A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in the name of purity, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Pilar Troya Fernández, Ana Maldonado &Vijay Prashad (Posted to Monthly Review Magazine, Nov 20 2019)

3,223 words

excerpt:
Revolutions are not easy to make. They are filled with retreats and errors, since they are made by people who are flawed and whose political parties must always learn to learn. Their teacher is their experience, and it is those amongst them who have the training and time to elaborate their experiences into lessons. No revolution is without its own mechanisms to correct itself, its own voices of dissent. But that does not mean that a revolutionary process should be deaf to criticisms; it should welcome them.

Criticism is always welcome, but in what form does that criticism come? These are two forms that are typical of the ‘left’ critic who derides revolutions in the name of purity.

1. If the criticism comes from the standpoint of perfect, then their standard is not only too high, but it fails to understand the nature of class struggle that must contend with congealed power inherited over generations.
2. If the criticism assumes that all projects that contest the electoral domain will betray the revolution, then there is little understanding of the mass dimension of electoral projects and dual power experiments. Revolutionary pessimism halts the possibility of action. You cannot succeed if you do not allow yourself to fail, and to try again. This standpoint of critique provides only despair.

The ‘stubborn class struggle’ inside the revolutionary process should provide someone who is not part of the revolutionary process itself to be sympathetic not to this or that policy of a government, but to the difficulty—and necessity—of the process itself.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/57770463

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40875214

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/89595

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As you can compute for yourself, AI datacenter water use is not a substantial environmental problem. This long read spells out the argument numerically.

If you'd like a science educator trying to make the headline claim digestible, see here

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/640271

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Cross posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11378717

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/11742763

The novelist and short story writer JG Ballard, is known for conjuring warped and reimagined versions of the world he occupied. Dealing with strange exaggerations of realities and often detailing the breakdown of social norms, his unconventional works are hard to categorise.

Sitting on the edge of reality, these unsettling visions often provoked controversy. Eschewing a science-fiction of the distant future, Ballard described his own work as being set in "a kind of visionary present".

Today, as we contemplate generative AI writing texts, composing music and creating art, Ballard's visionary present yet again has something prescient and fresh to tell us.

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The topics in Ballard's fiction frequently reveal just how highly attuned he was to the subtleties of the emerging technological and social shifts that were, as he puts it, just below the surface. The fuse box of society was often rewired in his ideas.

And with generative AI there is undoubtedly something odd going on, to which Ballard's attention seems to have been drawn long before it even happened.

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Looking through the archive of an old arts magazine which Ballard used to edit, I discovered that he was writing about this futuristic concept way back in the 1960s, before going on to experiment with the earliest form of computer-generated poetry in the 1970s.

What I found did more than simply reveal echoes in the past: Ballard's vision actually reveals something new to us about these recent developments in generative AI.

Listening recently to the audiobook version of Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life, one very short passage seemed to speak directly to these contemporary debates about generative artificial intelligence and the perceived power of so-called large language models that create content in response to prompts. Ballard, who was born in 1930 and died in 2009, reflected on how, during the very early 1970s, when he was prose editor at Ambit (a literary quarterly magazine that published from 1959 until April 2023) he became interested in computers that could write:

I wanted more science in Ambit, since science was reshaping the world, and less poetry. After meeting Dr Christopher Evans, a psychologist who worked at the National Physical Laboratories, I asked him to contribute to Ambit. We published a remarkable series of computer-generated poems which Martin said were as good as the real thing. I went further, they were the real thing.

Ballard said nothing else about these poems in the book, nor does he reflect on how they were received at the time. Searching through Ambit back-issues issues from the 1970s I managed to locate four items that appeared to be in the series to which Ballard referred. They were all seemingly produced by computers and published between 1972 and 1977.

The first two are collections of what could be described as poetry. In both cases each of these little poems gathered together has its own named author (more of this below), but the whole collection carries the author names: Christopher Evans and Jackie Wilson (1972 and 1974). Ballard described Evans as a "hoodlum scientist" with "long black hair and craggy profile" who "raced around his laboratory in a pair of American sneakers, jeans and denim shirt open to reveal an iron cross on a gold chain".

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Ballard's view of the poems in 1974 seems consistent with the more recent comment included in his autobiography. A short introductory note to the second collection of pieces opens with what is said to be the "text of a letter from prose editor JG Ballard advising rejection of a well-known writer's copy". Apparently, Ballard wrote the following, which is quoted in brackets before the short pieces:

B's stuff is really terrible – he's an absolute dead end and doesn't seem to realise it … Much more interesting is this computer-generated material from Chris, which I strongly feel we should use a section of. What is interesting about these detective novels is that they were composed during the course of a lecture Chris gave at a big psychological conference in Kyoto, Japan, with the stories being generated by a terminal on the stage linked by satellite with the computer in Cleveland, Ohio. Now that's something to give these English so-called experimental writers to think about.

Whether these little computer-generated texts are stories, novels or poems is unclear and probably is a secondary issue to the automatic production of culture on display here. Ballard seems to have been taken with the new possibilities, and also seems to like the provocation it presents to other writers.

With the announcement the USA has completed its destruction of chemical weapons, I was reminded of this article explaining why nations seem willing to put an end to their use, but not cluster munitions or landmines.

Probably not what you're looking for, but I'm hyper passionate about land reclamation; a topic not a lot of people know much about.