This is such a fantastic synthesis of the political economy of AI and "Big Tech." Max Read wrote a quite good postmortem of the so-called "Tik Tok electorate," but I'd be eager to read a more granular, Ongweso-esque (haha) analysis--something that provides a grammar to supplant my "do you know what I means." Any leads/suggestions?
I’m just going to stop paying my debts. The government took my tax dollars and created a digital employee model that they refuse to regulate and is currently causing massive layoffs in every sector.
It’s one thing to subsidize “job creators.” It’s something entirely different to subsidize “job destroyers.”
SB-1047 should have passed, and when it didn’t, it appears as if the government itself is trying to make sure I can’t find work in my field ever again.
This isn’t a conspiracy. This is my real life. My professor used Chat-GPT for syllabus creation, told his students to use it as well, and then I discovered a 500-image trove of student works that had been used for generative-AI content training.
It’s blatant. I feel as if I’ve been stabbed in the back.
Some extremely helpful work here, Edward. Thank you.
This is such a fantastic synthesis of the political economy of AI and "Big Tech." Max Read wrote a quite good postmortem of the so-called "Tik Tok electorate," but I'd be eager to read a more granular, Ongweso-esque (haha) analysis--something that provides a grammar to supplant my "do you know what I means." Any leads/suggestions?
I’m just going to stop paying my debts. The government took my tax dollars and created a digital employee model that they refuse to regulate and is currently causing massive layoffs in every sector.
It’s one thing to subsidize “job creators.” It’s something entirely different to subsidize “job destroyers.”
SB-1047 should have passed, and when it didn’t, it appears as if the government itself is trying to make sure I can’t find work in my field ever again.
This isn’t a conspiracy. This is my real life. My professor used Chat-GPT for syllabus creation, told his students to use it as well, and then I discovered a 500-image trove of student works that had been used for generative-AI content training.
It’s blatant. I feel as if I’ve been stabbed in the back.
I think about slavery all the time, almost literally, and I'd never connected tech to it. Now I can't believe I hadn't. My mind is kind of blown.
'how fundamental surveillance has been to capitalism since World War Two.'
I suspect the importance of surveillance to capitalism predates WWII by a fair bit.
An example-
https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~glencora/cs175/uploads/CS175-race-surveillance-empire.pdf
'Race, Surveillance, and Empire'
Deepa Kumar and Arun Kundnani / March 21, 2015
"The earliest process of gathering systematic knowledge about the “other”
by colonizers often began with trade and religious missionary work. In the
early seventeenth century, trade in furs with the Native population of
Quebec was accompanied by the missionary project. Jesuit Paul Le Jeune
worked extensively with the Montagnais-Naskapi and maintained a
detailed record of the people he hoped to convert and “civilize.” By
studying and documenting where and how the “savages” lived, the nature
of their relationships, their child-rearing habits, and the like, Le Juene
derived a four-point program to change the behaviors of the Naskapi in
order to bring them into line with French Jesuit morality. In addition to
sedentarization, the establishment of chiefly authority, and the training
and punishment of children, Le Juene sought to curtail the independence of
Naskapi women and to impose a European family structure based on male
authority and female subservience. The net result of such missionary
work was to pave the way for the racial projects of colonization and/or
“integration” into a colonial settler nation.
By the nineteenth century, such informal techniques of surveillance began
to be absorbed into government bureaucracy. In 1824, Secretary of War
John C. Calhoun established the Office of Indian Affairs (later “Bureau”),
which had as one of its tasks the mapping and counting of Native
Americans"
That’s why I talk about slavery and the link between plantations and computation and surveillance that Meredith Whittaker writes about!