In America in 2025, I’d say they’re right*. Flock has cameras all over cities, Palantir has scary face recognition data that iirc uses social media info up to a decade old, DOGE made a database of everyone’s social security information that other bureaus probably have access to, ICE uses Israeli spyware that bypasses end-to-end-encryption, and state governments are trying to push VPN bans and ID checks to use web services. On the federal level, both MAGA and Democrats are pro-surveillance, so you can’t just vote this out, not completely. You also can’t vote with your wallet since the most dangerous surveillance tools exist at the infrastructure level. We’re one step away from turning into China.

*By and large, there’s nothing Americans can do about those things other than protest, normalize pro-privacy rhetoric, try not to support privacy-invading consumer services, and call local- and state-level elected leaders when new anti-privacy legislation is introduced.

In most cases, privacy efforts can help for some use cases, but there is no perfect threat model anymore, and it’s mostly a symbolic act of protest these days, which is useful. Lemmy is the only social media I use these days, Linux is my daily and only driver, I’m boycotting tech oligarchs like Google, and I gravitate toward privacy-focused products and services. We need an active privacy advocacy bloc that will support causes and alternative technologies if we ever want things to get better, if not today than in the future.

One big thing people can still do is evade targeted ads. I probably have an ad profile stored somewhere, but I use adblock and enough FOSS apps that I haven’t gotten targeted ad in years.

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Hey, go for it! If c/mensliberation became men-only, I’d support them! There are some communities where women wouldn’t have anything to contribute, and that’s okay and wouldn’t be sexist.

But just don’t go full kiwifarms with a men-only community and I’d say that’s fine.

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Maybe this could work, but only if you divide the military across the committees. If it’s just an advisory role, it’s meaningless. That’s the problem we’re seeing with the Supreme Court and Congress in America.

Even with those safeguards in place, what’s to stop the committees from working together to turn on the people? Maybe this doesn’t happen immediately, but what about in 300 years across many changes of power?

We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.

Any system that has any hope of being sustainable, after the destabilization of heirarchies, needs to distribute resources across and not from the top down. It’s exhausting watching capitalists and democratic socialists fight against each other in western countries, with little to no anarchist presence whatsoever, when they both miss the point in a pretty glaring way.

I’m not an expert or an economist, mind you. I’m also jaded after America’s change in power. It’s a noble idea and a step up from capitalism. But while capitalism ends in mass surveillance and police states so the wealthy can profit, communism is similarly likely to lead to centralized identification, albeit with benevolent intentions. Allocating resources from the top down requires a system of administration, which is a hierarchy and an unchecked power. But Classification is the first step to genocide, and we’ve seen multiple times now that any country can fall to fascism in the span of 15 years. Just because you have a wonderful benevolent communist government now doesn’t mean it’ll always be that way.

Maybe there are ways around this. Part of me wants to say that only names and dates of birth (not race, gender marker, country of origin, income level) should be recorded, but even names in many cases can reveal a person’s gender and sex at birth, which is itself a form of classification. Maybe you could have a single-blind ID system, only including a name and DOB, where only citizens have access to their IDs, and governments do not store that data centrally. The hope being that if people’s needs are taken care of that the incentive to steal another person’s identity goes away. There are flaws, I know.

Again, maybe there are ways around this. I’m more partial to anarcho-syndicalism because it can more easily exist without a centralized ID system. Having traditional government functions decided democratically among and between the worker-run syndicates also helps stop fascists because if any one syndicate goes fascist, they get cut out from everyone else’s resources and get starved out.

However, if a communist government can exist without collecting data, then I’m potentially in favor of it.

If organizations want to make actual change, they need to stop it with the one-day boycotts. We shouldn’t ever be giving these companies money. The longer you go without using Amazon and Target, the easier it gets.

Moment for silence for David “Ribs” Carillo 🪦

I feel like in the 2000s before the monetization of the internet became the norm, people were more able to share their art and writing in forums. There were entire sites dedicated to grassroots art-sharing without any profit motive.

Yes, grifters exist, but we’re all so cynical these days, not just at the corporations, but everyone. I miss people just sharing things with each other without any suspicion that dark money is involved.

I looked at the blog and it looks like a mere $182 changed hands for the month, and I assume most or all of it goes to Gardiner Bryant and not the OP. Is that comparable Instagram “influencers” hawking Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in a paid sponsorship deal? Maybe this is just a person who was excited enough about a new console that they decided to write about it, and honestly, good for them.

I’m so happy we’re finally getting a handheld that’s genuinely portable! I watched a disassembly video and really appreciate that the battery isn’t glued down, too. And have you all seen gameplay videos? Ocarina of Time 3D at 7x native resolution looks about as close to those Unreal 5 Zelda tech demos as we’ll likely ever get.

I skipped the Nintendo Switch line, but I’d eventually pick the Thor up to replace my 3DS. (If I don’t hold out for an Ayn Freya 😅 .)

Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it’s not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.

Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn’t have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.

I’m part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it’s a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.

And I wonder if it’s just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I’ve done that, it’s a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.

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