no colonial power and no empire ever lasted forever. Everything made by human eventually dissolves. The current strategy of trying to stay alive (kinda) and keeping their identity is more than enough to eventually see the American empire collapse on itself and Israel with it.
chobeat
joined 6 years ago
omg you're so American. These places have clear rules, systems to guarantee accountability, with software tracking every person using a room or a tool at any given time. They are managed by people that work there full-time and guarantee everything is in order.
this is all stuff that in Italy goes on inside the city. There are fab-labs, maker-spaces, communal gardens and other communal organizations that enable you to do this without living in bumblefuck nowhere or renting a giant ass house.
Commenting with no clue what people are talking about
While I'm not part of XR myself and I'm not a super fan, I still invite you to stay in the group, especially if you lack alternatives. You have a lot to learn, especially because you disagree with what you perceive is the general strategy.
XR is a movement that locally employs a diversity of tactics and it's not a homogeneous, centrally-directed organization. So when you say that "XR is demonstration oriented", you should understand it as an emergent property of the current situation in which XR is in, or at least your local chapter. It's not like that everywhere, but especially it doesn't have to be. While movements have their own DNA that is hard to alter, XR is relatively open to a diversity of tactics. Being part of a movement means also to have the ability to shape and direct its actions.
Let's be more concrete: once you forge relationships in your local chapter and you gain trust, you can start proposing different kinds of actions and bring change in the org. Learning to do that is a lot of work and it's far from trivial, but better doing it in XR than in a stale ML org full of old tankies. If XR identity is too far away from your proposals, you can gather interest for a side-project done with a different public identity: just because you meet people in XR and do stuff with them doesn't mean you have to go public as XR. You can for example create a lobbying group on your local politicians that is easier to talk to than XR, and then bring XR positions into a city council, for example.
If you feel your local chapter has become a machine to pump out demos without a broader strategy, point that out. Ask what's the long-term strategy, what's the theory of change, how do they expect to make things happen. Ask them to point you to document in which they analyze that: if they have them, your questions will remind them that they should stick to the strategy, if they don't have them push the chapter to set up sessions in which they develop their local strategy.
Thank you, you're right ^^
Yep. The onboarding is organized by the "online chapter" called TWC Global, that is one of the many chapters of TWC. It's an introductory meeting to either start contributing to TWC Global, find out the nearest local chapter or, if you have that kind of energy, start a new chapter where you are.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. But I wouldn't be surprised. I'm personally trying to push more technological autonomy and the usage of more self-hosted software but it's a slow process. Some chapters though have a lot more discipline like TWC Italy, that is basically all organized on self-hosted stuff and has a social media strategy deliberately aimed at funnelling users away from big platforms.
the technical term would be "alt-labor organization". It's complementary and supportive to unions and does what unions usually cannot do. Each local chapter does different things and some are directly involved in unionization or works council formation.
There are entire fields of research on that. Or do you believe the internet, a technology developed for military purposes, an infrastructure that supports most of the economy, the medium through billions of people experience most of reality and build connections, is free from ideology and propaganda?
This paper explain a taxonomy of harms created by LLMs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3531146.3533088
OpenAI released ChatGPT without systems to prevent or compensate these harms and being fully aware of the consequences, since this kind of research has been going on for several years. In the meanwhile they've put some paper-thin countermeasures on some of these problems but they are still pretty much a shit-show in terms of accountability. Most likely they will get sued into oblivion before regulators outlaw LLMs with dialogical interfaces. This won't do much for the harm that open-source LLMs will create but at least will limit large-scale harm to the general population.
No more "alternatives" please. That formula has failed over and over again. We want software that can do what proprietary platforms do not pursue because it's not profitable. Online spaces to build meaningful connections, have interesting conversations with like-minded people, discover new things, be free from trolls and toxicity, possibly without the guilt of polluting the hell out of this planet with hardware and excessive electricity consumption.