I agree that “publicly owned, publicly funded” would be a fine option (but which public? Is twitter global or for the USA or for California?) Good luck making the case for $5 billion/year new tax revenues to fund that new expense. Until then, there are small janky services on the Fediverse which rely on donations and volunteer work.
Yes, all of these services should perish. But if you repeatedly chose to build community on a for-profit service that is bleeding money, you can’t complain that it eventually runs out and either goes bankrupt or is restructured to make more money. Valente wants the perks of a site that spends a lot of money, but democratic government and no annoying ads or tracking.
you run an overpriced web hosting company and run conferences for race scientists. my bayesian intuition tells me humanity will probably be fine, or perhaps better off.
Someone in the comments calls them out: “if owning a $16 million conference centre is critical for the Movement, why did you tell us that you were not responsible for all the racist speakers at Manifest or Sam ‘AI-go-vroom’ Altman at another event because its just a space you rent out?”
OMG the enemies list has Sam Altman under “the people who I think have most actively tried to destroy it (LessWrong/the Rationalist movement)”
I agree that a big part of the problem is financialized capitalism (whether VC money or Reddit’s stock market speculation or the Putin regime realizing that they could just buy LiveJournal). We also have the right to take generous paychecks from Substack, or host all our video on Youtube for free. But we can’t expect that Substack will be as generous forever or YouTube could offer exactly what it offers today minus the ads and tracking and pay for itself. There are lots of Internet communities which are decentralized or nonprofit or democratically governed but they don’t have the budgets of giant corporate services.
Online communities can also fade for mundane reasons like “failure to recruit new members as fast as old members leave” or “founders have a tiff and the community breaks up into warring factions” or “old site was designed for laptops and dialup, now we have smartphones and broadband, but our user base does not want to change.” Financial speculation make this worse but community management is hard.
Not at all. I am saying that we cannot all have our own digital Versailles and servants forever after. We can have our own digital living room and kitchen and take turns hosting friends there, but we have to do the work, and it will never be big or glamorous. Valente could have said “big social media sucks but small open web things are great” but instead she wants the benefits of big corporate services without the drawbacks.
I have been an open web person for decades. There is lots of space there to explore. But I do not believe that we will ever find a giant corporation which borrows money from LutherCorp and Bank of Mordor, builds a giant ‘free’ service with a slick design, and never runs out of money or starts stuffing itself with ads.
A point that Maciej Ceglowski among others have made is that the VC model traps services into “spend big” until they run out of money or enshitiffy, and that services like Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal offer ‘social-media-like’ experiences on a much smaller budget while earning modest profits or paying for themselves. But Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal are never going to have the marketing budget of services funded by someone else’s money, or be able to provide so many professional services gratis. So you have to chose: threadbare security on the open web, or jumping from corporate social media to corporate social media amidst bright lights and loudspeakers telling you what site is the NEW THING.
In an ideal world, reddit communities could have moved onto a self-hosted or nonprofit service like LiveJournal became Dreamwidth. But it was not a surprise that a money-burning for-profit social media service would eventually try to shake down the users, which is why my Reddit history is a few dozen Old!SneerClub posts while my history on the Internet is much more extensive. The same thing happened with ‘free’ PhpBB services and mailing list services like Yahoo! Groups, either they put in more ads or they shut down the free version.
Its not nihilism to observe that Reddit is bigger and fancier than this Lemmy server because Reddit is a giant business that hopes to make money from users. Online we have a choice between relatively small, janky services on the Internet (where we often have to pay money or help with systems administration and moderation) or big flashy services on corporate social media where the corporation handles all the details for us but spies on us and propagandizes us. We can chose (remember the existentialists?) but each comes with its own hassles and responsibilities.
And nobody, whether a giant corporation or a celebrity, is morally obliged to keep providing tech support and moderation and funding for a community just because it formed on its site. I have been involved in groups or companies which said “we can’t keep running this online community, we will scale it back / pass it to some of our users and let them move it to their own domain and have a go at running it” and they were right to make that choice. Before Musk Twitter spent around $5 billion/year and I don’t think donations or subscriptions were ever going to pay for that (the Wikimedia Foundation raises hundreds of millions a year, and many more people used Wikipedia than used Twitter).
I think I read that post and thought it was incredibly naive, on the level of “why does the barkeep ask if I want a drink?” or “why does the pretty woman with a nice smile want me to pay for the VIP lounge?” Cheap clanky services like forums and mailing lists and Wordpress blogs can be maintained by one person or a small club but if you want something big, smooth, and high-bandwidth someone is paying real money and wants something back. Examples in the original post included geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter and those were all big business which made big investments and hoped to make a profit.
Anyone who has helped run a medium-sized club or a Fedi server has faced an agenda item like "we are growing. Input of resources from new members is not matching the growth in costs and hassle. How do we explain to the new members what we need to keep going and get them to follow up? "
There is a whole argument that VC-backed for-profit corporations are a bad model for hosting online communities but even nonproffits or Internet celebrities with active comments face the issue “this is growing, it requires real server expenses and professional IT support and serious moderation. Where are those coming from? Our user base is used to someone else invisibly providing that.”
I have never met Ceglowski or talked to anyone involved in his movements. These days I am doing some local things rather than join in the endless smartphone arguments about “everyone should be an activist and organizer!” vs. “I tried that and the things that make me good at writing long essays about politics / viral social media posts make me bad at organizing to elect a city counselor.”
I wonder what would have happened if Ceglowski had kept focused on talks and on working with the few Bay Area tech workers who were serious about unionizing, regulation, and anti-capitalism. It seemed like after the response to his union drive was smaller and less enthusiastic than he had hoped, he pivoted to cybersecurity education and campaign fundraising.
One of his warnings was that the megacorps are building systems so a few opinionated tech workers can’t block things. Assuming that a few big names will always be able to hold back a multibilliondollar company through individual action so they don’t need all that frustrating organizing seems unwise (as we are seeing in the state of the market for computer touchers in the USA).
There is a Yud quote about closet goblins in More Everything Forever p. 143 where he thinks that the future-Singularity is an empirical fact that you can go and look for so its irrelevant to talk about the psychological needs it fills. Becker also points out that “how many people will there be in 2100?” is not the same sort of question as “how many people are registered residents of Kyoto?” because you can’t observe the future.
His talks are great, but his time as a union organizer and campaign fundraiser left him so disillusioned that he headed in a reactionary direction (and neglected the business that lets him throw himself at random projects). He is a case study why getting on twitter is a very bad idea.
Maciej Ceglowski said that one reason he gave up on organizing SoCal tech workers was that they kept scheduling events in a Google meeting room using their Google calendar with “Re: Union organizing?” as the subject of the meeting.
The latest poster who is pretty sure that Hacker News posts critical of YCombinator and their friends get muted like on big corporate sites (HN is open that they do a lot of moderation, but some is more public than others; this guy is not a fan of Omarchy Linux) https://マリウス.com/the-mysterious-forces-steering-views-on-hacker-news/
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Author works for something called Varda Space (guess who is one of the major investors? drink. Guess what orifice the logo looks like? drink) and previously tried to replicate a claimed room-temperature superconductor https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-diy-race-to-replicate-lk-99/
Some interesting ethnography of private space people in California: "People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren’t. "
Page uses that “electrons = electricity” metonymy that prompt-fonding CEOs have been using
I also enjoy :
Radiation/shielding impacts on mass ignored; no degradation of structures beyond panel aging
Getting high-powered electronics to work outside the atmosphere or the magnetosphere is hard, and going from a 100 meter long ISS to a 4 km long orbital data center would be hard. The ISS has separate cooling radiators and solar panels. He wants LEO to reduce the effects of cosmic rays and solar storms, but its already hard to keep satellites from crashing into something in LEO.
Possible explanation for the hand waving:
I love AI and I subscribe to maximum, unbounded scale.
I agree that its gross to discuss a lot of this in public, and that underage sex is often an ethical grey area. I had no idea that the person who accused BD of pushing him into substance use and extreme BDSM scenarios is also the person who allegedly had sex underage with a MIRI staffer while living in a Rationalist group home.
I can imagine Peter Singer’s short-termist EA splitting off from the longtermists, but I have a hard time imagining any part of the EA movement aligning itself against global capitalism and American hegemony. If you are in to that there are movements which have better parties and more of a gender balance than Effective Altruism.