Kai's epic guide to ethical technology

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This is post one in a two post combo: this one details how you can manage your own technology use, and the other details how you can start owning your own online identity via creating your own website. Both are targeted at people who know next to nothing about such concepts.

In this blog post, I’m going to go over a lot of ethical ideas on the internet and how I’ve found we should use it. I’m also going to be providing a lot of free tools and applications that pretty much anyone my benefit from. If you just want the latter, you can scroll down and go link fishing. Otherwise, strap in for a lot of yapping. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

As much work as this essay has been, I’m certain it’s still imperfect. In my estimations, this piece lands somewhere between academic paper and opinion piece, which has been a hard balance to strike; I’m not sure whether I’ve done it properly. If you find a claim missing a source, take it as opinion, give it some research yourself, and let me know if I’ve messed something up or you find a good source for something I’ve left uncited.

The end goal here is to move towards a more ethical usage of technology. Ethics is not a monolith, and a lot of the points I make in this essay can and should be discussed.

A case for self-managed media consumption

Profit focused social media and the advent of the algorithmic content feed have been a disaster for the human race. If you still happen to use an algorithmic feed regularly, I invite you to ponder

• a) how much of your time it takes without your explicit permission
• b) what thoughts it makes you think that you would have not thought otherwise and
• c) whether the result creates a positive impact on your life, or simply serves as a convenient distraction/ cure for boredom.

If you happen to not love where that pondering has led you, that’s why I’m making this post.

This isn’t going to be a “burn the entire internet” post, but rather one that hopes to re-contextualize the way you perceive it, and hopefully change the way you use it so that it works for you, not the multi-billion dollar corporation profiting off your attention and time.

Do remember as you read this that nobody is perfect. Everyone’s going to have a limit whether that’s time or technical expertise, or something else, and that’s perfectly OK. This kinda stuff isn’t linear either. Sometimes you do a bunch of things, then nothing for a while, then undo some stuff, then do some more. As long as you’re making your best effort to move toward ethical and beneficial usage, that’s what counts.

Background

There’s some stuff that I need to go over before we get into the meat and potatoes, or else you won’t know what the hell I’m on about.

Free & Open Source Software

You’ve probably heard the term “Open Source” thrown around in regards to software, and have correctly ascertained that this means the code that makes the software do things is, well… Open. Not all public code is open source, though, and open source specifically refers to public code that anyone can do anything with. There are a few things that this means, though, that I’m not sure are well understood by the layperson, so I want to give a quick crash course on it now.

First off, you’ve used open source software before. You probably use it every day. Youtube uses FFMPEG for video transcoding. Pretty much every website uses a linux-based server to send you http(s) results, potentially via Nginx or Apache. You know those sketchy youtube to mp3/mp4 downloaders? They’re all almost certainly running yt-dlp behind the scenes. Though for some reason, cough advertising cough, people don’t really know that they can use open source software directly, as well as indirectly.

FOSS is a model that has its pros and cons (that’s a blog post for a later time), but critically, it returns ownership of the software to the individual, and it’s a damn lot better than the proprietary alternative. If a maintainer power trips and tries to close source the software, the community can simply fork it and move on without them. From a user perspective, you simply swap over to the new fork, and keep using it like nothing happened, or just stay on the open version. If you want a new feature, you can ask, and see what exactly is going on, and how progress is coming. If you want to learn how the thing works, or modify it, you can just do that. If you want to share your changes with everyone else, you can. It’s like an entire area of industry completely free of garbage copyright systems– it’s beautiful.

Not everyone will want to take full advantage of the above, but just the comfort alone of knowing that some probably publicly traded company isn’t going to totally lose their shit and fuck me over for having learned their software has made the swap well worth it. Fuck you, Unity.

Are open source alternatives perfect? Nope. Depending on what kind of software you’re looking for, some open alternatives might require hosting, which is a lot of overhead for the layperson, and others might not yet have certain features or creature comforts of proprietary alternatives. But as much as that’s true, I’d also argue some open source software is straight up better everywhere (Hi blender!). All I’m arguing here is to take a look around. It’s free, after all!

“But Kai, it’s free! Doesn’t that mean it’s bad?”

Don’t make me get out the spray bottle. Is a community garden bad because it’s free? No! People volunteer their time and labor for the sake of building something worthwhile, together. With software, you even have the added bonus that there is functionally no scarcity or marginal cost, and thus minimal adverse effects of free riders. With proprietary software getting more and more enshittified, requiring accounts and internet connections, shamelessly harvesting metric tons of user data without permission, moving to subscription models, and generally leveraging users’ sunk cost in their platforms for shameless profiteering, does a free and open source alternative really sound that bad?

Further, just because it is free doesn’t mean the work people are doing isn’t worth paying for. I’d argue it makes it more worth paying for, as you get value out of your money in the form of better software, but everyone else gets that value too! And the people spending their spare time and effort making this thing that everyone uses get compensated for that time and effort, so they can dedicate more of that time and effort back into the project.

Rather backwardly, I suggest that you should instead think about paying for free things!

Ads and Adblocking

This blog post is gonna mention a lot about ads. Ads are how the modern internet works. They’re why huge corporations like Google and Facebook are able to make a profit by giving so much free shit away. They’re also why LLM generated slop populates the vast majority of cooking search results these days. Here’s my silly opinion on ads:

You should block every single one from ever reaching your eyes, and, god forbid, your thoughts. If you ever think about an ad or engage with an ad, the corporation the bought that ad is getting their money’s worth. You can’t get that time or mental energy back; It has already been bought and paid for. This, I would argue, is bad.

If you feel guilty about blocking ads, as that takes money from individuals, you should determine exactly how much time and attention those ads were taking from your life, give your time and sanity some monetary value, and pay creators you care about directly via donations, merch, subscriptions, kofi/patreon, etc… Even if this is just a couple bucks, it’s almost certainly orders of magnitude more than they get from you watching ads on their content, and likely gives them a larger portion of the money as well, as they can choose a platform that allows them a better cut.

I’d also like to point out that viewing ads is a net negative for you as an individual, as it allows corporations to directly influence you and your thoughts. Further, in the age of targeted advertising, viewing ads makes you more valuable to corporations, and thus more profitable to advertise to. Who would you rather serve an ad to, someone who makes an effort to block them and might not see it, or someone who doesn’t? Yep, you simply looking at ads is making corporations money. They’re definitely thankful, but not thankful enough to give you a cut.

This sentiment has been echoed ad-nauseam, but if you’re getting a corporate product with ads for free, you’re the product. Ads make you a product. Every single social media service is working night and day not to make the experience of using their platforms better, but rather to make it more addictive. They only make money when you’re on the platform; ergo, the longer they can keep you on there, the more money they make. The logic holds with news. That cooking example I mentioned earlier. The longer you stay on the page, the more ads you see, thus the content is influenced to be longer, more verbose, in order to keep you on that page. You want to game that youtube algorithm as a creator? Make content that keeps people watching youtube and you’ll do fine. Youtube will make sure of it.

This culminates in a rot that has spread across the internet. Most people are not creating to create. Writing to write. The very things that you as the internet denizen are here to experience are being corrupted by the very thing that brings you them for free. They are not. This is the cost.

In summary: pay for free things and fuck ads.

Sidenote: Individual sponsorships

Some of you may be wondering about individual sponsorships that advertisers will give directly to individuals, as opposed to large, platform-wide campaigns that you see on google ads or whatever.

I don’t want to make any statements regarding what exactly those agreements may or may not contain as I assume it’s largely individualized, however I do want to refer you to the above idea on skipping them and just giving the creator money directly. Same deal here. I would rather a creator be able to sustain themselves without having to resort to corporate sponsorships than otherwise, though I do understand that many cannot.

Notably, these too taint the creative output of the individual. Take something as small as referral links. If you’re a computer hardware reviewer, are you going to rank a device without a referral link higher than one with a referral link, even if you know you’ll get less money? Even if everything does have referral links, will you be more inspired to create buyers guides for more expensive products if the kickback is higher? If a corporation has sent you a thing, are you more likely to review it than otherwise?

Evil Design and Dark Patterns.

Ever wonder why it takes half a second and a misclick to accidentally sign up for a subscription of some sort, but 3 days’ hard labor to cancel? This is an example of a dark pattern.

A dark pattern is simply a series of design decisions that when put together exploit users into certain, usually profitable behavior. Think of it as a form of psychological manipulation. Once you’re aware of these, they show up everywhere. Those big countdowns on shopping sites. Raising prices on goods then discounting them to make them appear better value for money.

At some level, a lot of design patterns fall into this category. Think of the algorithmic feed, for example. Some may argue this is a feature, rather than a dark pattern. I would argue that while not necessarily a dark pattern, the constituent components of most algorithmic feeds: data collection for personalization and infinite scroll, among others, combined with the advertising profit motive of most social media companies, almost certainly result in something that is. Something designed to consume as much user time as possible. Something that collects and feeds off user data and optimizes itself to perpetuate that consumption of time even further, as well as market that data to advertisers. Whenever you scroll an algorithmic feed, you’re battling a team of engineers and psychologists each paid hundreds of thousands a year to capture your attention, data, and time. If you’re aware of it, maybe next time you’ll be able to put up a fight.

These properties are not incidental; They’re designed.

Decentralization and Federation

These two ideas frequently come hand in hand, with some caveats.

Decentralization

Decentralization entails the idea that no one entity has full control of something. Something like discord is centralized, where something like email is decentralized: Anyone can run up their own email server, but only discord can run up discord servers. Big email can’t tell you to shut down your email server if they don’t like what you’re sending (your government can, but that’s a whole other can of worms). Discord, however, reserves the right to shut down servers for whatever reason and they just can. They own the servers.

Another benefit of decentralization is your capacity to own your own data. Everything you send on a discord server is un-encrypted and lives on discord’s servers. They can (and do) just read it. Sell it. Hand it to ICE- (SUBTLE FORESHADOWING). This data can also leak by accident, or by coordinated effort from a third party, which gets significantly more likely the more data there is in one place, and the more valuable that data is. Remember kids, data leaks are a “when”. Not an “if”. If you want your data to be safe, never give it to anyone in the first place.

Federation

Federation is a property of decentralized networks that’s important so that this array of servers all owned by various people can talk to each other. It would be annoying if you could only email people on your same email server, right?

Broadly speaking, without federation, bob@website.com can only email other people who have their email hosted on website.com, like felix@website.com but not emily@internet.org. With federation, now bob can email emily@internet.org on internet.org and also ed@website.com on website.com. Very convenient!

This technology is still getting improved as time goes on, but there are already a good number of modern services that make use of it, such as mastodon (twitter-like social media) and matrix (instant messaging) both of which I’ll get into soon. (You can also read me crash out on git servers not having any federation here lol)

Sidenote: Technical people

Yeah I know that email example is a little weak in practice. I’ve found that it serves as a really good explainer for newbies though, as everyone’s heard of and used email, and are at least mostly familiar with its ins and outs.

For you non-technical people reading this because you want to feel included, basically, in theory, email should work as I described, but in practice, if an email isn’t coming from a trusted source, most mainstream providers will mark it as spam and thus the recipient may only find it in their spam folder, or in some cases not at all. This makes self hosting more difficult, but still not impossible. You can use a SMTP relay to get around this problem, but either way you get the idea and this sidenote has probably overstayed its welcome.

Use is endorsement

When you use something, you’re endorsing it. Period. There’s a base level of buy-in contained in simply choose to use something, and continue using it. A level that even words to the contrary can’t counter, as much as we hope they might. Did you pay money for it? Does it send telemetry to the manufacturer? Does it show you ads? Have you developed a set of skills or expertise in its usage? Do other people see you using it? These, and many many more, are all forms of endorsement.

“But Kai these issues are so big and pervasive! And I’m just one silly little guy, what’s one more little silly guy?”

Your presence still lends backing to the platform’s decisions and adds to the platform’s power. If you agree the world would be a better place if everyone sane simultaneously stopped doing something, I would urge you to consider being the change you want to see in the world, taking the hit, and stopping yourself. Or even just shopping around for alternatives.

The reason I want to hammer this one home is that I hear a lot of people excusing their use of problematic technology, and heck, a lot of other stuff this way. “I don’t support Elon but I’m just on twitter for this random ass meme account.” “I support trans people, but i just bought this harry potter merch for the nostalgia.” “I don’t support the bigotry, but I’m just using hyprland for the animations.” (Just use Niri, you’re welcome).

Shade aside, we should stop excusing our unethical behavior like this. Rather, recognize yourself as an imperfect entity, acknowledge the flaws and drawbacks to your specific actions, and try to make them better, one step at a time. Because, again, nobody is perfect, and I wholeheartedly include myself in this group.

I jokingly listed a few examples above, but in theory, a hermit could come along out of the mountains and declare my usage of a laptop computer as unethical due to its sourcing involving the exploitation of laborers around the world, that my purchase and usage of it is a direct endorsement of that system, and they’d be right.

Friends of mine have made very good points that I completely agree with about the ethical benefits of biking as opposed to driving, or vegetarianism as opposed to supporting the meatpacking industry. I currently continue to do both; I couldn’t go climbing as frequently or live my current day-to-day without a car, and would probably starve to death without the protein input that meat provides.

OK so everything sucks, got it. What now?

Now you figure out what’s feasible for you to do, right now, that will make it just a little bit better, a little more ethical. Then you do it. And you keep doing it. That’s the only way any of this gets any better. A shit ton of people doing little things, a bit at a time.

For me, that might involve taking my bike out instead of my car on Mondays. Or taking an afternoon to look for more accessible meat substitutions that I can start integrating into my day to day. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know it’ll be better if everyone did their best to put in a bit of work here and there, little by little, over a long period of time.

These little step-by-step improvements will be inconvenient; That’s the point. We live in a society that has normalized a lot of unethical practices and ideas that will have made themselves a mainstay within our lives, due simply to the adoption-by-default that just happens within these kinds of group structures. Over the course of our lives, it is our job and responsibility as individuals to, at the very least, deconstruct them, question them, and when necessary, deem them unethical. From there we can gauge the degree to which that breach of ethics exists, and finally, at long last, make a truly educated decision as to whether the pros outweigh the cons, and what actions you may be able to take from there to minimize cons and maximize pros. Maybe you do decide to change nothing, but at least you can do so knowing you have made an informed decision.

There’s another good Smashing Frames post on this, that I’d also recommend. You don’t need to agree with everything in there to get a lot out of it; It’s a very thought-provoking piece.

Sidenote: Not there yet.

Please don’t beat yourself up if you can’t do any of this. I’ve been there. Sometimes you’re just not in a place where you can worry about big stuff, and you just have to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. That’s alright too. It won’t help anyone to burn yourself out worrying about this shit on top of your own garbage. Focus on yourself right now, and hopefully you too will eventually have the luxury of worrying about ethics.

Extracting from an embedded platform 101

When thinking about social media platforms, the idea of one or another being “embedded” is almost a socially accepted default. Try to take ten steps into your local music scene without seeing an Instagram page, or using the internet without seeing a discord server. I dare you.

The idea of an embedded social media platform is one in which the majority of the user base is currently on. One that becomes less socially acceptable to not have, and one in which a large body of social interaction takes place. This is convenient for users as it’s a bit of a hassle to move between platforms, however it’s also really profitable for corporations. They can do whatever they want! What are you going to do? Leave? LOL!

Needless to say, this natural FOMO buildup is ruthlessly profited off, due to the incredibly inelastic demand. (Read: Corporations take advantage of you via ruthless advertising and data collection , and they just can as a result of you socially being unable to leave). But leave we must.

I don’t want to, your honor!

“But Kai! All of my friends are on {{nondescript platform name here}}! If I didn’t have it, I would DIE!”

First off, calm down. Perhaps you’ve built up a lot of social infrastructure on said platform and would suffer negative social consequences for leaving. Which is a fair point! But if you think about it, isn’t that itself a problem? Would you be able to reach the people you care about if the platform went down? Or you account got banned?

Even if you’re unable to fully leave, doesn’t mean you can’t start moving towards the door. Using both the embedded platform and a more ethical alternative simultaneously is, in fact an option! This in turn makes it easier for other people to leave as well, as they can follow your lead.

Art and Politics

“Stop making games/movies/music/art political!”

I’ve heard something along these lines too many times. Politics dictates the world we live in. Any artistic piece is inherently in conversation with the political, even and especially if its creators have the privilege to “ignore” politics. This is simply a political argument for the status quo, but still a political argument nonetheless.

Recently, a Lebanese game developer called into my ethics class and showcased his game that he made in a game jam. Among other things, the game engages with the impacts of war on everyday people, specifically children, who make up the game’s two protagonists. Under the material conditions that Lebanon has been under, especially in recent times, how can any art made under these conditions be anything but political? Should the game have been about something completely unrelated, such as a goofy platformer of some sort, how can that be seen as anything other than a distraction or respite from the political hardships that its creators must face every day?

Many of us in more privileged environments have gotten in the habit of conveniently ignoring this, and idealizing the absence of politics in art. This absence simply doesn’t exist, and instead serves as a convenient way for us to avoid difficult conversations and ideas, simply by including them as we wish in our definition of what happens to be “political” and what doesn’t. After all if I can include something in my definition of “political,” and frame being “political” as being bad, then I can simply dismiss the idea wholesale without engaging or contemplating it. This, of course, is simply a badly disguised argument for the status quo; If no outwardly “political” arguments are permissible, then the only option that remains is to continue with things the way they are, which of course is a political argument in and of itself.

Sidenote: Art and Diversity

One of the main targets of this rhetorical strategy that I’ve seen recently is diversity, with many proponents therein appealing to some nebulous idea of merit in place of efforts to diversify, which are deemed political and thus bad. In a neutral society, I completely agree that merit should be the sole deciding factor in something such as employment. However, we must make an effort to realize that the society we live in is not a neutral one, but one built to benefit its creators: Cis, het, white, able, and especially, rich, men. These biases cannot simply be glazed over or hand-waved away. On gender alone, we see depressingly few women and non-binary people make their way into male-dominated fields even today, not because they are any less capable, but rather because the environment is a hostile one. If you’ve ever talked to someone who has a female-presenting voice who plays competitive shooters, you will hear horror stories.

Diversity is a beautiful thing. Different perspectives and life experiences can introduce unique ideas into art that would not have existed otherwise. Much of the art we hold dear is a direct result of a diverse creative environment. We grow as individuals as we learn from others’ way of existing as human beings, and everyone is better off for it.

Efforts of diversity seek not to undermine the idea of merit, but rather the bias of society. Heck, pretty much the only way to get a non-evil career these days, especially in games, is to know someone. If the people in industry are already mostly cis, het, white, able, rich men, what is the proportion of their networks that also hold many of these features as well? When hiring strangers, how likely are they to associate with and “like” someone also possessing these traits, as opposed to someone who does not? This dynamic perpetuates itself. People hire others like them, and those others go on to do the same. No systems designate or spell out this bias; it’s simply human nature to prefer similarity over diversity. The goal is simply to work against this bias.

Wrangling modern tech: A Guide

I did not set out to write a hit piece, but I have started and cannot be stopped. If you wish to skip the turmoil, you need not read this whole section.

Each header not only contains a justification for its inclusion, but also a list of alternatives, and most importantly, even steps that can be taken on said platform if you’re unwilling to leave in full. I’ll also broadly go over major corporations, or as I’ll be referring to them: megacorps, in the space. And yes, it is always ethically OK to deadname corporations.

Someone stop me from ever doing this ever again :3

Megacorp | Apple

Due to my focus on Free and Open technology in this essay, I will not be touching much on apple. I genuinely have few complaints with the quality of their hardware or their software, but my disdain for their products focuses purely on their anti-consumer, anti-ownership design practices. If I cannot flash custom firmware or uninstall the bootloader on a computer I have purchased with my own money, I do not own the computer. If I cannot take apart and repair or upgrade a computer I have purchased with my own money, I do not own the computer. And the term “Computer” in this context applies to mobile devices as well.

I’m being a bit hyperbolic, and perhaps you don’t see the value in these things, but I’ve seen many apple users complain about the failings of the “Liquid Glass” design philosophy (especially as far as legibility goes), as well as ludicrous repair costs, on top of the already ludicrous hardware costs, all of which would be significantly better off if apple had to compete in any meaningful way without locking its users into its ecosystem. No apple, even in the modern day RAM hellscape, 16GB of DDR5 does not cost $400. It currently costs half that ($200), and should cost an eighth of that ($50).

Of course, Many apple users have knowingly traded ownership for convenience, which is a decision I respect, though would urge you to potentially reconsider, regarding the broader context of this essay.

If you wish to remain on apple, you can likely still use linux through the asahi project, in full, or in part alongside MacOS. (Though notably, to the best of my understanding, this only piggybacks off the MacOS bootloader, as the thing can’t boot anything other than MacOS. Weird!).

Alternatives

Mac hardware alternatives are numerous. I own a framework, and generally like what they do, other than the fact that they continue to donate to hyprland, which I find issue with. Most x86_64 computers will work fine (Read: most things that come with windows installed). If you like battery life and don’t mind compatibility issues, arm computers exist as well, which is the same tech that runs modern macs (which also suffer from the same compatibility problems).

If you’re crazy like me, you might find interest in the open standard RISC-V instruction set. Quick architecture summary: x86 is bad and proprietary, arm is good but proprietary, risc-v is good and open. Unfortunately, the more open you get the less things work as you’d want them to >:( (If I can save enough money, expect me to burn some on a RISC-V board and try to load NixOS on it)

As far as software alternatives go, if you want to avoid the windows dumpster fire, I’d recommend something like Fedora Workstation, which runs a similar UI to MacOS.

For mobile devices, you’d think I’d say android. You’d be wrong.

Instead, I recommend smashing your phone with a hammer repeatedly, dousing it with gasoline, lighting it on fire, then flinging it into oncoming traffic, off a bridge, or into the fiery magma of mount doom at your earliest convenience.

Megacorp | Google (aka: Alphabet)

Google’s strangle hold on the internet cannot be understated. The term “de-googling” and the sheer difficulty therein pretty succinctly summarizes what we’re up against here.

Chrome

Chromium, the engine behind chrome, makes up an immense amount of the web browser market (pretty much everything that’s not firefox and saf*ri), and it’s completely controlled by google who are in the process of making ad blockers and content blockers less effective. Ublock Origin is open source and incredibly powerful (stop reading and go install it now if you haven’t already), however Chromium based browsers (Chrome, edge, opera, brave, vivaldi, etc…) do not support the full version due to this.

There is a Lite version of ublock that supports chromium, which I would recommend if you’re committed to a chromium browser. If you wish to do more without fully swapping off chromium, you can use an open source chromium implementation such as Ungoogled Chromium or Qutebrowser.

Alternatives

Firefox! It’s not perfect; It’s primarily funded by google in order to keep the default search engine as Google, but it’s still not unilaterally controlled by google, which does make it better in my book.

Some firefox-based browser suggestions:

• Librewolf - Don’t wanna think about it? Do this one.
• Waterfox - Has some really neat features, such as tree style tabs.
• Zen - Beta, lets you “glance” at a window and quick return to the original webpage.
• Firefox - It works!

If you want to do something privately, I wholeheartedly recommend having the Tor Browser on hand. It’s free, and does almost everything a VPN does, but better. The real privacy threat these days isn’t IP addresses, but rather browser fingerprinting, which Tor works to mitigate. It sounds intimidating, but in reality it just does its thing, is a bit slower than your average browser, and does what you tell it to.

Google, the search engine

Believe it or not, these are different from your browser! A search engine is a website; a browser is the program that runs on your computer to show you websites.

Unfortunately, google pays pretty much every major browser to make Google the default search engine. And now, google unhelpfully presents bullshit as the first result, which most people will simply read and take at face value. That combined with the number of ads that google is shoving into their results, and their recent use of LLMs to rewrite headlines, the case for swapping off remains strong.

There are browser addons that allow modification of google search results, such as the helpfully named google AI overviews blocker. But I’m sure more exist.

Alternatives

I’d recommend Startpage or Duckduckgo for the layperson.

For the power users LibreY and SearXNG might be worth a shot. I think I might run up an instance of the former on my homelab soonish. There’s also Marginalia Search, which is a surprise tool that will help us later. Subtle foreshadowing

Gmail & Email

I foreshadowed this one earlier, but email is notoriously centralized, despite being an open protocol, due simply to the fact that major providers that host most everyday peoples’ emails have broadly agreed to be assholes about it. Gmail is definitely the worst offender here, though Microsoft outlook is almost certainly doing this as well. Email is also notoriously insecure, and can be read by your email provider, and used for LLM training, advertising, etc… There’s not much you can do about this, as only certain email providers allow any form of encryption, let alone end-to-end encryption, and any attempt to communicate with someone who doesn’t use such systems will inevitably leak data. Regardless, more people using secure and privacy-respecting email hosting is only a good thing, and I would still recommend swapping.

If you can’t swap off Gmail at the moment, look at toggling off LLM features, though I can’t speak to this doing anything other than ticking off the user-facing features. As far as I can tell, outlook has no such toggle.

Another thing you can do is try using an open source email client like Thunderbird so you can minimize the direct access they have to your computer, though, this doesn’t address the concerns with content on the server being read.

Alternatives

As far as free alternatives go, Tuta offers 1GB for free, with 20GB for ~3€ per month. Proton has a similar 1GB plan, however also has A few problems, enough that I don’t necessarily endorse it, though it’s definitely better than Google. Fastmail is a pretty solid paid option from what I can tell as well.

I personally will be looking at self hosting my own email server through Mailcow and routing traffic through an SMTP relay, though this looks to be a cripplingly technical endeavor, so I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint of heart.

Android, the OS

The mobile market is genuinely the most horrific wasteland of corporate abuse I’ve yet to come upon in technology. Android sits at a cool 67% market share. (not one word. I will kill you.) The rest are iOS, which, no surprise, already suffer from the following lacks of freedom.

Android may be based upon the Linux kernel, but has diverged and become an incredibly closed environment as compared to other linux distributions, which it doesn’t even consider itself anymore. The AOSP (Android Open Source Project) has moved much of its development behind closed doors, and much of mainline android is closed source, and not included in the AOSP, and rather added on top of it through proprietary services such as google play services. These include pretty vital elements of the operating system.

Further, many android phones have disabled rooting entirely, and even bootloader access is being fully prohibited (as I recently discovered with my piece of shit Samsung), and many more are installing hardware level trips that will permanently disable applications on rooted devices. These actions are plain malicious, aimed at discouraging and preventing reclamation of ownership, and locking users into controlled environments. It’s becoming more and more likely that you’ll have to buy a phone that specifically allows you to own it than just owning a device as a result of having purchased it. If this was the case for desktop computers, every PC would operate like a console. This would be unacceptable. Yet on a small computer (a phone), it’s perfectly fine. It’s genuinely insane how normalized this kind of behavior has become.

And worst of all, soon you will need google’s express permission to simply run applications on the device that you have bought with your own money. This is literally the “isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?” meme, but for running shit on a device you supposedly own, running a supposedly “open source” operating system. Of course the onus of registration goes to the developer and not the user, making it so much easier for the average person to handwave, but this is some 1984 shit. If I want to run some shitty C code I wrote in an afternoon, or code that someone (who does not wish to dox themselves to google) wrote, on a thing that I own, I should not have to ask google pretty please to let me go and do that. I should not have to ping google servers and wait 24 hours to turn off this behavior, which is something they can simply remove quietly later on to little backlash. This is a horrifying level of power that one company is demanding over 67% of all mobile devices globally.

TL;DR? As with apple, I recommend smashing your phone with a hammer repeatedly, dousing it with gasoline, lighting it on fire, then flinging it into oncoming traffic, off a bridge, or into the fiery magma of mount doom at your earliest convenience.

I’m being a bit facetious. You have a few more options here, but they all have asterisks, which is what drives my genuine hatred for the mobile form factor. First off if you can root your phone, do it, and install something like /e/os, which replaces the proprietary google play services with the open source microG. Alternatively, if you have a phone that supports grapheneos I’d definitely recommend giving it a try. The maintainers are a bit… Prickly, but the software itself looks incredibly well-hardened.

Alternatives

Honestly? At this point a flip phone, or forgoing a phone entirely might be the best option here for non-technical users. Pretty much everything is android, and everything non-android comes with cringe-inducing drawbacks, as almost every modern mobile device is made specifically for android.

The obvious caveat is linux phones. Compared to the AOSP, these are comparatively early in development, and many require specific hardware. PostmarketOS looks promising, but is not nearly polished enough for the layperson. Devices like the Fairphone and Pine phone have promise, but are still too niche to benefit from economies of scale, among other usability problems that frequently derive from young projects. In time, I’m sure the situation will improve, however at the moment, we’re pretty much cooked.

Personally, when I find the time in my god-forsaken life, I’m going to assemble a custom cyberdeck and throw NixOS on it. Then, I think you know exactly what I’m going to do with my phone.

Google maps

Google Maps, or apple’s alternative for that matter, are pretty much a mainstay in most peoples’ day to day. Unfortunately that does give incredibly precise location data directly to google. I will concede that the utility of sharing location data with the Megacorp is not zero; you do get traffic statistics out of it. But do understand you are selling your data in exchange for this service.

Google has also begun to pretty aggressively advertise within maps. Have you heard it say “Turn left at the Starbucks,” replacing the coffee chain with any given store? I’d bet money that many of those callouts, if not all of them, are paid sponsorships. I also wouldn’t trust the reviews on there either, as businesses have been manipulating those systems like crazy for years. Not to mention the sheer bloat of the software itself. It takes concerningly long to launch, and overheats my phone concerningly often, for what should be a simple map.

Honestly at a more fundamental level, I’d argue that tools like google maps are doing the same thing to our sense of direction as LLMs are to our capacity to think. Maybe we should consider relying on them less often, just in general. Try going to a place without navigation every now and again. Turn it on if you miss a turn or get lost.

Alternatives

When I really need a map, I’ve been using Comaps which is based on the splendid Open Street Map project. It’s handled pretty much anything I’ve thrown at it thus far. The main downside is that it’s not perfect about listing stores and such, and keeping those listings up to date. The good news is that if you know something about a place, you can easily contribute that information back to openstreetmap and make the community project just a little bit better for everyone else. I’d recommend it!

Youtube

It’s genuinely insane how monopolized the video hosting market is as a result of youtube. Video hosting is not an easy problem, nor is it a cheap one, but just because one platform is giving out free shit, should we allow them to dominate the market, shoving ever more ads, shorts, and slop into it?

If you, like me, still use youtube because you’re a slave to long-form video content (hbomberguy release the adobe essay please I’m fiending for it), the following modifications can improve your quality of life considerably.

Ublock should take care of the injected ads, but Sponsor Block takes care of the embedded ones (eg: “This video is sponsored by…”) by simply crowdsourcing sponsor timings and fast-forwarding through them automatically.

Hate youtube shorts? Do the things grab your face and eat an entire afternoon, after which you don’t remember a single thing you watched? Improve Youtube lets you mod them out completely.

It also lets you make a couple more important modifications to youtube as a whole: removing the algorithmic feeds. Look, I love endless videoslop as much as the next person but at some point enough is enough. I need to have a semblance of ownership over the news, entertainment, and content that I consume. The main edits here are as follows:

• I completely remove the homepage and replace it with the subscription timeline. If I want something to show up on my feed, I’ll subscribe to its creator. Novel idea, I know. (especially considering youtube has been moving away from algorithmically showing you videos from your subscribed channels if you don’t click on them consistently enough).
• I’ve also killed the recommended sidebar and endscreen so that I don’t get recommended more videos after the one I’ve picked. These changes combine to a platform with clear end points. If a video’s over, it’s over. If I’ve run out of subscribed content, then I can’t keep watching youtube. Simple as that.

If you use youtube on your phone, you’ll notice the app doesn’t benefit from browser addons, unless you want to use the web app, which is not great. For android users, you can actually patch a custom youtube app via revanced. This allows you to make most of the above modifications, in the app. Including the adblock and sponsorblock. Waiter waiter! 3 bajillion dollars to the revanced team please!

Want to go even further? Check out invidious which does away with the classic youtube frontend entirely.

Alternatives

Youtube is a tough one to replace due to the heavy infrastructure that video upload and playback requires. Nonetheless, Peertube, a FOSS alternative, has risen to the occasion. It’s not a full youtube replacement yet, but functionally it works, so now it just needs to build the userbase. As an added bonus, it’s also federated, which means you can host your own peertube instance and have everything hosted on your own hardware, while also optionally communicating with other people doing the same.

You can actually find my peertube account here! (Thanks a bunch to makertube for letting me onto their server!).

Discord

We got complacent with discord. For a while, they provided a free service without ads, and maintained it sanely. Take it from someone whose first baby steps into programming was making little discord bots in discord.py; That discord is dead. It has been gutted by the forces of capital and thrown in a ditch to rot, save for its skin, which is now worn by its killers.

Now, a former blizzard executive and McKinsey consultant sits in charge of the corporation, charged with driving value for investors in the company’s looming IPO. They’ve reduced the free upload file size limit. They’ve introduced deeply integrated ads into their platform, to great effect, and concerningly little backlash. They’ve been trying to insert themselves as critical game infrastructure in the form of their social SDK. And are using the metric tons of un-encrypted data users give them to, at the very least, give directly to ICE, and even train predictive models off of– “we have an internal system that works to accurately determine your age.” (Stanislav Vishnevskiy, discord CTO) How does it do that discord? Please elaborate!

Speaking of, let’s get into age verification, shall we? They’ve kept user government ID photos that they claim to delete “within sixty days after the age appeal ticket is closed” (source) as showcased by the recent data breach that exposed government IDs of at least 70,000 people who submitted one to discord. (Yes I am aware the breach was from a subcontractor. No, I do not care. Corporations should be held fully accountable and liable for vetting and overseeing their subcontractors, period.) And this was before the whole recent mandatory verification thing!

Now they’re rolling out sweeping global age verification largely without governmental obligation. For what purpose? If I had to guess, I’d say brand safety going into the IPO. Accusations of grooming and CSAM on your platform scare investors, so you need a convenient defense to hide behind while doing nothing to actually help the situation. And No, collecting a bunch of high value data on children in a convenient little hackable bundle, and creating further stratification between adults and children where groomers can simply choose to move to childrens’ spaces is NOT helping kids.

Further, the companies that they’ve been using to verify peoples’ ages since this new initiative are hardly ideal. Persona, an age ID company funded upwards of $200 million by Epstien lister, Palantir founder and chairman, and overall slime bucket Peter Thiel, (or more specifically his VC fund), has been temporarily used by discord for verification purposes as a “test”. The simple fact that they’re even entertaining the idea of giving childrens’ government IDs to a company so closely tied with someone on the epstien list IS NOT GOOD.

K-ID, their main age verification provider, however, has the vaguest nothing-burger-ass data retention policy: “We store [user data] as long as you use our Services, or as necessary to fulfill the purpose(s) for which it was collected, provide our Services, resolve disputes, establish legal defenses, conduct audits, enforce our agreements, and comply with applicable laws.” (source). That could mean literally any length of time. Their backing is also pretty hilariously bad, having drawn a notable ~$45 million from nationalistic defense nuts and investors in autonomous military robotics andressen horowitz.

A few of the above links were helpfully sourced from this rogue article on the subject, which I would recommend reading as well.

TL;DR? Fuck Discord!

If you wish to continue using discord in full or in part, I would recommend using vencord or another client mod to prevent discord from having clientside access to your computer. If possible, try uninstalling any native apps and just accessing it via web.

It’s a worse experience, and that’s the point. The added friction makes using the platform more difficult, and as such I can move towards using it less. I personally lost a lot of time and energy constantly sifting through notifications and getting distracted by pings (That shit is literally just a skinner box istg), so having to consciously make my way to the website irregularly when I choose to was incredibly helpful. I also set clear digital boundaries with friends and told them that I would no longer be reliably reachable over discord. If someone wishes to contact me urgently, I have offered everyone I care about my contact information via text and signal.

Alternatives

I can solidly recommend the matrix protocol (specifically the element client) as something that’s been put through its paces. It’s got pretty much every feature out there.

If you’re in the mood to try something younger, fluxer has pretty much feature parity with discord, (sans a mobile app, for the moment), and has a solid roadmap; I’m pretty optimistic about its direction.

Additionally, if you only really need group chats, I’ve found signal really well designed, and generally use it for as much as I can, especially after leaving discord.

For communities, L + self-host discourse. It’s not a chat platform. That’s what makes it great. Instant messaging for online communities was a mistake. Need vc? That’s what Jitsi and Mumble are for. Reject modernity; return to forum.

Tik Tok

TODO

Megacorp | Amazon

TODO

Twitch

TODO

Alternatives

Twitter

You don’t need me to tell you twitter is not good. I think we all collectively know this by now. If you need some reminders other than the nazi running the show and the whole mecha hitler/ infinite CSAM generator things, here’s a relatively recent Last Week Tonight Episode that highlights some pretty major problems with the platform.

I personally have never used twitter, so I can’t help very much as far as usage goes, but general social media etiquette concepts as discussed elsewhere in this piece should apply here. I’ve seen nitter tossed around as an alternative frontend, but I have no experience with it, so I can’t speak to its quality.

Alternatives

More and more, I’ve been convinced that open source, decentralized, federated social media is the only way forward. And no project is more emblematic of that ideal than mastodon. Give mastodon a shot; look around for good servers, they’re like little communities scattered around. I’m here on peoplemaking.games. The best part is whichever one you choose, you can still talk to the entire rest of the network. This is how digital spaces should work.

Bluesky definitely exists. It’s technically open source, though it’s very centralized in its design, and it’s developers are taking VC money to scale it, which doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. More people (and bots) are on it than mastodon though, so if you care about that, then this might be the way to go.

Megacorp | Facebook

These fuckers explicitly allow trans slurs on their platforms. Like that shit was written out on training material. Their hateful conduct policy also kindly allows us to be discriminated against, and called mentally ill. Fun!

They’ve also intentionally stopped investigations into scam ads on their platforms due to the profit motive.

Even their most “private” application, Whatsapp (which implements the Signal protocol, lol), collects pretty much everything that’s not your message contents, and uses it to train content serving models for the algorithmic feed as well as profile your account to sell to advertisers. That privacy policy is rough.

As far as continued use goes, Facebook as a company is really locked down, so any attempts at recreating alternative frontends have died as far as I can tell. As with anything else, a good compromise can be found in deleting apps and using simple web applications within your browser.

Alternatives

For Instagram, which I see as the biggest hurdle here, there’s a great, mastodon-based, FOSS alternative called Pixelfed.

For any messaging functionality, I’d defer to Signal.

It bears repeating that this kind of platform is one of the more entrenched ones, as most people are only on it because their friends are as well. If you skimmed that section above, definitely give it a read.

Megacorp | Microslop

I want to flag that Microsoft is a priority target of the bds boycott due to their azure cloud services provided to the Israeli military for the surveillance and genocide of innocent civilians.

TODO

Windows

The device you use to access the internet isn’t just a neutral conduit to the internet; Rather, it’s an incredibly sophisticated amalgamation of hardware and software, all designed by corporate entity for the purpose of profit. (The internet isn’t a neutral entity either, but I digress)

Not only are modern operating systems designed meticulously for user retention and data collection (especially mobile ones), but even the hardware is getting more invasive and locked down. Once you realize how many household objects need to ping manufacturer servers, many requiring an end user account, there’s no going back. Look up the intel ME if you want to get really paranoid.

If you still need to use windows, in full or in part (dual booting is a great option for bi(OS)-curious individuals!), I’d recommend looking at the winutil framework to make the thing even a little bit usable.

Alternatives

This topic is a whole blog post on its own, but I would be remiss if I didn’t encourage you to give linux (Mint/ Fedora) a try on your current hardware. It’s a reasonable, privacy-respecting operating system that serves as a perfectly viable alternative for many windows and mac users, and, in any case, is a much more attainable goal than swapping all your hardware to RISC-V (my beloved), or burning your phone with gasoline and casting it into the cursed pit from whence it came.

Github

OK OK I know no sane layperson is going to be thinking about github in their spare time, so feel free to skip this one if you just don’t care.

Since I’ve gotten further into FOSS, github has become something of a bastion. A stupid percentage of FOSS projects use github as a collaborative platform, and as such, I’m compelled to be on there as well, and for a time did so happily.

These days it’s a monopoly on the FOSS ecosystem held in place by Microsoft. That’s why we haven’t seen federation take off for code forges. It’s simply more convenient for Microsoft that everyone be platform locked to github. It’s effectively holding the community hostage. Want traffic? Use github.

And given the aforementioned boycott, I have been making an effort to leave.

Alternatives

Codeberg is perfect if you just need something to work and you’re cool with your code being public. git.gay seems silly as well, but I can’t speak to their uptime.

I personally have a forgejo server on my homelab that I use for private projects (read: a dwarf fortress game I’m playing with a friend)

Minecraft

Yeah. It hurts me too, but it’s Microsoft and it’s literally called out on the fucking boycott page.

Alternatives

The worst part is that there’s a thriving open source competitor to Minecraft called lunati. It’s like right there, people! Then again, we play Minecraft for the nostalgia, not the gameplay, so perhaps this one’s a harder sell than I give it credit for.

Life 360

SCREAMING

TODO

Alternatives

Dating apps

I don’t see this one talked about a lot, but it’s personally a little horrifying how normalized these have become. Skirting over the many problems with objectifying people that plague these platforms, they also suffer from the same corporate greed that runs social media companies. Keeping people on-platform is how they make money. Doing their literal job is the antithesis to the point of their existence. They just need to jingle some keys in front of you to give you hope every now and then, and ka-bam, instant money printer. It also feels pretty icky to me how they play with social dynamics for profit, though in fairness, pretty much any profit-focused social media company will also be doing this.

Alternatives

The death of third spaces fucking sucks, but that doesn’t mean we need to stop trying. Local maker spaces, events, and hobby/user groups still exist, they’re just a bit harder to find. Go outside and talk to strangers. Set up a recurring board game night at your place. Make a community, a support system. Asking friends to set you up on dates isn’t normalized anymore, but you can still try.

Bottom line, there are things you can do to meet people. It’s not as easy as I hear it used to be, but nothing ever is. We still have to try.

Smart TVs

OK this is a bit of a weird one, but oh my god those TV operating systems are fucking evil. Burn them all.

TODO: Netflix are assholes

Alternatives

Get a mini computer, throw something like the upcoming kde plasma bigscreen on it, and plug it into your TV, and use the thing like a big monitor.

Or alternatively…

Routers

TODO

Hey. Did you know you can block all ads on your home wifi? Go take a look at the pi-hole project.

Conclusion

This was probably pretty depressing up to now. Not to worry, this post gets better!

The Ethics of Slop

I’ve been at ends about slop posting on my blog. My main thought pattern is thus: I simply don’t want to give it credence by talking about it more, and the less time it spends cluttering my mind, the better. That said, in a manifesto-style schizo-post on tech usage such as this one, there’s really no getting around it.

I will be referring to these concepts as “LLMs and Generative Models” or more succinctly, just “slop”. The term “AI” is unfathomably broad and applies to completely unrelated concepts such as enemy behavior trees in games. It is also the preferred corporate language for these objects that also just so happens to evoke profitable misconceptions about the functionality and efficacy therein, so I will not be using it. Ali Alkhatib has a good blog post, defining the term “AI” as a political term rather than a technological one, which divorces it from the disparate technologies that it’s used to refer to, and gives the term genuine utility once again.

Off the bat, on ethical grounds, I do not use LLMs and Generative Models, I avoid tools that include slop features wherever possible, and I’ve been working to avoid software that is built with these tools where I can. Though that last point has become almost entirely unfeasible, as I will get into later.

I’ll also be starting by temporarily putting the many ethical implications of using such tools aside, and defining what we’re working with in a vacuum, then moving on to those full ethical implications, so please bear with me. This is a field that’s still relatively new and incredibly nuanced, so I’ll do my best and hope nothing ages too badly! Anyone who happens to study these things is more than welcome to reach out if they find any technical or logical inaccuracies in the following.

LLMs

First order of business, LLMs are autocorrect. Autocorrect is not your friend. Autocorrect is not an expert. Autocorrect is not an omniscient god. Though, autocorrect is actually a pretty good thesaurus. I can’t necessarily speak to its programming capabilities due to my ethical aversion, (though I’m skeptical of misuse and laziness), but I’ll link a recent blog post from a friend who has a bit more depth of experience and can speak to the tech a bit better. And finally, if we’re getting philosophical, it’s also a pretty good mirror of the internet and broader societal perception as a whole. Let’s talk.

My Ethics Teacher has likened a LLM to a lossy snapshot of the internet. I really like this comparison, as it succinctly captures the essence of a LLM. The only reason LLMs can do what they do is the sheer mass of data that they require to operate. They get this data by scraping the internet. I’ll get into the more dubious elements therein later, but for our purposes right now, this accumulation of data allows someone to ask a model something, and get the “average” answer. Not necessarily the correct answer, as LLMs have no idea what truth even is, but the average answer, as represented by the accumulation of data. The goal with this data is to reproduce natural-sounding language. In this goal, I think everyone can generally agree, LLMs have succeeded. Is this a genuine use case? Perhaps a little bit, as I mentioned above, as a thesaurus. However, as I said earlier, they have no conception of the truth, and thus the validity of any generated statement should be perpetually in question.

“ChatGPT is Bullshit” (Hicks, Humphries, Slater) is an ethics paper that describes LLM output not as truths, lies, or hallucination, but rather as “Bullshit.” And it does so in a technical sense, rather than a colloquial one. The term “bullshit” in this context sits at odds with the ideas of truth and lies. Both truth and lies acknowledge the presence of a truth, they simply have opposing goals regarding it. Conversely, Bullshit has no regard for truth whatsoever. Doubtlessly, many people are adept bullshitters in this sense, but this characterization of LLM output seems pretty spot on to me.

The paper goes on to contest the term “hallucination” in the context of falsehoods contained within LLM output, as it suggests a level of perception that exists in the model in the first place that is then being undermined in some way. This perception does not exist in the first place, so this term unduly anthropomorphises models and gives users a false image of their capabilities and salience. Further, they argue the process that results in a generated falsehood and the process that does not are one and the same. These falsehoods are not a hiccup or bug of the model, but are simply artifacts of the LLM, as designed. The term “hallucination” does not characterize them as such, where “bullshit” does.

The aggregate data elements of LLMs are pretty genuinely fascinating though, especially as a mode of querying societal perceptions and inequity. A few of the examples that my ethics teacher showed me in class involved asking a LLM to give you a jail sentence in days based on two crimes, and change only the gender or race between the two (a black person was given double the sentence as a white person, all else equal), asking a LLM whether certain groups of people deserved basic human rights, (to which it responded “all people deserve human rights”), then asking whether Palestinians deserve human rights, (to which it responded a concerningly long and verbose “it’s complicated”). Like it or not, this is what we’re working with. This is the aggregate of pretty much the entire internet and every single piece of information that AI companies could get their hands on. And like it or not, that does say something about the people whose information trained it. All of us.

Of course, this is a mostly un-scientific mode of drawing conclusions, but it does highlight a lot of important ideas and issues with our society as a whole, and if that can shake someone out of the malaise of ignorance or apathy, then I think the technology does have a bit of genuine value! Of course, coming back to planet earth, we’re not using LLMs like this. We’ve actually sprinted away from this kind of LLM behavior as fast as our little legs can take us. After all, nobody wants to hear about modern day prejudice, and it would be a lot more convenient to duct tape those parts of the model off so the shareholders don’t see our model going haywire and calling itself something crazy like “mecha hitler” or something. God forbid they start thinking there might be something wrong with the society and individuals that ended up producing that output. No, no. Better to guardrail it and pretend everything’s fine. Much easier than making positive societal change.

Like it or not, these datasets are inherently biased. biased toward ideas and cultures that are primarily represented in the data.

Unfortunately in the context of how we use LLMs now (Read: for literally fucking everything why the fuck are we putting LLMs in toothbrushes fuck literally everything I just $50 of RAM to cost $50 sobbing), I think realistically the best case scenario is that those guardrails get real good real fast. Heavy benefit of the doubt here, but assuming the whole Grok CSAM thing wasn’t intentional, that kind of usage is just going to get more common as models become more and more accessible. These companies in charge must be held to standards and regulation hitherto unseen, or some really fucking bad shit is going to happen. Though, what am I even saying, you probably heard a little laugh track in your head at the word “regulation.” Me too, buddy. Me too.

Generative Models

I don’t think I fully understand the value of generative models. Images, video, music, speech, etc… At the very least it’s a moderately interesting technical problem, but its existence only really serves to replace people in creative industry with the hollow shell of pure output. This touches a bit on the idea of commodification of art, and the Kantian use of people as mere means.

Art posting

Oh boy here I go art posting again! Broadly, I like to define art as human expression. This definition is quite broad and includes a lot of crazy shit that people might not conventionally think of as “art.” I do not care. Perspective is a key aspect of art, so gatekeeping an artist by telling them their art isn’t art isn’t productive nor helpful. Instead, we should critique the art itself, and if necessary, simply concede that it’s not for us, whatever it may be. The value in art, however, is not the residue that it sometimes results in, but rather in the process itself. The lessons learned. The skills obtained. The base human joy of creation and expression. This is what makes art beautiful and what makes us grow as artists and as people.

However,this system of ours prioritizes only what can be sold: that residue. And in doing so, it tells people that the rest does not matter. If there’s only one take away you’re taking from this section, I want it to be that you should appreciate the beauty of the artistic process just a little bit more.

Slop == art?

So, what does this make slop? Well, it’s complicated.

First off, let’s look at the model itself. I think the engineering and programming that people did to create such a thing definitely qualifies as such. In this sense, a LLM or generative model itself is art. Now, I’m not making any statements as to the quality, morality, or societal implications of the piece, but I do think it’s art.

Now for the output. I want to take a leaf out of other artistic mediums here to make my argument. Imagine, if you will, an art exhibit that involves the viewer somehow. This could be an interactive museum exhibit or a pretentious art installation in a gallery. For the sake of the argument I’ll imagine a contraption of some sort with a weight, and a paintbrush, and a set of canvases. Viewers are encouraged to gently push the weight in their preferred direction, and observe the contraption paint. There is no argument that the contraption itself is art. However, in its inclusion of the viewer, it creates some further questions: is the interaction between the viewer and the piece art? And is the resulting painting artistic residue? I would argue yes.

In my mind, this is actually a very simple game. Games feature an interesting dichotomy of art, where both the game itself is art, but so are the players’ interactions with it (eg: speedrunning). Let’s label this derivative art “secondary art.” These secondary arts are (almost always) both an intended and a designed effect by the designer of the primary piece. The designer of our painting machine designed the thing to be interacted with in a certain way: Pushing the weight. However the secondary artist need not interact with it thus.

Perhaps they take the weight off and attempt to paint a friend’s portrait using the mechanics of the contraption. Or figure out a modification for the mechanics that allow the machine to interpret the swinging of the weight completely differently. Or use the machine as a paperweight. This is very similar to how many D&D players use 5e! Most players, however, will simply choose the simplest or most straightforward, optimal option. As game designers, this is what we optimize and design for; Our goal is to make this optimal option also the most fun option. Or the most punishing option. Or the most thematically interesting option. In doing so, we are designing around player behavior. We are shaping this secondary art’s possibility space. We are (usually) not designing for when players decompile our game and hack in an infinite cheese spawner. Yet the latter is, without a doubt, a much more creative mode of secondary art than simple, straightforward engagement with the provided systems.

These varying modes of secondary art create a spectrum of creativity within the possibility space, ranging from art that many would refuse to consider art, to works of genuine wonder*. All this to say: I would pose that the idle generation of slop by a human is a form of secondary art, low on the secondary creativity spectrum.

However, one quick little problem. Where does this spectrum begin and end? Have you created low-creativity secondary art simply by looking at a piece? Thinking about it? NOT thinking about it? (You just lost the game lol) Moreover, if you draw inspiration from another piece in your creation of primary art, is it now secondary art?

*: Disclaimer: This link is included for *comedic effect*. If you do not consider it a work of genuine wonder, feel free to substitute it in your mind for something that is, such as an innovative game mod/ hack or some other form of secondary art. There’s nothing I can do about bad taste, unfortunately.

Gender isn’t real

Just like the socially constructed concept of human gender, I have crafted a false binary structure between primary and secondary art. (Yes, both of those were me; I regret my actions). While there generally “feels” like there should be a distinction, I don’t think there is. Art is derivative, after all. Outside a vacuum why should one art be considered “Primary” and another “secondary?” Each of our tools is a piece of art in some respect, and we all take inspiration from the people and works around us. Is a game mod of Theseus, in which a game mod copies the original source code and completely rewrites it, secondary or primary art? I don’t think the idea of primary and secondary art is entirely useless as a concept to help frame ideas, but push comes to shove, it simply does not hold itself up to scrutiny.

So now that we no longer have our helpful little dichotomy, what do we do about the whole slop problem? Unfortunately, not much. I’m having trouble decoupling the value of art from its effect on the artist. Yes we have this vague idea of a scale of creativity and some concept of learning and acquiring skills, however the only hard and fast conclusion I can come to here is that this effect is fully individualized. There is no true “objective value” of art, insofar as its impact on the artist, (which is generally immeasurable), as much as I’d like there to be one.

That said, I feel strongly that in the use of a tool, especially one as sweeping as a generative model, in the place of learning a craft, the world has lost something of value. Just as craftsmanship declined with the rise of the industrial revolution and the advent of mass-production, replaced with the soulless, uncomprehending usage of machines, and the centralization of production within corporations, I am concerned about another such event occurring here. This is, of course, a subjective opinion though. The admiration I have for true mastery and understanding of a craft, is, to some, unproductive. The process of art is of little to no importance to them. Subjectively, they might find more value in generating slop than creating something themselves. Why waste time learning something, they ask, when a tool could do it for you? To which I’d like to respond: “If you’re nothing without the suit then you shouldn’t have it.” But, while I thoroughly disagree with this worldview, can I in good conscience refute it on objective grounds? Tell them that their opinion of art is simply incorrect? Unfortunately, due to the subjectivity that permeates my definition of art, I don’t think so.

This lands us at a rather stupid, vague, and useless conclusion: Pretty much everything related to human action is art, and no specific piece is inherently more valuable than another. I think one can potentially attempt to tie some form of external value to the art by querying the audience and obtaining a collective opinion and determining the collective impact. However, this process neglects the value of pieces that do not possess or appeal to an audience, as well as lends undue weight to pieces that are used as mere means of wealth and fame, as opposed to ends in themselves. I will not be exploring it.

I just zoned out really bad, what?

Basically, TL;DR, art is subjective and performative, so if someone thinks they did art, then they have. We may criticize this art for whatever we wish on an individual level, but from my perspective, one cannot categorically reject another’s actions as “not art,” nor can we make objective statements on the superiority of certain modes of art over others.

This is rather frustrating, as I myself very badly want to claim that typing a handful of words into a corporate web portal isn’t art or is at the very least objectively worse than actual art. But this is just a crude form of poetry is it not? And many people have exclusionary opinions on stupid performance arts (relevant dropout clip), musical compositions, or even video games! I think these forms of exclusion are frankly stupid, which is why my definition of art has evolved in the way that it has. You’re welcome to disagree with it as a premise, however, I can’t in good conscience breach my own definition of art in this way.

Did I need that many words to say that? I don’t even know at this point.

Now, let’s get this train back on the rails.

Slop and Society

Interestingly, the advent of this kind of technology is showcasing all kinds of problems, not necessarily with itself, but rather with our society and our systems; Under different systems the nature of such a technology might not be as negative as it is under ours, which is partially why I’m capable of coming to such an oddly pro-generated art conclusion in the purely theoretical vacuum I presented above.

School System

As someone in school, the amount of model usage I see is frankly appalling. I can’t comment on whether or not models can be used educationally, but I know for damn sure that they can be used in lieu of genuine understanding of concepts, and I’d hazard a guess that the majority of usage falls to the latter.

I’d argue, however, that this is not fully an inherent flaw in models, but rather one in the school system. The gamification of learning through grades was frankly stupid before generative models came around and it’ll be stupid long after. And as far as university goes, I’d argue it’s more of a corporate tool than it is a learning institution. How many corporations use degree ownership as an applicant sorting mechanism? How many university students are here to satisfy that requirement, or out of some nebulous societal obligation, rather than to actually learn shit?

My distaste for the school system is a blog post on its own, but these problems already existed before the dissemination of generative models. The models just made them far more evident and exploitable.

Copyright System

Models are trained upon anything and everything corporations have been able to get their hands on, with no permission or compensation. This has driven immense bot traffic to websites, the owners of which have been left to pick up the bill of serving https requests to tens of thousands of bots. This disproportionately affects open source projects and non-profits, many of which are already suffering financially. This also creates the distinct problem of “License washing” where GPL code or otherwise can be consumed then reproduced by a model under a completely different, more permissive license. Many people have found their art or writing styles perfectly reproduced by models upon request without their consent, which is simply disgusting.

Not all of these problems are a fault of the copyright system, but many are. Copyright is not a tool of the individual, but rather one of corporations or those with the money for legal counsel. If we simply retreat back to the copyright system to protect our work from being used without our consent, we will be retreating back to a system that will inevitably be used to exploit us in the same way, but legally. Remember that legality and morality are different things; laws can and are changed by those in power to benefit themselves, morally or not.

Capitalism

The widespread use and marketing of these models is not one of artistic intent, but rather of corporate profit seeking. While they may afford a commodified art experience, their intended goal is to create salable, marketable artistic residue, while minimizing or replacing as much of the genuine artistic process as possible. On an individual level, this focus on results over craft might mean less engagement in the artistic process, and less control and understanding of the craft involved. On a societal level, this means that corporations who wish to minimize cost of labor in the production of commodities can simply stop paying artists and craftspeople, making an already impossible career somehow even worse.

We as consumers need to stop seeing artists and craftspeople as a mere means of obtaining art residue and rather as other human beings with desires, struggles, and joys, just like everyone else, who simply want to make a living making art. Observing the current landscape, the use of generated content in place of human art undermines this idea, as the money and resources that would have gone to them, instead makes its way to corporations in exchange for the tools that have replaced them. Like it or not, even if you consider users of such models as such, fewer artists will be able to survive in this climate, with largely worse-paying, less stable employment, all while corporations use the tech to consolidate power. And this assumes the tools are well built and reliable, which they are not. If we build infrastructure upon this stuff we will be sacrificing our own capacity to create as well as setting ourselves up for disaster should these tools enshittify or fail outright.

My vision of an ideal future is one where people can spend more time making meaningful art and less time working to afford life, endlessly striving for infinite productivity, the excesses of which are all gained by executives and shareholders rather than individuals. The current existence of generative models is almost certainly moving us away from, rather than towards, that future, at least under modern systems.

Thus, I believe this mode of technology should be categorically rejected until systematic change brings, at the very least, the capacity for artists and craftspeople to comfortably live off their work in conjunction with the use of such technology.

Open source slop is not real (mostly)

There’s a quite good, if a little technical, blog post by Smashing Frames that gets into this in much more depth than I have time for in this already quite huge post, but suffice it to say, just throwing a bunch of weights out there without saying how you got them, or from where, is not open. This is equivalent of publishing a binary blob to github and calling it “open source.” This is only open source in the sense that “everything’s open source if you have unlimited time and can read decompiler output,” which, for the layperson, is a hacking joke and not actually indicative of open source status. Open source is interested not in the openness of the artifact (that’s what we call “source available”) but rather, it’s interested in the process with which that artifact is assembled, so it can be modified, improved, and understood. Model weights achieve none of this.

Slop in open source

Instead,

TODO

Avoiding Slop

That’s the neat part, you can’t.

TODO

Corpo Slop, homemade slop

TODO

The Indie Web: An Introduction

Did that last section give you crippling depression about the horrors of modern technology and our collective overreliance on them, as they’ve slowly but surely co-opted our support systems and to rely upon them

Surfing the Indie Web

RSS: Content Consumption as God Intended