aesthelete

You can't spy on our citizens, that's our (and our corporations') job!

Signed, the US Government

I'd rather they just ban spy apps in general...but that's a "dream a little dream, it's never gonna happen" type of thing.

Yes, I understand your point and agree with you for the most part.

I feel like there was a turning point in the Internet though, where the federation of user identities basically ended for most Internet users. I track it to the advent of MySpace and Facebook. People started using their actual identities on these sites (most likely, at first, to attempt to get laid), and our privacy began being flushed down the toilet then. I also think the creation of Google Chrome with Google's all-consuming want for private data and to tie all of your Internet activity to a real person had a big hand in this as well. The modern Internet is a surveillance Internet.

As the article states, it's no longer true that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". They hook you to your actual physical identity the instant you do anything on your phone, search using a logged in account, browse one of their sites with your logged in cookie, or generally browse anything after you've touched any of the major social media sites because they added trackers to everything.

In some ways, this is beneficial because many cannot handle anonymity, but the bad parts of the Internet have largely drowned out the good. As the Internet has scaled, more and more of the bad side of humanity is reflected digitally. To add to that mix, the major sites in their fun house mirror algorithms supposedly designed to amplify engagement (or "enragement algorithms" as I sometimes say) constantly amplify items posted by the most degenerate among us.

However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be.

IRC was a ghost town the last time I checked in on it. In the mid-90s there were constantly thousands of people on it.

I hate fucking snap. It might be enough to make me switch distros if Ubuntu keeps up with it (which I am sure they intend to).

The continual "you have new snaps" or whatever it was message every time I'm just trying to have a web browser open made me eventually figure out how to install firefox for real on all of my computers.

EDIT: I think you may have convinced me to try out Debian on my next OS installation.

He was invited to give a speech from the bushes.

Yes, and they do.

This is Twitter equivalent to fucking yourself down the bar skank ladder. I knew of Laura Loomer exclusively from Twitter when I was there and she was in a similar but less illustrious category as that guy who got caught pretending to be a black man, that weirdo whose profile pic looks like he bought a shirt too small in order to roid rage out of it, or that former Hercules idiot.

I think the step you're missing is 4chan

So, we’re not doing Section 230 anymore ?

That's a part of a US law, and as such doesn't throw a shrimp on the bar-b in Australia, mate.

Yeah, I too don't understand why everyone around him is just OK with the idea of the guy being a completely responsibility-free empty vessel.

It seems that once again they want to absolve this...former president of all responsibilities, but him being responsible for what comes out of his donkey-brained mouth is the lowest possible bar of accountability before the bar clangs to the floor.

You're right that every capitalist wants to be a landlord, but the distinction between the two groups is that capitalists aren't there yet, and capitalists are largely also subjected to rents by those that already are.

A lot of the recent movements in software has been away from selling products and toward rents (i.e. away from capitalism and toward neofeudalism / technofeudalism). That is why everything has become a subscription service (even things that you used to pay once and be able to use as is until you wanted to "upgrade" like, for instance, Adobe Photoshop).

Doctorow explains the difference in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Tl6yIsCoY