It's long and angry but damn, did it strike a chord with me. It was written in December, '22 so pre-Reddit meltdown but still very relevant to it.
Some highlights include:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters... It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Over and over again ... I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.
All ... gone. Dismantled for parts and sold off with zero understanding that the only thing of any value the site ever offered was the community, its content, its connection, its possibilities, its knowledge. And that can’t be sold with the office space and the codebase. These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.
It does end on a hopeful note, though.
Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world.
Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.
It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.
Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.
Stop buying things and start talking to each other. They’ve always known that was how they lose.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
This isn't just a news story that lasted a few months and then went away.
It's hard for international news sources to get accurate information of what's going on in the Xinjiang area thanks to the CCP's military police controlling the region, but there's still been a steady drip of information that clearly shows that the Uyghur population are being oppressed and their culture being stamped out.
The confusion comes because "liberal" is a very nebulous word that can mean very different things.
In terms of political ideology, there are three main types that generally exist in Western democracies.
Classical liberalism - emphasizes individual freedom, limited government intervention in the economy, and the protection of natural rights, such as life, liberty, and property.
Neoliberalism - emphasizes free markets, deregulation, privatization, and reduced government intervention in the economy.
Social Liberalism - combines the values of individual freedom with a belief in the role of government in addressing social and economic inequalities through healthcare, education, and welfare programs.
Typically these days, especially in the US, most people think of #3 when they hear the word "liberal" in a political sense, I'd say.
Neoliberalism is more focused on free trade and globalism, whereas libertarianism focus more on individual liberties and minimal governmental intervention in all aspects of society, not just economically.
The real red flags here were the carbon fiber hull and the fact that the Titan wasn't even certified or properly tested to ensure it could survive the stress of repeated dives to such extreme depths.
It's kinda insane that OceanGate got away with taking paying tourists down in that thing for as long as they did.
My mistake, I understood admins had been asking for the return of captchas as soon as they were removed.
Still, it took a few days for the devs to agree to reinstate them, which, combined with the general tone seem in that second link, is what gave me the impression that they were reluctant to do so.
That only happened recently, though. For weeks they were replying to instance admins requests to reinstate captchas with things like "bots have beaten captchas, so they're useless."
Say thanks to the
lemmy.worldadmin team for fixing issues with the Lemmy code and sorting out the load balancing for their instance.https://lemmy.world/post/1061471