thebartermyth

Copied from The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber - Heavily edited down to summarize.

These books are not just appealing because they create endless daydream material for the inhabitants of bureaucratic societies. Above all, they appeal because they continue to provide a systematic negation of everything bureaucracy stands for. Just as Medieval clerics and magicians liked to fantasize about a radiant celestial administrative system, so do we, now, fantasize about the adventures of Medieval clerics and mages, existing in a world in which every aspect of bureaucratic existence has been carefully stripped away.

1. Fantasy worlds tend to be marked by an absolute division of good and evil - this negates the bureaucratic principal of neutrality
2. The existence in fantasy universes of demi-human species—gnomes, drow, trolls, and so on—which are fundamentally human, but absolutely impossible to integrate under the same larger social, legal, or political order, creates a world where racism is actually true. - this negates the bureaucratic principal of indifference
3. Legitimate power in fantasy worlds tends to be based on pure charisma, only the villians will use systems of administration - this negates the bureaucratic principals of regularity and predictability
4. In fantasy, political life centers around the creation of stories - this negates the mechanical nature of bureaucratic operations
5. Protagonists are endlessly engaging with riddles in ancient languages, obscure myths and prophecies, maps with runic puzzles and the like. - Bureaucratic procedures in contrast are based on a principle of transparency.

However, in another sense, D&D represents the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy. There are catalogs for everything: types of monsters (stone giants, ice giants, fire giants …), each with carefully tabulated powers and average number of hit points (how hard it is to kill them); human abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution …); lists of spells available at different levels of capacity (magic missile, fireball, passwall …); types of gods or demons; effectiveness of different sorts of armor and weapons; even moral character (one can be lawful, neutral, or chaotic; good, neutral, or evil; combining these produces nine possible basic moral types …). The books are distantly evocative of Medieval bestiaries and grimoires. But they are largely composed of statistics. All important qualities can be reduced to number. It’s also true that in actual play, there are no rules; the books are just guidelines; the Dungeon Master can (indeed really ought to) play around with them, inventing new spells, monsters, and a thousand variations on existing ones.

iirc it's from ubuntu-advantage-tools - you can remove it, but it's set as a dependent for something important (ubuntu-minimal?) which makes it really annoying. I don't use ubuntu anymore so hopefully someone who knows more will stop by.

I have no idea who that is, honestly even with the body text as context

E: yeah, I've seen this picture before. Never knew the character's name though

bump amber whataboutism

Nice, ty

Sorta relatedly, I remember back before AI the most common reddit bots would just post a top comment from the same askreddit thread or a similar one. It's a weird feeling to think that everyone seems to more or less have forgotten about this as the main way to do account farming for a while. The focus on AI modifying the response makes no sense to me. The 'content' literally doesn't matter so why do the more computationally expensive thing? There were plenty of methods that people used to reword and avoid bans too. Like checking the thread for the same text and picking a different comment, having a table of interchangeable common words, etc, etc. The AI methods seem to be literally worse than just a copy-paste fuzzy matching (or markov chain etc etc).

When you own the orchestra, you get to choose the music

Cool phrase, is it from something?

iirc Trump hates windmills because there was a windfarm created near his golf course.

This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.

(Hey, sorry, I wrote way more than I had planned to.)

Sorta? 'Online' is just kinda where most information is. The problem isn't really the internet or being on it too much, although I guess screens are bad for your eyes. I think the thing you're picking up on gets referred to as 'human attention as a capitalist frontier' in that attention-based social media and advertising companies make money through views. So the strategy for all of them is to be as reflexive and 'addictive' as possible.

Kinda in the way that you open your phone and your thumb reflexively clicks on some app (hexbear maybe?, lol). Or that when you go on your computer you open a web browser (cause like what actually is a computer for) and you just go to some website as a page to look at because the alternative is about:blank or a homepage, etc. Modern (but also non-modern) capitalism puts a lot of pressure on time because of efficiency and everything, so it makes lots of people uneasy to sit idly for basically any prolonged period of time (like in line or on the train). Even more so if they're in view of other people (please do not perceive me xD <3) . There's a pretty common response to 'always on they damn phone' which is a picture of a bunch of people on a train reading newspapers, but it really misses the point. Being 'online' all the time is an attempt to blur capitalist-productivity mindsets with leisure and extend the accessibility of what marketers refer to as "content".

So the reflexive, online, social media content becomes accessible at almost every moment of our waking lives, which allows an outlet for the capitalist-productivity anxiety. Scrolling / Doomscrolling doesn't really do anything to address the underlying anxiety, partially because most content exists outside of oneself, but more importantly the underlying structure of social media, especially capitalist social media is arranged to monopolize human attention. For an extreme example, platforms encourage and push conspiracy content because the paranoia it creates makes it difficult to ignore and there is an infinite wellspring of further details for people to scroll through and click on or whatever. But it's not even really the 'content' itself that makes people interact with these platforms in this way. There are a lot of systems decisions that are way more important. The easiest example is asking "How often is there something new here?" For instagram, twitter, reddit, tik tok, etc, etc, etc, the desired corporate answer is: every few minutes. And they all follow similar-ish ways to make that happen. Lots of platforms just mark things as 'read' when they're rendered then save an index of 'read' content as a cookie (essentially).

A person who checked their phone 10m ago and scrolled instagram (because you're gonna check your phone and just look at the time? no that's silly there's content on there.) Well, yeah, they go and re-check instagram and it shows different content than the previous stuff because if there wasn't they wouldn't need to check, because the new-ness will make it seem as though their feeds are moving fast, because new stuff is on there, because the world is moving fast, because there's a lot to see, because every moment someone you follow is posting something, and because the anxiety of capitalist efficiency requires it. Also - this is kinda an aside, but I'm already writing this giant wall of text so I might as well - dating apps have extremely manipulative algorithms to keep people on the app as long as possible. Essentially they use like/dislike ratios to feed based on the variance of average dwell time.

If it's any consolation, the monetization and advertising angle of this may not actually work profitably or even at all. I'm not really sure what the future is for these platforms are when capitalists admit that this kind of monetization doesn't work, but they might just be head-in-the-sand forever because it's kinda a superstructure-superstructure interaction. A concession that these kinds of platforms are unprofitable or just e-waste can't really happen while it's still the economic foundation of like quite a few countries. So yeah, I guess it depends if capitalism wants to have a new artificial frontier, which was sorta trying to be crypto, but that seems kinda out, so idk. Maybe it'll be something more nightmarish like imagination lol.

I feel like I can sorta tell what type of online people are by taking to them irl.

huh, well maybe we could add a derivative... does anyone have data on the change in the rate of the rate of change of the change in the rate of change of a dollar's value when purchasing an average 'basket' of commodities?