You did not correctly read the text. Winner’s essay is “Do artifacts have politics?” i.e. does a particular bridge instantiate some politics, not bridges in general.

So a particular bridge which is designed to exclude black children from school by stopping the bus carrying them sits there having racist politics. Another bridge designed to help black kids get to school might be anti-racist in its politics. They are two separate artefacts.

The author is arguing that the machines as they exist, are fascist artefacts. If you made one say with consent of everyone involved, that could not be used for commercial purposes somehow, the data and outputs were not curated via exploitation of people from the global south, the data were made to be representative of humans truly etc then this would not be a fascist artefact. The author doesn’t really specifically address this as a possibility because I think it’s clear that (a) this isn’t happening and (b) it actually can’t at the moment.

Do you have thoughts on the article? I think this and his article on vulgar displays of power are interesting critques.

As I’m sure you’re aware lots of folks in our field cannot write shell script to save their lives.

Basic scripting was a requirement for being a sysadmin. If you can’t script you can’t sysadmin, you can maybe be the IT person but idk it’s a skill that takes a year to learn well. Shell is a very restricted language. This was 15 years ago, maybe things have changed. I know some people run around with microsoft certs and cisco certs pretending they are qualified to do more than resell (for free lol) products but companies shouldn’t hire those people.

At least when I worked in the field a basically competant linux sysadmin got paid around 40k usd a year. It was not highly paid work, almost every dork and any programmer who was willing to sit and read “the art and practice of system administration” could do it. You need one whizz on your team and a few technicians to carry out their vision.

I was not a programmer or engineer, just a sysadmin.

Idk thousands? we were a hosting provider lol. Don’t want to dox myself. Not sure how regions come into it, I mean if you can write shell and some orchistration language you’re golden for anything.

We had some PCI stuff, I relapsed smoking because of getting through it haha. We were also halfway through getting the Australian government PII/gov contract thing when I left.

Most people suck at passing audit compliance because they try to box tick rather than explain how their tailored systems meet and exceed the requirements.

We used to use KVM and qemu. There was no serious overhead maintaining them.

In his influential 1980’s paper “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Langdon Winner argues that this view of “neutral technology” does not hold up. That the politics of specific artifacts do not just come from who uses the technology and for what purpose but that technologies have built-in politics that stem from the political views and goals of the people building the technology as well as their internal structure.

He shows this by pointing at how certain bridges were built racist: When the civil rights movement in the US got black kids the right to go to the often better schools that used to only accept white kids, politicians did for example plan roads and bridges in a way that the buses that were supposed to take the black kids to the white schools could not pass the bridges and roads. This was not oversight but design intent. The racism is built into the structure of the artifact itself.

Winner also argues that certain technologies imply certain political or social structures in order to exist: The nuclear bomb implies not just scientists who can build it and a state thinking that that form of destruction is a valid form of acting in the world but also a security state capable of controlling and defending it. You simply cannot build a nuclear bomb without those structures, they are implied if not required, enforced by the artifact itself.

Winner’s work does not argue that the embedded politics of an artifact are always absolute: We do know of many potentially oppressive technologies that have been taken by artists and activists to turn them against their original use. But that is always an uphill battle: Surveillance will always lean towards a more forceful, rigid, less free understanding of government for example. You can use (counter-)surveillance of course but you always have to be aware of not reproducing the logic you are trying to criticize or attack.

Nobody is claiming all technology is fascist, but all embodies some politics and some of that politics is fascist.

Well on your whole “it’s just what’s more common” this sort of entrenching of the “norm” as what is true is specifically one of the criticisms raised, so it seems strange to raise it as a defense, further much of the training data for all models is in english and reflects global north values and perspectives, particularly european and american because this is what has been digitised.

He also writes about the issues with centralisation and control, disinformation, lack of consent, undermining of government accountability/devaluing of institutions and transparency. It seems weird to dismiss this all as “just use a distillation of chatgpt run by a chinese company”.

There are FOSS hypervisors that are more than adequate for almost everyone’s useage. I would not advise anyone to make any single company a critical part of their infrastructure unless you are tightly integrated in a mutually beneficial arrangement.

If you have your own sysadmin then you don’t tend to get as fucked, alternatively migrating hypervisor software is a fuckload easier than migrating from a cloud service provider.

Read the whole article, don’t just react to a single bit I highlighted.

I was working as a sadmin (like a sysadmin but more alcoholism) when the _cloud butt became all the rage.

Suddenly nobody wanted to host services on the hypervisor down the road, administered by someone you could _throttle call in a crisis. Nobody wanted to hire a monkey to keep their local tubes clean and run the basic stuff they needed.

Everyone could tell you that once they had your overbuilt shit locked in to their very specific apis and services they had you by the short and curlies and by god were they gonna squeeze for all you were worth.

Alas, nobody cared because initial offerings were cheap and your stupid magento storefront had to be webscale.

Now 6 companies control the internet and everything else is going that way too.

It’s a shame you feel that polluting our cultural heritage with bullshit, and damaging people’s brains, is worth being able to sit on your arse.

Using chatgpt carries its own death sentence

That list is divided into “extract rents” and “work a job” It seems kinda weird to call a job passive income just because you’re not paid a wage. But no I don’t mean people buying a book you wrote.

Where does the money come from lol? It doesn’t grow on trees. Stocks are labour appropriation, rent is labour appropriation, interest on investments? Who’s paying lol, the bank? No, people in the bank’s debt that they credited with your money.

Passive income is just labour appropriation and deserves the death sentence.