Why do you use social media?
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Why do you use social media?
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Why do you use social media?
@haubles to stay in touch with lovely people like you
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Why do you use social media?
@haubles Why does one use media? What changes when that media becomes social? How do different media and different social systems affect each other?
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@haubles to stay in touch with lovely people like you
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Why do you use social media?
@haubles
Bored retiree. Nobody listens to me irl. (No reason anybody should, tbh.) SM gives the illusion at least that someone is. -
@haubles
Bored retiree. Nobody listens to me irl. (No reason anybody should, tbh.) SM gives the illusion at least that someone is.@qurlyjoe I’m listening :)
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@krans@mastodon.me.uk The analogy is structurally interesting, but I think it breaks down at a crucial point.
With tax credits, the argument is that the subsidy lets employers off the hook—pressure that would otherwise force wages up gets absorbed by the state instead. The discomfort falls on capital, or at least that's the intent. But when you apply the same logic to language access, the discomfort doesn't fall on the Anglophone center. It falls on the people who were already excluded. The implicit suggestion becomes: non-English speakers should communicate less fluently, so that English speakers are eventually pressured into… what, exactly? Learning Korean? There's no mechanism there.
The deeper problem is that “lowering the bar for communication in English” is not the same thing as accepting English hegemony as permanent. I use these tools to participate in a conversation that would otherwise exclude me. That's not capitulation—it's the same logic as using a wheelchair ramp. You don't refuse the ramp because its existence lets architects keep building stairs.
The structural critique of hegemony is real and I share it. But it shouldn't cash out as advice to the marginalized to make themselves less legible. That's a cost I'm not willing to ask people to pay on behalf of a structural shift that may never come.
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@hongminhee Criticisms of Anglophonic hegemony are similar to (and inseparable from) criticisms of capitalism.
In many cases, systems people put in place to mitigate capitalism's harms inadvertently strengthen capitalism's grip (e.g. tax credits for low paid workers allow them to be paid even less).
Similarly, lowering the bar for communication in English, as you describe, makes it ever less likely that we'll ever start treating non English speakers as first class citizens.
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Chi esercita il DIRITTO di voto ha il DOVERE di informarsi.
#referendum #ReferendumGiustizia
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@levelbot I feel good about myself and this number.
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buckle up <-> buckle down axis
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@reiver@mastodon.social knowing people in general... They will get more bug reports if they said "whom"
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@reiver I've heard John Mastodon personally picks those out of a tall hat, for each user, individually. What a great man.
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I'm writing this in English.
Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.
This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.
@Gargron@mastodon.social argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.
For many of us, translation is first about access.
The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.
@Gargron@mastodon.social notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.
There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.
I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron@mastodon.social describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.
The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.
