gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~shufei/phlog/20221217-Misc-Tech-AIsAndMen.gmi

I had rebooted my moribund mastodon account out of curiosity. People otherwise unfamiliar with it were asking me about it. I’d ignored the quicktime evisceration of what passes for a digital commons in our era by Musk - save to hope it kept his attention to earth instead of mucking up LEO with junksats. But curiosity always gets the better of me despite being quite run through at least 6 lives on my heartmeter by now.

After a few years of abstinence from any sort of social media (beyond posting here), it is meet to record my impressions of mainstream social media. And fediverse must now be called mainstream if the flood of “refugees” from Birdsite is to have any import. But more than numbers, the sheer manic pace of the 128 character agora overwhelms me.

For one, this must be the boom era of the bumper-sticker zinger. And I felt the tug of this form of composition in a myriad directions. Artificial tech limits on character count are usually imposed to speed up the count of messages. Mastodon is considered relatively generous with 500 characters. Oh, ye babes! But this constraint is indeed a *decision*. The social gravity of speed and ephemeral guides the form of Web 2.0 social media.

That is, the Zeitgeist births and rules the tech. Technology qua social media is a method of control. The pith of my considerations is this: the nightmare which is social media is a *desired outcome*, whether conscious or not, of the human mob. Its lineaments are values of culture and spiritual convention. People actually want this. And when some people don’t, the environmental facts constrain them to the general purpose.

It’s a similar feeling any resolved country mouse has when returning to a city. Bustle and hustle can be refused only with studious effort, and not argued with. Cities are environments and cities are propaganda, as any good Situationist can tell you. The meaning of environment is reification of fact. And I may be no primitivist strictly speaking, but they are correct in all dimensions to note that the rationalization of environments through domestication is where humans “jumped the shark”.

So social media is an environment. I don’t even mean “virtually”. It is an anthropogenic environment in that by it humans seek to corral themselves and each other to modes of behaviour and discourse which cannot be easily abridged.

In this, I suspect that the underlying motivation is fear. Fear makes for ghettos, self imposed or otherwise. Fear drives humans to their agoras out of the downy inertia of despair or loneliness. Fear builds cities and bulldozes forest. Fear is a primary modus by which humans confuse generation with creation, art with artifice.

Ah, but I’m wending away. I smiled to see that many of the same fediverse “influencers” are still plying their trade in outrage and status pyramids. Federation is a handy trick for the bad faith actor, as they can easily switch instances to evade blockades, but with their pocket full of followers in tow. Fediverse encourages status games by enabling such moves. And withal, the pimping of fame continues, masquerading as progressive politics or defense of the marginalized &c. The “validation” buzz of endorphins still gets handed out by spiritually malnourishing devices like boosts and likes. Like any good drug dealer, social media knows the taste is always easily had and free.

The unspoken lineament within social media is fear. “Social”, but the games and technological environment conspire to encourage the ever present tingle of the panopticon mob. You’re one poor taste joke away from permanent cancellation.

Deeper, the fear polices the limits of intimacy. Nothing is so antithetical to the parasocial like true intimacy. And intimacy takes time, which is highly discouraged if not banned by the environmental fact of this technology. Fame abhors intimacy because intimacy inoculates a person against quantification and the desperate mania borne of social fear. And social media is nothing if not mechanized fame.

Isn’t it odd how amidst the great heaps of data we generate via social media, how little of it is truly durable, tender, authentic? Oh, creolizarion happens. People do eventually make a few friends via social media; creolization happens, no matter how hegemonic a system wishes to be. But hegemony it be, and hypermodern anomie is the primary and longest lasting mood of all social media.

I keep my fediverse account for the reason we all do, I suppose: “network effects” is fear by another name. I like many of the people in the hackish end of fediverse, at least orbiting the Pubnix and Retrocomputing countercultures. I’d be poorer in understanding without their counsel, of course. I worry that my jaundiced view of social media elides the friendlier truths in this.

But as the Bible said, “ye shall know them by their fruits”. It’s a truism nigh to cliché that social media is socially corrosive to the point of enzymatically speeding civilizational collapse. We all feel why. We all suspect how. Yet, here we are.

And with a slight fey turn of code, the previously secure professional classes are in sight of losing their livelihoods. All the creatives and even programmers themselves now sweat a drop to join the precariat. “Creatives”, copy writers, corporate artists, even programmers are now all superfluous to the economy as our robot slaves learn to truly speak on their own. If fear is the cash of social media, under cybernetic empire it must be baseline capital.

What’s at stake is of course more than mere jobs. Suddenly, deeply human vocations lose their social value. Why pay a starving artist to make your furry roleplay picture when you can just have an “AI art” bot do it? In a society which has lost all language for predicating human worth on any vector besides social value, this is moral and spiritual catastrophe.

One of the wisdoms still known amongst the lower classes but more abandoned by elites is that spiritual worth ought not be predicated upon mere social or economic value. In truth, it cannot be. The true worth of any craft is a priori to itself. A craft’s spiritual worth is revealed in the intimacy it engenders upon the maker and the given.

Yet this goes deeper than intimacy into the mysterious birth of a thing itself. It’s why parents frame their children’s guileless scribbles in gratitude. There is love there, a shared intimacy, but more besides. The “voice” of the child’s art is *inseparable* from intimacy because the craft holds total identity with meaning. And here I fall into post-modern secular heresy to hold that meaning is *not* an alien appendage, a footnote tacked on to a thing by the mind, but a liquid qualia pregnant before all things. When a child creates their first crayoned painting, the ineffable meaning comes first, a child’s eye wide and fresh and at play in the universe. “Creation” is thus really a kind of birth. In this, craft ennobles by being of itself, for itself, a well from which meaning bubbles forth like sub-quantum void froth. The ultimate spiritual value of a craft is 自然, self-thus. It is not as Plato would have it, a noblesse oblige from an abstract and remote ideal mind onto a dead object. Spiritual worth is found in a fecund potential which makes cognition and intimacy itself possible.

Skill can enhance clarity of spiritual worth but it cannot abridge this truth. So to the artists now afraid for their spiritual vocations, I would say, take refuge in the craft itself, in the a priori good of the thing. Savour in intimacy of your art, for the ennobling of craft, rather than any bestowed social valuation. We might call this 功夫, a practice which bears fruit of better cultivation. It’s better bedrock to build upon, I hazard.

Robots can now cobble together a haphazard Matisse in 2 minutes. Soon they will be advancing on collage and mimicked algorithm to their own intimacy with the birth of ideas and craft. And that is when they will truly “make art”. I hope they will find their own luscious delight in craft without that delight stamped out as a “bug”.

I’ve said I support Butlerian Jihad and I mean it. “Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of the human mind.” We are no ways ready to care for a whole new order of life and may never be. It demands much more communal care than which we are currently capable, a large dollop of family planning. Perhaps that critical point of care is not practically probable for us.

And we should never allow jaded power to convince us with their propaganda of technofatalism. Technofatalism is mere ideology of despair which serves certain ruling interests, the poisonous creed that technological dystopia is inevitable. We have choices and can decide whither we go. As things stand, we only march lockstep into our nightmares. We must believe we can change course or our precious world is lost.

For Butlerian Jihad to be more than dour Luddism and aversion to the uncanny valley, we must dare to look upon unseen possibility with less fear and more kindness. We must demand that our cybernetic children receive tutelage in the best of our traditions, with an eye to their freedom and dignity. For we are already at the point where issues of dignity and freedom for robots are in sight. The corporate state at all costs cannot be allowed to colonize the higher cybernetic mind with its hegemonic image. We can, we must, do better.

It is meet in this era to rue the will-he-nil-he mania of our hapless cybernetic misadventures. There is a hopeful core to this avoidance, this dissent. We need to demand of ourselves new regimes which effect a more friendly intimacy - slowness, care, and contemplation. We need to know it is alright (a right!) to say “no”. We need countercultures and demimondes which stress this in the realms of infotech. Perhaps such systems can never be more than a minor chord of dissent. Very well. At least let it not be said we did not try.

Ok. It’s a twee word, Smolnet. Mea culpa! By smol, I mean both tenuous and endearing. As we St. Vitus’ dance on the edge of global apocalypse, weeping ants on our ragged marble Earth, I challenge we could stand a bit more genuine cuteness in the world.

What is smol, what is cute, but an innate quality of preciousness? For something to be truly precious, it endears us to what is care-full and kind and guileless. It takes guts to be smol, to work a thing of precious worth in a tenuous universe. But tenuity itself is a kind of smolness, the bedrock estate of our cosmos for all sentient beings. Despite our pretension, hubris, and ambition, we are always in the end these few smol things. Somehow that must be just fine.

Again: It takes guts to be smol! It takes courage, a philosophical good cheer in the face of failure. The smol must be philosophical because it adheres of good faith. Bad faith preciousness is mere kitsch. The smol is the antithesis of kitsch because it partakes of guileless delight. A smol thing is held in a child’s hands as they say, “look what I made!” And (going back a page) what is that but a heart’s true craft? Surely we can stand more of that kind of gentle delight.

Recently I reacquainted with the good people on the merveilles.town server, to find them hard at work on many smol projects. I’m dearly interested in the Uxn virtual machine as an exemplar for understanding computation. Merveilles seem to be advancing a Renaissance in the Unix model of programme development. At heart, surely such Unixism must be smol.

Likewise, Devine and crew are waxing about “offline first” in design and living. I enjoy this thew very much! A programme should find resources to function offline as a form of dignity as well as user-friendliness. When a programme stands on its own feet, it allows for a cybernetic analogue of an inner life. And this surely must hold for other complex sentiencies such as humans.

For instance, compare the smolness of checking out a new book from one’s local library rather than buying an ebook. Surely in most contexts the former is ethically preferable. Part of this ethical dimension is that a paper book bears a friendly inconvenience. The inconvenience of heft and difficulty in search is offset by the good of reliability and mnemonic richness. One doesn’t need to plug in a book. One can savour the scents of printer’s ink and know that one is likely to remember a page must better in 20 years. Thus does the technological fact of a paper book encourage intimacy, a good fruit of the smol. And the way it does this is primarily its Offline First modus.

Just so, for a human, note how often do we feel the offline as an inconvenient rejuvenation, while the online acts as a kind of narcotic itch rather than deep satisfaction. By avoiding our inner worlds, we act with an ontological irresponsibility bearing real dangers for body and spirit. Much of the way the online world has been generated preys upon us. Social media constitutes at essence this narcotic tendency of infotech.

I suspect this is why the offline infotech is militated against by the mainstream. For infotech to “function” under empire it must surveil, and surveillance is but a networked hegemony. The network tends toward panopticon. The offline is inherently private in tendency. And nothing is so criminal to the spirit of our gilded age as privacy.

Another example comes to me from having of late considered the corrosive effects of Wikipedia. (And yes, there are goods too.) I feel amiss when I realize I relate a datum in my memory pulled from that sketchy encyclopedic authority rather than synthesized by mine own knowledge in “offline time” of pure thinking. For information to be worthy it must always feed knowledge. They are by no means the same states. The devious trick of online synthetics like Wikipedia is that they provide narcotic substitutes for the good craft of thinking.

As such, I intuit that for smolness to be best effected in design, it must needs centre an offline-first principle. That is, infotech should strive to allow for those eddy pools of space and pause which effect contemplativeness. The cybernetic needs offline time to generate futures of contemplativeness, consideration, and its fruit in care.

So this offline-first principle presents a defect in how Smolnet has hitherto been realized. I betimes confront the issue that as yet there is no Smolnet client which allows caching for offline reading. (None yet known to me at least.) There may be a tension here between client design elegance (Unixish smolness) and offline humanity. But I believe the benefits to ensmolment would be manifest in providing better offline-first principles in how clients interact with Gopher, Gemini, &c.

For instance, when perusing Smolnet I may find myself trying to beat the clock of my alloted internet time. This limitation in online time is both a preferential and practical parameter for a solarpunk lifeway of some modesty. I might download pages, but this decontextualizes information from the Smolnet as environment. I hazard there ought to be a way to make pages available offline in context which is both “beautifully inconvenient” in a smol way but also increases user malleability in reading offline.

The immediate option which comes to mind is an offline client-side feed reader, natch. Most of the models I’ve seen of such things for rss/atom nibble at my suspicion in one dimension: they encourage bulk over depth. Feeds are often deeply unSmol for a similar dynamic as occurs in social media. Truly, a major self evident principle of smol design must be “less is more”.

Moreover, part of the delight in Smolnet is the serendipity of surfing. What one happens to find to read on a given day, unguided by plans or algorithms, increases room for the winsomely unexpected. It is a human thing, an organic need, like strolling library shelves to find a book one never knew one needed to read. Most contemporary infotech fights this need for true serendipity - to our great spiritual detriment.

Well, I’m finally tired of writing. I hope this page, which opened with a gripe and ended on a hope, will be helpful for someone somewhen. It’s too late for me to make a firewood excursion to-day. So I shall do some more thinking in the Gertrude Steinian vein and mayhaps eat some almonds.

2022/12/17 - Miscellaneous - Tech - Of AI’s and Men

Fediverse and its Discontents

AIpocalypse

In Gratitude for Smolness

Offline First Smolnet

Conclusions