When I was talking to Mork yesterday about Instagram, it became apparent that describing the web accurately makes you sound unwell. You can leave one service because it has enthroned a cyber-tyrant who is training an AI on all your data, and then go to another service where only a few months later they will start training an AI on your data. You might open up an account for your art on an independent service, where your enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of others strikes their infrastructure so hard that it generated a hundred thousand dollars in overage fees after a few hours. How do you orient yourself toward such an environment? These aren’t natural phenomena.
Where the conversation resolved is rendered in the third panel, which is that… let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that you forswore all access to these apps. In the modern era, these corporate intranets constitute the peopled crossroads of the Internet. The farmer’s markets and bazaars you might reasonably expect to trade your wares, and to be enriched by the wares of others. These companies are also trawling the open web for data, and they aren’t even pretending to ask. This means the thieves are in your house.
So, I have children who don’t think capitalism works. I’m the kind of annoying person who is philosophical even about things which are broadly considered to be settled, and also I don’t mind being wrong about concepts if it means I can be less wrong about those concepts in the future. I’m honored to have the opportunity to discuss those things with them. But their entire conscious lives have taken place with the board at something akin to an Endgame state. They look at it, intuit some of its principles, and essentially ask themselves why they would play a game like that.
I’m not sure I’m joking about the ‘zine.
(CW)TB out.
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