OK, I've been silent for a while because ... research. My wife's gonna kill me if I write another book, but I realized she's not on Mastodon, so let's keep this our little secret, eh? My question: does the following make your socks roll up and down or is it a yawnfest?
I was comparing AI job displacement to the Enclosures—English commons privatized, millions of workers displaced. Seemed like a tidy historical parallel. Unfortunately, I kept reading. And reading. And reading. 1/8
This goes WAY beyond "job displacement", though.
The digital commons ARE being enclosed-- and the parts they can't fully control, they are destroying. "AI" slop is a signal jammer, poisoning the wells of information with toxic digital chaff. They don't want any communication, education, or trade to happen without passing through their gates.
Moreover, it's getting harder and harder to access our own home computing-- they're manipulating the availability of hardware, aiming to stick us all with little terminals that can't do anything on their own without access to the cloud computing, again through their gates.
And then there's the surveillance, those big data centers analyzing all the footage and speech and data they can find in order to target people for much worse things than advertising. No privacy.
At least in the ancient civilizations pre-capitalism it was still somewhat possible to pack up, head into the wilds and establish a new village outside the oppressors' reach. Enclosure buttons all of us in until "There is no alternative".
Exploitation, theft, and cruelty have been around a long time. Capitalism is the most successful system for maximizing it to planetwrecking levels. And then there's the layers of patriarchy, colorism/racism etc, all the different criteria a supremacist culture uses to stratify everybody into rulers and peons.
Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
Violet Madder