Tag: profit

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Business Society The Internet

Pairing: business values

Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar (TechDirt) by Mike Masnick

If you’re not going to moderate, and you don’t care that the biggest draws on your platform are pure nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions, fucking own it, Chris.

Say it. Say that you’re the Nazi bar and you’re proud of it.

Say “we believe that writers on our platform can publish anything they want, no matter how ridiculous, or hateful, or wrong.” Don’t hide from the question. You claim you’re enabling free speech, so own it. Don’t hide behind some lofty goals about “freedom of the press” when you’re really enabling “freedom of the grifters.”

You have every right to allow that on your platform. But the whole point of everyone eventually coming to terms with the content moderation learning curve, and the fact that private businesses are private and not the government, is that what you allow on your platform is what sticks to you. It’s your reputation at play.

This is also where Twitter is going. I think Musk would be fine with either outcome: driving Twitter to bankruptcy or driving out all the liberals and turning it into 4chan with a veneer of carryover trustworthiness.

(See also: Controlling the information platforms, controlling the information)

I don’t get it. Are there that many Nazis that these businesses think that’s a better long-term business audience than… everyone else? Because no one wants to hang out at the Nazi bar besides Nazis. Or are they worried their VC funding will dry up if they don’t allow Nazis? Because Substack’s already dried up…

I’d bet Substack thinks they can somehow pull off the rewards of social media without accepting the responsibility. They looked at their shrinking budget and said, you know what? It doesn’t matter if we enable genocide, because we can’t afford quality moderation, but without this shiny new sell the company will fold. And what are the odds we’ll actually support a genocide?

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We should all be embarrassed that companies in the entertainment industry are taking leadership positions on pushing back against fascism, while companies involved in journalism, education, and publishing, are taking the collaborator stance.

The parts of society that everyone promised would save us from fascism, are failing. The parts of society that the Very Serious People ™ saw as frivolous pastimes, are providing more truth and safety.

This is the Teen Vogue’ification of the world.

— Mekka Okereke @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
Apr 15, 2023, 09:44

The example he highlights of Scholastic preemptively censoring material is exactly as Tim Snyder calls out in On Tyranny: compliance in advance. There are no actual restrictions on explaining that Japanese internment was the result of racism, but Scholastic is vaguely concerned it could be “bad for business” because the topic of racism has become controversial to conservatives who don’t want to talk about bad things white people did to people of color in the past (especially in ways that highlight those continuing practices)… basically showing Scholastic doesn’t actually care about their purported value of inclusion, and is more scared of conservative book bans than public outcry from liberals over their censorship (which is exactly what they’ve gotten — and tbh now the book has gotten so much attention it will certainly be included in book bans and boycotts). Essentially, in censoring this book they’ve gotten the worst of all outcomes: they’ve tarnished their brand among liberals and drawn a lot of attention to this particular book so it’ll be on the conservative’s radar for book bans. If they don’t publish it now liberals cry censorship, and if they do conservatives push against it.

You can’t appease both fascists and their victims at the same time. You have to choose.

— Mekka Okereke @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
Apr 15, 2023, 09:39

Categories
Art and Design Business Culture Featured Technology

The dream of AI is the dream of free labor

Replied to Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (@siderea@universeodon.com) (Universeodon Social Media)

@clarablackink@writing.exchange

The whole damn point of AI is the fantasy of slave sentiences. “What if we had things that could think but because they are things we can own them.”
@emilymbender@dair-community.social

Corporations are excited to stop paying writers and designers and artists and actors and models and musicians and videographers — even developers. They can’t wait to make movies and games and TV shows with as few employees as possible. They are salivating over their profit margins when they can eliminate their “overhead” of employees.

Individuals are excited to create ‘free’ ‘art’ without investing time or effort into developing a skill or style. Their ideas deserve to exist, and they’ll use whatever tools allow that.

Both corporations and generative AI enthusiasts feel entitled to use others’ work without permission or pay, for their own profit. They can’t afford or don’t want to pay for art or professional writing, but they’ve found a technical way to take it anyway.

This is rooted in devaluing creative labor and wanting to mechanize production: corporations perceive creativity as a quantifiable output that they can reproduce on demand with these new tools. They cannot fathom there’s something humans contribute that they can’t reproduce through technology. To them, creativity can be distilled to data. Hard, clear, ownable.

Continue reading “The dream of AI is the dream of free labor”
Categories
Business Technology Work

They don’t only take our labor.

Replied to This is a rant about beds at work by Meg Conley (homeculture by Meg Conley)

Last week, Twitter installed bedrooms for employees. They’re expected to be “hardcore” and being hardcore means working too late to go home. And then waking up and working some more. The rooms look like an answer to the alternative history question, “What if IKEA showrooms existed behind a 2022 Iron Curtain?” But they’re really just a reaction to the relative freedom of remote work and an empowered labor force. It’s just another lever to pull when seeking maximum extraction for maximum profit.

They steal our lives too.

My husband works in tech and in 2019 spent two months basically living in the office for a product launch. He’d already been working 60-80 hour weeks remotely, but then he had to add a commute — the opposite direction from my work. We only have one car so often I’d have to walk home — only 45 minutes but sometimes you’re wiped at the end of the day and just want to fucking sit down, not climb a giant hill.

But suddenly making his partner responsible for *everything* to keep our household going was a cost his work could extract from my body, though I wasn’t the one working for them.

His boss said he’d pay for us to go out to dinner when it was done. As if one meal makes up for months of missed dinners. There’s a photo of me with the fancy drink I got — I look exhausted, can barely smile. My husband was so wiped he forgot to expense it. And we don’t even have kids.

I have multiple friends who have nearly been driven to quit by the tech sector’s on-call schedule.

Because it’s a good-paying job, it’s hard to complain about the expectation to work long hours, knowing how many others have it so much worse. But even though we’re not in Silicon Valley, Seattle has a price bubble of its own. With shitty ramblers from the seventies starting at a million bucks, even tech workers can’t afford a home now without two salaries.

I wish white collar workers could recognize that while they’re rich compared to the poor, they’re not rich compared to the *rich*. If you have to work, you’re not really rich. Workers of all classes could build some solidarity together. There’s a lot of manipulative class warfare turning people who should be allies against each other, when workers are not the root of the exploitation problem: owners are.

Categories
Art and Design Society

Rethinking Success of Art Outside Profit

Liked GOES PHILISOPHY (goesbooks.com)

While these points are in no way true for everyone across the board, neither are they exhaustive, they aim to highlight the ways that capitalism can negatively impact the process of making art:

1. It turns art into a product

2. It restricts the reach of the artist

3. It is a privileged and racist system

4. It encourages competitiveness and fosters individualism over community

5. It links success to financial gain

6. It encourages unrealistic goals

7. It breeds toxic and unhealthy habits

8. It values marketable ideas over others

9. It expects the artist to also function as a business entity

10. It does not foster an artist’s uniqueness

11. It creates a sea of content that too often feels overly similar and repetitive

12. It breeds gatekeepers and toxic business environments

13. It nurtures the tendency to view things through a consumerist lens

14. It is a poor yardstick by which to measure the success and fulfillment of an artist

Very cool project: giving away comics, and gifting comics to strangers.

Their philosophy is interesting and worth considering.

Imagine that instead of a system that ultimately encourages us to favor art that will earn as much money as we can, we are operating in a system that encourages us to create art that will earn as much connection with other people as we can.