I am mentally burned out, I can’t read about one more ai model, i can’t read about one more surveillance, I can’t read about anything new anymore. Why can’t people just make a better battery? How about a nice sounding commercially available keyboard? I am exhausted of reading posts after posts after posts, anthropic released this master model, deepseek released this giga model, there’s a new surveillance system, new spyware, new processor, new gpu, new location software, then I avoid then people start to literally start to talk at me about how their favourite country is using their favourite technology, my peers will talk about American professors encouraging adoption of ai, my tech pilled comrades will talk about China teaching deepseek to kids in school, like of it was upto me, kids wouldn’t see a piece of tech till 5 and only get basic com sci at 6, literally please for the sake of God learn to live for a moment instead of constantly chasing the next big thing and let others live too. We don’t need more, we have more than enough in the world, this world is drowning in our garbage please let the world live and let people like me live. Please don’t drive us to death.
Half the reason I can maintain my sanity is because I actively avoid all the techno bs. Cut out all ads in my life. Refuse to listen to tech news except once in a blue moon. In this cyber dystopia you gotta fight back and cut away.
Teach people technology literacy to avoid being drawn into the AI craze. Teach them the dangers of surveillance. How to avoid it.
That’s a distinct shift I’ve noticed over the last couple decades; it used to be that keeping up on tech news and tech literacy went roughly hand in hand. First example that comes to mind is back when Mac OS X dropped, there was a lot of discussion in Apple spaces and media about it being built on a unix-type kernel and how to use the new terminal in the OS, unix commands and scripts to use.
It felt like things changed once smart devices started becoming prevalent. Tech developments, both from the developer side and the media side, stopped being about understanding and literacy and started being about hype cycles, FOMO. Like, don’t worry about the details or knowing what’s going on under the hood, you need to dive headfirst into whatever the tech bros are pushing or be left behind. AI being the most blatant example; you don’t need to know anything about what it’s doing, you just need to vibe.
That’s crazy I ain’t live long enough to remember such days but it sounds wonderful. Sad that I never got to live in that era.
It might just be technology itself becoming more prevalent. Impossible for so many laymen to really keep up with it all. I can’t keep up with the thoughtful way of using all my tech and that’s literally my chosen profession. At some point the world just becomes too overloaded for humans to keep up.
Yeah the specialization within tech has made it trickier to see the bigger pictures. I think it’s also because tech has gone from being a backend feature, the thing an industry uses behind the scenes to get the public-facing work done, to being the front and center, public-facing work itself.
I honestly can’t help but suspect malicious intent when it comes to how much ignorant some people are, you say something about surveillance apparatuses or the fact that we need to scale back production and you see accusations of luddite and primitivist. Like seriously how many GPUs do you need? World is drowning in e-waste. People seriously think saying a country people are sympathetic to is doing something will amount to something like come the fuck on, saying China is using ai(deepseek) in schools won’t make it any better, China also has competitive exams and toxic education system so guess what blindly following what ONE country is doing doesn’t prove anything even after ignoring the fact that China has only been trying controlled rollout but these fuckwit journalists and netizens have decided to spam the internet like China is switching its entire curriculum to promot engineering. Why I know all this don’t ask because those are dark dark parts.
Hate it when people roll out the luddites accusation, especially marxists who should know better. There’s no such thing as technology which can be separated from a social or political context.
Yeah. China is also ruled by a DotP and has a different economic/political structure. It had its own conditions, own policies and the CPC constantly emphasizes this. Copying China is dumb. What we need is to think for ourselves.
Really people take Marx’s quote from chapter 5 of capital vol 1 “it took English proletariat 15 years to realise its enemy wasn’t the machine but the bourgeoisie” and run with it, like have read anything else from him or his fellow theorists? Bourgeoisie are the enemy but so are their machines.
“The real threat is not the gun but the mf trynna shoot you with it. If you have a gun in your hand it’s not a bad thing”
Certain smoothbrains: guns are not the problem we should let the enemy have all the guns they want.
“I’m just happy the technology exists. It has so much potential.”
As if commodities were people and could choose - benevolently - their applications.
Exactly, literally that
I haven’t seen an ad in like, 5 years I think. DNS adblocking + uBlock, and just avoiding ad infested websites. I successfully kept people near me away from “AI” while contextualizing it as a part of the larger capitalist system while; while promoting grapheneOS and such, I think many people began seeing how better FOSS is than proprietary corps
Yeah that’s nice work!
Luckily I’m surrounded by tech students who are already quite tech literate so they don’t worship AI. I mean there was a phase where some students thought AI would overcome humanity in a few years but that hype died quick.
Tech students that aren’t techbros? Amazing… I did some time in uni last year and everyone loved LLMs in IT lol
My uni is way more focused on hardware development than software so that probably makes a difference.
Fair enough, sounds nice, I had to quit university cause it was a bunch of traumatic bs and was bad