This wonderfully captures of what our neighborhood learned in the 90s. I'd only heard bits of this from my tentative conversations with neighbors who had been around for the attack (or the NYPD riot in Tompkins), or what I picked up from Sante's pieces when I worked at the Voice.
I don't think I'd realize how much my world view was shaped by having the defining years of my early adulthood be surrounded by people who were persecuted for coming together as a community, building better lives for themselves, and protecting a vibrant and vital culture.
But I benefitted *so* much from being broke (and honestly, lonely) in the East Village and LES in those days. You could wander around, stumble into interesting conversations with strangers, and learn a completely different history of America in 20 minutes while sitting in a park.
We put the best minds in the industry in it, and spent billions of dollars, plus we misused the public commons in all kinds of unexpected and unspeakable ways. But ultimately, we triumphed. Computer bad at math.
These dudes: “Hey snowflakes, facts don’t care about your FEELINGS!”
Also these dudes: “Our software is so smart, it uses vibes instead of math.”
We need a term for something beyond “tragedy of the commons” when the extractive platforms try to kill off the sources they depend on to feed their models in the first place. The same thing the gig economy tries to do to workers, and equally short-sighted.
Part of the reason AI should be trained only on data given with consent is so that you can possibly go back to those sources again in the future. Every creator and problem-solver who has had their brilliance strip mined for this generation of AI will not let it happen again.
This is an astute analysis of where capital is at in tech right now, and focuses on founders/CEOs, but it explains why the capital class is also so focused on punishing workers right now. They really want to take out their frustrations with founders by targeting workers.
And it’s not just about VC — the backlash against workers is so powerful that one of the most consistently critical voices who has been anti-VC has now moved to sucking up to Musk, just to let his workers know his allegiance.
All other things aside, the fact that he clearly doesn’t know how to use GitHub or Slack is such outrageously funny boomer energy. Fully in keeping with “print out your code” and “I am constantly getting duped by obviously fake bullshit online”.
My man is cosplaying CEO by pasting screenshots into Microsoft Word documents formatted with Comic Sans. We’re a couple days away from him emailing everyone “FW: FW: fw: CAREFUL! Fentanyl in Halloween candy!”
Send him a zip file of your code changes, tell him if he doesn’t open it within the hour, Bill Gates is going to start putting a tax on email.