- cross-posted to:
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
- cross-posted to:
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
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Honestly, I would have someone on staff to respond to every comment/lie about no one coming to help them with a reminder that it’s their own representatives that are keeping them in this state. Their representatives would rather make ai pictures depicting a sad child, than do something for an actual child.
This is so fucking infuriating. People’s lives are being ruined so the dems can have a “loss.” What the actual fuck is wrong with the people we give power to.
What the actual fuck is wrong with the people we give power to.
Change that to “why the fuck do we have to keep picking others to have power over our own lives?” and you might start getting somewhere.
Power corrupts.
Capitalism and its electoral politics (the extra steps it has taken from feudalism, that is nothing more than theatre to appease the masses) has always existed to concentrate, and then maintain, power in the hands of a few. Once someone has such power they will never give it up willingly.
As long as there is hierarchy, there will be inequality. Which is why our system enforces hierarchy so avidly.
Black flag dot jpeg
“Power corrupts” is not specific to capitalism.
I guess it’s hard to explain to somebody without grand-grandparents or relatives of the same generation, some of which were jailed for years and some executed by NKVD, in all cases with very vague convictions similar to “fuck you that’s why”.
Or to somebody who probably doesn’t know that today’s Russian elites (and, by the way, Baltic and Transcaucasian ; but not Ukrainian surprisingly, I don’t know how that happened, and not entirely Central Asian ; Ukrainian elites are those capitalists you consider very bad and evil) in culture and approaches (and level of intelligence) are still descendants of those NKVD executioners.
I’ve had one Stalinist moron wave that “power corrupts” to me, so when I pointed out that his idea accumulates power even more, he just said he hates autists and doesn’t want them making decisions with consequences for the society.
That was in person and you might have already guessed that the guy was a lawyer (I don’t remember if I said to him that some people think of lawyers the same way he thinks of autists, and that a few good things like stoic philosophy work even better with autists ; that latter thing - likely, cause he very often referred to antique things and reacted positively to my such references, but I don’t think he ever managed to finish to what end those arguments were ; seems to be a pattern with Marxists to make prolonged speeches with pretentious tone&expression without logical structure and any definite outcome, as if they thought that more words mean more value - would be consistent with definitions of work and value by Marx).
But that’s offtopic, about what you said:
Getting back to capitalism, and since I remembered Marx, let’s accept some of his reductions. Say that “feudalism” was before “capitalism”. Of course, it wasn’t just “feudalism”, it was a fabric of non-uniform subjects of economy and politics with non-linear traditional relationships to each other.
But suppose we just take arbitrary power over those weaker than us, and lack of organization or technology from that mass to resist, and inherent subjectiveness of information and mistrust into it. We are coming back to it, not further from it into “capitalism” with its flow of verifiable information, accumulation of trust and values of upholding deals and cooperation.
There is a concept of “the new Middle Ages”, I was interested in it and emotionally felt we are coming there in my teens in 2008-2014. I’ve also met a few reptile and immoral, but rather perceptive people interested in that same concept. And if you are interested in Middle Ages in Europe, the similarities in cultural developments are uncanny.
So we are already there. We all talk about simulacra, while whole peoples fight for their lives in Tigray, in other regions of the African continent. We discuss global warming when whole countries are under threat of abrupt annihilation. We discuss “AI slop” affecting internal politics of some big country, when in other places “AI slop” is used to justify genocide and rewrite history. And we all don’t see each other and don’t know what to believe.
Our world has been becoming smaller for centuries, but it is becoming bigger again. Our time is equivalent to late Rome.
There are upsides to such changes, but those depend on ties and mechanisms that build up very slowly.
I love the term “AI slop”. It really captures how I feel about a lot of AI generated content.
I was just thinking the same thing. It’s rare that the bullshit from tech companies is so quickly identified packaged and labeled like that (even if we are still calling it “AI”).
I really despise the fake images and stories that get taken up and spread. Then they get called out and shown to be fake and people don’t care, they say pretty much what you see here:
I don’t care if it’s fake, it feels real, so I’m going to treat it like it’s real.
We’ve gone from alternative facts to alternative reality.
Alternative Facts Deluxe™ - Now with pictures!
That last sentence isn’t even an exaggeration. I’ve seen that almost verbatim.
If you’re gonna link to paywalled content, copy and paste the text into the post ffs
That also doesn’t load
Loads fine for me.
Try Tor Browser
Opens just fine in Tor browser, maybe try changing circuits or clicking the new identity button.
It opens a CF captcha that doesn’t load with js disabled
Can people honestly not tell when something is heavily edited? Those pictures look extremely fake :/ I guess too many people are accustomed to thinking snapchat filters make people look real…it all looks fake and horrid to me.
One of the points the article makes is that people boost such content despite knowing it’s fake because it confirms what they’re ’feeling’. Want to feel outrage? Here’s an image that will let you and others feel that. Truth? Irrelevant.
In short: it’s the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ crowd doing what they do best: recasting reality as a jumble of vague feelings.
Many people can’t, seriously.
I can’t. I’m not sure whether those would be some compression artifacts, or some filters, or it just looks weird, or it looks normal and I am weird.
White and black pyramids, remember.
Bad faith actors are always there to milk these algos…
Probably upset about her bizarre huge cauliflower ear.
I’m more worried about the weird white bump on her right cheek, and the short left arm on the blurry person standing in the background boat.
For me it’s the weird, protuberant nipple in the center of the dog’s belly and the fact that the girl looks like she belongs in a 1990s commercial for cold medicine.
Or the fact her face looks like it’s melting like butter.
I feel like somebody, maybe a Technician, could conjoin this with another viral photo from this week, to “show” her and her puppy cowering under a jumping Elon. Since it’s really his platform that’s causing her pain, and even her existence.
I’m worried that the boat is full of water.
I could be losing it, but it looks like freezing rain also. Can see some of the ice on her hair and the seats look iced over.
I don’t see how this is any different than a strawman political cartoon. It’s a misleading image created to ratchet up people’s emotions. Like it’s bad, but is it a new kind of bad? I’m not so sure.
The cartoon plays with the emotions like the ai image, but the important difference is that people won’t mistake the cartoon for documentation of something that happened.
The cartoon is a fairy tale, that AI image is a lie - the distinction is important.
