"But X is useful" is not the good defense you think it is.

Who is it useful to, for what purposes and who bears the costs/harms?

Child labor is useful (to people wanting to squeeze out some money from desperate people). We still think that it should not exist.

(X in this case is a variable not a fascist social network site)

@tante
I always see X as either X11 or formerlyTwitter and get confused for a sec
@tante
So is slavery. And yet …

@tante That's why we should not bring up utility when what we actually want to - must - address are the ethics.

I despair about that shift in the GenAI discourse. I think too many people claim GenAI is useless because their mind goes "ethics bad, thus there can be no utility for anyone". And while their heart is in the right place, that argument *does not hold*. Or at least is not clear cut.

We *must* talk ethics. We *must* make ethics matter.

@tante

Systems that have you concentrate on outcomes and not the process are inherently bad systems.

@tante
Yes, of course. X should be destroyed immediately, together with facebook, instagram and all other corpo media.

Sadly, thats not possible. So at this point i suggest to my peers to focus on non western and non corpo media. The fediverse has a wide variety of places but it is still white dominated so I tend to steer them towards upscrolled and rednote as well.

Feel free to suggest others that arent imperialist.

@tante Maybe we should write «X/Y/Z» to avoid confusion with the site formerly known as Twitter when we mean [insert variable here]?
@tante the social network is called Twitter, regardless.
@tante stealing from you neighbor's fridge is useful : you don't have to pay and don't have to run/drive to the shop. Very useful.