Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    31·
    16 hours ago

    Previously, on Awful:

    [Copyright i]s not for you who love to make art and prize it for its cultural impact and expressive power, but for folks who want to trade art for money.

    Quoting Anarchism Triumphant, an extended sneer against copyright:

    I wanted to point out something else: that our world consists increasingly of nothing but large numbers (also known as bitstreams), and that - for reasons having nothing to do with emergent properties of the numbers themselves - the legal system is presently committed to treating similar numbers radically differently. No one can tell, simply by looking at a number that is 100 million digits long, whether that number is subject to patent, copyright, or trade secret protection, or indeed whether it is “owned” by anyone at all. So the legal system we have - blessed as we are by its consequences if we are copyright teachers, Congressmen, Gucci-gulchers or Big Rupert himself - is compelled to treat indistinguishable things in unlike ways.

    Or more politely, previously, on Lobsters:

    Another big problem is that it’s not at all clear whether information, in the information-theoretic sense, is a medium through which expressive works can be created; that is, it’s not clear whether bits qualify for copyright. Certainly, all around the world, legal systems have assumed that bits are a medium. But perhaps bits have no color. Perhaps homomorphic encryption implies that color is unmeasurable. It is well-accepted even to legal scholars that abstract systems and mathematics aren’t patentable, although the application of this to computers clearly shows that the legal folks involved don’t understand information theory well enough.

    Were we anti-copyright leftists really so invisible before, or have you been assuming that No True Leftist would be anti-copyright?

    • flaviat@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      14 hours ago

      the legal system is presently committed to treating similar numbers radically differently. No one can tell, simply by looking at a number that is 100 million digits long, whether that number is subject to patent, copyright, or trade secret protection, or indeed whether it is “owned” by anyone at all

      If you look at data in the way that best obscures what it actually means, of course it can’t be told apart from other data. Binary is simply a way to encode information that most often has an analogue equivalent. You can of course question the copyright of all works, but looking at them in a hex editor is almost a distraction.

      Certainly, all around the world, legal systems have assumed that bits are a medium. But perhaps bits have no color. Perhaps homomorphic encryption implies that color is unmeasurable.

      This is getting pretty close to technolibertarianism. Corbin, I like your posts but i can’t get behind this

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      15 hours ago

      TL; DR: please forgive my ignorance on this topic:

      I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a “good” leftist in the sense that I don’t do a ton of reading, and didn’t think too hard about copyright at this level. I did try do some reading because the anti-copyright takes as I encountered them in this context initially seemed iffy, but through research I found that my initial ideas weren’t well informed.

      The most common form of anti-copyright sentiment I’ve encountered comes from mostly the piracy community. I don’t really participate in the community part of that, so I haven’t spent a lot of time reading any of their theory or philosophy, which has been to my detriment here. That being said, the stuff that I have seen has been mostly from a place of entitlement, so I felt safe in not exploring the literature.

      Also, basically all of my recent reading of leftist material has had no focus on copyright. It’s all been economic, geopolitical stuff. That isn’t to say copyright issues aren’t important, it just hasn’t been in focus.

      Anyway, this all started on my end because, in a discord server unrelated to this instance, I had expressed consternation over individual artists getting fucked over by AI companies, and celebrating whenever they clawed back whatever amount of justice they could. This was immediately in bad faith equated with full throated support for Disney’s ruthless copyright lawyer army. I didn’t really understand why that was happening, so I did some reading, and thought it was worth sharing about here.

      So to specifically answer this:

      Were we anti-copyright leftists really so invisible before, or have you been assuming that No True Leftist would be anti-copyright?

      More the former than the latter, but only due to my blind ignorance. The latter was not my assumption. I had encountered someone claiming to be a leftist but was not, for reasons unrelated to being anti-copyright.

    • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
      41·
      15 hours ago

      @corbin

      “[Copyright i]s not for you who love to make art and prize it for its cultural impact and expressive power, but for folks who want to trade art for money.”

      Fatuous romantic bollocks.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        31·
        8 hours ago

        Thanks! You’re getting better with your insults; that’s a big step up from your trite classics like “sweet summer child”. As long as you’re here and not reading, let’s not read from my third link:

        As a former musician, I know that there is no way to train a modern musician, or any other modern artist, without heavy amounts of copyright infringement. Copying pages at the library, copying CDs for practice, taking photos of sculptures and paintings, examining architectural blueprints of real buildings. The system simultaneously expects us to be well-cultured, and to not own our culture. I suggest that, of those two, the former is important and the latter is yet another attempt to coerce and control people via subversion of the public domain.

        Maybe you’re a little busy with your Biblical work-or-starve mindset, but I encourage you to think about why we even have copyright if it must be flaunted in order to become a skilled artist. It’s worth knowing that musicians don’t expect to make a living from our craft; we expect to work a day job too.

      • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
        43·
        15 hours ago

        the concept that copyright is about art or artistic value and not money, is about as attached to reality as the ai technorapture

        this barely has to even be argued, in spirit or in practice. even the concept of “ownership” as ascribed to creators is basically just a right to sell the work or sublicense said “ownership”

        • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
          41·
          14 hours ago

          @ebu

          “the concept that copyright is about art or artistic value and not money”

          I didn’t say it was.

          “Real artists do it for love, not money” is as stupid as saying “Real artists shoot heroin and have untreated mental illness.”

          Real artists have bills to pay and families to feed.

          • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
            32·
            13 hours ago

            you definitely did in fact say that the idea that “copyright is about trading art for money” is bollocks. that is in fact a thing you said, straightforwardly

            compare and contrast with “real artists do it for love, not money”, which is a thing nobody in this entire thread said

            and wouldn’t you know it, a complete devolution into full-tilt “”“debate”“” shadowboxing is my cue to turn off notifications. best of luck in the ring, i hear the spectre of communism has a nasty left hook