this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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learned helplessness is going "we own nothing and we'll be happy" or more accurately being entirely apathetic to the existence of no longer having ownership.
in my experience, the vast majority of people (in tech circles) that use that phrase, are practicing what they preach.
No, learned helplessness is "we own nothing, it sucks, yet we see no alternative and we gave up on looking".
If you were to imply that's my situation happy to report it's not, cf https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence or how I, just as an example, deleted my e.g Google and Meta accounts few years ago, and gave a workshops to RightsCon last year, unfortunately not recorded.
Well to be specific here. The example of learned helplessness that everyone loves citing, is when we put animals in a cage with a floor that will continually give them an electric shock that is impossible to avoid. And what is commonly seen is that the animals eventually just stop caring, become apathetic in a sense, and just wait to be shocked.
So my application of apathy here applies, and is reflected in your interpretation as well. So realistically the best way to phrase it would be "We own nothing."
Then those people are not citing the experiment properly because the whole point about it is NOT that it's unavoidable. The experiment goes on an the threat is actually removed YET animals, either the same or new ones who get in touch with the others who were subject to the threat, keep on not trying. They LEARNED to become helpless despite the situation being objectively solvable.
ok but the thing here is that this is all still new. Owning nothing doesn't exist yet.
Corpos would like for us to own nothing, or at the very least it seems like everything is moving that direction. I.E. we're being put in the cage.
Exactly the kind of learned helplessness that I'm fighting against. Sure a LOT of content is now only streamed and behind DRM ... but it is NOT all content. In fact maybe even quality content exist precisely outside such platform. Even if it's less than 50%, heck even if it's 1%, it might be enough. The whole of my argument is precisely that making shortcuts like "everything" are supporting the narrative that no alternatives exist, while it is simply not true. This is a great example of the problem. Please do not spread such ideas because that's doing the job of the "Corpos" you seem to want to criticize.
yeah no, i fundamentally disagree with you though. Your argument essentially seems to boil down into "but actually, it's not as bad as you think it is" which is a really fucking weird point to hold when it comes to this kind of stuff. That or you're ignoring how bad it is, because of something else, which you seem to be more focused on.
I still don't see what the point of this is. This is basically the equivalent of giving someone shit for calling out a racist because "well actually, thats what racists want, they want their shit to be spread"