I mean, I want to have hope, but the major first world nations of the world didn’t build a god damned surveillance state over the last 40 years for nothing. Those fourteen eyes are watching.
What’s coming is Hitler’s Shutzstaffel on absolute fucking steroids. We used to say, regarding the Patriot Act, that the tools being developed were the kind the Nazi SS would have fucking wet dreams about.
Anne Frank wasn’t followed by a GPS tracking unit & surveillance device in her pocket tied to her real name and address that she regularly used to talk with friends. Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about heat-scanners that find people hidden in walls. Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about the internet at the home she was being hidden in was monitored. Anne Frank was still found and murdered by the Nazis, with much less surveillance, and much lower tech.
I’m not gonna drown myself in hopium and copium. I’m ready for our ramshackle poor-man’s cyberpunk world to pop off and start the Water Wars. Because that’s sadly way more likely than humans getting their fucking shit together.
EDIT: You want it to get better, start organizing, even for things as simple and small as local mutual aid networks, only using encrypted channels. No, people won’t like it. Yes, they’re hard to use. If you want to not be constantly infiltrated by people trying to stop you doing good works, go ahead and keep organizing in cleartext. If we want to actually make headway against corrupt governments and corporations yes that means you’ll have to learn to do some shit on your own and it won’t be as fancy and clean as the corporate option. Stop relying on the groups oppressing you for the tools to fight your oppression by them. The groups oppressing you will never give you the tools to dismantle them.
poopium
Industrial society surely sucks.
Yeah, I’m soon going to be testing out technologies like Meshtastic and ensuring I have a basic survival kit in case natural disaster, revolution, martial law, or some other shit hitting the fan.
If we can’t trust the people we’ve put trust in to do good for us, then we have to re-make every aspect of our society from the ground up.
(Honestly speaking about my government, I have faith in my province and city, but if PP gets into federal office I will be very worried).
This is the way.
Whether we like it or not we rely on modern technology these days. I’d like to see more Mutual Aid Group activity driven to build community mesh-networks and the like. Bring back the ideology of the barbed wire phone networks and community communications. We sold off every bit of communications to corporations, and that’s a problem.
LoRa texting devices are also pretty dope, too.
from the ground up.
An important point. Real change never comes from the top down. Stop looking for leaders and start being a community.
Uuuhh, just like anything that transmits RF, Meshtastic nodes can also be tracked, even if you set location info to some very low precision level.
It is perhaps less likely to be tracked than a phone, but it still can be.
Yeah of course. You can also seclude yourself in the mountains but planes and drones can track that too. That’s not really the point though.
The point is that we have to rebuild communities on new trust networks, not the ones operated by billionaires that work in concert with government. With those, information is readily handed over. With smaller locally distributed networks, they have to deliberately take it from us. This tacit censorship and manufactured consent is what I’m trying to defeat. Taking on the surveillance state is far too much of an uphill battle to go alone or in small groups.
As an analogy, it is trivial to scrape my and other users’ posts off the fediverse, but some actor for the government, data broker or AI has to create the tool or ask every server admin for information rather than a central entity (such as dessalines). This data is less valuable commercially because it is not exclusive to whoever collected it, anyone of the public can too. It is also difficult to just remove us all off the fediverse, because simply taking the site offline doesn’t removes its copies from others. A federated purge would is needed which is harder to acheive on a large scale.
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They’re watching, but here’s the thing: at a certain volume, seeing everything actually becomes a detriment as the noise creates false positives and drowns out useful data.
If EVERYONE is pissed off, angry, and posting about it online etc then sorting out “angry enough to do something” gets harder. It’ll be interesting to see what the “right to bear arms” folks in government come up with when they’re the ones in the crosshairs rather than schoolkids
Correct.
When it comes down to the necessary facts, it’s a numbers game. There are so many more pissed off people than there are in power and wealth. They’d essentially have to massacre incredible amounts of people without destroying their own means of making income.
Guess how much a health care insurance org makes without people to insure?
$0. Interestingly, the same amount we believe it should make with people to insure as well.
I mean, I want to have hope, but the major first world nations of the world didn’t build a god damned surveillance state over the last 40 years for nothing
Tinfoil hat
I’m 100% convinced the drones in the news lately are prototyping a new mass surveillance program to be kicked off after Trump takes office, likely funded by Musk, likely for purposes related to his planned mass deportations, and so little is being done about it because folks are being told Jan 20 isn’t that far away, you better not.
/Tinfoil hat
My slightly less tinfoil hat option B is that it’s only your garden variety mass surveillance program being piloted, kicked off under Biden, and that will be unlikely to be curtailed under Trump.
Because as a veteran, I refuse to believe that craft the military weren’t intimately familiar with would receive nothing but a shrug in reaction to this, yet that’s all that has happened.
While we’re tinfoil hatting, it’s worth noting the weird uptick in UFO/suddenly “UAP” stuff the last few years. UFOs have often meant “we’re covering up some other program, LOOK OVER HERE DUMMIES!!!” and it just sort of appeared, blew up, then has simmered in the background with no resolution. As UFO stuff is wont to do. And a lot of Republicans have weirdly jumped on board (Rubio, et al.).
I’m actually with you on both of those possibilities. It was some of the first stuff that came into my head in regards to that issue, as well.
The rich already control the narrative and peoples mind. They effectively got whole nations to vote against their own interests. They are absolutely fine. This is copium.
Or just rich people getting stronger and ever more lethal security teams…
So we need a new money?
Musk has all of the new money too. We need a new new money.
Ya, not some crypto shit too
Musk’s feds would like to know your location
The money we have now works for Luigi defense funds
We still out number them by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to one.
There are 2781 billionaires in the world. I say we eat them.
No thanks! I heard they taste like smegma.
Adam Smasher incoming.
I want to believe that the working class will finally take back its power, the first step of which will be forming strong and effective unions. The second step is ensuring high taxes on the wealthy, coupled with accountability for how that tax revenue is spent
But I look at all the previous decades of failure, and I recommend that young people in particular should make alternative plans in case they have to fend in a hostile social, political and economic environments
1—do nothing else but learn some skill or trade (or several) which you can use to get paid
2—don’t excessively drink, don’t excessively do drugs, don’t excessively sleep around, and get and stay fit
3—create a network of friends and family, but don’t stress if you cannot. Get a hobby, try to get married, but don’t stress if you don’t. Cut out toxic people and family from your life
4—do whatever else you care about if you’ve done the above
Conventional wisdom still helps, don’t be fooled by people who say that it doesn’t work
What’s wrong with sleeping around?
And what’s the point of getting married?
I understand the sentiment, drugs, drinking, and sleeping around is a way to have an enjoyable time, but it’s not a way to create meaningful relationships.
None of those three things are, by themselves, bad. But if you do them to excess, it can replace a real, stable social network.
The point of getting married is that you legally tie yourself to another person in a way that is recognized by larger institutions. If you don’t have a spouse, or LEGAL family, then it can be difficult to make co-decisions. One of the major reasons why same sex marriage was such a huge deal, was that end of life support and care was almost impossible. You could live with someone for 30 years, but then when they’re in a coma in the hospital, you can’t legally visit them, or make medical decisions for them.
I want to believe that the working class will finally take back its power, the first step of which will be forming strong and effective unions. The second step is ensuring high taxes on the wealthy, coupled with accountability for how that tax revenue is spent
Here in Australia our centre left party, The Greens, support both of those things, and other imitatives like free dental care etc alas they don’t get the votes needed to advance their policies. We have a preferential voting system (ranked choice) but we still have centre right and far right domination of the political zeitgiest.
Don’t even need to take up the rifle and pitchfork, just need to put numbers on a ballot paper in a differnt order, alas that seems beyond us.
No, it isn’t.
This was one pissed-off kid out of 330,000,000 who are being purposefully kept in poverty, and nothing fundamental will change as long as 99% of voters are only going to pick a candidate based on team color.
And they will probably try out of fear to take Americans’ guns, which is going to be hilarifying
one can hope.
im not holdin my breath though. even luigi there wasnt one of those stuck at the bottom with nowhere to go but violence. hes a little rich kid that acted out of conscience.
a better example is that kid that nearly saved us another trump administration by inches, but it hasnt exactly been a trend.
He acted out of pain. Literally.
Us public official and a dead corporate parasite don’t get the same level protections, plus half the country supports team red no matter what.
Nobody but owners and their bootlickers support a parasite tho hence why plebs got unity this one time.
None of this matters in a ubiquitous surveillance state, which is either here now or a couple years off.
It’s been here for a while, smart phones were basically the nail in the coffin. Switching to GNU/Linux is not enough, there are proprietary backdoors in your BIOS firmware. Nearly everything we buy is bugged by default. Laws need to be in place and the education system needs to be required to teach about libre software. If we don’t do this, all hope is lost for privacy in the future.
Nobody is making you carry a phone I bet, it’s a choice. People can still do stuff offline and in private when needed.
They barely mix with us, peasants. They will probably follow this trend and live in inexpugnable, extremely well defended citadels. Apartheid, in a word.
That never works though. Like literally it’s never worked.
I work in the municipal office of a tiny city that’s an enclave for the super rich. We’re entirely surrounded by a major city, but we’re a different jurisdiction.
Of course, I don’t get to live there. Literally every resident is a millionaire or better. The average new house being built there is about 8 million dollars, and we have a lot of housing churn.
That is, people will buy a 5 million dollar house and tear it down to build a 12 million dollar house.
All that to say that I interact with these people all the time. They almost invariably don’t realize how out of touch they are, because their neighbors are also millionaires.
You’d think it’s a super nice city, but other than the houses it’s fairly run down. They don’t want good roads or sidewalks because then people would use them. The city was essentially founded to prevent bus lines from the major city from having stops near the fancy district.
Over half the municipal employees are cops, and their main job is keeping homeless people away.
All this work goes into isolating the rich from the poor, and it’s worked so well that most of the rich don’t even realize it’s happening.
So…what you going to do about it?
I’m having a meeting this week to decide what we do next.
Just in case you need: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
Educate, agitate, organize
I hope so. I really really hope so. If not, then we’re headed for an incredibly terrible future of the kind that used to exist in dystopian fiction.
Who is we ? are you not bearing witness to the fawning obsiquisness ?
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments - Adam Smith
If only.
<pfft> Let them eat cake.
X for doubt
OP is fucking delusional.
