Your definition of the internet as just modern social media is, in my opinion, deeply reductive. There is so much beautiful, useful and enlightening stuff out there on the internet, much more than any one person could ever hope to even delve, let alone hold within their mind. And yes, corporate interests have been behind social media from the first “like”. Does that mean that maybe people should go out and touch grass? Yes, of course it does. Does that mean that all social media is inherently evil? I mean, maybe? I’m willing to be convinced that even somewhere federated might be irredeemably corrupted by purpose and intent as a tool, much like the rifle and bomb up above. (I actually agree with your earliest point about how the block feature on Lemmy was likely implemented in that way to allow for minority opinions to have the last word, often to the benefit of Tankies.) But the entire technology of the internet as nothing more than the opiate of the masses? No. Just because you seem to be disillusioned by it doesn’t mean that all effort to use digital connections is futile, let alone that that is somehow causing all of the world’s problems. The problems we’re seeing today are just the consequences of the political and regulatory decisions of the last 100 years, from Ratfucking to the failure of Antitrust, from climate change to corporate capture. Certainly sped up by the vast acceleration in information transfer rates from the 90s to now, but none of them caused by it. Even the existence of Billionaires is a symptom, not the cause. The root cause is debatable, but I would posit that it is the laissez-faire capitalist perspective of most governments in the world with respect to corporate regulation in all respects.

I appreciate your response. If you think that the invention of the internet is why we are failing as a species, that it is the thing destroying our planet, then it seems I have much more work to do. Corporate greed and political corruption are what is literally destroying our planet. I agree: talk is cheap. Go find a way to make corporations, billionaires, and corrupt politicians fear the people.

From someone who’s on the spectrum to another: To classify a difference in focus or a difference in processing as a defect is inaccurate. “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will go through life believing it is stupid”. There are things that come naturally to neurodivergent brains of which neurotypical brains are utterly incapable. “Hyperfixation” is just a way of saying that we become subject matter experts faster than other people. Even the reviled “attention deficit” is just our mind getting bored of things we’ve seen before. You are an explorer of the cosmos. If someone else says you are less, just because you find it difficult to care about the meaningless monotony of social constructs, that is a limitation not of you, but of them. Fuck 'em. Find your superpower, and follow it.

I figured out that I am preternaturally talented at classifying bits of knowledge and drawing them together to form syllogisms and comparisons. This has made me find my life’s work in teaching chemistry. I get go be paid to be an alchemist, teaching the arcane secrets of the universe to students, showing them how we have learned to bend the very fundaments of reality to our will. I think that’s pretty neat.

I’m a science teacher. I have serious conversations with unserious children every day. It’s what I do.

Don’t kill yourself. Engagement with people through a digital medium is not a sin.

Also, if I mischaracterized your position in calling it nihilism, I’m sorry. It seemed like your primary thesis was “none of this matters, and to think it does is inherently absurd, so you should do nothing”. To me, that sounds like nihilism.

A take with which I disagree, but mostly a fair one. If you want to live an unexamined life, it’s not like that’s any of my business. You are absolutely correct on your read of me. I am committed to arcane esoterica, so that’s what I’m doing here. I’m here to discuss, and to learn, and I genuinely want to explore the limits of my understandings, identify my biases, and catch my fallacies, so when someone throws out some take that seems spectacularly inane, like “all technologies are tools, and all tools are the same”, I want to know if I’m missing something.

As far as why I dare to be so “absurd”: I’m inclined to wonder why you have decided that your personal nihilism means that no-one else should be able to have a serious discussion of any kind. That’s kind of sad.

You know what? They can go ahead and slander me. Fine. Good for them. They’ve shown they aren’t interested in actual argument. I agree with your point about the whole slander thing, and maybe there is some sad little invective, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, further belittling my intelligence to try to console themself. If other people read it and think “yeah that dude’s right”, then that’s their prerogative. I’ve made my case, and it seems the best they can come up with is projection and baseless accusation by buzzword. I need no further proof of their disingenuity.

EDIT: now I understand. After going through your comments, I can see that you just claim confirmation bias rather than actually having to support your own arguments. Ironic that you seem to show all of this erudition in your comments, but as soon as anyone questions your beliefs, you just resort to logical buzzwords. The literal definition of the bias you claim to find. Tragic. Blocked.

While this may be true for technologies, tools are distinctly NOT inherently neutral. Consider the automatic rifle or the nuclear bomb. In the rifle, the technology of the mechanisms in the gun is the same precision-milled clockwork engineering that is used for worldwide production automation. The technology of the harnessing of a nuclear chain reaction is the same, whether enriching uranium for a bomb or a power plant.

HOWEVER, BOTH the automatic rifle and the nuclear bomb are tools, and tools have a specific purpose. In these cases, that SOLE purpose is to, in an incredibly short period of time, with little effort or skill, enable the user to end the lives of as many people as possible. You can never use a bomb as a power plant, nor a rifle to alleviate supply shortages (except, perhaps, by a very direct reduction in demand). Here, our problem has never been with the technology of Artificial Neural Nets, which have been around for decades. It isn’t even with “AI” (note that no extant “AI” is actually “intelligent”)! No, our problem is with the tools. These tools are made with purpose and intent. Intent to defraud, intent to steal credit for the works of others, and the purpose of allowing corporations to save money on coding, staffing, and accountability for their actions, the purpose of having a black box a CEO can point to, shrug their shoulders, and say “what am I supposed to do? The AI agent told me to fire all of these people! Is it my fault that they were all <insert targetable group here>?!”

These tools cannot be used to know things. They are probabilistic models. These tools cannot be used to think for you. They are Chinese Rooms. For you to imply that the designers of these models are blameless — when their AI agents misidentify black men as criminals in facial recognition software; when their training data breaks every copyright law on the fucking planet, only to allow corporations to deepfake away any actual human talent in existence; when the language models spew vitriol and raging misinformation with the slightest accidental prompting, and can be hard-limited to only allow propagandized slop to be produced, or tailored to the whims of whatever despot directs the trolls today; when everyone now has to question whether they are even talking to a real person, or just a dim reflection, echoing and aping humanity like some unseen monster in the woods — is irreconcilable with even an iota of critical thought. Consider more carefully when next you speak, for your corporate-apologist principles will only help you long enough for someone to train your beloved “tool” on you. May you be replaced quickly.

Haha, ahh Fogbank, we hardly knew ye

Is this sarcasm? They fired 350+ workers in charge of overseeing the nuclear stockpile before they even knew who they were firing, and nothing happened. To pretend that there is some line in the sand is, at this point, naive.

To be fair, since we’re talking about their historical militarism, we can definitively blame the French for being the reason English is so hard to learn and is an inconsistent, bad language all-around. Never forget 1066. Also, before we get the circlejerk going, let’s remember that the French government plays dirty just like everyone else, like their insanely unethical nuclear testing in the pacific and their later state-directed terrorism against new Zealand in an attempt to continue said nuclear malfeasance.

ETA: (To be clear, as an american, I’d much rather be French right about now, but we need to be realistic. All humans are crappy in large groups when given unchecked power. I just want to be clear we should be hailing the French people, not the French government)

Like most meat, actually composting bodies would require a very hot composting temperature, constant mixing, and you’d want to put it through a grinder first, or else it won’t properly mix. Especially in the case of bones, those really need to be ground down so they can properly decompose.

Hypothetically, of course.