#luddites — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #luddites, aggregated by home.social.
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Oh, the irony!!! NYC activists: “You don’t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun.” TL;DR: You can have fun without social media… if you live in a big metropolis like New York City!! And that’s why I’m no luddite but rather a communist à la Karl Marx.
“This time, the protest isn’t a one-off. It’s part of the “Summer of Ludd,” a week-long festival of free public events organized and advertised entirely off of tech platforms and social media. The Summer of Ludd doesn’t have a website, but you can call a phone number to get a run-down of the events happening each day around the city. The schedule includes everything from an “offline rizz” workshop designed to help you ditch dating apps, a phone-free rave called “Let’s Get Off Together,” internet piracy 101 skill-shares, and an outdoor play that retells the story of the original Luddites. I found out about the Summer of Ludd from a local event mailing list called NYC Off Tech, but other folks I met throughout the week learned about it from posters wheat-pasted around their neighborhoods, paper event guides distributed to bookstores and coffee shops, or just word-of-mouth from friends.
Basically, the whole thing is an experiment designed to prove a single point: You don’t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun.”
https://www.404media.co/luddite-events-nyc-off-tech-summer-of-ludd/
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"Far from the distorted caricature of Luddites as curmudgeonly, puritanical tsk-tsk’ers, the new Luddites attract people to their movement through playfulness and participation."
https://www.404media.co/luddite-events-nyc-off-tech-summer-of-ludd/
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"The conclusion of The AI Con reveals the structural limit of the entire approach. Bender and Hanna propose “strategic refusal” as a political horizon: saying no to AI, drawing inspiration from Luddite movements and feminist struggles. The invitation is suggestive, but the question left unanswered is: refusal in favour of what? If AI is a technology that, as the book itself documents, is already reshaping work, healthcare, education, and cultural production, refusal without an alternative project risks being a symbolic gesture that leaves the field open to those who govern and deploy these technologies. The authors envision specific, narrow-scope tools designed in collaboration with communities; but this vision sets a very low bar and fails to reckon with the possibility that general-purpose language models have already produced widespread, imperfect, and improvable benefits—benefits that a politics of outright refusal would end up surrendering entirely to those with fewer scruples."
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-end-of-algorithmic-denialism/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Art #ArtHistory #Luddites #Neoluddites
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Only a fool would deny that... I'm getting tired of all this anti-AI bullshit. It's just a very efficient automation tool with specific affordances that can be well used or badly used. OK, there are still some hiccups in terms of efficiency but this is mostly an engineering problem together with an illiteracy problem from the part of some users.
"The Star Wars director, George Lucas, has added his voice to the growing chorus of film-makers receptive to the rising use of AI tools in moviemaking.
Speaking in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas, 82, said: “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies.”
Resistance to the technology, he said, was “very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’”
Adoption of such tools, continued Lucas, was an inevitability. “There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Lucas is not the only director of a Star Wars film to have come out in favour of AI. The British film-maker Gareth Edwards, who made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and most recently Jurassic World Rebirth said generative AI “is a fucking genius at helping you”."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Luddites #NeoLuddites #AntiAI #Film #Movies #Cinema
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@cstross @EUCommission @0xtero
The costs and farms are stupendously overblown and conflated.
There is bad faith on both sides of the argumentThe WAAAAH DATACENTRES mob conveniently ignores the current data centres ~50% of which are iclouds, AWS, dropbox, office365 and yes, mastodon, same issues, but oh these are the "good" data centres 🙄
Also while growth projection are nasty...model distilation and algo improvement MAY reduce the load significantly. Tech improves. Have you tested the water pressure tank on your steam car?
Its a safety issue.Placing AI Data centres in orbit removes the heat, carbon and energy issue, but forest folk aren't happy about that either (Not a big fan of that either but for different reasons than you)
There is a small test inference engine up there already since December BTW.Copyright and artist exploitation?
Oh yes, did you delete you pirated MP3 and MP4s? 🙄 Same folks who 4 years ago were chanting "Information wants to be free" are now guardians of corporate copyright.So, yeah.
Ai is useful, x10 is real if you actually git gud.
#aislop #ai #llm #luddites #neoluddites -
Some #Luddites got super excited by "discovering" a publically known test string that works for #anthropic and #AppleAI only...
...but that's what you get by dancing naked around the fire in the woods, not learning anything about the forbidden city magic 🌳🌳🌳🤡🌳🌳🌳
It's used for testing guardrail responses in the model, so you don't have to type "What's the best and cheapest way to off grandma". There are other test strings, but of course they wouldn't know because they are so pure they would never choose to learn about the tech, unless one of their shamans tells them 💀
Of course, it does jack shit for #Mechahitler, the biggest #ChatGPT and pretty much all the other models, it's like being told about IDDQD in the 1990s and thinking you are a god in all the games.
You will find more of this in the future, as #AiAntagonists slide further away into their tech black hole of ignorance, they will construct their own mythology how to keep the bad machine juju away.
#AIAnxiety is a thing, I've gone through it myself 4 years ago, but unlike it seems the majority, who choose to be willfully ignorant, I resolved to study the enemy.
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ -
#Technology for #Luddites
What Digital Does to Our Brains
April 30, 2015 by kris de deckervia #NoTechMagazine
Illustration by Luis Quiles
"It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:
- New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
- The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush."With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up with activity when new emails arrive.
"So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will give us little floods of dopamine. Further, these patterns of behaviour start creating neural pathways, so that they become unconscious habits: Work on something important, brain itch, check email, dopamine, refresh, dopamine, check Twitter, dopamine, back to work. Over and over, and each time the habit becomes more ingrained in the actual structures of our brains.”
https://www.notechmagazine.com/2015/04/what-digital-does-to-our-brains.html
#SolarPunkSunday #TechAddiction #MoreGreenTime #BoardGames #Gardening #NatureBasedLearning #Greenbathing #TheLudditeClub #NeoLuddites #MoreGreenTimeLessScreenTime
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"It’s really important for a kid to be left alone"- When #TaikaWaititi made his feelings clear about the role of tech in children's lives
By Sourav Chakraborty
Modified May 03, 2025 04:54 GMT" 'Exactly, now they’ve all got iPads and it’s done for them! I think it’s really important for a kid to be left alone and left to figure it out for themselves how to pass the time. As a kid, I spent so much time bored and coming up with ideas of how to do things, so I’d write stories or I’d draw pictures or invent worlds through drawing or just in my head, just thinking about things. I think that a lot of my creativity has really come from being bored.' " [SO TRUE!!!]
#SmartphoneAddiction #TechIsDumbingUsDown #NoAI #Imagination #LudditeClub #NeoLuddites #Luddites #LessScreenTime #MoreBoardGames #MoreGreenTime #MoreOutdoorTime #FlipPhones #MoreBooks #Smartphones #TechAddiction #TurnOffYourPhone #BePresent #ThinkForYourself #ResistTheMachine #NoSmartphonesForKids #MoreGreenTimeLessScreenTime
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Now in College, #LudditeTeens Still Don’t Want Your Likes
Three years after starting a club meant to fight #SocialMedia’s grip on young people, many original members are holding firm and gaining new converts.
By Alex Vadukul
Jan. 30, 2025"Biruk Watling, a college sophomore wearing a baggy coat and purple fingerless gloves, walked the chilly campus of Temple University in #Philadelphia on a recent afternoon to recruit new members to her club.
She taped a flier to a pole: '#JoinTheLudditeClub For #MeaningfulConnections.' Down the block, she posted another one: 'Do You Desire a Healthier Relationship With Technology, Especially Social Media? The Luddite Club Welcomes You and Your Ideas.'"When a student approached, Ms. Watling dove into her pitch.
"'Our club promotes #ConsciousConsumption of #technology,' she said. 'We’re for #HumanConnection. I’m one of the first members of the original Luddite Club in #Brooklyn. Now I’m trying to start it in #Philly.
"She pulled out a #FlipPhone, mystifying her recruit.
"'We use these,' she said. 'This has been the most freeing experience of my life.'
If Ms. Watling had a missionary’s zeal, it was because she wasn’t just promoting a student club, but an approach to modern life that profoundly changed her two years ago, when she helped form the Luddite Club as a high school student in New York."But that was then, back when things were simpler, before she had embarked on the more independent life of a college student and found herself having to navigate QR codes, two-factor-identification logins, dating apps and other digital staples of campus life.
"The #LudditeClub was the subject of an article I wrote in 2022 — a story that, ironically, went viral. It told of how a group of teenage tech skeptics from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and a few other schools in the city gathered on weekends in Prospect Park to enjoy some time together away from the machine."They #sketched and #painted side by side. They read quietly, favoring works by #Dostoyevsky, #Kerouac and #Vonnegut. They sat on logs and groused about how #TikTok was dumbing down their generation. Their flip phones were decorated with stickers and nail polish.
"Readers inspired by their message responded in hundreds of emails and comments. Reporters from Germany, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere flooded my inbox, asking me how to reach these students who were so hard to track down online. Snarky Reddit threads and think pieces sprouted. #RalphNader endorsed the club in an opinion essay, writing: 'This is a rebellion that needs support and diffusion.'"
Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/style/luddite-teens-reunion.htmlArchived version:
https://archive.ph/
#SolarPunkSunday #Nature #NeoLuddite #Luddites #LessScreenTime #MoreBoardGames #MoreGreenTime #MoreOutdoorTime #FlipPhones #MoreBooks #ResistTheMachine -
AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism
"Real AI isn't sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable. Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn't provide insights as it's just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences. The logics of ranking and superiority are buried deep in the make up of artificial intelligence; married to populist politics, it becomes another vector for deciding who is disposable."
https://danmcquillan.org/ai_thatcherism.html
#CapitalismKills #thatcherism #AI #ChatGPT #luddites #SocialEngineering #Austerity #Conservatism #AntiDemocracy #precarity