i'm probably using an informal fallacy but if online advertisers earn hundreds of billions of dollars, someone must be finding some return on their investment.
i might be wrong, it might just be a huge grift, but i dont know how to come to that conclusion
My suspicion that is a huge grift ? This is what I want to find out. I know very little people in my social circle that used internet ads successfully for their business and very little that found them useful at all
i got put on a statin 10 years ago and started to have blindness events, a migraine related symptom. the effect showed up within a few weeks of my first time taking the statin, at age 35
for ten years i lived with it
but then i experimented with coq10 and basically the day i started taking those the blindness and migraines disappeared
sharing out of a compulsion that it could help a wayward googler some day
well, what if an artist put something controversial in the lyrics, like, something that radicalizes a minor into developing something maligned like, agency, or self awareness
does anyone remember that episode of star trek tng where the kid is given a little laser engraver that carves a dolphin from a block of wood? and the kid is like "i didn't make this" and the teacher (who abducted him, ew) is like "yeah but it's what you wanted to make, the tool just guided you"
so in 2026 we're going to get in trouble doing code "the old way", the pleasurable way, the way an artist connects with the work. we're not to chefs any longer, we're a plumber now that pours food from a faucet.
we're annoyed because our output can suddenly be measured by the time unit. the jig is up. our secret clubhouse has a lightbulb the landlord controls.
some of us were already doing good work, saving money, making the right decisions. we'll be fine.
some of us don't know how to do those things - or won't do those things - and our options are funneled down. we're trashing at this, like dogs being led to the pound.
there's before, there's during, and there's after; the during is a thing we so seldom experience, and we're in it, and 2024 felt like nothing, 2025 feels like the struggle, and 2026 will be the reconciliation.
change sucks. but it's how we continue. we continue differently or we dont exist.
I sure do. I believe it's the first season episode "When the Bough Breaks," (S01E16). That show tackled so many heavy topics right out of the gate... I respect the hell of of the courage to try, even if it produced some pretty epic whiffs along with the home runs and standing doubles.
anyone else get big audio buzz relief using the extra, three prong cable on their normally two prong apple laptop charger? it felt as good as having my wisdom teeth out after i switched
if my operating system had an atomic Undo/Redo stack down to each register being flipped (so basically, impossible, star trek tier fantasy tech) i would let ai run commands without worrying about it. i could have a cool scrubber ui that lets me just unwind time like doctor strange using that green emerald necklace, and, i'd lose nothing, other than confuse my network with replay session noise. and probably many, many other inconsistencies i can't think of, and then another class that i dont know that i dont know about.
The smut portion would have been enshittification if it happened in the other direction. Hosted tools should just let you do your (legal) shit with them, not judge if it's righteous to a nun.
i havent been in a tier 1 ISP in 20 years. can anyone who is in that life give a little summary of how much infrastructure we have in the united states to implement the same level of control as what china has available for walling its garden?
like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed since 2004. probably.
There are actually two part of mechanisms in China to wall its garden.
The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.
The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.
> how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.
Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.
> Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should.
A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the role of morality police is played at the point where control can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.
As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g. in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and neutralize or undermine dissent.
When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute this function throughout the economy and society.
The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open-web and social-media content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn’t as hung up on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That’s why there isn’t a comparable system in place, and claiming that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.
It's not totally comparable, but if you went against the approved covid narrative a few years ago, you would absolutely get shut down by the big players for "misinformation". Same with the 2020 US election results. And in many cases they acted on behalf of the goverment:
Misinformation or not, I like form my opinions myself, rather than have the government do it for me. There was absolutely a lot of nonsense[1] going around during covid, but constantly being told what to believe felt extremely irksome.
This is changing, because the ruling class of politicians and billionaires is discovering that things can actually change if they don’t control the narrative, especially in the age of social media.
Read up on the motivations behind the TikTok acquisition, or the attempts to legislatively censor certain topics on Wikipedia, or the myriad of knobs used by social media “content review” teams etc, or Chat Control in the EU, or going back further, the surveillance systems detailed in the Snowden leaks (why surveil if censorship isn’t the goal?).
It’s ultimately exactly the same reasoning as that used by the CCP, but in a more subtle and gradual manner. Yes, right now, the GFW is a different beast, but if we do nothing, I would wager that the solutions will converge.
This discounts the effects of things like shills (commercial or government) or propaganda in general and its quieting effect on discussion. Yes, there are conspiracy theories, but there is a reason why they end up relegated to the quacks and aren't broached upon at all, save for in jest perhaps, by mainstream sources of information. I mean really consider the actual diversity of thought among mainstream sources in this country. It is astoundingly limited and entirely biased towards neoliberalism. Our political spectrum is extremely narrow and differentiated by only a small handful of hobby horse issues.
i might be wrong, it might just be a huge grift, but i dont know how to come to that conclusion
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