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3 days agoThose are still external to the thing, not internal.
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2025
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I was ready to roll my eyes at the title and move on, but i’m glad I spent the time to read this.
TLDR; i very much disagree with the premise, but the author brings up an interesting bit of philosophy that is helpful to the conversation.
When people say “it’s just a tool”, it is not to assert that the tool is neutral, only that the thing being referenced should be thought of and discussed in a similar fashion as we do when discussing other items in the same category. This is in opposition to the tendency to ascribe moral features or aesthetic to things that aren’t inherent to their ‘essence’, but rather features external to the thing being discussed or features that are commonly shared by items in the set but not exclusive to it.
What comes to mind (possibly because of the great effort it took to read and understand it) is Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the ‘assemblage’. Here’s an excerpt from "A Thousand Plateaus (that happens to contain my favorite passage in possibly all of philosophy) that I think adds a contrast:
spoiler
[…] These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse “can do.” They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can’t get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame … . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, “playing” horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what way would that ameliorate Hans’s problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked?
The author here is correct to point out that tools are not neutral - and the connection to Heidegger’s conception of the Gestell is very well received. I just wish they hadn’t stopped at their conclusion and actually kept the analysis going. Taking their example of SUV’s engendering ‘asshole driving behavior’ - it isn’t just that the existence of SUV’s bears a causal relationship to asshole drivers because of what that gestell produces, but that the existence of SUV’s reshapes the relations of all the other assemblages in close proximity to it regardless of how it’s used and by who. They even kind of preview this more balanced conclusion in their comparison of javascript and vue, stating that it’s not a matter of one being better than the other, but simply that they have different purposes and enable different types of collaboration.
I think the entirety of the problem of this argument could be captured just in this part of the blog,
After all, all kinds of fascinating weapons systems are being used in defence of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and this is both good and necessary, but none of this makes the effects on leaders of having access to bombs and artillery, or on individual people of having access to firearms, not ceteris paribus deletrious.
All other things couldn’t possibly remain ‘equal’. The addition of those tools fundamentally changes the relations and constituent parts of all the assemblages around it, including concepts like “freedom” and “democracy”. To take it one step further - if the signs and symbols that refer to those assemblages and relations - that have now necessarily changed by the new addition - do not also change with them, then they simply stop being practically useful to describe them.
Any tool is going to have a non-neutral affect on those who use them - that’s mostly the point of the assertion.
It really depends on which externalities you’re talking about
The only one I can think of as ‘inherent’ is the ethical concern over copyright. The others are more broadly related to the commercialization of the tool than to the tool itself.
0·4 months agoI don’t doubt it even for a second.
I’m lowkey kind of fascinated this morning with what feels like a moment of real panic among western liberal-democratic institutions (projecting a little from my morning news and coffee). That an anarchist instance is getting this much targeted harassment feels like a microscopic extension of that (if I allow myself to be so bold)
As far as I can tell, dbzer0 isnt even being explicitly called out here, but it has an undeniable bdzer0 flavor to it. If it doesnt come out that this was one of our mods at this point, I’d almost be disappointed.
Aside from the ethical implications of profiling users or of using a corporatly owned server and model to execute this, I see nothing uniquely concerning about this practice that isnt already a risk of federated social media generally.
Every mod on every instance is free to use whatever tools or standards for moderation they want - that’s an intentional byproduct of federation. Similarly, the collection of this data for use with llms is a bygone conclusion at this point - there was never any way of preventing that from happening with a federated network.
I think the only thing here to talk about is the way these questions are being framed as a question of intra-instance policy. We already have communities where moderation abuse can be called out and adjudicated- why pose this as a question of instance administration when there doesnt seem to be any evidence for it?
Can someone explain why jellyfin compatibility is helpful? I’m not aware of any jellyfin clients that function better than i typical subsonic one - unless this is just for people who want all their media in a single app?