Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.

If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.

And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.

Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals.

It is the departments’ choice to cancel subscriptions anytime and start publishing on their own terms. They are equally to blame when they esteem reputation above all, and measure reputation by publishing to these journals. Let’s not pretend that big-shot universities are simply taken hostage by a handful corrupt billionaires. They’re in on it.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Racket.

Another thing I came up with is the time factor. Or the pacing if you will. We have also received that from those other platforms. I have turned to reading e-books instead of scrolling and I have found my attention span has improved. It is the time factor that is internalized and doesn’t allow careful consideration of everything. Conflict and weaponization of sincerity might well be a side effect of this one.

I don’t even know if it is about conflict per se, or the very notion that it is virtuous to engage with these media politically. Even these alternative platforms, because they are modeled after Twitter, Reddit, and the like, possess the same qualities, by making us react and respond to similar ways. I guess digital infrastructure for activist groups should be more similar to private infrastructures of orgs rather than corporate social media. And they should be community first, with a sophisticated take on the channels available to communicate to and from the organization and the rest of the community.

Until some time ago, I was still on the fence about Lemmy though. On the technical level it has some desirable attributes in the community structure and federation, that could possibly help. But the user culture, me included, is so fucked up that only with insane levels of moderation it could ever fulfill such a purpose. For this another medium should be considered in Lemmy’s place (I don’t think Mastodon is the one either), that would constrain antisocial and non-social user behavior on the technical level. So, this is a loose argument that Lemmy and Mastodon are not tools for social change, and should be abandoned as such.

But the worst people in the Valley also thrive on all the demobilizing disengagement that their platforms have slowly led us towards. They have alchemized activism into toxic Twitter beefs and seduced us into thinking that we’re one viral campaign away from solving some massive socio-structural problem, which makes it all the easier to devote our energies to pursuing these digital white whales in lieu of more tangible goals in our lives and communities.

First and foremost, one of the ugliest side effects of terminal COVID-posting that proliferated amongst the Extremely Online was a deepening mistrust of their fellow human being; every time they fell for outrage-bait about some wanker being a dick about not wearing a mask, their inevitable response was, “I don’t trust people anymore!” This is a neat fit for conservatives, whose entire movement is built on a notion of Original Sin, developed through two centuries of monarchism, fascism, nativism, and lesser varieties of know-nothingism, that treats strangers as essentially threats. But for anyone to the left of Mussolini, such contempt for your fellow human being, such unwillingness to reach out to one’s neighbour for fear they’ll be like That Bitch from Panera Bread I Saw on TikTok, is extraordinarily dangerous — and fatal to realizing the ideals we share, which are necessarily collective.

This myth of social media’s indispensability to our movements, not just as a tool but as the forum for change, is dangerous. If we internalize it too deeply, it actually demobilizes our movements, lulling us into mistaking quote-tweet wars and “clapbacks” for meaningful political action, seducing us into seeing nanoseconds of digital catharsis as an adequate substitute for change. It seduces us into mistaking the profitable content we generate for truly resistive speech — as well as tying our worth and our success, as people and activists, to the engagement metrics created by large tech corporations.

Social media is chock-a-block with political content, hashtag activism, and disinformation that turns grandparents into fascists. How could it be anti-political? Because it demobilizes and scatters the polity; it makes it much harder to come together, deliberate, and effect change in our communities. Worse, social media tricks us into thinking that that’s exactly what we’re doing. What results is a “public square” where real people can get hurt but nothing ever really changes.

Good, but the way the developer spells “nazy” makes me to follow the quoted advice on my own brain process:

if you want to change the wallpaper during runtime, you must pkill the daemon, and then start it again

If your threat model involves all these, then you can only be one person, and he has already been arrested due to stylistics. /joking

BTW your advice to use AI against writing style fingerprinting is not what I have heard, and some people don’t want to use AI, especially OpenAI. You should at least make your remedy about local models, but those are not as good as the commercial ones.

The correct response here is: style guides.

Style guides are specifically designed to make multiple staff writers to all sound the same. There are tools like back-and-forth translation and reading level analyzers that you can use offline to minimize peculiarities in your writing.

But is is all very cumbersome and error prone, and for low threat scenarios just mimicking another person at a lower reading level than yourself is the most accessible method.

I won’t respond to any of your shit. I don’t block you just to keep tabs on you. kbye

This is apologist rhetoric, and since you are the OP, it is telling that you found this crap worth posting to start with.

You are not persuaded yet huh? And think Rogan is middle of the tent? He might be an idiot but he is squarely right wing you know, unless you know utter shit about politics. And you are watering down who is a fascist and who is not? You know Kirk had lists with targeted academics whom his fan-base harassed? Threatening academics for being woke is an anti-intellectual fascist tactic.

It really doesn’t matter how you dress your world and gloss over reality, but there is a huge overlap between MAGA and authoritarian regimes worldwide, especially the Nazi party. People who don’t see that it is mainly because they have zero idea about what the Nazi party was, except for “the absolute evil”, and then pearl-clutch and say “they call me a nazi for being a militarist racist transphobe and because I believe in nationalism and traditional family values”. Well, yeah? That was what a fucking nazi was, you pitiful ignoramus. What you nowadays call a “centrist”.

Questioning whether “it is formally fascist” regarding the christian nationalist and organized racist forces behind this systematic attack on check and balances of the executive branch is simply SEALIONING.

• It is a historical fact that America has not only undergone an autocratic power grap, that was deliberately engineered and outlined in Project 2025, but that it is already half-way implemented.
• It is also a fact that rounding up undesirables to prison camps as well as the persecution and scapegoating of trans people closely parallel the early stages of the Jewish Holocaust and the enslavement of a large part of the European population in different types of camps.
• It is a fact that Trump wants to destroy the separation of government functions, and uses the military against his own population to drown dissidence.

Your own fucking intelligence service says so. What you are doing is really actionable, because if you are not simply a useful idiot, you are an active operative. As an added bonus, he poses with established nazi apologists among young Republicans. And you are STILL MOVING THE GOALPOSTS ABOUT WHAT A FASCIST IS THEORETICALLY?

If you don’t see that already, there really isn’t reason to waste time on you personally or any other regime apologist. You are the type of person who will tell us we are overreacting until there are actual gas chambers, and then claim it never happened. The more your side pushes in the direction of barbarism and inhumanity, the sooner this will be solved by the fourth box. Humanity has rejected your ideas with deadly force, and it will again. Case is closed.

Clickbait + crap methodology + biased framing = This is complete rubbish. Right-wingers are historically the biggest perpetrators of intolerant, hate, and overall political violence. No clickbait slop is gonna change that. People have a right to self-defend and defend democracy against occupation, fascist power grabs, and unlawful state violence.

See, this is the bit I don’t get… If there are two people, like ANY two people, that their crimes and corruptions are enough to subvert the status quo, then what fucking difference does it make if they cover it up so hard. The message is still the same, that there is so much crime and corruption in government that a violent response is in order. Are they so stupid, or so confident?