9k:RD/ an indecipherable hope against Big Tech (Q618)
Main entry
Motifs or claims (new example)
- everyone agrees that it's too late -> too late for what?? too late to stop what????
- the forces we need to overcome to fix everything are so great it's an almost impossible task -> A) who are We? B) what are The Forces? what is Everything? C) what is Fixing Everything? D) "[unclear task] is almost insurmountable" is one of the only clear parts of this sentence.
well no wonder it's so "almost impossible", you haven't explained what the task even is. - Big Tech
- big tech sucks but what can you do?
- I will focus not on what they did but how they did it -> so... boiling the whole thing down to their intentions rather than their actions? every time you try to realize an abstract goal it always gets distorted and garbled as it passes through reality. the garbled results are the actions. rule out the garbled results, and you rule out actual material consequences as they connect to any specific Idea.
- hope (highly specific metaphorical image for something else)
- The Algorithm
- "Algorithms" are designed to take users that engage with platforms highly and sort new users toward them -> believable. but I think it's worth asking, why? could it be, maybe, that the platform is actually just performing a service of connecting individuals into social graphs because people have come to believe they need that? to make any money the platform first has to be appealing and convince people they have a reason to be on it. so the real question to ask is, how is the platform's real-world function different from the stated goal of "socializing"? it sounds like a joke, but one entirely valid answer to that is "capitalism". capitalist society, as demonstrated by the arrival of Europeans on North America, is characterized by setting down an initial layer of "thingpeople" or "storypeople" that become associated with particular things and that people will then cluster around to form larger fanbases in order for capitalism to scale up into a larger society. fanbases were not created by social media feeds and popular profiles, they were a fundamental characteristic of the existence of the bourgeoisie. the first "fanbases": railroads. nobody back then said "I'm a fan of railroads", but a lot of people needed them and handed over money to use them, so if and when any particular person owned them it had the same basic effect. I won't tell you that the power of Stalin's government over the nationalized industry apparatus in the Soviet Union and the cult of personality were entirely unconnected; it can be overstated how much they were connected, but there wasn't zero connection. so. "social media" platforms disguise and mystify the fundamental structure of capitalist society where the owners of particular corporations and their close allies play an actual role in ordering people into social circles and taking society from disorder into something at least slightly more functional as part of the whole reason they exist. the word "market" is thrown around to describe capitalist society, but it's quite opaque and inaccurate. (why would bazaars have anything to do with the fundamental structure of society?? "market" doesn't give any explanation as to how "capitalist society" could exist.) I find, ironically, that the word "economics" is actually a lot more insightful. "eco"-"nomics" connotes "the laws of houses" — how small socially-linked chunks of people, mainly households or coporations, interact together to form a larger society. that's just it, "economics" is managing society itself period down to every aspect of life and socialization, not some separate sphere of existence called "the economy" or "markets". each attempt to build a "social platform" is its own experiment in messing with the laws-of-houses and either trying to understand them or trying to change them. a "social platform" is social in the sense that the laws-of-houses are social, the sense that they are a model of society interacting with itself and evolving and producing products in order to live and exchanging products. "capitalist society" and "social platform" mean almost the same thing; a social platform is just a small fenced off area containing an ocean of capitalism.
I only think about this more and more as Haven is coming into being and trying to build an alternative video site for "artists" to market to non-artists. you set down the storypeople that are inherently conflated with stories, then you set down the rest of the bourgeoisie, then you set down the workers, and try to convince everyone that no chunk of society could possibly be created without the bourgeoisie. and then if you're very unlucky some of the thingpeople turn around and start using their money earned from selling pillows to pay for persecuting demographic minorities or other countries and everyone wonders how on earth this happened when in a way they were all complicit in setting the thingpeople down and ignoring the thingpeople and storypeople's existence. - People preferred feeds with less out-group interaction and more in-group -> I find that believable. culture never exists independent of social bonds. it forms as an agreement based on whether people trust each other, and when people stop trusting each other they give up what they once cared about — even if the thing itself was harmless. if you thought that feeds only contained things like sports teams and camera equipment and video game news, you might think that out-group engagement could be a good thing, but once you've ever seen a political tweet in your life you realize that for everyday people out-group engagement involves a lot of questions of required beliefs and hazing and heresy and trust and is very dangerous, hence every single social graph becomes closed-off including non-political ones to avoid that kind of danger.
- you don't have to lie, you just have to boost the wrong stories -> okay. this is almost an insight. I think the one error in this is that no particular conspiratorial actors are needed to achieve this. all you need is individuals sorting together all at once into a socially-linked graph that filters important things out through everybody boosting things that achieve group cohesion. to put it another way: Nightmare Moon didn't crash the party from the outside, the party was ruined by the magic of friendship.
this is.... really basic and elementary in terms of political philosophy though, I was "studying" this stuff as a total newbie to philosophy and Marxism back in 2020 or so. I called it "Social-Philosophical Systems" and I thought it was really important and you wouldn't understand the structure of the United States or the historical Soviet Union or China or North Korea without it. now... I laugh at that a bit. I wasn't totally wasting time because I'd set down some interesting questions, and the color swatch system which would allow me to phenomenologically classify tendencies whenever people spot new ones "in the wild" in order to examine if they are connected to any interesting questions of group structure. but I wasn't getting into the most important questions either, like "when Google owns an agora what does it actually own?" or "how do chunks of people in three countries merge into one sea of people?". I had a powerful tool for historical materialism but I then needed a worldwide historical materialism to actually apply it to.
Motifs or claims (Cato Institute)
- The Education of a Libertarian [3] (Peter Thiel, Cato Institute; 2009) -> field: right-Liberalism.
- Libertarians scream into a hurricane / Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane (Thiel) / the broader education of the body politic has become a fool's errand -> why does he not realize this is inherently hilarious
when society is made of capitalism the limited amount of free markets there are is the thing whipping up the hurricane! once it gets going it'll never listen to you. I find it funny that right-Liberals can ever think that political philosophy is even capable of creating a government with more or fewer regulations. the thing is that in a capitalist society everything cancels everything out whether or not it's good and nothing even happens. this is the exact thing that so-called "extreme" people want change from: the actual lack of policies, government, democracy, or freedom. it's simply absurd that right-Liberals show up wanting change, without realizing that being in favor of capitalism genuinely stops all change whatsoever, even change in favor of capitalism. the actual political system that goes with capitalism is that everything which is already true must continue to be true and must not be true in perfect contradiction. for how stupid right-Liberals are you might as well bust out the pagan imagery and portray capitalism to them as a hostile Greek god whose real-world referent is still unknown after 2000 years. "regulations" and "market freedom" are just breaths of air cooked up by mere mortals. capitalism in the real world is on entirely another level from you.
Motifs or claims (Chomsky)
- Manufacturing Consent
- news corporation filters (Chomsky)
Related
- the thingpeople / thingperson -> the motif of human individuals being conflated with a product and the concepts of social interaction and non-interaction being inherently tied up with all interactions with that product.
- the storypeople / storyperson / auteur (sociological) / author (story owner; sociological) / artist (story owner) -> the motif of human individuals being conflated with a creative work and the concepts of social interaction and non-interaction being inherently tied up with all use, discussion of, or sometimes even analysis or criticism of that creative work. when you hold up a Harry Potter book and people start getting mad about J.K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling is functioning as the storyperson.
the concept of "a storyperson" is the polar opposite of the concept of "death of the author". when death of the author occurs it is the tight connection of the storyperson to the story that dies.
Ideologies, topics, or genres
- / meta-Marxism
- / Western-Marxism
- / media studies
- / fandom sociology
- / My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Wavebuilder combinations
- : forms result [Item]
- bourgeoisie ( / ES)1
-1-1 - along with [Item]
- the thingpeople ( / Fy)1
-1-1
- bourgeoisie ( / ES)1
- : forms result [Item]
- bourgeoisie ( / ES)1
-1-1 - along with [Item]
- the storypeople ( / Fy)1
-1-1 - forming from [Item]
- the storypeople ( / Fy)1
-1-1 - copyright ownership ( / ES)1
-1-1 - bourgeoisie ( / ES)1
-1-1
- bourgeoisie ( / ES)1