Incremental_anarchist [he/him, he/him]

I’m not a fan of slop and the whole attention economy / arms race social media has created, but fwiw I think it’s less important to make sure people are literate and more important to ensure our society does not require literacy. Iirc over half of Americans are already considered at least partially illiterate, and they’re not really accommodated for adequately.

Also, language and mediums do shift over time and preferring video over text isn’t an inherently bad thing imo.

I like this; it aligns with my preference for restorative justice before punitive justice. I do wonder how they would handle cases like Israel v Palestine though.

I switched from obsidian to logseq and prefer logseq a lot. The whole atomic notes thing never really worked for me, but using an outliner does (and tbh on some pages I just write in prose anyways).

I watched a leftist cooks video essay that brought up the argument that (perhaps - Neilly makes clear she hasn’t fully resolved her thoughts on the matter) insults are inherently hierarchy reproducing. Insulting elon by calling him fat or ugly or autistic is going to reinforce the idea that those are negative things to be.

It makes sense to me. Vertical screen real estate is worth a lot more than horizontal

I don’t think it’s necessarily decades away, and in any case decades isn’t even that long - within most of our timespans even.

You might appreciate this blog, about various ideas and projects by an ex employee of Discourse: https://blog.muni.town/

I think the issue is less that we’re engaging with people physically far away from us, and rather that we’re engaging with so many people. It’s fine if a friend group only talks online and they’re thousands of miles apart, because they can still feel really close to each other through their regular interactions. When you’re in a discord server and look who liked your message and see it’s your friend, that feels meaningful.

In contrast, all these large social media platforms have algorithmic feeds showing popular posts, with comments from users you’ll likely never interact with again, who are all posting for reasons like fame and influence and money, and it gets very impersonal and alienating. It’s clear we’re comodifying our attention, and the interactions feel less like genuine connections with other living people.

So I think the solution is “democratizing influence”. Designing a system where specific creators and specific posts don’t spread that far, while still letting culture and ideas and political movements spread. I discussed a radical social media design based around digital gardens that would try to democratize influence in this way, but there are likely other approaches more similar to what we have now as well. The main idea is to interact with fewer people more often, and you find new people through your existing friends.

All that said, I think our local physical community is really important and one of the biggest victims of neoliberalism and individualism. I’d love a social media that’s actually just for a specific physical locality, with posting, mutual aid, community event planning, organization of CPRs, etc.

I’m aware that anarchists tend to be against copyright law, but I find it hard to believe that a cashless society that relies on mutual aid wouldn’t allow artists to say “hey I’m giving you this art for free, but I don’t want you using it for training AI or otherwise reproducing it without my consent”. In fact, I’d expect artists to probably share stories of people who violated their consent wrt their art, and refuse to give further art to those individuals, per voluntary association. Do anarchists believe that those kinds of limitations simply can’t be placed upon gifts?