I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole LetsBuySpiritAir.com thing and I honestly think the most interesting part of it isn’t even the airline. It’s the coordination.

Kickstarter already exists, obviously, but Kickstarter is basically built around creators asking people for money to build something. The Spirit thing feels different. It feels more like the internet spontaneously trying to organize itself around a collective idea in real time.

And the weird part is the internet is simultaneously amazing and terrible at that.

It’s amazing at generating momentum. Millions of people can suddenly care about something overnight. But the second that attention starts becoming real coordination, everything immediately gets messy. Fake domains appear, random accounts claim to represent the movement, people don’t know which sites are official, nobody trusts the pledge numbers anymore, communication gets fragmented, and the whole thing suddenly feels fragile even if the original idea still has genuine support behind it.

That’s what made me think there should maybe be some kind of public infrastructure for internet-native collective projects. Not a crowdfunding platform exactly, and definitely not some crypto thing. More like a trusted coordination layer.

Basically a place where projects could establish legitimacy before they get buried under scams, impersonation, and chaos.

I don’t think it should control projects at all though. That part feels important. The platform shouldn’t own movements, dictate governance, hold money, or become another centralized authority deciding what’s legitimate. It should stay neutral and infrastructural. Almost boring in its restraint.

The whole point would just be to provide trust systems. Verified project pages, authenticated organizer accounts, audited pledges, official communication channels, maybe local coordination tools so people can actually see whether support exists near them instead of just abstract internet hype.

Because honestly I think the real product wouldn’t even be the pledges themselves. It would be legitimacy.

Right now internet-native movements mostly run on Discord servers, spreadsheets, Twitter threads, random websites, and vibes. Which works surprisingly well until something suddenly gets big, and then everything starts breaking at once.

I also think it’s important that something like this stays non-custodial. The second a platform starts handling money directly, the entire dynamic changes. Suddenly you’re dealing with regulation, liability, power, and incentives that completely alter the spirit of the thing. I think projects should handle their own fundraising and governance. The platform should just help people coordinate and trust what they’re looking at.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like the internet already has infrastructure for almost everything except collective coordination. We built systems for payments, content, streaming, fundraising, and commerce, but we still barely have systems for helping large groups of people organize around shared public ideas without instantly collapsing into fragmentation and confusion.

And I genuinely think the Spirit thing accidentally exposed that gap.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/64007684

Introduction

The current socio-political discourse is dominated by a new divisive issue concerning "AI" - so called Artificial Intelligence. While some are vehemently opposed to the idea of AI infiltrating newer and newer aspects of life, some are convinced of its revolutionary transformative power. The question of AI usage in our project of The Brotherhood, has also been put into question and this essay will attempt to put my^[not everyone working on the project, just my own] perspective on it.

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What even is "AI"

What is typically referred to as "AI", is in the more technical corners, known as, LLMs, or Large Language Models. They are a new innovation^[still, pretty old, around 2017-18] in a long line of automation technology, going back to the mid-20th century, not long after the computer itself was starting to become a thing of utmost usefulness.

The long journey of automation

Actually, the computer itself can be seen as the first innovation in this automation technology. After all, the computer is a literal automatic computation^[and much more, of course!] machine, that uses some carefully arranged silicon and phosphorus to manipulate electron flows and deterministically execute some rigorously defined steps.
The idea to take this further and further, was always an ambition of early computer scientists. And as speed and size started getting accessible, effort was made for closer integration with humans. This was not a trivial task as the computer and the human spoke two different languages that might as well be from different universes. From punching cards, where programmers painstakingly "wrote" binary in a literal card to Fortran to programming languages to OS to GUIs and applications, we have made tools, for our tools, for our tools, in a seemingly endless recursion.
One biggest aspect that programmers got interested in, in the very late 20th century, was natural language processing, to further bridge the "language gap". This is what enabled the early internet, through search engines. Now, this fundamentally differs in structure to previous tools. This is not deterministic, as language itself was not deterministic. So these tools relied on various statistical tools like N-grams, Markov Models, Bayesian inference etc.

The parallel research on Neural Networks

Around the same time, with the advent of neuroscience^[that replaced the previous psychological models of Freud, Jung and Lacan, which were indeed not suited for STEM fields], another curious line of research began with the perceptron.
Very much influenced from early neuroscience, it slowly split from its initial inspiration and drifted towards statistical science, rather than trying to follow the exact structure of brains. This too, went through its own series of innovations with neural networks, backpropagation, Hopfield networks, CNNs, LSTMs etc.
But two innovations were critical for the explosion of interest in this very niche field -

1. Deep neural networks, that made use of the newly popular GPUs, back in the early 2010s
2. Transformers, which was the topic of a now, legendary 2017 paper, titled, "Attention is All You Need.

In the early 2020s, it was realised, that these two can be combined and scaled up massively^[and I mean massively] to gain a general semantic understanding of general language. This is where the two paths collided. What started as experimental cognitive research at the intersection of neuroscience and computation, turned into a statistical method to give the computers an understanding of semantic language! Thus began the era of LLMs.

An LLM is simply a statistical model trained to have a general understanding of semantics!

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So What's All the Hype

What is True

The innovation, especially of GPUs and transformers are legit groundbreaking innovations that have broken a very long stall in their respective fields. And their combination to create LLMs are indeed a great engineering feat, even if not that innovative from a purely academic standpoint^[the massive scaling needed, is another level of brute-forcing. Think of the pyramids of Egypt - not as clever as it is awe-inspiring, simply due to scale].
And it is also true that this has opened up the pathway to some commercial usage in a way that was just not possible earlier. In a certain sense, it is an upgradation of the search engines with a powerful fuzzy semantic translator.
It is indeed a great addition to the coding landscape. Programming used to be 80% manual intellectual labour, where you had to go search for that one silly bug, or implement a very simple system for the 100th time. Now, a lot of this can be automated. However, to think, that this makes programming itself obsolete, is very naive. For most serious project, you still need to have great knowledge of computer science, but the entry to programming has been indeed lowered^[which is either very good news, or very disappointing, depending on how much you like to gatekeep your nerdy interests!]. Most serious programmers have simply become a senior software developer and have delegated the manual repetitive tasks to the "AI", which can understand natural language and turn them into code it has seen before^[if it has been trained in it].

What is the "Bubble"

What remains in heavy doubt is the "efficiency" problem. It is yet very unclear as to whether Moore's Law will come into play here and decrease costs as time passes by, or whether the architecture itself, despite its genuine innovations, is fundamentally limited. The big corporations are betting on the former.
Meanwhile some "tech-enthusiasts" have become a little too enthusiastic about the range of its applicability. The LLMs, like any sophisticated statistical model, requires massive amounts of structured data. In certain areas like day-to-day coding, or summaries, this is not that hard. However, in areas like robotics, it is still not a "done" job^[just getting structured data itself].
The more laughable matter is that some have put into esoteric questions of consciousness^[philosophical exploration of consciousness, is indeed possible, but requires a level of rigor and seriousness, that is missing from most such discussions] in this new light. This is in part, due to the specific ancestry it has, and mostly just due to human nature of "jumping the bandwagon".

---

What About the Political Issues

Now we come to the most important point of this discourse. I will break it down into specific points that are frequently put to question.

The Environmental Hazards

As it now stands, the development and deployment of LLMs remain highly inefficient. But technology and development always comes at the expense of natural resources and equilibrium. The question is not of, whether it is ethical, but who controls/decides how much is sustainable^[moreover, the current climate crisis has already put adequate strain on these resources in a lot of places].
At this point, however, it stops being a environmental concern and starts being a political one. The neoliberals would indeed argue that the market would balance itself when resource scarcity starts being critical, whereas opponents might argue that state intervention is needed to prevent a calamity at all. But whatever the arguments remain about their ideal states, what is true, is that, the real world is none of those "ideal world" situations.
The neoliberal free market does not exist in its full glory, as most of the technological market is monopolised by a few corporations. The current global climate crisis, is a failure of the free-markets of the industrial and the post-industrial era. Whereas state intervention, remains, at best, ineffectual, and at worst, prone to lobbying by the same monopolised corporations.

The conclusion is that the control of such critical decisions, remain concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs who are prone to taking risky decisions and making mistakes.

The Data "Theft"

It is not unknown that the data that the LLMs are trained on, are public data. However, the access to such LLMs remain out of the hands of the people whose data made it come to fruition. It is also clear that the current copyright laws are not built to handle such cases.
Close-sourced LLMs represent a new kind of injustice with no easy solutions. On one hand, making LLMs accessible to all, would exasperate the "hype-train" and worsen the environmental impact. Whereas, stopping research on such lucrative frontiers would be catastrophically conservative. And again, this comes down to control - control of how and where to gather source data and how to commercialise it. But as long as the monopolies exists, especially on the production of cutting-edge of LLMs, control remains firmly on the hands of the select-few.

The Unemployment Issues

The layoffs have been quite eye-catching, since it happened on high-class educated employees. But this is a constant byproduct of changing times and advancing technology, especially in automation. This can not be avoided without an aversion to technology itself^[which is hard to sell in the modern world!].
However, this never leads to humans not having "any work left to do" at all. No, jobs come and jobs go! But as the current landscape stands, it is indeed the case that many millions of people will get trampled under the changing times - people who have long pursued a high-profile job, only to lose their long-expected market volume or high-end salary.
This represents an utter failure of our social contract. The fact that technological progress comes at the cost of social cohesion, is a reflection of our embarrassing societal technology in comparison to our other feats^[such as engineering, or research, or industrialisation]. An automation, theoretically, should be a boon to the labour force, taking away manual labour, in place of far more interesting jobs and more time for recreation! But alas, instead it represents an existential threat to a substantial section of the population!

No society can last which has a structural opposition to technological progress. The societal technology needs to keep up!

---

So Where Is The Brotherhood's Position on This

Now, The Brotherhood is NOT a monolithic entity. The different people in here, has significantly different positions on this^[the division is one of the reasons of this long essay]. However, I have been a significant part of this project from the start, and I can say what my position is, on this.
My philosophy is of pragmatism. One must keep the danger, very very close. The one who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. But one who forsakes the sword, lives under the sword! Currently, as it stands, "AI" is the brand new weapon, in this long warfare of control, of ideology, of dominance, as it always has been. But if the disenfranchised people needs to win, they can not afford to forsake the game. They can only win by playing the same game.
I have used AI IDEs very substantially to build the project - because I am not such a good programmer, and even if I were, I could not have done the entire project, alone, in such a short time. Now I know that this is not a replacement for actual skilled people, and in the best-case scenario, I never would have needed to use it too much. But unfortunately, reality is never perfect, and we had to do get by on what we could!
And that is my philosophy on AI usage. The rules of the game are no different, only the goals of the players and as long as we are working for a noble goal^[actually, we directly respond to that political problem of unemployment], we cannot compromise on not taking the best shot at victory!

The End Justifies The Means 🔥

(Crossposting from my Beehaw Post.)

Let’s talk brass tacks. A lot of people I interact with online seem to see top-down reform as the only option for real societal change, and often despair when they see the rampant corruption in our government and private companies as being unsolvable problems.

Similarly, Union organizing efforts have largely stalled despite significant effort from activists. This is simply due to the enormous power wielded by capitalist corporations, who will always protect their own interests above those of their employees. Again, we reach a point where many people despair at an apparently unsolvable problem. Indeed, unionization has faced a steady decline in the US for over 40 years, and is now likely below 10%.

The problem here is that people keep trying to organize against their employer, when in fact there is another option: they could organize without their employer. Put another way, the workers of a company could pool their resources and found a worker’s cooperative which they all operate together through elections and democratic voting. Then they simply quit their old jobs as work in the cooperative becomes available.

However, the problem with worker’s cooperatives is that there are very few successful examples, and I am not aware of their internal documentation being available for review. The best information I could find was this diagram of the Mondragon Corporation, which has similar elements to my organizational diagram, but isn’t descriptive enough to give insight into the inner working of their management.

There simply doesn’t appear to be a standard template on which to construct such an organization, at least not one that I would expect to be successful. This post is the beginning of an attempt to address that shortfall.

Hierarchy by Consent: The concept that a strategic executive at the top of an operational hierarchy should be legitimized in their position through a popular election enfranchising all stakeholders.

Many worker’s cooperatives built in the 19th and early 20th centuries failed because they weren’t as productive as other companies at the time. Researchers have indicated that this is likely due to the lack of hierarchical management in the organizations, which resulted in a “flat” management structure.

I would agree with this analysis, and point out that hierarchical decision making is what gives an organization strategic direction. Without such structured teamwork, productive efforts are less coordinated and as a result suffer from reduced overall productivity. In biology I was taught that a cell is greater than the sum of its constituent parts, but if those parts can’t coordinate properly then I would expect the effect is diminished.

The problem with traditional capitalistic companies, in my opinion, isn’t the hierarchy itself, it’s that the hierarchical management structure results from conditions over which a worker has no control and there is therefore no incentive for the hierarchy to act in accordance with the worker’s best interest.

A person is forced to find work for their own survival, but because there are almost no democratic companies to work for, they’re forced into a traditional company, where the top of the hierarchy could be determined by any number of inappropriate factors including generational wealth, nepotism, favoritism, or other corrupt circumstances. Those decision makers then have no incentive to act in the best interest of the workers who fall under them in the hierarchy. I would call this arrangement Hierarchy without Consent.

By integrating elections into the empowerment of key decision makers, an organization can maintain a healthy, productive work environment while letting the workers have self-determination in their work environment and goals. I believe this will lead to much healthier and more productive workplaces.

Call to Action: Help me Write a Template

Some time ago I started writing a template for an Articles of Association for such an organization, which you can read as an odt or as a pdf. The image on this post is the organizational diagram.

The organization I envisioned is governed by General Conferences, which are meetings to include all of the Owners. The GC first elects a President, who acts as head of the labor union and is the primary facilitator of company business. The GC then elects a CEO who becomes the executive at the top of the operational hierarchy for productive work. The CEO is elected based on their business plan, which is voted on by all owners. Elected leaders serve for a term after which they come up for reelection.

I’m here to ask for input and debate on this template. It has not had a legal review so if you’re a lawyer or co-op expert expect to notice lot of missing legal clauses and the like.

Incentive Structures

To make this work, there should be some sort of incentive for Owners to step up and take on the burden of leadership. To keep things balanced, however, the incentives should provide different objectives to different positions.

In my template, the President receives a percentage of the total payroll as a bonus, while the CEO receives a percentage of the business income (aka “surplus”) that their project generates. In this way, the President seeks to maximize payroll while the CEO seeks to maximize surplus, and in that back and forth the organization will theoretically achieve long-term stability while maximizing the financial return for the Owners. The effect would be similar to the political pendulum metaphor.

Similarly, if the cooperative is big enough to require a Board of Directors, those people would also be eligible for an incentive bonus based on company performance, perhaps including factors such as workplace safety and legal compliance.

Worker payroll could be handled a number of ways, but my current thinking is that it would be an hourly pay scale similar to union payscales, with progression for years of service, but also with performance ranges so that production management can offer performance incentives to all workers.

The bonus rates, the payroll chart with ranges, and performance metrics would all be voted on by the GC.

Equity Control

Another key pitfall of traditional capitalist companies is ownership rules. Most workers own very little or no stock in the company for which they work. They have no opportunity for financial growth except what the hierarchy decides to give them each year, while the investor class, which does no work, makes off with the surplus.

I’m proposing a system of equity control where owners are forbidden from owning more than a single share in the Company’s stock, called an Equal Ownership Share (EOS). Once an Owner has a full share they have full voting rights, but they are not permitted to purchase any more stock.

New and Partial Owners can have a partial EOS during their Provisional Period, during which they will have a corresponding partial vote. The length of the Provisional Period is set by vote, and Equity is awarded to the new Owner incrementally during that time.

Because the Owners have stock in the Company, they are the recipients of all the Company’s declared dividends. This way they are paid twofold, once from their hourly compensation and again from their dividends.

Incorporation

An open question I have is how to legally incorporate such an organization. One strategy might be to incorporate as an S-Corporation, which is a “pass-through” organization, meaning all business income is distributed and reported on the tax returns of the Owners. This may run into trouble due to regulations concerning voting rights, since my template has custom voting.

Another alternative may be to incorporate as a not-for-profit of some type.

I’m not sure about the answer to this one, but I certainly welcome input, especially from any legal or co-op experts.

Team Management Software

I’m in the early stages of developing open-source team management software for this specific type of cooperative. The software will ideally include things like Accounting and Payroll, Secure Voting, Document Control, Chat Functions, Video Calls, and other team management solutions. This is key to making sure these cooperatives can function efficiently right from the get-go.

The software should include multiple users with multiple roles and permissions, and should work over LAN, with the option to run it without being connected to the internet (as it should be resilient).

I have experience with local programming including database and GUI design but I’ve never done anything over a network, so I have some learning to do if I’m taking this all on myself.

I plan to host the files on Codeberg.

EDIT: Further Discussion:

Block Diagram Discussion on Programming.dev

If you or someone you know might be interested in contributing to this software, please let me know.

The Big Picture

The key take away here is that most people seem to be waiting for someone like a politician to come along and make a change for them. Instead, we should be working on reform from the bottom up in the places where we spend the most of our time: our workplaces.

I believe that if we are able to incrementally build up an alliance of these organizations we could begin to fix some of the bigger problems currently facing our society.

If you or someone you know would like to contribute time and effort to this project, please direct them here. Also, feel free to make your own version if you like.

TLDR: Workplace hierarchies traditionally increase productivity at the expense of worker enfranchisement. I’m proposing a new type of worker’s cooperative to include what I call “Hierarchy by Consent” and asking for help realizing it.

Thank you,

Juniperus

Hi, I'm working on a collection of resources to make writing solarpunk and other aspirational fiction easier. The idea is to put together premade chunks of writer-level research and collections of solarpunk ideas and links on different topics that might come up in worldbuilding.

If you want to see the other pages (which tend to be more link-heavy) you can find them here:

https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:start

Someone on Mastodon asked if we had a page on how work would change in solarpunk settings and it's a topic I have some thoughts on so I put a draft together.

The current draft of the page on work is here:

https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:solarpunk_work

Basically what I'd like to know is what does your ideal outcome look like? If we were able to start fixing things today and never stop, what does work in this future look like to you? I've written up my version but if I've missed something or gotten something wrong I'd very much like to know.

If there is anything you'd recommend I read or include, I'd love to check it out.

At the very least I can promise I'll try to show your ideas well in my own fiction, but hopefully this resource will spread them a little further into stories that inspire others.

Employees say poor leadership is driving stress, job changes, and even financial loss, while companies invest more in AI than in people.

Employees say poor leadership is driving stress, job changes, and even financial loss, while companies invest more in AI than in people.

Original Reddit discussion: View on Reddit

Original Reddit discussion: View on Reddit

Original Reddit discussion: View on Reddit

The concept is explained much better in the link, but TLDR: People are trying to organize and crowdfund the purchase of spirit airlines assets with the goal of running it as a worker owned business similar to winco or rei. Seems at least tangentially relevant to this community

cross-posted, via Videos Community.

More Info.

They're tired of the stonewalling and union busting. Now they're escalating, and asking you to join them.

Charles Bradley sings what we all are feeling today.