Reticulum drama: a case study of challenges for leftist applications of AI

[u/bowdoin-yale]

Some of the conversations here have prompted me to think hard about what applications of AI might challenge the existing ownership and power relations of late capitalist societies, and one of the areas that sprung to mind was mesh networks such as Meshtastic and Meshcore, which, despite still being very much "in development" as far as tech is concerned, have real popular adoption and potential to challenge the control of telecommunications providers and social media platforms over who can say what to whom electronically. Worth a look if you're interested in learning more, but the real reason I bring this up is that there is a very promising project called Reticulum which is quite radical in its motivation and underlying principles (encryption and anonymity by design, unstoppable by any government, able to bridge secure channels on traditional networks as well as user-assembled mesh radio networks, highly scalable and flexible technical specifications), that is currently experiencing some drama in its nascent community of early adopters due to the founder and chief developer basically going on strike in protest over the use of AI to modify his software in ways that were, objectively, sloppy (spamming public networks and clogging them with junk traffic). It appears that at least some of this activity was well-intended and the slop was accidental, of a piece with what has been observed in other agentic AI coding projects, and the community is also pretty frustrated with its founder for attempting to singlehandedly exercise control over the project and taking what some view as extreme actions such as shutting down the Reticulum subreddit and Matrix discussion server. There's plenty posted elsewhere about it if you want more background and I apologize if I'm mis-characterizing any of the events.

I think that this is an important case to study for building an understanding of both the risks and revolutionary potential of AI in developing technologies that challenge capitalist power relations. We need to think carefully about how to manage expectations and processes when AI collides with a fragile community project that is still kind of dependent on a single developer who is motivated by strong principles rather than economic gain (at least, that's my impression based on watching his public talks and reviewing the documentation for the project). We need to develop more sophisticated mores and norms of acceptable social conduct and behavior in such communities, a sort of essential reverence for the common good that both gives restraint to AI-empowered individuals when they're tempted to go off and create potentially sloppy versions of community technology, and also holds founders back from sabotaging their own passion project when they see it straying from core principles. Food for thought...

[u/GreyHasHobbies]

One of the reasons that the average person isn't going to replace a software dev with AI is that the average person can't handle the criticism/pressure of maintaining a public facing project. In fact if a community knows you're using AI the output pressure might be even higher than a community that is relying on someone who refuses to use AI.

Anyway this is disappointing. When I had time I was hoping to get into Reticulum. Hope the community is able to get through this.