Lady @Lady@cat.family

@coriander so people in the U·S hear “heavy metal is my religion” and assume there is a belief system at play, or some kind of ideology, when actually what is important about heavy metal is “issues of family, cultural integrity, the transmission of tradition, sacrificial offerings, concerns of purity, ethical system, and the enforcement thereof” (to quote Wikipedia)

but the important thing is that the latter can also be the basis of religion; belief systems are optional (just not in Protestant Christianity)

@coriander one thing which might help shed some light on this is that sports and heavy metal are orthopraxy religions, not orthodoxy religions (and protestants consider the former to be pagan nonsense, so we don’t have many good examples of them in the U·S)

@coriander i’m 95% confident that religious studies doctorates would be entirely on board with you saying heavy metal is your religion

@coriander i never want to recall anything i do on a computer

@aescling @coriander tl;dr capitalism doesn’t optimize for unemployment, it optimizes for employing the most people in the least fulfilling way possible

@aescling @coriander (the companies who build AI might be fine with you typing “make money” and getting money so long as they get a cut, but it’s important to recognize that even in this case “typing ‘make money’” is just the menial task you are being employed to do)

@aescling @coriander the whole idea behind Microsoft Copilot is to make work which happens on a computer accessible to people without training or experience, so companies can hire people without training or experience

it’s being used to eliminate some positions entirely, sure (get rid of secretary who writes your emails by having computer write your emails), but no CEO wants you to just be able to type “make money” into a computer and get money, because that weakens their own position

they want making money to be restricted to people like themselves, who have the resources to employ others in menial tasks, while preventing the people engaged in those tasks from having any connection with the value created by their labour

@aescling @coriander execs do not want to have to do everything themselves, they just want to be able to hire unskilled workers to do tasks which formerly required skilled workers, because it means the workers lose their bargaining powrr

@aescling @coriander no, the hope is to make human labour more replaceable (not the same thing)

@coriander well, really the reason why it’s getting shoved in everywhere is because we have monopolistic and value-extractive tech companies who don’t have to actually please customers to sell product

@coriander but what if they add an ice level