[dwoldrich]

'Hate' and 'fascist' seem to reliably trigger people to stew in anger and give up their power.

Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.

AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.

There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.

Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?

[jauntywundrkind]

This really keys in for me, expresses something super super important: figuring out what powers we do have and seizing them, finding positive constructive narratives & modes to get into and to share and tell of. Finding positive basis for interaction, for mastery, for the self to grow in: it's so obscured by the amassed consolidated pervading dark corporate consoldationism, that's subjugated us all under it's vast sprawling reporting chains.

There's a lot of rage against the web too. Not quite as strong, but the image of what the higher concentrated capital does with it, how it uses this platform that's available everywhere, that's super powerful... I hope people can somehow see past their rages and frustrations and think and ask after themselves and their friends, their communities.

Aside from them though, the stories of webshacks of the past, individual practitioners out there, pre the Pax Reactus, figuring stuff out: that tale of a smaller scale industry was beautiful. And I don't know what a new claim to power, what staking in today looks like. How to we see ourselves as deciders, project ourselves as making meaningful decisions & steering? How do we show that, and what can make it looks like a success?

I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building. But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell. Those "Close to the Machine" (Ullman) live a weird life if having these deep connections & intimacy with systems, that are so sweepingly powerful, but man, it is such an alien world to most, and trying to tell these stories, trying to share this wonder: it's hard.

I worry so much that the beauty & wonder here won't figure out how it can stand. I think of the Rose in Dark Tower, showing up across time & form, in ways, signalling so strongly to some few in the world who recognize it, but the world mostly moving around it, unheeding.

[dwoldrich]

> I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.

Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.

> But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.

Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.

The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.

[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii