Asta v. Schröder5d ago

Wikipedia went from "do not cite" to "the last trustworthy source on the internet" in the past 25 years and now it looks like they want to throw it all away because they want to break a union.
The largest community driven project in the world, relying directly on volunteers, and they still do not see the value of their own people.

I hate capitalism

Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia | by Jake Orlowitz | May, 2026 | Medium
https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire…

Medium
Show threadViolet Madder4d ago

@AvSchroeder

This is NOT merely about busting a union.

This is about seizing the the last big motherlode of free information and locking it down for technofascist control.

Look around. They are enclosing the digital commons. This is a coup. We are under attack. Generative slop is a signal-jamming weapon. Journalism and education are being destroyed. Surveillance is invading every facet of our lives, and democracy is getting disemboweled.

Think for one minute about what any megalomanaiacal jerk would do with tech like "AI". Wannabe supervillain billionaires are fighting over who gets to rule the world, and they'll burn the whole thing in the process.

It's not like they were just going to let Wikipedia just keep running around un-enshittified.

Show threadReg

@violetmadder

Good call. The 'AI is a financial bubble' rhetoric disguises the fact that AI is a huge punt to create information and processing monopolies that will act as corporate gatekeepers for all human knowledge.

Removing or corrupting alternative sources of truth is a means of forcing people to use those corporate gatekeepers, because if they didn't then AI itself would starve for lack of new data.

Now might be a good time to buy a set of hard copy encyclopaedias.

@AvSchroeder

May 27 at 3:51pmWeb
Show threadViolet Madder4d ago

@ReggieHere @AvSchroeder

Definitely.

And the financial manipulation from this bubble is making it harder and harder to get our own hardware, too-- they're not just hoarding data, but computing power itself so we'll have to go through their gates to their cloud to get anything done.

And when the bubble busts, we can bet those responsible have a plan for how to weather it and collect bailouts while their competitors crumble. Even while the rest of us experience a crash that could be worse than 1929, they'll make bank.

And they expect to control the therapy bots everyone will be crying to about all this once our access to any real mental healthcare is gone, too.

This whole dystopian hellmess has to be stopped.

Show threadReg3d ago

@violetmadder

This exactly. Stealing the world's data and polluting the remaining sources of primary information is a real super villain flex.

There's no need to create a killer-app if the gatekeepers establish a commercial monopoly over global knowledge, and as hardware and datacentre monopolies start to kick in, client-side compute will become too expensive for ordinary people to own with some grim implications for domestic access to power and water supplies.

@AvSchroeder

Show threadViolet Madder3d ago

@ReggieHere @AvSchroeder

The Nazis would swoon. They could scarcely dream of this.

Show threadReg3d ago

@violetmadder

Agreed. This is Super Villain grade audacious.

.....it's still pretty fragile though, because ultimately any AI will become stale without new data to keep it fresh, and with China and increasingly Europe defecting from the US Big Tech empire, new, primary sources of defended information will gradually become more widely available, and devices running FOSS and old hardware will last for years if not decades to scupper attempts at a hardware monopoly.

Starve them.

@AvSchroeder