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Cake day: October 26th, 2025

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  • You raise some very interesting points. Not trying to argue, but I’d like to share some thoughts I had in response.

    The surveillance and ad networks are products of the same ecosystem as any other digital technology. Short of regulating them out of existence, I don’t know how you can’t distinguish between the two with a disposition like ”we want one but not the other.” Telemetry is core to iterative development, and it only becomes “surveillance” when you use it a certain kind of way. Content delivery is no different in how a specialized use case, barely a specialized implementation, can produce an “advertising network.”

    Lock-in at platform, ecosystem, and hardware levels is also the easiest path forward many times, from a development perspective. Short of having a bolstering engineer culture that spends time prioritizing quality over capital, how do you incentivize companies to wait for standards to be developed and adopted before they engineer their products? How do incentive them to redesign legacy code such that it uses open standards? How do you tell the difference between priority disparity and intentional ecosystem management for the purpose of lock-in?

    “You are the product” is right on the money, and it’s astounding that culturally we know, but most of us don’t seem to care enough. To change that, I think people need to start making better arguments for why “being the product” is bad. Arguments that the average person can relate to. It might help if people understood that a platform that didn’t crowdsource engagement probably wouldn’t have a fraction of the success as the tech giants we see today. This is reminiscent of the feudalist era — they own the land where market + public discourse occurs; they draw influence and power from that relationship.



  • This sounds great. If we can pass legislation like this in enough states, as well as legislation that requires ICE to remain unmasked and constantly wear ID (and more legislation requiring local police to intervene in cases where ICE does not obey the aforementioned, obstructing the ICE agents from continuing their work until complete compliance), we might be able to set up a “screw your neighbor” kind of authority.

    • local police can be held responsible for not obstructing the out-of-compliance (and potentially-fraudulent) ICE agents
    • ICE agents can be held civilly responsible for their state crimes (but what about people who need help/anonymity when filing civil lawsuits?)
    • State governments can issue warrants for ICE agents that don’t appear, don’t pay, or otherwise don’t comply with civil lawsuits

    Can a state support people in creating lawsuits?









  • You’re living through a grand moment. We don’t know how this story will be told, but probably as the fall of an imperialist empire led by a population of spectacle dazzled individuals who believe in the authority of concepts like The Market. A society too obsessed with their own freedom from to actually obtain any freedom to. A society with such little humility, American Exceptionalism can be seen touted as the cultural norm despite clear lack of substantive exceptionalism (mind having the most war ships). When all of this becomes immediately obvious to the general public, you might say we’re in an age of post-enlightenment. I wonder what we’ll find on the other side of that evolution.






  • You bring up my first intuition on the matter. If the federal government wanted to destabilize counter movements, they most certainly would take three approaches: (1) propagandize the organizations leading those movements, (2) attack the organizations leading those movements, and (3) attack the members of the organizations leading those movements. Look no further than the history between the US and their workers unions.

    However, this perspective is unfair. It doesn’t quite justify the alternative, because the alternative seems to be: “don’t join the organization, alleviate the risk from yourself.” That’s just inaccurate positing from the fears mentioned here. The truth is, doing nothing has risks that you can’t predict. Though, you can approximate your risks by asking yourself: “what if I was on a green card right now?” Doing that, at least, lets you view the problem as though it’s already at your doorstep — and this gives justice to the inherent risk we all face during a fascist takeover. Fascists only start with minorities, as they develop the infrastructure necessary to target anyone they please.



  • God damn it, I hate my education system. I thought NATO was the peacekeeper of the world — a valuable residue of WWII. One sided propaganda-based education developed to fuel a belief in American exceptionalism and nationalistic egoism. This education-level propaganda is pretty effective because you don’t actually know what details to question, and so you grow up with some pretty bold assumptions about how the world works (and don’t even realize it). They had me believing Christopher Columbus was some kind of messiah-explorer too.

    How does this happen? My anti-conspiracy brain wants to believe there’s no such thing as an evil man behind the curtain, twisting his mustache and orchestrating these details like ”meh, we need to make sure all the kids believe in this propaganda such that we have an imperialistic society.” So, short of that, how does this happen so effectively?