Good points. I was musing over similar thoughts in my latest reply to RedWizard just now; if it may be that they were unhappy with the extent to which they’d managed to capture it through covert means and so turned more overt.

Thanks for taking the time to explain in such detail. I think I understand better now where you’re coming from on this. I (unfairly) assumed a much more off the cuff sentiment compared to what you put into your perspective on this.

There is one point that stands out to me that I’m not fully clear on and it’s not your point exactly, but something that may just require more investigation in general and may not have a clear answer any time soon: Which is that we can to an extent speculate on how much the legislators believe their own lies and how much the alphabet agencies have gotten control over TikTok, but I’m not sure we’ll ever be clear on how concretely it swings in one way or another. if I were hedging on the complexities that may arise from trying to control an app that is owned by a Chinese company but has a US branch, I’m inclined to believe they have tried to censor TikTok to their desires, but have struggled to fully do so in part because of those complexities. And perhaps that’s where the legislator buzz kicked more into gear recently, is when the alphabet types failed to fully suppress the genocide.

I don’t think TikTok is as simple a case as fully western apps, in terms of the imperialists being in control, but I do get your point about not acting like it was a bastion of freedom before and has now suddenly done a 180. I was also wondering when I first heard about this if technical issues were part of the problem, so it’s insightful to hear some of it was.

Implying that every claim about TikTok suddenly being censored is a form of “liberal hallucination” isn’t a good look. As far as I can tell, (part of?) your argument is that it has already been on that path for years and if you have evidence of such, then fair, that evidence is important for understanding its behavior now. But 1) That doesn’t on its own mean it didn’t get worse after the shutdown and 2) It doesn’t make someone a liberal to get people questioning TikTok w/ regards to censorship just because they don’t know everything about its history.

It’s a known thing that the TikTok ban was in some part motivated by trying to block pro-Palestine content: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/ (the convo referenced in the article happened in May of 2024, if the sources are correct)

So the suggestion that TikTok was already being subsumed by fascists and imperialists for years doesn’t make a huge amount of sense in that context, unless we are to believe the lawmakers were playing 5d chess and putting on a big show while they were already suppressing a pro-Palestine narrative that has nonetheless spread to help get word out about genocide? Or would the argument be that TikTok was already being taken over silently and the lawmakers were ignorant of that process?

Maybe I don’t quite understand what you’re going for here.

I deleted my account months ago and haven’t missed it once. Twitter at least still shows me insightful information sometimes, cause of who I’m tuned into. Reddit for me had become basically just arguing with imperialists, if my comments weren’t insta-shadow-deleted on bigger subs or if I didn’t get banned on one sub or another for challenging the genocidal zionist narrative or the “Russia is cartoon evil and inexplicably decided to be as evil as possible” narrative.

If someone can get value out of it / can deprogram others effectively on there, more power to em. But for me, it was a healthy one to cut off.

Their tactic to avoid awareness of the trick is to distract the people with what-if debate on “whether to support the abstract ideological thing that we said are bad” from the realistic debate on “whether we are giving the correct label or definition”.

Well said!

What’s wrong with opposing cartels?

What’s wrong with opposing terrorists?

What’s wrong with opposing dictators?

The answer to all of these is: The western empire declares something/someone an enemy when it wants an excuse to attack it/them. If you take it at face value in a vacuum, it sounds reasonable enough, but historically, it’s almost never about what they say it is about. You can even see this sort of thing in the hundreds of years old colonial civil/savage narrative that lingers some today and the narrative playbook hasn’t changed that much, fundamentally. They’re still doing it to Palestine, for example.

I mean, isn’t this just a more personal version of the “person from socialist state who, for unexplained reasons, is no longer there doesn’t like it and is repeating official imperialist talking points that badmouth it” trope. I’d be far more interested in hearing his lived experience and what class he comes from and so on than hearing him repeat the words of a brazilian politician.

I’m trying to wrap my head around that last poster’s train of thought. And what I’m realizing is it’s largely incoherent propaganda loanword salad from a zionist and that’s why it’s hard to do so. I’m not saying that to be dismissive either. It reads like someone who has grown up immersed in ethno-supremacist lies and has yet to contend with them seriously. Reminds me of another reddit post I read some years back, where someone was raving about Germany’s productive forces (not in those words, but that’s the best way I can think to describe it) and how amazing they were like the poster was a key part of them. It has that vibe of someone taking on the identity and credit of something they aren’t even part of, logistically, and are very ignorant of the mechanics of. Like “we mean it with every fibre of our being”, what have you even done substantively. Those are not the words of someone who has organized to protect their group’s rights, those are the words of someone who felt a thrill when listening to a national anthem.

I’ve seen stuff in passing on twitter that people are having stuff censored in searching TikTok that wasn’t before - but then some others were saying in response that they weren’t. Something glitchy or shady, I don’t know, but I’m keeping an eye out for more clarity cause pretending to fix the issue only to produce a TikTok that is more in line with imperialist propaganda could very well be what is happening. Then again, it’s also possible that shutting that many people out of an app like that can introduce some temporary glitches when you try to bring them back.

The real bankruptcy policy she describes basically sounds like a protection against a rich person exploiting bankruptcy laws to get out of paying people what they owe them, i.e. a way to stop people from doing a particular kind of financial scam. I’d be curious to know for sure though where it derives from, historically, because the context of where stuff comes from is sometimes more important than what it looks like in principle. Such as with how you put it, a student paying back loans in the US derives from a predatory system. As do many costs that would put someone in the US in a position of having to “pay someone (most often an exploitative entity) back”; very different conceptually than the idea of a person who can afford to be rich, rich, rich trying to get out of paying someone back who may be a non-rich individual.

• Replace entry level work with AI, but experienced engineers waste more time fixing the slop

• Save money on training new people

• Over time, lose experienced engineers to normal human things, like aging and abnormal things like asking them to do the job of five people

• Realize you need to train new people in order to get experienced engineers

• Systems are too big to fail and nobody knows how to work on them

• Pick a random group out of a hat to scapegoat with the blame for it

(I actually wrote this before I read the bit about “low-performers” but it does track with the idea of entry level. They would inherently performance worse and they’re the only ones where AI replacement would make any logistical sense in the short-term; setting aside longer-term consequences as outlined above.)

This is so on the nose, some part of me is like “is this real?” and yet it’s completely believable with everything I’ve seen online. Like the fact that the first poster is a white dude calling himself a “dark triad man” (alluding to personality disorders like sociopathy and narcissism), is agreed with by someone calling himself “rational male”, and the punchline is that they’re accidentally praising a Chinese woman. It’s like a piece of art microcosm of western chauvinism and patriarchy delusion vs. reality.

If “reasonable people” was changed to “red scare propagandized USians”, this would probably be a fairly accurate portrayal of things.

They could try, but they don’t have control over the app in the same way that they do with empire ones, so they’ll be fighting with whatever measures are put in place to stop it. Which is part of the reason we got to this point in the first place, that they don’t have control over TikTok. I fully expect the empire to try to fight dirty in whatever way it can come up with, it’s been fighting dirty for decades (hundreds of years if you consider the empire to include British colonialism and others). But wanting to make something happen and having the means to do it aren’t always the same thing.

So be wary, certainly, but keep the logistics of things in view too. The logistics can be more telling about what may be attempted and how it may be attempted than what is desired to happen. The colonial/imperial orgs of the world have had a certain understanding of this historically; it’s why you can find writing with the CIA calling Stalin a captain of a team rather than a dictator. Though at this point, they may be believing their own lies more, I don’t know. Either way, whether making ineffectual attempts that ignore logistics, or making attempts that contend with the realities, Red Note / XHS is not exposed to their predation in the same way that it is with western apps.

Fair points. I think my mind was going more in a direction of how a regular person might engage with AI. But this seems like a solid analysis of what they’re gunning for and talking about on a business level.

The author makes a great point here to springboard off of:

Music is a form of creative expression that’s old as humanity itself and exists in every culture. Babies will “make music” by clapping their hands and smashing blocks together long before they can talk, and they don’t find that frustrating.

I don’t think most people do find it frustrating to “make music”. What people struggle with—and this connects to some broader discussions about generative AI I’ve had in another place—is becoming an expert in a skill and living up to conventional standards of producing “great works”. You can tap out a rhythm on a countertop and sure, it’s not going be hailed as a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, but you can still derive enjoyment from it.

Or to use a field that wouldn’t so much be considered artistic as an example, you can create a Hello World computer program with relative ease, even with knowing little about computers. But creating a complex program is going to be hard. The basics tend to be pretty easy and mastery, well… I would not say it’s “supposed to be hard” in some meaningless sense of “doing hard work for the sake of it”, but it’s supposed to be in the sense that mastery is defined by (something like) having worked so thoroughly at something for so long, that it’s like second nature. The end result of mastery in composing isn’t “Hans Zimmer” (who is a particular musician who got very famous - a rare thing), it’s something more akin to “I can pick up an instrument and start composing or improvising a pleasing tune that adheres well to musical theory, with ease”. It says nothing about what kind of music you create - but AI does, because it is heavily biased by the dataset it’s trained on. A masterful Turkish music composer will create great Turkish music. If an AI does not understand Turkish music—if for example, it has been exposed only to synthetic takes on what Turkish music is through guesses by people who know nothing about the culture—it will just create stuff called Turkish that is nothing like it.

In other words, there is the capitalist product-focused way of thinking about “creation” which tends to view any inefficiency as abhorrent, creation of a thing as an inherent good because it can be sold as a product, and tries to justify any reduction of labor as “it’ll totally benefit you fingers crossed behind my back”. And then there is the realities of how people actually engage with the world now and historically.

And somewhere along the line in the capitalist jumble, for some of us, there’s something that can get tangled up inside about how we think about entertainment. A baby can entertain themself just clapping their hands. Do we need advanced toys to feel entertained, to express ourselves, or is there something else going on, such as with ego? (Like the case of people who generate with AI doing 99% of the work and then call themselves an artist.) I don’t see it as an open and shut case, simplistic thing. But I think it’s something to think about.

Another thing to think about is how we experience appreciation. Part of my enjoyment of a cover song like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InmcAzhz1fc

Is admiring how much skill and practice must have gone into him being able to do it. And then getting the original creator to collaborate with him on it too. None of that has to do with how it sounds, intrinsically, but it does increase my enjoyment of it.

Teens, a group that is famous for listening to condescending adults who say they know better and try to prevent them from doing things.

I feel like for once the word terrorist would be appropriate here (as opposed to all the times the empire uses it wrongly).

Like even just the implied “joke” of a threat could cause anxiety in people who are using Planned Parenthood, which is probably intentional.

Love to see it. ❤️

This news has made my week. I don’t know where it will lead, but right now, it’s a beautiful thing to see.