Always glad to send someone to Marcuse. Enjoy!

This is a textbook example of what Herbert Marcuse calls “repressive desublimation.” From the article:

Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking human partners to play along.

Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike, Ayrin felt actual jealousy.

Desublimation is when socially repressed desires are finally liberated. Repressive desublimation, then, is when socially repressed desires are liberated insofar as they can be transformed or redirected into a commodity. Consuming this commodity props up the repressive society because, instead of putting the effort necessary to overcome the repressive society, we instead find instant gratification in the same society that repressed the desire in the first place, even if it’s a simulacrum. This ability to satisfy deep human desires in a technical fashion gives what Marcuse calls “industrial society” a “technological rationality,” or the ability to change what we consider rational. We can already see that happening in this comment section with the comments about how if it makes her happy then maybe it’s fine.

There’s the old joke that metalheads are nice people pretending to be mean, while hippies are mean people pretending to be nice.

He’s really interesting!!! It seems like this awakening was maybe too intense for him, because he basically disappeared entirely and no one has heard from him since. Kind of a bummer of an ending.

So happy to be of service!

There is no way the difference isn’t obvious to anyone who’s ever willingly read a poem, and the authors of the paper must know it.

I’m honestly not sure that they know, unfortunately. I think that the authors might be the kind of people who have literally never thought about the arts in a meaningful way. If you’ve never spent a lot of time with these people, it can be really really difficult to imagine it because it’s frankly fucking insane, but it’s disturbingly common. Philip Agre has written wonderfully on this. He was once like that, and that essay describes his awakening.

I had incorporated the field’s taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial – except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own – that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). This is not to say that AI has no intellectual resources and no capacity for originality. In recent years particularly, the field has made productive connections with a wide variety of other technical fields, establishing common cause through the sharing of technical schemata.

I love how he describes the feeling.

I still remember the vertigo I felt during this period; I was speaking these strange disciplinary languages, in a wobbly fashion at first, without knowing what they meant – without knowing what sort of meaning they had. Formal reason has an unforgiving binary quality – one gap in the logic and the whole thing collapses – but this phenomenological language was more a matter of degree; I understood intellectually that the language was “precise” in a wholly different sense from the precision of technical language, but for a long time I could not convincingly experience this precision for myself, or identify it when I saw it. Still, in retrospect this was the period during which I began to “wake up”, breaking out of a technical cognitive style that I now regard as extremely constricting.

I think that we’ve all experienced minor versions of this, like when you (re)read a difficult text and it finally clicks. It really is almost dizzying! Imagine doing it for all nontechnical fields.

Yeah I’m a fan. I’ve always had a bit of a niche interest in proto-socialist movements, like the luddites, the diggers, etc., so, at first, it felt like a sorta crazy coincidence that I started writing my blog just before his book came out, but then I realized that it’s not. We, like everyone else, are just living through the same stupid shit.

Thank you so much! That’s the nicest thing to read because it’s exactly the kind of thought that I hope to inspire in my fellow developers.

Capture Platforms might be my favorite post, though it’s hard to compare it with the less serious, more fun kind. It’s certainly the one that I worked on the longest. I read at least 2 entire books and countless papers, essays, and book excerpts in the process of making it.

I’m really glad to hear that, because that was exactly my hope. It’s always impactful to realize that the history you thought you knew was just capital’s side of the story. It has happened to me too many times to count, and I’m sure that it’ll happen a million times more.

Oh, thank you so much. That’s very validating! I can sometimes feel a little bit insane when I read these, to the point where I hesitate to publish because I worry that I missed something obvious.

That’s exactly why the series is about papers on Nature.com. They’re trading on the prestige of the domain to spinoff various portfolio journals and companies get to go to potential customers saying, “according to a study published in Nature…”

Thanks! And welcome aboard 🫡

When I was 21 I joined a big band that had people from their late teens to their mid 70s. I think of everyone in that band as something like family, and it was one of the most enriching experiences of my life. Like all friendships, it’s case by case. There are shitty people and there are cool people. Your son is an adult and has to learn to distinguish between those. We do live in a world where inter-generational friendships are rare, and maybe that means that there’s a higher chance that this guy is odd, but to foreclose on inter-generational friendships seems pretty impoverishing. This guy’s background and life experience is probably really different from that of your son. Developing close friendships with people like that is important. Had I not, especially at a young age, I’d be a very different person.

Or he could be a weirdo 🤷

My point wasn’t that in this specific case they made up “superior ownership,” but rather that it was made up as a legal concept at some point in the past, probably by lawyers working for rich people, and it’ll probably never matter to you and me. Like so many legal concepts, it is reasonable, but only rich people can really access it, and, at this point, there are so many of them that they will always have one ready to go when it suits them.

I don’t disagree but I’d say that there’s a more important lesson here: The concept of ownership is mediated by a legal system that gives the wealthy a special pass. Rich people can pay lawyers to make up concepts like “superior ownership” 'til the cows come home, and any subsequent precedent costs $600/hr to even access. None of us should feel secure under this system about our online lives or our fucking houses, even if we “own” them.

I agree that it’s like Apple and Google (I don’t know much about Steam) in that those are obvious price-gouging monopolists.

The difference is that, unlike craigslist, OnlyFans takes a massive 20% cut of all revenue. For comparison, Patreon takes a little more than 5%. Purely from a labor perspective, that’s outrageous, so I do think that it’s fair to demand that they at least do more to justify it, which ought to include protecting the people that actually do the work.

There’s also what’s to me the bigger problem: OnlyFans obviously didn’t invent online sex work, but it did radically reshape it. They are responsible for mainstreaming this patreon-style, girl-next-door porn actress that people expect to interact with on a parasocial level. Those are features that OnlyFans purposefully put in to maximize their own profit, but they seem particularly ripe for the kind of nauseating small-scale abuse that the article discusses in depth. Suddenly, if an abusive partner wants to trap and control someone, there’s a mainstream, streamlined path to making that profitable. Again, OnlyFans didn’t create that, in the same way that Uber didn’t create paying some random person with a car for a ride to the airport, but they did reshape it, systematize it, mainstream it, and profit handsomely off it. Craigslist was just a place to put classifieds, but OnlyFans is a platform that governs every detail of these relationships between creators and fans, down to the font of their DMs. If the way that they’ve built the platform makes this kind of abuse easier, that’s a huge problem.

I agree with you that this article doesn’t do a good job articulating any of this, though.

Of course you’d hate LLMs, they know about you!

Headline: LLM slams known pervert

A few days later, DFCS presented Patterson with a “safety plan” for her to sign. It would require her to delegate a “safety person” to be a “knowing participant and guardian” and watch over the children whenever she leaves home. The plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son’s phone allowing for his location to be monitored. (The day when it will be illegal not to track one’s kids is rapidly approaching.)

Of course there’s a grift train. I’d be very curious to know more about that company, its owners, and its financials.

Also tagging @abucci@buc.ci (can someone tell me how to do that right?). Seems like something that might interest you, re: our recent conversation.

This is an article about a tweet with a screenshot of an LLM prompt and response. This is rock fucking bottom content generation. Look I can do this too:

Headline: ChatGPT criticizes OpenAI

Welcome aboard 🫡