Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
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@pluralistic thus I coined the term "#TechLiteracy" (or lack thereof as "#TechIlliteracy").
- As this is a more fitting term to differenciate between "us" #TechLiterates (who know how to setup some lightweight #Linux distro and make it work (not just for us bot others) and those who believe the #Enshittification, #bloat and crap is "a fact of life" (aka. "#TechIlliterates")…
- Just like #literacy enables people to learn, interact and communicate, the same applies to using #technology and #media (see "#MediaLiteracy")…
Thus I see it as both moral and social duty to spread "Tech-Literacy" among society because decades of #illiteracy in #tech are now paying dividends and #Cyberfascists actively work on sabotaging and destroying #HumanRights and #CivilRights under #FalsePretenses lile "#YouthProtection" (see "#AgeVerification")…
First step in Tech Literacy: use a password manager. Use A Password Manager. USE A PAASWORD MANAGER.
- As this is a more fitting term to differenciate between "us" #TechLiterates (who know how to setup some lightweight #Linux distro and make it work (not just for us bot others) and those who believe the #Enshittification, #bloat and crap is "a fact of life" (aka. "#TechIlliterates")…
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First step in Tech Literacy: use a password manager. Use A Password Manager. USE A PAASWORD MANAGER.
@lemgandi @pluralistic OFC!
And then go to a @cryptoparty@mastodon.earth / @cryptoparty@chaos.social / #CryptoParty and learn the basics on how to get started with @tails_live / @tails / #Tails and @torproject / #TorBrowser and all the other things…
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Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.
A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes.
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All that to achieve ... what?
Cheaper mass goods for a now dying out human populace that no longer want them, because the machinery that produced the goods so efficiently was alsol killing the very ecological balance that the consumer (human) species needed to be alive on.
Stupid of what?
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That's "Ed, the financial sleuth." But Ed has another persona, one we don't get nearly enough of, which I delight in: "Ed the stunt journalist." For example, in 2024, Ed bought Amazon's bestselling laptop, "a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage" and wrote about the experience of using the internet with this popular, terrible machine:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
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@pluralistic "stunt journalist"
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Even if you want to write a pastiche in the style of some writer you admire (or want to send up), word choices and sentence structure are only incidental to capturing that writer's style. To reduce "style" to "stylometry" is to commit the cardinal sin of technical analysis: namely, incinerating all the squishy qualitative aspects that can't be readily fed into a model and doing math on the resulting dubious quantitative residue:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/
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@pluralistic One my favorite writers on the epistemology of aesthetics, Graham Harman, defines style as precisely that which you *cannot* turn into a protocol of if-then rules (which would make it a parody)
