stabby_cicada @ stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net

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Very few western vegans want to imagine that, in a vegan world, domestic pets would go the way of domestic livestock. But a world that takes animal rights seriously is not a world that uses animals for human pleasure, whether that pleasure comes from food or companionship. Vegans aren't "pet owners" because vegans don't see animals as things to be owned.

Which is all to say, healthy plant based pet food may or may not be possible, but either way it's not going to be vegan.

But this is wrong. There are meaningful differences between the internet as it stands today – the enshitternet – and the old, good internet we once had. The enshitternet is a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love. The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet.

I'm a big fan of Doctorow, but I have to disagree with his view of the "old, good internet", for a reason he recognizes with Amazon but doesn't take to its logical conclusion (at least not in this excerpt).

In step 1 of enshittification, a website is good to its users. Granted. But as the excerpt points out, Amazon was "good to its users" thanks to a massive pile of investor cash, which let them do consumer friendly (but anti-competitive) stuff like sell goods below cost, have a fair search system instead of making money off search placement fees, and not squeeze its suppliers.

But that couldn't last. The money ran out. And Amazon transitioned to stage 2, and stage 3, squeezing its suppliers and customers, in order to pay back its investors and make a ton of money.

And this has been the life cycle for most of the internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter, pretty much every big web company started by using investor cash to give unsustainable benefits to consumers, and then either started squeezing them for profit when the cash ran out or transitioned to some other role (like becoming a propaganda outlet for the world's richest man) because they couldn't continue providing the customer-friendly internet we all enjoyed without going bankrupt.

What I'm getting at is, the old, good internet was inherently unsustainable, because most of the things we enjoyed about it were subsidized by investors. The Facebook that just showed you what your friends were doing? Made no money. The Twitter that the Occupy movement and Arab Spring ran on? Never made a profit. That good, effective Google search engine? Cost a lot more than ad revenue brought in. The entire modern Internet was built on the concept of locking users in with unsustainably cheap services and then squeezing them to repay investors. Enshittification was the plan from Day 1.

We can't go back to the old, good internet. We don't have angel investors willing to subsidize all the good stuff we enjoyed.

But we can go forward to the fediverse 😆

Not supporting the "dictatorship of the proletariat" types, but the reason tankies support Russia isn't because they think modern Russia is Communist. It's because Russia is fighting Ukraine, which they see as a proxy war against the United States and its puppets in NATO.

In the authoritarian Communist worldview, the United States is the vanguard of capitalism and the most dangerous threat to global communism. That's why they think Communist nations need authoritarian governments and powerful militaries: to protect themselves from the United States and its client states.

So tankies support anyone fighting the United States or its allies, no matter who they are or how bad their governments are. Because they think anything that weakens the United States is good for the world.

If you think sharing a meme about voting once every six months or so is trying at all, much less trying hard, you need to recalibrate your definition of activism.

I see it, I like it, I share it, it takes thirty seconds. Calling this "slacktivism", even, is an insult to actual slacktivists.

But this meme affected you so much that instead of downvoting and moving on you felt the need to comment. Please step back for a minute and think about why you felt that way.

(Also? I live in the United States. The majority voted in 2024. They overwhelmingly chose Donald John Trump as their President. And follow up polls showed very clearly that, had every registered voter voted, Trump would have won by an even greater margin. The government that resulted is the greatest indictment of American democracy I can imagine.)

No.

The trick is to keep talking about corporate responsibility - and so making people aware of how corporations avoid it, and normalizing the idea that corporations have responsibility - instead of dismissing it with discouraging phrases like "it'll never happen".

Hope is hard. That's why it's so important.

And you're right to feel that way. Sharing dumpstered food with other dumpster divers who share your values is one thing - plenty of urban communes with shared kitchens do it. Sharing dumpstered food with random people on the street? I wouldn't do that either 😆

Hotter take: "individual responsibility" is propaganda from the corporations that sell dangerous products and the politicians they have contracts with.

There's nothing wrong with selling guns, the problem is people who use guns irresponsibly, say the gun companies.

There's nothing wrong with prescribing opioids for everything, the problem is people who can't control themselves and get themselves addicted, say the pharmaceutical companies.

And in this case, when there's a massive propaganda campaign trying to sell AI as an educational tool and good for children, it just feels wrong to blame a parent for using an AI tool the way it was marketed for use.

We're going to encourage you to use this dangerous tool without warning you of the risks? And if you or your children take harm from it we're going to blame you for using it wrong? Never mind individual responsibility, what happened to corporate responsibility?

Probably very few people will change their mind. It might sway a few Catholics who are on the fence about global climate change (somehow).

But what the Pope says will have an impact on young people from Catholic families who haven't learned much about climate change. Especially in places like the Philippines where climate change is quite literally lapping at their shores.

The idea that all Catholics have to do what the Pope says, or even agree with the Pope, is, frankly, anti-Catholic bullcrap - back when I was a very very small child, John Birch Society bigots were passing out pamphlets claiming JFK would be taking his orders from the Vatican.

But what the Pope does have is moral and persuasive authority. And when teenagers are growing up and learning about the world, and TikTok and right wing news are spewing all sorts of climate denial garbage at them, and they're being bombarded from all sides by the message that all politicians are liars and everybody's out to take your money and trying to change anything is hopeless - don't underestimate the influence of someone who's respected as not just a world leader but a good man.

My dumpster diving days are far behind me, but that attitude used to be called "freegan".

For me, I wouldn't criticize anyone who chose to eat animal flesh sourced in this manner - no one in the capitalist supply chain is going to make any money off you, you're not increasing demand for animal flesh, eating that flesh does no harm to any living animal and makes it no more or less likely that more animals will be killed.

At the same time, the personal is political, and part of that is living your values in a way that is not only consistent but appears consistent to others. Publicly eating like a vegan, and sharing how your diet reflects your system of ethics, normalizes veganism and encourages people to respect and consider your point of view. Every time you, as a vegan, share a meal with others, you are also sharing your values, even if you unobtrusively choose a vegan meal option and don't say a word about other people's choices.

But if you call yourself a vegan, and then you eat meat, or wear leather, or otherwise consume animal products, it taints you with perceived hypocrisy, discredits your words and actions, and makes other vegans look bad by association.

Also, it just feels icky.

OP, I would ask, are you part of a collective? Are you in contact with other dumpster divers you could share or trade food with? Because I hate the waste involved, too, and though I wouldn't eat the animal flesh myself I would be willing to give it to someone whose ethics permit it.

A long time ago I read a science fiction story from the 40s or 50s where an isolated child was taught by screens and cared for by robots.

It's like we forgot that those kinds of stories were dystopian.

No publicity is bad publicity, as the saying goes.

I mean, people are thinking about the product and being creative about the product and encouraging other people to pay attention to the product, and that gets the company's name out there.

I imagine a lot of the people making fun of this product are going to pay attention to the company's next product, just out of curiosity 😆

I think that response is more responsible than most of the lawyers in that article. "I didn't think I needed to check the LLM's work, I fucked up, my bad" is a lot more honest and forthright than "it's my paralegal's fault" or "somebody in my office did it" or "my deadlines were too tight to do my job right" or "I was out sick at the time" or whatever.

Fucking lawyers. They're the worst possible way to defend people's rights except for all the others.

If they're using stories from Am I the Asshole, there may be some issues with recursion.

I strongly suspect a lot of the recent stories on that subreddit are AI generated. As are the responses. So one LLM is prompted to describe (generic AITA scenario, probably about a racial or sexual minority, a fat person, or a feminist behaving badly, because last I checked that sub was crawling with crypto-fascist propaganda), as if they are in the right. Then the second LLM is asked to determine whether or not the first LLM was actually in the right. And the second LLM will probably agree with the first just because they're both running on similar algorithms.

And if the AITA data set was pulled from pre-LLM posts, the LLM they tested was probably trained on those AITA posts, which could likewise cause different results than stories it hadn't been trained on.

Wow, I haven't thought about AITA in years. I didn't realize how much better my life was without it 😆

This is the true nature of labor that executives fail to comprehend at scale: that the things we do are not units of work, but extrapolations of experience, emotion, and context that cannot be condensed in written meaning. Business Idiots see our labor as the result of a smart manager saying “do this,” rather than human ingenuity interpreting both a request and the shit the manager didn’t say.

What does a CEO do? Uhhh, um, well, a Harvard study says they spend 25% of their time on “people and relationships,” 25% on “functional and business unit reviews,” 16% on “organization and culture,” and 21% on “strategy,” with a few percent here and there for things like “professional development.” 

That’s who runs the vast majority of companies: people that describe their work predominantly as “looking at stuff,” “talking to people” and “thinking about what we do next.” The most highly-paid jobs in the world are impossible to describe, their labor described in a mish-mash of LinkedInspiraton, yet everybody else’s labor is an output that can be automated.

As a result, Large Language Models seem like magic. When you see everything as an outcome — an outcome you may or may not understand, and definitely don’t understand the process behind, let alone care about — you kind of already see your workers as LLMs.

Emphasizing this because it's absolutely true. And it's why I've believed, for years, that the United States no longer has a class system. It has a caste system.

We have a management caste - a CEO caste - whose members are born and raised among CEO families, who are educated as CEOs, who are assigned to CEO-track positions from the beginnings of their careers, and who will never work at anything less than a high leadership position no matter how much they fail at leadership.

And we have a labor class whose children dream of being successful influencers and podcasters and video game players instead of following their parents' trades. They know, if they enter the corporate world, they'll never be more than skilled labor, because they lack the family connections to go further.

The traditional American "working class businessman" who started young at the bottom of the company and worked his way up to CEO doesn't exist anymore. If you start with an entry-level job in America in the 21st century, you're not going to work your way up to management. Ever. You're going to get capped at some sort of senior worker position while your CEO hires the 20-year-old son of his golf partner as your manager.

We have no social mobility. We have no economic mobility.

And don't get me started on the billionaire caste.

LLMs aren't the cause of this. They're just a symptom. Like the author says elsewhere, LLMs can't actually do your job, but they can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an LLM.

But they can only do that because the management caste and the labor caste are so isolated from one another that management doesn't understand and doesn't care how their workers actually do their work.

Because the management caste is taught from birth that all labor is unskilled labor and all workers are fungible, programmable NPCs - and they only communicate with lower caste workers in formal, ritual settings like "all hands broadcasts" and "team meetings" where the workers are heavily discouraged from doing anything a programmable NPC wouldn't.

So why wouldn't they believe a LLM, programmed to flatter them and agree with them, could do a worker's job? After all, that's the only interaction they ever have with their workers.

And that's the only silver lining of LLMs: that they are, ultimately, a grift, and the victims of that grift will ultimately include the CEOs and MBAs who so richly deserve it.

In the last few years, people have been pointing out an emergent benefit of ink on dead tree books: there are no banner ads, no tracking cookies, no social media integration, no gamification, no information about your reading habits sent to Google's data mines. When you buy a physical book, you own it, and nothing you do with it can be tracked, monetized, advertised, or subscriptionized.

And I bet some tech bro heard that and said "Hold my beer".

but these are not the best pick for everything.

Why not? Seriously, you've got canvas sneakers for running or casual wear, canvas boots (waxed if need be) for hiking and wet conditions, even moderately dressy canvas shoes for business casual.

I feel like, counterintuitively, fake leather encourages the idea that your shoes have to look like leather to be "dressy" or "professional", and if you need shoes that look like leather, most people will reasonably wear leather shoes, and only vegans will buy the fake leather.

Normalize sneakers in the workplace! Hell, normalize tire tread sandals! We save more animals by making the default something that doesn't involve animals in the first place than we do by coming up with alternatives that look/taste just like animals.

Distance also matters a lot. I know where a bunch of little free libraries (no trademark) are in my community, but I don't visit them because they're too far away - I can check out books from Libby, I'm not going to take a bus ride for free books 😆

So advertising something like a free farm stand has diminishing returns, because you're going to reach a lot of people for whom the stuff at the stand isn't worth the time and effort to get to even if it's free.

Which is to say, instead of creating a farm stand and then trying to advertise it, one might want to figure out what the people in walking distance want in a farm stand first. Then you set up an email chain or something similar and let the locals know what's ripe when.

If you're in the United States, don't worry. Between tariffs and mass deportations, ordinary grocery store veggies are going to be more expensive than farmers' markets pretty soon.

Arable land. The issue is the vertical farms rely on jute fibers, which are farmed conventionally, and take up more land than the crops grown in the vertical farms normally would.

The article discusses some workarounds to this problem, but currently it's another entry in the "technological solutions to climate change are predominantly scams" column.