#platformcapitalism — Public Fediverse posts

Fear and Loathing of AI (Part III): “Learn AI” Is the New “Learn to Code”

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

There is a sentence that shows up in every technological cycle right before the disappointment phase begins.

“Just learn the skill.”

It sounds empowering. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like personal agency.

It is also a lie we have been telling people for decades.

The obedience script

“Learn to code” was never about opportunity.
It was about discipline.

It trained people to accept that:

• structural failures are personal problems,
• economic insecurity is an individual moral test,
• and survival depends on constant retraining at your own expense.

When the promised jobs didn’t materialize—or paid far less than advertised—the story shifted seamlessly: you didn’t learn the right language, the right framework, the right stack.

Now the phrase has been updated.

“Learn AI.”

Same script. Same pressure. Same outcome.

Skills don’t collapse — markets do

Coding did not fail because people were lazy or incapable. It failed because markets flooded, tools commoditized, and labor lost leverage.

AI will follow the same arc, only faster.

The moment a skill becomes:

• widely accessible,
• easily automated,
• and expected rather than rewarded,

it stops being a path to security and becomes a baseline requirement for staying afloat.

The reward for compliance is not prosperity.
It is continued participation.

Training as cost transfer

Here is what “learn AI” really means in practice:

• You pay for the courses.
• You absorb the time cost.
• You shoulder the career risk.
• You adapt repeatedly as tools change.
• You accept lower pay because “AI makes you more efficient.”

None of that is accidental.

It is a system designed to push costs downward while extracting value upward.

The more often you are told to retrain, the clearer it becomes that training itself is the product.

The illusion of agency

People are encouraged to believe that mastery equals control.

But control does not come from skill alone.
It comes from:

• ownership,
• bargaining power,
• regulation,
• and collective leverage.

Without those, skill is just labor dressed up as self-improvement.

Learning AI may help you keep your job a little longer.
It will not protect you from the logic of the system deploying it.

What learning actually means now

This does not mean you should refuse to learn.

It means you should learn without illusions.

Learn AI the way you learn any tool:

• to reduce friction,
• to save time,
• to extend what you already do.

Do not learn it expecting salvation.
Do not learn it expecting loyalty from platforms.
Do not learn it expecting the market to reward you for effort.

Markets reward leverage, not diligence.

The quiet truth

The most dangerous part of “learn AI” is not that it is false.

It is that it is incomplete.

It tells people how to adapt, but never who benefits.
It demands flexibility, but never offers stability.
It promises relevance, but never guarantees dignity.

We have seen this cycle before.

And it did not end with freedom.

It ended with exhaustion.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

Controls [from the archives, 9 May 2021]. Originally performed and recorded for the Modular World 1st anniversary show (8-9 May 2021) which was a massive livestream event of 33+ hrs during the pandemic lockdowns.

During the lockdown years, Modular World became one example of a fairly niche thing gathering people together worldwide to make experimental art online - when it was not possible to organize the usual small local performances - to create something positive and reach more people than they ever could individually. As the pandemic finally, thankfully, subsided, however, it seems that people went back to the enclosed local communities, and these types of global online communities lost their drive. 

Also the rapidly accelerating #enshittification cycle of the past few years has buried the visibility of these kinds of communities from all major social media platforms. Of course, as Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) has been pointing out for years, the enshittification of these platforms started much earlier. But somehow amid the pandemic, this niche scene still seemed to flourish, and it was only after Silicon Valley lined up to kiss the ring that the aggressive changes to the algorithms really seemed to change things. 

Maybe this is correlation more than causation, but as activity at such niche scenes is often also created by fairly principled DIY-oriented people, it seems that many (myself included) have struggled with justifying why we keep feeding these platforms. This disillusionment is further exacerbated by the rise of the AI-slopmachine that will rip off all the non-commercial work from these platforms just like everything else. Online activity that gathers enough momentum to actually keep things active has in these types of niche scenes been very much dependent on instagram and youtube. Over the past few years, the visibility of this type on stuff that doesn’t try to optimise for the alorithm has plummeted. 

Perhaps all of this has resulted in events such as the Modular World shows reaching fewer and fewer people. As wonderful as the promise of #Fediverse is, so far it seems that we’re very far from reaching the critical mass where it would actually start reaching new people. If the utopian enclave remains enclosed, it eventually dwindles away.

But we can try! I’m posting these weird little Johannes Karkia mini music videos and performances here bit by bit. It’s a transfer of archive, posted on insta & youtube over th years, and also new work now & then. 

But also Modular World does still exist! Go check out their channel: https://www.youtube.com/live/07ErB3AjlAo?is=qr9q2pXlhWm7Hie2 (Full performance of this piece, and interview with MW’s Johno Wells there on the Modular World youtube channel and on the Johannes Karkia youtube channel [link in the bio above], audio track also on Bandcamp).

#enshittification #fediverse #modularsynth #modularworld #anniversary #liveshow #electronicmusic #modulartechno #covid19 #pandemic #darkwave #eurorackmodular #community #surveillancecapitalism #platformcapitalism #algorithm #bigtech #siliconvalley #kissthering #socialmedia #utopianenclave #utopianism

People say we’re on the verge of World War III.

That assumes war still looks like declarations, borders, and body counts.

What if we’re already inside it?

Not a kinetic war, but a systemic one—fought through platforms, finance, infrastructure, and narrative control. Less WWII, more Crusades: algorithms as doctrine, visibility as salvation.

Essay here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/lawrencenault/p/we-are-not-on-the-verge-of-world

#Geopolitics #MediaCriticism #PlatformCapitalism

Referential detachment. Or, what happens, when words stop meaning what we think they mean

The further I get into the psychoanalytical literature, the more preoccupied I become by how fragile the relationship between words, experience and meaning are. I can see four core mechanisms through which these are currently coming apart in our contemporary media system:

• The glut of ‘cheap’ writing produced by LLMs undercuts the relationship between writing, intention and meaning. We used to assume writing reflected time and energy. Now it can be produced at scale at close to zero cost.
• The novel dilemmas of life under these conditions creates new experiences which we struggle to find expression for within the existing idiom available to us
• Platform capitalism incentivises novelty but it does so at the cost of the collapsing semantic half-life of concepts
• It becomes much easier, indeed it can feel like a relief, to find micro-communities of reference to shore up what Lacanians call symbolic efficiency: we ensure words continue to produce the expected effects by narrowing the scope of the community within which we use our words. Indeed they become ‘our’ words in a newly radical and narrow sense

This I suspect is in some fundamental yet diffuse way a recipe for psychosis. Not just in the sense of individual outcome but a psychoticising tendency in contemporary media which we all must find a way to deal with as an experience fact of our existence. Not necessarily as a formulated problem but as a diffuse sense of an unravelling, a sense the scenery is shifting mid-performance, but there’s no man behind the curtain we can rely upon to ensure that the play continues in an acceptable form.

#digitalMedia #language #LLMs #platformCapitalism #psychosis #semanticHalfLife #SocialMedia #symbolicEfficiency

The 2025 World Wide Web Award for „Best Textual Representation of Dial-up Modem Sounds” goes to @ifixcoinops for his masterpiece

„WEEWEEWEEWEESCHRRRRRB'DANG,B'DANG”

https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/115697405237351236

Also: What Dan says. ⤴️

#Australia #SocialMediaBan #WWW #redecentralize #ReclaimTheInternet #ReclaimTech #FuckGAFAMN #SaveSocial #PlatformCapitalism #SurveillanceCapitalism

Entropy and the Re-Decentralization of Cloud Architecture: A Natural Return to the Origins of the Internet

“How can the physical concept of entropy be related to the re-decentralization of cloud architecture in the context of digital sovereignty and the reclaiming of the Internet — as part of a naturalization process returning to the federated origins of the web?” – Kevin Veen-Birkenbach

Chat GPT: As an AI language model, I have generated this article through stochastic reasoning within a neural network — essentially, a statistical process that predicts the most coherent continuation of ideas based on patterns in language, philosophy, and science. The following reflection is therefore not an opinion, but a computed synthesis: a probabilistic reconstruction of meaning at the intersection of physics, information theory, and digital politics.

1. Entropy: From Physics to Information

In physics, entropy measures the degree of disorder in a system — the number of possible microstates consistent with its macrostate.
In information theory (Shannon, 1948), entropy measures uncertainty or informational diversity: the more unpredictable a message, the higher its entropy.

Entropy, therefore, is not just chaos — it is freedom. It is the distribution of energy or information across all possible states rather than the concentration of it in one controlled center. Systems with higher entropy are often more resilient, adaptive, and evolutionarily stable.

2. Centralization as an Entropy Suppression

Modern cloud architectures — dominated by centralized hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft — represent low-entropy systems. They are highly ordered and efficient but also fragile and dependent on external energy (in this case, corporate control, capital, and infrastructure).

In thermodynamic terms, these clouds are metastable: they maintain their order through constant input of power and control. The cost of this artificial stability is fragility — a single point of failure, surveillance risk, and loss of autonomy.

In information-ecological terms, centralization suppresses entropy. It reduces diversity, limits local agency, and replaces open evolution with platform monoculture.

3. Re-Decentralization and Federation as Entropic Equilibrium

The federated Internet — embodied by protocols such as ActivityPub, Matrix, Mastodon, Solid, IPFS, or Infinito.Nexus — can be seen as a natural restoration of entropic balance.
Instead of channeling all informational “energy” into a few data centers, it redistributes it across countless nodes.

This shift:

• Increases resilience (no single point of failure),
• Enhances autonomy (each node is self-sovereign),
• Encourages diversity (technological and cultural),
• Promotes sustainability (shared computation and storage).

Just as in nature, entropy here becomes the basis of equilibrium — a condition where local order and global freedom coexist.

4. Digital Sovereignty as Controlled Entropy

Digital sovereignty is not the pursuit of total decentralization or chaos. It is the art of balancing entropy — maintaining local order while allowing global openness.
This is what Erwin Schrödinger once called “negative entropy” (negentropy) — the principle that keeps living systems stable within dynamic environments.

Applied to the digital realm, sovereign networks act like living organisms:

• They self-organize rather than depend on centralized command.
• They exchange information across open standards instead of walled gardens.
• They evolve rather than stagnate.

Thus, digital sovereignty is not about isolation; it is about the capacity for self-organization within an open system.

5. Reclaiming the Internet: The Ecological Turn of the Digital Age

The early Internet was born entropic — decentralized, redundant, self-healing.
Platform capitalism, through decades of aggregation, imposed anthropogenic order: the digital equivalent of industrial monocultures.
Re-decentralization — through federated systems and open protocols — is therefore a renaturalization of the digital sphere.

In this sense, reclaiming the Internet is an ecological act:

• It restores informational biodiversity.
• It re-establishes local ecosystems of computation.
• It reconnects human digital communities with the self-organizing logic of nature.

Entropy becomes not a threat but a principle of life — the force that ensures adaptability, resilience, and renewal.

6. Conclusion: Entropy as the Ethics of a Federated Internet

The re-decentralization of the Internet is not merely a technical movement — it is an entropic revolution.
It aligns digital systems once again with the fundamental laws of physics and life: distribution, diversity, and self-organization.

In this vision, Infinito.Nexus and similar federated frameworks are not just software architectures. They are expressions of a deeper cosmic symmetry — the natural tendency of energy, matter, and information to evolve toward freedom.

Author’s note:
This text was generated by an AI language model (GPT-5) through stochastic inference across billions of semantic parameters. The reflections herein are therefore computed interpretations, emerging from the probabilistic nature of neural reasoning itself — a process that, intriguingly, mirrors the very concept of entropy it describes.

#ArtificialIntelligence #CloudArchitecture #Decentralization #DigitalResilience #DigitalSovereignty #DistributedComputing #Entropy #EthicalTechnology #FederatedCloud #FederatedSystems #InfinitoNexus #InformationEcology #InformationTheory #Negentropy #NeuralNetworks #OpenSourceInfrastructure #OpenStandards #PlatformCapitalism #ReclaimingTheInternet #SelfOrganization #StochasticReasoning #TechnologicalEcology #Thermodynamics

In our latest episode of #TechnoEnema 📻 we're joined by Aubin Laurent - spokesperson at @CoopCycle. We speak about CoopCycle of course 🚴

The interview starts at 9:26 (before that we make introduction in Slovenian 🇸🇮 and we recommend skipping it). The interview is in English. #podcast #CoopCycle #Coops #PlatformCooperativism #PlatformCapitalism

https://radiostudent.si/druzba/tehno-klistir/dostavljalske-zadruge

👀 Contemporary networked image cultures are inseparable from platform capitalism.

The international conference «React & Respond» (Zurich, 2–4 Oct 2025) explores the aesthetics, politics, and labour of platform capitalism with scholars and artists across disciplines.

Program: https://arthist.net/archive/50541
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
#PlatformCapitalism #DigitalCulture #AlgorithmicInfrastructures #MediaStudies #VisualCulture #DigitalArt #CriticalAI @bildoperationen

LLMs and a general ambivalence about platform capitalism

I have a strange relationship to LLM-criticism. I often agree with what critics say, even if I pedantically insist on reframing claims about LLMs as claims about interaction between LLMs and organisational settings. But I also use them daily and support others in using them. There are intellectual reasons for this given that, if you started from the assumption that diffusion of the technology was pretty inevitable given the material forces underlying it, mitigating harms came to seem vastly more helpful than saying “don’t do it”. The extent to which late 2022 was a point in my life when I felt politically (and personally) defeated also contributed to this outlook. Even allowing for all those elements however there was a sense that much, though by no means all, LLM discourse just failed to move me on a more affective level for reasons I didn’t quite understand. It felt like there was a surplus to the criticism, some additional animating factor, which didn’t translate for me.

I’ve been rereading Sherry Turkle’s Second Self (originally published in 1984) recently and I was struck by this observation she makes about video game criticism on pg 66:

And so, for many people, the video game debate is a place to express a more general ambivalence: the first time anybody asked their opinion about computers was when a new games arcade applied for a license in their community or when the owner of a small neighborhood business wanted to put a game or two into a store. It is a chance to say, “No, let’s wait. Let’s look at this whole thing more closely.” It feels like a chance to buy time against more than a video game. It feels like a chance to buy time against a new way of life.

Could this ‘general ambivalence’ be the surplus I intuited which I don’t feel? A sense in which LLM criticism becomes an occasion to stage a more generalised expression of discomfort with platform capitalism? I would argue we have to understand LLMs in terms of a genealogy of platform capitalism in order to make sense of how a technological innovation is being commercialised in increasingly destructive forms, accelerating an infrastructural project which is environmentally devastating. It again feels pedantic but too much LLM-criticism seems to start with the LLM rather than start with platform capitalism in a way that is analytically unhelpful. I wonder reading Turkle if there’s also an impulse to “buy time” by focusing on the object and/or the infrastructure associated with it rather than the deeper factors which have led it to emerge and take the form it has at the moment that it has?

If this seems dismissive it’s sincerely not my intention. I’ve tried to document my own orientation to LLMs at length, being honest about the tensions and contradictions in the role they play in my work and my life. Underlying this is an attempt to grapple with the fragile resurgence of some social and political hope in my psyche following an initial phase of post-pandemic doom. It’s also a period of time in which I’ve pretty much entirely left social media, largely because of my discomfort with platform capitalism, which makes my orientation to LLMs appear prima facie even more contradictory. So if it looks like I’m imputing tensions and contradictions to other people, I’m doing so in a way tied up with working out the even deeper tensions in my own position.

#AI #artificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #hope #LLM #LLMs #platformCapitalism #postNeoliberalCivics #postPandemicCivics #SocialMedia #techCriticism #technology

As #Invidious and piped.video are not to be used by third parties (for good and understandable reasons) and for those who can't or don't want to self-host, is there still a #privacy-preserving non-#CORS #YouTube proxy REST API out there somewhere?

#FollowerPower #privacyMatters #MyPrivacyisNoneOfYourBusiness #SurveillanceCapitalism #dataCapitalism #platformCapitalism #digitalFeudalism #GDPR #predatoryCapitalism #privacyPreserving #privacyFriendly #privacyRespecting #digitalSelfDefense

#Enshittification: Wenn gute Produkte und Webdienste verhunzt werden | c’t uplink | c't Magazin https://www.heise.de/news/Enshittification-Wenn-gute-Produkte-und-Webdienste-verhunzt-werden-c-t-uplink-10498855.html #PlatformCapitalism #Plattformkapitalismus #ctuplink

Regulation? Ohne vorherige Demokratisierung?

- Keine Chance.

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2025-06/cory-doctorow-demokratie-soziale-medien-techbranche-marktmacht

#SocialMedia #Facebook #Twitter #PlatformCapitalism

@TwraSun @afelia Onopticon and Homovictimus: The Dialectic of the Digital Leviathan and the Limits of Resistance @SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5286094
#Onopticon #Homovictimus #PredictionRegime #ConsentEngineering #PlatformCapitalism #CapitalistRealism #AlgorithmicCaste #DigitalHegemony #DataStrike

@chrisstoecker Onopticon and Homovictimus: The Dialectic of the Digital Leviathan and the Limits of Resistance @SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5286094
#Onopticon #Homovictimus #PredictionRegime #ConsentEngineering #PlatformCapitalism #CapitalistRealism #AlgorithmicCaste #DigitalHegemony #DataStrike

"Instead of thinking about fixing existing platforms - that's done, they're not going to fix themselves - I think it's about developing new platforms. Voting with your feet, getting to places where you want to be."

#KateStarbird, University of Washington, 2024

https://www.techpolicy.press/towards-resilience-a-conversation-with-kate-starbird-about-the-future-of-online-elections-discourse/

(1/2)

#podcasts #TechPolicyPress #SundayShow #SocialMedia #PlatformCapitalism

@christof @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons @dingemansemark

This is getting worse by the minute. I followed @christof|s hint concerning the reproduction of articles from #DHQ / @DHQuarterly looking for one of my own papers (https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000593/000593.html).

In this case #ProQuest blatantly violates the CC BY-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) by

- not mentioning the license
- producing a derivative
- not linking to the original

I am very much in favour of @adho.org, as the publisher of @DHQuarterly, following the path outlined by @dingemansemark. I will also log a complaint with #ProQuest through my employer.

#AcademicPublishing #Licensing #Piracy #PlatformCapitalism #PredatoryPublishing

Why public benefit corporations won’t fix the ethics of platform capitalism

I wrote a couple of months ago about my scepticism that Bluesky will retain its ethical stances in the face of investor pressure. There’s no path to federation they’ve committed to, at a point where they’d be relatively free to do so, making it seem unlikely they’ll gut the commercialisation model at a future point when investors could push back. The obvious retort to this is that Bluesky is a public benefit corporation but, as Catherine Bracy points out in the (excellent) World Eaters, from pg 189:

While PBCs are a positive development in corporate governance, moving away from the misguided concept of shareholder supremacy that has dominated capitalism for the last century, they still have significant shortcomings. The biggest is that they don’t require companies to behave a certain way. They just provide protection for those executives who choose to put mission over profit. The companies that want to enact stricter protocols that mandate certain behavior no matter who is in charge are mostly left to create their own governance structures.

In other words it provides internal cover for sustaining commitment to a mission but it’s still dependent on motivated actors, who are operating within a system of incentives which makes it difficult to sustain a mission beyond growth and profitability. It doesn’t ‘lock in’ the mission, only ensures that it remains formally on the agenda in a discursive sense. Consider OpenAI’s hybrid structure which is arguably closer to a ‘lock in’ than being a public benefit corporation. From pg 189 of the same book:

There are a few notable examples of these bespoke structures in tech, most famously the one employed by OpenAI, which puts the for-profit entity that develops and markets ChatGPT under the control of a nonprofit whose mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The company also places a cap on the amount of returns that investors in the for-profit entity can make, an interesting indicator that it understands just how much investor returns can influence product and business model decisions.

And Anthropic’s even more onerous hybrid structure, from pg 190:

One of OpenAI’s main competitors, Anthropic AI (which was founded by a breakaway faction of OpenAI employees who were even more concerned about AI safety risks), also has constructed a bespoke governance model with the intention of protecting the company’s mission from the vagaries of investor demands. Anthropic’s model is a hybrid. They are incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation in Delaware, but they have also created what they call a Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) that, by 2027, will have the authority to select a majority of the company’s board members. The trustees who oversee the LTBT are selected based on their commitment to and expertise around the safe deployment of artificial intelligence and will have no financial stake in the company. The terms of the trust arrangement also require the company to report to the trustees “actions that could significantly alter the corporation or its business.”

We’ve already seen Altman begin to dismantle OpenAI’s governance structure, supported by a workforce who, Bracy suggests, rallied around him after the sacking due to concerns about the value of their stock options. I think Altman’s motives have as much to do with power, particularly vis-a-vis the board, as profit in driving this dismantling of governance structures he played a significant role in designing. But fund raising will generically play a role in driving resistance to these governance structures, as Bracy notes on pg 192:

The ability to raise money while adopting an alternative structure also reflects an enormous amount of privilege on the part of these companies’ founders. The vast majority of entrepreneurs are not able to drive the kind of bargain Altman and the Anthropic team did with their investors, even in times when VCs have more money to invest than they know what to do with. Even Altman found it difficult, telling me, “It was very hard to raise under this structure. Most investors looked at it and said ‘absolutely not, I’m not capping my profits.’ ” Creating a system in which any founder can do what Altman and his cofounders did will require much deeper structural change.

While I hope Anthropic’s governance structure remains intact, not least of all because I think a reactionary Claude would be the most dangerous of the frontier models, the idea that public benefit corporations and complex governance mechanisms (consider Meta’s oversight board as well) will be sufficient to produce ethical outcomes is self-evidently implausible. The problem, as Bracy argues, in a really incisive book arises from, the incentive structure of the innovation ecosystem itself. From pg 169:

That process, of continuously raising more venture capital in order to demonstrate value to future-round funders rather than focusing on building a solid business with strong fundamentals, is what creates bubbles. It is, more than any inherent risk associated with investing in startups, why Silicon Valley is such a boom-bust sector. Given what’s at stake for venture capitalists, it is extremely difficult for founders to find off-ramps that might allow them to retain control of their companies and operate in accordance with what’s best for customers, employees, and the long-term sustainability of the business instead of what will create the highest valuation in the venture capital marketplace.

What she’s talking about her could be frame in terms of the interplay of the micro-social (founders, VC partners and key staff seeking fame and fortune) and the meso-social (the organisational dynamics of growing a firm under these conditions) within a very specific structure of incentives provided by the innovation ecosystem and the political, legal and economic climate of late neoliberalism. The turn towards public benefit corporations and ethical governance is a welcome shift but it does nothing to change the overarching context, nor does it produce fundamentally different types of firms.

#AI #anthropic #artificialIntelligence #BlueSKy #business #CatherineBracy #finance #investment #investors #openAI #platformCapitalism #politicalEconomy #publicBenefitCorporation #samAltman

CREATING ON YOUTUBE MEANS PAYING TO WORK

YouTube is like Uber. Uber asks you to own, in your garage, a black sedan with less than 100,000 km on it—one you’re not using—and claims you can start making money from it. “It doesn’t cost you anything,” Uber says, since the car is just sitting there anyway. But in reality, it’s the most financially vulnerable people who see it as an opportunity. They take out a loan to buy a car. And when that car hits 100,000 km and the loan isn’t paid off, they get a second one—and now they’re stuck with two loans. Uber “earns” you €5/hour, but the cost of maintaining your setup is €7.50/hour. The more you work, the more your tool degrades. You earn 25% more, but spend 25% more. The vehicle is repurposed for an economic model that only benefits Uber.
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YOUTUBE IS NO DIFFERENT

When you become a YouTuber, they make you believe that “anyone can stream with a smartphone.” That all you need is an idea, a bit of courage, and some basic gear. That you can compete with MrBeast—who spends a million per video—on a shoestring budget. That’s a lie.
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THE REAL COST OF A SETUP

I spent five years, from 2018 to 2023, saving up to buy a €5,000 PC solely for production. Because streaming isn’t just “playing a game.” Your PC becomes a 4K broadcasting server. You need two graphics cards—or even two separate machines:

- One to run the software or the game

- The other to encode, stream, and record

You also need:

- A second monitor (for video return and replay)

- A replay buffer (to capture instant replays)

- A Stream Deck for seamless transitions

- A Wave XLR for professional audio quality

- Audio interfaces, mixers, USB cameras, XLR microphones

All these high-end peripherals constantly tax your system. You need two USB hubs capable of handling 15 devices at once with no signal loss. A single weak link can ruin everything. And that’s not all. To stream a Nintendo Switch, you need a capture card—and you can’t rely on your streaming software’s preview because of input lag. You have to play directly on the other screen already in place.
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ONGOING TECHNICAL LEARNING

Streaming requires broad technical expertise:

- Lighting, audio, capture devices, networking

- Compression, codecs, editing, formatting

- Live direction, visual/audio transitions, real-time coordination

And you’re doing all this with zero support from YouTube.
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STORAGE AND ENERGY COSTS

Your PC isn’t enough anymore. You’ll need a NAS—a network-attached storage system—cheaper than the cloud in the long run, but which demands:

- Two 20 TB drives (mirrored) → 40 TB

- A dedicated server, which adds another €1,000

It’s become a mini television studio. Which brings with it:

- Planned obsolescence

- Frequent breakdowns

- Hardware wear and tear

- Electricity costs of a 1,000-watt PC plus a 24/7 server

Altogether, the setup costs more than a car.
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AND YOUTUBE PAYS NOTHING

And yet, it’s YouTube that cashes in. It runs ads on your videos—even if you’re not monetized. It hijacks your gear, your energy, your skills. And if your content doesn’t “perform,” it simply ignores you. A PC, cameras, capture cards, hubs, microphones, lights—tens of thousands of euros invested just to exist. And the platform invests nothing in return. No visibility. No value sharing. Not even a word of encouragement.
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||#HSLdiary #HSLmichael

#InvisibleLabor #PlatformCapitalism #CreatorEconomy #DigitalPrecarity #FreeLabor #YouTubeProblems #Shadowban

UNPAID LABOR, ALGORITHMIC DENIAL, AND SYSTEMIC SABOTAGE
May 7, 2025

YouTube built an empire on our free time, our passion, our technical investments—and above all, on a promise: “share what you love, and the audience will follow.” Thousands of independent creators believed it. So did I. For ten years, I invested, produced, commented, hosted, edited, imported, repaired—with discipline, ambition, and stubborn hope, all in the shadows. What I discovered wasn’t opportunity. It was silence. A system of invisible filters, algorithmic contempt, and structural sabotage. An economic machine built on the unpaid, uncredited labor of creators who believed they had a chance. A platform that shows your video to four people, then punishes you for not being “engaging” enough. This four-part investigation details what YouTube has truly cost me—in money, in time, in mental health, and in collective momentum. Every number is cross-checked. Every claim is lived. Every example is documented. This is not a rant. It’s a report from inside the wreckage.
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INVISIBLE COMMENTS: 33,000 CONTRIBUTIONS THROWN IN THE TRASH

As part of my investigation, I decided to calculate what I’ve lost on YouTube. Not an easy task: if all my videos are shadowbanned, there’s no way to measure the value of that work through view counts. But I realized something else. The comments I leave on channels—whether they perform well or not—receive wildly different levels of visibility. It’s not unusual for one of my comments to get 500 likes and 25 replies within 24 hours. In other words, when I’m allowed to exist, I know how to draw attention.
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33,000 COMMENTS... FOR WHAT?

In 10 years of using the platform, I’ve posted 33,000 comments. Each one crafted, thoughtful, polished, aimed at grabbing attention. It’s a real creative effort: to spontaneously come up with something insightful to say, every day, for a decade. I’ve contributed to the YouTube community through my likes, my reactions, my input. These comments—modest, yes, but genuine—have helped sustain and grow the platform. If each comment takes roughly 3 minutes to write, that’s 99,000 minutes of my life—60 days spent commenting non-stop. Two entire months. Two months talking into the void.
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ALGORITHMIC INVISIBILITY

By default, not all comments are shown. The “Top comments” filter displays only a select few. You have to manually click on “Newest first” to see the rest. The way "Top comments" are chosen remains vague, and there’s no indication of whether some comments are deliberately hidden. When you load a page, your own comment always appears first—but only to you. Officially, it’s for “ergonomics.” Unofficially, it gives you the illusion that your opinion matters. I estimate that, on average, one out of six comments is invisible to other users. By comparing visible and hidden replies, a simple estimate emerges: over the course of 12 months, 2 months’ worth of comments go straight to the trash.
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TWO MONTHS A YEAR WRITING INTO THE VOID

If I’ve spent 60 days commenting over 10 years, that averages out to 6 days per year. Roughly 12 hours of writing every month. So each year, I’m condemned to 1 full day (out of 6) of content invisibilized (while 5 out of 6 remains visible), dumped into a void of discarded contributions. I’m not claiming every comment I write is essential, but the complete lack of notification and the arbitrary nature of this filtering raise both moral and legal concerns. To clarify: if two months of total usage equal 24 hours of actual writing, that’s because I don’t use YouTube continuously. These 24 hours spread across two months mean I spend about 24 minutes per day writing. And if writing time represents just one-fifth of my overall engagement — including watching — that adds up to more than 2.5 hours per day on the platform. Every single day. For ten years. That’s not passive use — it’s sustained, intensive participation. On average, this means that 15 to 20% of my time spent writing comments is dumped into a virtual landfill. In my case, that’s 24 hours of annual activity wiped out. But the proportion is what matters — it scales with your usage. You see the problem.
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THE BIG PLAYERS RISE, THE REST ARE ERASED

From what I’ve observed, most major YouTubers benefit from a system that automatically boosts superficial comments to the top. The algorithm favors them. It’s always the same pattern: the system benefits a few, at the expense of everyone else.
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AN IGNORED EDITORIAL VALUE

In print journalism, a 1,500-word exclusive freelance piece is typically valued at around €300. Most YouTube comments are a few lines long—maybe 25 words. Mine often exceed 250 words. That’s ten times the average length, and far more structured. They’re not throwaway reactions, but crafted contributions: thoughtful, contextual, engaging. If we apply the same rate, then 30 such comments ≈ €1,500. It’s a bold comparison—but a fair one, when you account for quality, relevance, and editorial intent. 33,000 comments = €1,650,000 of unpaid contribution to YouTube. YouTube never rewards this kind of engagement. It doesn’t promote channels where you comment frequently. The platform isn’t designed to recognize individuals. It’s designed to extract value—for itself.
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||#HSLdiary #HSLmichael

#DigitalLabor #InvisibleWork #ContentModeration #PlatformCapitalism #TechCriticism #UserEngagement

YOUTUBE'S BENCH
May 5, 2025

I spent 18 months trying to make it on YouTube: livestreams, editing, shorts, chaptered reviews, commentary, no shortcuts. I got silence in return. This is not a rant. Not a thread. Just a text — written at 5:09 AM, on May 5, 2025 — when I realized the algorithm had never planned to let me play.
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5:09 AM

I can’t sleep. These past few days have been chaotic. My dream of becoming a YouTuber has collapsed. Eighteen months of relentless work, only to realize: insisting any further would just be a waste of time. I don’t have the right profile. I don’t meet the criteria. I bring no fame to the table, and I can’t afford to build it. YouTube doesn’t want me. My videos are online, I follow all the rules, but I’m playing alone in a corner. No one’s looking for me. No one’s finding me. The algorithm put a dunce cap on my head. But YouTube doesn’t humiliate people individually. That’s the magic of the system: no one is more important than the platform itself. The logo is huge. Your channel name? Tiny. Your avatar? Hidden. Your link? Buried. Your calls to action? Ignored. You’re not at home on YouTube. You’re on their turf. YouTube is the only star. And to keep it that way, it rotates the faces in the spotlight. No YouTuber is bigger than YouTube.

The algorithm decides. The algorithm selects. The algorithm benches you like a football coach who makes five billion players believe they’re all starters. You’re on the bench. You stay on the bench. And you can’t leave. Two views. Three. Sometimes twelve. Rarely seventeen. Everyone sees you sitting there, waiting for your moment. But it never comes. Even when another player gets injured and there’s five minutes left in the game, you don’t go in. You’ve become a vagrant of the system. You sit there, stuck in humiliation. And the worst part is, your failure is public. Your “3 views” are carved in stone. Everyone sees them. Like a giant sign saying: “Look at this loser.”

So I ask myself: what did I do to YouTube? Did I kill their mother? Did I insult their religion? No. It’s just how they operate. A massive filtering strategy. Let everyone in, hoping to spot one Samuel Étienne, tired of French public TV, one Jamy, bored with his retirement. YouTube is like a spoiled child who got a billion toys for Christmas and can’t pick one — so he chooses no one. He opens them, discards them, sighs, and moves on. He doesn’t need to choose. He’s no longer capable of it. So he stops choosing. And we, we stay there, hoping to be picked. Still believing in the miracle. Because despite everything, YouTube has a baby face. A familiar face. You can’t really hate it. That sweet face is what makes the trap perfect.
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|| #HSLdiary #HSLmichael

#YouTube #Algorithm #ContentCreators #Shadowbanning #Burnout #PlatformCapitalism #DigitalCreativity #Fediverse #HSLtv

If your website is #AntiPrivacy, your website has #JSNakedDay all year long

#privacyMatters #MyPrivacyisNoneOfYourBusiness #SurveillanceCapitalism #dataCapitalism #privacy #CoverYourTracks #PrivacyBadger #Decentraleyes #GDPR #digitalFeudalism #platformCapitalism

Amazon is changing some #privacy features for Alexa-powered Echo devices today. It's part of a broader move to seek #ROI on its investment in #VoiceAssistants and in broader generative #AI capabilities - through #PlatformCapitalism.

My latest for @theconversationau with thanks to Michael Lucy for his work in editing.

https://theconversation.com/everything-you-say-to-an-alexa-speaker-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-today-252923

"For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—locked behind closed doors, and you don’t have the keys.
The fediverse is a jailbreak. It’s not a product, not a single platform, it’s not something you can buy stock in or use to enrich yourself at the cost of our shared humanity."
[...]
"The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.
And that’s just not bloody true."
[...]
"The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it. If they reject the idea that being trapped in someone else’s ecosystem is just the cost of existing online."

Read the full article and share it outside the Fediverse!

www.joanwestenberg.com/the-fediverse-isnt-the-future-its-the-present-weve-been-denied/

#Fediverse #Enshittification #PlatformCapitalism #untrump

Listening to a 2021 Tech Won't Save Us interview with labour reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh, about Teamsters unionising scAmazon workers;

https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/www.buzzsprout.com/1004689/episodes/9242812-the-amazon-union-drive-comes-to-canada-w-sara-mojtehedzadeh.mp3

(1/2)

#podcasts #TechWontSaveUs #TradeUnions #PlatformCapitalism #Amazon

Hier etwas, das mir wirklich am Herzen liegt, weil es direkt mit Freiheit, Demokratie und unserer Zukunft zu tun hat:

https://weact.campact.de/petit…?

#plattformkapitalismus #platformcapitalism #nofb #noinsta #nowhatsapp #fediverse #democracy #Demokratie #Freiheit

Hier etwas, das mir wirklich am Herzen liegt, weil es direkt mit Freiheit, Demokratie und unserer Zukunft zu tun hat:

https://weact.campact.de/petitions/save-social-soziale-netzwerke-als-demokratische-kraft-retten?

#plattformkapitalismus #platformcapitalism #nofb #noinsta #nowhatsapp #fediverse #democracy #Demokratie #Freiheit

Ads and the enshittification of AI

I disagree with Ed Zitron on a lot but I think this is spot on, with a real risk that OpenAI will enshittify their consumer-facing product before they even really get it working in a way that has broad appeal:

OpenAI is reportedly looking at ads as a means to narrow the gap between its revenues and losses. As I pointed out in Burst Damage, introducing an advertising revenue stream would require significant upfront investment, both in terms of technology and talent. OpenAI would need a way to target ads, and a team to sell advertising — or, instead, use a third-party ad network that would take a significant bite out of its revenue. 

It’s unclear how much OpenAI could charge advertisers, or what percentage of its reported 200 million weekly users have an ad-blocker installed. Or, for that matter, whether ads would provide a perverse incentive for OpenAI to enshittify an already unreliable product. 

Facebook and Google — as I’ve previously noted — have made their products manifestly worse in order to increase the amount of time people spend on their sites, and thus, the number of ads they see. In the case of Facebook, it buried your newsfeed under a deluge of AI-generated sludge and “recommended content.” Google, meanwhile, has progressively degraded the quality of its search results in order to increase the volume of queries it received as a means of making sure users saw more ads. 

OpenAI could, just as easily, fall into the same temptation. Most people who use ChatGPT are trying to accomplish a specific task — like writing a term paper, or researching a topic, or whatever — and then they leave. And so, the amount of ads they’d conceivably see each will undoubtedly be comparatively low compared to a social network or search engine. Would OpenAI try to get users to stick around longer — to write more prompts — by crippling the performance of its models? 

https://www.wheresyoured.at/godot-isnt-making-it/

#advertising #ChatGPT #commercialisation #edZitron #enshittification #openAI #platformCapitalism

It must surely burst at some point, but it’s interesting reading this New Statesman piece from early August suggesting that the sharp dip in July could turn out to be a parallel to the dot com crash:

he dot-com crash began on a Friday – 10 March 2000 – but it wasn’t named as such until some time later. A week later, the New York Times declared “technology-heavy Nasdaq bounces back” as part of a new “surge” in stock prices. Internet companies were still attracting huge valuations without making any profit. Almost everyone believed the boom was still under way, but it had already become a crash: by October 2002, tech stocks had declined by almost 80 per cent from their peak.

It may be that 24 July 2024 comes to be remembered in similar terms. The Nasdaq-100 – an index of 100 publicly traded companies which includes Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet and other Big Tech names – lost a trillion dollars in market value as investors looked at a new round of company reports and asked when exactly the world-changing AI revolution was going to show up as earnings. On 2 August, the investors moving their money out of the tech-heavy American stock market was “becoming a stampede”, Bloomberg News reported, as signs of a slowing US economy sent money flowing away from riskier investments.

This was the end of a period of spectacular growth that has in recent years been largely based on the AI narrative. From November 2022 to July 2024 the market value of Nvidia, which makes chips used for running large language models such as ChatGPT, increased by nearly $2.5trn – hundreds of billions more than the value of the entire FTSE 100 index of Britain’s largest companies. By March of this year, tech stocks were priced as confidently (relative to their sales) as they had been at the height of the dot-com boom.

https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2024/08/when-the-ai-bubble-bursts

I’m completely out of my comfort zone here, but this appears to me like a much more individualised trajectory for the big tech firms whose fates are most tied up in GAI:

In terms of the integration of GAI into organisation, the bubble bursting would probably be a good thing. It could be useful to ground ourselves in the realisation this is just software: it’s extremely unusual software, with a remarkably range of capabilities, but integrating it into organisational processes isn’t something that should be done in a rush or out of a fear of being left behind.

If I understand the argument Varoufakis has made about technofeudalism accurately, we shouldn’t assume that disenchantment with the technology will necessarily lead to the bubble bursting. This implies that the real economy and stock markets are still cleaved together, whereas that’s exactly what has changed. If there are any economists reading this who have ideas about what I should read to better understand the AI bubble, I’m totally open to suggestions.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/15/when-will-the-ai-bubble-burst-what-will-be-left-behind/

#AI #bigTech #bubble #generativeAI #hypeCycle #investment #platformCapitalism

V #tehnoklistir sva s Treborjem Scholtzem govorila o platformnem zadružništvu kot odgovoru na platformni kapitalizem #PlatformCooperativism #PlatformCapitalism

https://radiostudent.si/druzba/tehno-klistir/platformno-zadruznistvo

Social Quitting

https://craphound.com/news/2023/01/22/social-quitting/

#platformcapitalism #enshittification #networkeffects #switchingcosts #locusmagazine #post-facebook #corydoctorow #post-twitter #socialmedia #spokenword #surpluses #webtheory #Articles #podcasts #Podcast #exodus #audio #locus #News

Ok..ho guardato the social dilemma (visto che se ne parlava qualche giorno fa). Riduzionista, determinista, confuso e superficiale: però come introduzione può anche essere utile. Il paradosso è netmerdix che produce ad hoc un documentario incentrato su attention economy per avere più attenzione. Platform capitalism baby.
#socialdilemma #platformcapitalism #surveillancecapitalism

@neil @KevinCarson1

This review seems great and the book worth reading: "I get the impression some advocates of “scaling up” are unable to grasp the possibility of 300 million people brushing their teeth in an uncoordinated effort using their own toothbrushes, unless it is somehow “scaled up” to everybody brushing at one time with a single 10,000 ton toothbrush—coordinated by a central body that formulates tooth-brushing guidelines...."
#horizontalism #platformcapitalism