My point wasn’t that in this specific case they made up “superior ownership,” but rather that it was made up as a legal concept at some point in the past, probably by lawyers working for rich people, and it’ll probably never matter to you and me. Like so many legal concepts, it is reasonable, but only rich people can really access it, and, at this point, there are so many of them that they will always have one ready to go when it suits them.

I don’t disagree but I’d say that there’s a more important lesson here: The concept of ownership is mediated by a legal system that gives the wealthy a special pass. Rich people can pay lawyers to make up concepts like “superior ownership” 'til the cows come home, and any subsequent precedent costs $600/hr to even access. None of us should feel secure under this system about our online lives or our fucking houses, even if we “own” them.

I agree that it’s like Apple and Google (I don’t know much about Steam) in that those are obvious price-gouging monopolists.

The difference is that, unlike craigslist, OnlyFans takes a massive 20% cut of all revenue. For comparison, Patreon takes a little more than 5%. Purely from a labor perspective, that’s outrageous, so I do think that it’s fair to demand that they at least do more to justify it, which ought to include protecting the people that actually do the work.

There’s also what’s to me the bigger problem: OnlyFans obviously didn’t invent online sex work, but it did radically reshape it. They are responsible for mainstreaming this patreon-style, girl-next-door porn actress that people expect to interact with on a parasocial level. Those are features that OnlyFans purposefully put in to maximize their own profit, but they seem particularly ripe for the kind of nauseating small-scale abuse that the article discusses in depth. Suddenly, if an abusive partner wants to trap and control someone, there’s a mainstream, streamlined path to making that profitable. Again, OnlyFans didn’t create that, in the same way that Uber didn’t create paying some random person with a car for a ride to the airport, but they did reshape it, systematize it, mainstream it, and profit handsomely off it. Craigslist was just a place to put classifieds, but OnlyFans is a platform that governs every detail of these relationships between creators and fans, down to the font of their DMs. If the way that they’ve built the platform makes this kind of abuse easier, that’s a huge problem.

I agree with you that this article doesn’t do a good job articulating any of this, though.

Of course you’d hate LLMs, they know about you!

Headline: LLM slams known pervert

This is an article about a tweet with a screenshot of an LLM prompt and response. This is rock fucking bottom content generation. Look I can do this too:

Headline: ChatGPT criticizes OpenAI

Jesus yeah that’s a great point re:Musk/Twitter. I’m not sure that it’s true as you wrote it quite yet, but I would definitely agree that it’s, at the very least, an excellent prediction. It might very well be functionally true already as a matter of political economy, but it hasn’t been tested yet by a sufficiently big movement or financial crisis or whatever.

+1 to everything that you said about organizing. It seems that we’re coming to the same realization that many 19th century socialists already had. There are no shortcuts to building power, and that includes going viral on Twitter.

I’ve told this story on the fediverse before, but I have this memory from occupy of when a large news network interviewed my friend, an economist, but only used a few seconds of that interview, but did air the entirety of an interview with a guy who was obviously unwell and probably homeless. Like you, it took me a while after occupy to really unpack in my head what had happened in general, and I often think on that moment as an important microcosm. Not only was it grossly exploitative, but it is actually good that the occupy camps welcomed and fed people like him. That is how our society ought to work. To have it used as a cudgel to delegitimize the entire camp was cynical beyond my comprehension at the time. To this day, I think about that moment to sorta tune the cynicism of the reaction, even to such a frankly ineffectual and disorganized threat as occupy. A meaningful challenge to power had better be ready for one hell of a reaction.

Same, and thanks! We’re probably a similar age. My own political awakening was occupy, and I got interested in theory as I participated in more and more protest movements that just sorta fizzled.

I 100% agree re:Twitter. I am so tired of people pointing out that it has lost 80% of its value or whatever. Once you have a few billion, there’s nothing that more money can do to your material circumstances. Don’t get me wrong, Musk is a dumbass, but, in this specific case, I actually think that he came out on top. That says more about what you can do with infinite money than anything about his tactical genius, because it doesn’t exactly take the biggest brain to decide that you should buy something that seems important.

I actually also reviewed that one, except my review of it was extremely favorable. I’m so glad that you read it and I’d welcome your thoughts on my very friendly amendment to his analysis if you end up reading that post.

Glad to hear it!

Totally agreed. I didn’t mean to say that it’s a failure if it doesn’t properly encapsulate all complexity, but that the inability to do so has implications for design. In this specific case (as in many cases), the error they’re making is that they don’t realize the root of the problem that they’re trying to solve lies in that tension.

The platform and environment are something you can shape even without an established or physical community.

Again, couldn’t agree more! The platform is actually extremely powerful and can easily change behavior in undesirable ways for users, which is actually the core thesis of that longer write up that I linked. That’s a big part of where ghosting comes from in the first place. My concern is that thinking you can just bolt a new thing onto the existing model is to repeat the original error.

This app fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Your friend sets you up on a date. Are you going to treat that person horribly. Of course not. Why? First and foremost, because you’re not a dick. Your date is a human being who, like you, is worthy and deserving of basic respect and decency. Second, because your mutual friendship holds you accountable. Relationships in communities have an overlapping structure that mutually impact each other. Accountability is an emergent property of that structure, not something that can be implemented by an app. When you meet people via an app, you strip both the humanity and the community, and with it goes the individual and community accountability.

I’ve written about this tension before: As we use computers more and more to mediate human relationships, we’ll increasingly find that being human and doing human things is actually too complicated to be legible to computers, which need everything spelled out in mathematically precise detail. Human relationships, like dating, are particularly complicated, so to make them legible to computers, you necessarily lose some of the humanity.

Companies that try to whack-a-mole patch the problems with that will find that their patches are going to suffer from the same problem: Their accountability structure is a flat shallow version of genuine human accountability, and will itself result in pathological behavior. The problem is recursive.

I would love to read an actually serious treatment of this issue and not 4 paragraphs that just say the headline but with more words.

I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can’t change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks “I wonder what happens then,” and while I’m sure that there’s a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,

Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

I know that this kind of actually critical perspective isn’t point of this article, but software always reflects the ideology of the power structure in which it was built. I actually covered something very similar in my most recent post, where I applied Philip Agre’s analysis of the so-called Internet Revolution to the AI hype, but you can find many similar analyses all over STS literature, or throughout just Agre’s work, which really ought to be required reading for anyone in software.

edit to add some recommendations: If you think of yourself as a tech person, and don’t necessarily get or enjoy the humanities (for lack of a better word), I recommend starting here, where Agre discusses his own “critical awakening.”

As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field’s taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial – except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own – that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). T

I’ve now read several of these from wheresyoured.at, and I find them to be well-researched, well-written, very dramatic (if a little ranty), but ultimately stopping short of any structural or theoretical insight. It’s right and good to document the shady people inside these shady companies ruining things, but they are symptoms. They are people exploiting structural problems, not the root cause of our problems. The site’s perspective feels like that of someone who had a good career in tech that started before, say, 2014, and is angry at the people who are taking it too far, killing the party for everyone. I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with that perspective, but it’s certainly a very specific one, and one that I don’t particularly care for.

Even “the rot economy,” which seems to be their big theoretical underpinning, has this problem. It puts at its center the agency of bad actors in venture capital becoming overly-obsessed with growth. I agree with the discussion about the fallout from that, but it’s just lacking in a theory beyond “there are some shitty people being shitty.”

I’ve already posted this here, but it’s just perennially relevant: The Anti-Labor Propaganda Masquerading as Science.

“The workplace isn’t for politics” says company that exerts coercive political power to expel its (ex-)workers for disagreeing.