Category: Technology

Anti-Tech Movement (Part 2)

I have been diving in to this as I become increasingly disillusioned with the internet, surveillance, age verification and the many issues that have arisen around technology over the past decade plus.

It is coming to a head for me to the point that, other than for musts, I am considering leaving the internet behind completely.

I have already stopped carrying a phone, smart or otherwise, outside of the home and have not been on social media for the best part of a decade due to the issues that have been painted widely, around companies such as Meta and Google. Advertising and privacy go hand in hand, and now might even be secondary to governmental control and surveillance through age verification which could be coming to operating systems as a whole, though Apple is out front with this as per usual when it comes to controlling users. Government and tech companies and who is leading the way, that is up for debate when it comes to our techno-feudal lords.

Let’s not forget the yearly, pretty much the same as last year, product push of the black mirror most of us carry, damaging not only pockets but the environment as a whole, while tracking our every move on and offline if you are uninitiated. See Graphene OS. I am almost tempted to do a Tails OS post at some point… Moving on…

I have put together a reading list, along with my usual, personally curated, RSS feeds to deep dive on the wider topic at hand and to try to understand where I stand when it actually comes down to anti-tech and even anarcho-primitivism as a whole.

Most of the books I have on my reading list can be found at the wonderful site Anti-Tech Collective and I link to their reading resources there.

Personally I am currently reading:

The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

Endgame by Derrick Jensen

And one not on their resource list due to it being new I suspect:

Techno-Negative – A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser

I can also kind of recommend the /r/nosurf community on reddit for its occational insights and also /r/privacy and the website Privacy Guides

Also, the classic Surveillance Capitalism is not to be missed by Shoshana Zuboff along with Technofeudalism By Yanis Varoufakis

I think I can consider this a Part 2 to my previous post. I will, more than likely, create a part 3 with further thoughts, such as on China and its social credits system and where we might be headed.

AI (Enshitification) Slop

I was recently made aware of someone, through family, who has set up a new podcast; details are irrelevant, however what is is their prodigious use of AI. To put it simply, the podcast is AI generated, possibly tweaked, and then read by the person as posted as a novel idea.

This person is of middle age, and like a lot of those of a certain age, they have adopted AI in every aspect of their lives.

Personally, if we put the economic and environmental concerns to one side, I believe AI is and has amazing uses as a tool, see this recent New Scientist article. My issues arise when it is used as a creative tool, and said results are passed off as the persons original work. This is not a phenomenon unique to the lay person, see this recent article surrounding Ars Technica.

I am not even upset, though I think it is poor taste, with regards to novel writers using AI as an aid, see James Frey.

What does bother me is people using AI and passing the results off as their own work completely. In the case of the person at hand, I simply feel a little sad and sorry for them. Using AI to write books, podcasts and create art as they are doing simply smacks of a lack of knowledge around what can and will be sniffed out as AI generated. And the larger issue, AI models via LLMs do not create unique content as of yet. It is an amalgamation of other peoples work that has been hoovered up by the LLM / AI Company. From books, to music, to Youtube, to the entirety of the internet et al.

The AI revolution is going to, and is changing the world, from math to physics and programming, the list is literally endless; let’s just hope that it doesn’t mean everyone’s Grandma is going to start ‘creating’ as if they are a polymath, using straight from the tap, AI slop.

I believe that at some point in the near future, AI will be the creative force across most areas of art. This is when, like a first edition signed book, certified human created content will be at and demand a premium.

Minimalism (+digital) and the Art of Conscious Consumption – 1

 

Minimalism gets a bad rap these days. It has become almost cliche… passé.

However when you break it down to the essence of what it is and means for individuals it couldn’t be more important as an ideal; with offshoots.

Looking at, for example, what could be considered the canonical text for us Westerners, Fumio Sasaki’s ‘Goodbye Things’; minimalism becomes a microcosm and the crux of the human dilemma with regards to the modern world and the phycological issues it presents to us humans. From the historical dualistic mind-body Christian misconception that formed through the idea of dominion and the industrial revolution, the modern world as we inhabit it was formed; and minimalism is an attempt at an antidote.

Hyper capitalism, and what Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism attempts to nutshell, for example, hold within the kernel, where we are. Eloquently and concisely illustrated by The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.

Consumers and cogs in the consumption machine with a data exhaust that can be recycled to facilitate the snake eating its tail.

Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, rounds out some of the social corners and I intend to try to give my own holistic take through philosophical enquiry and logic.

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TBC and subject to change through minor edits.