AlteredEgo

I never implied this definition of fascism is the consensus. It is however undeniably clear and concise. There have been an actual and real problems with defining fascism, like that 12 criteria thing is pretty useless in normal political discourse.

How do you fight fascism effectively if you you can’t easily define it? At any moment someone is going to come in with a sideways tackle “actually it doesn’t fulfill the criteria 532.2 of subparagraph 7 so shouldn’t be considered fascism!” lol.

Which is basically what the OP mainstream news is doing, see OP article with their fucking mealy mouthy both sides approach. This approach helps the actually fascist Örebro so if they do happen to get into power and commit a ethnic cleansing…

Needless to say I definitely consider ethno-nationalism or even just strong nationalism as at least partially fascist. And I think the specific leadership configuration like authoritarian dictatorship doesn’t really matter than much or have anything to do with the ideology.

Check out the book I linked. The definition of fascism is an academic question.

Definitions of fascism has always been problematic because it is a chimera. Personally I really like this one: Fascism is the moral belief in inequality based on identity, like e.g. ethnicity or gender. It is a bit more wide ranging definition, but pretty simple and clear. For example a democracy where women are not allowed to vote and are exploited as cheap labor at home would be fascist.

Contrast that with neoliberalism, which is the moral belief in inequality based on class / wealth. Which explains why they are so close.

We could work on improving technology for building high density housing, producing food and clean water with little space and energy and then exporting that into desperate areas. We could massively uplift the quality of life all around the globe while spending much elss energy and resources. With automation and AI this could be even easier. But practically this won’t happen. We can’t even stop the US imperialist wars and conflicts that are producing so many refugees.

how to change the culture to be more welcoming to immigration in the time of looming climate refugee crises

There are some estimates for 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050 globally. No idea how accurate that is. But I do not believe there is any possibility of people somehow being convinced of accepting anything close to that. Even if wealth inequality and looming economic hardship wouldn’t undermine that goal.

PS: And yeah good point about population density in Sweden. I’m not sure how much habitable land there actually is though. I don’t think it really matters though.

The Proton CEO or found is I think also a libertarian or something. Libertarians are stupid, but they do actually believe in something.

Örebro party advocates for “remigration” which is an alt right term for mass deportation or ethnic cleansing. The article is a bit obtuse on this. Basically this means crimes against humanity because it would mean detention centers or concentration camps and insane cruelty. Unfortunately this needs to become the end of Mullvad.

None of this is really surprising though, backlash is to be expected. Most people in most countries are against mass immigration, which does not make one a fascist. Sweden is now 8.1% Muslim which is a lot to ask of people. Since 1990 it rose from <1% and still seems to be rising. Most are not actually practicing Islam though, only like 25% or so according to the numbers on wikipedia. Which also has been my anecdotal experience in my country.

The issue is that the large parties do not budge on the neoliberal idea of immigration, to fuel economic growth and depressing wages. So only extremists or fringe parties remain to be voted on. Some people simply feel very strongly about “this is our land”. And in most countries this is completely different than the mostly empty / very low population density USA which is traditionally an immigration country. It is not just a question of ideology. People have a right to feel less than holy thoughts about preserving their homeland. My point is that ignoring these feelings is irresponsible politics. Especially in times of looming economic decline and coming mass refugees from climate change.

Of course, Örebro is not acceptable because it advocates fascist policies and should be outlawed and all supporters shunned.

With that said, the amount of societal destruction caused by it, I do wish it hadn’t been invented.

I don’t disagree but I believe this is inevitable and unavoidable. We could never prevent pandora’s box to be opened.

I believe the main thing is the loss of trust that you are talking to actual human beings and that massive amounts of opinion and upvotes on social media are just manufactured. Economic power translates into supremacy of political opinion and influence.

But this already began before LLMs were good enough, from content farms producing slop articles to the russian web brigades and other state backed operations, to special interests like fossil fuel lobby, Trump’s rise to prominence during Obama’s term with the help of organized operations by Alt-Right and Gamergate that Steve Bannon weaponized, the simplified smartphones that allowed boomers easy access to social media. The political correct mandatory narrative about Ukraine.

Basically we had bots long before AI and the culture war was already lost.

I don’t know when or even if it happened, but discourse now is drastically different than it felt a decade earlier. You’re either with us or against us.

One stupid idea I have is “Only a good AI in a browser can stop a bad AI in the internet”. Not sure about the technical feasibility, but terniary models can pack 27b LLMs into a smartphone. Imagine we could actually filter out a lot of disinformation and brainworms. Or have an LLM parse all comments by a suspected bad faith actor and make an estimative judgement on it. Make the internet usable again lol. Maybe it can be used as a powerful tool for good. But fuckai cuts off any discussion about this. The immediate backlash to an AI model inside Firefox was near absolute.

I totally agree that AI is a force multiplier (for profit and seeking power) but what to do about this? What would concrete policies we could demand actually look like?

My issue is that this goes against fuckai doctrine: “AI is completely useless and can’t do anything, can’t replace workers, produces no intelligent output, can’t code, can’t produce images or video or anything really. Only slop!” According to fuckai, it’s completely worthless. So how CAN it be a force multiplier? The enemy is at the same time too strong and too weak. This is an example of the doublethink this requires and it’s my main problem. This disconnect with reality.

Not just is it disgusting just like other reality deniers (e.g. maga, antivax, climate, ukraine) who thought terminate and just verbally attack when they meet someone who disagrees, it makes it easy for this outrage to be used against us. If there is a resistance to AI, the AI bros could not ask for a less effective resistance to face. Look at the comments here, now they want to cancel George Lucas because he sees potential for visual effects lol.

I believe this force multiplier will slowly build up over the next decade. The AI bubble will presumably pop soonish, we’ll have a massive economic crisis (which started long before AI) and eventually we’ll find and deploy “useful” applications of these new AI models.

Of course, as a socialist, should I refuse a machine that does useful work? I don’t believe so. E.g. I see immense potential for these LLM models to be used for planned economies and other things.

So what policies do we actually want? I don’t see any demands except stopping data centers. Which is sensible. BTW even the Anthropic CEO called for a moratorium and regulation on AI.

The first should be mandatory electronic metadata tags for AI generated images and tags. The second should be slow down the speed of data centers and regulating that they need to be actually sustainable ecologically (e.g. solar and wind and recyclable batteries and water).

The larger issue I see is that our global economy, that the vast majority of money today is “imaginary”. It’s not backed by actual real production or services. We keep printing money, and people want to grow that money so we see this insane multi trillion investment boom into overhype. That is why even the anthropic CEO thinks AI is growing too fast. Imagine if we’d invest all that money sensibly. And that has nothing to do with AI really.

There is really a purposeful ignorance to the whole fuckai movement. Like the OP article treats “AI is notorious for stealing from humans” as a settled argument, like if you don’t agree with that statement it’s a moral failing. There is no disagreements in their echo chambers any more, only good vs evil. But as we know, only a Sith deals in absolutes lol.

Or “a technology that’s being used to remove the human element from the process” yeah it - once it actually does look better and is more controllable - can drastically reduce how much human labor is needed.

But that argument has two sides, and thee author is basically making a pro-capitalism argument. Films and movies SHOULD belong to the capitalists, who control who can make movies and expensive entertainment, they get to control the narrative, and obviously anything that won’t make money never sees daylight. Yeah it’s nice that people work on movies, but it incredibly expensive.

If their argument was that we should build a socialist movie industry, with a separate institution with separate elections printing money to produce movies and art and the voters get to vote and influence what is being financed - yeah that would be nice. But who can even imagine some system today any more?

Instead we are already seeing plenty of amateurs making shitty AI movies and slop, but eventually the tools will get better and the best new directors will produce worthwhile art.

And the argument against is of course “no current AI is a dead end here someone said it over there, it won’t get better, only slop!” and then they treat THAT as a settled argument and a moral failing to think we’ll see progress. Do these people now have eyes to see? People struggle to tell if a scene is AI generated or not, but someone it’s not good enough and a filmmaker saying “yeah cool” is worthy of being scolded?

Just the last months we’ve seen breakthroughs in computing hardware and in software with full 27b models compressed to “terniary” fitting on a smartphone. The AI bubble is grotesque and will pop. The advancements in AI models will remain.

All this hatred and rage should be directed against capitalism and the plutocrats, but it’s being misdirected and turn out counterproductive.

The most straightforward AI policy we should push is to mandate AI metadata tags for images, video and text that must remain when editing. So you can immediately see a watermark or icon on an image or video in the browser. But do we hear this anywhere?

If you’re honestly asking, one thing I just read is that you need an account to use it. Not sure if that is a downside for many.