Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson @ simontherockjohnson @lemmy.ml Posts 6Comments 99Joined 3 wk. ago
No, I meant complexity and I even gave concrete examples throughout the article.
Yeah but you're not disentangling complexity as an independent factor. You squish it into difficulty and other factors, and you ignore those other factors when they're against your argument.
Beyond that scaling complexity typically means that the larger your problem size is the less complex it is per size unit. e.g. A country of 500 people is more complex to govern per capita than a country of 500,000 people. You don't make it clear by providing actual data to that or against that effect. You have a couple of fuzzy examples in disparate dimensions but not a clear measure of what you mean.
Maybe read up on the concept of division of labour.
Division of labor does not mean that you must inherently create hierarchies and cannot do horizontal decision making. Hierarchy simply creates higher order functions, these functions don't need to be higher order if they are spread out across distinct units.
Likewise as a Marxist you're doing yourself a disservice basing any argument on the division of labor when Marx identified it as one of the primary causes of alienation and a method of control in his theory of the social division of labor. Furthermore Marx advocated for the dissolution of the division of labor under socialism because division of labor is quite literally the basis of classism.
No, you have a delegate for the 50 people. Why you’d claim that delegates have power over people the represent is beyond me. I guess people growing up under capitalism naturally have slave mentality.
What are you even talking about? I'm literally saying horrizontalism vs hierachy is, you have a Department of Energy in every region or you have 1 national Department of Energy that controls energy in all regions. Of course the hierarchical Department of Energy has power over all the regions energy. Other wise what's the point?
Syndicalists literally advocate the same thing as Marxists in terms of organization. You’d know that if you spent any time learning about the subject you’re attempting to opine on.
Very funny because traditionally syndicalism has always had problems with sectarianism based on labor function, and even the largest and best syndicalist orgs in history have had horrible stances on women in the workplace compared to even just the Bolsheviks. The IWW historically was the only good one in that they accepted women and heard them out, but they were still fairly chauvanist in their gender relations.
Did ChatGPT write this?
You wrote "this is reactionary" without actually explaining how it's reactionary. That's not my fault.
You should put a bit more work into your trolling. At least try to engage with the point being made.
The point being made is just naturalism. There's no logical connection to be made between the reason that humans communicate human to human (rather than cell group to cell group) and hierarchical organization. This again just begs more questions for what the actual criteria is here. I have cells in my body that are designed to be expendable, so it naturally follows that some people in the hierarchy are expendable right? If that's right then on it's face it's gross, if that's wrong then why even create a naturalist argument? You don't engage with the trade offs especially the moral trade offs of following biological models in one instance and not the other.
It's not even a good example because your argument rephrased is "Humans are an abstraction for a collection of cells", which is morally and factually wrong. Morally because humans shouldn't be an abstraction, and factually because there are aspects of human minds and bodies that are effectively not mapped/mappable to basal cell functions. E.g. why is a heart shaped like that is a question that cannot be answered by the collection of cells being abstracted, but why does TCP/IP use a 3 way handshake can be answered by the properties of network communication that are being abstracted.
I literally give concrete examples, but sure bud.
No you don't you say things like:
Under democratic centralism, representatives remain recallable by their electors, policies undergo open debate before finalization, and all authority ultimately derives from and answers to the collective will of the working class.
This is not an example, this is School House Rock USSR Edition. You're giving me the "United States has 3 branches of government that are governed by a system of checks and balances ensuring democratic representation that respects the rights of the people while enacting the will of the people." You don't actually engage with how democratic centralism worked in practice, nor do you ask any contra-positives regarding if demcen prevented the things you claim it supported.
LMFAO what are you even talking about?
Whole process people's democracy is literally a consequential model. It doesn't prioritize liberal deontological expressions of rights, it instead collects input from various strata and it prioritizes the analyzing the consequences of governance in hindsight. It's worked fairly well for China but as a consequential hierarchical model it is highly subjective to the whims of elites, meaning it's not possible to be replicated systemically. Taking the CPC at their word there is nothing technical about their process that creates systemic durability. It is simply that they choose to grade themselves in a particular way. They choose to be good people. An obvious example of this is that Xi notes that voting rights are important. In China people can only vote for the 2 lowest national congresses, every congress votes for delegates in the congress above it. So the question is what purpose does this actually serve? If the argument is that we choose to evaluate ourselves this way, we reflect the will of the people, why not directly elect national congresses? Why risk breeding patronage networks? Why not have deontological democracy instead of consequentialist democracy if the argument boils down to we choose to be good? It's not like the system is even set up so that the CPC can practically be defeated only rebuked.
Likewise the Chinese congress system is incredibly complex, not very simple and creates an extremely large class of legislators. There's something like 100,000 legislators among all congresses, spread out on 5 levels and across multiple districts. It doesn't "scale complexity" at all.
They have and continue to do so.
This is quite literally not true. Easy example is voting in the USSR required ballot spoilage to vote against official candidates. There have been plenty of historical examples of creating ineffective feedback loops and lack of transparency.
I’d be so insulted by that if you weren’t such an obvious troll.
I'm sorry you feel this way.
Uhh.....
The literal axiomatic "good guys" are magic space cops and the main story is about how they cannot police their own nor can they police their political structure so the entire galaxy falls into a fascist regime that can only be saved by yep you guessed it the same "good guys" who fucked up the first time, joined by a sins of the father trope character.
The Jedi Order collects devshirme (blood tax) because it quite literally rips away force sensitive children from their families. It's quite literally one of the Order's primary functions. Qui Gon Jinn was going to let Anakin rot in slavery until he realized he was force sensitive. Furthermore it tells these children to forget their feelings for their family as part of their training. it's literally Janissary shit.
Furthermore most of the media treat this like Anakin is totally wrong for coping the way that he does because his literal choices are between slavery under a happy merchant style character and slavery under a child cop training program, but he's the magical chosen boy so he should be thankful that he never gets to see his mother again until he see's her violent death. What a piece of shit, loving his mom, having feelings for his family, doesn't he know that there are more important things like institutions that are axiomatically good and their extremist religious beliefs???
Jedi's esp prior to Disney were religious zealots. They literally had their own terms for apostasy that were differentiated from followers of the "bad" religion, e.g. Dark Jedi were apostates and Sith were the evil religion guys. The Jedi Order does not recognize anything outside of it's orthodoxy as "good".
Oh and the whole Anakin thing literally happened because their prophecy which was defined as "bringing balance to the force" was always interpreted as wiping out the Sith. It was essentially heresy that "balance" could possibly mean the ruination of the order because the Sith believed loosely in Rule of 2 and there was quite literally battalions of Jedi.
Canonically the question of "why would anyone trust the Jedi as negotiators since they have the power of mind control?" Is literally answered by the fact that they do not police capital with no further thought on why that's a good answer logistically speaking or morally speaking. And the whole neutrality thing is canonically a lie as well both in the trilogies and in Legends. Jedi are consistently not impartial.
A large chunk of the story is centered on Tatooine a planet with outright slavery, our "good guys" regardless of their level of institutional power at any given point in the plot have always just shrugged their shoulders at this. By the way when Starwars guys defend this they always say something like the Jedi coudl never stand up to the Hutts because of you name it, "jusidiction", "alliances", and "strength". Which is funny because the guy who controls the Five Families after the fall of the Republic is literally Darth Maul. So yeah our "good guys" can't end literal slavery for no good reason.
Like Lucas can say what he wants, and I believe that he believes it and I believe that he took inspiration from all the leftist political things he says he took inspiration from. But, he's libbed up as hell, and the story line is basically exhalted good guys vs exhalted bad guys duke it out in space with everyone else dodging lasers and orbital cannons. The lore of the Jedi actually makes them fairly awful fascists in their own right.
It's actually cuz they are secular and have no friends. Not joking.
However, the dismissal of hierarchies is a reactionary position because their structural purpose facilitates scaling complexity
They mean efficiency.... Not complexity. Inherent complexity scales with the problem and its optimal solution. Hierarchies actually make a trade to add complexity and increase fragility to ease difficulty. In horizontal structures you'd have to do something across all your units which is simple but scales in difficulty across how many units you have. In a hierarchy you'd have to interact with the abstraction in the applicable way if it exists, which is more complex to understand but may be more efficient and simpler in comparison.
So instead of having to ask 50 people who have the same function in different regions, you could ask 1 person who has power over that function in 50 regions. At the same time, if something were to happen to that one person you've just lost functionality in 50 regions.
Also how is the dismissal of hierarchies a reactionary position when reactionary politics is inherently hierarchical? There are no horizontalist reactionaries because horrizontalism has never been the status quo ante for millenia? Are we just writing big words for fun?
Consider how we perceive other people: when we speak to someone, we don’t track the billions of cells in their body or the firing of individual neurons.
What? LOL. Are you serious? is this a serious argument? Where's the camera? You think I have the option of sitting there with a microscope looking at cells? Telling all my friends, if you were really my friend you'd let me open up that cranium and peep those neurons firing.
The middle of the article is making an argument more for syndicalist sectarianism rather than Marxist Leninism. You cannot really fault vanguardists for not saying red philosopher kings out loud.
The end of this article is extremely hand wavy. They basically state that transparency and accountability are "hard" and then cite an example from CPC, which honestly begs more questions than it has answers. What is the CPC actually doing other than arbitrarily "choosing" these things? How do they prevent themselves from not choosing them? In hindsight how effective was the campaign vs how effective could the campaign have been? Were decisions that could have made it more effective made for the right reasons? How about the decisions that made it less effective were they made for the wrong reasons? How did they align their incentives? How does this system improve?
It ignores the fact that the CPC is self described as a consequentialist entity -- meaning it won't prioritize transparency since its actions are not required to meet deonotological facets (like transparency) of right and wrong.
Likewise the advocacy of Marxist Leninism specifically means that it tacitly endorses the practices of democratic centralism which tend to add occlusion rather than transparency this is not addressed anywhere.
It ends with just a statement:
When imbued with transparency, recursive feedback loops, and a mandate to self-correct, hierarchy becomes a bridge to collective awareness.
Okay, so like why doesn't just every communist hierarchy do that? Why hasn't every communist hierarchy historically done that?
Feels like this is just ChatGPT for the left.
S2 blows S1 out of the sky.
Just saw it. Season 2 keeps getting better and better.
- Janitor
- Babysitter
- Contortionist
November is actively enrolled in a collegiate program and seeking a career in fake pig science. Seriously she's doing criminology lol.
No you don't. This is me IRL now:
I have such sights to show you on the borders of sensation (pain, anger, frustration, mechanical keyboards).
But seriously tho, it's a thankless job that drives you insane. My experience differs from yours most likely in that I was already predisposed to this insanity. I figured out how to sell myself. I am very sensitive to corporate politics because I often find myself in vulnerable positions (startups, tooling and platform teams). I don't really chase huge bumps in pay because I don't want to stand out on the P&Ls. I'm also fairly insulated in my personal life (no kids, live below my means, etc) so that I am well equipped for these fights and more well equipped if I ever lose.
Honestly most companies believe they are looking for me, but I've found that not to be the case. They simply believe someone with my qualifications will prove that they're right in terms of how they do things. It's a hard thing politically.
That and my real job is talking to morons and cleanup. I wrote a data modeling system for typescript from scratch last year so that we could actually manage a eternal data registry (which is part of our goals). It auto-generates TS Types, Factories, Typeguards, Validators etc. I also had to ask for 2 months extension from some senior execs, because I couldn't upload a file and the team that owns the file management service is under resourced and underutilized. Guess how much management time each project took up? Data modeling system? comparable to IC reporting hours over 2 months. File Upload? A week and a half.
And how do you expect to build a design system without some kind of task tracking or governance process?
Business does not actually govern according to anything but profits. Product is highly aligned with business goals at the majority of places because they often have the same metrics breakdown of the problem, marketability = features, features = money, new features = recurring revenue from subscriptions. Product managers going against business is often a sign of a toxic company or a misalignment in strategy/market position/expectations. Enterprise features = durable recurring revenue.
I usually advocate for increasing the scope of governance decisions to include production stakeholders (not just tech, but design and other production functions depending on industry I'm in) to achieve economies of scale for systems. The reality is the governance process at most places is nonexistent, and is solely a managerial function. The reason that leadership is split into technical and managerial in most modern tech companies is to consecrate governance power. We're told to as tech dweebs who cannot commune with the scam that is stock companies that we need to "manage up" instead.
I'm not against ticket tracking. I'm against the corpo culture where process is used as a soft power against people who are only treated with respect because the relation of their job to the market that leads to micromanagement and worse financial outcomes anyway.
Enterprise sales is a death knell for so many software teams because it disconnects the payer from the user. Meaning recurring revenue from sales to the same user aren't an organic process of conversion based on good software, they are a managed process of procurement. It creates a bad product and a bad set of incentives that ends up undercutting the original value prop. This happens bright as day within our own industry with our own tooling. Things like Jira, Trello, DataDog, AWS, tableau, looker, etc. I have a friend who's in the data science space with purchasing power and they change tooling every 2 years because as companies ramp up to the enterprise sales pipeline they stop maintaining the core offering as well and things get slow. Tableau and Looker are perfect examples that I've personally seen completely hollow out in my life time.
Certainly it’s an issue how product people get to control these mm processes but that’s an implementation thing.
This is the agile version of real (capitalism/communism/socialsm) hasn't ever been tried. Not only are processes picked by their susceptibility to managerial meddling, but managerial meddling is a feature. That's why nobody uses XP and everyone uses scrum. That's why companies where there's push-back on mid sprint re-prioritization and waste go to kanban. These systems are ultimately products and are sold as such to management. That's why SAFe is getting incredibly popular in enterprise despite being overwrought garbage that cuts its own legs out from under it, and is more waterfall in design than the average scrum implementation.
I've only started working with bootcampers post 2021. I've seen trash code/design/architecture mainly from college educated SWE's.
I have no problem with designers. They have a real job and the best of them make really great interfaces. It's a really difficult skill. They are a parallel work capacity to me. Most of the time most software has really bad UI/UX because designers are treated even worse than us at companies that have been financialized to the hilt. I've been at several places that have fired designers only to have to rehire them again.
I know I make programmer interfaces. Designers help refine those to something simpler and more usable. I actually have had multiple talks to designers at multiple companies saying how we needed to push for a unified product style guide + component theme to standardize the visual language and design. This helps lighten everyone's load because it makes time for building important shit on both sides. It's so hard to explain to business how valuable it is to have a process for building a durable library off the shelf components.
The chilling effect this causes will make communities even more like echo-chambers, as dissent will be pre-emptively squashed.
If only there was a tool that allowed you to host an instance on a federated network that allowed you to make your own community and control how the rest of the network can interact with it. Why has nobody built this???
Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.
Often software success is measured by adoption. Let's say tomorrow a turn key persona management system existed.
The most institutionalized levels of success possible is to be coopted by and contract out to an intelligence service (immediate pass, even the attention, immediate pass). However that means that such a system must unknowingly solve the problems of:
- the features that are absolutely required for said service
- the ease of migration of operations onto said service
- be completely self evident to many at that service to be an answer for their problems
- be a person that they could feel they could trust or manipulate into control
Very unlikely.
Another level of success is adoption in the general ecosystem. So now the DSA's, PSL's of the world can run persona management easily. Not really a big socialism success given you literally said it yourself it's a tool that if proliferated creates a "broad distrust of social media".
So who are gonna be the biggest users of such a tool? Open your phone and look at your texts. That's right the people who are shaking down grandparents, the people who are pretending to be a rich celebrity that has taken an interest in a lonely isolated person living in a rural community, scammers, flim flam artists, NFT enthusiasts, crypto bros.
The problem is that there is already a "broad distrust of social media", that doesn't stop humanity from using the communication tool, and that doesn't lower the total incidences of exploitation that happen.
If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet
Lol China would not have you. This is a movie plot. They don't want guys who make "rocking the boat technology" at all. You think they'd want some OSS enthusiasts running experiments with apes commenting on the net in their green zone? They have their own versions. They have their own trusted operators. This is like adoption with any other intelligence service.
In general the problem with this technology is literally like nukes. It shouldn't exist. It's easier to make social systems without its existence. This tech doesn't change anything, it makes a better integrated version of desperate components of an existing system.
If tomorrow at the same time everyone woke up with a turnkey nuclear bomb, Israel would pre-emptively nuke Gaza.
come around on social programs.
Wat.
Anarchists are the ones who are consistently making social programs from scratch. Direct action is and has always been about feeding people as well as sabotaging bulldozers.
Strongly agree that something like this is needed. However, what enables the asymmetry here is a limitation on material resources and labor. No such limitation exists with digital systems that cannot be trivially copied and deployed by bourgeois interests.
Only idea I have for something like this is a system that requires user verification by existing members, possibly gatekept by irl meetings and capped at some rate per user. Few people use the fediverse because of tiny barriers to entry. No one would tolerate a system that imposes more burdens.
DDoS prevention solutions are probably capable of thwarting most technological solutions we can come up with to create our own asymmetries.
The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have "promoted posts" for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.
You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.
Do you have any specific knowledge on the characteristics, capabilities, or implementation of these? I would be very interested in learning more.
Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, "to protect researcher identities".
The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.
Most software out there isn't a highly capable consistent package. I'm sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM's any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).
There are some OSS tools out there in various states of quality like:
I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what "success" would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.
Typically your keywords are "persona management", "sock puppet tools" etc.
Posting internet comments is the one form of media that proletarians can easily participate in to reach the masses without outright gatekeeping by an editor
Be for real lol. You're posting on one of the only places on the internet that isn't completely owned by the bourgeoisie. Your reach is already limited by segregating yourself on this site. Pretending that posting on "the internet" (e.g. the biggest sites) which is mostly controlled by gigantic bourgeoisie interests and petite bourgeoisie interests is a purely proletarian act is silly. In practice "freedom to post" is ancillary to feeding you advertising. You are playing in their sandbox and have always been. The enshittification of the 2010's blurred the lines between content and advertising intentionally because the smallest advertisers who refused to pay for ads already started doing that in the late 2000's.
This creates an asymmetrical playing field where corporations and NED orgs can spend lots of money on GPU farms to push their messages, but prole groups cannot nearly as easily.
You're just competing over different resources. Prior to the mechanization of this through any software you were competing for bodies doing the posting (whether the medium was internet, newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, word of mouth etc doesn't matter). With augmented mechanization prior to AI you were competing for bodies and compute. Now you can argue you mainly compete over compute. However because of the fun logic of capitalism, in the current state of capitalist organization proletarians can afford compute more than they can afford to feed other proletarians amortized over time. So this really only boils down to "humans are becoming obsolete in the posting wars", which was already true.
The inherent contradictions in capitalism make it effectively impossible for this technology to be really gate kept from proles over time without a literal crackdown on ownership or development. The cat is so out of the bag there'd be a civil war if the bourgeoisie started drawing lines on who can own what things for the "greater good". The US could not even keep a lid on encryption software over time, despite export controls for encryption still being a thing.
So even if we built ourselves a life raft with the fediverse / Lemmy, we are still trivially subject to large scale influence operations, even if less valuable as a target. It seems like big tech is aware of efforts to avoid corporate control over public opinion
This was already true before 2020. The type of software that major botnets/intelligence services/ad companies specializing in guerilla advertising is called a Persona Management System. These systems mechanized the dissemination of posting and conversation shaping across the internet. It has only really been in the last 8 years that Persona Management has been a thing that exists outside of intelligence adjacent circles.
What AI does is it makes running / developing Persona Management Systems easier. You no longer have to make a cohesive overarching strategy to make things feel organic for humans, you can simply be "good enough" with AI and that's always what these systems campaigns aim for.
Don't get me wrong this is an acceleration, but it's not an acceleration that brings us to a "brave new world". Yes the owners have new toys, but they haven't been able to prevent us from using them. Likewise if this was a real "information war", this becomes a war of logistics like every other war. It becomes necessary for proles to find a tactic that allows them to make the equivalent of a Hamas piss rocket or a Quds drone, something that is incredibly cheap but because of the capitalist state of the world requires a wasteful amount money to defend against. For every dollar in prole spend we make them spend $1,000 against it.
Smaller sites are already protecting themselves using proof of work systems like anubis to prevent AI crawling. Anubis is a great example of making them pay more. If Hexbear/Lemmy implemented anubis, it would be a slight annoyance for us an extra 1-2s browsing. However for an AI crawler running at scale to "take over the community" it would create a significant financial disadvantage because at scale the costs for running a hashcash for every interaction would balloon.
This isn't even new for reddit. They seeded the original site back during the 2005-2007 years by paying people to run sockpuppets to simulate the network effect. They'd post about tech before, the subject matter they're posting now is a level of degeneracy that only comes with an IPO.
Honestly, his post isn’t that far off from various Palestinians I’ve seen online. Their main thing is that anti-Zionist Jews can’t simultaneously complain about people conflating Judaism with Zionism while at the same time not taken up arms for the sake of saving Judaism from Zionism. If the IOF is Jewish ISIS, then where is Jewish Hezbollah or Jewish Ansarallah to send Jewish ISIS to hell and punish the Zionists for their shameless desecration of Judaism?
As a diasporist Jew, Palestinians have a moral standing to make that demand.
If a Palestinian says something questionable. I don't give a single fucking shit. The Zionist entity that is destroying their homes and their families is the source of their belief about Jews. The Zionist entity tells the world that its actions, it's interpretations of scripture and its decisions are representative of all Jews. The Zionist entity itself is a source of ethnonationalist supremacist garbage and I cannot fault the people it oppresses for believing what is written on the sides of its bombs. It's entirely correct that if we believe that it is a genocide, we should give them latitude in expressing their anger as it relates to their oppressors.
I am not going to give a Westoid the same latitude. You haven't earned it. Your cities aren't ash. You have never seen an Israeli bomb in your life unless you were signing it. You haven't known terror for your entire childhood, you haven't been deprived of education, health care, safety, food and family since birth. That is the reality for most Palestinians. So yeah, I'm not going to really take it too hard if they have some funny ideas about Jews. Westoids have no such excuse.
Likewise this doesn't explain the differences within Jewry. Beta Israel were oppressed by Israel itself. Not only did Israel originally refuse to allow them to make Aliyah, but after they did they were sterilized. We're not all just Ashkenazim (though I am).
A Westoid saying Jewish Supremacism after being accused of antisemitism is ZOG shit and I literally agree that Israel has created an extremely powerful outsized role for itself in the politics of many Western nations.
And I don’t agree with his assessment that Jewish people have been completely subsumed into whiteness. As a whole, Jewish people are white*. You have white people of Jewish ancestry who are otherwise completely indistinguishable from your average WASP at one end and you have Hasidic Jews at the other end.
This doesn't even encompass all European Jewry.