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Welcome to the web we lost

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  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    There are people who work late into the night creating something for the benefit of humanity or just for their own pleasure in creation. There are other people that take those things and bleed them dry to make profit to the point of ruination. There are yet others who use them to spew out hatreds that eat away everything good inside themselves and those that will seek out depravity. What we are getting in this is not the loss of any promise of the internet or the coming of AI but an uncomfortably clear reflection of what, in the mass we actually are.

  • There are people who work late into the night creating something for the benefit of humanity or just for their own pleasure in creation. There are other people that take those things and bleed them dry to make profit to the point of ruination. There are yet others who use them to spew out hatreds that eat away everything good inside themselves and those that will seek out depravity. What we are getting in this is not the loss of any promise of the internet or the coming of AI but an uncomfortably clear reflection of what, in the mass we actually are.

    AI has been the most promising thing out to come out of the internet. It's a new frontier. Like any new frontier there is a lot of propaganda to convince us all to take our eyes off it. The exact same happened with the Internet in the early days.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.

    We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.

    Should just avoid them. That's hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.

    I've recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it's designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It's not obsolete. It's a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.

    And even the Web as in year 2000.

    Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.

    But they can be applied to the old model, and it's simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person's public key. Overlay networks are a thing.

    We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.

    The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don't use it to the full extent.

  • There are people who work late into the night creating something for the benefit of humanity or just for their own pleasure in creation. There are other people that take those things and bleed them dry to make profit to the point of ruination. There are yet others who use them to spew out hatreds that eat away everything good inside themselves and those that will seek out depravity. What we are getting in this is not the loss of any promise of the internet or the coming of AI but an uncomfortably clear reflection of what, in the mass we actually are.

    Humans do indeed contain multitudes, but I think this gives too much credit to the influence of corporate (and their political interference) interests. Enshittification is an active choice made in board rooms. Disinformation is an agenda. They're not inevitable grassroots outgrowths.

    Lemmy, curated to avoid AI, curtail corporate news, and where the admins and community are fighting bots and trolls is an example of the reclamation attempt.

    And you know what? It's kinda nice here.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    418 - I am a teapot

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    Limitless opportunity comes with limitless opportunities for corruption

    Seems obvious but people don't ever learn that till we see it happen over and over. .
    I have.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    For the first time strangers were meeting other than face to face, and without any of the social context clues that would have previously guided us in person.

    The suggest this was the 90's? More like the 80's. BBS were doing this for quite a while.

  • Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.

    We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.

    Should just avoid them. That's hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.

    I've recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it's designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It's not obsolete. It's a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.

    And even the Web as in year 2000.

    Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.

    But they can be applied to the old model, and it's simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person's public key. Overlay networks are a thing.

    We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.

    The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don't use it to the full extent.

    The people who create for the sake of creativity are not doing it to be flashy or attract anyone or anything. The internet had a groundswell of people who want to make money, so here we are

  • 418 - I am a teapot

    So... no coffee then?

    Aside: I'm still annoyed with Mark Nottingham for trying to assassinate 418.

  • The people who create for the sake of creativity are not doing it to be flashy or attract anyone or anything. The internet had a groundswell of people who want to make money, so here we are

    The internet has plenty of people who don't want to spend their effort for others' moneymaking.

    All we need is a transparent and simple process of using the real system.

    Registering a DNS record is still cumbersome and done only by technical people, just like making a simple webpage. Or hidden someplace hard to find in Yandex/Google/other web interfaces. Despite it not being hard.

    Maybe some simpler tools are needed too - say, Geminispace is an example of one such.

    But in general what's hard is as hard as things that are now easy were. Just the same effort didn't go there.

    Say, it's not a common thing now to register a DNS record like one person's "internet identity" (just personal websites maybe), but if it were, would it be harder than registering an e-mail account or a phone number? And then, if the system were used as it should, the rest could be done without users troubling themselves. Navigating that "internet contact directory" like you do in Facebook, sending DMs like you do in Facebook, but over an Internet protocol (say, XMPP or something new using that contact functionality) by a native application, having forums and feeds and e-mail and filesharing without platforms. All via native applications just as easy to use as the social media we have.

    OK, I'm sleepy. Just - it's technically possible.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    30 years ago creating content was hard but also destroying it was difficult. Now it's very easy to post shit online but internet is also full of bots, scrapers, malware, scam and spam. I don't think you can separate those two. We can keep the internet private and free but full of shit or make it safe and "fun" but difficult to access.

  • Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.

    We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.

    Should just avoid them. That's hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.

    I've recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it's designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It's not obsolete. It's a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.

    And even the Web as in year 2000.

    Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.

    But they can be applied to the old model, and it's simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person's public key. Overlay networks are a thing.

    We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.

    The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don't use it to the full extent.

    This is probably a bit "I'm 14 and this is deep", but I was thinking the other day about how "pull down to refresh" is weirdly similar to pulling a slot machine handle. 😬

    I don't think that was ever part of its design (didn't the Tweetie dev invent it?), but still.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    I've been thinking a lot about webrings lately. Now that Google is basically cutting off traffic from the indie web.

    I feel like everyone's kinda having the same idea at the same time, which gives me some hope, but... it's difficult enough to find a ring to join, that I think most people will give up?

    I don't know what I think the solution is. Centralising it and having a big, user-friendly "webring platform" is just inviting more enshittification. But the handful of webring directories I've found are really lacking.

    Does anyone have any suggestions? Or, does anyone want to team up and make, like, a Gaymers Webring? (That's pretty much what I'm looking for.)

  • So... no coffee then?

    Aside: I'm still annoyed with Mark Nottingham for trying to assassinate 418.

    I am glad that he tried to assassinate 418, because the massive outcry that led to 418 being saved is something wholesome that I love.

    Link with context for anyone unfamiliar with the context: https://save418.com/

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    I think the thing you are missing is probably the community sense you had though. In your youth you went online to talk about x-files instead of going to the mall; people on IRC probably recognized your username, probably knew your opinions on scully and moulder. You can derive some self-worth from feeling like people know you, or feeling like people are interested in what you have to say. Now you have to scream at the top of your lungs while masturbating on camera to have a chance of being heard. Discord exists for now, you can find some small fandom to engage with there. You can accept the fact that your ego is not adapted to measuring yourself against all of humanity at once and find a smaller pond to swim around in; or start screaming and masturbating.

  • For the first time strangers were meeting other than face to face, and without any of the social context clues that would have previously guided us in person.

    The suggest this was the 90's? More like the 80's. BBS were doing this for quite a while.

    My blazing fast 26k baud modem had my friends and I connecting ....(mom, I'm on the computer!)....connecting... (BeepBongBoobBeeereREEEEEEEEEEEE Pingping ding eoooohhhhh bding) connecting to the greatest BBS with color ascii to play the newest text based space trade war adventure games !!!

    As a 10 year old, though, it was never about meeting people. It was just cool and fun.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    My first real 'community' online was mp3.com. When I joined I was like the 132nd person on that site. It was such an incredible thing back then. People could post their own music, get feedback, promote, find a label, and get paid for streams/downloads.

    I actually earned money from my music while chatting with future mega stars like Darude and Dido.

    I got some real world tracks out there, had my stuff played from Australia to Canada, and there was a time I could walk into a club and hear my music being played.

    Surreal thinking about it now.

    I've never had that kind of connection or sense of belonging online since.

  • In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

    It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

    We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

    The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

    But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

    Very well written piece. I like his perceptions about the speed of how we access the internet being shaped by content being constantly pushed at us by feeds. I think it's having a profound effect on people's whole thought process. He mentions exploring a new website and an hour goes by - but that hour ends and he's done, at least for now. You never get done with a feed, it's an endless, self-refilling "in" basket. I think we perceive and handle feeds the same as a stack of work items we're supposed to get through. We want that sense of completion, so we try to process each item as fast as possible - taking in minimal information, making a superficial value judgement, and swiping left or right on it ASAP so we can scroll to the next item. Then we apply this same false sense of urgency to how we process the real world, which lowers the quality of our decisions and even our enjoyment of life.

  • I've been thinking a lot about webrings lately. Now that Google is basically cutting off traffic from the indie web.

    I feel like everyone's kinda having the same idea at the same time, which gives me some hope, but... it's difficult enough to find a ring to join, that I think most people will give up?

    I don't know what I think the solution is. Centralising it and having a big, user-friendly "webring platform" is just inviting more enshittification. But the handful of webring directories I've found are really lacking.

    Does anyone have any suggestions? Or, does anyone want to team up and make, like, a Gaymers Webring? (That's pretty much what I'm looking for.)

    domain cliques, webrings, forums, and guestbooks were wonderful and they should come back

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    J
    Agreed - the end of the article does state compiling untrusted repos is effectively the same as running an untrusted executable, and you should treat it with the same caution (especially if its malware or gaming cheat adjacent)
  • The Internet of Consent

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    L
    Arguably we should be imposing 25% DST on digital products to counter the 25% tariff on aluminium and steel and then 10% on everything else. The US started it by imposing blanket tariffs in spite of our free trade agreement.
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    You don’t understand. The tracking and spying is the entire point of the maneuver. The ‘children are accessing porn’ thing is just a Trojan horse to justify the spying. I understand what are you saying, I simply don't consider to check if a law is applied as a Trojan horse in itself. I would agree if the EU had said to these sites "give us all the the access log, a list of your subscriber, every data you gather and a list of every IP it ever connected to your site", and even this way does not imply that with only the IP you could know who the user is without even asking the telecom company for help. So, is it a Trojan horse ? Maybe, it heavily depend on how the EU want to do it. If they just ask "show me how you try to avoid that a minor access your material", which normally is the fist step, I don't see how it could be a Trojan horse. It could become, I agree on that. As you pointed out, it’s already illegal for them to access it, and parents are legally required to prevent their children from accessing it. No, parents are not legally required to prevent it. The seller (or provider) is legally required. It is a subtle but important difference. But you don’t lock down the entire population, or institute pre-crime surveillance policies, just because some parents are not going to follow the law. True. You simply impose laws that make mandatories for the provider to check if he can sell/serve something to someone. I mean asking that the cashier of mall check if I am an adult when I buy a bottle of wine is no different than asking to Pornhub to check if the viewer is an adult. I agree that in one case is really simple and in the other is really hard (and it is becoming harder by the day). You then charge the guilty parents after the offense. Ok, it would work, but then how do you caught the offendind parents if not checking what everyone do ? Is it not simpler to try to prevent it instead ?
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    L
    I think the principle could be applied to scan outside of the machine. It is making requests to 127.0.0.1:{port} - effectively using your computer as a "server" in a sort of reverse-SSRF attack. There's no reason it can't make requests to 10.10.10.1:{port} as well. Of course you'd need to guess the netmask of the network address range first, but this isn't that hard. In fact, if you consider that at least as far as the desktop site goes, most people will be browsing the web behind a standard consumer router left on defaults where it will be the first device in the DHCP range (e.g. 192.168.0.1 or 10.10.10.1), which tends to have a web UI on the LAN interface (port 8080, 80 or 443), then you'd only realistically need to scan a few addresses to determine the network address range. If you want to keep noise even lower, using just 192.168.0.1:80 and 192.168.1.1:80 I'd wager would cover 99% of consumer routers. From there you could assume that it's a /24 netmask and scan IPs to your heart's content. You could do top 10 most common ports type scans and go in-depth on anything you get a result on. I haven't tested this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work, when I was testing 13ft.io - a self-hosted 12ft.io paywall remover, an SSRF flaw like this absolutely let you perform any network request to any LAN address in range.
  • Microsoft Bans Employees From Using DeepSeek App

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    L
    (Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.
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    kolanaki@pawb.socialK
    I kinda don't want anyone other than a doctor determining it, tbh. Fuck the human bean counters just as much as the AI ones. Hopefully we can just start growing organs instead of having to even make such a grim decision and everyone can get new livers. Even if they don't need them.