Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@anon_opin@mastodon.social borrowing from the language and ideas of Achille Mbembe and the theory of Necropolitics, doing stuff like this is a form of choosing who gets to be served and who doesn't. When that service includes public medical, financial, and housing material, developers are quite literally choosing who is allowed to die from hazards that these services are supposed to prevent.

Even if it doesn't go that far, it creates a really hard limit on how I as a digital services volunteer can help people in need. If you've got a smartphone-reliant service, I can't help a person get access to that using library/public computers. The only scheme I know about (in where I live) that provides free devices for people in this position can take months to provide relief. And yet people treat smartphones like they're naturally occurring and you can just pick them off of trees smh my head

@davidgerard@circumstances.run ah yes, the space industries foundational issue of not being computers.

Capitalist approaches to space need it to be a resource that can be "captured" and "owned". Your margin comes from being the person who owns and utilises a parcel of it - this is the same line of reasoning that gives you space drug manufacturers. But the hard constraints on the use of outer space are mostly things like cost (capex becomes opex when satellites have a finite lifetime and can't be repaired/upgraded/improved easily) and collision risks, which are their own nightmarish economic box of tricks.

We have invented ways for people to need more and more computer every year. Space data centers are an attempt to bring that spiralling model to the space industry, without the understanding of why people need more and more computer every year and how those additional chips end up being absorbed into our lives. Fixed-capacity 10 year datacenters that take an additional 5-10 years either side for build-out, launch, disposal, and downtime can't fit into the terrestrial datacenter economic model.

source: I am a former economic/data analyst in the space industry who went back to just making the spacecraft.