by
Tim Maughan
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[...] We're so young we don't remember a time where there was no Internet, but we're still old enough to remember being excited that we could use it to start a revolution.
But we were so wrong about that, our friends. So very wrong.
There was no revolution to be had on the Internet. None at all. The idea that there ever was is false. A big fat lie.
[...] We watched huge battles rage. And we thought they were exciting and important.
But we were wrong, we slowly realized. We realized those battles were just a spectacle, a distraction from what was really going on. Because those battles were taking place on a battlefield that didn't matter. On a battlefield that had no way of making a difference. Because that's a battlefield we don't own, and never could. New battlefields built just to keep us occupied.
[...] We watched our political activists and community leaders become celebrity brands, our tech-utopian visionaries bow to capital and shareholders.
a pastebin post from dronegods
The algorithms control everything now. And it goes up much further than just ads in your timeline. The algorithms control all the networks - both the physical and the digital ones, if there's any real use in pretending there's a difference anymore. From plastic-spewing gulags in China to the automated trading floors, from the bridges of container ships to the warehouses of Amazon, the algorithms decide everything.
Our politicians and corporations and leaders and economists and bankers - they all do nothing now. They do nothing more than the algorithms. [...]
We were all busy on the Internet when this happened. Some of us might have been reading stories or watching movies or playing video games about THE ROBOT UPRISING when it happened, which is kind of funny, isn't it, friends? Entertaining ourselves by worrying about a massive inhuman artificial intelligence rising up and enslaving us, when in fact a massive inhuman artificial intelligence WAS rising up and enslaving us. Haha, isn't that funny, friends? It's ironic. What's different is that the massive inhuman artificial intelligence wasn't enslaving us with nuclear bombs or turning us into batteries (how WOULD that work?) or crushing our feeble human skulls with its metal feet, but by finding the best ways to sell us stuff. SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves.
this ceding-of-agency narrative is overblown but the point is cool
[...] Ningo was one of China's many input/output gates, Rush remembers reading somewhere - the rest of the world sent ships full of coal here, and in return got back ships full of cheap consumer goods. This was why the supply chains existed, in order to make transactions that logic dictated were most efficient on local scales work on global ones, through sheer size, brute force, cheap labor, and global inequality.
[...] Decades of studying and picking apart the supply-chain networks - their vast spaces, both digital and very real - and now what he really wanted was to see them dead. As endlessly intoxicating as they were in their scale and grandeur, he could see Simon had grown disgusted by them; by the endless money and labor that had been piled into what was history's greatest engineering achievement. The pinnacle of human effort had been to create a largely hidden, superefficient, globe-spanning infrastructure of vast ships and city-size container ports - and all to do nothing more than keep feeding capitalism's hunger for the disposable. To move plastic trash made by the global poor into the hands of hapless, clueless consumers. A seemingly unstoppable beast built from parasitic tentacles, clenching the planet with an iron grip.
"Well, what did you think was going to happen? After you broke everything? Really? What did you think? That everything would magically take care of itself? That this network of yours would somehow provide all the answers?"
"We didn't pretend to have answers. Not for everything. That wasn't what we were fighting for. We were fighting for people to be able to decide things for themselves, Grids. To start again. We were fighting for self-determination -"
"Well then, you got what you wanted. Self-determination? You're looking at it." [...] "[...] Lots of gangsters and warlords and fucking terrified people trying to look after themselves, trying to protect their own, and fuck everybody else. Me and all the other chancers and yardies that have carved this city up between us, trying to look after their own little bit of turf and their own people. Your self-determination is a fucking power vacuum, that's all it is. Your revolution, with no idea of what would happen next, just created a massive hole of people fucking each other over just to stay alive."
"Grids. He was right. About us not knowing what came next. That's why all this failed. We didn't have any vision, did we? Just some belief and some ideals. But no way of, y'know, making something solid out of them. No organizing, no planning. Instead we ended up just scrabbling around, trying to fix things, trying to keep them patched up." [...]
"[...] You want it to not fuck up? Then don't let it. Take some ownership of it. Shape things. Talk to people. Organize. That's where we fucked up last time, we just burned everything down, didn't plan for afterwards. [...]"
[...] "[...] Back before the crash this was the best place you could put a data center if you didn't want it to be in the city. All those Wall Street motherfuckers, after nine-eleven, they moved their shit out here, hidden away in the middle of nowhere. And those big-data motherfuckers, too. They got backups here of all their stuff. All that cloud bullshit. When the crash happened, a lot of these centers automatically shut themselves off to avoid getting infected. Looked like they'd been wiped but the data is still intact. That's why you're out here, soldier. To make sure they can't be started up again. To make sure everything gets wiped. You get me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Damn right, yes, sir. You doing the most important job there is for the Movement right now. We can't go back ... No turning back. That data in there, it's slavery. It's oppression. It's greed. It's me, not we. We can't go back to that. Understand?"
it's a cool concept, tho tbh it feels a bit overblown as a risk? it's not the numbers that are responsible for the oppression, it's the control over infrastructure (enclosure of the commons etc) - the numbers are only used to manage that control. but it sounds like they dont have control in the first place.
A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
There's luck in art. And there's the gift. You can't earn that. But you can learn skill, you can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift.
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.