Deborah PickettI know we’ve got a shitton of corporations naming themselves after the dystopian things in Lord of the Rings, but has anyone cut right to the chase and called their product “Omelas” yet?
Techbros read Tolkien but they do not read Le Guin.
If you’re paying, you’re the customer.
If you’re not paying, you’re the product.
If no one’s paying, you’re the child they put in the torment machine to make the product.
Steveg58
Proto Himbo European@futzle Wait, am I the product of Linux or just in Linux's torment machine? Honestly, some days it feels like option B...
Linux and praxis: part of the resistance 🇵🇸 ☮️Thye thing about Linux is that there is always another solution - even if installing a different distro.
@linuxgnome @futzle Most days it's good. Then very occasionally something breaks (Mint is honestly becoming kind of bombproof), and much less occasionally I do something stupid that breaks things, and then I'm some meme-gif baby crying "But I'm already on the simplest distro!"
Edit: OH MY GOODNESS. A couple of hours after writing this I broke things. Not my OS, thank heavens. I broke R. I got lost in the tangled web of trying to fix what I broke, so I'm reinstalling all my packages, which has taken about three hours, so far. Definitely not the worst breakage I've done, but a delay I didn't want.
Claude
Elizabeth M, stationer@futzle I think they watch Tolkien and Le Guin hasn't been translated to film 🙄
calcifer 
@elzbethmrgn @futzle uh… Lathe of Heaven has been a movie twice, and Wizard of Earthsea was done by Studio Ghibli and then (very very badly) by SciFi.
Le Guin is one of my all time favorites, and it’s a travesty her work never got A-list adaptation, but there is still film. And opera. And plays and musicals.
Licho@elzbethmrgn vaguely inspired and still at the end the solution was to overpower the bad guy. No techbro would learn a thing by watching this animation
RustyRing@calcifer @elzbethmrgn @futzle
Sounds like that's the problem here (after the obvious existential threat of illiteracy that endangers our entire species): the marketing-industrial complex.
Tolkien's been judged a "draw", so he's saturation-marketed, therefore even STEM majors know him.
LeGuin is not judged a draw, so adaptations of her work muddle along in obscurity – only viewed by intellectuals who have or would have read her anyway.
there is beauty in simplicity@calcifer @elzbethmrgn @futzle in high school American lit class, I wanted to do a paper on my favorite LeGuin novel (Tombs of Atuan) and my teacher tried to tell me that she wasn't American
🇵🇸 Amanda@calcifer @elzbethmrgn @futzle Wow thank you, I LOVE Le Guin and enjoy Ghibli but had no idea he adapted Earthsea. Marketing industrial complex, indeed.
Malcolm Herbert@futzle her works aren't "boys own adventure" in space ...
John Maxwell@futzle They don't do a good job reading Tolkien, either.
Vysogota@futzle my hot take is that techbros read and misunderstand Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Alex Zakhlestin 🇵🇹
Renke Meuwese@futzle we have Ansible, but it's from a previous generation and not really all that bro-ey. It's from the same kind of IT worker that would name a language Python: Open Source and Dutch...
DartzIRLTechnbros read Tolkien and think Sauron should've been the real hero and we're just reading the history written by the victors
Frédéric Grosshans
Corvus
Carolyn
Real Syntactic
Michael Kohlman@futzle Their loss.
wiredogThey certainly don’t walk away from Omelas.
su_liam@wiredog @futzle @conniptions “Perhaps we can find a way to elevate Omelas further by tormenting more children.”
Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen@futzle they don't READ Tolkien they merely watch those awful movies
groff 🇺🇦
Fazal Majid@futzle Or in the case of Musk, read Iain M Banks and completely miss the point.
Zodypop
Sam Livingston-Gray@futzle @Ashedryden and are the poorer for it; my software job feels more and more like Earthsea wizardry the older I get.
John Quentin Heywood@futzle and it shows
katalogeur@futzle
Head before heart, that's par for the course.
Head before heart, that's par for the course.
Alanna 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️@futzle I'm fascinated by "Melon Husk" claiming to be a fan of Iain Banks yet behaving like the absolute worst villains from his books.
JdeBPMostly, what they read are the old boy's #SciFi stories from around the 1930s and 1940s, where the male uberman genius industrialist, with his girlfriend along for the ride in the rocketship, saves the galaxy, and knows better and does better than stupid governments.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/115826293180493731
Every half-arsed idea that makes for a good boy's story but is terrible science, from greenfingering a planetary climate to swarms of 'AIs' in space, has a precursor of some kind in these tales.
It's not that they've missed LeGuin specifically. It's that they've missed six decades of thoughtful counterpoints to that old stuff beginning in the late 1960s.
bigblen
Ozzelot 
@futzle ok, that Wikipedia summary is pretty harrowing ... not one I'd read before ...
Keith Wansbrough@futzle last I checked there were two - one that claimed to be aware (o--.io), and one completely unaware (o--ai.com). Unbelievable.
irina 🐇🌷
Lucas C. Wheeler@futzle They clearly missed the whole point of LOTR. I don't think they'd understand Le Guin even if they did read her. They're the violent, colonizing villains of The Word for World is Forest. They're the capitalist shitheads from The Dispossessed.
The Ones Who Walk Way from Omelas is a super short read and I would say it's definitely worth it. But yeah, it's unsettling.
Robin
neoluddite@futzle close, maybe? https://aus.social/@neoluddite/115353282419874996
@neoluddite I’ll allow it.
ShadSterling@futzle we could reverse the trend and start referring to the “Epstein class” as “Omelas”.
And maybe to “Grok” as “OmelAIs”
(works better in a font where “l” and “I” look different)
Lea de Groot TZ+10
@leadegroot I can’t even.
@futzle i know, right? :(
Bill, organizer of stuff@futzle @leadegroot Holy crap, it's beyond even the prediction of future satire!