Sideloader

Yup, the future is looking pretty sinister these days. It’s all about tech being used to surveil and control people and parasitic companies commodifying the data they produce.

The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.

Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.

The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.

We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.

And of course China and Russia are mentioned in the comments. Propaganda works. Repeat something often enough and people will internalize it and assume it’s true even when no proof is provided.

Isn’t this beating a dead horse? The video game/violence link has been debunked many times. OTOH, a comprehensive study determining whether violent games and movies contribute to people becoming desensitized to actual violence would be interesting. I recall an interview with US soldiers in Iraq saying that shooting people was “just like playing a FPS game.”

It can’t be denied that our society is obsessed with violence. Americans have been like this for a while but recently produced movies and TV shows in Europe and the UK feature much more graphic violence than they did two decades ago. Why? Is it a reflection of a more ruthlessly competitive society or are there other reasons?

Hmm...from a tech porn perspective it’s a cool little gadget. But given the shadow surveillance and police state that was erected post 9/11 and how often “national security” outfits have been caught playing fast and loose with the laws of the land, there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

Governments in most western countries have thrown out habeas corpus and have given themselves the right to indefinitely ‘disappear’ anyone they arbitrarily deem a threat to national security. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden come to mind.

I wouldn’t trust governments and intelligence services in the post-democratic west with this technology any more than I’d trust their counterparts in “classic” totalitarian states.

A lot of the comments seem to be discussing social anxiety, which is not the same as loneliness. In my late-teens and early-20s I was extremely anxious in social situations but I did not feel lonely. Social anxiety, and the isolation that often results from it, can contribute to a person feeling lonely but the two concepts are not synonymous.

As I understand it, loneliness is a psychological state that results when a person feels deprived of meaningful contact with other humans. Very few people can maintain their sanity and well-being completely cut off from their fellow humans (the proverbial hermit living contently in the wilderness with only himself for company is a rare phenomenon) but how much and what type of social contact an individual needs to maintain their equilibrium varies wildly.

So, it is impossible to determine how lonely a given person is only by looking how much time they spend alone or how anxious they are in social situations.

Loneliness is primarily a psychological state. A person who spends a lot of time alone, and is ok with that, is not lonely. Conversely, there are people who say they feel lonely even when they are in the company of others.

Since you don’t seem to have a problem with spending time alone, you are not lonely and the purported* results of this study don’t apply to you.

*I am skeptical of this study’s validity but that is irrelevant to what constitutes ‘loneliness’.

+1

Well put. Corporations aren’t people no matter what Citizens United “says.” Their goal is maximizing shareholder profit at any cost. They do nothing out of the goodness of the hearts they don’t have and they certainly are not guided by ethics the way individuals are.

As you said, if Apple “cares” about privacy more than Google or Facebook it is not because it is a more “moral” or “just” company, it is simply because its business model is not, and never was, based on hoovering up and monetizing personal data.

It’s not like a conscious decision was made by Tim Cook or Apple’s shareholders to do things differently than the aforementioned two companies.

Pointing out how Apple “cares about your privacy” is simply a PR (read: propaganda) move designed to gain some extra positive publicity which, of course, helps the bottom line. It’s the kind of thing companies do all the time. Taking these pronouncements at face value requires a certain naïveté (or a wilful suspension of disbelief).

And while Apple might not traffic in its customers’ personal data, the company recently revealed that it scans content stored on its servers, e.g. your iCloud Photo Library, because of “concerns” over child pornography.

This suggests privacy isn’t quite as sacred to Apple as its PR department would have one believe.

(Never mind that there is no evidence whatsoever that mass surveillance reduces incidence of child sexual abuse or decreases the production and distribution of child porn. Which begs the question, why <i>is</i> Apple spying on its paying customers’ personal content?)

Whenever a company, or a government, deploys the cliché “think about the children!” argument as a pretext for increasing internet surveillance, you can bet this reason was chosen because if anyone objects on privacy grounds they can say, “what, so you’re on the side of the child pornographers/suicide trolls/cyber bullies?” It’s a discussion stopping tactic.

Yeah, corporations are definitely not people, they are not your friends and they do not care about you as a person. That in 2020 this even needs to be said is a testament to how thoroughly corporate propaganda has been woven into the fabric of western culture.

You are teaching your nephews to be greedy and to value individual ambition over everything else. In other words, encouraging them to internalize the values of the society in which they live.

This is not very bold or novel, but rather ordinary.

Given all the problems that are coming to light in societies that have have taken individualism to absurd and self-defeating extremes, this is exactly the opposite of what is required if these places are to avoid collapsing into failed states, technocratic dictatorships or banana republics run by and for delusional oligarchs.

Well put. A lot of people miss this fact. Also, the US/UK trying to pin the blame for their own incompetence on China suggests that reality attachment in these places, at the government level at any rate, is seriously sub-optimal.

In the US, the Trump administration’s bungling incompetence handling of the outbreak is truly staggering. Wildly contradictory statements from moment to the next, no coordinated pandemic plan, “hijacking” PPE shipments enroute from China and Malaysia to the countries that had bought, and paid for, them...this is rogue/failed state level stuff.

Other western countries also messed up big time. In Canada, France, the UK and Spain people in longterm care homes were abandoned and left wallowing in their own filth as COVID-19 burned through these facilities like wildfire, killing scores of elderly inpatients, many of whom were left to suffer and die alone.

It’s striking how some of the most “advanced” countries utterly failed to prepare for and manage a very foreseeable pandemic.

Then again, is it really that surprising that this happened in places where health care systems have been chronically underfunded for decades as permanent homeless camps have become normalized and the middle-class economy replaced by low-wage precarity and easy credit?

It’s like after four decades of “there is no such thing as society” governance the health and well-being of people, of the public, in these places has become an afterthought.

The scramble to blame other countries or pretend that “there is nothing we could have done to prepare for this” is theatre designed to deflect attention from the fact that dictatorships, like China, and places with authoritarian governments, like Singapore and South Korea, care more for the health of their citizens than many of the western liberal democracies, where austerity and massive neglect of public services and infrastructure have become the norm.

Like the market crash of 2008, the coronavirus outbreak of 2020 is showing that the social and economic system underpinning the west is seriously broken and can’t handle even the slightest amount of stress.

It needs to be replaced with an arrangement that reins in the ability of the avaricious banker and CEO class to dictate how the economy should be run. The health and well-being of all people in society needs to come first or these places will degrade even further.

Many HN types don’t really care about politics that don’t affect them directly. Imperialism and war directed at countries they never think about doesn’t bother many Americans. Only fellow Americans who share their ideology matter. Everyone else can pound sand. Foreigners aren’t real people to them.

Even democracy, which everyone claims to support, can be dismantled with many people not really noticing because they are mindlessly submissive to authority. America is doing a pretty good job of setting itself up for a very grim and conflict ridden future and many people don’t even notice that. Climate change? Oh tech will save us don’t worry!

It’s a weird time for sure. The deeper the multiple crises we face get, the more determined the masses are to bury their heads even deeper in the sand. The fanatical pursuit of ever elusive “happiness” and effectively enforced optimism that threatens transgressors with social ostracism is a sure sign that things are not okay.

The American people fully embrace pathological denial but they are, of course, in denial about that too and are always relieved to find another messenger they can shoot.

Advertises and marketers mislead and exaggerate with near impunity and use legalistic language drafted by lawyers to cover their asses. It is standard practice for companies to knowingly deploy psychological trickery in order to manipulate consumers, including very young children. This is accepted because capitalism is the one cow that can not be slaughtered. Profit is always good. Caveat emptor.

But a civil liberties group informing citizens of their rights in an attention catching way is deplored as intrusive and inappropriate and not “objective” enough.

This attitude speaks volumes about a society that has lost its way and is slowly collapsing under the irreconcilable contradictions it refuses to honestly address.

Very cool article. Somewhat surprised China wasn’t included on the list as they have built a high speed rail network in the last several decades that already has more track mileage than Europe’s.

Where there is a will there is a way, as the saying goes, and America, and the UK, with their profit über alles obsession are happy to let infrastructure rot and make people use woefully underfunded and overcrowded rail systems rather than trying something “new.”

Does it also bother you that the hysteria over Russia’s “guilt” is shamefully hypocritical and misleading? Are you aware, for example, of the role the Clinton administration played in 1996 to get their man Boris Yeltsin re-elected? One reason for Putin’s popularity is he put a stop to the Yeltsin facilitated post-communist era plundering of Russia’s wealth and resources by scruple less Russians and foreigners alike, and Americans were heavily involved in that avaricious free for all.

The United States not only interferes in other countries’ elections, it also regularly orchestrates coups, finances and arms violent insurgent groups and has a history of invading and destroying countries based on false pretexts.

The United States and its NATO vassals pushed their militaries right up to the Russian border, which is like Russia, China and Iran sending their armies to the border regions of Mexico and Canada while their navies patrol the Gulf (of Mexico).

Need I say more?

Even if Russia is guilty of everything the hysterical and disingenuous Russiagate crowd alleges, it is still a lightweight when it comes to messing around in other countries’ affairs. The mythology, and ideology, of American exceptionalism says the United States has a divine right to subject the entire planet to its will. World domination has been an explicit American political goal since the 1930s. It’s a matter of public record.

Russia with Putin as its leader stands in the way of American domination of Eurasia. Hence, the military encirclement of Russia and the belligerent anti-Russian rhetoric from American leaders.

If there is one thing American exceptionalists can’t abide, it is a country that wants to chart its own path free of American domination. The United States is threatening Russia, not the other way around, and the Russian state’s alleged actions are a response to that.

Really, Americans don’t have a leg to stand on here. The 24/7 nonstop anti-Russian hysteria whipped up by the media and Democrats who can’t accept they lost an election is overloading the emotional circuits of millions of Americans and shorting out their critical thinking abilities. It’s rather disconcerting.

Convoluted piece that uses a lot of words to say very little and ends up being (yet another) defense of “social” media and its billionaire owners.

It matters little if Facebook users, their attention-span or their data trail and the content they churn out are the “product”....Facebook’s business model (data, data and more data) requires the company to maximize the time users spend browsing, reading and clicking through its network.

As we have seen, the company has no problem with using people’s psychology against them to achieve this. And the company’s devious and underhanded tricks (like its data mining “security app”) designed to Hoover up as much information as possible are legendary.

Multiple studies show “social” media use is detrimental to people’s psychological wellbeing and these companies not only own the channels billions use to communicate daily, they own the CONTENT of those communications. With FB and Google/Alphabet cozying up to the DoS, DoD and intelligence services...and deploying algorithms to limit “fake news” (i.e. any and all information that challenges the status quo) these companies have way too much power.

They are a menace to our societies and need to be busted up and regulated.