this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
2 points (52.6% liked)
Technology
60677 readers
3255 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Black box algorithms should be banned.
Social media algorithms affect society deeply.
Why the fuck are they allowed to be black boxes instead of forced open for the scrutiny of legislators, the courts, and the public?
Nah, instead of doing anything fucking reasonable like regulating the algorithms, we're just gonna ban ones we don't like.
No we are not. I recall Marshall McLuhan telling a story about early Egypt. Originally, the power in society was with the Priest caste, because they could write (heiroglyphics). Eventually though, papyrus was invented, and the Military caste began to use it to do things like document stores, send short messages, and so on. The language on papyrus was used in every day life, the heiroglyphics were not. So, over time the power in society moved from the Priest caste to the Military caste because they were in charge of the useful communication tools.
In the modern era, software code is quite literally language made manifest. Only a relatively small number of knowledge workers speak these lagnauges fluently, and it does give them deeper control over the world because now everything runs on computers and software code. We have handed control in society over to the techbros accidentally by centering software so much they essentially can put a gun to the head of society and say "Hey, without us, all this stuff stops working. Do as we say."
Traditional media/communications was our Priest caste, and the tech community is the now the new Military caste, having developed and are in control of the dominant and important communications infrastructure/language.
Not natural language in any meaningful way. Not even close.
Also, I'm not at all convinced about the whole caste analysis, since historically there has been huge variation in the details of what one caste does and another doesn't, even if you can find enough parallels that you can label them as military, priestly or mercantile.
In addition, even if you buy the caste analysis, those called tech bros are really just members of the owner caste who happen to own tech-intensive businesses. Though even that is hard to make stick, since almost all kinds of businesses are now tech-intensive. And if you look at a tech bro such as Musk, much of his portfolio isn't pure-play tech. Cars, for example. Tech is an intrinsic component in nearly all enterprises, just as the phone or written word used to be. "Phone-intensive" only made sense to characterize early adopters when phones were emerging. But at some point in the adoption curve, it becomes essentially everyone, and no longer has meaning. The same could be said now for tech.
The more meaningful distinction now is between those who make money by doing things, versus those who make money by owning things. The latter have disproportionate power right now, and it's become toxic to the rest of us.