Tootfinder

This is what Weizenbaum wrote about the dawn of the computer age: it was used as an excuse to not even try to make society better. The same thing is happening with “AI” now.
We know what would make society better.
One example is UBI (which Weizenbaum mentions in the same book in passing as “negative income tax”).
But of course we don’t have universal healthcare or UBI nor really any other advances (perhaps the ADA was a rare win); instead trillions of dollars are invested into software that tells us to bomb schools; for the sole reason to say it was the computers’ fault, not ours.
This book* was written 50 years ago.
*Computer Power and Human Reason
#AI #society

Noch ein paar der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Gelöscht und doch nicht weg: Signal speichert Nachrichten länger als erwartet

Gelöscht und doch nicht weg: Signal speichert Nachrichten länger als erwartet
Je nachdem, wie intensiv man den Messenger nutzt, kann es Tage dauern, bis eine gelöschte Nachricht weg ist. Signal ignorierte den Fehler ein halbes Jahr.

Trump threatens to "put a big tariff on the UK" if it does not drop its digital services tax, which he views as unfairly targeting US tech companies (Connor Stringer/Telegraph)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/04/24/trump-dr…

Trump threatens Starmer with ‘big tariff’ over tech tax
President tells The Telegraph he will retaliate if Britain continues to ‘target’ major American companies such as Apple, Google and Meta

Job loss? That one really seems weird. The numbers are not adding up to the stories we hear yet. But the numbers are not dire yet. Of course, our actual tracking of those numbers is increasingly suspect because of the US fascist project.
The big tech companies are absolutely pulling shenanigans, and using "AI" as an excuse for layoffs in a great number of cases, and in many cases, openly admitting they don't have any good ideas, so they'll lay people off instead of allocate them better. We are absolutely seeing the shifts in what are viable careers in tech though. And that was underway before AI: the UX bootcamps, for example, destabilized those job function, devaluing the workers, and the resulting shifts absolutely wrecked those job titles and the pay for them, leaving a bunch of people in the lurch.
But behind that too was our broken education system in the US: it was a shortcut around the massive debt that going to college can produce for people. But it didn't last, because it was vocational training being used purposefully as a wedge to change the labor market. Similar, sometimes intentional effects have happened in other aspects.
A huge amount of the "AI" problem is actually labor problems coming home to roost. We can blame Reagan for a lot of this.

#SMBC with #Marriage as a Service:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waas

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.
The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.
The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.
It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.
This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.
But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.
Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

The DEA is expected to reclassify marijuana as a less hazardous Schedule 3 substance as soon as this week. A spokesman said (as if stoned) “wait, did we miss four twenty? Aw man, that would have been a really cool schedule.”
Lines like that and 2 sketches I wrote in the all female cast (this week) of This Week This Week in LA tonight. Like the news, but funny.
Get tix:

The Open Fist Theatre Company

"Stop mowing the lawn – and five more ways to save Britain’s ‘charming’ and ‘polite’ gatekeeper butterflies"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Environment

I've mentioned it before, and I'm sure I will again, but, as much as there's a reason why I reject Christianity, there were also a lot of good things. Churches have governing bodies (with varying degrees of democratic representation) that guide the ministry (preaching and actions) as well as managing logistics (building maintenance, accounting, etc). This provides opportunities for self-governed collective action.
Quakers are the most radical in terms of this, and are basically anarchists. Quaker circles often meet at people's houses and can be as small as 3 people. There is often no leadership. A Quaker service could easily just be everyone sitting in a circle and someone talking at one point.
I grew up in a Presbyterian church, and one of my first jobs (at 11 or 12) was landscaping there. Within the church there were a lot of different trades, which meant that you could volunteer time and learn basically any kind of maintenance. Basically everything that needed to be done was done in-house. This also meant that if you needed a plumber, an electrician, etc, that you could pick one from within the church.
I remember painting the church, learning how to paint, with a bunch of other members of the congregation at a work party. I also remember being volunteered for child care during choir. There were a few rooms around that were used for different things, such as music practice. But these rooms could be made available for any type of community activity. This can actually include community organizing. In fact, Seattle GDC was offered an occasional space for organizing in a church (we didn't take it, but appreciated the offer), and that same church hosted a lot of other community events. I actually went to a queer relationships skills class once hosted in a church, which was great.
What I'm saying is that churches often act as a kind of parallel society up-to-and-including acting as dual power structures....