Toots for kissane@mas.to account

Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-22 at 01:43

Thanks to the makers, if you see this.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-22 at 01:39

I’ve been thinking about this anonymously produced RPG for practicing anti-authoritarian tactics since I ran into it last week.

https://survivethetyrant.infy.uk/?i=1

It dovetails well with my general sense that acting extremely normal online and off is probably a strong move for most people at this time.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-16 at 18:59

I wouldn't have posted this knowing I wouldn't be around to look at replies but I have to get offline now for unexpected reasons, so any responses will be slow/in a few days.

The point was, "Niche alternatives will not prevent societal damage wrought by giant corporate platforms knowingly accelerating the worst things humans do to each other, and alt-network advocates better grapple with that right now." The rest is commentary.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-16 at 17:42

I am hopeful about the changes at Mastodon. I think IFTAS is doing absolutely crucial work with very little support. I've come around on bridging, as wildly imperfect as it is, as a stop-loss and a way of keeping fedi more viable for more people who are willing to accept the (nebulous) trade-offs.

But also I love the federated model and I want it to be a real option for more people in more places, so it's discouraging to keep hitting "eh screw the normies" when the societal risks are so high.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-16 at 17:38

"People should just think more critically about technology" is not a solution. "Normies just love their evil dopamine and dumb celebs, let them suffer" is not a solution.

"I don't believe people when they say it's unpleasant or confusing because it's not for me" is not a solution.

"But Threads!" is not a solution.

The window for making fedi a robust and substantial part of an alternative pluriverse of networks is not going to be open forever, I don't think.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-16 at 17:33

I hesitate to add to the atmosphere of dread, but Meta's increasingly unfettered acceleration of the kinds of messages that precede genocides is so alarming.

And—how to say this… Avoiding Meta platforms doesn't confer a get-out-of-atrocities-free card. This is why I'm so focused on the need to build broadly appealing, maximally accessible alternative platforms.

I understand, "It's good if the fediverse stays niche," but that's a solution for a tiny number of people.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-16 at 04:12

This is a story about a human who has developed a ~relationship with an LLM and is therefore way out of my usual zone—the “AI girlfriend” articles always feel like rubbernecking a car crash to me—but Kashmir Hill is such a great writer and uses this fundamentally sad and tawdry situation to tease out some genuinely haunting dynamics. (The context window section made my soul lurch.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html

(archive.ph also has a copy if you want one)

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-16 at 02:12

Would that I had not made a dumb offhand joke on the internet

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-15 at 22:36

I guess the good part about the incredibly dopey TikTok shutdown is now we get to teach all the teens to use VPNs

Edit: It’s a little joke, folks. You can stop exhorting at me and taking offense on behalf of the teens, I promise.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-15 at 20:06

Pandemic broke me is what.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-15 at 20:06

“You’re completely right to be mad but you’re mad about the wrong parts bc you’re relying on malformed information which matters if you ever want to fix things” is sure a weird and annoying beat to have taken up.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-15 at 19:20

PINKED IN made me choke on toast ty @ingrid

https://ripcorp.biz/episodes/a-wing-and-a-prayer

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-15 at 18:23

Any Christine Nystrom readers/scholars lurking?

I'm just cracking into her Genes of Culture—which I found by following a footnote, it seems like she's just about been erased from the outsider view of media ecology, or at least been fully eclipsed by Postman's stance—and I am doing some real hollering as I go.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-14 at 04:27

omg why did no one tell me about the “deux” typo in the top post why, whyyy

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-14 at 04:25

Oops sorry not done, I think the other, quieter reason LLMs-as-AI are going to get shoehorned into everything governance is that they allow technologists to keep focusing on things that sound neutral or blandly prosocial rather than “political” and not being overtly political is a comically huge part of being perceived by powerful people as a legitimate and reasonable force. Just another structural reality.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-13 at 21:14

Hey if you're a supporting member of my work at wreckage/salvage and don't get anything today please check spam filters. Google and co do what they do and I don't want anyone to miss the first discussion unless they want to.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-13 at 18:42

Note: I can't keep you from posting in my replies to express disdain for people who liked NG's work to begin with or preen about never having liked his work or complain about the paywalls that produce the money that allows journalists to follow legally risky stories for months, but it would be cool if you didn't, just as a treat for my brain.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-13 at 18:38

BTW that NY Mag/Vulture article about Neil Gaiman is as graphic and nightmarish as the most detailed things (podcasts and transcripts) previously circulating, but includes new details related to exposing a young child to significant harm, so just, ugh. Keep that in mind when you decide whether or when to look at it.

(Thanks to friends for warning me in advance that it was extremely upsetting.)

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-13 at 18:32

I'm temperamentally not a predicty person, but it looks to me like the coming wave of LLM-centric solutions to new-school platform governance is going to get a whole lot of resources and attention because it's the saving throw/deus ex machina for redeeming the combination of global scale + hyper-acceleration + a generally neoliberal-to-libertarian sense of what's good. I hope some boring-to-capital, sensible, and human-centric things break through.

I think that's all I will say about that.

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Written by Erin Kissane on 2025-01-13 at 18:17

The next moves here will probably be definitive for the near- to mid-term future of the fediverse. Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/

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