adorablesergal

Go out and make something!

๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ Mom, ๐Ÿ•น๏ธ gamedev, ๐Ÿ”ญ amateur astronomer, ๐ŸŽจ artist, idTech4 engine appreciator, DOOM 3 shotgun enjoyer

โ˜ข๏ธ 2D Lead, @dnf2001rp โ˜ข๏ธ

๐Ÿš€ I run @nasa-unofficial ๐ŸŒ 
๐Ÿ”ž I draw porn, yo. ๐Ÿ”ž

โค๏ธ๐Ÿงก๐Ÿค I was here ๐Ÿค๐Ÿฉท๐Ÿ’œ

ย 


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finally nuking my reddit account

it's wild how when we're younger and less experienced we kinda can't envision what it would be like to simply stop using a web site that we form a habit of checking every day almost like that site is a part of our computers or phones or whatever

and then we walk away from it and realise how much of a sink it was, and not even the good kind of sink with dogs.

it's just... all turning into this grey goo, eh? the only time i was landing on reddit in the past year was for obscure tech troubleshooting posts, and now it's all being fed into the plagiarism contraption and i don't know if five years from now i'll be able to find anything of use on the web, like this grand arc of evolution where search started out pretty hit and miss and shitty then got better, and now it's descending into senility with SEO cholesterol clogging the internet's arteries, and there's fuckin autocomplete web articles and mushroom guides on amazon that will get you killed

fuck, i miss the old web


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in reply to @adorablesergal's post:

libraries are great, but we also live in a world that requires us to track down information fast, and it can be difficult to find the time to really slow down and just read a physical book. Ebooks exist but those tend to be crippled by DRM and i'm aware of the shitty things that companies like Libby do to libraries. I desperately want the world to slow down and stop being so shitty to our stores of knowledge

It feels kind of sad, knowing that I directly benefited from the internet (1990 - 2010) and through it achieved so much: financially, mentally, educationally, friendships, etc. And now that period of potential nourishment from its existence is basically over. Newcomers to the internet are more likely to think TikTok is the entire internet, rather than seeing the whole internet, and its substrate surface as it were.

People saw it coming of course, I'm reminded of "Pandora's Vox On Community In Cyberspace By Humdog" written in 1994, that called it all out straight:

"... and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called โ€œthe means of production.โ€ capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management."

The internet is quickly becoming entirely factory workers, harvested by neural networks.

And the theft already happened. The mass harvesting of data already occurred. Now sites like Reddit are scrambling to try and get SOME money for more up-front 'refreshing' of the datasets, because OpenAI has already basically admitted that without human factory workers creating "real data", the "fake data" ends up eating itself in Oroborus-like JPEG compression. It's why OpenAI wants into our Google Docs, Dropboxes, and every corner where Humans actually Create. Because without it, their fake little mechanical turk can't continue pretending to be a Real Boy and make them money with the bezzle.

I've gotten ear-dragged on more than one occasion about not doing artwork for free for people, to actually value my time and my work instead of working for "exposure" and such

and that feels really tangible to practice with my art, but I don't think a lot of us really thought much about all the other random shit we do online as being a product. In hindsight, it's blindingly obvious what was going on. The entire i can haz cheezburger network sprung up around the creativity of random strangers who will never see a dime of ad revenue their memes generated.

there were those who cautioned over and over that "if a service is free, that means you're the product" but what was the damn alternative? to never speak at all? of course no one was going to live like RMS, no one should have to live like RMS, we should be able to gather and chat and make stupid memes and not have it be harvested by idea landlords who genuinely believe every second of existence is a product to be sold

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