I don’t want to take away from the general thrust of your point, I just don’t think we have actually seen boycotts that people were actually fired up en masse to enforce.

I think up until right this very moment the general center of mass of society has been largely ok with most of what capitalism is, I think that is going to continue to drastically change, and we will see a lot more wildcat boycotts of companies that significantly hurt them.

That being said I agree that overly focusing on that as a strategy isn’t necessarily wise, but boycotts are definitely a weapon that can absolutely blow up the bridges of corporate 'Murica.

Boycotts are performative stunts that feel good but don’t have impact on companies and even gets more attention ON those companies.

No they aren’t? People just haven’t actually been pissed off enough to actually wield the weapon of “ok, fine, now I will not buy ANYTHING from you”.

Boycotts most definitely work, Tesla’s stock is plummeting, and one of the major reasons is an aggressive and enthusiastic boycott of buying Telsas (also they suck).

This isn’t to say in any given situation a boycott is the best strategy to use, or that your organizing energy isn’t better spent elsewhere, but don’t dismiss boycotts when we are seeing one of the most effective high profile ones in recent memeory be VERY successful.

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Unlike the serial killer Bryan Thompson who used indiscriminate means of murder which not only brutally killed his victims but destroyed their loved ones lives too with all of the collateral damage.

Bryan Thompson is the mass murderer here, Luigi allegedly stopped the murderer in a way that put no one else at unnecessary risk.

Let’s talk about something interesting for once like color theory or classical paintings

No

Some American drama, another one in the long streak of news. There is no hate, there is no love. The only constant is indifference.

Don’t you understand this is the precise mindset that is powerless to resist fascism and in fact sets the table for it?

The point of the firehose is so you stop caring, congratulations you did it! Do you want a medal?

There is no getting out of this fascist hellhole without mass protest, but if the ruling class wants to turn that into riots against the rich, ok then.

ACAB

I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.

One man’s slowing growth is another man’s hardening growth (me, from reading this headline).

They should name their union Unionvision

Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal.

This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.

I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this

Why are we acting like this is a detail.

Why did I have to burrow all the way down to this spot to see this?

The conversation should begin, or very nearly begin with this as it puts EVERYTHING ELSE around bluesky hype into question, it transmutes the castles you are describing into constructions of sand that might topple any moment to forces of money, greed and effective (even if not explicit) centralized control.

sigh I don’t mean to attack you personally, but this conversation feels so warped sometimes.

Right… isn’t the obvious response to this “holy shit, they really don’t have a business model even remotely figured out here???” which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of “sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions”.

This isn’t difficult, it is just exhausting.

What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has…

Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can’t stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.

Yeah sorry I am tired and I realized after re-reading your response and my response that I misread you and should have taken more time to think my response over I apologize.

Thank you for the thoughtful response, I am sorry I didn’t give it the space in my mind it deserved!

edit would it honor you if I flicked some snot at you in solidarity?

Of course, this is also something artists who create and performs art for an audience understands, as much as expression can be about vulnerability it can also be about lying, twisting the truth and getting people to agree to terrible things because the way you deliver it is charismatic or distracts sufficiently from the material reality.

All of this to say, yes, manipulation is still rampant, but we are talking in an a semi-abstracted space, manipulation will always be possible it is simply a question of how obvious it is to authentic users and/or how costly it is to create sufficiently convincing astroturfing bots and consensus.

Your response doesn’t invalidate my point (I don’t mean to assume it does or take a negative tone), my point is that public conversation where people explain their arguments and give sources and people can respond and critique each other with no centralized authority necessarily determining the existential ability of users to participate in the conversation (i.e. you get banned from reddit for mentioning luigi) is the best solution we have. This is the fundamentally difficult problem of social media, all the programming, scaling up of server architecture, design of protocols, UIs and coding of clients, apps etc… that is the easy stuff honestly.

I really have very little tolerance for people on the continuum of techbro to naive-libertarian that try to invent lots of technical hypothetical solutions to this that all either boil down to systems of centralized control, or wildly unrealistic systems that will never take off the ground like fantastic depictions of flying machines…

Lets get straight to the point, the hard problem here is that philosophically there really is no shortcut to tell AI slop from genuine real information, there also can fundamentally be no logical operation you can perform that can seperate the “real” from “bot spam” because you fail at the first step of defining “real” especially if you are a techbro or libertarian fool who has never thought through the implications of any of this (see the shitshow that is the social media hellhole gab).

I think a lot of people I am tempted to refer to as “centrist”, though that is a problematic generalization it is of course more complicated, want to believe we just need more authoritarianism and advanced technology to solve this problem, and it is ultimately a dangerous fantasy.

At a philosophical level, which let me remind everyone, is the level you need to talk at before you ever bother thinking about technical implementations and advanced AI fact checkers blah blah blah… the only thing we can really do is design spaces that make it most likely for the human parts of real information to shine through in a way that makes it apparent that it is unlikely that information was generated by a bot or by a nefarious actor.

This is a game of probabilities, like trying to guess someone’s intentions or understand what they are feeling, we might get very very very good at doing so but ultimately there is always a significant likelihood that we are wrong either because of a lack of context or just because that is how things go with unpredictable chaotic things…

So then how do we design spaces so that they let the authenticity of “real” things shine through? I would argue the answer is genuine, spontaneous conversation and interaction in public or semi-public shared spaces. Forums, lemmy/reddit-likes and other forms of public discussion create conversations and as human beings we are INCREDIBLY good at observing interactions between strangers and deducing if those interactions feel genuine or not.

We can often be wrong about it, but anybody that has done theater for any amount of time, or really done any kind of art for an audience, knows that though the audience may not be able to put into words why something feels inauthentic the moment it becomes so they notice. That is why art performed to an audience is so endlessly compelling and why you can spend a lifetime learning from it.

What we can hope to do, and will always at some level fail at because we can never be ideal, is to help build the “real” collectively through public conversation, disagreement, explanation and sharing of sources of information.

Ok there’s a point when you get so obsessed about shoving colonialism into EVERY conversation it just gets funny.

aw thank you, that is a very sincere compliment, as cynical as I can be sometimes it feels good to know I haven’t lost a youthful perspective : )

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

East coast got lucky last year with hurricanes given the bonkers forecast, this year the ocean hasn’t cooled down any (very alarming) and east coast might get slammed.

No, it is far less environmentally friendly than rc bots made of metal, plastic, and electronics full of nasty little things like batteries blasting, sawing, burning and smashing one another to pieces.

Definitely falls under the category of a Trap ICE card.