And with that, I return to Children of Dune. :theory_gary:

There are plenty of lessons to learn. Propaganda tactics on social media have become a lot more advanced over the past 10 years. But this shit - this shit is baby-brained. It is like people became aware of media literacy as a concept, but only on an extremely superficial level.

People pretend their political adversaries are fake. It is a convenient and self-reassuring story. That we can blow up a server farm somewhere on the other side of the world and all of our enemies will evaporate like the White Walkers after killing the Ice King. And then after that, everything will go back to the Obama years.

At the very least, we should be considering things in terms of The Propaganda Model described by Herman and Chomsky. That the main source of misinformation is not some Death Star we can send Luke Skywalker to blow up for us, but is actually the deeply embedded corporate interests which make up the skeleton and musculature of our entire system of government. The ones who pick our political candidates, who write our laws, write grants for our cops and counterinsurgency training centers, build our propaganda organs, and use them promote stories to justify them.

Another thing the Russian Bots narrative smuggles in is a paralyzing institutional epistemology.

Like the poor smol bean social media behemoths, we are supposed to look at our shameless hyper-consolidated for-profit warmongering media racket as the plucky Woodwards & Bernsteins, tasked with the social responsibility of bringing the regime to justice (conveniently, all we must do is observe from the sidelines and share links to their articles on social media). It is the story of David and Goliath, where the David in question is David Ellison.

We are told there is a "firehose of falsehood," and the only way to combat falsehood is to dutifully read the truth. Where do you read the truth? Well, the New York Times and the Washington Post, of course! The truth is tautologically uncontroversial, undisruptive. If it is printed under those august mastheads, it is true. The further away you get from their good graces, the less sure you can be. Better not risk it!

Elite journalism is a country club, and the thankless work of the muckrakers and skeptics rarely graces their pages. Under institutional epistemology, the whole tumor of critical journalism is cleanly excised. Likewise, anybody who actually gives a damn about concepts like justice or democracy can be omitted from the discussion, due to their prejudices in favor of justice.

This whole Russian Bots narrative is really tiring. It has been ten fucking years of this shit. It is a pervasive story because it is an incredibly useful propaganda tactic in deflecting blame from anybody in power who can actually be held accountable.

As Liberalism deteriorates under the weight of its contradictions (namely, trying to reconcile Capitalism with Democracy), all of our sins can be conveniently shunted to an external enemy. We can keep telling ourselves the lie that our system is fundamentally just, only we keep getting bamboozled by a foreign enemy.

Rather than confront the antisocial unity of the Republicans, Democrats, corporate media, finance capitalism, and rent-seeking monopolies, we are conditioned instead to circle our wagons around them. We are supposed to believe that this unholy alliance is actually democracy manifest, and that it is actually very fragile. That it is dangling by a thread, and how sorely we'll miss it when it's gone.

This facile mode of media analysis completely lacks any power analysis. We are to believe that the world's most valuable social media properties are powerless in the face of common cyber-criminals. As a countermeasure, we not only accept, but welcome increased surveillance and censorship, to the most privacy invading companies in the world, to make sure the people spreading the wrong politics can be swiftly eliminated from the body politic.

This is awfully convenient for the powers-that-be. Also, pay no mind to the fact that these platforms are an overflowing dumpster of reactionary sludge, despite all of this increased surveillance. It has literally never been worse.

This isn't the work of a foreign bot farm. This is the deliberate design of capitalist social media platforms. Bots - to the extent they factor into the equation - are only a drop in the bucket. A bug's corpse on the windshield of a home-grown propaganda machine which is driving straight towards fascism.

https://hexbear.net/post/9740718

Repost: Request for #camera advice.

#photography

From their perspective, any project which digs in against LLM contributions needs to be either forked or replaced (or infiltrated, or taken over). This is a campaign which requires a war chest, the veneer of an auteur's opinionated vision, as well as an army of goons.

That ultimately is what this is all about. The fact that Free Software projects exist which will not accept these labor practices means that there are now some substantial pieces missing from the stack. The fact that the average software company has transformed all of their software engineers into LLM zombies means there are a lot of projects which will no longer accept their contributions. You can't simply pay them to land a patch in (many components of) GNOME anymore (for instance).

They need to recuperate the tech stack and plug these holes. That is the point of throwing millions of dollars at a vibe-coded fashslop dotfiles distro.

These corporations can pay people to develop Free Software. They do in many cases. And when you are paying someone to do the work, you can dictate the conditions and practices of that work (e.g. If you're not using Copilot, you will be replaced by someone who will gladly shit out 100x as much code as you).

But an innumerable amount of responsibilities in the Free Software world are not paid. And you can't force a volunteer to use LLMs if they are convinced it is a socially and ecologically poisonous technology.

Re-posting something I wrote on another site about the recent wave of big corporate donations being directed at hollow fash-tech like Omarchy.

Setting the obvious fascism thing aside for a moment (capitalists love fascism, news at 11), I think it might be helpful to actually look at this from the perspective of a labor struggle. The Free Software community at large has been doing a pretty lousy job of resisting LLM slop, but this is very inconsistent across the board. Some projects have rolled over and embraced the slop fully. Others have taken an infuriating "centrist" position which only demonstrates how little your average techbro knows or cares about sociology, while others have taken a solid principled stand, that we are humans who make software for humans and the corporate practices of churning out the lowest quality product at the highest possible speed is NOT THE FUCKING OBJECTIVE of building software for the commons.

This is inconvenient for the AI boosters. For better or worse, Silicon Valley in the 2020s is built on the back of Free Software and the (frequently) unpaid labor of volunteers. The tech stack of every major company relies on it, and they behave as if they own it. The fact that there are projects out here resisting this drive to slopify - refusing to comply because of ethical and moral principles - is not supposed to happen. They were happy when Free Software was largely a homogeneous corpus of technology they could appropriate at their own will. The fact that they now have to worry about individual projects refusing to embrace this technology has suddenly made Free Software an arena of social struggle in a way it hasn't been for a long time.

Without a People's Army, the people have nothing

If you truly believe that violence has no place in America, you must support the abolition of the United States.

Regarding Jimmy Kimmel, it seems awfully late in the game to be saying shit like "Violence has no place in America." I know Liberals love to pretend that the violence of the state is just an Act of God. Something that comes from nowhere and which nobody bears responsibility for. But that fantasy is wearing awfully thin after two years of live-streamed genocide and the intense retaliation against anyone who opposes it.

I have a mental picture in the grotesque style of an Eli Valley illustration of a slave-driver on horseback holding a whip and saying "Violence has no place in America."

Violence is the only reliable function of this decrepit state. It is the glue holding everything together.

A lot of people seem to be confused here. This is not Trump's war. This is not happening because of incompetent leadership, sleazy corruption, or any kind of stupidity. This isn't happening because the poor old US bumbled it's way into another disaster.

This is the CONSENSUS across the entire political apparatus, Democrats and Republicans. This is the consensus of the entire US media apparatus. This is IMPERIALISM, the highest stage of Capitalism.

In moments like this, when the interests of the empire are on the line, you watch ALL of the dominoes fall. The noble "fourth estate" absolutely frothing at the mouth, salivating over the idea of bombing civilian nuclear infrastructure to turn the world's eyes away from the unlimited genocide they have been pursuing for 600 days. The most "left wing" politicians in our country mincing their hands NOT BECAUSE WE INITIATED AN UNPROVOKED WAR, but because the President didn't ask Congress first.

Harden your hearts folks. We have no allies in these bourgeois institutions.

Death to America

Look. You might not remember this, but abolition was a big issue in 2020. It was the cornerstone of the largest public mobilization in this country's history. And what did the Democrats do when they returned to power? Nothing. They increased budgets for the police and border patrol. They continued building the cop cities. And then they ran for reelection on the pretense that they were the more competent border fascists.

The liberals have completely abandoned these people. They literally have no choice but to take community defense into their own hands, because nobody else is going to do it. It isn't a fucking campaign rally. They aren't doing this to make YOU feel good about yourself.

The liberals clutching their pearls about nonviolence, about "optics," about people not waving enough US flags at the *police riots* have no clue how DEEP they are in the back seat of history. They might as well be zip-tied in the trunk of history. They have never been less relevant.

The well-known phrase "Shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" originates from the US Supreme Court case, Schenck v. United States, which determined (unanimously) to uphold a conviction for distributing anti-war pamphlets during the first World War.

The irony is that the theater (Europe) actually was on fire. Over 17 million people died.

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal"

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding" - They Might Be Giants

Stolen from Hexbear where it was stolen from Twitte