#the purpose of a system is what it does

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[oliviawebsite]

i agree w you about pre employment drug testing but job interviews? the thing where they meet you? and see what your like and if you’ve got the skills required? i dont get why theyre bad

ive elaborated multiple times on this. they are not skill checks by any means. they are only in place to filter "undesirables" from employment positions. they are ALWAYS subject to cultural biases. this is why so many people struggle to find work. now they can see youre a tranny before drafting up any paperwork and they can reject you with enough plausible deniability to claim it wasnt discrimination. this is the purpose of interviews. they ask generic blanket questions that test how Normal the subject is. its a way of doing things with a ton of negative side effects and whether it was intentional or not (its very much intentional btw) we need to rethink how we do job placement in the western capitalist world. people shouldnt have to grovel and socially compete with each other for an opportunity to barely cover their living expenses. job interviews need to be abolished. as i elaborared to a previous anon, there can be placement programs, employers can be required to offer paid training trial periods to job seekers. we dont have to do it the way we do it now.

[nateconnolly]

She woke in the darkness of the early morning and — without consciously making a choice — she knelt to pray. 

“I don’t know if You’re out there, but I have two requests. 

“First, I need someone to pray to. So God, please let there be a God.

“And I need to touch Him. So God, please give God a neck that I can strangle.” 

[thepoisonroom]

'I flirted with the idea that instead of being trans that I was just a cross-dresser (a quirk, I thought, that could be quietly folded into an otherwise average life) and that my dysphoria was sexual in nature, and sexual only. And if my feelings were only sexual, then, I wondered, perhaps I wasn’t actually trans.

I had read about a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, by a Northwestern University professor who believed that transwomen who were attracted to women were really confused fetishists, they wanted to be women to satisfy an autogynephilia. And though I first read about this book in the context of its debunkment and disparagement, I thought about the electricity of slipping on those tights, zipping up those boots, and a stream of guilt followed. Maybe this professor was right, and maybe I was only a fetishist. Not trans, just a misguided boy.

About a year later, on the Internet, I come across a transwoman who added a unique message to the crowd refuting this professor. Oh, I wish I remember who this woman was, and I wish even more that I could do better than paraphrase her, but I remember her saying something like this: “Well, of course I feel sexy putting on women’s clothing and having a woman’s body. If you feel comfortable in your body for the first time, won’t that probably mean it’ll be the first time you feel comfortable, too, with delighting in your body as a sexual thing?”'

-Casey Plett, Consciousness

[bitchthefuck1]

The thing that really kills me about Logan is that his kids are disappointing and ultimately unfit to be CEO, and it's not just that they're like that because he made them like that, but that they're like that because he wants them to be that way.

For all his talk about them being spoiled or coddled and his rant in the S3 finale that getting cut out of running Waystar is their chance to "be your own man" and build something themselves, he has spent the entire show actively undermining any attempt of theirs to do that. Shiv stays out and works in politics, but as soon as she joins a big campaign that could actually distinguish her from her family, he tells her he wants to make her CEO. He offers to buy Kendall out of his shares, but as soon as Kendall tries to take the offer and cut himself out, he refuses. He says he wants them out of the business and doing their own thing, and then as soon as they start actually doing that and buy Pierce, he tries to get Roman back.

The fact of the matter is that as much as he might claim to want a "real" heir, what he really wants is to never need one and for his children to stay children: incomplete, incapable, and under his thumb.

[pluralcultureis]

Niche plural culture is our host couldn't see a majority of grey scale (3 maybe 4 shades of grey, 1 shade of black, and 2 shades of white)

And they were like that for 8 years minimum

And when they fused with another alter suddenly they could see grey scale and lost their mind over it lmao

-Luna

[ruegarding]

hi! what are your thoughts on the calypso scene in botl? read your tags on the percy thoughts on gods post and wanted to know

short answer:

the scene w calypso exists for the audience and to foreshadow ethan.

long answer:

percy has never divided the world like this. percy as a character already knows the outcome of this conversation; things aren't black or white. percy is an incredibly empathetic, observant, and intelligent character, and in the post anon is referring to, he shows this by understanding why hades was bitter (third quote) while simultaneously calling the gods out for their behavior (last quote). percy has never done something bc "the gods are his family," and that includes retrieving the lightning bolt in tlt, the closest u could get to this. similarly, percy never hated luke bc he was leaving camp or betraying the gods, percy's feelings abt luke are personal, to the point where it's a bit blinding.

as a more specific example using this scene, percy doesn't leave calypso bc of the gods.

percy genuinely considers staying on ogygia and only leaves bc of his personal loyalty to his friends. no where in his decision to leave does he bring up the gods, as family or something good that needs to be defended.

this is one of the reasons he and athena have that conversation in ttc abt his fatal flaw. the gods are scared of percy bc his continued loyalty to them isn't guaranteed. percy's idea of good vs bad is very nuanced and personal and his loyalty is much the same. but the audience, primarily young since the books are middle grade, might not be on that same level of understanding. this conversation establishes to the audience what percy already knows but hasn't said. and the audience needs to understand this bc it's the crux of luke's character in tlo.

furthermore, this conversation foreshadows ethan's character. ethan's primary motivation is getting recognition for the minor gods, his mother, his family, himself. he's willing to sacrifice a lot for this.

ethan knows that nemesis isn't good. he's not siding w her bc she's good. he's siding w her bc she's family and she's the only one who paid him any attention, good or bad.

this is also why ethan switches sides. he's not loyal to a side bc it's good vs bad, he's loyal to whoever will help him and his goals, his family. calypso's words here perfectly set up ethan's character, and makes it easier for the audience to understand where he's coming from.

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

"What would the Fabricator eat...?"

(Transcription under the cut)

Francisco: I'm now thinking we should have added more food in this level... Charlie: It is noticeably missing, isn't it? Francisco: Yeah! Charlie: What would the Fabricator eat? What's her favorite snack? I'm thinking, like... a little dessert. Like a French bonbon or something. Francisco: Yeah... Maybe it's a scorpion sandwich with a chaser of antidote. Charlie: Ohh, yes! I think she would like- in the same way that people like spicy food, she would like poisonous food, and then antidote chasers. Francisco: Yeah... Charlie: ... That's horrible!

[mad-hunts]

[avatarthelastairgender]

do you think any callout is bad, including those against confirmed abusers with large platforms? (from online users like toonimal or squimpus to the metoo movement as a whole)

to borrow from healed here:

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

there are a lot of reasons i think pericles is really slept on as one of the most tragic characters in sdmi, and they start with how easy it is to connect the dots that he took a mind-destroying curse full to the face as an infant. one that breaks adult humans and renders them unrecognizable, when pericles was not only a baby but is from a species that is explicitly much more vulnerable to it. right from the beginning of his life the entity obliterated his sense of self so thoroughly that there's not even a version of him who shows up in the Sitting Room.

fuck, man.

[lucalicatteart]

Poll adventure (paventure? lol) Day 4: read the small story tidbit below the poll for more details, OR just vote based on initial impression

(✦ see past poll results + further information HERE (link) ✦)

The winning option of yesterday's poll was that the adventurer should offer the Well Creature some bread and soup ….

"Completely unsure how to even begin to interact with the strange creature from the well, The Adventurer recalls reading in a book once that 'food is a universal language', or uh.. something like that.. thus, some hearty soup and bread would surely bridge any communication barriers... probably. He serves the little cannister of broth cold, straight from his bag just dumped into a wooden bowl, mostly because he's far too nervous to try and start a fire with someone watching.. hopefully they won't mind the food not being warmed..

After gently placing a single bread roll next to the soup, he steps back, gesturing towards the meal with an uncertain smile. The creature pauses, sniffs around, then promptly disappears back into the darkness. Just as The Adventurer begins to sulk over his apparent rejection, something stirs behind him... With a rush of creaking and plopping noises, the creature resurfaces, revealing it's massive serpent-like body as it hoists itself over the crumbled stone of the well's edge with it's many arms. It cracks open it's mighty jaw just far enough for a tiny blue tongue to slither out, then politely slurps at the soup, delicate enough not to spill any.

Stumbling backwards in shock, The Adventurer simply sits there staring the entire time whilst the creature happily (and rather quickly) enjoys their meal... Seemingly appreciative of his kind offerings, another strange slinking arm creeps up from the depths of the well, daintily opening a velvet sack with it's claws and laying out a small assortment of items onto the grass. Still a bit shaken, but also never one to turn down a free gift, The Adventurer senses that the creature intends for him to take any single item of his choosing... but, which one?"

[crimsongrimoire]

ayo boothill come home. ill replace your cooler. Freak

[alectology-archive]

I think it’s simultaneously funny and tragic that the most compelling character to come out of throne of glass was only introduced in the third book. manon blackbeak has eaten men for breakfast and has never regretted it. she has a complicated relationship with her grandmother and treasures that antagonistic bond because it’s the only relationship she’s permitted to have and feeds into the cycle of self-hatred that she desperately clings to - giving it up would mean she’s been deceiving herself for a century and manon hates being wrong. she’s a repressed lesbian and she’s also obsessed with the forbidden, not that there’s any connect between the two at all (and not that elide specifically acts as a thematically delicious love interest). her best friend convinces her to be brave enough to be on the receiving end of kindness after a hundred of years of hurting herself, and manon later rises to her defence with the intention of sacrificing herself, revealing just how much love she had stored away in a secret place in her heart. her storyline features accidentally well-executed commentary about how women’s bodies are abused and discarded and how imperialism specifically facilitates this. 

best of all, sarah j maas didn’t intentionally write 90% of this commentary.

[desertsportshipping]

Leon: I've heard from my mom that Hop and Gloria have made some jokes about drugs and I'm a little worried about them.

Wes: Don't worry. I've got this.

Wes: [tells the kids a story about how a member of Team Snagem was injecting himself with drugs and caught Pokerus (basically rabies) and they watched him slowly go insane over the next few months until he became afraid of water and trying to bite people so they had to tie him up, drag him to a remote spot in the desert and kill him, all in graphic detail.]

Hop:

Gloria:

Leon: I think you traumatized them.

[lesbian4lqg]

one thing i really appreciate about svsss is that with anyone else in shen yuans role?

the system's lbh mood ring points (satisfaction, heartbreak, etc) would be considered an invasion of privacy more than the whole transmigration thing already is or at least a source of valuable insight but instead

its shen yuan. if anything the mood ring reveals make him more confused