wanderingmeomeo

wanderingmeomeo , 4 months ago

Yeah I seriously do not understand the hatred for very anarchism 101 takes happening in our instance recently. From what I observed, most people just care about clean energy technology and lifestyle without trying to engage in radical discussion about politics. The extent of their political concerns ends at very surface level environmental related issues.

Other social justice problems receive very little attention, just look at every post that is not strictly about environment and you'll see my point. It's such a HUGE shame since every single social justice issue: feminism, racism, state oppression, capitalism, and even environmental exploitation are heavily interconnected, to the point that it's hard to meaningfully solve one thing without extending the critical critiques to/shedding light on other problems.

Meanwhiles more explicitly radical, subversive political sentiments are collectively sneered at, like what the hell? How could you achieve the degrowth ethos inherent in solarpunk movement without discussing alternative mode of production, or stopping giving legitimacy to state-enforced institutions, or abolishing every single hierachy possible? Goddamn watching the reactions to very basic anarchistic notions makes my blood boil. I'm so tired of seeing the replication of lemmy.world politics in this supposedly anarchist instance.

wanderingmeomeo , 5 months ago

Eh, they don't care precisely because they believe they have the privilege to shield themselves, and their descendants from environmental catastrophe. Luxurious fallout bulkers are built right now to do just that: protect themselves and their children from iminent threats, be it mob riots or tsunami or nuclear fallout. They don't give a shit about the rest of us, and why would they? What do they have to gain from caring about us, it's just not in their interest to do that when they could afford to survive through this and we don't. They've already won the logic of the free market in a bloodthirsty, capital-centric world then surely they earned their superiority, and their place as the true, deserving heirs of the Earth reborn. Looking through their eyes, it's just natural selection.

wanderingmeomeo , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I'm not really sure, or, well, at least AI in what people tend to associate with nowadays. I think a solarpunk future is a future where degrowth is a main ethos for the development of the society. AI, as it currently exists, relies on global scale exploitation of not just artists, writers, but also people in the Global South living in abject conditions and are forced to accept mentally and physically damaging jobs to help "AI" to exist in the first place. Using AI, as far as I know, also comes with huge environmental costs simply because of how energy intensive it is to run and train its huge dataset. So the existence of stuffs like ChatGPT or Midjourney is a no go, unless "human ingenuity" could do something like being so cost effective energy wise that technology like that would require way less energy to run, or somehow the colonization of the universe would happen, but for the latter to happen will neccesarily require the kind of economy that centers growth above all else like capitalism.

Imo, Solarpunk technology should be local and open source and easily understandable for communities and individual to use, the factor of being environmentally friendly is also very significant and I don't think AI infrustructure would guarantee to fullfill those requirements.

That's the reason I would never understand the obsession with nuclear power or AI techinology of some solarpunk enthusiasts. These are all infrastrcutures that requires a degree of centralization of human and resouces, which drastically constrasts what solarpunk should be about. A solarpunk future is not fully automated luxury communism, but a low tech communism that still guarantees the well being of all. Low tech does not exist simply because of accessiblity, but also the capital E Environment.

Furthermore, the basic issue of human creativity being ripped off is also a thing that should be addressed. I don't belive in intellectual property, but we shouldn't need IP to protect arists from exploitation without consents. A solarpunk world is a world that respect human autonomy, so if an artist do not consent for their works to be used in training AI, their wish will be respectfully followed through. As an artist in art communities, I don't think that many people are fond of submitting their works to an AI so that others could code a drawing, so the dataset required for AI would not be enough, thus render AI useless. That's just creatives though, maybe scientists and researchers would hold different views? If that's the case, circle back to the question of energy intensity inherent in AI technology.

That's just AI in a very specific sense though, I don't know what constitute an AI. If AIs are just machines that can beat human at chess, or to predict patterns of local weather, or regulate irrugation system for farming, or organize documents, then sure, there's no reason why it should not exist in a solarpunk future. But the existence of such machinery should be put under scrutiny. If an AI could not be operated without significant environment impact, it has to go. Impressive techonology is not just codes, it's also very real, very material hardware that possess impressive processing power, and with it, impressive amount of energy, resources, and human power.

To address your AI specificly: I think your AI is HUGE, and I'm not confident about its place in a solarpunk world. Your AI would exist in some versions of communism, but solarpunk? I don"t think so.

wanderingmeomeo , 8 months ago

Oh my god, Luna Oi is such a propaganda machine for the Vietnamese government, and I say this from the perspective of a Vietnamese leftist.

Well, to be fair, I'm not good at law, but I think anyone with half a brain could see that the law is only good for workers when it could be realistically enforced. Yes, Vietnamese workers have rights, lots of them, but it would be ridiculous to say that words on legal papers alone could arm workers with a powerful arsenal of arguments and resources to fight for their rights. We have to keep in mind the sheer imbalance of power between the workers and the capitalists at all times, since when workers appeal their case to the court, most of them cannot afford the money to hire a good lawyer while the capitalists have legions of legal consultants and lawyers backing them up. It's not uncommon for a worker to represent themselves, and no, Vietnam does not have any system to assign a mandatory public defender for destitute people, which reduces the possibility of workers winning a case drastically. Even if they manage to bring the case to the court collectively, the procedure is still very lengthy and complicated and the cost of going through them is money and time, which most workers don't have. They barely get by with the wages and benefits of the company, asking them to suck it up for a prolonged legal battle that could very well last for 2 years is downright unreasonable.

Strike is another story altogether. Luna said that strikes require permission from the labor union and this is very true. However, let's stop for a second and really think about the fact that workers need permission to strike in the first place, doesn't that sound ridiculous? Why would they have to entrust the right to strike to another body of authority? What if they decided to refuse? The workers should just drop the case and go back to work peacefully then? You might say that the union will not refuse because it's a democratic institution and has to follow the will of the masses. However, in order for that argument to work, labor union have to be independent institution without the influence of both company leadership AND the state, because if the leading party decide to adopt a neoliberal policy, they would have every incentive in the world to mess with the democracy of the labor union and what could be the easier way to do it than subduing all unions under the control of the state? Yes, I'm saying this because all unions in Vietnam belong to the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour, an organ of the Vietnamese Communist Party whose current interest is to develop the economy by accumulating capitalistic wealth, not to protect worker's interests. This makes Vietnamese labor unions very prone to corruption and backstage vote rigging. There's no guarantee that a labor union could really present the interest of the worker. In Vietnam, the union's practical role is not to reel up workers to fight the factoríe, but to extinguish the intensity of their struggle so that Vietnam doesn't become a place that foreign investors would actively avoid.

Luna said something very interesting: most strikes are illegal because Vietnamese workers don't bother to ask for permission, which is debatable. Why doesn't she consider that there is a very real possibility that most strikes are actively declined by the union leaders? Vietnamese workers have been striking since Doi Moi and established a labor struggle history of their own, there must be more structural reasons why wildcat strikes are preferable than just their individual failings to be more knowledgeable about labor law. In fact, the laws are actively making it very difficult for the workers to strike. Aside from asking for permission, they would have to make sure that they are asking for benefits, not rights, striking for rights is illegal, and good luck differentiating the two because the Labor Code doesn't do that for you. Before they could ask for permission to strike, workers must negotiate with their employers in a process called meditation. The employers could sit on their asses for 30 days without going to the negotiation session to prolong the battle with the employees. And like I said earlier, time is of the essence because they have to accept not having any money to live during the entire process.

We have to address the elephant in the room too: Workers in a lot of capitalist countries also have rights, sometimes even more rights than their Vietnamese counterparts. Labor laws in Germany, Finland or more progressive states in America are way more comprehensive and the mechanism through which workers's rights are protected in those countries is way more developed. Vietnamese workers have suffered a lot and it's so disingenuous on Luna's part to present her video in a way that frames American laborers are way more miserable than us. I could not overstate how wrong this is enough when workers in factories throughout Vietnam, especially in special economic zones, have to live through abject working conditions but can not quit their jobs or protest about it. The power dynamic is heavily skewed towards the capitalists because the government is kissing their feet or inviting them to destroy our land. There is a reason why Vietnam is an attractive place for foreign investors and it's absolutely not communism. Vietnam is not a socialist paradise, but just another victim of neo-colonialism like the rest of the Global South.

@Five, I really respect your effort to maintain the vitality of many progressive communities on Lemmy, but you can noy promote Luna Oi if you also support anarchism. The narratives she pumps out are very harmful for the left because her videos are purely dogmatic propaganda that promotes a vision of socialism based on an opressive, authoritarian regime. Vietnam is a capitalist, authoritarian country that have attempted multiple times to attack progressive movements by framing them as reactionary.