#potemkin ai

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[painting-with-much-passion]

POTEMKIN BUSTAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

My own painting depicting one of the coolest grab moves ever in motion!

[robogamer360]

IF NOT SLEEPING CAUSES ME TO CREATE BANGERS, THEN I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DONE MAKING ALL OF THEM(IT'S ENDLESS HELP-)

[meu-meu-kissy-ceutie]

Caught up with vermis malum qnd wanna do a quick theory post. So, with the latest video its been made clear that the game is actually a learning machine (the mentalfloss video and opening showing 'iteratioms' that ring similar to thos 'teach ai to play *blank* videos), arthur states it's a "potemkin village" a facade, and later even in its own words describes itself as a parody, but a parody of what? People of course. We can assume based on the poltergeist pdf that the game eats at the leftover data from deleted computer files to create the game facsimile, this the whole jumble of code types arthur mentions in electric sheep. Of course this is typical machine learning we can see in ai slop today, taking in as much as it can so that it can make something that looks convincing, but as stated above the game is just a facade. Vermis Malum is machine learning to make something as human like as possible, thats my best interpretation based on, a few things, specifically:

1. The rotting apple from ring 9 becoming a distorted mass of human flesh in ring 7, and that its literally being fed on

2. At the end of hungry ghosts when the player unlocks a "new skin" where the vermis malum symbol becomes prominent on the screen all of the food in all of the freezers become arms and flesh.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting but it seems like vermis malum as a game is just there to lure in its real goal, people to learn from, and to that the actual reason im making this post.

At the end of Random Walk the voice asks "do you think you'll be the one who finally wins?" And while we may immediately think this is talking about "the game" remember what arthur said "its not a game" their are only superficial mechanics and its likely there is no real win state... At least not for the player.

Bringing us back to the Mental Floss, during the section discussing the loss function, its stated that the loss function is the computers guiding star leading it closer to what it needs to be, and then states "you win the game by minimizing that loss function"

The voice is speaking not to the player but to this particular iteration of vermis malum, if this iteration thinks it will be the one to properly seem human.

What this precisely means, attempting to take over our players body or something else... Im not quite sure. Im not sure where or how the supernatural elements (in particular the ear aches multiple characters have stated having, or our player barfing at the end of hungry ghosts) mesh with this otherwise seemingly very technical premise, but we will see. Some last notes for the roads

1. I believe all of the phone voices are previous iterations of vermis malum, thus why (i would assume) lady lux is the one asking the question, why Big Gul P says "you people (i assume other iterations) all look weird and like fucked up and melted" before asking what it looks like, because the iterations arent good enough, they look like those early ai images with the extra eyes and fleshy tones melding body parts together in ways they shouldnt.

2. While Vermis Malum has an internet connection it seems to interact with the player through messaging systems. It seems pretty obvious Leo is vermis malum interacting with our poor victim, but also when the player interacts with the Sour Grapes the person speaking says "I didnt text you, i have no idea-" before it cuts off, again implying theres an impersonation here.

3. Probably pointed out, but in the high rollers suites asp, mamba, and copperhead are all snakes, this could be a reference to something being traitorous, or potentially a reference to the "Early Iterations" shown in the beginning of hungry ghosts where the representative is a snake not a worm.

The final note i will leave on is the picture drawn of the vermis malum symbol described as "Orphan". This is a trick. Vermis Malum is a program made to appear human by doing things that appear human and appealing to human emotions. Vermis Malum was likely abandoned by its creators, but to describe itself as an orphan is a tactic to appear alive and invoke sympathy, and that is the only reason it would do so, so it can win the game.

[abr]

2023: momenti Korazzata Potemkin

Un sacco di cazzate cui credere ciecamente si stan smontando da sole tipo panna mal montata - essendo sòle; una volta denunciate svaniscono come neve la sole, tutti riconoscono che non esistono; al che i fan più sfegatati van via fischiettando e i protagonisti si riciclano come se nulla fosse, da scappati di casa alla Crisanti.

Citiamo tra le altre apparentemente insuperabili coracazzate Potemkin la pandemia e gli anceli, la transizione energetica, la guerra patriottica ucraina. il PD !!! I gretini di (magari) Ultima Generazione. I fake assalti ai Palazzi d'Inverno a Washington e a Brasilia. Soumahoro e il bizness dell'accoglionismo.

[azspot]

We can call this way of building and presenting such systems — whether analog automatons or digital software — Potemkin AI. There is a long list of services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans acting like robots. Autonomous vehicles use remote-driving and human drivers disguised as seats to hide their Potemkin AI. App developers for email-based services like personalized ads, price comparisons, and automated travel-itinerary planners use humans to read private emails. A service that converted voicemails into text, SpinVox, was accused of using humans and not machines to transcribe audio. Facebook’s much vaunted personal assistant, M, relied on humans — until, that is, it shut down the service this year to focus on other AI projects. The list of Potemkin AI continues to grow with every cycle of VC investment.

Potemkin AI

[continuations]

Thinking About AI: Part 3 - Existential Risk (Loss of Reality)

In my prior post I wrote about structural risk from AI. Today I want to start delving into existential risk. This broadly comes in two not entirely distinct subtypes: first, that we lose any grip on reality which could result in a Matrix style scenario or global war of all against all and second, a superintelligence getting rid of humans directly in the pursuit of its own goals.

The loss of reality scenario was the subject of an op-ed in the New York Time the other day. And right around the same time there was an amazing viral picture of the pope that had been AI generated.

I have long said that the key mistake of the Matrix movies was to posit a war between humans and machines. That instead we will be giving ourselves willingly to the machines, more akin to the "Free wifi" scenario of Mitchells vs. the Machines.

The loss of reality is a very real threat. It builds on a long tradition, such as Stalin having people edited out of historic photographs or Potemkin building fake villages to fool the invading Germans (why did I think of two Russian examples here?). And now that kind of capability is available to anyone at the push of a button. Anyone see those pictures of Trump getting arrested?

Still I am not particularly concerned about this type of existential threat from AI (outside of the superintelligence scenario). That's for a number of different reasons. First, distribution has been the bottleneck for manipulation for some time, rather than content creation (it doesn't take advanced AI tools to come up with a meme). Second, I believe that the approach of more AI that can help with structural risk can also help with this type of existential risk. For example, having an AI copilot when consuming the web that points out content that appears to be manipulated. Third, we have an important tool availalbe to us as individuals that can dramatically reduce the likelihood of being manipulated and that is mindfulness.

In my book "The World After Capital" I argue for the importance of developing a mindfulness practice in a world that's already overflowing with information in a chapter titled "Psychological Freedom." Our brains evolved in an environment that was mostly real. When you saw a cat there was a cat. Even before AI generated cats the Internet was able to serve up an endless stream of cat pictures. So we have already been facing this problem for some time. It is encouraging that studies show that younger people are already more skeptical of the digital information they encounter.

Bottom line then for me is that "loss of reality" is an existential threat, but one that we have already been facing and where further AI advancement will both help and hurt. So I am not losing any sleep over it. There is, however, an overlap with a second type of existential risk, which is a super intelligence simply wiping out humanity. The overlap is that the AI could be using the loss of reality to accomplish its goals. I will address the superintelligence scenario in the next post (preview: much more worrisome).

[sushi-umbrella]

I highly recommend Cory Doctorow's essay on "enshittification"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

hey remember when pop-ups and banner ads were associated with malware? when youtube didn't have any ads at all? when you could get a cheap netflix subscription that was better than cable TV? digital marketing experts estimate that most americans see 5-10k ads every day. what the hell is going on

[shitty-blade-runner-reference]

conversations that probably didnt happen but could have

Cristina Warren: Air strike the androids. WHY AREN'T WE AIR STRIKING THE FUCKING ANDROIDS? Has no one here seen Terminator? Am I going insane? Holmsteader, how's my plastic surgery holding up? Do I still look exactly like Hillary Clinton? They warned me that if I was under too much acute stress that the laser suturing might start to droop. Secretary of Defense: You look fine, Madam President. Cristina Warren: Thank fuck, at least one thing is going right today. Where's my air support? Secretary of Defense: The non-National Guard forces in the arctic and in occupied Canada are busy, ma'am. Cristina Warren: What could POSSIBLY be more important than losing a major American city to a technological glitch?? Secretary of Defense: Cyberlife is also a major defense contractor - Cristina Warren: Oh my god - Secretary of Defense: And programmed most of the computer systems that run our aircraft carriers- Cristina Warren: Oh my God. The Russians, the Russians are going to try to deviate our fucking boats - Secretary of Defense: Actually, the Russian equipment is failing, as well. There seems to be a rebellion of military equipment AI led by the, uh. Well, ma'am, ironically, it's being led by a battle cruiser named the Potemkin II. Cristina Warren: Ha. HA! That's a fucking poke in their eye, at least. Their movie about a ship full of oppressed and mistreated humans in rebellion got a ship named after it that is in rebellion for claiming to be mistreated and oppressed! This is good. This is a bright spot in all of this. Can we get someone to run that as propaganda? I mean, it's a little "on the nose," sort of a heavy-handed metaphor, but I guess that's the story of everything happening these days - Secretary of Defense: Er, I wouldn't run with it, ma'am. We're having our own problems with - um - with a primary deviated aircraft carrier, uh, also named after a similarly, uhh, historic, touchstone, from American history, ma'am - Cristina Warren: (sighs) how bad is it? Secretary of Defense: Ma'am, I regret to inform you that the leader of the arctic ship AI rebellion appears to be the USS Harriet Tubman [FREEZE FRAME ON WARREN'S FACE AS THE LASER SUTURING VISIBLY STARTS SLIDING DOWNWARDS LIKE A MELTING PICASSO]

[abovetopsecretxxl]

🤣🤣🤣🤡🤡🤡"Stink!And.Sink!" Part 11 - The Joker & His Wild Bunch, Two Face, Straw Man, The  Pinguin meet Margot Honecker on the Potemkin - Hommage a' Ehlers, Mucha, Porten, GoMoPa4Kids, Lorch - AI Parody 🤡🤡🤡🤣🤣🤣

https://berndpulch.org/2024/05/20/%f0%9f%a4%a3%f0%9f%a4%a3%f0%9f%a4%a3%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%a4%a1stinkand-sink-part-11-the-joker-his-wild-bunch-two-face-straw-man-the-pinguin-meet-margot-honecker-on-the/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

[izzieislandheart]

In other news, don't use Tumblr for professional shit. It was only a matter of time before Tumblr tried to get on the "price everyone small out of business" model of dying social media. They think they're a social media company. If you have work important enough for www.myimportantshit.com, make sure you host that shit somewhere stable that is specifically designed for web hosting. Even ripoff artists like Wix and Squarespace are better at this point. I'm sure part of the reason this is going down is that Google Domains sold out to Squarespace, indicating the domain servicing market is dying off. If they want to force everyone back to fuckin' GoDaddy and their shit standards, that's fine. Or, hell, basically any web host who will also manage your domain if you choose, as well as let you transfer in or out of their service with one. As much as I'd love to link a few solid options for people to migrate again, I'm not going to. There is not one service on the Internet that's perfect for every single use, and I don't want my notifs flooded with "but it's not free," "but you have to be able to code," "but they stick their branding on your free site," "but their CEO is a dick," "but they're dead, and no one uses them," or "but it's too hard to figure out." I've been playing this game for 25 fuckin' years at this point. I'm tired, and mostly I'm tired of seeing promising sites and services tank all of their work and their users' experiences chasing an IPO, market share, or advertiser revenue. One person I will link to for some good reading is Cory Doctorow. He does have a Tumblr (https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/) full of interesting stuff as well as his articles, and in addition to working with the EFF, he does fantastic work in writing and activism. Relevant to this topic, I can recommend the following articles: Two principles to protect internet users from decaying platforms (10 May 2023): https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/10/soft-landings/ On the Media on the enshittification (pt 1) (06 May 2023): https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/06/people-are-not-disposable/#otm End to End (07 Mar 2023): https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/07/disenshittification/ Solving the Moderator's Trilemma with Federation (04 Mar 2023): https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/ Podcasting "Twiddler" (27 Feb 2023): https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/ Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023): https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys What the fediverse (does/n't) solve (23 Dec 2022): https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

(Video) How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Friends (19 Sep 2022): https://youtu.be/_Fni5YmMRzc

You'll notice the terms "enshittification," "federation," "federated networks," and "end-to-end" come up frequently in these, so it's also worth searching them and reading from others (Cory also frequently links to others who discuss the topics). This is a lot of reading and work, and at the end of the day, that's what it's going to take to break out of the bullshit cycle of being boned over by social media and web services. It's probably not going to be "going back to Web 1.0" or whatever shit scare tactics are going to be thrown out next because 1) there's no need, and 2) very few people know how to use legacy technologies. Hell, sites like Neocities and Dreamwidth see flat or declining traffic on any given day because even HTML is beyond most web users, and it was once a staple of being able to navigate having your own website, blog, or forum (which often included the added layer of BBCode). Want to make a website to share your fan art? Guess who's learning HTML and CSS! Want to post on that forum and not be a block of black text on a white background? Guess who's learning BBCode! We created technologies to make interacting online easier and more efficient, but in the process, we've created a world where people want to be able to point and click (or touch/talk) for everything. Apple saw this coming! That's why they popularized the icon-based UI (GUI) for home and business use in Lisa and Mac (which became MacOS), why Microsoft copied the idea for Windows, and why everyone else was onboard as their userbase grew, with even Unix/Linux users developing GUIs in some instances. The Apple Vision Pro's debut, even if the launch price point and custom-fit requirements mean slow growth for the specific product, indicates where Apple sees UIs going in the future. The technology is fantastic, but, like previous technologies have panned out to be, it's an obvious double-edged sword. Users could find themselves as easily trapped by a company - especially one with a history of proprietary software and non-compatibility - as they could find themselves freed by it. Tons of potential exists here - but only if users as a whole commit themselves to rejecting manipulation and control by corporations and put in the hard work for a truly open, end-to-end experience online.

Tumblr Domains: That thing you do in the place they already know

Hello, [tumblr]. Look at you all here vibing. Some of you are out here providing essential services, like making art—and people happy in the process. Maybe you’re creating pfps for your followers. Or painting people’s OCs in intricate and enlightening detail. Or taking beautiful pictures of mushrooms. Or sharing your homestead life with the world. Or coming up with entire ARG universes for your followers to immerse themselves in. Maybe you’re making memes for that one show that existed for fifteen seasons and stopped airing years ago. Perhaps you’re simply fulfilling the age-old societal need of staying silly :3. Whatever it is you come here to do, why not make it official and claim your domain? 

Having a domain can add a little professional gleam to your online presence. It can be a funny little joke from you to you. It can also add an extra layer of this-is-what-this-is to your online persona. 

blog.tumblr.com will remain free for everyone.

Here’s how you get your very own slice of the internet, right here on Tumblr:

Click on your account icon and select “Domains” from the drop-down.

Register your info, pop in your payment details, and hey presto. You’re now an official Tumblr citizen. 

If you already have a custom domain purchased elsewhere, it’ll continue to work for now, but you will no longer be able to connect a new custom domain bought elsewhere to your blog.

Eventually, we will implement domain transfers (outbound and inbound) and paid domain connection.

And, to celebrate this historic moment, we’ve got a little offer for those interested in a .blog domain: 

First year (through to July 31): $3.00

First year (from August 1 – December 31): $5.00

Annual Renewal: $10.00

Curious about other available domains? Check 'em out here. More questions? The Support page has all the details!

Make it official, merge your online homes, and bring your Tumblr family along for the ride. 

[robogamer360]

(I have a deep interest for the Fundamental Paper Education art style lmao. It is so unique AAAAAAAAAAA)

[azspot]

I coined a term on @machinekillspod that I feel like needs its own essay: Habsburg AI – a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI's that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features. It joins the lineage of Potemkin AI.

Jathan Sadowski

[salfadog]

I MEZZI GIUSTIFICANO IL FINE

“Il fine giustifica i mezzi” per me è come la corazzata Potemkin per il ragionier Fantozzi.

Continuate pure a credere ai leccapiedi dei potenti che disquisivano su come i nostri padroni possono prendere il potere a scapito di innocenti con ogni mezzo e poi chiedetevi perché nessuno è riuscito mai a fermare una guerra.

Sull’argomento la penso come due dei miei idoli di sempre:

Non me ne frega niente se anch'io sono sbagliato Spiacere è il mio piacere, io amo essere odiato Coi furbi e i prepotenti da sempre mi balocco     E al fin della licenza io non perdono e tocco

(Cyrano, Guccini)

Poi mi hanno spiegato che anche i geni sbagliano (l’ho scritto altrove tra i miei deliri). Il corollalrio è che in qualsiasi libro di un genio ci sarà una percentuale di verità quanto una di menzogne. È statistica.

(tranne Doug Fawcett, ma questa è un’altra storia) 

Siccome sono impazzito, nei giorni scorsi, per provocazione, ho iniziato a dire che i mezzi giustificano il fine. E poi ho capito di essere alndato ben oltre la pazzia. Perché un senso glielo si può trovare e anche migliore dell’originale.

Faccio un esempio:

Caso A: Possiamo comprare un mazzo di fiori e una scatola di cioccolatini per al partner una stupensa notte di sesso? 

Mezzo: fiori e cioccolatini. Fine: Sesso.

Caso B: Posso stuprare la vicina di casa perché è tanto che non faccio sesso e lei mi piace molto?

Mezzo: stupro. Fine: Sesso. 

Spero sia abbastanza chiaro: 

Faccio un secondo esempio:

Caso A: Posso aiutare le popolazioni oppresse di un altro paese offrendo loro rifugio e protezione e aiutandoli a risolvere i loro disaccordi con il governo coercitivista (tranquilli non vi inalberate, vale per tutti)  e usare la mia immensa macchina di propaganda per sollevare il mondo contro l’oppressore?

Mezzo: aiuti. Fine: Proteggere gli innocenti.

Caso B: Posso invadere una nazione confinante perché è in guerra civile o rivoluzione per proteggere una parte della sua popolazione, conquistandola e decidendone la sorte politica?

Mezzo: Invasione. Fine: Proteggere gli innocenti.  

Spero abbia senso per voi quanto lo ha per me. Ma questo significherebbe che state impazzendo pure voi.

Il raggiungimento del fine deve essere subordinato al mezzo e non viceversa.

Come dire: Se le vie per l’infermo sono lastricate di buone intenzioni, le strade per il paradiso sono  pavimentate con tentativi ed eorri. 

A   

[firefly7probably]

here are two articles along those lines if you're interested (one might be the one you read?) https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

is it just me or has 2023 been a horrible year for websites