Definitely Instagram.

While Lemmy is slowly making a dent in my reddit participation, it doesn't do much for other things. I'm involved in IRL politics, food, and the clubbing scene, all stuff that is almost completely absent on the fediverse, especially the American-dominated side of it.

A full wallet among other wallets, perfectly disguised. Somebody left it there a few hours before. It was a guy from Scotland on a trip with his friends who went shopping for party clothes. He answered on Instagram (after much stalking) at midnight when I was already inside a club and they were on their way to the club too. So we rendez-vous at 6 AM after clubbing because they had a train at 8AM for another city. They left some joints at my place as a thank you. Also offered some ketch for a, I shit you not, "crunchy landing".

The mistake of this logic is to believe that this betrayal of electoral logic won't radicalize people. It is a necessary step. There are now 11 Million French people, many of which probably don't believe much in electoralism but vote anyway, who are furious at what's happening.

People don't change their mind listening to arguments, they change their mind living experiences. The experience of joy after winning, followed by the disregard of democratic logic by Macron, will mobilize an insane amount of popular energy, contrary to snarky "electoralism doesn't work" comments that are relatable only to a microscopic niche of edgy, maximalist leftists.

I'm a union organizer in tech. I'm Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.

In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It's also very very focused on the legal aspects.

Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it's a game of numbers.

Italians..., well, let's say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don't know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.

I feel like the last remnants of the New Atheists have retreated onto lemmy. Often when you reference spirituality, religion, or even reflections on group dynamics and psychology that doesn't portray humans as perfectly rational self-interest decision-making machines, you get raided by these edgy "facts and logic" kids that are extremely annoying.

On reddit, they are contained in their own zoos, while here they seem to pile up even in generalist communities. It feels like 2012 all over again.

At a demo some weeks ago in Berlin I definitely saw them chasing a kid that was 12 or younger, but luckily he was swift and disappeared into the crowd that was starting to surround and corner the police after they charged the crowd from the side into an otherwise completely relaxed demo. Obviously, the kid was arab.

Police in Germany is composed of pigs as much as any other police force.

Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn't throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.

Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.

Most people in the field don't even ask themselves this question. They all have an incentive in believing it works.

There's a book about it though: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651/subprimeattentioncrisis

dude, we should have gotten to 0 emissions yesterday to prevent global ecological collapse. Any year in which we keep emitting at this rate, it's millions of preventable deaths in the years to come.

What is happening is that any renewable development slightly lowers the price of energy and so energy consumption increases, because there are no meaningful degrowth policies in place. This is a complete failure for the ideology of transition and for humankind as a whole.

No more "alternatives" please. That formula has failed over and over again. We want software that can do what proprietary platforms do not pursue because it's not profitable. Online spaces to build meaningful connections, have interesting conversations with like-minded people, discover new things, be free from trolls and toxicity, possibly without the guilt of polluting the hell out of this planet with hardware and excessive electricity consumption.

It's not from me but from AlgorithmWatch, one of the most famous and respected NGOs in the field of Algorithmic accountability. They published plenty of stuff on these topics and human rights threats from these companies.

Also this is an ecosystem analysis of political positioning. These companies and think tanks are going on newspapers with their names to say we should panic about AI. It's not a secret, just open Google News and you fill find a landslide of news on these topics sponsored by these companies with a simple search.

In the picture you can see organizations moving in the public sphere around AI. On the left you have right-wing and libertarian think tanks, corporations and frontline actors that fuel a sense of panic around AI, either to sabotage their business competitors or to leverage this panic to project an idea of being sellers of a very powerful tool while at the same time deflecting responsibility. If the AI is dangerous and sentient, you won't care much about the engineers behind.

On the right you have several public orgs or NGOs operating in the field of algorithmic accountability, digital rights and so on. They push the opposite of the AI panic, pointing the finger at the corporations and powers that create and govern AI