I’m confused, is this a serious take? How they make their money leads to how the game is designed and who for. If it’s advertising it’s shit. If it’s microtransactions it becomes about min-maxing annoyance for most gamers while attracting whales, gambling and is shit. Monthly subscriptions is a model that needs loyalty and should attract people who want to “live” in an permanent virtual game world.

Ideally I’d want a global “entertainment subscription” non-profit that is funding projects for the players benefits and is somewhat crowd-controlled like a socialist bank.

Yeah, blowing up satellites and cutting undersea internet cables would be (a short) prelude to world war III.

Wikipedia relies on sources, and humans choosing the sources like newspapers. And those newspapers are more and more inside a “bubble” that rejects any evidence or reporting presented by a competing bubble.

Right now wikipedia is covering up one of the greatest acts of mass murder of our times, because the newspapers are covering it up, or rejecting evidence because it’s by the “enemy”. Part of this is a defensive posture against AI bots and enemy disinformation.

It also has to be a waste of some resource that is rare to not use up and throw away like this.

Shithole country. Honestly, together with the issues like voter roll purging and winner takes it all. How can you take this “pro/con” discussion even seriously?

The real question should be why the US is so undemocratic, what the forces are that drive this minority rule and prevent a more free and open society.

Yes but the issue is that any technology will be used to maximize profit, which results in almost always the worst case outcome. We already have the technology for a global post-scarcity civilization with a circular economy.

Those 4 things are just random ideas but anything that is unprofitable or decreases power or destroys massive wealth of capitalists is basically censored in mainstream political discourse. And today effective countermeasures have been developed to make protests useless and reform or revolutions impossible.

But I do agree that this doesn’t justify radical anti-natalism. Just teach your children profitable skills, multiple languages, subsistence farming, electronics and how to build electric motors and windmills, how to build a cozy tiny house or a boat. I also hope for technological advancements (like 3D printers, genetic engineering) that allow for a more democratic industrial base.

PS: Kurzgesagt has a new video on this: Is Our World Broken?. TLDW: We need to tell ourselves a new story (but that requires we stop believing in the old ones)

Thanks, this gemini protocol looks interesting! This would be an easy protocol for distributed p2p hosting / caching / archiving of websites similar to federalist. I just wish gemtext would support bold and italics and hyperlinks.

How closed minded they must be, to think everyone shares the exact same despair they do, as well as the inability or lack of creativity needed to envision a better future and a path that takes us there.

Lets do a test. Could you imagine supporting:

1. Banning of commercial advertising
2. Abolishing patents or making them free or extremely low cost to use to quickly adopt new / better technology
3. Nationalize all big news and social media companies and turning them over to the democratic control of their own workers (a cooperative)
4. Massive wealth and land redistribution

Most people can’t because they have been programmed to see these as “holy touchstones” of their true religion, capitalism. And that means only economic power may rule, and there are no paths to the future except the profitable ones. They rather de-federate call socialists tankies and than to deal with the angry dirtbag left. They prefer to exist in a calm apolitical space with a total war on good vs evil.

So please don’t insult people who can imagine many paths but also have the wisdom why all these paths are shut. It’s just like a physics problem, you can’t overcome the political energy worth trillions of dollars with a few measly millions of dollars of political energy we could muster.

Oh I didn’t even mean trust as in maliciousness, and not even as in “do they know their shit” but do they have the time and money to do things right? And also do I have time to read and learn what all this is supposed to mean?

And the inconvenience with VPNs alone… What I really want is a kind of universal addon or browser project that just “cleans up most websites”. So many websites have bad behavior now and anti-features. I just want to read an article not get a slide in or blinky thing. Internet is becoming unusable even before the dead internet thing. Ironically for such a “website cleanup” you’d probably want advanced AI so Mozilla is probably on the right track.

Ah those were the good old days, when we still made quarks in this country!

I guess any used android smartphone should have plenty of apps. Then you can even have video com

I mean the protons and neutrons are never new, all of this stuff is just second hand, cobbled together recycled garbage!

What is “media freeze”?

I’ve looked at one or two variants but how do I trust them? They are also forked from some previous version so presumably somewhat out of date? And then also it’s not clear what they are doing what firefox isn’t.

Well that is part of the defense mechanism. There really are trolls, bots, agitprop etc. So we now anyone who is using an argument that Trump or Putin ever made, must be an enemy (genetic fallacy). And is hence is “fair game” to attack and lie about to protect the narrative. Being called a bot is like the ultimate dehumanization.

I don’t think it’s reddit culture, it’s bigger than that. People are just badly informed and the disinformation is total. Journalists who even slightly deviate are fired all over the world.

Maybe there is so much noise now that people rely more and more on mainstream media that are completely captured now.

The complete post-truth doublethink the liberals are doing these days is shocking. There is no difference between MAGA Trump supporters and the vast majority of liberals these days. I don’t think they are capable to be truthful any more.

It really shows what happens when the mainstream media is owned by oligarchs and use the right propaganda to hone in on the “emotional truths” of a group. For them it’s about justice and and evil and a good. US supporting Israel commit genocide is evil. US supporting Ukraine become demcoratic is good. Russia attacking because of NATO expansion is evil.

So everything that doesn’t fit with this narrative, that they are the good guys, is dismissed or rationalized. Easy when it just so happens if the arguments are made by their evil enemies. Historical facts simply don’t matter.

Where does that idea even come from?

Ironically it’s the same logic Israel uses against the Palestinians. They want to destroy us and can’t be reasoned with, so it has to be total war.

Yeah. Discord can create FAQ and “threads” now that I believe work better for this. You can take some question and the answer and discussion and put it in a threat in some channel for issues. Presumably once you have a quality chat server, it is easier to add threads / articles / issues to it than starting from a forum.

Well, I believe the marxist-leninist definition of liberalism and “fascism is capitalism in decline” just means that everyone not calling for the overthrow of capitalism is a fascist. I don’t find those definitions that helpful. And it doesn’t really tell you how you should use your limited political power.

But I do understand arab americans who just can’t bring themselves to vote for democrats. So there would be a reason 3. you’re just so revolted and you just can’t stand the disgusting feeling of supporting them.

For example Jake Tapper just spread racist lies about Tlaib. Tlaib criticized the Michigan US attorney office for prosecuting and showing biases against Pro-Palestinian Protesters (including Jewish protesters). Now they are smearing her as anti-semitic. CNN Hosts BUSTED Manufacturing Quote To Smear Democrat

I don’t get how people honestly think Trump is Putin’s bitch. Trump is a malignant narcissist and impossible to be “handled”. He’ll throw anyone and everyone under the buss and had no problem escalating with Russia. The thing is that Trump like his base simply don’t give a shit about any Slavic people, even if they’re married to one. The republicans are simply not susceptible to the “justice and democracy” nonsense the liberals are selling. So Trump does whatever serves Trump and he had no problem arming the worse of the far right elements in Ukraine:

From this

Manafort duly resigned, and the RussiaGate racket erupted–a connivance that went some way to ensuring the “pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy” wasn’t compromised one iota.

Indeed, Trump’s term in office was typified by ever-escalating hostility between Washington and Moscow, the Oval Office resident going to dangerous lengths his predecessor had consistently refrained from to arm and galvanize the most reactionary and violent elements of the Ukrainian armed forces, including the notorious Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and tear up Cold War arms control treaties, much to Moscow’s chagrin.