Comment on What happened to techbros from the 90s to now?
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
What I think a lot of people fail to put together, is that this is the end-game of the early ideologies of the internet.
Think about internet piracy and the change from Napster to Bittorrent.
In the tech world, even since the early days, tech was seen as a way to route around bad laws. In the early days, copyright laws were viewed as overly draconian (they are, but that’s not the point), so piracy flourished by routing around the legal framework.
What has happened is the power and wealth of some people with those ideologies have grown so big, they now view all laws that prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want as “bad laws to route around.”
It can be seen at OpenAI where they knowingly used books3 to initially train their AIs, which was well known to have been sourced from piracy. OpenAI doesn’t care about the provenance of the data as long as they can legally route around the copyright issue and make a fuckton of money in the process.
Anyway, it’s a deeply libertarian ideology that was accidentally spurred from earlier, more anarchist ideologies, within the tech community. I would peg tech nerds from the 90s as more anarchist, and tech nerds of the modern era as having bought into the technolibertarianism that began to grow out of it.
BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 3 days ago
You emphasized the words well known but provide no links to back that up because I’ve never known
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
huggingface.co/datasets/…/the_pile_books3
I say “well known” because it was literally in the description when it was initially uploaded to the internet. It was always right out in the front that this was all the ebooks from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Shawn Presser/books3 never lied about where it came from.
BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 3 days ago
Thank you for the links and reading!