Approaching dystopia. How did we get here?

I miss the days where people didn’t self-censor on the internet out of fear they were being watched, where anonymity (even if only perceived) was sacrosanct. I miss public forums where most people followed the golden rule, but bad people could still be bad because platforms only banned content that actually broke the law. It was the public square. Today I see ads everywhere. Bloat everywhere. Proprietary software (often spyware) everywhere. This dominates most people’s interactions with technology. There’s no concept of free software being a freedom. Privacy is being eroded more and more. US States proposing laws to ban VPN’s, EU to ban E2EE. How did we get here? How do we get out?

Dec 01 · 3 weeks ago · 👍 stack, Homer, SavaRocks, bsj38381, 99thplace · 🤔 2

19 Comments ↓

It sucks. Every effort to regain privacy makes me look more and more like a criminal, or at least a lunatic.

We got here due to the availability of easy capital, the business philosophy of only serving the shareholder, and the tortured logic of the libertarians who built the infrastructure with the explicit goal of removing power from government and public institutions. We thought they would share that power back in the 90s. What a bunch of rubes we all were. The lapsing ethics of silicon valley have been written about for at least 11 years.

To me, the only way to win is to not play. Send letters, make landline phone calls, have different offline hobbies, shop local with cash, and above all, keep the tech to what you must absolutely do to survive in society. It will be very lonely.

'All tech is evil' is perhaps too broad! I love diddling with retrocomputers and writing compilers and such; I don't think that is in any way damaging to me or others...

Staying out of the horribleness is getting harder and harder. Same local shops I shop in with cash are now proudly announcing that they are 'cashless'. Banking requires giving up significant information which is constantly lost in 'breaches', and generally keeping the appearance of 'normalcy' just sucks you back into the system. I tried really hard (my partner did not agree with my attempts), and now am feeling somewhat pessimistic.

It certainly is not making my life easier, anyway.

I can say here in the sticks cash is still accepted everywhere. In the city where I work, lots of cashless businesses including the parking garage.

Retro computing is good fun. I've got a Compaq Portable III I like to noodle with on occasion.

I personally blame corporations ruining it for everyone, alongside corporations like Visa/Mastercard basically getting away with kicking people out of their program over pretty petty and puritanical reasons too, which is frankly really fishy behaviour. I also blame capitalism too, and I usually don't say this too much tbh.

at the moment you can get your privacy back in one easy way: stay offline

That assumes you don't need to work, travel, park your car, and in some places, do the laundry

self-censoring is pretty interesting. it's something we've done since before the rise of social media. take death - in real life you rarely say "so and so died." you say they passed away, kicked the bucket, they lost their battle against (disease) etc.

we've kind of always found ways to discuss uncomfortable topics via euphemism.

now the "why" behind it in the social media age (people just want their content to go to more people) combined with how it's just way more obvious (using direct substitutions instead of more indirect euphemisms) is kind of depressing. but the core concept isn't new.

@jprjr @SavaRocks I think before social media some self censoring was also the sort of shutting up to get along. I don't debate religion at Thanksgiving, for example. But something shifted and I began getting death threats from strangers for the work I have done. I don't share that with enough detail to know who I am publicly (more self censorship) and yet it happens with frightening accuracy. The only semipublic disclosure that matches is my CV which means someone looking to hire me doxxed me.

I will emphasize this hasn't happened on Gemini.

That's awful, nobody deserves a death threat.

I think part of the reason we see more fighting at Thanksgiving is how extreme people have gotten. It used to be you got your information from say, a newspaper. That's basically a set dosage of information, accompanied with ads.

Now we get firehosed with information all the time. Cable news, social media, all of it. That's lead to people just making things up in order to keep your attention and put ads in front of your eyeballs.

So you come home to Thanksgiving and there's your uncle saying the craziest things, and it's all because companies just want people's eyeballs and they don't care how they get them.

I think it's a combination of not knowing facts and being told that you need to fight to the death to protect your position.

Social media quickly hones in on your fears and outrage and amplifies to drag you to the extremes by feeding more and more 'proof'. People who earn money from clicks and views have gotten very good at recombining snippets of truth to frame a position slightly more upsetting than the one you start with, trying to split and isolate you with others who now have this 'secret knowlege'...

This is spilling into all of our interactions, and we are told that 'those people' are evil, ruining the world, and are not even people -- 'look at what just happened'.

Yes. Keep engaged with the platform so we can shove more ads into your eyeballs. Rage is engaging.

I never thought that clickbait would then mutate into ragebait of any kind on the internet. Man I wish ragebait to dissapear honestly.

Culturally, the society needs to decide that it is eating their time and energy and fundamentally isn't worth their attention. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pretty pink pony to take me to the marshmallow kingdom.

Yes, the society is doubling down.

@jprjr Interesting, considering we do say “so and so died” here, nobody says “X passed away” except in media. This is outside of USA, though. And I can speak only for what I heard and said myself, of course.

I fortunately have limited experience with this. But the worst incident was also with all the subtly of an atom bomb. A close friend lost their teenager in a car accident. I was told by my friend via text "<child's name> died today" as a response to some inane thing I had sent.

In my experience it tends to vary based on who's delivering the news and who they're delivering it too.

Like if I'm telling people about my pet dying - I'm using terms like passed away, or we lost them, etc. If some random animal is hit by a car - it died.

If someone famous dies that I don't have any real connection to - I'm just going to say they died. But if it makes the news or obits etc, those are probably going to say passed away if it wasn't a surprise, or they'll probably just say "so and so was found dead" this morning if it is a surprise.

But I've also gotten a "my husband died today" text from a friend.

I guess it's kind of all over the place

Each person manages such news different ways. I mean sugar coating it won't lessen it's impact. I had a lot to parse from such a simple statement because of the sheer magnitude of such news and things like "I'm dying" as a response to something hilarious or embarrassing.