I found the critique of protesting/rioting interesting.
The framing of these being a “prepared stage” of protesting, wherein the government declares (non-state-)violence to be unacceptable, the opposition declares the protesters should be listened to, and the outcome ends up being, at best, a compromise, but most often, nothing.
They point to this being caused by governments not actually having the power to change any of this. Still agree, so far.
But the “cops are risking their bodies for a shitty pay, and we should be friends, because the governments is powerless, so they’re not that bad” puts me off.
And the conclusion ends up being “our common enemy is social media, so turn off your phones and stop throwing stone! The revolution is simply to be organized by assemblies(ie.: offline)!”
This is what they propose to do about it, and it absolutely infuriates me.
I agree with their critique, but the conclusion that “Power has moved. Probably gone for ever. Oh well” could just as well have been “Let’s figure out where that power has moved and attack it”
There is a lot of really low hanging fruit.
Right now there are a lot of aggressiv scrapers, sharing little to non of the work they do. A single aggressiv scraper shared by many or all model-trainers would probably never have been a big problem and would have had the same output.
We also already have a public, scraped archive of the internet, The Internet Archive, who already did the annoying scraping part and already have a programmatic interface to that (absolutely fucking huge) database.
My point is, think of these companies like all other companies that make money from extraction of ressources. They are not doing “a rational minimum” of sustainability, not even to keep making money, they just pump everything dry and move on.
A bulldozer can drive around every tree in a forest without doing damage, but a bulldozer in a forest is probably there to kill the trees.