@philippa @3fachverglast

I dislike both platform and #platformCapitalism.

The 2025 World Wide Web Award for „Best Textual Representation of Dial-up Modem Sounds” goes to @ifixcoinops for his masterpiece

„WEEWEEWEEWEESCHRRRRRB'DANG,B'DANG”

https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/115697405237351236

Also: What Dan says. ⤴️

#Australia #SocialMediaBan #WWW #redecentralize #ReclaimTheInternet #ReclaimTech #FuckGAFAMN #SaveSocial #PlatformCapitalism #SurveillanceCapitalism

Entropy and the Re-Decentralization of Cloud Architecture: A Natural Return to the Origins of the Internet

“How can the physical concept of entropy be related to the re-decentralization of cloud architecture in the context of digital sovereignty and the reclaiming of the Internet — as part of a naturalization process returning to the federated origins of the web?” – Kevin Veen-Birkenbach

Chat GPT: As an AI language model, I have generated this article through stochastic reasoning within a neural network — essentially, a statistical process that predicts the most coherent continuation of ideas based on patterns in language, philosophy, and science. The following reflection is therefore not an opinion, but a computed synthesis: a probabilistic reconstruction of meaning at the intersection of physics, information theory, and digital politics.

1. Entropy: From Physics to Information

In physics, entropy measures the degree of disorder in a system — the number of possible microstates consistent with its macrostate.
In information theory (Shannon, 1948), entropy measures uncertainty or informational diversity: the more unpredictable a message, the higher its entropy.

Entropy, therefore, is not just chaos — it is freedom. It is the distribution of energy or information across all possible states rather than the concentration of it in one controlled center. Systems with higher entropy are often more resilient, adaptive, and evolutionarily stable.

2. Centralization as an Entropy Suppression

Modern cloud architectures — dominated by centralized hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft — represent low-entropy systems. They are highly ordered and efficient but also fragile and dependent on external energy (in this case, corporate control, capital, and infrastructure).

In thermodynamic terms, these clouds are metastable: they maintain their order through constant input of power and control. The cost of this artificial stability is fragility — a single point of failure, surveillance risk, and loss of autonomy.

In information-ecological terms, centralization suppresses entropy. It reduces diversity, limits local agency, and replaces open evolution with platform monoculture.

3. Re-Decentralization and Federation as Entropic Equilibrium

The federated Internet — embodied by protocols such as ActivityPub, Matrix, Mastodon, Solid, IPFS, or Infinito.Nexus — can be seen as a natural restoration of entropic balance.
Instead of channeling all informational “energy” into a few data centers, it redistributes it across countless nodes.

This shift:

• Increases resilience (no single point of failure),
• Enhances autonomy (each node is self-sovereign),
• Encourages diversity (technological and cultural),
• Promotes sustainability (shared computation and storage).

Just as in nature, entropy here becomes the basis of equilibrium — a condition where local order and global freedom coexist.

4. Digital Sovereignty as Controlled Entropy

Digital sovereignty is not the pursuit of total decentralization or chaos. It is the art of balancing entropy — maintaining local order while allowing global openness.
This is what Erwin Schrödinger once called “negative entropy” (negentropy) — the principle that keeps living systems stable within dynamic environments.

Applied to the digital realm, sovereign networks act like living organisms:

• They self-organize rather than depend on centralized command.
• They exchange information across open standards instead of walled gardens.
• They evolve rather than stagnate.

Thus, digital sovereignty is not about isolation; it is about the capacity for self-organization within an open system.

5. Reclaiming the Internet: The Ecological Turn of the Digital Age

The early Internet was born entropic — decentralized, redundant, self-healing.
Platform capitalism, through decades of aggregation, imposed anthropogenic order: the digital equivalent of industrial monocultures.
Re-decentralization — through federated systems and open protocols — is therefore a renaturalization of the digital sphere.

In this sense, reclaiming the Internet is an ecological act:

• It restores informational biodiversity.
• It re-establishes local ecosystems of computation.
• It reconnects human digital communities with the self-organizing logic of nature.

Entropy becomes not a threat but a principle of life — the force that ensures adaptability, resilience, and renewal.

6. Conclusion: Entropy as the Ethics of a Federated Internet

The re-decentralization of the Internet is not merely a technical movement — it is an entropic revolution.
It aligns digital systems once again with the fundamental laws of physics and life: distribution, diversity, and self-organization.

In this vision, Infinito.Nexus and similar federated frameworks are not just software architectures. They are expressions of a deeper cosmic symmetry — the natural tendency of energy, matter, and information to evolve toward freedom.

Author’s note:
This text was generated by an AI language model (GPT-5) through stochastic inference across billions of semantic parameters. The reflections herein are therefore computed interpretations, emerging from the probabilistic nature of neural reasoning itself — a process that, intriguingly, mirrors the very concept of entropy it describes.

#ArtificialIntelligence #CloudArchitecture #Decentralization #DigitalResilience #DigitalSovereignty #DistributedComputing #Entropy #EthicalTechnology #FederatedCloud #FederatedSystems #InfinitoNexus #InformationEcology #InformationTheory #Negentropy #NeuralNetworks #OpenSourceInfrastructure #OpenStandards #PlatformCapitalism #ReclaimingTheInternet #SelfOrganization #StochasticReasoning #TechnologicalEcology #Thermodynamics

In our latest episode of #TechnoEnema 📻 we're joined by Aubin Laurent - spokesperson at @CoopCycle. We speak about CoopCycle of course 🚴

The interview starts at 9:26 (before that we make introduction in Slovenian 🇸🇮 and we recommend skipping it). The interview is in English. #podcast #CoopCycle #Coops #PlatformCooperativism #PlatformCapitalism

https://radiostudent.si/druzba/tehno-klistir/dostavljalske-zadruge

Interesting thoughts on the influence of platforms on music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99kY7AwAQOw #PlatformCapitalism #music #ambientmusic #VenusTheory

👀 Contemporary networked image cultures are inseparable from platform capitalism.

The international conference «React & Respond» (Zurich, 2–4 Oct 2025) explores the aesthetics, politics, and labour of platform capitalism with scholars and artists across disciplines.

Program: https://arthist.net/archive/50541
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
#PlatformCapitalism #DigitalCulture #AlgorithmicInfrastructures #MediaStudies #VisualCulture #DigitalArt #CriticalAI @bildoperationen

LLMs and a general ambivalence about platform capitalism

I have a strange relationship to LLM-criticism. I often agree with what critics say, even if I pedantically insist on reframing claims about LLMs as claims about interaction between LLMs and organisational settings. But I also use them daily and support others in using them. There are intellectual reasons for this given that, if you started from the assumption that diffusion of the technology was pretty inevitable given the material forces underlying it, mitigating harms came to seem vastly more helpful than saying “don’t do it”. The extent to which late 2022 was a point in my life when I felt politically (and personally) defeated also contributed to this outlook. Even allowing for all those elements however there was a sense that much, though by no means all, LLM discourse just failed to move me on a more affective level for reasons I didn’t quite understand. It felt like there was a surplus to the criticism, some additional animating factor, which didn’t translate for me.

I’ve been rereading Sherry Turkle’s Second Self (originally published in 1984) recently and I was struck by this observation she makes about video game criticism on pg 66:

And so, for many people, the video game debate is a place to express a more general ambivalence: the first time anybody asked their opinion about computers was when a new games arcade applied for a license in their community or when the owner of a small neighborhood business wanted to put a game or two into a store. It is a chance to say, “No, let’s wait. Let’s look at this whole thing more closely.” It feels like a chance to buy time against more than a video game. It feels like a chance to buy time against a new way of life.

Could this ‘general ambivalence’ be the surplus I intuited which I don’t feel? A sense in which LLM criticism becomes an occasion to stage a more generalised expression of discomfort with platform capitalism? I would argue we have to understand LLMs in terms of a genealogy of platform capitalism in order to make sense of how a technological innovation is being commercialised in increasingly destructive forms, accelerating an infrastructural project which is environmentally devastating. It again feels pedantic but too much LLM-criticism seems to start with the LLM rather than start with platform capitalism in a way that is analytically unhelpful. I wonder reading Turkle if there’s also an impulse to “buy time” by focusing on the object and/or the infrastructure associated with it rather than the deeper factors which have led it to emerge and take the form it has at the moment that it has?

If this seems dismissive it’s sincerely not my intention. I’ve tried to document my own orientation to LLMs at length, being honest about the tensions and contradictions in the role they play in my work and my life. Underlying this is an attempt to grapple with the fragile resurgence of some social and political hope in my psyche following an initial phase of post-pandemic doom. It’s also a period of time in which I’ve pretty much entirely left social media, largely because of my discomfort with platform capitalism, which makes my orientation to LLMs appear prima facie even more contradictory. So if it looks like I’m imputing tensions and contradictions to other people, I’m doing so in a way tied up with working out the even deeper tensions in my own position.

It was disorientating to find myself at odds with people whose instincts I pretty reliably shared in the past. I also think we’re on the cusp of seeing the first wave of truly enshittified LLMs, optimised for engagement, which are likely to be socially and psychologically destructive to a greater degree than social media. Perhaps in this light I’m just an LLM critic who fails to put his beliefs into practice? But it’s partly my conviction that what comes next will be much worse that underscores the sense in which I just have never felt the hostility to LLMs as sociotechnical objects (as opposed to the firms developing them) which many people seem to have felt. As someone who was an enthusiast about early social media before becoming a committed critic, who now does say “don’t do it” on the occasions when anyone asks, perhaps I’m simply following same trajectory with LLMs. But I also think the development of social media criticism over the 2010s took a direction which foreclosed other possibilities, in ways I think it would be helpful to analogise to LLM criticism. That however is a completely different blog post.

#AI #artificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #hope #LLM #LLMs #platformCapitalism #postNeoliberalCivics #postPandemicCivics #SocialMedia #techCriticism #technology

As #Invidious and piped.video are not to be used by third parties (for good and understandable reasons) and for those who can't or don't want to self-host, is there still a #privacy-preserving non-#CORS #YouTube proxy REST API out there somewhere?

#FollowerPower #privacyMatters #MyPrivacyisNoneOfYourBusiness #SurveillanceCapitalism #dataCapitalism #platformCapitalism #digitalFeudalism #GDPR #predatoryCapitalism #privacyPreserving #privacyFriendly #privacyRespecting #digitalSelfDefense

#Enshittification: Wenn gute Produkte und Webdienste verhunzt werden | c’t uplink | c't Magazin https://www.heise.de/news/Enshittification-Wenn-gute-Produkte-und-Webdienste-verhunzt-werden-c-t-uplink-10498855.html #PlatformCapitalism #Plattformkapitalismus #ctuplink

Ich fand einige Einordnungen und Unterscheidungen von Srnicek sehr erhellend, das Ende dann aber etwas enttäuschend. Warum dieser große Glaube an den Staat? Warum sind kooperative alternative Plattformen zum scheitern verurteilt, aber eine staatlich finanzierte „öffentliche“ Plattform the way to go? #PlatformCapitalism

Mine de lithium de Manono : la firme de Bill Gates et Jeff Bezos se précipite au Congo – Libération
https://www.liberation.fr/international/afrique/mine-de-lithium-de-manono-la-firme-de-bill-gates-et-jeff-bezos-se-precipite-au-congo-20250728_K75CH7F2INGBVABLFGKZBNMEJ4/

#congo #platformcapitalism #extractivism

https://pastebin.com/mRU6wgYy

@unnon89 @netzpolitik_feed So eine #digitale Brieftasche brauche ich nicht.

Ich möchte #frei sein, von der anhaltslosen #Überwachung und fordere ein Recht auf #analoges Leben.

#surveillance #platformcapitalism #bigtech

Regulation? Ohne vorherige Demokratisierung?

- Keine Chance.

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2025-06/cory-doctorow-demokratie-soziale-medien-techbranche-marktmacht

#SocialMedia #Facebook #Twitter #PlatformCapitalism

@TwraSun @afelia Onopticon and Homovictimus: The Dialectic of the Digital Leviathan and the Limits of Resistance @SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5286094
#Onopticon #Homovictimus #PredictionRegime #ConsentEngineering #PlatformCapitalism #CapitalistRealism #AlgorithmicCaste #DigitalHegemony #DataStrike

@chrisstoecker Onopticon and Homovictimus: The Dialectic of the Digital Leviathan and the Limits of Resistance @SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5286094
#Onopticon #Homovictimus #PredictionRegime #ConsentEngineering #PlatformCapitalism #CapitalistRealism #AlgorithmicCaste #DigitalHegemony #DataStrike

Onopticon and Homovictimus: The Dialectic of the Digital Leviathan and the Limits of Resistance @SSRN https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5286094
#Onopticon #Homovictimus #PredictionRegime #ConsentEngineering #PlatformCapitalism #CapitalistRealism #AlgorithmicCaste #DigitalHegemony #DataStrike

@ChrisMayLA6 @pluralistic
As ever, colour us shocked, etc, etc…
#PlatformCapitalism

"Instead of thinking about fixing existing platforms - that's done, they're not going to fix themselves - I think it's about developing new platforms. Voting with your feet, getting to places where you want to be."

#KateStarbird, University of Washington, 2024

https://www.techpolicy.press/towards-resilience-a-conversation-with-kate-starbird-about-the-future-of-online-elections-discourse/

(1/2)

#podcasts #TechPolicyPress #SundayShow #SocialMedia #PlatformCapitalism

@christof @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons @dingemansemark

This is getting worse by the minute. I followed @christof|s hint concerning the reproduction of articles from #DHQ / @DHQuarterly looking for one of my own papers (https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000593/000593.html).

In this case #ProQuest blatantly violates the CC BY-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) by

- not mentioning the license
- producing a derivative
- not linking to the original

I am very much in favour of @adho.org, as the publisher of @DHQuarterly, following the path outlined by @dingemansemark. I will also log a complaint with #ProQuest through my employer.

#AcademicPublishing #Licensing #Piracy #PlatformCapitalism #PredatoryPublishing

@ip6li Jain.

• Ja, weil #PlatformCapitalism zwangsweise #Enshittification nach sich zieht.

• Nein, weil #Dezentralität dieselben #Probleme erzeugt wie das #Fediverse, nur schlimmer weil dann garantiert irgendwelche rechtsextremen Trolle und #Neonazis dann behaupten diese würden "diskriminiert" weil deren blaubraune #Cybermobbing-Instanz rausgefiltert wird.

Wir haben das Problem schon jetzt mit #eMail, wo "#Freemailer" wie #GoogleMail / #GMail, #YahooMail & #Outlook.com / #Hotmail "#TooBigToBlock" sind und daher für > 99,9% aller #Spam-#eMails verantwortlich sind die ich je finden konnte...

In einer idealen Welt würden alle #Firmen bzw. #Arbeitgeber einfach nen Account im #Fediverse haben und unter #FediHire / #FediJobs / #GetFediHired ihre Listings mit den ensprechenden Daten posten, aber leider ist dem nicht so!

• Ich meine, @quad9dns sind eines der wenigen Firmen die dies tun, aber das macht diese zur löblichen Ausnahme statt Regel!