Walter Water-Walker

There is a dialectic between theory (or head knowledge) and practice. To be a Marxist is to do both things, working through that dialectic to evolve yourself as a practicianer. Additionally, to be a Marxist in practice necessitates interaction with an organized group of other Marxists. This interaction will challenge you to resolve conflicts between ideas, theories, strategies and so forth and develop a practical version of democratic centralism for your organization.

Those who think that Marxism is just learning theory aren’t actually practicing Marxism. They become purists and commit the error of dogmatism. Many Trotskyists fall into this camp (I won’t say all Trotskyists, but I’m still looking for counter-examples). It’s why a Trotskyists probably knows Marxist theory better than I do but is also the most useless leftist on the planet (and can often even become useful to the bourgeoisie!).

If you only ever read theory and do not put it into practice, you are simply doing so for some personal reasons, like to feel smarter than others because you have an insecurity. This is not just useless but dangerous because people like this can sound really smart and like they know what they’re talking about for new leftists. But because they offer no real solution to the material problems of those around them nor any practical avenues for the proletariat to direct their anger and pain from capitalism towards revolutionary action, it drains the energy away from more serious praxis.

Praxis is the hard part. It’s why many don’t do it. But it’s what actually makes any of this make sense.

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — Karl Marx

Does anybody have resources on AGI being a real possibilities beyond just a marketing term and, one day, just a mashup of various different things of AI?

I haven’t read anything about AGI that isn’t a “tech bro” kind of approach. Also, I don’t see how AGI is anything more than a marketing term where, once enough shitty jobs are replaced by it, they’ll hail it a success and that’s pretty much it.

I want an AI, for example, to analyze the material conditions of a country and plan a Communist revolution for me. Can I have that? Will capitalism produce this for me?

He’s a gaffe machine.

Tanks. Lots and lots of T-34s.

To be clear, capital - the value produced from society that is cycled back into society to develop further surplus - isn’t the problem, it’s capital within capitalism. Capital doesn’t have the “insatiable appetite” but rather capitalists, who control most of the capital, do. How we handle capital is a large part of what defines the system.

“What? Me? On equal ground with the dirty commoner? Good heavens, no!” - bourgeoisie

Human psychology suggests that major life changes require a lot of time to process the internalization we have while going through them. We have to unpack things and question our own assumptions and be honest with ourselves on things we thought we’d never have to be honest with ourselves about.

I think that most people becoming socialists are coming from the toxic ideology of liberalism. Liberalism is a mental cage, designed to keep people captive in the predominant mode, all while thinking they’re actually free! When becoming a socialist, it’s a real struggled to free oneself from the shackles of liberal thought. It’s really, really tough. And it takes a lot of time, just like any change.

During a transition period from liberalism to socialism (technically, Marxism), people go through large periods of doubt and frustration and pessimism. But don’t let that get you off track. It’s natural and normal. You’re just starting to see the world for what it is, rather than what the powerful want you to believe it is. And the world is confusing and wild and lots of ugly. So it’s alarming.

Keep the course. Stay steady on. You’ll get out of the murky waters eventually. Once you can use material dialectics to analyze news and current events and history and movies and … then you’ll start realizing that the world was always this way and there’s no real sense in getting down about it. Live your life, do your part and push things a little further along.

None of the timings of things are up to us. It’s only on us to be ready for when the moment’s right. And to be humble enough to also be ready for that moment to be after we’re gone. Regardless of the circumstances, a socialist’s job is always the same: educate, agitate and organize.

Ferengi are the ultimate capitalist realists.

Because it’s not “failing”, the Internet is fragmenting off into large factions. Step 1 has been capitalism commodifying information, resulting in most information taking one of two forms: siloed off into private databases or SEO sites designed to fish people into siloed off sites. Step 2 is now taking the form of political factions as the world becomes multi-polar again (China, USA and Russia, essentially). Large super powers push their domination in the form of information and each claiming they’re right so you don’t need to worry about all that other stuff.

The concept of the Internet being global is dead. The concept of the Internet being content created by regular people for regular people is dead. Search engines are just showing us this with their results. Which is why sites like duckduckgo aren’t even enough at this point. We are, in effect, just entering a “dark age” of the Internet, where we can expect whole sections to simply not be accessible to us anymore.

To build an entirely new search engine, with broad indexing and showing us real results again that are relevant, you’d need massive amounts of capital. You can’t get that capital from private investment because there’s no profit in doing this. You can’t get that from public funds because it’s not in the interest of governments to go against their chosen hegemony. You’d have to grass-roots the effort, which would be a very precarious endeavor that, even if it launched (which would be a miracle), it would be difficult to maintain. Even models like Wikimedia aren’t actually sustainable. Wikipedia ultimately curtails to the Western world, as it’s moderators and editors largely make up the same hegemonic viewpoint. And Wikimedia doesn’t have to do indexing of the entire web, which, at minimum, requires substantially more compute power than they currently use.

EDIT: It’s also worth mentioning at this point that a project to “fix the Internet” is probably low on the list of things to “fix” right now. So any leftists taking on the challenge should be aware that they’re spending gobs of resources and time on something that only the upper-tier of individuals care about in this world. Time and money would be better spent towards humanitarian aid as people get displaced due to climate change. Or in funding revolutions for areas of the world that are ready for it. By no means am I suggesting we should do a Google rewrite. I’m simply pointing out that everything we should have predicted capitalism doing to information is coming to pass and while things are shitty, they’ll definitely get shittier and we shouldn’t be surprised. Nor should we really care much, IMO. Because the core issue is just the contradictions within capitalism manifesting themselves into the Internet. Trying to fix the Internet is working backwards and, frankly, will probably be a fruitless endeavor. We Marxian-read leftists should know better.

Not saying we should trust it or anything but NordVPN does have a “no-logs” policy.