Comment by lkey
6 months ago
| Drop the politics
Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation of energy costs is about as political as a topic can get.
Economic uncertainty (firings, wage depression) brought on by the promises of AI is about as political as it gets. There's no 'pure world' of 'engineering only' concerns when the primary goals of many of these billionaires is leverage this hype, real and imagined, into reshaping the global economy in their preferred form.
The only people that get to be 'apolitical' are those that have already benefitted the most from the status quo. It's a privilege.
Hear hear, It's funny having seen the same issue pop up in video game forums/communities. People complaining about politics in their video games after decades of completely straight faced US military propaganda from games like Call of Duty but because they agree with it it wasn't politics. To so many people politics begins where they start to disagree.
There are politics and there are Politics, and I don't think the two of you are using the same definition. 'Making decisions in groups' does not require 'oversimplifying issues for the sake of tribal cohesion or loyalty'. It is a distressingly common occurrence that complex problems are oversimplified because political effectiveness requires appealing to a broader audience.
We'd all be better off if more people withheld judgement while actually engaging with the nuances of a political topic instead of pushing for their team. The capacity to do that may be a privilege but it's a privilege worth earning and celebrating.
My definition is the definition. You cannot nuance wash the material conditions that are increasing tribal polarization. Rising inequality and uncertainty create fear and discontent, people that offer easy targets for that resentment will have more sway.
The rise of populist polemic as the most effective means for driving public behavior is also downstream from 'neutral technical solutions' designed to 'maximize engagement (anger) to maximize profit'. This is not actually a morally neutral choice and we're all dealing with the consequence. Adding AI is fuel for the fire.
The negatively coded, tribal/political speech can be referred to as 'Polemic' which stems from 'warlike' expression.
And polemic is an entirely legitimate form of political action.
Would you rather starve or never lie about those that would starve you?
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IMO this is one of those areas where we (English speakers, likely most other languages as well) collectively suffer from ambiguous words.
It might be more accurate to say "drop the partisanship" or "drop the in/out-group generalizations", etc.