MudMan

Would you? I think that’s the most interesting question in this hypothetical. Would dropping future tech knowledge in a different context just clone cultural and political progression or change course?

I think assuming industrial revolution inevitably leads to colonialism, then imperialism lets actual colonial powers off the hook. I mean, never mind that you’d probably be able to explain inflation to people and skip past some of the straight-up self-defeating resource chases, arguably colonialism is very dependent on European culture being very specifically theocratic and self-absorbed. Especially if you step in prior to the Middle Ages. Roman expansion had slavery as a common law figure, like everybody else at the time, but their incorporation of other territories was extremely not based on colonial principles, even in parts of Africa that would then be under straight-up colonial rule. Would having muskets and combustion engines have changed that? I’m not sure.

A steel bycicle will surely work.

The problem with all of it is going to be scale. I think you’re right in that you think you can just jump into the technology bit in these Yankee in King’s Arthur’s Court scenarios and instead you’d probably get stuck trying to revolutionize mining and material science and then die from an ingrown toenail.

Which, to his credit, Twain absolutely covers when he does the thought experiment. I’m constantly impressed that his take was “you’d cherry pick the people that are open minded enough and spend the rest of your life trying to set up an education system only to be chased away regardless because politics is a bitch”.

That’s still probably the right answer.

But I stumbled upon those, I didn’t plan on acquiring them.

That’s why college kids don’t plan on what to make of their lives after college. They’re kids! If they knew, they wouldn’t need to be there. It took me a degree and a half, a number of failed creative projects and taking a job out of necessity to end up back in a completely different, adjacent career, eventually in multiple different countries. I could have predicted none of that when I started my first degree. For one, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, that was the entire point of university. For another, I didn’t know half of the options I ended up taking even existed or were available to me. Many weren’t, in fact, until a particular set of circumstances lined up.

But I’m sure glad that in the meantime I learned crucial things that made me more capable of taking advantage of those circumstances when they came by.

There’s this girl I remember from that time. I was a bit older than my classmates, owing to that whole changing tracks thing, so a few gave me more credit than I deserved in some areas. This girl once walks up to me and asks me if I’ll read some stuff she wrote. I didn’t know how to say no, so I said yes. And it was terrible. No style, no flow, no command of language. It’s a high school essay at best, corny and florid in all the wrong ways. I weaseled my way out of giving her feedback and mentally discounted her as a writer.

She’s now a professional journalist involved in many high profile activist movements. I’ve read her stuff. It’s great. Turns out the reason she was bad at it back then is she was twenty and had many years of getting good at that crap ahead of her. That’s fine. It’s fine to figure yourself out and learn to do things as an adult. That’s supposed to be the point of higher education when it’s universally accessible.

Anyway, I don’t think you’re wrong, for the record. I think you’re right in your context. If public university wasn’t basically free around here that would have been a very expensive approach to learning creative writing and figuring yourself out. At most all I’m contributing is I’m glad we do it that way over here. I spent ten years, give or take, doing that stuff and I spent between sixty and six hundred bucks a year doing it. And that’s because I didn’t qualify for any grants or government student aid. For some of my classmates it was free, or they even got some help for books and housing. I go to vote every time (and pay taxes) thinking that contributing to keeping that up is the most important thing I do in life.

Don’t get me wrong, you could also just materialize chained up to the bottom of a mine or in the middle of a war campaign lasting 40% of your lifespan and die in a week.

It’s just since the premise doesn’t say you get to refuse at least this way you’d have a good chance at just absolutely smashing it and maybe bypassing some of the real nasty stuff on the way to technological advancement.

Not necessarily insurmountable, but still a good point.

You may still have an easier time getting things up and running as a slave in antiquity than as a serf in the Middle Ages, depending on where you end up. Pretty sure you’d have a better shot as a slave in antiquity than in the US or other colonial areas, both because colonialism reeeeally sucked and because you’d have relatively more valuable skills.

This take is super depressing, but like I said elsewhere, maybe it makes sense in the US. And that sucks, to be clear.

For what it’s worth, I spent maybe a decade in university, bounced around a couple of things before I got my actual degree. I did not do a STEM degree, I still got a lot out of it in both soft and hard skills. Also in relationships, experience and general ability to approach situations and extract information from the world. Frankly, if your time in higher education has to be driven by a securing a specific job or goal then you’re in a broken higher education system. If it leaves you in crippling debt you’re also in a broken system, but I’m pretty sure you guys know that already.

I could risk a suggestion, but you seem like you are in the US and frankly what you describe does not line up with my experience of higher education pretty much at all, so I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be useful.

I’ll just say that that seems like it sucks, it’s not what higher education should be about and you guys should probably get around to fixing it at one point or another.

I mean, tune it just right and you can get the Industrial Revolution started a couple millenia early and maybe bypass the whole colonialism nonsense. Middle ages is too late, too much theocracy. Common knowledge gets you in grecorroman spaces, but maybe you can overshoot a touch and get some nice Phoenician traders to bankroll your plan to mass produce bycicles or Ikea-style furniture and ship it all over the Mediterranean.

Just… hope you stay healthy or that the rules let you pack a bunch of antibiotics. Or maybe learn a bunch of modern medicine before you go. Maybe prioritize the whole “discovering penicillin” thing when you get there.

Right?

We’re going on a tangent here, but I feel like Western progressives, particularly with anglo backgrounds, tend to think the entire world runs by their parameters and always has. There is nothing intrinsic to the current kinds of bigotry in their societies. It’s pretty arbitrary and specific, in fact.

I keep telling people that the UI being similar is the least of the worries of a Windows expat. I promise all of Linux’s mainstream GUIs are perfectly intuitive for a frequent Windows user. The things that are most annoying are software and hardware compatibility and not having to manually hunt for support or equivalent software.

Well, the idea of the original post is that ALL algorithms used for any reason are bad, and the retort is to explain that a chonological feed is still a (simple) algorithm and use that to “well actually” a distinction with proprietary algorithms.

Which is fine, but nitpicky. I’d think most Masto users get that, or at least take no issue with the obvious explanation. For all I saw the majority of the response to BlueSky’s idea of an algorithm marketplace where you pick and tune how your feeds are sorted was relatively well received.

But as always around here I don’t doubt that with a different set of follows and even usage times the pushback on principle may be more frequent or obvious. It just hasn’t been my experience and I think the “what algorithm actually means” bit is a bit deceptive.

A few of these are interesting and accurate (email comparisons), a few are pretty obvious and widely distributed already (privacy challenges), a few are a bit of a straw man argument (not sure “algorithms are bad” is a thing) and a few I’d caveat a little bit (quote tweets).

Going through all that would mean a whole response piece, though, so I’m more than happy to vaguely nod and move on.

Yep. Terrible analogy, a bad fit for both the tech and the use cases, tells nothing to anybody, and federation is not the biggest feature most people care about going into Mastodon anyway.

I’ve been seeing this story do the rounds and I feel like we’re burying the lede here.

Who the hell is watching porn over Plex? That is somehow simultaneously the most uninformed and the most complicated way to access porn.

Hey, it’s why it’s so possible to make loving parodies of Trek, right? If it seems okay to Tony Shalhoub it’s fine by me.

Look, I know it sucks, but that’s not how it works. No more Trump can absolutely be your rallying cry because Trump isn’t just Trump, it’s an entire structure of actual fascists with explicit plans to dismantle the democratic system. I don’t know what people thought was gonna happen after Biden got elected but this is reality now for the foreseeable future.

I understand the exhaustion, I understand the frustration, but I’m genuinely sick and tired to see countries conflate being tired and frustrated with their current balance of liberal democracy and vote in fascists only to reel in horror after the fascists rule like fascists.

The US did it with Trump, bailed out after they realized what that meant. Bolsonaro in Brazil? Bring back literally the previous guy, please. Maybe Tusk wasn’t so bad, says Poland now. The UK is about to bounce off of the mess left by Boris Johnson by bringing in the most milquetoast centrist.

Can we just skip the part where you let the fascists run the show to be remembered how much it sucks? Please? If you don’t see any version of sustainable democracy you need to get involved in politics. Hands-on. Reform, revolt, protest, lobby and set the world on fire until it gets better.

But sitting at home thinking it’s the centrists’ fault for not being exciting while you let the actual nazis reach power is not a valid answer, no matter how tired and frustrated you are.

You’re arguing against yourself a lot here. Somehow you have a working democracy, but simultaneously you have zero recourse to get the policy you want implemented. You can’t possibly get the policy you want implemented, but somehow protest voting is a healthy democratic act that may be more useful than voting for a compromise candidate.

Which is it? Is the democratic system going to eventually get you where you want to go, and so you should push for your candidate in the primaries and then back whoever ends up winning them or is the system broken and fossilized and so you should be utilitarian in the election and then use non-electoral action to seek profound reform? Because you’re munching on a lot of that cake and you can’t still have it after.

For the record, I absolutely support endorsing whichever candidate is closest to your position and has the best chance of winning at all levels of administration. Engage in every single election, put forward the most leftist candidate, then vote for whoever is running against the Republican. If you do that consistently, then a) you’ll vote for Biden in the next election, and b) we have zero disagreement.

Also for the record, you guys keep misrepresenting Biden’s term and that’s already a pro-fascist take. I’m not saying you need to align with him or can’t argue that he and the party should be further to the left, but if your take on things is to put forth misrepresentations while actively ignoring the views held by the opposition on those issues you’re campaigning for Trump, as well as voting in his favor. It’s a tired, boring playbook that has been deployed forever, because the average terminally online democrat is somewhat to the left of their leaders will not push back on the misrepresentations. It’s not holding up any better than the disingenuous takes you get from the alt-right, frankly. Don’t think I didn’t notice the US cosplay left arguing that Biden was in favor of genocide in Gaza and against a ceasefire until he effectively pushed for a ceasefire, at which point it was crickets until he pushed for lifting restrictions on Israel military support, at which point it was a deluge again.

Man, I’m far to the left of the guy, but I swear sometimes it seems like US leftists actively hate when the government does what they ask.

I explicitly reference the student loans stuff elsewhere. That’s not structural change.

Structural change at this point is changes to the governance and Constitution of the US. You don’t have a functioning governance with the current Supreme Court, you don’t have it with Citizens Utd in place, you don’t have it with the current set of state level and federal level election rules.

That’s step one. Minor tweaks to policy are not structural.

And until you get a functional democracy yes, advocating for not voting for the sole liberal democrat on the ballot is advocating for the rule of his fascist alternative. No ifs and buts. If you want that to no longer be true, see point one. That’s the flowchart. You can’t have a different flowchart until you take the steps required to change the current one.

So if you want to pretend that the US is a functional liberal democracy where you can use your vote as a form of self-expression that is a dangeroud delusion at this point. I do believe in representative democracy, but you no longer have one of those, so go get one so I don’t have to keep having this dumb argument every couple of years with a bunch of delusional Americans threatening to set actual fascists at the helm of the most influential western superpower because they don’t feel self-actualized enough.

Go set cars on fire until you get a funcioning system, France-style or go vote for an endless stream of Bidens until the heat death of the universe, but those are your two options.

I hear this so much from Americans. The utter inability to conceive that reform of any kind is possible.

Weirdly, I don’t hear that as much from most comparable liberal democracies. That narrative I get much more frequently from Eastern European friends in post-soviet states that recognize themselves as a kleptocracy. Both have mostly access to a troubled but functional representative democracy, both capitulate to corruption (or in this case outright fascism) out of disbelief that either their vote is impactful or that any other political action is possible. Both are wrong, IMO.

Because it’s a campaign and people campaign for things.

But also, voting for Bernie wasn’t shamed. Voting for Bernie and saying you’d refuse to vote for the democrats unless he won the primary got shamed. Rightfully so.