Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.

Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.

If I were malicious enough to design the system, I would make it a heartbeat. Skip too many heartbeats and your car bricks. It could be written in to the terms of the loan since companies are using in-car computers for repossession.

“Why is my car bricked?”

“Because you tried to disable our payment verification system.”

“I live in a rural area.”

“You’re like 1% of customers. Your loan contact says you have to drive within cell range once a month. Fuck you, we’re repossessing the car and keeping the money anyway.”

your car is bricked

People who understand technology know that most of the tremendous benefits of AI will never be possible to realize within the griftocarcy of capitalism. Those who don’t understand technology can’t understand the benefits because the grifters have confused them, and now they think AI is useless garbage because the promise doesn’t meet the reality.

In the first case it’s exactly like cryptography, where we were promised privacy and instead we got DRM and NFTs. In the second, it’s exactly like NFTs because people were promised something really valuable and they just got robbed instead.

Management will regularly pass over the actual useful AI idea because it’s really hard to explain while funding the complete garbage “put AI on it” idea that doesn’t actually help anyone. They do this because management is almost universally not technically competent. So the technically competent workers who absolutely know the potential benefits are still not able to leverage them because management either doesn’t understand or is actively engaging in a grift.

So funny thing, Seattle Police Department did a pilot for AI that did sentiment analysis on police audio and looked for things like racial slurs. They pretty quickly disbanded the project and destroyed the evidence.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/decision-to-halt-program-analyzing-seattle-police-bodycam-video-under-scrutiny/

(IIRC some folks requested info from the pilot and they claimed to have deleted it.)

They don’t care about profits any more than feudalism did. It’s about domination and sadism. Read “Bullshit Jobs” if you want to understand the dynamics here. Profit had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Read “Bullshit Jobs” if you haven’t. Most “work” is really always been about control and enforcing a religious ideology that being subservient to someone else makes you a better person. Return to work is about the psychological domination of workers. We all know it was never about productivity but about justifying inequity through institutionalized sadism.

Its time to start talking about “memetic effluent.” In the same way corporations polluted our physical world, they’re pollution our memetic world. AI spewing garbage data is just the most obvious way, but corporations have been toxifying our memetic space for generations.

This memetic effluent will make sorting through data harder and harder over the years. But the oil and tobacco industries undermined science and democracy for decades with it’s own memetic effluent in order to protect their business for decades. Advertising is it’s own effluent that distorts and destroys language. Jerry Rubin said it in 1970, “How can I tell you ‘I love you’ after hearing ‘cars love shell?’”

While physical effluent destroys our physical environment making living in the world harder, memetics effluent destroys meaning and makes thinking about and comprehending the world harder. Both are the garbage side effects of the perpetuation of capitalism.

This example of poisoning the data well is just too obvious to ignore, but there are so many others.