1. Vulture capitalism should not exist.
2. People who abuse the elderly should be dressed in baby seal outfits and sent out in front of YeeHawdists with clubs.
3. Jaybird CEO Kevin Russell is a bad person who does bad things and should feel bad.
The only arrangement for supporting a critical mass of talent to dedicate themselves in this way has been #venturecapital . But this model is so flawed and counter to the values that must be embedded in the new technologies we need, its a non-starter.
On the other hand, risk averse institutions that lack technical acumen cannot underwrite random promises to "change the world". So there is growing gap between what is possible with a bit of conviction and what is actually done.
2/2
My “not a book review” of Careless People – the book Facebook doesn’t want you to read.
With highlights on Ireland’s complicity and the lengths people farmers (as I call them) will go to to appease authoritarian regimes like China.
https://ar.al/2025/03/21/careless-people/
It’s clear from this that Ireland should be stripped of the authority to enforce GDPR and, really, people farmers – and the business model of people farming in general – should be banned in the EU.
(Don’t hold your breaths.)
Which #Messenger To Replace the #DataKraken #WhatsApp with? 
(4/n)
....value anymore. The future of #Matrix always seems somehow, em.. unconfirmed? An interesting project. I wonder where it will go. There's been a LOT of #VC [#VentureCapital] funding up to now, one might assume some return is expected at some point. Maybe not though. I've run #Jabber servers in the past,...
So today I'm taking a break from lamenting the state of my fascist nation led by a meglomaniac and returning to my roots: Taking pot shots at the tech industry. Today we are specifically taking a pound of flesh out of one of the most maligned groups of all: VCs.
Specifically in this case, the VCs that run Y-Combinator and their seeming infatuation with with the new fad called "vibe coding"
Spoiler: I already posted this link on HackerNews (run by Y-Combinator) and unsurprisingly, it has gotten no traction (just like my two other most recent posts). They can't add a proper dark mode, but they sure can shadow ban right up there with the best of em!
https://itfossil.com/posts/2025/3/vibe-coding-and-endless-optimization-are-for-fools/
Complaining about enshittification does belie a certain lack of awareness of always having been swimming in shit.
" China will set up a government-backed fund in the near future that will mobilize 1 trillion yuan ($138.01 billion) from social capital to support technology startups, Zheng Shanjie, the head of China's state planner, said on Thursday.
The "national venture capital guidance fund" - an investment vehicle set up as public-private partnership - would focus on "hard technology", Zheng told a news conference, referring to areas such as semiconductors and renewable energy.
The fund, will maintain long-term investment cycles, increasing tolerance for risk, and invest in technology enterprises through market-based approaches, the director of the National Development and Reform Commission said."
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Episode 52 - The Anti-Bookclub Tackles 'Superagency'
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/videos/watch/b370c625-1846-43c6-a70a-894291075b2f
When trying to find “European alternatives” to US products – to avoid looking like a 
– ensure that your “alternative” is not funded by US venture capital.
The Camera Panopticon
How did we end up in technofascism? Watch this talk I gave over a decade ago warning of the dangers of Silicon Valley and Big Tech and urging us to embrace alternatives.
https://small-tech.org/videos/the-camera-panopticon/
(Transcript available in English, Español, and Nederlands, thanks to the community.)
Great new piece by @Daojoan - Why personal websites matter more than ever https://www.joanwestenberg.com/why-personal-websites-matter-more-than-ever
"Social networks came along with the seductive - and entirely bullshit - promise of 'easier publishing.' Running a website is too hard, they told us (it’s not), it’s too expensive (it wasn’t), and finding an audience is impossible (never true). In the world they promised us, backed up by a credulous media that breathlessly and unquestioningly reported on their Fauxtopian visions, we could replace our websites with their tools and thrive. By abandoning our properties for Facebook pages and channels, we could tap into a global audience with the potential to become household names on a web that would connect every human being.
It was a vision they had to sell us at any cost. Why? Because the venture capitalists who funded these platforms - Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk - needed a return, one way or another. The path to that return was forced centralization, bringing in every creator and user and eliminating any other channel or option."
“A venture capital-backed ‘AI performance monitoring system for factory workers’ is proposing what appears to be dehumanizing surveillance of factories, where machine vision tracks workers’ hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs and yell at them about efficiency.”
https://www.404media.co/optifyeai-ycombinator-startup-ai-factory/
@drtcombs.bsky.social For the people following on Mastodon, here's a screenshot of the Mark Cuban post that Tab was referring to (full text in the caption):
it will get worse
the #vulturecapital #venturecapital will exert its inevitable poison
#bluesky is as surely doomed as #twitter
just a matter of time
@SearingTruth @hamishb @JapanProf
i disagree
if something is #decentralized it can't be taken over by #venturecapital
that's a huge difference in my view
you're worried about the dominant human sentiment
positive aspects of human sentiment can become dominant again in a system where #ignorance and #indecency is warded against, rather than amplified on purpose by #plutocrat agendas like on #centralized #socialmedia
a system like the #fediverse #mastodon *has* to grow
to save us
An excellent article by @AnnPettifor on how private equity has taken advantage of the modern state where she says capitalism now bears uncomfortable semblance to the Soviet economic system.
#PrivateEquity #VentureCapital #StateCapitalism #Deregulation #Economics
Private Equity as Public Debt - by Ann Pettifor
https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/private-equity-as-public-debt
Ed Zitron’s previous piece “The Rot Economy” should be mandatory reading for anyone curious about the environment in which tech companies exist today.
“Venture pumps millions or billions of dollars into ideas that might sell a product or a service, but ultimately resemble things that can be sold to other companies or put on the public market for a profit higher than what was paid on a per-share basis. I once suggested that Silicon Valley conflated “making great ideas work” with “making ideas I like work,” but on consideration, many of these companies aren’t even things venture capitalists like - they are things that resemble things that they can sell. Do I genuinely believe that everyone who invested into the Web3 grift was a strident believer in the brave new decentralized economy? Hell no. They just went where the winds blew — or where they seemed to be blowing.”
Save Social Media From Billionaire Capture: freeourfeeds.com?
"But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app."
I see the executive director and president of Mozilla Foundation as their technical advisors, no surprise. But it surprises me to have the executive director of the Social Web Foundation (@swf) there.
Any thoughts, @evan ?
It also surprised me to see Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, involved.
