful Wikipedia-generated search tools, the #SearchGizmos, a whole suite of special-purpose search tools that mine Wikipedia for informational goodies:

https://searchgizmos.com/

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- ResearchBuzz Search Gizmos

Using JavaScript to explore search questions through tools and experiments.

ResearchBuzz Search Gizmos

Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

They're the creation of @researchbuzz, and there are so many of them that's it's hard to choose just one to highlight, but I'm enormously fond of "#GossipMachine":

> A powerful tool that uses Wikipedia page views to surface potential “news days” in a given year for any topic with a Wikipedia page. By analyzing daily page views and flagging dates with significantly higher-than-average views, Gossip Machine provides you with pre-filled Google News and Google Web search links.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

One of the bitter ironies of companies like #OpenAI is the co-opting of generativity for "Generative AI," a set of products that could not be more unlike the generative projects of Bhoite or Calishain.

This kind of language game is a hallmark of every scam (not for nothing: Open AI isn't open, and its product is neither artificial nor is it intelligent).

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

As debates over "Generative AI" (which neither "generative," nor "artificial," etc, etc) rage, it's worth revisiting how earlier debates about automation, creativity and appropriation played out.

This week in #ClotMagazine, #EstelaOliva interviews electronic music pioneers #JenniferWalshe and Jon "#Wobbly" Leidecker (#Negativland):

https://clotmag.com/interviews/jennifer-walshe-jon-leidecker-on-collaboration

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JENNIFER WALSHE & JON LEIDECKER, on collaboration

An interview with Jennifer Walshe & Jon Leidecker, who came together to respond to the main theme of transmediale 2023 questioning the paradoxes of scale

Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

The whole interview is great, but it really starts to smoke when Leidecker describes "#Morover" a Negativland project built on samples of billionaires' own fevered rants about AI:

> With Negativland, we sample those CEO quotes directly – with Jennifer, those quotes also wind up in her notebooks, which she uses live as a source – it turns out CEO & EA musings make for an excellent libretto.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

> Our deliverable is the ecosystem itself! Image diversity is more useful than photorealism! Sometimes the original sample is unbeatable, such as when Sam Altman’s voice falters when he says he feels terrible that AI is the reason his Rationalist friends have decided not to have kids. He thinks in the future, so many jobs will be lost to AI that our economy will be forced to come up with new solutions.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Later, Leidecker digs into the meat of the debate:

> Electronic music has been dealing with issues of generative music and cybernetics since the 1940s, with Louis and Bebe Barron working out the creative potential of these new tools, making self-playing instruments capable of observing their own behaviour. I take the core questions faced by creative electronic musicians to involve issues of automation. What can be automated that points one in unheard musical directions?

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

> Can networks involve more people, as opposed to replacing them? What new roles open up for humans once the old decisions are being handled? Electronic music has 70+ years’ worth of deeply moral, very creative responses to the issue of automation, and these patent-chasing corporations aren’t likely to bring up any of that work during their demos. They need you to believe they invented this. But there’s a long and helpful history, and there’s still time to learn it.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

These are the interesting discussions we could be having about these tools, if we could stop letting mediocre billionaire live rent-free in our heads as they hold flashlights under their chins and intone "Aaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeeee" in their spookiest voices. These guys are pumping their upcoming dump, and all the biggest disaster-stories are part of the scam.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

"AI will become sentient" and "AI will do your job as well as you" are both statements whose primary purpose is to increase the value of the stock in companies making "AI" technology (neither "artificial" nor you get the idea).

I mean, sure, our bosses will fire our asses and replace us with shell-scripts, but they don't need *working* AI to do that - no more than they needed working voice response systems to replace human operators.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

They just enshittify their products and services, and do it under cover of chasing amazing new technology, and reap the stock gains bequeathed by keyword-drunk investors.

But the endless repetition of this vision of Fully Automated Austerity Pronatalist Space Neofeudalism gives people absolute *brain-worms*. The entire passive-income/rise-and-grind subculture has been convinced that they can use AI (neither etc etc) to make a fortune by...uh...generating plausible paragraphs.

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Cory Doctorow May 20, 2023

Only problem: there's no market for plausible paragraphs. The closest anyone comes is the tiny, low-dollar market for short science fiction and fantasy, which is pretty much the last bastion of paid short fiction markets. Now, these are amazing publications, and they do wonderful work, but they pay $0.01 to $0.25/word, and - more importantly - are edited by humans who sift through 1,000+ manuscripts per month looking for *brilliant* work to publish.

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Jigen May 20, 2023

@pluralistic It's also a means of controlling people. Like the 'we'll just build a robot McDonalds' BS.

Jani Poikela May 20, 2023

@pluralistic in my experience, P in LAMP was mainly referring to PHP.. many early internet services were written in PHP [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP] which has an interesting history (see that wiki page).

PHP - Wikipedia

LisPi May 21, 2023

@poppis @pluralistic There was some Perl too, but mostly PHP.