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An Entirely Other Day: The Triumph of Triumphalism

Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.

“You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable.

I Hate Wasting Time on Identifying AI Slop • Buttondown

It’s an annoying cognitive task: detecting weird photo artifacts, bizarre movement in videos, impossible animals and body horror, and reading through reams of anodyne text to determine if the person who prompted the synthetic media machine cared enough to dedicate time and energy to the task of communicating to their audience.

I hate that this is the bleak future which venture capitalists and AI boosters have gleefully laid out for us, that they consider this to be a “democratizing” technology in any real sense of the word. Far from strengthening democracy, these are technologies more apt at propping up scam capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. I would like my time and mental space back.

The Gist: AI, a talking dog for the 21st Century.

My main problem with AI is not that that it creates ugly, immoral, boring slop (which it does). Nor even that it disenfranchises artists and impoverishes workers, (though it does that too).

No, my main problem with AI is that its current pitch to the public is suffused with so much unsubstantiated bullshit, that I cannot banish from my thoughts the sight of a well-dressed man peddling a miraculous talking dog.

Also, trust:

They’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now?

Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift – Another angry woman

On day 1 of your class about behaviour change in a science course, you learn that behaviour change is not a simple matter of information in, behaviour out. Human behaviour, and changing it, is big and complex.

Meanwhile, on your marketing courses, which I have had the misfortune to attend, the model of changing behaviour is pretty much this: information in, behaviour out.

Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I can’t even. I’m out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier

Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.

Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:

How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?

The Laboratorium (2d ser.) (I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It…)

The bottom line is that almost everything NFT advocates want to do on a blockchain can be done more easily and efficiently without one, and the legal infrastructure needed to make NFTs work defeats the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

Web3 - creating problems where we need solutions on Vimeo

This is a great talk from Laura that clearly explains what web3 actually is. It pairs nicely with Molly White’s wb3 is going just great (speaking of which, Casey Newton interviewed Molly White about the site recently).

Make Free Stuff | Max Böck

At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.

It’s not still the early days

If you’re interested in so-called web3, you should definitely follow Molly White.

How long can it possibly be “early days”? How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains? How many people must be scammed for all they’re worth while technologists talk about just beginning to think about building safeguards into their platforms? How long must the laymen, who are so eagerly hustled into blockchain-based projects that promise to make them millionaires, be scolded as though it is their fault when they are scammed as if they should be capable of auditing smart contracts themselves?

The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down.

Norton

It me.

Occasionally, I wonder whether I’ve got it all wrong. Is my age, my technical unsophistication, or my fond remembrance of an internet unencumbered by commerce blinding me to the opportunities that crypto offers me? But then I read something terrible and I recant my doubts, meditate for a while and get on with my life.

Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are

Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.

A great analysis of the system of smoke and mirrors that constitutes so-called web3:

Instead of being at the mercy of the “big tech” companies like Amazon and Google that monopolize the traditional way of doing things on the web, you are now at the mercy of a few other tech companies that are rapidly monopolizing the blockchain way of doing things.

Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3

A balanced, even-handed look at actually using so-called web3 technology. It turns out that even if you leave the ethical and environmental concerns aside, the technological underpinning are, um, troublesome to say the least.

Crypto: the good, the bad and the ugly | Seldo.com

A very even-handed and level-headed assessment by Laurie, who has far more patience than me when it comes to this shit.

Washed Up - Infrequently Noted

The term “web3” is a transparent attempt to associate technologies diametrically opposed to the web with its success; an effort to launder the reputation of systems that have most effectively served as vehicles for money laundering, fraud, and the acceleration of ransomware using the good name of a system that I help maintain.

Perhaps this play to appropriate the value of the web is what it smells like: a desperate move by bag-holders to lure in a new tranche of suckers, allowing them to clear speculative positions. Or perhaps it’s honest confusion. Technically speaking, whatever it is, it isn’t the web or any iteration of it.

A not so gentle intro to web3 | Koos Looijesteijn

Web3 is like a combination of pyramid schemes, scientology and Tamagotchi. There’s the fact that ultimately anything you do on blockchains costs you real money and that once you’ve paid that, you’re one of the people who need to get the next cohort of buyers onboard or lose your money. There’s believing that you’re joining a movement that’s in the know, with all kinds of interesting words and sci-fi stuff that normies just don’t understand. And there’s your portfolio, your pretty JPGs, wallets, apps and everything you spent so much time on understanding and maintaining. Good luck avoiding sunk cost fallacy there.

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels | web3 is Centralized

Ethereum is only decentralized in the way that doesn’t matter — you’re free to join the decentralized system, under the condition that you act in the exact same way as every other actor in that system.

The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger

Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

This resonates:

I’m not alone in believing in the fundamental technical uselessness of blockchains. There are tens of thousands of other people in the largest tech companies in the world that thanklessly push their organizations away from crypto adoption every day. The crypto asset bubble is perhaps the most divisive topic in tech of our era and possibly ever to exist in our field. It’s a scary but essential truth to realise that normal software engineers like us are an integral part of society’s immune system against the enormous moral hazard of technology-hyped asset bubbles metastasizing into systemic risk.

Who is web3 for? • Robin Rendle

Thoughts from Robin, prompted by the Web History podcast I’m narrating and the other Robin’s notes on web3 that I linked to:

Who is the web for? Everyone, everywhere, and not only the few with a financial stake in it. It’s still this enormously beautiful thing that has so much potential.

But web3? That’s just not it, man.

Exactly! The blinkered web3 viewpoint is a classic example of this fallacious logic (also, as Robin points out, exemplified by AMP):

1. Something must be done!
2. This (terrible idea) is something.
3. Something has been done.

Notes on Web3

I think Web3 is pro­pelled by exhaus­tion as much as by excite­ment. This isn’t appar­ent on the surface, but I believe it’s there, lurk­ing just below. If you’re 22 years old, Twit­ter has been around for about as long as you’ve known how to read. YouTube is fixed as firmly as the stars. I honestly don’t know how that feels, but I wonder if it’s claustrophobic?

There are so many astute and accurate observations in Robin’s piece that I kind of want to quote them all.

Web3 promises rewards — maybe even a kind of justice — for “users”, but Ethereum doesn’t know anything about users, only wallets. One user can control many wallets; one bot can control many wallets; Ethereum can’t tell the difference, doesn’t particularly care. Therefore, Web3’s governance tools are appropriate for decision-making processes that approximate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, anything that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned!—value of personhood.