in the long run, we're all dead

unwarrantedly polemical (the fact that i've been)

yea we're all implicated in evil, obviously. especially when you're performing roles in institutions. and furthermore its important not to just flatten over the particularities of such evil though!

thats the main thing that bugged me about diza's objection and characterization of me before. like yea obvi we're all implicated but that doesn't mean you just throw up your hands and flatten everything out. the difference DOES matter, even if it were just quantitative (it's not)

i didn't do a good job of analyzing my own particularity but the specificity nonetheless matters a great deal. the aversion to recognition (even going so far as to deny!) is embarrassing*. the dismissal is preemptive and the characterization as slave morality misses the more true morality embedded

in the expression, however haphazard. *i'm bringing multiple people into conversation here and leaving one unnamed so it might be kind of unclear what im getting at

god that was fucking ELECTRIC

merkletr.ee/fast merkletr.ee/fast merkletr.ee/fast merkletr.ee/fast merkletr.ee/fast merkletr.ee/fast merkletr.ee/fast merkletr.ee/fast

unironically tabbed out to start playing this after reading "they’re identification methods, but not decentralized identification methods" and it only got better from there

unrelenting bar after bar, fucking tight writing, and it's inarguable that she's put in the work to earn every word

somewhat apprehensive about the fallout but we'll see where this goes

hm this thread focused on the rhetorical properties but i should be clear that it only works as well as it does because it doesn't overstep itself and there are fantastic citations for everything. the brevity is impressive because it demonstrates acute discernment and domain expertise

swapping between dotesmite and hegel is so peak as an effort-relief cycle

productive labor is simply determined by what generates surplus value

this accounts for how self-employed workers are still productive laborers (surplus value need not imply that the surplus is appropriated by another) and also accounts for the negative cases where some type of human expenditure does not count as productive labor (arguably thereby not labor as such)

im full of love and sparkles and joy

! but not exuberance

i'm in such a kaseycoded mood lately

except i love people instead of hating them

the jian ying to her yang

i love my friends !

elf harem is my favorite sitcom

sugar is literally so dangerous for me

life is fun :)

i have to pee tho

nostr is kinda neat for being so restricted/straightforward but i like atproto better

pds my beloved

it’s funny to imagine “what if all relays went nonarchival” and what that would mean for each proto

yay thanks mary threadgate

just wise to get ahead of it yknow

boat the goat

at least for me (this is what kasey kat and i chatted about last night) the main concerning thing is the continual prioritization of app over protocol. yes it’s a demo app ballooned out of control but i think that’s basically the most telling thing of all, that they chose to keep rolling forward.

ig i just worry you can’t roll back history, and with bsky it’s painfully obvious what things created as temporary patches become massive perpetual thorns (dms anyone?). because yea once implemented once it’s cannon and now your problem to deal with until replacement (have we ever actually seen

something replaced yet? for gods sake we still have backwards compatibility all over the place with things that haven’t been used for ages).

my core concern is that very rapidly there became an identification of bsky interests with the interests of the protocol in general, despite all the lip service to “the company is the future enemy”. like they knew cognitively what could happen but at nearly every single point that truly mattered

(okay this is entirely unfair, i wasn’t around for decisions, and obviously id mainly be exposed to choices that went in one way over the other) there was an approach of “well we just have to do this to stay afloat” or “we would be foolish not to ride this fortuitous wave of new users” and

protocol concerns went to the backburner. not to be dramatic but this really is the exact same dynamic of ML parties in relation to the proletariat, like yea ostensibly the app’s success could lead to the success of the protocol, but clearly these two interests aren’t one and the same.

and regardless of humble beginnings, that’s not where we are now. mao isn’t a poor rural kid anymore and is now a part of something larger, operating according to all sorts of mute compulsions. sure the history is important on the one hand, but it feels potentially obscuring as a contribution.

idk, it sometimes just gives “prolonged birth pangs” ad nauseam vibes. just give it more time, you’ll see, it’ll all come to fruition. and sure, maybe, but i’m pretty squeamish and untrusting. obvi i love all the folks working there (okay like 3 of them) but we’re operating at scales and logics

that go beyond individual intent, which is kind of the point. and no one’s like evil or whatever, they’re just kinda trapped it feels like.

and like, i don’t really have the answers here because im not a great political theorist of optimal capitalist corporate structure. would it have been better to spin off protocol as a separate entity to maintain that separation (similar to original twt inception LOL)?

funding would be wacky but you could set up some split thing, tho i imagine it’d get hella complicated with funding and it’s intended purpose. i’m not really gonna pretend like i have a ton of insight in this domain so im gonna stop pontificating

this got way off track but one last thing i wanna mention is the unbelievably massive gulf between bsky and literally any other app. where like the reference appv and every other existing app arent operating at anything resembling the complexity,

and it feels like there’s a lot of underestimation of how much inside baseball benefits there are and it’s frustrating how opaque things are. zeppy is cool! but also like lowkey in ruins atm and i don’t think that’s an individual failing.

idk despite all the hemming and hawing in some corners here about power and political-adjacent theorizing, no one really has any clue what they’re talking about. which is fair on multiple grounds, and to build anything at all you kinda just have to take the leap, but at minimum

i do wish there were a more developed vision of what the path to “future enemy” looked like to these people because it’s kind of a cop out to be like “waow ya we’re gonna be so evil one day” and take no preventative measures bc you don’t understand the process.

which is again going to appear unfair bc ofc they’ve thought about it, but we needed more than dorm room speculation

shrug this is boring, gl proto

oh and last thing re:conflation of interests/success, it’s funny how that less categorical form of centralization on bsky the app leads to weird situations where the success of the app leads to direct conflict of the success of the proto. pds/client userbase and impl details have outsize influence