Government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.

When saying something, anything the context of what you say is at least as important as the literal group of words you are saying or writing.

Context is a big word. In spans the history of the person speaking as well as the time and place or publication that that person choses to speak. We all know that, it’s why people use very public situations to provoke the powers that be by saying something “out of context” to make a point. Playing with context can be very powerful and allows effective and useful forms of communication to push your agenda. Being able to understand context, adapt to it and knowing when to break it is one of the qualities of a good communicator.

In the past I have sometimes criticised forms of messaging within communities I interact with or am part of. For example I criticised people on the left selling DEI initiatives by saying “But diverse teams are more effective and have better outcomes” (even if that is objectively true) because fairness in society is not about it being economically beneficial, it’s a human right. I have also criticised many European NGOs for accepting the framing of “digital sovereignty” in order to acquire money to give to open source projects because I think that by submitting to that framing you have opened the door for nationalistic and xenophobic arguments (basically: “digital sovereignty” is a term every fascist will totally accept, even though they mean something radically different than what the NGOs I am referring to mean.) Basically:

Whenever I make an argument like that I get similar responses: “You have to be pragmatic” or “Games of intellectual purity don’t get us anywhere” or “The argument needs to work for those we want to convince” or “Shut up” (it still is the Internet after all). And I am not saying that those replies don’t have any value. They are pragmatic. Saying something in a way that people in power like or that supports their world view increases the chances of creating change. Especially when one has facts and studies at one’s disposal (at least that was how it maybe was a bit in the past before the reign of Musk).

But I think there is a cost. Because I think people mistake tactics for strategy. The basic difference between tactics and strategy is that while tactics focus on smaller, short-term actions, strategy looks at the long-term big picture. And I feel like that is where the costs stack up.

Say for example people who are into actual justice for everyone (hello, cool person!) get certain DEI initiatives pushed by framing them as economically beneficial. Cool, now we get fewer white dudes hired and maybe some people with skills into relevant jobs. Awesome! But this has shifted the position of the speakers. They lost their ground.

When I argue for something based on my personal values, based on human rights and fairness for all this is not an argument business leaders care about. It has no monetary value, I am just marking my “position” in a way. I am saying: DEI is necessary because it is right and our political values and the rights our constitutions grant people demand it. That is the position I speak from. The fact if something is economically beneficial is of no concern for that, I explicitly speak from a different angle. Because I don’t want the next human right to be cut because it’s maybe economically not beneficial.

If I say DEI is great because diverse teams are more effective and a study shows that that is not true when the DEI initiatives concern people with disabilities what is my leg to stand on? Saying “but it would be right”? I’ve given up that position when selling my DEI initiatives with their economic value. I’ve weakened my long term strategic goals for a short-term tactical win. And I think that this is – even more so looking at the USA in the last months – a dangerous mistake. Because a lot of stuff that we need to do or need to build, need to pay for as societies won’t look good on Mr.-Business-Dude’s balance sheets.

As I said earlier: There is value in those pragmatic arguments. They can speak to other people, other groups than ones based on more abstract political values. But I think it matters deeply who makes those arguments. If I wanted to sell some human rights thing based on an economic argument I would not make that argument myself, I’d look for allies who can make that argument without giving up their position. Maybe some left-leaning economic research group/think tank. Someone who does not need to give up their foundation.

Because I have seen what that pragmatism does way too much. I live in Germany where many of the supposedly “left-ish” (more like centrist) parties such as the Greens have given up so much ideological foundation for the sake of making pragmatic (usually economic arguments). And now they have a hard time arguing for necessary changes to our energy sourcing and production because they always need to frame it in narrations of “green growth” and “investments in startups”. They’ve lost their position.

You might know the statement that you cannot compromise with a right-winger: When you move a step towards them trying to find a compromise they will make a step back and keep dragging you with them. Making “the wrong” arguments isn’t exactly the same. But it also is not all that different.

It is important to know where you stand – for your political goals as well as your mental health as a human being. And I think one shouldn’t give that up this easily. Even if that makes me not pragmatic enough or “playing games of ideological purity”. At least I know where I stand.

BBC News has run as much content-free AI puffery as any other media outlet. But they had their noses rubbed hard in what trash LLMs were when Apple Intelligence ran mangled summaries of BBC stories that were so bad the BBC formally complained. Apple ended up removing the summaries.

The BBC does a lot more than news — such as its research department. In the wake of the Apple debacle, BBC researchers spent December looking into just how good ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity really were at answering questions from a large corpus of test data: the BBC News site. [Press release; report, PDF]

BBC journalists rated the LLM summaries on accuracy, source attribution, impartiality, distinguishing opinions from facts, editorialisation, context, and representation of BBC content.

The report starts with a lot of noises about how great and important AI will surely be in the fabulous future — but the reported results are dismal.

91% of AI responses had at least some issues. 51% had “significant” issues.

The most common issues were factual inaccuracies, sourcing, and missing context. Quotes were frequently altered. Opinions were reported as facts. The bots would find old pages on the BBC site and report facts from 2022 as current. Summary sentences would frequently be misleading or partisan.

How can chatbots serve as part of the news ecosystem? “They must first be accurate and follow basic editorial standards when answering questions about the news.” Yeah, good luck with that one.

Check out the timelapse video of this cartoon being drawn!

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. They mostly focus on two members of Congress. The first is a bald middle-aged man, usually wearing a collared shirt with a necktie. The second is a middle-aged woman, dressed mostly in skirt suits.

PANEL 1

The man, looking very intense, is waving a piece of paper that says “BILL” in large letters. The woman has her arms crossed and looks thoughtful. The Capitol Building can be seen behind them.

MAN: We must ban trans from participation in sports!

WOMAN (thought): If I give in on sports, it’ll be easier to resist future anti-trans bills.

PANEL 2

The same two, in different outfits, are now chatting in a hallway, with him standing in a doorway to an office.

MAN: Now that we’ve banned trans people from sports, we have to do bathrooms. Bathrooms are like locker rooms, so it’s really the same issue.

WOMAN (thought): I should give in on this too – people are sensitive about bathrooms.

PANEL 3

The two are in different outfits, standing in front of a fancy desk.

MAN: We need to ban changing gender on birth certificates and driver’s licenses to enforce our bathroom and sports bans, right?

WOMAN (thought): That does make sense…

PANEL 4

The woman is on a city sidewalk, talking to three angry-looking constituents. On of the constituents is holding up a newspaper, with a large headline saying “47th TRANS BAN BILL PASSES.”

WOMAN: I’m sorry. There was nothing I could have done to resist.

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is long-dormant cartoonists’ vernacular for unimportant details we sneak into the drawings.

PANEL 1 – Woodstock from “Peanuts” is standing on top of the Capitol dome.

PANEL 2 – There’s a portrait on the wall of Commander T’Ana from “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”

Lower on the same wall, there’s a little recessed alcove. Standing in the alcove is a mouse wearing a collared shirt and tie, holding his morning coffee and contemplating the world.

PANEL 4 – The name of the newspaper is “Daily Opiate.” The subheadline says “Trans People Now Banned From Public Parks and Eating Ice Cream.” The story is accompanied by a photo of a Klansman giving a thumbs up. A different story at the bottom has the headline “Cartoonist Unsure of What to Fill Space With.”

If Not Now, Then Never | Patreon

One of the most popular memes when it comes to talking about the tech sector is Alex Blechman’s tweet about the Torment Nexus:

One can interpret the tweet in a bunch of ways. As a comment on the level of reading comprehension that billionaire tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or some ghoul that Peter Thiel funded constantly show: Calling one’s products or comapnies “Metaverse” and “Palantir” does not express an understanding of who and what is criticized in the respective works of fiction. And we are not even asking for nuance here.

Another interpretation is that the products that are being brought to market as massive innovations seem to be less than stellar. Best case scenario they are just weird stuff nobody asked for (think Juicero), most of the time they are “here’s a thing you kinda want but you have to pay rent for it now instead of buying it and we might shut it down any time”. And a lot of the time they are just bad for you, products that insult your existence as a human being.

Obviously there is no objective way to make these calls, to decide what is dumb but meaningless or what is evil. People have different values, different needs and sometimes can accept different levels of crap for a specific product or service.

We talked about this a bit in the Q&A part of my talk at Fluconf that gave a bit of criticism of the Open Source movement and its beliefs. But while my argument in the talk was mostly that the beliefs that Open Source is based on might not actually be based on or support the actual political values that people might have there is value to having Open Source software. Software that you can use and change to suit your needs and demands (if you can of course).

But Open Source software does not happen in a vacuum, it is written by people. Often to serve their needs, sometimes to serve a community’s needs: To provide a better solution for users. The “Open Source Alternative to proprietary X” thing.

If you’ve been on the Internet for about 7 seconds you will have come into contact with guys (using a gendered term here because they are mostly male) who will respond to any criticism of or issue you have with a proprietary software with “Just use this Open Source tool”. It’s a bit annoying because a lot of the time that answer doesn’t come from a genuine desire to help based on empathy and an understanding of the problem the original post expressed. But It’s also oftentimes better than one might think.

The Open Source community has gotten quite good at replacing proprietary tools with open source solutions. The feature set might not be 100% there and some things might not work but there are totally valid alternatives to Slack or Chrome or Microsoft Office (if you really just need office tools and not something that specifically depends on MS’s ideosyncracies). There are whole websites dedicated to listing Open Source alternatives to proprietary tools with at least one of those alternatives being pretty much a copy.

This has tremendous value and provides a bunch of people with the software tools to do their thing – me included. But when building those replacements the Q&A at FluConf made me wonder: Are we maybe doing a tech-bro? Are we not properly reading and understanding the texts we reference?

Any artifact is a text. You can read for example any piece of software as a document about the beliefs and assumptions of the programmer about the users. The software tells you how the programmer sees and understands the user. It’s just a form of text that is maybe a bit harder to read and it might have animations and sounds and can send bits somewhere.

What triggered this train of thought was me thinking about social media platforms. With Meta and X and all US tech companies finding their love for fascism currently many people want to jump off those platforms to find a better home. And there are Open Source Alternatives to Twitter/Instagram/WhatsApp/etc. Which in general is good. Maybe. Sometimes.

(Quick sidebar: I’m gonna use an example of an Open Source project here but don’t read this as me shitting on that project. People can build what they want and have their reasons for doing things. My feelings and needs are not “right” and other perspectives are wrong. I’m using the project as an illustration.)

I don’t use Instagram. Not because I don’t like seeing pictures or because it is “beneath me” and not even because it’s Meta and Mark Zuckerberg bend the knee to Trump. (In fact I have an account I use to follow tattoo artists but that I only use for exactly that research because tattooers live on Instagram sadly) I don’t use Instagram because it’s bad for my mental health. The affordances and the social practices of Instagram have lead to every picture (and the people and lives in it) looking like an ad. Perfectly designed and sculpted representations of better lives of better people. It just makes me feel bad about myself, my looks, my life. For me Instagram is the Torment Nexus.

Now that might just be a me-problem. But when I see an Open Source project like Pixelfed that basically attempts to provide users with a federated, open source drop-in replacement for Instagram I wonder: Are we just building an Open Source Torment Nexus? Because Pixelfed looks like Instagram. Has all the bones of Instagram. The same basic logic of the app (maybe the recommendation algorithms aren’t as aggressive but you can always patch that). There is nothing that would lead me to believe that – should Pixelfed get very popular – it would not also develop similar esthetics. Would also help people feel bad about themselves (if they are vulnerable to that kind of thinking).

And Pixelfed isn’t the only tool here. Bluesky is basically a carbon copy of Twitter a few years ago (not technology wise but in the way that interactions work, the way in which status is produced). Mastodon isn’t that different either. Which in this case doesn’t feel as bad for me – but I also liked Twitter.

It feels like too often we are bound to think about what’s possible in the framing of what businesses think is possible. I recently argued against scale and that topic is a perfect example: Meta needs any new product to scale to millions if not billions of users. Amazon needs to scale products to the whole world. Google needs to scale. Microsoft needs to scale. And they all need to do the things you need to do to scale. Build interaction loops that enforce you coming back to an app or platform regularly ideally daily, to make it a habit. Build tools promising you a view on everything, to give you feelings of power, understanding and control.

We here on the open, decentralized, free web don’t need to do that. Pixelfed does not need to scale. Mastodon does not need to scale. At least not in the way that Facebook needs to.

We are doing a tech-bro. Just like Peter Thiel calls his surveillance company after the stones the evil wizards use in The Lord of the Rings because he doesn’t seem to have understood that those are the baddies we are building tools that are built for growth hacks and scamming VCs out of their money because we don’t read them properly. Because we just take what’s there and make it open source.

Just is doing a lot of work in that last paragraph. The amount of work that goes into duplicating those proprietary functionalities is incredible, awe inspiring. Thousands of people put work into building those tools, often without payment, without a lot of thanks. Spending their limited time on this planet contributing to the commons with software.

But recognizing the amount of work and time and life that goes into building this huge pile of software shouldn’t we spend it on something good? Something that is actually good for the people using it? And are we always so sure that the things we build do that, enable that?

We should stop building the Open Source Torment Nexus. Because the problem with the Torment Nexus is not the software license or opaqueness of the code: It’s the part with the torment.