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A story about a t-shirt at a protest that said "I've been to the future, we won." made me cry today.
Even Marx said that humans make things in their minds first before they can build them. This applies to the future as well. All we get now is dystopias, war, climate crisis and fascism and that is why we can no longer imagine an end to it all.
I think we need to imagine better futures in order to build them.
If you look around at the state of the world—and the despair that comes with the reality of climate change, fascism spreading its tentacles around the world, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—it’s very difficult to feel hope.
"Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy." DAVID FRUM
den bilden visar ju mest symboler & kända företeelser som vi förknippar med Sverige, snarare än en bild av “svensk kultur”. Även om de tycks ha gjort en ansträngning att förstå vad kultur är. De har missat (eller glömt) att kultur innefattar allt från språk, litteratur, musik, konst & framförallt värderingar & sociala normer. Mycket av det som syns här är populärkulturella uttryck, som midsommar, köttbullar, IKEA & ABBA.
A #ThankGNU! to Catalin Francu and Deborah Jackson for helping the FSF to promote #FreeSoftware. To see a longer list of those who have helped us financially in our advocacy for #SoftwareFreedom and awareness, visit: u.fsf.org/45m
Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new prompt injection technique called PromptFix that tricks a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) model into carrying out intended actions by embedding the malicious instruction inside a fake CAPTCHA check on a web page. Described by Guardio Labs an "AI-era take on the ClickFix scam," the attack technique demonstrates how AI-driven browsers, posted by pod_feeder
During the Xbox Gamescom stream on Wednesday, Kalypso Media officially announced Tropico 7 was coming in 2026. The post Tropico 7 Announced For 2026 Release appeared first on Insider Gaming.
A reminder: Asylum seekers are in hotels because of a huge application backlog that the gov't must work through. Robert Jenrick - now, bursting with creative solutions - processed applications slowly ***on purpose*** as a deterrent. Here he is, as Immigration Minister two years ago, saying so. ~AA
In case you are wondering, the backlog of asylum applications, at this point, in August 2023, was about 175,000. Far from "clearing it" by the end of that year, Jenrick resigned to pursue his leadership bid. The backlog left behind by the Tories eleven months later was about 225,000. ~AA RE: bsky.app/profile/did:plc:agxhu…
A reminder: Asylum seekers are in hotels because of a huge application backlog that the gov't must work through. Robert Jenrick - now, bursting with creative solutions - processed applications slowly ***on purpose*** as a deterrent. Here he is, as Immigration Minister two years ago, saying so. ~AA
Having passed the one year birding mark, while still living in the same place, is fascinating. I'm watching the makeup of birds in my yard shift to just what I remember of late summer last year: mixed flocks of starlings and grackles, northern flickers around when previously there were none, a slow but steady trickle of warblers passing through...
I keep hearing the flicker today: calling, even drumming, but I just haven't managed to spot them. It's like they have a sixth sense for when I'm around and go quiet, even when I'm inside and just peering out a window! 😭
I've also found new things to mourn with the season's changes. The cliff swallow colony under the bridge near me has dispersed, I only saw one swallow when I was last there a couple of days ago. By the end of last month there were already far fewer Baltimore orioles (though I did spot one in my yard last week). I think I might have missed my shot to see black terns this year. The constant shifting and change in the world of migratory birds is beautiful, but it also makes me melancholy.
Yet I am also so excited for the birds who will be arriving in a few months from the far north, the weird ducks and interesting gulls, fancy finches and beautiful owls...
Israeli-Born US Attorney Declines to Prosecute Top Israeli Cyber Official Arrested in Child Predator Case, Releases Him Without Explanation #Palestinequdsnen.co/israeli-born-us-att…
Nevada (Quds News Network)- Israeli-born acting US Attorney for Nevada, Sigal Chattah, has declined to prosecute Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, a senior Israeli cyber official who was arrested in Las Vegas
July’s PPI surged 0.9% month-over-month, far above the 0.2% forecast. Core PPI also jumped 0.6%, the largest rise since March 2022. This suggests businesses, squeezed by tariffs and higher import costs, will soon pass more expenses to consumers, reversing recent mild CPI trends. Despite market hopes for a September rate cut, the data confirms inflation remains persistently above the Fed’s 2% target, complicating its next move.
How theater kids and flitty floofs reshaped sexy, strong, and soft — from Prince to Zaddy to the boulder shoulder ideal. A cultural stage still holding space.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice anime studio Qzil.la lands in the hotseat after suspected AI usage—though whether it's generative or not is still up in the air
Visit @SpeedCubeShopOfficial and use code TRU at checkout at www.speedcubeshop.com for a discount on your order.www.texturecube.com - Use TRU15 for 15% off ...
Story speaking of ants, when I was in the Bahamas once w/a friend just driving around with a guide. We stopped at a beautiful little beach. I wondered why it was empty. Sitting on the sand, I was attacked by fire ants running up both my legs. I screamed and ran into the water before they got to my sensitive area. I got a blisters on my legs. The guy driving & my "friend" laughed. I was too naive to consider revenge, lol.
Please SUBSCRIBE - http://bit.ly/BWchannelWatch More - http://bit.ly/OLstingkillOn this episode of Breaking Trail, Coyote takes on the Bullet Ant Challenge a...
Fire ants are monsters. But my husband, who met many fire ants when we lived on the Gulf Coast, said that as a kid, living in the CA desert, he was stung by a bullet ant, and it hurt so badly that he thought he had been shot. I've never seen a bullet ant in real life, and I hope I never do.
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantilism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A 404 Media investigation reveals how the man who started Tea, the ‘women dating safety’ app, tried to hire a female ‘face’ for the company and then hijack her grassroots community.
My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🩸". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
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You can also get a fulltext RSS feed, licensed CC BY 4.0:
the point about friction really struck a chord with me. It's all just entropy really. The rich can only have their entropy free lives by increasing the levels of entropy everywhere else for all of us.
Also the thing about nurses' pay made me so angry. That is why I spend my spare time getting people into unions. (Another way for people to become collectively unoptimisable I suppose!)
One of the biggest cultural issues we have is that no major media or journalistic institutions have been reinforcing norms of what things *should* look like. That corruption isn’t normal, that cronyism isn’t normal, that lies and scandals should be punished, that incompetence is disqualifying.
They’ve simply stopped pointing out that there are any standards at are, or that there used to be a bar of any sort. And now an entire generation doesn’t know this concept at all.
Seven IOF soldiers were wounded, including four in critical condition, due to the explosion of an old Syrian bomb on Al-Sheikh Mountain. The soldiers were transferred to ’Ziv’ Hospital in ’Safed’. english.alahednews.news/fastne…
Alahednews - Fastnews - Seven IOF soldiers were wounded, including four in critical condition, due to the explosion of an old Syrian bomb on Al-Sheikh Mountain. The...
Columnist Garry Clement, former RCMP anti–money laundering expert, argues Canada’s leaders have built prosperity on sand — leaving the nation exposed to collapse unless urgent reforms are made.
Alors, pour le #MastApéroStrasbourg pirate de ce vendredi, la suggestion serait donc de se retrouver au Télégraphe, rue de Zurich. Il y a à boire, à manger, possiblement de la place si on n'arrive pas trop tard (je sais pas s'ils prennent les résa, si quelqu'un a envie de tenter). On aurait donc possiblement : @jeeynet @AudeCaussarieu @symcasolari @Alchemiadominum @machine_chouette @mr_jack et éventuellement @mag @tsadiq et/ou @zemoko, et n'importe qui d'autre qui voudrait nous rejoindre. Vous validez ?
Table réservée au télégraphe pour une douzaine de personnes à partir de 18h40 🤗 La résa est à mon nom -> Duval parce que "mastapero" semblait trop compliqué 🤭
US President Donald Trump is absolutely correct that yesterday’s White House event involving himself and his top aides along with Zelensky and the European leaders was the most important meeting to take place since World War II.
How to find Mind Worker Helmet and Gloves in Disney Dreamlight Valley
During Disney Dreamlight Valley's Emotional Rescue quest within the Inside Out realm, you'll meet Joy for the first time and help her regain some of Riley's long-term memories. Along the way, she'll reveal that Sadness is also handling her memories, prompting you to investigate. Before you go and find Sadness, you'll need to wear a Mind Worker helmet ...
Following its release on PC on Steam Early Access in 2024, Ubisoft's The Rogue Prince of Persia is releasing today on console, including through Xbox Game Pass.Ubisoft announced this during the Xbox Gamescom livestream today. The game is launching for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, and PS5. It's coming to Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 later this year.The game's 1.0 release ...
A previously unreported spreadsheet of 2,152 international legal requests with the State of Israel was hidden within last year's "Anonymous for Justice" leaks.
The Guardian: Voices arguing that climate action is a waste of time are getting louder. Here’s why they are wrong | Clear Air theguardian.com/environment/co…
Started just dumping raw caffeine powder into a glass to start the day instead of drinking energy drink and it's been great Starting to think that the advertising about celsius being healthy was junk!
Warlock ransomware exploits unpatched Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities to gain access, escalate privileges, steal credentials, move laterally, and deploy ransomware with data exfiltration across enterprise environments.
I have never owned—let us assume that one can "own" money stored in a (((bank)))—this much money in my whole life! But everything comes at a cost. Now I have to choose between buying a burger to meticulously balance debit and credit and spending some extra time on my beloved Fediverse.
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantilism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The answer I came up with at the time is that the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security.
No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.
As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair - say, by building hospitals and schools - than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:
Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill.
And there's *lots* of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a *ton* of money on the table.
That's the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompson‡, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough:
But there's another way in which surveillance abets rampant billionaireism: when companies spy on us, they can change the rules of their services to increase how much we pay them, and decrease how much they pay us. When companies do this to their customers, they call it "personalized pricing" - but everyone else calls it what it is, *surveillance pricing*:
When a company charges you more than someone else for the same service (say, Uber jacking up the price of a ride because your phone battery is about to die, or an airline charging you extra because they know you have a funeral to attend), they're effectively re-valuing the dollars in your bank account. The fact that the cab-ride that costs you $20 and costs someone else $15 means that your dollar is only worth $0.75.
For example, the apps that hospitals use to hire contract nurses first buy their recent financial information from an unregulated data-broker, checking to see whether the nurse has a lot of credit-card debt, because if you owe a lot on your Visa, the app can offer you a lower hourly wage and you'll still take the shift:
This is re-valuing your labor. If my debt means that I get $20/h for a shift that would pay you $25/h, the app is saying my hours are only worth 80% of what yours are worth.
This kind of price-fixing is an example of a phenomenon I call "twiddling," which is when a company changes its underlying business logic (prices, costs, recommendations, search rankings) on a per-user, per-session basis to shift value from customers and suppliers to shareholders:
There's lots of kinds of twiddling: the fact that apps generate so much fine-grained, up-to-the-second surveillance telemetry about our use of them means that zuckermuskian social media bosses can make pretty good guesses about how many ads and boosted posts they can enshittify into our feeds without us switching off the app:
If you were studying this stuff in an MBA, they'd call it "optimization." Mass surveillance allows the optimization of guard-labor, by identifying threats to the status quo for targeted enforcement, which is much cheaper and effective than indiscriminate enforcement. Commercial surveillance allows buyers to figure out the most an individual consumer will pay, and raise prices accordingly; and to calculate the lowest wage a worker will accept, and lower pay accordingly.
Commercial surveillance allows companies to "optimize" their products to be *nearly* so enshtitified that we quit them, but not quite, maximizing the value they can shift from us to them.
To be free people, we don't merely need to be ungovernable.
How do we do that? Well, there are lots of policies that would make it harder for the ultra-rich to "optimize" us so that we are easier to fleece and abuse, but every "optimization" starts with surveillance. After all, you treasure what you measure, and if you can't observe a worker or a customer - or a citizen getting ready to build a guillotine - you *can't* optimize them.
That's where "privacy first" comes in. There are a *lot* of people angry about a *lot* of problems that are all rooted in the unregulated, unrestricted practice of mass surveillance by governments and their corporate partners:
Pulling together people angry about being turned into deepfake porn, people angry about parents who've gone Maga or kids who've become anorexic; Fox News cultists angry about the use of reverse warrants to identify Jan 6 rioters or Tiktok millennials quoting Osama Bin Laden; immigrants angry about ICE plundering commercial databases to locate their next victim; and people angry about online racial financial, hiring and housing discrimination makes for a hell of a coalition.
If we make it illegal to spy, we make end the conditions for rampant billionaireism. We become unoptimizable.
Billionaires are overgrown toddlers, after all. They don't acknowledge the humanity of others - indeed, they probably don't even believe that the rest of us are really *real* (we're "NPCs"):
The point of billionaireism is to escape: to escape any mutual obligations to others, any duty to give moral consideration to your workers or your customers or the voters you're trying to hoodwink with a torrent of manipulative, dishonest media messages. It's to do whatever you want, to move fast and break things, from rocketships to the night sky. It's being able to shout down anyone who says "NO!"
That's the drive behind "libertarian exit" projects, where people dying of terminal billionaireism attempt to colonize some "empty place" where they owe nothing to anyone:
It's why billionaires are obsessed with tunnels and skycars (escaping the inescapable geometric reality that the only way to move a lot of people through a city is on public transit):
It's why they build luxury bunkers, so they can wait out "the Event" in comfort while the not-quite-real people on the outside rebuild civilization, whereupon they can emerge with their AR-15s, bomb-collared mercenaries, and thumb-drives full of bitcoin and assume their rightful place as Frazetta warlords with a harem in every fortress:
It's a life without friction, because all of that friction has been offloaded onto *us*, through the process of optimization. The gig economy lets a billionaireist enjoy the pleasures of round-the-clock staff without having to pay workers to sit idle. You just summon a worker whenever you want a burrito or a massage or a blunt, and they only get paid while they're "on the clock" for your task.
The fact that this means that an ever-larger fraction of the world has to scramble in mounting desperation to stay clothed, fed and housed is a *hell* of a lot of friction, but it's not *your* friction. They've been *optimized* - to your purposes.
In a fair society, we'd have transparency for the powerful and privacy for everyone else: we'd know every time Elon Musk's jet took off and where it was going so we could surround the landing strip with angry protesters - and Musk wouldn't know a single thing about his workers, his users, or anyone else. He would experience us through the same veil of total ignorance through which he experiences his children.
Interesting fact--mass surveillance is a lot older than most people think. In America, the government kept files on every man since the Civil War. They had to--we had "universal conscription". I put that in quotes because rich people could openly buy their way out and didn't need a bullshit doctor's note about bone spurs.
I'm pretty sure the Suffragettes and Mata Hari let the feds know women can be dangerous, too, so they've tracked all women since WWI.
Big Tech are newcomers to this stuff. Imagine what you could do with a hundred, hundred fifty years of longitudinal data? Lots of traits run in families. That was known well before Darwin crapped his first diaper.
Browse millions of anime, manga, videos, hentai, and video game themed images on Gelbooru. Discover art with detailed tags. Contains explicit hentai content.
matthew - retroedge.tech
in reply to Mitch Conner • • •