Strongly agree that something like this is needed. However, what enables the asymmetry here is a limitation on material resources and labor. No such limitation exists with digital systems that cannot be trivially copied and deployed by bourgeois interests.
Only idea I have for something like this is a system that requires user verification by existing members, possibly gatekept by irl meetings and capped at some rate per user. Few people use the fediverse because of tiny barriers to entry. No one would tolerate a system that imposes more burdens.
DDoS prevention solutions are probably capable of thwarting most technological solutions we can come up with to create our own asymmetries.
The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have “promoted posts” for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.
You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.
Do you have any specific knowledge on the characteristics, capabilities, or implementation of these? I would be very interested in learning more.
Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, “to protect researcher identities”.
The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.
Most software out there isn’t a highly capable consistent package. I’m sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM’s any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).
I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.
The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have “promoted posts” for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.
You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.
Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, “to protect researcher identities”.
The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.
Most software out there isn’t a highly capable consistent package. I’m sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM’s any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).
There are some OSS tools out there in various states of quality like: https://github.com/dimensi0n/persona
I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.