deadryn.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirlo
(don't know why the preview isn't working, weird)

From the outset we’re focusing on our “exit to community,” where those who contribute to the platform will have a say in how it is run and managed. We guarantee that their livelihoods will not be part of a corporate buyout. Drawing on our deep shared experience with mutual aid organizing and collective self-governance models, as well as our developers’ skills in building and maintaining open source software, we are excited for Mirlo to be a space where people gather to share music and support musicians!

In 1983, you said that “the amount of killing of innocent civilians is being reduced step by step.” You added, “We think that kind of progress needs to be rewarded and encouraged.” This is why we were aiding the Guatemalan President, who was later found to be responsible for widespread human-rights violations, correct?

Well, we were, and I was just transitioning because I thought it was interesting.

apparently the plan was to use humans to train an ML system but it never ended up getting good enough to take over

the Mechanical Turk strikes again

Many years ago, a few biiiig companies started to have this really neat automated phone tree system. You called in, the robot said you were allowed to ask for whatever you wanted, and then it shut up. If you said some long sentence explaining what you wanted, it somehow knew where to direct your call. Background noise? No problem. Not sure what department you need? No problem, it just knows! What a cool robot, right?

Anyway, they accomplished this using cheap human labor. Not sure if they still do this stuff today, but it seems likely, right? I worked at one of these facilities. It was a sad little office building, unlabeled and hidden between a bunch of warehouses. There was one pathetic break room and then The Computer Zone that looked like a middle school computer lab.

You sit at a computer, log in, and put on a headset. A "call" comes in. When someone tells one of those phone tree robots "Hey I need to know how to buy a ____", it sends that audio clip to your headset while simultaneously showing a bespoke array of buttons on your computer screen. The buttons represent different parts of the phone tree. "Billing", "Repairs", etc. As you listen to the audio, you click one of the buttons to direct the call to the correct part of the tree. In order to help with accuracy, 2-3 people receive the same audio clip at the same time. Whichever phone tree button got the most "votes" is where the call went.

The truly disgusting part of it all is they turned this into a competition. You could see your answer speed scores as you went through your shift. You were trying your best to direct a call before the other two people hearing the same clip as you. But if you were TOO quick on the draw and directed a call before the audio clip finished (and it was revealed the caller actually wanted something else at the last second), you were punished for rushing. FAST but not too fast. Those with higher scores on the honest-to-god leaderboard would get a slightly higher hourly wage for a given paycheck. Of course, this leaderboard constantly reset. There was no way to do well and then coast on a higher wage. You were fighting a bunch of other disgraced souls for the chance at maybe getting a few more scraps that week.

Humans crammed in a gray room getting carpal tunnel at lightning speed, all racing in the hopes of getting a bit more than minimum wage. You were listening to audio clips NON-STOP your entire shift. Rapid fire. Pain, suffering, torture, with no way to listen to music or look at your phone or talk to another human being.

And then you went home. Another day of a job well done, helping these massive corporations get a bit more wealth by talking up their cool "artificial intelligence".

I quit that job after a month. It really broke something inside me. When I walked up to the desk where the Computer Lab Warden sat, I just said "Hey I don't think I can do this anymore. I wanna quit." And no shit, the guy was like "Oh sure. Thanks for coming up to say something, most people just stop coming in one day."

I have to imagine every big innovation is like this.

(okay I know full well I'll be telling on myself here, so: no, I have not worked corporate retail. I've done retail, but not at a huge chain, so I'm sure the following was only news to me - but also take my word for it that i assumed this existed, I just didn't know what it was called, or that it was quite this stark)

I was at Fred Meyer today and as the cashier rang me up, I happened to notice a big red exclamation at the bottom of the register screen next to a number and the letters "IPM." i immediately guessed this was "items (scanned) per minute," because of course that would be printed on the screen in order to keep the staff continuously scared, and yes that is what it means, and yes she was failing to meet the threshold

i googled it and the first results were exactly what i expected: people saying that their bosses didn't even fucking care if the cash drawer balanced at the end of the day, nothing mattered except ipm. which is of course because their bosses don't care about anything else, because this is the KPI of the week. sometimes i wonder whose sanity suffers more from this shit, the front liners or the fucking managers

so, let's go over a small amount of context, for the class:

• over the course of a year, a wave of people get increasingly bold with their transmisogyny on the blue website, culminating in a massive shitstorm that gets dozens and dozens of trans women ejected unceremoniously and undeservedly from the website either by staff or by choice
• those women appear here, along with a lot of their friends, and talk about the nightmare experience they've just had
• several people get Very Uncomfortable with this, because of course you see said nightmare experience was largely the fault of a group of tme trans people, and to talk about (or worse, vent about) the situation was introducing Discourse into their otherwise quite tranquil little pond
• some of them, in their infinite wisdom, decide to go up to the traumatized primary target of the previously-mentioned mass harassment wave and feel that it's an appropriate course of action to start an argument about how she's actually the transphobic one against trans men, or whatever, and get jumpscared when she spits something mean back at them (the classic "kys 👍" combo)
• i, and several other trans women, watch this happen and get, rightfully, Pissed As Fuck about it what with having just witnessed this entire thing already play out once (with several of us also having been, yknow, secondary victims of the situation)
• the people who thought it was a Grand idea to get in rita's face then decide that it'd be Even Better to keep the party train rolling, searching for posts and users that they can Also start bombarding with bad-faith argumentation
• i, personally, wake up this morning (read: it was like 4 pm, listen my sleep is fucked) with like 45 notifications or something, a hefty chunk of which are all multi-paragraph bad-faith comments on basically anything i've said at all in the past day and a half
• making the choice to not get bogged down in stupid debate club style nonsense, i block someone in particular who is absolutely flooding my comments section and clearly antagonizing me on purpose
• said person then Immediately block evades (and i mean immediately, like, within 10 minutes) to send me an anon message continuing said antagonism
• i spit something mean back at them (the classic "kys 👍" combo)

but, yeah, you know if we delete literally the first 9 bullet points here then maybe you have a point. guess i'll think better next time