That’s not how I meant it when 10 years ago talking about regulations being a bad thing.

I meant starting with copyright =\

“AI tool”.

I live in Russia and I’m pissed that they are making its gang in power look almost competent in comparison.

I would say the future is in pooling resources.

Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.

Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.

All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.

But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.

And global cryptographic identities.

Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.

Honestly even in the late 90s it was going down. I don’t think DEC or Amiga or something else cool you can remember have anything to do with the Silicon Valley.

After the original Intel and other hardware things fame, it’s a place that mostly collected parasites living off the dotcom bubble and then profanation and oligopolization of tech. The least important part - the companies making suddenly popular user applications and websites. Their main effect was negative - they reduced diversity, competition and redundancy in that.

In any case … “AI startups”.

I’m so morally prepared to dance when that bubble finally bursts. A lot of today’s rattling of sabers depends on the promise of AI workers, AI drones, AI everything so that a crime would involve only a few real humans.

Suppose I agree, but the plant is cool.

Mega-NPP maybe?

Not really, there’s an OR logical element present in our world.

Divide et impera, applied to engineering. For 80% of things this fast cool solution works, for 20% the simpler one works. The aggregating element to make using both in their own situations transparent reduces reliability just a bit, but the efficiency gain is visible.

And the “80%” and “20%” solutions can further on too use such unifying elements to aggregate different solutions for them. To improve efficiency without additional failure points (except for aggregators).

Nobody does that because the “80% solution” producer wants to capture you, they don’t want alternatives, they want power, and it’s a honeypot.

It’s up to you the customer to understand this. In the classical model. Also see customer associations, which are like unions inverted. Isn’t it funny how we have big businesses organizing, but not labor and not customers? While for them it’s much more important.

As you can see, the aggregator is very important here. We need standards, so that all social media would compete with other social media in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all search engines would compete with other search engines in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all file hostings … you get the idea.

Technology is developed by people to fulfill their goals, more interest - more power - more developed technology.

Hence big tech is where it is, and meshnets-p2p-cipherpunk is where it is.

I don’t think a socialist society without propaganda would be much better or worse than a capitalist society without propaganda.

The differences would be almost decorative, so the socialist variant can be represented as a market of ideas in many democratic organs, with those people more successful by accepted criteria getting more resources allocated to them “for merit”.

Or the capitalist variant can be represented as a system of efficient resource distribution via accepted universal equivalent, with voluntary associations and public morale acting to help those in need.

Those would be both comprised of humans, so without propaganda you’d have normal human hierarchies, human inequality and the resistance to it, human groupings and human hostility, all the same.

Provided, of course, that both are democratic. Otherwise you’ll have Stalin’s time Soviet bosses with their palaces and lovers and cars, and you’ll have Nazi Germany’s industrialists, the former as accountable as the latter and the latter as much part of the state hierarchy as the former.

SpaceX does launches and Starlink does satellite internet.

I think all the Musk hate here misses that moment - SpaceX does what it’s intended to do which is amazingly cool all by itself, Tesla made electric cars more popular, and Starlink made satellite internet more popular.

These are good.

Musk yes, but there are quite a few Ukrainian servicemen not happy, I think.

USA hasn’t yet built anything like “three gorges” hydroelectric plant, tho

Authority is the right word, nothing in this is about actual products or traditional economic value.

It’s feudal (or crook) impression economy. That “AI” is liked by people who can afford to continuously waste money on it. Such schedules are liked by the same people. They are the “Silicon Valley elite” or whatever.

I’ve read once a description by Russia’s ambassador to Persia during Qajars how this historically worked.

So - Qajar Persian court, they’ve received, say, 2 (I don’t remember, maybe 6) modern (for that moment) Russian cannons as a gift. What do they do with the cannons? The cannons stay with the court and are shot for fun at an empty ground with no aim, while the whole court and the monarch moan “ja-a-a-n” with every shot.

It’s the same. The oligopolization of tech has made these people so much money and connections with other such people who have money, that they don’t care about results at all. It’s all shared impressions of what they “already have”. They don’t have to “run to stay on the same place”. They don’t have to compete - they collectively own search, social media, what we use instead of pen and paper, everything.

Or a more traditional example (I might have gotten the years wrong, but I think the idea doesn’t suffer) - a bunch of knights in XV-century tournament armor are not a very good army compared to cuirassed musketeers with a wagenburg and actual discipline, but the societies are built the way that those real soldiers are very rare, expensive and present only in select important areas during real honest-to-god war. While on their tournament the gentry may pretend it’s still XII century and they are competing in useful things.

Oh. I want a droideka bodyguard.

Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that.

For prices set by whom? A moneymaking machine, see? Unless libraries are nationalized.

But if you intend to nationalize everything, then there should be a damn good plan at basically building a commonly-owned corporation to maintain nationalized services.

A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.

Yeah, except there’s one country where subsidizing paid services with taxes instead of fixing laws has both turned into a moneymaking machine for cronies and didn’t make the services more accessible. The country of origin, well, of all those tech companies.

It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it.

This is self-contradictory. Unless you forbid lawyers to work for money.

But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.

The situation always changes, so laws become more and more complex rapidly with a long tail of legacy that doesn’t solve its initial goals anymore.

So no, this can be solved with starting anew too. Just start anew every 5-10 years. If life requires something specific and the real world situation changes, I think one can wait that long. And this keeps the process simple enough.

And the most important part is that this doesn’t allow malicious parties to carefully build up legal traps over many decades to subvert democracy.

Just clean the house completely once a few years, leaving only the constitutional law. Accumulate political knowledge, not rituals and procedures most people don’t understand, with surprises hidden by crooks.

Like mowing the grass.

Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.

This is not exactly what I said. “Too many levels” is when representatives of one level elect other representatives, hierarchically. That shouldn’t happen (the first level might reminisce the buildup of opinions in the society, the following ones degrade to be comprised of the members of the most uniform plurality, not even the majority). I meant exactly more distributed horizontally as an alternative. Functionality-wise too.

That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.

Agreed.

Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.

Actually necessary. Ballot box is almost a scam by now, since you are offered a limited choice based on limited information and can’t just, say, press “+” and write in your own candidate. Almost the first time I see the word “sortition” used by somebody else on Lemmy.

At some point I thought that it’s good that people not interested can avoid participating, but then realized that this is the simplest way to hijack anything.

We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.

No. One can have constraints on from whom such organs are formed. Just no bureaucratic institution should be allowed to self-reproduce all by itself and have its secrets. Only that.

I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance.

Couldn’t be further from truth. So, your representative is supposed to represent you, right? If they don’t do that, what’s better, wait another N years until another vote, or, if they failed notably enough already, call a vote with enough signatures and elect someone better immediately?

This also makes lobbying a far less certain thing, since the person paid might be recalled a few days after. Which is good.

Except there should be some practical limitations to prevent what Stalin did in 20s (pressuring the specific small initial constituency of his key opponents to disrupt their groups ; this was in the Soviet system with a hierarchy of councils electing members to upper councils and so on, so - with not as many levels this isn’t really a vulnerability even).

7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.

At some point it was normal in western countries, even more than unions. There’s a risk, of course, since, well, customer associations and unions might sometimes press in the opposite directions.

But when actual violence and half-legal pressure are denied by the law and the enforcers, these work just fine.

the oligarchy as it currently stands precedes the capitalist state as we know it today. some of them even come from the very same families, like they are fucking kings (they are)

I mean, these are terms with vague borders - oligarchy, feudalism, capitalism …

About same families - I guess in France/Italy/Germany or in Japan maybe.

and that’s nothing, if you consider feudalism lasted even longer

Same problem. Arguably in Britain a lot of it still lasts, and in Germany.

OK. So my point was specifically about modern regress and tech corporations. Not all of history.

Enforcement.

I mean, such things can be false flags. It wouldn’t make sense, the Confederates were much weaker strategically and knew it.

That “treated like a utility” approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don’t like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.

I don’t believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.

It’s not about for-profit or not for-profit, it’s about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.

Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.

So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.

And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”, because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.

The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It’s not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It’s an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I’m pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.

One can even say that this is a market dynamic.

So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.

The problem is

1. in a too complex set of laws (honestly I’d suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),

2. in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,

3. in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,

4. in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,

5. in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,

6. in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,

7. in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.

So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.

LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.

yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.

And I’m trying to say that the state helping them was first.

this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.

Not really. Every month, year, decade is different.

aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.

He had the right ideas of how to solve one particular industry which is the spearhead of barbarism. And he somehow committed suicide in jail.

I think it’s the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.

The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.

The state gives them very expensive projects.

The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.

The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.

So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.