Toots for johnzajac@dice.camp account

Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:55

Basically, it's interactive reality television where we provide the programming.

As a friend said to me: "Social media makes actors of us all".

My point here is that all the folks hyperventilating about "the oligarchs" are literally their product, and if they stopped being their product (it's easy) those oligarchs would...disappear.

Knocking out the monopolists in the early 1900s was a lot more difficult, because they controlled material goods that you couldn't get elsewhere, but you needed.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:55

Everything that big tech does at scale so they can dominate markets can be done in much smaller scales for not that much more money. Look at Mastodon! Each instance is mostly run by normal people who occasionally raise some money for server fees. You don't need Xitter or FB-level infrastructure to have vibrant online communities and social networking.

No matter how you slice it, web tech is not steel or food or clothing or medicine. It's just fucking ad-supported entertainment without overhead

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:43

This, like a great deal of material differences between this era and the last time we saw this kind of rise of fascism, is why I don't think we can game out how this is going to go.

You can't do anything with a broken search engine that looks for information on an internet that is 90% hallucinated "AI" content. A social media network is nothing if it doesn't have any actual users to pay it or attract advertisers.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:41

The wild thing about the tech oligarchs is that if they stopped offering their services tomorrow, most of us would be at a loss for maybe a week, then replace them with the dozens of other, smaller alternatives that they keep beating down below the fold.

They're nothing like the robber barons, who could materially fuck you up just by like, losing a shipment on their railroad or forgetting to ship you steel or cutting you off from oil.

These people bottle and sell the air like it's gold.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 19:23

I'm eagerly anticipating what happens when the fascists need to reward their followers but their masters the oligarchs hoover up all the rewards for themselves.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 18:12

So many people are like "it's not malice it's incompetence!" and I'm like "no baby boy it's straight up hatred I get the feeling nobody's ever tried to malice you to death so quiet down and listen to people who don't live in a sweet little peapod of denial"

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 18:09

Of course, I have to add that this isn't true at all, because Harris lost not because of her terrible aesthetic decisions, but because of the substance of her policy proposals and the intransigence of her Gaza policy.

The aesthetics, the gender, and the racial element were all contributors, but not the cause.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 18:01

I can't help but think there's an alternate universe in which Tim Walz didn't turn into a meek little mouse and instead went to every event saying "All the consultants told me not to say this, but those people are weird as hell" and in that universe President Harris was just sworn in.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 15:47

The only truly consistent part of the modern era of US politics is the march of evil toward supremacy. Every time more and more people "do the responsible thing" and vote for something they think is "less evil", the greater evil advances farther and farther toward complete control.

As we've seen, every decade their advance gets faster, more confident, and less contained. It accelerates.

But that's not because the "lesser evil" political force hasn't been winning bc of "lesser evil" voters.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 15:44

But my biggest complaint is that I don't think their strategy is an effective way to prevent what they call "greater evil" from achieving their very very evil goals, regardless of whether their "lesser evil" party wins elections/power or not.

It turns out, I was wrong.

Not only is it not a good strategy, it's the actual, real accelerationism that we've been criticizing all these "radicals" for for so long.

That's right: lesser evil voters are the accelerationists.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 15:40

I've got an axe to grind with "lesser evil" voters, in large part because they always seem to be behind lot's of fucking evil shit that all-too-often fucks up my life. Supposedly it's "less evil" than the fucking evil shit that will fuck up my life under the other evil people (who are more evil, I guess?)

I also think the idea that voting for a political party you disagree with and giving them power for the purpose of convincing them to change is...dumb as rocks. Straight-up stupid.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 15:38

It's widely misused, too, to shut-down people who vote third party or don't participate in our captured electoral system because of its moral, ethical, and practical brokenness.

Adjudicated in the center and the left, the consensus is that accelerationists don't know what they're talking about and can be safely ignored or beaten about the head and neck.

But I don't think any of those people are the real accelerationists. At least if you take the term and its meaning literally.

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Written by John on 2025-01-22 at 15:34

Yesterday, I was dialoging on here with all you smart fuckers and I typed something that really made a bunch of stuff click.

I've been recently talking about IMAPOL (Inversion of the Meaning And Purpose Of Language) and how it's feels like a core feature of our current cultural era, and this is related.

We all know the term "accelerationist". It's been used ad infinitum to invalidate and shut down people who think the only path out of whatever this is is a brutal correction.

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Written by John on 2025-01-21 at 23:16

I thought crypto was it, but really there's nothing that encapsulates the yawning void-like emptiness of the current moment more than the juxtaposition of LA burning down because of climate change and this announcement.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/tech/openai-oracle-softbank-trump-ai-investment/index.html

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Written by John on 2025-01-21 at 19:45

But this is folly. The EU, should it ever be roused from its comfortable, fat post-colonial post-War repose, would be a more than worthy rival. China has been doing the work the US has eschewed for decades, building an economic empire abroad in the same way the US did in the 50s and 60s. India continues to develop and as the worlds most populous country its needs will be driving its actions, not some fantasy of US hegemony.

What's coming won't just pass the world by. It involves them.

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Written by John on 2025-01-21 at 19:39

First, nearly every tool Trump says he's planning to use to "reassert America's greatness" is a hammerblow to every relationship the country has. Many of them will break, and ones that have never been even remotely in doubt will crack and waver.

The right wing thinks that the US is powerful because it's been annointed by God; like true-bred imperials, they see the rightness and supremacy of their empire as a fait accompli. It need not be maintained because it cannot fail.

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Written by John on 2025-01-21 at 19:37

I don't often disagree with Nwanevu, but I gotta say the whole "everything will basically be the same, only this group will win and these groups will lose" just rings entirely false to me.

This isn't just "one more rung added to our ladder to hell". It's the Acceleration. The things Trump is doing/going to do are material to the status of the US as global hegemon. They aren't just "clown President does weird shit and our allies all sigh" like they were in 2016.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/21/trump-is-back-and-the-resistance-has-been-humbled-into-near-impotence

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