𝑨𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒏𝒔 𝑨𝒓𝒆 𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝒍𝒈𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒉𝒎𝒊𝒄 𝑪𝒂𝒈𝒆

"The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/trump-administration-voter-perception/681598

“#Microsoft walking back its climate commitment is a great example of why we need binding state and federal #climate laws, not corporate pledges that are reneged when they become inconvenient to profits and shareholders”
#climatefriendly #it #bigtech #unplugtrump #opensource #foss #ClimateAction #datacenter #ki #ai
https://urbanmilwaukee.com/pressrelease/microsoft-shrugs-off-company-climate-goals-to-support-burning-methane-gas-for-ai-data-centers/

"Anyone at an AI company who stops to think for half a second should be able to recognize they have a vampiric relationship with the commons. While they rely on these repositories for their sustenance, their adversarial and disrespectful relationships with creators reduce the incentives for anyone to make their work publicly available going forward (freely licensed or otherwise). They drain resources from maintainers of those common repositories often without any compensation. They reduce the visibility of the original sources, leaving people unaware that they can or should contribute towards maintaining such valuable projects. AI companies should want a thriving open access ecosystem, ensuring that the models they trained on Wikipedia in 2020 can be continually expanded and updated. Even if AI companies don’t care about the benefit to the common good, it shouldn’t be hard for them to understand that by bleeding these projects dry, they are destroying their own food supply.

And yet many AI companies seem to give very little thought to this, seemingly looking only at the months in front of them rather than operating on years-long timescales. (Though perhaps anyone who has observed AI companies’ activities more generally will be unsurprised to see that they do not act as though they believe their businesses will be sustainable on the order of years.)

It would be very wise for these companies to immediately begin prioritizing the ongoing health of the commons, so that they do not wind up strangling their golden goose. It would also be very wise for the rest of us to not rely on AI companies to suddenly, miraculously come to their senses or develop a conscience en masse.

Instead, we must ensure that mechanisms are in place to force AI companies to engage with these repositories on their creators' terms."

https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

Vandaag bijeenkomst van @nllgg met de interessante sessie:

"Weg bij Big Tech", door @Cambion zie
https://nllgg.nl/vorigesite/mc-events/weg-bij-big-tech-jessica-tran-1200-1300u-zaal-1/

Goed idee! en zodra je hiermee klaar bent, doen we ook het Nederlandse onderwijs even

Had enough of big tech browser corpos like Google (Chrome) or Mozilla (Firefox) collecting your data and selling them to Advertisers?

Then it is time to uninstall them and get yourself a Norwegian browser Vivaldi with 0 external investors!

https://vivaldi.com/

The FLOSS movement has failed to build a true counter power to Big Tech's hegemony.

However, I see this potential for tech autonomy with community tech.

It builds on the nonprofit, community centered aspects of free and open source software, while addressing its shortcomings.

Boosts and opinions on what I've outlined in my blog post very welcomed.

#FOSS #FLOSS #OpenSource #CommunityTech #BigTech #SurveillanceCapitalism

https://www.clayton.computer/community-tech-moving-beyond-free-and-open-source-software/

@pluralistic I’m reading chapter 12 of Chokepoint Capitalism and it’s really sad to see how we are very far away from fair antitrust policies, especially now with an oligarchical government run by the Big Tech. It’s somehow disheartening.

#bigtech #monopoly #uspol #ChokepointCapitalism #books #reading @bookstodon

Het zijn niet alleen scholen die volledig afhankelijk zijn geraakt van BigTech bedrijven die er geheel andere waarden op na houden dan de scholen zelf. Hier een interessant onderzoek en blog over gemeenten en publieke instellingen in heel Europa:

https://jurgen.gaeremyn.be/2025/03/08/european-critical-dependencies/

One of the things I've been advocating for years - and where I want to raise my voice even louder - is the importance of owning your data. #OwnYourData

Over the past few days, I’ve come across two examples of how misinformation is causing immense damage, leading people to believe that there's no alternative but to hand over their data to big corporations, putting themselves entirely in their hands.

- A well-known lawyer, just before a meeting, warned about using Teams and its new "virtual assistant," which joins conferences before anyone else and transcribes everything. When I pointed out that it would be wise to use alternative tools (like Jitsi, for example, but there are others), he abruptly ended the conversation, saying, "We've lost this war. There's no alternative anymore."
That wasn’t the right moment for a detailed discussion, so I just noted that alternatives do exist - but if no one starts using them, and if we passively accept certain behaviors from certain companies, things will never improve for us.

- Just now, I received another one of those emails that hurt more in the heart than in the wallet: "Our e-commerce is taking off, so we’re moving it to Shopify to better manage our growth."
I replied, trying to explain that handing over a growing e-commerce business to a third-party company (right now, they have full access to their own server - meaning all their databases, data, etc., are under their control) means losing ownership of it. Prices could change at any moment, contract terms could shift negatively, and, worst case scenario, if Shopify itself faced issues (which seems impossible today, but think of giants like Kodak), they could lose everything. Of course, they’ll do what they think is best, but I feel obligated to warn them.

Luckily, others are making the opposite choice. But I keep wondering: since these big platforms aren’t exactly cheap, rather than "selling themselves" to them just for (potentially) fewer headaches, wouldn’t it be worth paying someone (not me, of course, but someone working exclusively for them) to handle these things - ensuring they retain full ownership of their business and their data?

We are seeing more and more people heading our way. It is a response to people being fed up with Big Tech and their role in current affairs. Have you made the switch yet? Are you ready to make it? Have you told your friends?

https://vivaldi.com

#Vivaldi #BigTech #Windows #Macos #Linux #Android #ios #Politics @Vivaldi

"In late January, a crack appeared in the façade. The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek released R1 (a rival to OpenAI’s reasoning model), and the company’s app quickly became the most downloaded free program in the iOS App Store. “They proved that you can make a reasoning model for cheap, and you can run it for cheaper” than Silicon Valley companies, Zitron said. It would no longer be necessary for companies like Nvidia to release an expensive new chip every year. In a panic, the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index dropped about a trillion dollars in value in one day, with Nvidia alone losing nearly six hundred billion in market capitalization.

Remembering the insanity of that day, Zitron smiled. He described talking with hedge-fund managers and startup founders afterward: “Everyone was sitting around going, ‘Wait, why are we spending three hundred billion dollars on cap-ex?’ ” DeepSeek’s success showed that the narrative around A.I. was wrong. “It removed the sheen from OpenAI,” Zitron said. The market and the tech companies have not fully recovered, and Zitron said that people in the tech world are “unsettled—everyone knows that something’s shifted.”

Zitron doesn’t consider himself a tech fatalist. He can still find what he calls “genuine magic” in tech, such as the use of gallium nitride in batteries and chargers. “But then there’s all of these assholes who are making all of this money getting in the way of the cool shit that tech does,” he said.

He took a bite of his plum fried chicken. Then another."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/can-artificial-intelligence-stir-fry

INVITATION TIL WEBINAR

Ud af tech-giganternes kløer – hvordan din organisation kan frigøre sig fra afhængighed af store tech-virksomheder

Er din kommune eller organisation afhængig af store tech-virksomheder som Microsoft og Google? Ønsker du at øge din teknologiske selvstændighed og reducere omkostningerne?

Så er dette webinar lige noget for dig!

Vi vil gennemgå, hvordan du kan overgå til alternative løsninger, der giver dig mere kontrol, fleksibilitet og sikkerhed. Vores eksperter vil dele praktiske råd og eksempler på succesfulde overgangsprojekter, så du kan træffe den rigtige beslutning for din organisation.

Dato og tid: Onsdag den 2. april 2025 kl. 9.00

Varighed: 45 minutter

Målgruppe
IT-ledere og -chefer i danske kommuner og virksomheder
Beslutningstagere, der ønsker at modernisere deres teknologiske infrastruktur
IT-professionelle, der ønsker at forstå de seneste trends og løsninger

Bliv klogere på
Fordele ved at frigøre sig fra store tech-virksomheder: Hvordan du kan øge din teknologiske selvstændighed, spare licenser væk og opnå sikkerhed ift. GDPR-lovgivning.
Alternative løsninger: Introduktion til specifikke open source produkter, som kan implementeres og benyttes allerede i dag.
Tjekliste og anbefalinger: Praktiske råd og en tjekliste for, hvordan du kommer i gang med din overgang
Stil spørgsmål: Mulighed for at stille spørgsmål til vores eksperter og modtage personlige råd

Tilmelding
https://www.semaphor.dk/opensource/webinar

Tech bros are living, breathing embodiments of the false authority fallacy; claiming that their professed understanding of basic logic qualifies them to reason expertly upon every conceivable topic while conveniently ignoring a fundamental maxim of their purported core area of expertise: garbage in, garbage out.

Namiestnik europejskiej kolonii USA:

Nextcloud Hub 10 introduces Nextcloud Assistant 3.0 with #AIAgency, end-to-end encryption, and performance boosts!

Break free from #BigTech: choose privacy and innovation with Nextcloud!

#Nextcloud #OpenSource #E2EE #PrivateCloud

https://youtu.be/OkGd_pNuYww

Happy 10th anniversary to Spyware 2.0 – the video we released at the launch of Ind.ie (what is now Small Technology Foundation¹).

Have we learned any lessons in those ten years, I wonder.

https://vimeo.com/116656700

#spyware #SiliconValley #BigTech #technology #fascism #technoFascism #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #surveillanceCapitalism

¹ https://small-tech.org

Idea of #karlmarx s alienation or weber s objection to his very definition of class and www
If someone works in #google can they end up buying their own #alphabet product one day
But the means of production here can be free , thanks to open source , but can they be?
I mean server cost is never free , #labor isnt free of cost , tax cuts re not free, nor is marketing and lawsuits
But #bigtech folks dont go through alienation
Why , because they share political control ( ie bargain position ) , which can be different from ownership , while the latter , including the value, which they can influence of their stock holding is reduced in that accord and they end up being better off than their peers in #academia or #foss as bigtech is now big enough to influence policy making for that
The dictated aspect of #gametheory .
Afaik weber didnt highlight the rich gets richer or big gets bigger part