This isn't meant to shame this person. But I had a disagreement about AI with someone on Matrix. They brought up computers. While I do see the comparison in some ways (data centers, the harmful environmental effects, surveillance, etc); with computers, there feels like there's at least more of a discussion to had as to if they're worth it or not. While they've done a lot of harm, they're also useful for a lot of things. I also said LLMs were glorified text/image generators and that I didn't think of them as "great." This person responded with a video on improvements in generated meme videos, missing my point. This got me thinking.

Think of it this way, why would I trust my information from a generic text generator? Why would I use an image generator to produce an image when I like drawing and editing memes together myself? LLM-generated images have turned "I don't dream of labor" to "I don't dream of hobbies." for a lot of people and that's what makes me uncomfortable. Not an imagined threat to "meritocracy" as if that ever existed and was not just some rhetoric rich people and policticians used to justify their existence.

Vicious Delights: I know him from the Frutiger Aero Archive's Forum & IRC. He reviews anime and talks about trends in fandom culture. He often provides a unique perspective on things that's refreshing.

Rnotte.Art: They're an artist and an internet friend of mine. Talk about society, art, and finding joy in life when it seems like the world sucks.

I might add more later.

I've noticed I'm more interested in radical leftist news websites, middle eastern news websites, and people's blogs for punditry and analysis than I am the breadtube channels or even the mainstream news websites in my RSS feeds. I still keep up with them to get a different perspective. But it feels like more of a chore lately because it feels more "commodified" in a sense. Hell, there's this one youtube video essayist I used to love, but lately have been disappointed in. I might unsubscribe from certain Youtube channels. It's on Freetube, so it's probably not gonna hurt their subscriber count anyway. By the way, if you want a Lebanese news website, Megaphone News, El Nashra and Ujleb are pretty good.

But I think this coincides with the treatment of reformism as "revolutionary" regardless of what side of the reform you're on. For example, in the USA, basic social democractic reforms (like government funded healthcare) get associated with socialism even more than workers owning and managing their workplaces together (you know, owning the means of production). Even the revolutionary left ends up spending more time arguing for reforms than revolution. But at the same time, it's hard to blame people for turning towards more ethical consumerism or millequetoast reforms when literally the politicians and corporations fight so hard against it. It's hard to blame people for wanting to keep certain industries alive when big tech is trying to kill them off along with the workers in those industries when they can't pay their bills. Hell, you could argue fighting for reforms helps. But I don't think we should stop there. I'd get more into it, but quite frankly, I'm not a "revolutions" expert and most people have a simplified idea of what a revolution would entail anyway. If there's something like the Epstein files, the Panama papers, Democrats' willingness to cooperate with the Trump regime, etc. show, it's that these systems themselves breed corruption.

But if you think about it, even if you have a community centered around certain values, music, etc, the problem remains the same. Some people might fit some aspects and not others, but force themselves to fit completely regardless in an attempt to fit in. What I don't miss is the subcultures themselves but the sense of rebellion people had. Even then my experiences in mutual aid and keeping up with the news show that that hasn't been completely lost.

I think what people are complaining about is not the "inautheticity," but the even more blatant commodification of it & the lack of collective identity. As I made clear, I don't think the lack of an in-group and out-group is inherently bad. In some ways, it might even be good. But it's easy to see why people would miss it in an era where people are isolated from one another and individualism is touted in subservience to modern society rather than against it. There's a reason none of these subcultures challenged the status quo in the long run and got co-opted. They were easy to commodify to begin with. Don't rebel, listen to music about rebelling. Don't help your neighbor, complain about "posers." All that happened was the mask got taken off.

For example, I'm reading a book on a well-known science fraud scandal. I not only learnt some physics, like palladium filtering out hydrogen molecules, but also how misleading it can be to treat a charismatic expert in one field as a genius in every subject. Basically, the people behind "cold fusion" were electro-chemists but not physicists. But since they were already well liked and smart, people trusted them. I can take that and encorporate its message about "Great Man" theory into how I see systems and how I see the world at large. But even then how I interpret it is always gonna be influenced by my perspective in other areas. No one is without bias and that includes me.