clarity flowerswhat about computing makes it worth saving
do telecommunications keep us closer or do they just make it easier for us to ignore the ground under our feet and the people next door. does a global network empower us or does it reify and entrench the cultural building blocks of empire. are we the counter culture or are we the pressure release valve for an ever-accelerating engine
these are genuine questions, not presuppositions
nobody has offered the real answer to this question, which is “gay porn” and I mean that sincerely as a political argument
Devine Lu Linvega@clarity arts, music, communication, games, maths, navigation, education
@neauoire most of these got along fine before computers imo, but communication/knowledge sharing really does feel like the truly novel thing here
@neauoire idk I think a lot about how computers were built to calculate missile trajectories and the internet was built as a collapse-resilient communication network with the long-term preservation of the nation-state in mind. I don’t have any conclusions or admonitions here, it just troubles me
@clarity it seems to go that way for a lot of things, especially with transport. I get to sail all day, but I realize that it wasn't originally intended for leisure, or even personal transport. It's good to be conscious of that, but I also do not know how to square with this history either. Are we squandering these immensely costly inventions? most definitely.
Sam Powers@clarity twee pixel shops
brennen@clarity for me the answer here is something like "on _net_, we should absolutely have refrained, but at this point there is no real option to unwind its existence while still having food and stuff".
@brennen yeah I guess framing it in grand terms occludes the fact that the real question is, maybe my time would be better spent learning to make clothes or maintain homes or break cycles of violence in my communities.
@clarity yeah, that makes sense. i can't do anything about the big picture but maybe there are better ways to spend the effort.
Dym Sohin@clarity
basically: speed of information, nothing else.
but that includes entirety of internet, and way too many people at this point depend on it for literally everything — informational globalization supports physical localization (proved viable since 2020).
basically: speed of information, nothing else.
but that includes entirety of internet, and way too many people at this point depend on it for literally everything — informational globalization supports physical localization (proved viable since 2020).
@dym what do you mean by physical localization?
@clarity it allowed people to move out of the city to keep working remotely, but also to stay home and have everything delivered to them (during pandemic and such)
@dym this fits into the broader pattern of “computing helps us avoid reevaluating our social infrastructure”. Personally I want to end meaningless wage labor, not keep it afloat.
@clarity i agree, entire model of forced "economic growth" through selling and buying, plus taxes — should never have gone so far, that payed politicians advocate for bringing slavery back just to keep it going.
but that was also happening before computers and cutting the cord will make also good movements like unionizing way harder
bob@clarity if you can make the device you want just using software you get the economies of scale of industrial production (by using generic mass produced PCs and phones) no matter how small or niche your product is. and you can go from no one using a thing to everyone in the world using it overnight without having to ask capital for permission
@bob I’m not convinced that this is a good thing
@clarity the arguments against are basically the same arguments against cheap books and pamphlets in the 19th century. and those arguments had some merits, you might not have had the french revolution or the revolutions of 1848 without them, and arguably that would have been for the better. but that position is fundamentally a conservative one.
@bob how do you square this argument with Weizenbaum’s here? https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/110861149766840562
clarity flowers (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Joseph Weizenbaum, 1985 (thanks @[email protected])
@clarity mechanical tabulating machines and telegraphs solve that problem well enough, you don't need computers. you certainly don't need personal computers. maybe you'd have to change the way balances are written on the checks, eg: having some kind of scantron-like system at the top that fed into a mechanical sorting/tabulating machine
@bob so your argument is, Weizenbaum is straight up wrong here, & computing exterts a progressive force rather than a conservative one?
@clarity wiezenbaum is straight-up wrong here but I wouldn't go so far as to say computing is a progressive force. it's a lot more ambiguous than that, and a lot depends on how things play out over the next 20 years. it certainly isn't a progressive force in china, and the chinese model of computing could be the one that wins.
@clarity there's an active fight right now between the chinese model ("cloud" and locked down client devices, also what FAANG are pushing) and personal computing (where people store their data on their own devices that they control, and share that data with others directly over the internet instead of via cloud datacenters)
@bob why call this “the chinese model” and not “the silicon valley model”?
@clarity because the other model was also invented in silicon valley, and because the chinese platforms take it to a greater extreme and couple it with explicit state power (which is the end-game)
@bob well, I certainly agree that cloud computing is infinitely more terrifying than personal computing.
@bob also, I consider a “tabulating machine” to still count as computation, and the telegraph is a form of telecommunication, so the fact that banks could get alone fine without silicon transistors isn’t super relevant to my train of thought yere. I’m interrogating the whole package, not just modern software.