Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@toxi Case in point, coincidentally at the top of my feed currently: https://pixelfed.social/p/pixelglade/938588304451378019

@toxi My predictions:

- Promotion of art which demonstrates process, which includes live performances of course, but also simply "how to" or "making of". Participation, ephemerality, spontaneity, like you said. If you see someone just typing words into a box and mashing things together, it will be judged harshly. Good.
- Increased rejection of digital life, preference for the physical, and all that it entails. Or at least, rejection of tainted transmission media. In this, I am hopeful for the young people.
- Trusted systems attesting to provenance, even if anonymized.
- A possible forking of society, one which still values communication, humanism, and effort; and one which values systems and is self-absorbed
- One I'm particularly worried about: increasing alienation to a breaking point; potentially violence, especially in the US.

Unfortunately, I don't think things are going to get better anytime soon, we are all still getting started rag-dolling down the mountain, especially with so much money and power concentrated in the hands of people who want a systematic, top-down world.

However, we are headed down an unsustainable path and it will come to an end one way or another. I can only hope that people can keep resisting in stronger and increasingly sophisticated ways, dismantling the power imbalance, and building a new society if necessary.

@toxi It is my understanding that the people "in the middle" aren't worried as much about "missing out" or people being "unreasonably critical", but having to choose whether they themselves are going to participate in a social environment or not.

I believe that many if not most of those people already struggle greatly with conflict, even confusing it with abuse. In addition, these people struggle with being social already. Therefore, I believe it is often a matter of time before they yield to the systems being built.

@toxi Direct communication and relationship building. This has always been the human thing.

Art has always been a form of expression, however abstract or esoteric. This is why generative AI is bad: it makes social activities now antisocial. You are no longer gaining insight into another person, no longer wondering what they are thinking, no longer building connection, you are interacting with a system and yourself. What was once a beautiful, highly connected graph now looks ever more like a star topology all pointing to one thing. It's no different to wrecking and paving an ecosystem. It's evil.

This isn't new, either. Being on the Internet has always been fraught, texting has always been fraught. Anytime there is a technological proxy for communication there is danger of interception and mangling of the signal. There is a difference, however: a technological medium whose sole purpose is *transmission* without alteration is okay.

This is why telephones are more acceptable that television, and also why the comparisons of genai to previous technologies are utter bollucks. People can sometimes forget how lossy texting is, but they at least are choosing the words (although keyboard autocomplete seeks to diminish even that).

Everyone is simply ignoring what is basically a law of nature. Critics don't emphasize it enough and "neutral" / booster types don't even consider it because their value calculation has everything to do with "output", and their relationship to a system rather than to people. This leads to a critical stalemate because there is simply a different set of values that can never be reconciled.

I believe that alienation is the ultimate ill of all humankind and I believe that anyone who alienates or creates systems that alienate have done wrong. Simple as that.