• 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 24 days ago
cake
Cake day: January 9th, 2026

help-circle



  • this is funny and everything but there was no reason for him to be in the mcdonalds, wearing the same outfit, carrying a buffet of incriminating evidence. It doesn’t make any sense at all. He’s probably innocent, like for real innocent. Or at worst a fall-guy for thompson’s wife, who gained the most feom his death and now doesn’t have to go through messy divorce proceedings to get her hands on a good chunk of his wealth. That should have been the starting point for the investigation, but the whole thing became a circus.


  • tl:dr when they say ‘I have nothing to hide’ you respond with 'you aren’t even really you without privacy so you can’t really say what ‘you’ have to hide. Then when they give you a confused stare you walk them through the previous logical steps. I’m not sure it’s incredibly persuasive IRL especially to the kind of person who would argue against their own fundamental human rightd in this way (i’ve had similar chats with my own father fwiw) but it’s a good starting point.

    Following up with concrete examples of harm (which don’t rely on a logical chain of propositions) is a good follow up.


  • being monitored (even if you are not aware of it) changes your behaviour via the ‘big brother’ effect.

    Your behaviour is most of what makes you an individual, and is the means through which people express their autonomy and social existence.

    putting these things together gives you the result that you cannot fully be ‘yourself’ while you are being watched. At best you are performing what you’d like ‘yourself’ to be for an expected audience.

    Self actualisation, or the process of developing and becoming ‘yourself’ is therefore disrupted meaning that you can never be or know yourself while you lack real privacy.

    Another (more dramatic) way to say it would be you cannot be fully human without also enjoying a default privacy






  • we need time to collectively un-domesticate our thinking, and to basically recover enough of our lost human identity to even have bandwidth to imagine some way of life other than wage-slavery. It won’t be easy or quick to undo generations worth of programming, but the disruption is coming either way, AI and the looming collapse demand it.

    Covid also woke lots of people up. Suddenly families had time to spend together (including dysfunctional ones), suddenly normies realised that maybe giant pharmaceutical companies actually don’t care about the population’s health so much. It showed people that governments can and will drastically intervene in their lives (including by making money rain from the sky) when there is some threat of elite interests actually being effected. It was a huge, scary and unprecedented event, so it makes sense that people would freak the fuck out. You’ll notice i didn’t even get into mandates or the insane mania our media pushed during the period.

    IDK there was more going on than just ‘people suddenly had free time again’. But you’re right lots of people are already so conditioned that the thought of having the ability to spend their own limited earthly time however they wish literally scares them. These people have been separated from their own humanity, and even if the work is painful they deserve to be recovered as anyone else.




  • the search providers (especially that famously ‘not evil’ one) had a huge hand in centralising and then gatekeeping access to ‘the web’. They have such a disproportionately powerful effect on how users discover content, and huge power to drive self-fulfilling ‘network effects’ where people go where people already are, which has become so normalised that most people couldn’t imagine ‘the web’ without them.

    i’m not suggesting it was ever realistic or possible, but what we needed was for that one search provider and indexer of content to be broken up, partially nationalised, and partially integrated into the network specification itself. Only they are powerful enough to become a model for how to functionally disentangle their operations into public and private parts.

    the only alternative is to break the centralisation of the web as china is doing and other BRICS nations intend to do, by creating ‘national internets’ which in some ways federate together and in other ways do not. I don’t like this model of development for the future of the internet but the security considerations of the present require this kind of approach.


  • flamingleg@lemmy.mltoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldButtcoin
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 days ago

    the early plan for btc was to break the spine of central banking cartels and to eventually threaten the reserve status of the greenback. 2008 was still fresh in our minds, and back then it was fashionable to blame fiat currency and the pratcise of fractional reserve lending. The original ‘zeitgeist’ movie was a big influence on the whole scene.

    Eventually people began to figure out that btc was most likely a vehicle for oligarchs and elites to shelter their assets from the next financial crash which killed the libertarian enthusiasm for the project. Now btc is exclusively for tech-bros and other finance-adjacent types just trying to personally enrich themselves.






  • a january 6 except for real? there would be some poetic justice in that particular imperial boomerang returning home. But nah your glow-agencies have probably gamed things out enough to avoid that. I’m thinking they keep doing damage control and limping along until a combination of natural disasters and geostrategic blowback makes things unmanageable for the elites who lack the foresight to abandon their sinking ship.

    Rolling waves of general strikes have real potential also.

    Progressives never really got their version of a tea-party, and occupy never really fulfilled its potential. It could be that a new popular force will emerge to replace MAGA which inherits from these unfinished projects.

    Occupy would be especially salient given dedollarisation and the inevitable financial crash which will happen along the way. Even normies are expecting ai to crash and are watching gold prices lol