To be fair, people are choosing capitalism because they have to make money, buy food, and pay rent.

Graphic designer, writer, commissioned artist, were jobs people could do entirely online. And a lot of highly online people did one or the other, or have friends who did one or the other, and they see AI as the existential threat to their livelihoods that it, in fact, is.

And I feel for them. I really do. If you bought food and paid rent by making art online - especially if you’re neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t hold a normal job - AI tools have destroyed your career. And it sucks. There’s no getting around that.

But the core of the problem is not AI. The core of the problem is the lack of a safety net. Some of the enormous profits from the AI boom should be funneled back into society to support the people who are put out of business by the AI boom. But they won’t. Because capitalism.

Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.

Without getting into the definition of “art”, yes, people will use generated output for purposes other than “art”. And that’s not a gimmick. That’s a valuable tool.

Rally organizers can use AI to create pamphlets and notices for protests. Community organizers can illustrate broadsheets and zines. People can add imagery and interest to all sorts of written material that they wouldn’t have the time or money to illustrate with traditional graphic design. AI can make an ad for a yard sale or bake sale look as slick and professional as any big name company’s ads.

AI tools will make the world a more artistic place, they will let people put graphic art in all sorts of places they wouldn’t have the time or money or skill to do so before, and that’s a good thing.

It may have suffered, but it’s distinctive.

The webcomic space is flooded with generic “good art”. If you want to stand out and build or maintain your brand - you need a unique look. Artists want their audience to be able to look at a character and instantly know they drew it.

(The best example of this is perhaps the worst human being in webcomics today. You can recognize his style in the first three lines of a face.)

I think PA was in kind of a bad place, because they were popular so early in the webcomic boom and so many people copied their style that their original art became generic. What’s going to attract a new teenage reader to PA if it looks just like every other crappy “two guys on a couch playing video games” webcomic they’ve seen?

So PA had to change their style. And say what you will about it, there’s no doubt who drew (or had an AI tool draw) those characters.

I agree. Times change. Putting people out of work is not inherently a bad thing. How many oil workers and coal miners will be out of work when we ban fossil fuels? How many jobs emptying chamber pots and hauling dung were lost when cities installed sewer systems? Hell, how many taxi drivers were put out of work by Uber, and how many Uber drivers are about to be put out of work by self-driving vehicles? When specialized labor is replaced by technology that can do it faster and cheaper, that’s good for society as a whole.

The problem is, society also needs better support for people whose jobs are replaced by technology, and that’s something we don’t have. The logic of capitalism requires unemployed people to suffer, so workers fear losing their jobs and don’t oppose their bosses. OP’s comic shouldn’t be read as an attack on AI, but as an attack on capitalism.

Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.

To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)

Nothing is more punk than food not bombs. It’s just feeding everyone who shows up whether the government likes it or not.

Yes, and, Food Not Bombs is a great example to bring up, because they don’t only feed everyone, they also share literature and talk politics and organize community action. From FNB’s how to guide:

Your meal is not a Food Not Bombs meal if you don’t provide literature and display a banner. Otherwise the public will think you are a church and have the impression your group believes that our political and economic system is fine and that all we need to do is care for those who are not able to make it. We are not a charity, we are seeking to build a movemnet to end the exploitation of the economic and political system.

I think very few orgs do “the personal is political” better than FNB.

It is to turn a fascist society into one that does not need them, one where it is effective to engage in social works and to collaborate with public institutions.

And we don’t actually live in that society yet, and therefore protesting, feeding people, helping drug addicts, and doing odd jobs for your neighbors all remain punk af.

JFC. Selling food without a permit is illegal. Doing most home repairs without a license and permit is illegal. If I install a set of solar panels for my neighbor and she pays me in raw milk and eggs we could both be arrested. Don’t tell me helping your community isn’t punk.

Cryptocurrency is the online equivalent of the neo-Nazi bar.

You know how the story goes, with the bartender who tells the customer “you have to throw out neo-Nazis as soon as you see the uniforms or the tattoos, no matter how polite and well-behaved they are. Because if you let Nazis stay and get comfortable they’ll invite their friends, and word gets around that Nazis can drink comfortably at your bar, and customers who don’t want to drink with Nazis leave, and suddenly you have a Nazi bar”. You all remember that story?

Well, cryptocurrency in online spaces - especially futurist spaces and technological spaces - it’s a lot like that. Cryptocurrency supporters are constantly looking for opportunities to promote cryptocurrency. And they obviously see a movement like solarpunk, which talks a lot about decentralization, and mistrusts the global financial system, and so on, as fertile ground for shilling cryptocurrency.

And if you let cryptocurrency supporters hang out and talk about how awesome cryptocurrency is, they will inevitably start shilling their particular flavor of cryptocurrency. And that’s inevitably a capitalist scam and will inevitably harm anyone stupid enough to fall for it.

And the problem is not just that cryptocurrency is a capitalist scam. It’s that, if you don’t shut down cryptocurrency talk aggressively, you get more cryptocurrency supporters. Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites. You either block cryptocurrency talk or you get a website full of crypto garbage.

In other words, cryptocurrency supporters need to be shut down as quickly and ruthlessly as any other bots and spammers. Because if you don’t you inevitably get a website full of bots and spammers.

Yes. Approximately 73 million people per day, to be exact.

Talk about the API user revolt all you like, the statistics clearly show all those moderator complaints did exactly two things: jack and shit.

https://backlinko.com/reddit-users

Land is hard to get now because of overpopulation.

Once your neighbors start dying off in the mass famines of the next few years you’ll have plenty of opportunity to expand.

And if you make the best of the land you have now, you’ll have more calories than your neighbors and be better suited to take their land. So it’s win-win.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

I completely agree that second hand goods and clothing are a vital part of anything punk. Especially if there’s a particular brand or model that’s routinely found secondhand in good condition, due to its durability or whatever - that’s the sort of information we should share with one another.

I wouldn’t want to see too harsh a sourcing requirement for secondhand goods, even. It’s not like you can prove a statement like “I see these at yard sales all the time” even if you do. And even posts about things that are rare and difficult to find are valuable posts, because they let people know “hey, if you see this at a yard sale, you should grab it”.

Maybe require that every post has a sourcing statement - “this is where I got X” - and require that either the item is still sold or you acquired it secondhand recently indicating the item is currently available secondhand. That will disallow the “I inherited this refrigerator fifty years ago, they don’t build them like this anymore, I refill it with bootleg Mexico CFCs and it runs like a dream” kind of posts and still allow for secondhand and vintage stuff.

… doesn’t this already exist?

I mean to say, anyone can already start a website and call it a wiki, set whatever policies they want, synchronize with other websites via RSS feed or whatever, and open it to editing by anyone and everyone (or no one) they choose.

And anyone does. There are hundreds of thousands of wikis out there.

The point of decentralization and federation was to merge the benefits of personal websites - privacy and personal control of your data - with the communication and collaboration powers of centralized social media. So your account is hosted on your instance and under your control and then you can go post on a thousand other instances with that same account. And I don’t think it’s failed in that.

But wikis are already personal websites. And if somebody wants to federate a wiki they can host it on the same server they have their Lemmy instance on and put a link on the Lemmy homepage.

And the idea that a bunch of people hosting their own wikis with no correction or accountability mechanisms will be less corrupt and have less disinformation then those same people working together to build consensus on the same website? Not persuasive, is all I’m saying.

deleted by creator

Committing atrocities and then using your neighbors as human shields isn’t exactly good prepper etiquette.

But that aside, Hamas is not a community. It’s an armed group. It is parasitic on the Palestinian people. Its tunnels and supplies can only support a tiny fraction of the community and are funded by extorting the community and making the community less safe. What Hamas does is neither individual prepping nor community prepping - in prepper terms, Hamas are quite literally the people who stockpile ammo in order to rob their neighbors after law and order collapses, and it has, and they are.

I will never be convinced by arguments claiming that, at a given level of social and economic collapse, it’s better to not prepare for it and just die.

Nobody actually rolls over and dies. That’s where you get looters and gangs, because when things get bad enough unprepared people compromise their morals for the sake of survival and start stealing from other people.

And frankly, when you look at recent events, the “MREs and ammo” crew have more of a point every day.

Community relationships, community-based preparation for disaster and economic hardship, sustainable communities of every sort, are all very good things.

But in March 2020 when everything locked down and people literally could not leave their houses to get food or toilet paper, having some MREs or a deep pantry or some other form of individual food prep helped a lot of people until we were allowed to leave our houses and get food deliveries and so on. And frankly, if the next pandemic is more lethal and more dangerous and a 100% quarantine becomes necessary, that kind of individual food prep will be even more vital.

Because as wonderful as community is, just a few years ago the world went through an event where community members could not help one another because everybody was quarantined. Individual and household prep was what helped there.

And if you were a Palestinian living in Gaza on October 7, 2023, having a sustainable community wouldn’t mean shit.

What would have protected you and your family was food, water, a plan to get to the border with Egypt, cash or gold to bribe your way through, and weapons to protect yourself and your family on the way there.

Which is exactly what the right wing “collapse of America” doomsday preppers are prepping for - a collapse so violent and so extensive that your community will not survive and your only hope is to flee far from the chaos and hole up in the hope things get better.

And I really can’t criticize anybody who plans for that anymore.

if you wanted to ensure authenticity of any data you’d most likely need a blockchain

Lol no.

are there any actual real world uses for that? Like day-to-day things that make a persons life easier, not harder?

No. Web3 is a marketing scam designed to sell crypto tokens. The tokens are also scams.

Being uneducated on web3 is like being uneducated on the benefits of Amway. Some information isn’t worth the neurons it takes to store.