#techcriticism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #techcriticism, aggregated by home.social.
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Fighting Fascism pod welcomes Sarah Myers West, "who lays out why #AI, as it's currently structured, is all about the consolidation of power among a handful of #oligarchs, but also how that's not how it needs to be."
(v. her co-authored piece, "The Great AI Grift": https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/ai-crony-capitalism-grift/)
#tech #artificialIntelligence #BigTech #techFutures #techCriticism #techOligarchs -
‘Just looping you in’: why letting AI write our emails might actually create more work
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Workplace #EmailCulture #Productivity #BigTech #FutureOfWork #DigitalLife #Email #Work #Automation #TechCriticism
#Communication #Offices
https://the-14.com/just-looping-you-in-why-letting-ai-write-our-emails-might-actually-create-more-work/ -
Grimes calls AI "more influential than Jesus" — and also "the most dangerous thing coming."
She warns about military AI, names OpenAI and Grok as particularly risky, and criticizes Silicon Valley's pursuit of a "digital god."
Her new album Psy Opera is mostly human-made — except one track, "DeepSeek," with lyrics by open-source DeepSeek.
She backs decentralized AI, not lab control.
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"We have come to this cultural agreement that convenience is so important that it trumps everything else, forgetting that anything that matters in life is inconvenient [...] I think we should re-value difficulty, overcoming difficulty, and take pleasure in gaining mastery, because it is a form of empowerment"
#SpeakingOutOfPlace welcomes #CarissaVéliz, author of #Prophecy
#AI #tech #artificialIntelligence #techCriticism #techFutures #BigTech #books @bookstodon
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"We have come to this cultural agreement that convenience is so important that it trumps everything else, forgetting that anything that matters in life is inconvenient [...] I think we should re-value difficulty, overcoming difficulty, and take pleasure in gaining mastery, because it is a form of empowerment"
#SpeakingOutOfPlace welcomes #CarissaVéliz, author of #Prophecy
#AI #tech #artificialIntelligence #techCriticism #techFutures #BigTech #books @bookstodon
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"We have come to this cultural agreement that convenience is so important that it trumps everything else, forgetting that anything that matters in life is inconvenient [...] I think we should re-value difficulty, overcoming difficulty, and take pleasure in gaining mastery, because it is a form of empowerment"
#SpeakingOutOfPlace welcomes #CarissaVéliz, author of #Prophecy
#AI #tech #artificialIntelligence #techCriticism #techFutures #BigTech #books @bookstodon
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"We have come to this cultural agreement that convenience is so important that it trumps everything else, forgetting that anything that matters in life is inconvenient [...] I think we should re-value difficulty, overcoming difficulty, and take pleasure in gaining mastery, because it is a form of empowerment"
#SpeakingOutOfPlace welcomes #CarissaVéliz, author of #Prophecy
#AI #tech #artificialIntelligence #techCriticism #techFutures #BigTech #books @bookstodon
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"We have come to this cultural agreement that convenience is so important that it trumps everything else, forgetting that anything that matters in life is inconvenient [...] I think we should re-value difficulty, overcoming difficulty, and take pleasure in gaining mastery, because it is a form of empowerment"
#SpeakingOutOfPlace welcomes #CarissaVéliz, author of #Prophecy
#AI #tech #artificialIntelligence #techCriticism #techFutures #BigTech #books @bookstodon
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Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)
#HackerNews #Make #macOS #consistently #bad #unironically #techcriticism #macOS #discussion #softwareengineering #HackerNews
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'As the higher brain functions of society fade, what remains gradually starts to look like an economic creature moving on instinct—a zombie, mostly brain-dead, reacting only to immediate stimuli and driven by an insatiable hunger. [...] Not the “new industrial revolution” promised by #AI leadership, but weak productivity, low-value workslop, and a massive bubble of unprofitability.'
https://brooklynrail.org/2026/02/field-notes/social-debraining/
#tech #techCriticism #labour #artificialIntelligence #SiliconValley -
Crítica al alarmismo tecnológico: Análisis del discurso sobre el apocalipsis de la IA y su uso como herramienta de distracción frente a problemas estructurales de 2026. 🧠👾 🔗 https://www.glitchmental.com/2026/02/apocalipsis-ia-verdad-incomoda.html #AIEthics #TechCriticism #DigitalTrends #GlitchMentalMX
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An ‘AI afterlife’ is now a real option – but what becomes of your legal status?
#Tech #AI #AIEthics #DigitalAfterlife #GriefTech #TechCriticism #TechAndLaw #PrivacyRights #TechEthics #DataOwnership #AIRegulation #DigitalIdentity #GriefBots #HumanRights
https://the-14.com/an-ai-afterlife-is-now-a-real-option-but-what-becomes-of-your-legal-status/ -
How others see TikTok: social media short videos
How I see TikTok: narcissist aggregator
The popular view of TikTok is simple short videos, but my critical perspective sees it as something deeper: a highly efficient narcissist aggregator. The platform's mechanics, designed for endless scrolling and immediate feedback, inherently encourage and reward the seeking of external approval.
#tiktok #socialmedia #critique #narcissism #externalvalidation #humantech #psychology #techcriticism #shortvideos #internet #digitalculture #selfieculture #thoughts #activism #socialcommentary #onlinebehaviour #reflection #attentioneconomy #validation
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Meta 的產品就是奇葩，真的太垃圾了啊！還搞上地域歧視了？事情就是這樣，WhatsApp 上的 Meta AI 真的一言難盡，明明 Llama 模型的中文水平還不錯，非要屏蔽中文，當我用中文傳送訊息給 AI 的時候，AI 雖然會說中文但馬上就被系統屏蔽！你這是什麼意思？其它語言則不會，明明 Llama 的中文水平不錯，也沒什麼問題，非要故意屏蔽，見鬼去吧，不只是 WhatsApp，在 Instagram 等 Meta 的 app 上的 AI 都是會這樣！真的讓人氣死，而且 WhatsApp 上的 Meta AI 都有點 bug（在影片中能明顯的看得出來），要不是身邊人都用 WhatsApp，我也不想用這狗屁東西 💩 Meta 的產品真沒一個是好的，我個人認為真的全是垃圾，這就是為什麼我比較偏向開源，雖說還是會用閉源的東西但還是比較偏向開源的
@board #Meta #MetaAI #WhatsApp #Instagram #Facebook #AI #Llama #TechBias #AIBias #SocialMedia #BigTech #TechCriticism -
Geert Lovink – founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures – returns to Berlin for #dnl36. A fierce critic of digital capitalism, he exposes the emotional and political toll of today’s platform society. Author of Platform Brutality, Sad by Design, and Zero Comments, Lovink asks: what does collective resistance look like when the internet becomes brutal?
🔗 disruptionlab.org/technoviolence
#dnl36 #DigitalCultures #PlatformBrutality #TechCriticism #GeertLovink #SurveillanceCapitalism -
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
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What do platforms really do?
In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.
Design for a Teacup (1880-1910) painting in high resolution by Noritake Factory. Original from The Smithsonian Institution. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.So, why am I posting this on my own blog and not on a “platform”? I don’t view writing as a financial transaction. It is a hobby. By putting the financialization lens front and center, platforms are killing the mental space for hobbies. When you monetize tweets, you create incentive to craft tweets that create engagement in particular ways. Usually not healthy ways.
If we think of old media or traditional manufacturing, we can compare them to guilds. Guilds kept up prices and controlled production. With the simplification of tasks factories could hire workers who weren’t as highly skilled but didn’t need to be. Nowadays, why should any newspaper or TV channel’s output be limited by the amount of airtime or page space they have?
Platforms take unskilled and train them. We are in the age of specialization of ideas. Akin to the “the advantage of disaggregating a productive process” Platforms leverage this by having many producers explore the same space through millions of different angles. This allows the platform to “purchase exactly that precise quantity of [skill] which is necessary for each process” —paying a viral star a lot and a niche creator a little, perfectly matching reward to market impact. Which is to say platforms make money through whatever sticks.
In Landes’s essay, Management became specialized, today management will become algorithmized. Platforms abstract away the issues that factory owners had such as embezzlement of resources, slacking off etc. Platforms don’t care how much or how little you produce, or even if you produce. If you do, the cash is yours (after a cut of course).
This may lead to a visceral reaction against platforms. This week when Substack raised a substantial amount they called the writers “the heroes of culture”. This should ring at least a tiny alarm in your head. The platform’s rhetoric of the creator-as-hero is a shrewd economic arrangement. In the putting-out system, the merchant-manufacturer “was able to shift capital expenditures (plant and equipment) to the worker”. Platforms do the same with creative risk. The writer, artist, or creator invests all the time and labor—the “capital” of creation—upfront. If they fail, they bear the entire loss. The platform, like the putter-outer, only participates in the upside, taking its cut from the successful ‘heroes’ while remaining insulated from the failures of the many.
So what do platforms really do? They have resurrected the essential role of the boss for the digital age. They are the merchant-manufacturers who build the roads to market, and they are the factory owners who discipline production—not with overseers, but with incentive algorithms. By casting the creator as the hero, they obscure their own power and shift the immense risks of creative work onto the individual. While appearing to be mere background IT admins, they are, in fact, the central organizers of production, demonstrating that even in the 21st century, the fundamental challenges of coordinating labor and capital persist, and solving them remains, as it was in the 18th century, a very lucrative role.
What Do Bosses Really Do?, David S. Landes, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 585-623 (39 pages). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121476
#algorithmicManagement #Business #capitalism #creatorEconomy #digitalLabor #economicHistory #economics #futureOfWork #history #IndustrialRevolution #Leadership #management #monetization #philosophy #platforms #Startups #Substack #techCriticism #technology #writing
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#TechCriticism
https://thebaffler.com/latest/another-bullshit-night-in-slop-city-harrisonnother Bullshit Night
Trevor #Paglen - ImageNetRoulette
“models all the way down”
https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way -
Max Blumenthal on Palentir at AI Expo
https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/palantir-sponsored-war-tech-summit -
Improving human beings to make them perform better: Why is transhumanism so harmful?
#Humans #TransHumanism #TechCriticism #Bioethics #Capitalism #HumanEnhancement #Sociology #Humanity #SocialProgress #PoliticalPhilosophy #Ecofeminism #FutureOfHumanity
https://the-14.com/improving-human-beings-to-make-them-perform-better-why-is-transhumanism-so-harmful/ -
What a marvel!
Let’s hope no semiologist gets hurt reading this piece :)Art is becoming increasingly essential in asserting our cultural autonomy against a technological determinism that, more often than not, exists solely in the minds of those who take the Gartner Hype Cycle as gospel and the marketing of major consulting firms as sacred writ.
The space of critique is our salvation.
The future is a space for self-determination.[Link to article: Meet the Artist Using Ritual Magic to Trap Self-Driving Cars – Vice]
https://www.vice.com/en/article/meet-the-artist-using-ritual-magic-to-trap-self-driving-cars-2/
#ArtAsResistance #CriticalDesign #TechnologicalDeterminism #CulturalAutonomy #SpeculativeArt #AIArt #TechCriticism #FutureIsNow #SelfDrivingCars #RitualMagic #ContemporaryArt #AutonomyVsAutomation #DigitalCulture #PostDigitalArt
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UNPAID LABOR, ALGORITHMIC DENIAL, AND SYSTEMIC SABOTAGE
May 7, 2025YouTube 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 TRASHAs 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 INVISIBILITYBy 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 VOIDIf 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 ERASEDFrom 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 VALUEIn 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.
¯#DigitalLabor #InvisibleWork #ContentModeration #PlatformCapitalism #TechCriticism #UserEngagement
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"So a lot of my listeners and readers are not tech people. I have people who are from all sorts of walks of life, and everyone is being told artificial intelligence is the future. It’s gonna do this, it’s gonna do that. People are aware that this term is being drummed into them repeatedly.
I think everyone, for a manifold amount of reasons, is currently looking at the cognitive dissonance of the A.I. boom, where we have all of these promises and egregious sums of money being put into something that doesn’t really seem to be doing the things that everyone’s excited about.
We’re being told, “Oh, this automation’s gonna change our lives.” Our lives aren’t really being changed, other than our power grids being strained, our things being stolen, and some jobs being replaced. Freelancers, especially artists and content creators, are seeing their things replaced with a much, much shittier version. But nevertheless, they’re seeing how some businesses have contempt for creatives.
“Why is this thing the future? And if it isn’t the future, why am I being told that it is?” That question is applicable to blue-collar workers, to hedge fund managers, to members of the government, to everyone, because this is one of the strangest things to happen in business history."
https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/ed-zitron-interview-big-tech-ai-criticism.html
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"The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones. We’re not expected to work out “the new way to use a toilet” every few months because somebody decided we were finishing too quickly.
Yet our apps and the platforms we use every day operate by a totally different moral and intellectual compass. While the idea of an update is fairly noble (and not always negative) — that something you’ve bought can be maintained and improved over time is a good thing — many tech platforms see it as a means to further extract and exploit, to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer or take more-profitable actions.
We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways. There is no digital world and physical world — they are, and have been, the same for quite some time, and reporting on tech as if this isn’t the case fails the user. It may seem a little dramatic, but take a second and really think about how many little digital irritations you deal with in a day. It’s time to wake up to the fact that our digital lives are rotten.
I’m not talking about one single product or company, but most digital experiences. The interference is everywhere, and we’ve all learned to accept conditions that are, when written out plainly, are kind of insane."
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"A bias in favor of industry assertions is one we’ve seen over and over again — not just from Newton, but from tech journalism more widely. In January of this year, Newton admitted in an interview on his Hard Fork podcast with crypto investor Chris Dixon that he “deeply regret[ted]” trying to “keep an open mind” about crypto because almost everything he wrote was “at best irrelevant or at worst was stuff that people lost a whole lot of money on” when he looked back at it. The skeptics were right about crypto, as he admitted in December 2022, a year after the bubble burst. But just like the industry folks he frequently talks to, Newton wants to assure his readers that this time they’re wrong.
In his paywalled response to the pushback he received, Newton asserts he’s not ignorant to the drawbacks of AI, pointing to some reporting he’s done on subjects like deepfakes — reporting that hasn’t made him rethink using AI-generated images trained on stolen work to illustrate some of his stories. But in asserting AI is “real and dangerous,” Newton is largely echoing the AI safety position — one which effectively asserts that AI will match and exceed human intelligence, and that we need to be worried about the consequences of such a development."
https://disconnect.blog/dismissing-critics-has-real-and-dangerous-consequences/
#TechJournalism #TechCriticism #AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #AIHype #Journalism
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🚨 AI ads often reveal a lack of understanding about what AI is truly good for, while its use in automating tasks that define our humanity raises unsettling concerns. 🤖💭 #AI #TechEthics #Automation #FutureOfWork #ArtificialIntelligence #TechNews #Humanity #AIImpacts #TechCriticism
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„Why Tech Won’t Save Us“ — yet another fantastic video by Andrewism https://youtu.be/lV6JzroVr48?si=BHIjW5gjB7yZdMg_ #solarpunk #ecosocialism #ecoanarchism #luditism #tools #techcriticism #TechWontSaveUs
