I'm on Twitter Dot Com and over the past year, I've been seeing some Strangely Violent Arguments from accounts that you might call "Leftish".

On decentralization:( Around the start of the year, I've started to see decentralization (especially IPFS and Mastodon) lumped in with NFTs/cryptocurrency. I don't know if this is a larger trend or not but I was worried for awhile that anti-NFT/anti-cryptocoin sentiment would yield a proportional magnitude of anti-decentralization sentiment.

I think this "decentralization bad" is a reaction to "cryptocurrencies good because decentralization good". But the proper argument would be "cryptocurrencies are bad, not because they're decentralized, but because other reasons."

On cryptography: There was a time when "crypto" meant "cryptography" and "the right to crypto" was a meaningful and important, impactful thing. It's been years since cryptocurrencies completely co-opted the legitimacy of "crypto" as a term, and that legitimacy is burned to the ground.

I'll occasionally see someone who has tied their persona to the word "crypto", from those olden times, and occasionally** see them called a "cryptobro" or something like that.

I was volunteering with a friend who runs a local RRFM. All their communications are through GMail and Facebook, and I had a conversation that went kind of like this:

• "Do you have other ways to get to you? Anything end-to-end encrypted?"

• "Oh nono, we don't do that, we technically aren't allow to take cash either"

• "Oh no, I meant, a secure messenger? Maybe Signal?"

• "Oh yeah, I use Signal!"

On private payments: Then when Roe v Wade was overturned, I would see discussions about making and accepting private donations. I had a conversation with a friend who I thought was cool but then she hit me with the "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, and donating to abortion funds is not wrong." And I was really surprised to hear this from her!

I think this "private payments bad" is a reaction to "cryptocurrencies good because you can use them for private payments". But the proper argument would be "cryptocurrencies can't be used for private payments*".

I haven't seen anyone else making this argument, so this is the weakest point in the trend.

On AI-art tools and DNN-based art tools:

I've done machine learning research for a few years and I've been a hobbyist digital artist for awhile, so this especially concerns me.

On a technical note, I'd like to clarify three things:

1. "AI art tools" have existed for awhile. "AI" is perpetually vague, and "AI advances" perpetually lose their luster and become rote technology.

   • Remember "content aware fill" and "anticrop" in 2008 or whatever? (GIMP users got it earlier as "resynthesizer" around 2005)

   • Tron blah blah blah?

   • Remember when the AI in Halo, Half Life, etc. were a big deal? (They're still good, but not surprising in 2022)

2. "Neural networks" are a related technology. Simple neural networks are very classic parts of image processing, and I'd argue 99% of digital artists use them. (You've used them if you've ever blurred an image.)

3. "Deep neural networks" refer to networks with many many weights, which are set algorithmically against a dataset rather than set by hand. These are useful for interpolation, and this is the technology used in recent AI art.

I've seen this wild uptick of arguments like "I want all AI art bros to feel the cold barrel of a shotgun down their throat" and "If I ever met an AI artist, I'd punch them. Just full force." (These are real tweets!)

The association with NFTs is often more explicit, e.g. "Do I have to punch both AI bros and NFT bros?" and "I want to shoot an AI art bro in the face with a shotgun", "Fucking bootlickers".

There's a lot to be be angry about with "AI art". There's a lot to talk about how AI art will displace student/apprenticeship roles, how they're often trained on copyright material, risks for disinformation, etc. and how this compares with previous technological developments like printers, or clip-art, etc.

There's also a lot to be said about delusional horny Twitter men using prompt engineering to create absurd looking women and calling themselves "AI artists".

But Christ! This is how we talk about nazis and cops! And I think there's a vast gulf between someone using a DNN plugin for Blender, and literal cops/nazis.

Like, it's really bonkers to me to see "It's okay to kill artists sometimes, especially if they steal intellectual property or use new tools," as a leftish sentiment.

The main point: Not everything is NFTs

I think there's generally a reactionary response to cryptocurrencies. This is reasonable: It requires a privileged level of education to understand them to a sufficient technical depth to navigate any potential merits. But you don't need that to have the (correct) reaction that they're generally a pyramid scheme, rife with other scams, to understand they're horrible for the environment, or to understand that those 'bored apes' are ugly as sin lmao.

There are a lot of things that you can see are harmful without understanding thoroughly! That's normal.

But I get the impression that the anti-cryptocoin / anti-NFT sentiment is spreading to other things, by association or by "vibes". Decentralization, cryptography, private transactions and conversations, and digital art are all important things and I don't like seeing them guilty by imagined association.

Of course, these are all just a bunch of anecdotes that I strung together while terminally online, seeing a trend that might not really be there. So, grain of salt

* If you know what you're doing and you're willing to spend time and money, you can use a cryptocurrency for private transactions. I already know this pls don't correct me

** Like once or maybe twice on Reddit lol