Socialism
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. This is a place for undogmatic and constructive discussion from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
A certain knowledge of socialism is expected, if you are new to/interested in socialism, please visit c/Socialism101 before participating here. Socialism101 will gladly help you by answering questions, providing resources etc.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here.
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavour.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" (read: Dengist) (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Xenial Xerus" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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Technological development isn't intrinsically harmful though, and that includes so-called "AI". It's the ways in which capitalism exploits new (and old) technologies that is harmful, because of the way capitalists use those technologies to drive down labor costs and eliminate jobs.
I'm actually with the Luddites here. They didn't have a problem with the concept of textile mills. What they had a problem with was the fact that rich capitalist owners gave zero consideration to the health and safety of their workers, while paying them a pittance. I have the same attitude towards the "AI" industry as you do. It's being promoted by pyramid scheme AI-bros who are only interested in manipulating markets to get disgustingly rich. Those guys are scum. They have zero consideration for the environmental, social, and psychological harms that their products produce. But folks aren't fighting against them by complaining to us, they are instead directing their energy to fighting with an anarchist instance which is dedicated to fighting against capitalism, including corporate abuses of "AI" tools.
And when you say "capital controls them" that is only true of corporate AI. There are many open source models available. There is no reason why AI needs to use gallons of water to answer a web search, and the results can't be trusted. That's why I don't use AI web searches. There's no reason to build huge datacentres for AI. I can run an AI model on my PC at home, using no more power than it takes to browse the internet for a few minutes. Hobbyists and anarchists can deploy a locally hosted AI to work against capitalism, with none of the downsides. It's perfectly possible to use AI tools ethically and responsibly.
Who the anti-AI crowd should be mad at are the CEOs who are firing workers left and right to be "replaced" with AI tools that are totally incompetent. I'd bet good money it won't be long before the whole ponzi scheme comes crashing down once productivity starts tanking at those companies. And I'll be cheering on the end of the AI bubble as much as the next person. But those same CEOs will have generated a good little stock price bump in the meantime, so they can dump their shares early and depart richer than ever when the shit hits the fan. Again, the problem isn't AI, it's scummy capitalists doing scummy capitalist things.
Now what about our instance? Have we replaced anyone with AI? No. Have we used millions of gallons of water to generate our locally generated AI images? No. Most of them are produced using db0's AI Horde which is an open source, distributed, locally run model. Are we responsible for any of the harms associated with corporate AI? No. And we have never "promoted" AI, at most, we have just defended the way in which we use it, because it isn't harmful in that context. And yet...
We are relentlessly hounded by a bunch of misguided activists and trolls as though we are the font of all evil. The anti-AI crowd has some good points, but they need to target their efforts on the source of the problem, not towards a bunch of techy anarchists who like to self-host stuff. Yet our mods have had to deal with multiple death threats, transphobia and doxxing over our stance on AI, mostly from libs who are obsessed with protecting copyright law. In terms of relative harms, the anti-GenAI crowd on lemmy has done way more actual harm than anyone on this server has by posting an AI image.
I'm 100% with you that those things should be resisted. But folks are fighting us instead. And that seems like a waste of time and effort if you ask me.
My arthritis is playing up, if I come across as terse forgive me.
I don't want to argue a strawman position (i.e. that technological development is intrinsically harmful) but I do adopt the position that certain technologies lend themselves more readily to good, and conversely bad, ends. I think this is extremely obvious and won't bother explaining further unless asked.
In the field of so called AI I will admit that the underlying technology, the transformer model, is freaking awesome. Huge step forward, unlocked giant leaps in computer vision among many other things. The chatbots and diffusion algorithims? not so much, genuinely I struggle to think of positive social impacts. Most people give me are based on fundamental misunderstandings of how they are made and what they do, e.g. they are an appalling way to learn a topic or improve your writing (see semantic ablation if you need that last one explained https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/).
Mass manufacturing anti-information not only misleads people but also buries real information in a tide of slop. They are fundamentally designed to seem plausible, aka to deceive a user that information/communication/language/art is happening when it is not.
This is a popular refrain and it based on a misunderstanding of what they are. They are open weight models, the source (the information used to make them) is not shipped. They are more like shareware. In theory you could tweak them, like you could go to neuron 65423455 and tweak the weight but as the models are by nature inscrutable this is not a useful exercise. You cannot study what training went in, analyses sources for bias, replicate the creation, or anything else a truly open source model would be, you can simply run the finished product.
Can you? The technology is fundamentally nondeterministic, impossible to analyse, extremely convincing which makes disinfo/bullshit (in the Frankfurt sense) much more dangerous. Further because of the compute required to train them and the lack of source these models rapidly become outdated and of diminishing use. I think capital is better undermined by building solidarity, sabotaging these machines/their training, and making sure you retain your ability to operate without tools created by them.
I don't think anyone is trying to harm the instance, simply convince people. Are people ddosing you guys? doxing people? If you believe someone is doing something harmful you basically have a moral duty to try and convince people don't you?
The horde is interesting but I do think that it is dependant on capital as outlined above, and that in general using these things devalues language/art/humanity and harms your brain.
There are many devoted leftist that are against this stuff, there are many horrible techbro types that love it. It is not reasonable to smear a position based on the worst people that hold it.