VirtualExile

kids who grow up with LLMs will create their own bespoke languages

but not as a social activity, as an asocial activity

like the last thing the world needs is my judgment

Why are there no competing bids for Twitter? (1) Twitter isn't profitable. (2) Twitter is too big to avoid antitrust scrutiny if you already own media properties. (3) Nobody else is stupid enough to think they can fix Twitter with zero experience running a media property.

The only reason I'm still on Twitter at all is because I've hacked the algorithm to give me only the people I'm following, in order, and I turn off all their retweets.  All I'm seeing is what they post, in order, as here on Dreamwidth.  I see no liked posts, I see no suggested posts.

Otherwise I'd have left Twitter like I left Facebook.

After reading an essay on the Internet I wanted to know -- not just who authored it -- but who published it.  And by who published it I mean, who owns the company that runs this website/magazine.  Who is ultimately responsible for my having read this essay -- whose money is renting my brain?

If you've been reading anything published by The Atlantic, it is currently owned by Laurene Powell Jobs via a privately held for-profit LLC that she uses to run a bunch of projects that she claims include "philanthropy", "advocacy", and "impact investing" -- but with zero public disclosure of its budget or finances.

Ms. Jobs is the widow of the infamous Apple co-founder and sometimes CEO Steve Jobs.  Her mostly-inherited net worth is estimated at around $20 billion.

If you go to the website for her LLC, the first thing you see is a full-screen-sized picture of a beautiful black woman's face, but Ms. Jobs is certainly not a black woman.  And nowhere will you find an annual report or any other kind of audited public statement of what this for-profit LLC is up to.  It tells its own story.

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In a country stuffed with $100 trillion in wealth, our United States, we have many famous billionaires who run so-called philanthropic efforts, and some less-famous or non-famous billionaires who do the same.  But these philanthropic efforts seem to never cause these billionaires to become ex-billionaires, or to move the political needle off "gridlock".  Somehow these philanthropists create the illusion of giving their wealth away to help the rest of us, while their piles of wealth grow ever larger, while economic inequality continues to skyrocket, while the Everything Bubble continues to produce unprecedented hypervaluations of every available investment asset class.

One thing these billionaires never seem to advocate is an end to billionaires.

But it is this existence of billionaires that is one of our world's worst problems.  It's all the stuff these piles of capital are doing other than giving themselves away -- the 99+% of the world's net wealth that is not given away each year -- all that capital is busy reproducing itself at the expense of every living thing that does not own it.  If these piles of wealth were shared more equally, let's say solely within the US for starters, we could easily wipe out poverty.  If we were willing to jeopardize the size of these piles of wealth in favor of the global environment, we could start making a significant dent in our CO2 emissions and start rewilding parts of the planet.

As I wrote about yesterday, when projects like fixing the atmosphere and sharing the wealth are purely voluntary, the resulting gaps between our goals and reality remain immense.  Health care disparities of 100x and more around the globe, alongside continuing increases in the proportion of CO2 in the sky, and 1000x the normal rate of species extinction.

And it's because voluntary donations and reductions are always a tiny fraction of our activities.  Last year I gave away several thousand dollars to charity, for example, more than ever before, but it was only a few percent of my take home pay, and definitely less than one percent of my net wealth, especially if you include the present value of my pension in that calculation.  I'm no better than anybody else at changing the world via voluntary sacrifices.  Although I want to get better.

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Sometimes I get pushback from my LJ readers or others telling me not to criticize the baby steps that people are taking toward the goals we seek.  But somebody should say out loud that these baby steps are not nearly enough; even our adult steps are not nearly enough, heh.

But not nearly enough for what?  For any of us to be in control of the outcome on a globally relevant scale.  This global capitalist machine is far far far from submitting to any sort of democratic control.

At the level of my daily life, I accept this, because I can generally accept reality as it is and go on living.  I am not generally an unhappy or depressed person.  But this is what I see --> I see an ongoing global catastrophe driven by a relentless accumulation of capital -- and maybe it has always been thus, and will always be thus, perhaps our species is destined to destroy all other species and then itself -- but I have the capacity to imagine doing something about it, and I'm not.  Instead I'm living my own life and tossing a percent of my wealth at gestures that won't fix the catastrophe.  And those billionaires who also care are trapped in the same mode of tossing a percent of their wealth at gestures that won't fix the catastrophe.

It's definitely virtue signalling, which has become a fancy way of saying hypocrisy.  Benefiting personally from the catastrophe while tossing pennies into the beggar's bowl.

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For more than a couple decades I've forgiven myself because I've worked for non-profits or government agencies instead of working directly for capitalism; I've thought -- I give via my job, and I'm not in control of what they pay me to do it.  I could have, instead, gone to work for the private sector for 2x+ what I make now.  So I'm already giving up at least half of the income and wealth I'd otherwise have, and my job serves the community.  Paid to do good!

But solving our biggest problems requires collective action that we aren't currently taking, not individual sacrifice or even community service, how do I get that ball rolling?  The snowball of collective action?

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"Advocacy" -- that's certainly part of it, yes, Ms. Jobs.  But it's not enough.  A bunch of us agreeing with each other in our conversations and social media posts does not, by itself, accomplish anything at all.

I recall how one person who stopped reading or following me years ago called me an "armchair" politician as her reason for doing so.  I'd take that more personally if I didn't have a day job in public service, one that statutorily requires that I not run for office, and limits how I can advocate for partisan positions.

But, still.

Advocacy is not enough.  Having a job in public service is not enough.  What is enough?

Again, when solving a problem requires collective action, not individual sacrifice, how do you get that snowball rolling?

You can set a good example.  You can join one or more organizations that are trying to coordinate collective action, or trying to build social support for collective action.

Ironically, from the point of view of this post, the for-profit LLC owned by Ms. Jobs calls itself a "Collective".  Of course it isn't, but perhaps she is trying to get us to that point in her own way.

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Mass movements -- who controls these things?  Could you have mass movements before you had mass media?  Before the printing press, for example.  Instances of popular sovereignty were mighty rare before the printing press came along, and even so were limited to property-owning (and often slave-owning) males.  But then in Europe the printing press created massive problems for the ruling elite who had perfected a marriage between absolute monarchy and obligatory Catholicism.

As unofficial authors began sharing their essays about Christianity and politics, the ruling elite had to come up with a new formula -- Nationalism.  You get the people to identify with their nation, to feel patriotism, to view other nations as The Enemy, and then implement an obligatory state-controlled church.  Where this hasn't been enough, the ruling elite also needed to dangle a form of democracy in front of people's eyes, to get them to identify more closely with their nation -- because You the People Chose Your Leaders Yourself (wink).

Not really, of course.  The ruling elite would produce a short list of candidates to choose from and use their ownership of the mass media to control what The People see and hear about these candidates.  There might be a genuine contest for leadership, but within well-circumscribed limits.

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To create a mass movement, in support of collective action, do you need to control the mass media?  If so, is it up to those who control the mass media to get us there?  The Bezos, the Murdoch, the Jobs -- the billionaires who control the media?

In a country with a "free" press, there's still a genuine competition between the mass media empires, a competition for eyeballs, and I think this is ultimately -- in the Age of the Internet -- what has brought us to our current gridlock and inability to solve any of our problems.  As I've written before, the Internet allows mass media to compete for your eyeballs by giving you more exactly whatever it is you WANT to see or hear.  What you -- you -- individual you -- want to see or hear.  Completely divorced from reality if that's what you want.

So there is no possible collective in this Age of the Internet!  Only what you want to see.  And therefore, no possible collective action.  Mass media has been completely deconstructed by individual choice, and so has mass action.  What passes for mass media now is a set of computer algorithms that are able to finely parse the available content such that you can see exactly what you want.

To the extent we still get mass protest popping up around the world, it is ephemeral, without any goals, without any true collective action.  The world wanted justice for what's his name, after seeing that awful video, OK, they got it, but NOTHING ELSE CHANGED with respect to police violence in the US.  Ephemeral, without any goals, without any collective action.  There is no organized leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement, no single dues-paying democratically organized group that is applying systematic pressure to US governments to enact a clear program of remedies.  Justice for George Floyd, but three more people will be killed by police tomorrow.  And the next day.

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This is a long and rambling take on what I feel to be our collective powerlessness to effect global change during this Age of the Internet.  But I'm not sure we ever had that power before?  During the 20th Century the world was pretty well divided between the socialists and the capitalists for a while, but then the capitalists won.  Arguably, it was only the highly destructive world wars between the various capitalist empires that gave socialists an opening to exploit.  But eventually the largest and strongest socialist empires gave up and willingly embraced capitalism for themselves.  China as Exhibit A.  The last truly communist countries are like isolated historical anomalies, the Lands Time Forgot.

So I find myself echoing a book I bought but never finished (of course) -- Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?  That's what I've been struggling with in this LJ lately.  What does a person like me do to get the snowball rolling?  I look at my life thus far and conclude I haven't done enough, but I'm not sure what "enough" would entail.

Giving more to charity/advocacy, sure, working on that.  Downsizing my own footprint/lifestyle, sure, working on that.  Possibly choosing a different career, sure working on that.  Moving to a battleground state or even a different country, sure, working on that.  By the end of this decade the outlines of my life could be quite different from what we all see now.  But I doubt it will be enough.  I think this is one of those games you continue to play even though you're probably going to lose, because you want to be a good sport and not quit early.  Bug as Che, heh.  Another book I haven't finished, that biography of Che.

Today I had my most popular social media post of all time, with over 1000 likes.  All I did was share a meme on the poly subreddit.  I didn't create this meme, and I don't know who did.  I saw it on Twitter, posted by somebody who saw it on Tumblr, but they didn't say from whom.  The meme is not signed.

Something I'm finding more interesting than the meme at the moment, however, is that every response I've made to people who commented on the post has been downvoted!  Over 1000 people are happy that I posted this, but there's a disgruntled minority who must be trying to downvote the post, but that's not working so instead they're downvoting everything I say in response to the post.  No matter the tone I'm using, no matter what I'm saying, LOL.

Well, the post was a list of problems with "toxic monogamy culture".  A lot of the comments to the post take issue with the word "toxic" as applied to "monogamy culture", because a large chunk of the readers of the polyamory subreddit don't like it when people criticize monogamy.  I'd say about half of the readers of the subreddit think that monogamy and polyamory are equally valid lifestyle choices, and so there's no need for polyamorous people to criticize monogamy.  Many commenters said they'd prefer to see a differently worded title for this list of common relationship problems.

Only a few people took issue with the substance of the list itself.  But it seems those people downvoted all of my responses to them, no matter what I said.  They were apparently pissed off that so many people considered the items on the list to be problems.  I'm trying to imagine what kinds of people who read the polyamory subreddit would think the items on this list are not problems.

So I'm going to list these problems here in my LJ.  You can think of these as aspects of "toxic monogamy culture" like I do, or you can think of these as generic relationship problems like half of the subreddit does.  Or you can think of these as NOT PROBLEMS AT ALL, heh.

• the normalization of jealousy as an indicator of love
• the idea that a sufficiently intense love is enough to overcome any practical incompatibilities
• the idea that you should meet your partner's every need, and if you don't, you're either inadequate or they're too needy
• the idea that a sufficiently intense love should cause you to cease to be attracted to anyone else
• the idea that commitment is synonymous with exclusivity
• the idea that marriage and children are the only valid teleological justifications for being committed to a relationship
• the idea that your insecurities are always your partner's responsibility to tip-toe around and never your responsibility to work on
• the idea that your value to a partner is directly proportional to the amount of time and energy they spend on you, and it is in zero-sum competition with everything else they value in life
• the idea that being of value to a partner should always make up a large chunk of how you value yourself

I think many people appreciated the content of this list, no matter the title.  Food for thought!

As for me, one of the elaborations I made which was downvoted, explained that for me personally, I do experience monogamy culture as toxic.  I felt stifled by monogamy in so many ways: mentally, physically, emotionally, developmentally.  I've been much happier and healthier since I left what I call "the monogamy box".  I think it is important for me to communicate this experience to other people.  I don't claim that everybody who is monogamous is toxic; I don't insist that nobody should choose monogamy.  But some people like me do experience monogamy culture as toxic.  Just as some people experience masculinity culture as toxic.

Some people wanted to point out there can be toxic aspects of polyamory also.  Sure, share your own list of toxic polyamory culture.  Some people felt this list of problems can pop up in any kind of relationship, and that polyamory doesn't necessarily solve these problems.  OK!  But I think this is a great list for anybody to think about, whatever the title.

My karma can handle a few downvotes on my comments, this post is over 1100 likes now ;-)

That's a majority of the Republicans in the House voting to overthrow the will of both the voters and the Electoral College to keep Trump in the White House, even after today he incited mob violence that required their own evacuation from the Capitol.

One of these House Republicans claimed in his speech tonight on the House floor that the mob who broke into the Capitol and forced them to evacuate were made up of Antifa, not Trump supporters -- a false claim that is spreading on social media.  This is the country I live in now.  Trump can direct his supporters to storm the Capitol, then they do, then Trump supporters claim it was somebody else who stormed the Capitol!  And they use social media both to plan the storming of the Capitol (which they planned via Facebook groups), and to spread lies about who actually did it.

There will probably be another set of votes later tonight as Republicans make further "objections" to the counting of the Electoral Votes, but I'm done staying up to watch.  Nite nite.

On Reddit they can downvote you, not just upvote you, so occasionally my advice is deemed unpopular.  Other times it is deemed wildly popular, with hundreds of upvotes.

My latest unpopular advice was that poly people need to be flexible about calendars -- that on birthdays and holidays, poly people cannot be everywhere with everybody at the same time, so be willing to celebrate birthdays and holidays on more than one day with different partners.  I'm mystified as to why this was downvoted, nobody bothered to comment on why.

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Before that, my most recent unpopular advice was on the Gay-Young-Old subreddit, where guys talk about intergenerational relationships.  A young guy suspected his partner was cheating, so he broke into his emails and hookup apps by guessing passwords, and then verified his partner was cheating.

My advice was that snooping on people is also bad.  If you suspect your partner is cheating on you, your relationship has problems.  If you go snooping on your partner, you are unlikely to fix these problems, because now you have also become untrustworthy via snooping.

That was so unpopular!  Most people think that if you catch your partner cheating, you are absolutely in the right to have snooped on them.  I understand why this advice is unpopular, but I'm sticking by it.  Don't snoop.  If you don't trust your partner, ASK to see their private stuff for confirmation.  Tell them WHY you don't trust them.  Communicate with each other, damn it.

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Oh well.

I have over 5,000 positive karma on Reddit, so I can afford the occasional unpopular advice.  But sometimes I'm clueless as to why a particular piece of advice is unpopular.  Today, I'm clueless.  I've long had to celebrate my and my partner's birthdays on multiple days, because my partners aren't all friends, and I'm not friends with all of their partners either.  With my family -- I have a big family -- we never see each other on Christmas, we always have to pick a different day because there are too many other competing demands for Christmas Day itself.  So what's the big deal?

I will forget about this in five minutes, LOL.

When I put this phrase into my search engine of choice, it returns a list of sites that unironically instruct you in how to choose your own reality.

...

...

This is literally what the Internet, as shaped by the search engines and the social media companies, is training/allowing people to do.

Whatever it is you want to believe about reality, that version of reality can be found on the Internet.

Except, not really.  You can't self-reality yourself into being wealthy, or healthy, or surrounded by loving family and friends.  What people are actually doing is spending their lives staring at screens.  These screens have supplanted staring at anything else.  Having followers and getting likes has replaced having family and friends.

How is this different from television, or radio, or newspapers?  Or books?

Well, now you can individually tailor your experience, assembling the items you want to follow in bespoke patterns.  At the same time, artificial intelligence algorithms are also individually tailoring your experience.

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One interesting thing about this, and I see it rather painfully in some of my family and friends, is that many people choose unhappy realities.  They focus on stuff that upsets them, that makes them anxious or depressed.

I know somebody who is experiencing strikingly painful reactions to the continuous news of President Trump's ongoing, but pointless, legal battles to wrestle the election victory away from Biden.  This person is so upset by the minute-by-minute Trump drama, that he literally ignored me when I texted him that (1) my brother has COVID, and (2) a friend of mine is mourning a friend of his who committed suicide yesterday.

This person has chosen a reality in which the existence of our republic hangs by a thread, ready to be severed by Trump and his Republican henchmen.  A reality so scary to him, that he must ignore the real pains and sufferings of those in his social circles.

It reminds me of how I generally don't like horror movies or horror novels, yet there's no end to their production and consumption.  Some people WANT TO BE SCARED.  That's where they want to live, in a scary reality.

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What's the reality that I choose?  A lot of amateur porn stars and other fellas posting sexy pictures of themselves.  Poly people and nonbinary people asking for help with their various problems.  A variety of news media sites that I believe are generally trying to base their reporting on verifiable facts.  Some fringey Left-wing sites that provoke me to think critically or in new ways, as well as some Right-wing sites that keep me informed as to what the Right-wing is focusing on (whether their focus is real or fake).  Sites with various raw economic or COVID statistics.  Wikipedia.  Text-based porn.  Professional porn.  LJ.

I view the Internet as a wonderful tool for learning more about reality, and also as an endless universe of porn!  Not as a way to choose my own reality.  Well, I guess I've chosen a reality in which I'm constantly surrounded by sexy naked men, LOL.

I remember back during GWB's Global War on Terror, I appreciated the Internet for allowing me to learn more about what is really going on in the world.  How many Iraqis had we killed via our invasion and occupation, for example.  My favorite online chat buddies back then were a couple of young guys from Canada and Sweden.  We pooled our international viewpoints to learn more about reality, peeling back each other's national prejudices.

How do I know I'm not just choosing my own reality like everybody else?  By trying to test my own assumptions, by seeking out new sources of information that I disagree with, by trying to find the original sources of information rather than taking clickbait at face value.  By synthesizing lots of different viewpoints.

I was wondering today, how would I convince my youngest brother, an evangelical Christian Trump supporter, that he's constructed a personal fantasy about the universe?  He's not stupid.  He's an engineer, and before that he was a science teacher.  But back while he was in college, when our mother passed away, his grief reaction led him to join the Campus Crusade for Christ, and he's been sort of loony ever since.  He's a good parent, a good husband, a good engineer, but when it comes to the universe outside of his home and his job, he's completely crazy.  Because with respect to the stuff he hasn't experienced first-hand, he chooses his own reality.

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I expected Trump to do worse than he did (even though he lost the popular vote by 7 million), because I figured enough people would see with their own eyes -- the results of the mismanaged pandemic, the results of the mismanaged economy.  Millions fewer people have jobs!  Millions have been sick and hundreds of thousands have died!  And the pandemic isn't over yet!

During 2020 we had the sharpest economic recession in our lifetimes, and the worst pandemic in our lifetimes.  I thought more people would blame the President for these harsh realities that they could directly experience.

I was wrong.  And my regression equation based on past elections and past economic performance was wrong.  And I think it has to be due to the compelling power of staring at these screens and choosing our own realities.  People are spending more of their private lives online than they are in meat space.  So the worst recession and worst pandemic of our lifetimes don't matter -- what matters is the reality we're choosing to view on these screens.

When I was chatting with my youngest brother today about how the pandemic is worse now than it was back in April, and that we need to shut everything down now like we did back in April ... he said stuff that sounded like he was President Trump, "People can only take so much heightened alert and waiting.  The problem is that no one can agree on what the new normal is."

No one can agree on what the new normal is.

And cultural observers say this isn't only "the problem", it is the deliberate strategy of Right-wing demagogues like Boris and Trump and Putin, and many others that have sprouted up around the world during this Age of the Internet.

If no one can agree on what the new normal is, then we can't fix anything.  I believe in global warming, you don't, and since we can't even agree that global warming is real, we can't fix it.

Since we can't agree on basic facts, like, what's the actual death rate from COVID-19, is it 20x worse than the flu, or the same as the flu, then we can't fix it.

Choosing your own reality means we can never agree on anything, and can never fix anything.  We've destroyed human community, human society, human cooperation.

At the family level, at the company level, at the NGO level, where we know each other personally and have to cooperate to do things like buying groceries, producing widgets, or raising funds -- we can create a limited shared reality and work together.  But outside of personal experience -- at the governmental level -- at the international level -- that's impossible now.  Without shared reality we can't fix anything.

Trump couldn't even build the Wall, his signature program, even after shutting down the federal government over it.  Trump built 15 miles of new wall in four years.  That's less than four miles per year.  With all the resources of the United States, he could only extend the wall by 15 miles.  Trump couldn't fix anything either.  Did he rebuild our infrastructure like he'd promised?  No.  His most important legislative accomplishment was to cut taxes -- that doesn't fix anything, it just increases the federal deficit.  He couldn't even come up with a political platform for the next four years.  Now his main issue seems to be that his re-election was stolen from him.  So what, what was he going to accomplish if he'd won?  Why should anybody care?

And now Biden won't accomplish much of anything either.  But he won't piss me off as much while accomplishing nothing as Trump did while accomplishing nothing.

Our country is broken.  And we can't fix it, because we're all choosing our own realities, and these various chosen realities are set evenly against each other by social media engagement algorithms and the extraordinarily well-funded major political parties, such that we're repeatedly having some of the closest elections in US history (with respect to the Electoral College, which is the only meter that matters) -- nobody ever pulls far enough ahead to fix anything.

And why bother fixing anything if you can simply choose your own reality and stare at it on your screens?  We're broken.  And I have no idea how to get people to see the real reality.  They have to want to see it.  But once you've been granted the power to choose your own reality, why would you ever give that up?

The Genie of the Lamp granted you one wish, and your wish was to have all your wishes come true, so long as you can keep staring at that goddess damned screen.

I think I've written in the past about how when I spend too much time searching online dating/hookup profiles they end up pissing me off.  I think I'm more hardened about them now, but today on my lunch break while looking at Reddit fellas I saw a couple examples of what I've complained about before.

(1) How I'm pretty much stuck with younger guys because older guys only want younger guys:  I saw a hot 38-year-old, clicked to see his profile and posts, and he's only looking for guys aged 22-24 who are twinks (smooth & skinny body type) with circumcised cocks.  If you're a gay guy who peruses the dating/hookup profiles, this kind of profile is not news to you, you've seen this kind of thing zillions of times.

But 22-24?  So fucking specific.  There's no reason to exclude 21 or 25 year olds, is there?  To me, this guy is obviously shopping for a pre-existing fantasy and has zero interest in expanding his horizons.  If I were 22-24 years old, wouldn't I see this and think -- he's going to dump me on my 25th birthday, why bother getting to know him?

(2) How many online profiles are openly bigoted in other ways -- some guys specify they are looking for a white guy, or for a black guy, or they call people who might like them derogatory names like "no chubs".  Ugh.

(3) This isn't as common, but I saw a personal ad that scrolled on and on with very specific requirements and instructions for his potential applicants -- yet he didn't even bother to supply a picture of himself!  It sounded a lot like a job posting, must have five years experience with cocksucking LOL.

I'm more patient with this stuff now than I have been in the past.  But if a hot-looking guy messages me, I don't give a damn what age he is, what race he is, what his immigration status might be, his height or weight, whether top or bottom, his educational attainment, his experience level -- mainly I'm looking to see whether he's assertive enough to keep a conversation going (without me having to do all the work), shares some of my interests, is willing to show me what he looks like, and has some verbal intelligence & manners.

So, that's Reddit in late 2020, heh.