#meta

It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-creators of the RSS protocol (among many other things) was effectively assasinated by our legal system for “illegally” downloading about 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR - charged so excessively to be made an example of (we're talking 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and asset forfeiture) to the point where he felt the need to take his own life rather than deal with the court circus and impending financial ruin - while Facebook (oh I’m sorry Meta) has torrented 80 TERABYTES of books to train their AI models with virtually no consequences other than a court case they will most likely get some sort of financial slap on the wrist for while their AI models continue to print them money.

I’d say getting fired by Meta is like catching the last plane out of Vietnam, even in this ruthless job market.

AI is not a magical technology that simply happens to know a great deal about us. It is trained on a pipeline of people's information: video, audio, text. That's how it works. If you buy the device, it will monitor you.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

The more I see of the degradation and commodification of everything around us, the more I feel like wishing Bryan Johnson good luck with his diet of bonemeal and pine-cone rinds, and the constant monitoring of his night-time erections.

Meta’s size makes it de facto unkillable, and I’m sure it’ll exist in some form for centuries. But it’s my hope that it will exist in the sense that IBM exists today. Theoretically you know it’s out there, but it’s very hard to grasp the point of it and it feels thoroughly irrelevant. Nobody remembers who started it or why.

The company says it will restrict any image, video, or text post that “identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others,” which is an incredibly wide swath of content. If you speak about these things on Meta, your reach will be limited and your account will be surfaced to fewer people.

"I figure I should probably be respectful to the spirit of the promise with the "meditation me" so that I'll continue to trust my requests for deferred yak shaving during my meditation."

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