He / They

  • 9 Posts
  • 943 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • The real means to prevent this is unionizing, which is really the answer to most other techbro-hellscape problems too. Just like Hollywood is putting anti-ai clauses in their contracts, so too will tech workers need to. Unfortunately, given that the end goal is to remove the IT workers entirely, this is still only a delay if companies push ahead, since just like scabs, there will always be people willing to sell their fellow workers down the river for their own enrichment.

    But we’re not even close to that point; most tech workers think unionizing is a 4-letter word. There’s always a private chat room where folks are lamenting the absolute class-ignorance of their coworkers who are all convinced they’re going to stumble into unicorn stock options soon, despite multiple rounds of layoffs each year now being standard in tech.

    The real question is what has to happen to end this horrible capitalist nightmare in general.




  • No, this distinction prevents publishers from co-opting “indie” as a label, which people support because of that artistic discretion, and hiding it behind their opaque promises of such independence that no one can verify. You cannot trust a dev hasn’t been influenced by a publisher when they’re present, so the only way to ensure that is to not have a publisher present.

    I don’t know that movie, but I do know actual indie devs who use e.g. Patreon for funding. It’s not about not having money, it’s about who your money comes from, and whether there can be hidden stipulations on it. With publishers, there always are.


  • As someone with transphobic parents (including one who was actually fired for repeatedly and very pointedly dead-naming, we found out later) and a trans nephew, in their cases I there are 2 things I’ve seen:

    1. the “it’s not real”/ “young people made it up” thing:

    This is something my less ‘angry’ transphobic dad does, just writing it off as a ‘fake’ trend where young people do it because of either peer pressure or for attention (positive or negative). He continuously dead names my trans nephew when not in his presence because he doesn’t think it matters to anyone else, but will usually not do so to his face.

    1. the “I don’t like it, and I’m personally offended by things I dislike, and they’re bad people for offending me” thing:

    This is my mom, who was fired for continuously dead-naming a coworker and then loudly refusing to stop. She is very prudish, very conservative, and is just an all-around craven and bitter person.

    She just pretends my nephew doesn’t exist, or if forced to talk about him, insists that he’s been brainwashed by his mom. She literally gets angry at the mere existence of trans people, because to her, being confronted with something she doesn’t like is literally a personal offense.

    This is in line with her reaction to any criticism, and also her tendency to eventually hate anyone she has to interact with frequently enough, because no one perfectly agrees with you about everything. Not a joke, she used to change jobs every 1-2 years, and each new place she worked would follow the same progression: “I love my new coworkers, everyone’s so nice.” -> “The people here are so mean to me/ ignore me/ etc”. She lives alone, has basically no friends, and is miserable from what I can tell. She’s also super racist, but swears up and down otherwise, but that’s a story for another time.

    tl;dr either 1) dismissive, or 2) have zero empathy and just want everyone to conform to their worldview.







  • You keep using the word “useful” in a way that suggests you’ve narrowly defined it in your head to exclude art. Life without art quickly results in a whole lot of death. Even the poorest humans throughout history have created music and art, because it’s a fundamental part of human life. Just because art is less critical to immediate survival in most cases than eating doesn’t make it any less necessary than it; shelter being more or less critical than food in a given situation (deadly sub-zero blizzard, more critical. Temperate area with no dangerous weather or predators, less critical) also doesn’t make it more or less necessary, it’s just a varying order of necessity. Being anti-Capitalist is important, but I feel like you’ve written off “professional” art as the domain of Capitalism rather than another victim of it (which food is as well, for that matter).




  • immoral people existing is not the problem here

    True. The profit motive is. People pushing harmful content are doing it because it makes them money, not because they’re twirling their moustaches as they relish their evil deeds. You remove the profit motive, you remove the motivation to harm people for profit.

    the difference is that there isn’t an algorithm that acts as a vector for harmful bullshit

    The algorithms boost engagement according to 1) what people engage with, and 2) what companies assess to be appealing. Facebook took the lead in having the social media platform own the engagement algorithms, but the companies and people pushing the content can and do also have their own algorithmic targeting. Just as Joe Camel existed before social media and still got to kids (and not just on TV), harmful actors will find and join discords. All that Facebook and Twitter did was handle the targeting for them, but it’s not like the targeting doesn’t exist without the platforms’ assistance.

    Said bad actors do not exist in anywhere near the same capacity. Imo the harm of public chat rooms falls under the “parents can handle this” umbrella. Public rooms are still an issue, but from experience being a tween/teen on those platforms, it’s not even close to being as bad.

    It wasn’t as bad on those… back when we were teens. It absolutely is now. If anything, you’ll usually find that a lot of the most harmful groups (red-pill/ manosphere, body-image- especially based around inducing EDs- influencers) actually operate their own discords that they steer/ capture kids into. They make contact elsewhere, then get them into a more insular space where they can be more extreme and forceful in pushing their products, out of public view.

    If it was the case that it was just individual actors on the platform causing the harm and not the structure of the platforms incentivizing said harm, then we would see more of this type of thing in real life as well.

    I’m not saying it’s all individuals, I’m saying the opposite; it’s companies. Just not social media companies. Social media companies are the convenient access vector for the companies actually selling and pushing the harmful products and corollary ideas that drive kids to them.

    I struggle to think of a more complete solution to the harm caused by social media to children than just banning them.

    Given that your immediate solution was to regulate kids instead of regulating companies, I don’t think you’re going to be interested in my solutions.


  • despite how harmful it is for society as a whole, and especially children

    If you don’t understand that the motivation is to target kids with ads and influencer content designed to push products, you’re not going to solve anything. Kids have to have spaces to communicate with each other in order to develop healthy socialization skills. Locking them in a proverbial box is not healthy, and guess what, we killed off 99% of third spaces that welcome kids.

    If social media is banned for under 16’s, then children would have to communicate with normal chat apps.

    I feel like you are envisioning “chat apps” to mean “text-only”, but chat apps have been multimedia/ multi-modal, and multi-user (i.e. not 1:1 messaging) for a long time now, and can be just as easily infiltrated by the same actors targeting kids on social media.

    at some point some systemic problems are better served by systemic solutions

    This is not a solution, this is a band-aid that doesn’t attack the root cause whatsoever.