Strongly agree that something like this is needed. However, what enables the asymmetry here is a limitation on material resources and labor. No such limitation exists with digital systems that cannot be trivially copied and deployed by bourgeois interests.
Only idea I have for something like this is a system that requires user verification by existing members, possibly gatekept by irl meetings and capped at some rate per user. Few people use the fediverse because of tiny barriers to entry. No one would tolerate a system that imposes more burdens.
DDoS prevention solutions are probably capable of thwarting most technological solutions we can come up with to create our own asymmetries.
The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have “promoted posts” for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.
You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.
Do you have any specific knowledge on the characteristics, capabilities, or implementation of these? I would be very interested in learning more.
Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, “to protect researcher identities”.
The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.
Most software out there isn’t a highly capable consistent package. I’m sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM’s any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).
There are some OSS tools out there in various states of quality like:
I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.
Typically your keywords are “persona management”, “sock puppet tools” etc.
Thank you for this info. Lots of great launch points for looking deeper into this.
my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.
Observation of the development of FOSS ecosystems seems to back this up and does give me some hope for the state of technology to build alternatives to capitalist run software.
We do have our own asymmetries like not having the profitability requirement and being able to onboard developers without the barriers the constraints of employment impose.
I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.
Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.
Not sure if I am making the correct inference of what you are hinting at, but my initial thoughts are that something that creates a broad distrust of social media would result in a better world than a world where pre-existing comrades are the only people who have that distrust with no way of breaking through the astroturfed counter narratives.
Given FOSS bros tendency towards liberalism and reactionary ideology, open source would probably be a bad way to deploy something like this. If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet…or at least minimally build a cadre of capable comrades I could trust to use it responsibly.
Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.
Often software success is measured by adoption. Let’s say tomorrow a turn key persona management system existed.
The most institutionalized levels of success possible is to be coopted by and contract out to an intelligence service (immediate pass, even the attention, immediate pass). However that means that such a system must unknowingly solve the problems of:
the features that are absolutely required for said service
the ease of migration of operations onto said service
be completely self evident to many at that service to be an answer for their problems
be a person that they could feel they could trust or manipulate into control
Very unlikely.
Another level of success is adoption in the general ecosystem. So now the DSA’s, PSL’s of the world can run persona management easily. Not really a big socialism success given you literally said it yourself it’s a tool that if proliferated creates a
“broad distrust of social media”.
So who are gonna be the biggest users of such a tool? Open your phone and look at your texts. That’s right the people who are shaking down grandparents, the people who are pretending to be a rich celebrity that has taken an interest in a lonely isolated person living in a rural community, scammers, flim flam artists, NFT enthusiasts, crypto bros.
The problem is that there is already a “broad distrust of social media”, that doesn’t stop humanity from using the communication tool, and that doesn’t lower the total incidences of exploitation that happen.
If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet
Lol China would not have you. This is a movie plot. They don’t want guys who make “rocking the boat technology” at all. You think they’d want some OSS enthusiasts running experiments with apes commenting on the net in their green zone? They have their own versions. They have their own trusted operators. This is like adoption with any other intelligence service.
In general the problem with this technology is literally like nukes. It shouldn’t exist. It’s easier to make social systems without its existence. This tech doesn’t change anything, it makes a better integrated version of desperate components of an existing system.
If tomorrow at the same time everyone woke up with a turnkey nuclear bomb, Israel would pre-emptively nuke Gaza.
The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have “promoted posts” for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.
You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.
Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, “to protect researcher identities”.
The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.
Most software out there isn’t a highly capable consistent package. I’m sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM’s any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).
There are some OSS tools out there in various states of quality like:
I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.
Typically your keywords are “persona management”, “sock puppet tools” etc.
Thank you for this info. Lots of great launch points for looking deeper into this.
Observation of the development of FOSS ecosystems seems to back this up and does give me some hope for the state of technology to build alternatives to capitalist run software.
We do have our own asymmetries like not having the profitability requirement and being able to onboard developers without the barriers the constraints of employment impose.
Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.
Not sure if I am making the correct inference of what you are hinting at, but my initial thoughts are that something that creates a broad distrust of social media would result in a better world than a world where pre-existing comrades are the only people who have that distrust with no way of breaking through the astroturfed counter narratives.
Given FOSS bros tendency towards liberalism and reactionary ideology, open source would probably be a bad way to deploy something like this. If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet…or at least minimally build a cadre of capable comrades I could trust to use it responsibly.
Often software success is measured by adoption. Let’s say tomorrow a turn key persona management system existed.
The most institutionalized levels of success possible is to be coopted by and contract out to an intelligence service (immediate pass, even the attention, immediate pass). However that means that such a system must unknowingly solve the problems of:
Very unlikely.
Another level of success is adoption in the general ecosystem. So now the DSA’s, PSL’s of the world can run persona management easily. Not really a big socialism success given you literally said it yourself it’s a tool that if proliferated creates a “broad distrust of social media”.
So who are gonna be the biggest users of such a tool? Open your phone and look at your texts. That’s right the people who are shaking down grandparents, the people who are pretending to be a rich celebrity that has taken an interest in a lonely isolated person living in a rural community, scammers, flim flam artists, NFT enthusiasts, crypto bros.
The problem is that there is already a “broad distrust of social media”, that doesn’t stop humanity from using the communication tool, and that doesn’t lower the total incidences of exploitation that happen.
Lol China would not have you. This is a movie plot. They don’t want guys who make “rocking the boat technology” at all. You think they’d want some OSS enthusiasts running experiments with apes commenting on the net in their green zone? They have their own versions. They have their own trusted operators. This is like adoption with any other intelligence service.
In general the problem with this technology is literally like nukes. It shouldn’t exist. It’s easier to make social systems without its existence. This tech doesn’t change anything, it makes a better integrated version of desperate components of an existing system.
If tomorrow at the same time everyone woke up with a turnkey nuclear bomb, Israel would pre-emptively nuke Gaza.