Cory Doctorow, science fiction as a weapon against the metaverse:We are not free(english.elpais.com) |
Cory Doctorow, science fiction as a weapon against the metaverse:We are not free(english.elpais.com) |
Which human right is that, again? Your attention span? Your willingness to sign abusive contracts?
I wish Cory Doctorow would meaningfully refute these problems instead of fetishizing them for science fiction purposes. He's worse than Stallman in that respect - he acknowledges that we have these complex society-level issues, and instead of devising a solution he steelmans an insane opinion and waits to be proven wrong. Again, I don't even disagree with a lot of his thesis statements - the Metaverse is probably a net negative for humanity, and copyright law shouldn't be the be-all end-all of information. I just disagree with the hyperbole he uses to frame these discussions, because it makes all of us look like fools by extension.
If fixing society was as easy as reading more Doctorow, everyone would do it. Scratching our Black Mirror itch doesn't usually come with a solution proposal, though.
> The longer your name is, the more untraceable you become.
For some reason I don't believe you, Mr. Doctorow.
> For some reason I don't believe you, Mr. Doctorow.
Yeah. My name is shared by more than 10 living people who are known enough to have Wikipedia entries. I think I'm a bit more untraceable, as long as you don't know my SSN, address, or workplace.
And I'm only frustrated because it's a shame. I like Cory Doctorow for the lip service he gives to open source and individual freedom, but he has repeatedly dropped the ball on anything that isn't fiction authorship. Nevermind the fact that he's embarrassingly wrong with this statement - if his memo to the man is naming his kid something long and unintelligible, that makes him about as revolutionary as Elon Musk.
> trying to reimpose that which is being fought against
> When they only take into account those they consider as such
I got the intent of these sentences on some rereads, but these were poor noun choices from a communication perspective.
> In other words, restaurants automatically adapt their menus to the customer’s taste
> You can only get out of such a society if you start walking away from the centers of power — and from everything that ties you to the system.
A working solution is to train people to say "No". If you tell the algorithm that you aren't interested in its selections at this time the AI will, necessarily, broaden its propositions. And teaching people to say "No" is a very good thing to do, as too many of us are taught to default to just accepting what those in power offer.
> I can’t believe that it only takes one click today for the whole world to find out what you’ve set in motion.
This is because you (Doctorow) have done the hard work of becoming famous enough that people pay attention to you and spread your ideas around. One click doesn't cut it for anyone just starting out.
> The changes will only be real if we act analogically. In other words, the digital world must be a world of encounters, but we must stay on the street. It’s the analog that produces change
Saying "No" or "Yes" is a binary, not an analog. Try pretending that the offerings of Big Data AIs aren't Hobson's choice, and you might be surprised at what actual choice there is. Unlike Hobson, AIs want you to say "Yes" to one of their offers, and will offer you as much as they can to get that "Yes".
> “the only way to win an ideological battle is to extinguish the imagination, and that’s what neoliberalism is trying to do through technology.”
I'm pretty sure that many ideologues are trying to convert people to their ideologies by sparking the imagination, not by extinguishing it.
> My 15-year-old daughter knows that the system can’t offer her anything
Because she has come to this conclusion on her own, or because you have in-Doctorow-inated her to believe this?