ETPC

A bit of irony re: that (not good) New York Times piece about how "We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started With Jezebel": The "defining" post being discussed here -- a Jezebel post containing unretouched and retouched images of Faith Hill from Redbook magazine -- no longer contains those pictures, since a change to the Kinja platform permanently disappeared the images. (Though it still of course has pictures for ads and chum.) You can still find them on various bottom-feeder aggregator blogs, at least for now until they disappear. But the "defining stunt" no longer contains what made it defining; as a piece of digital media, it has effectively ended.

This kind of linkrot and link decay is everywhere. Digital news companies and platforms break, go bankrupt, or just yolo their money away until they get bored. The publications and websites that shaped the Internet disappear into stray links that managed to survive, stray ProQuest articles no one will read, the dwindling memories of people who were there, and the theories and vibes of people looking for something to blame.

idk; it seems to me like news companies viewing their news product as ephemeral throwaway content might also be relevant to "the end of a digital media age," but what do I know, I just read and write it

Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you "the internet is forever."

On timescales that matter, the internet does not exist.

um oceans??? are now battlefields??????? to cope???????????

wake up babes new ted chiang article just dropped

The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.

"As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved. As a result, A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor. There isn’t really anything like a labor-consulting firm that furthers the interests of workers. Is it possible for A.I. to take on that role? Can A.I. do anything to assist workers instead of management?

Some might say that it’s not the job of A.I. to oppose capitalism. That may be true, but it’s not the job of A.I. to strengthen capitalism, either. Yet that is what it currently does. If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one."

some friends & colleagues and i talk a lot about ai as a tool of capital. i think this quote sums up a lot of my feelings on the subject.

this article fucks. more folks need to be talking about the accelerationist death cult.