taps the sign

I live in Vermont. These rosy articles about Front Porch Forum come out every so often, and, as someone who writes about the intersection of tech and capitalism, they frustrate me.

First things first, it's a moderated mailing list with some ads. I don't know if it even makes sense to call it a social network, honestly. It's a great service because moderated mailing lists are great. Here's the problem:

To maintain this level of moderation, the founder does not want to expand Front Porch Forum beyond Vermont's borders. He highlighted Nextdoor, another locally-focused social media platform that has expanded internationally, which has often been accused of inflaming tensions within communities due to its more relaxed moderation policy. However, Sabathier believes that local social media similar to Front Porch Forum could work elsewhere in the US, including in less progressive states – Vermont, the home of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, was the state that cast the fewest votes for Trump in the November 2024 election. "It's not so much a political platform as a tool for communities to organize themselves and be more cohesive," said the researcher. "And that would be beneficial everywhere."

Capitalism makes this world impossible. Front Porch Forum is a private business owned by a guy (technically, it's a public benefit corporation, but those are toothless designations). Like so many beloved services, it'll be great until it's not. Eventually, cofounders, as lovely and well meaning as they might be, leave, move, die, whatever, and someone shitty will end up in control. Without a corporate restructuring into, say, a user cooperative, it is just as doomed as every other internet thing that we've all loved. These puff pieces always act like Vermont is a magical place and, frankly, it is, but not like this. We live under capitalism too. Sometimes, due to being a rural, freezing, mountainous backwater, we get short reprieves from the worst of it, but the problem with social media is systemic.

AMA I guess.

A few days later, DFCS presented Patterson with a "safety plan" for her to sign. It would require her to delegate a "safety person" to be a "knowing participant and guardian" and watch over the children whenever she leaves home. The plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son's phone allowing for his location to be monitored. (The day when it will be illegal not to track one's kids is rapidly approaching.)

Of course there's a grift train. I'd be very curious to know more about that company, its owners, and its financials.

Also tagging @[email protected] (can someone tell me how to do that right?). Seems like something that might interest you, re: our recent conversation.

"The workplace isn't for politics" says company that exerts coercive political power to expel its (ex-)workers for disagreeing.

We need to set aside our petty differences and fight the true enemy: bloated IDEs.

I've posted this here before, but this phenomenon isn't unique to dating apps, though dating apps are a particularly good example. The problem is that capitalism uses computers backwards.

This might seem like a minor quibble, but that money doesn't really come from taxpayers, and understanding what seems like a very technical financial thing is really important if you want to understand geopolitics in general. Here's an except from the beginning of David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 years, easily one of the single most interesting and enlightening books I've ever read:

Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re- payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.

So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as "empires," and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these pay- ments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on.

It's not that this article is bad, but it is what frustrates me about tech journalism, and why I started writing about tech. None of these people have any idea how the internet actually works. They've never written a line of code, or set up a server, or published an app, or even done SEO, so they end up turning everything into a human interest piece, where they interview the people involved and some experts, but report it with that famous "view from nowhere."

Some blame Google itself, asserting that an all-powerful, all-seeing, trillion-dollar corporation with a 90 percent market share for online search is corrupting our access to the truth. But others blame the people I wanted to see in Florida, the ones who engage in the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO.

Let me answer that definitively: it's google, in multiple ways, one of which isn't even search, which I know because I actually do make things on the internet. SEO people aren't helping, for sure, but I've seen many journalists and others talk about how blogspam is the result of SEO, and maybe that's the origin story, but at this point, it is actually the result of google's monopoly on advertising, not search. I've posted this before on this community, but google forces you to turn your website into blogspam in order to monetize it. Cluttering the internet with bullshit content is their explicit content policy. It's actually very direct and straightforward. It's widely and openly discussed on internet forums about monetizing websites.

4 years seems reasonable to me. It takes most organizations six months to do literally anything outside the status quo. A general strike is an attempt to organize a coalition of federations of organizations.

Why the fuck would you give four years of warning for managers to document “a slow accumulation of poor performance” and other bullshit to shit can pro-union employees.

This is the reality of striking. The threat and build up to the strike are just as important as the actual strike, because it's about more than just not going to work; it involves complex and wide-ranging logistical question, from how to support the strikers (otherwise corps can just wait you out) to how to decide on a single list of demands.

The very real threats you describe are what make outspoken union advocates awesome and brave people that we should all look up to, and it's why we all have a responsibility to express solidarity and never cross a picket line. Together we bargain; alone we beg!

I am the dude. Fair enough, but your summary misses the point. The original website was a useful tool that people use, but it didn't qualify for adsense. I draw an analogy to recipes. Recipe sites used to be useful, but now you have to scroll through tons of blogspam to even get to the recipe. Google has a monopoly on ads, and like it or not, ad revenue is how people who make websites get paid. Google's policies for what qualifies for AdSense have a huge impact on the internet.

The point of the post is to show how direct that relationship is, using an existing and useful website.

100% of these AI hype articles are also puff pieces for a specific company. They also all have a very loose interpretation of "AI." Anything that uses any machine learning techniques is AI, which is going to revolutionize every industry and/or end life as we know it.

Anyway, that complaint aside: That seems like a plausible use for machine learning. I look forward to wealthy Americans being able to access it while the rest of us wait 19 months to get a new PCP and take out a mortgage for the privilege.

I get the point they're making, and I agree with most of the piece, but I'm not sure I'd frame it as Musk's "mistakes," because he literally won the game. He became the richest person on earth. By our society's standards, that's like the very definition of success.

Our economy is like quidditch. There are all these rules for complicated gameplay, but it doesn't actually matter, because catching the snitch is the entire game. Musk is very, very bad at all the parts of the economy except for being a charlatan and a liar, which is capitalism's version of the seeker. Somehow, he's very good at that, and so he wins, even though he has literally no idea how to do anything else.

edit: fix typo!

edit2: since this struck a chord, here's my theory of Elon Musk. Tl;dr: I think his success comes from offering magical technical solutions to our political and social problems, allowing us to continue living an untenable status quo.