UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on The TikTok Ban Paradox: How Platform Restrictions Create What They Aim to Prevent 5 days ago:
Force people to behave how you like, bend them to your will and to subjugate somebody.
That doesn’t end with surveillance, though. You have to show your hand at some point, or people will (not unreasonably) assume they’re in your blind spot and can behave as they please. That’s why you might get those annoying “Hello this is your ISP, please stop violating the Millennium Copyright Act or we’ll disconnect you” emails if you’re not torrenting behind a VPN. Also why a random woman in Florida made headline news for saying “Deny. Delay. Depose.” to her insurance broker. Its not about real time universal surveillance so much as terrorizing people into thinking they’re a person of interest.
And ultimately, every bit of knowledge, every fact they know (and process) makes them smarter and gets them ahead of the situation and in control.
There are limits. A lot of this stuff is still just a game of percentages. You have a pool of 100M end users and you can whittle that down to 5M potential suspects. And then maybe you can get it to 100k people you seriously think are up to some shit. And then you get it all the way down to 5k people who are really truly dangerous, based on some mathematical heuristic. But then you have to do… what? Actually go peep in someone’s window or dig through their trash to see what’s up.
Meanwhile, you’re banking heavily on the other 99.995M people not flying off the handle when you weren’t actively looking.
Far easier to cultivate or outright manufacture radicals to target and do high profile arrests on. That’s why you’ll find police organizations like the FBI and the NYPD running honeypot websites and local groups, dangling bait and waiting for the radicals to come to them.
Edit: And I’m far more worried about more mundane and less conspiratory dynamics. Corporate greed ruining a lot of things. The attention economy and very unhealthy separation of society. Filter bubbles. The enshittification of the internet from all sides. That’s all way more prominent than what the NSA does.
Everything has its role. The NSA is, for the most part, outwardly facing. And a lot of its role is offensive rather than defense. But you do still occasionally see the knock-on effects downstream. The NSA trying to shut down Iranian nuclear energy with the Stuxnet Virus, for instance, blew back on the US in a big way. In the same way, Radio Free Asia doing anti-China agitprop all over the Pacific Rim gave us the Marcos and Duterte regimes in the Philippines and the chronic resurgence of the Park family and its allies in South Korea. That fuels religious radicalism and narco-trafficking in the region, which eventually comes back to the US in a big way.
Enshittification in pursuit of bigger and bigger profits is certainly its own problem. But it is only possible because smaller and less surveilled competitor media is either strangled in the cradle or bought out by the bigger fish. TikTok getting forced into sale to American investors, Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio prosecuted for insider trading after he refused to open up his telecom company to the NSA, Japanese car companies threatened with tariffs and sanctions unless they insourced their factories to the American Gulf Coast.
These systems work hand-in-glove. Enshittification is a consequence of the consolidation that state intervention allows. And state intervention is encouraged by big private interests seeking to weed out competition in exchange for more compliance with federal spying.
- Comment on The TikTok Ban Paradox: How Platform Restrictions Create What They Aim to Prevent 5 days ago:
I mean you could just install Signal instead of WhatsApp
Signal isn’t secure unless all parties are using it. That’s before you get into the company’s own questionable relationship with the Open Technology Fund.
And one day it’ll just be a world without porn, free speech, but with total surveillance.
What’s the point of total surveillance if there’s nothing to blackmail?
I’d argue we’re getting about as close as we can to total surveillance, and now we’re dealing with gluts of information that are too big to parse in a timely manner.
But a lot of this isn’t the end of porn, it’s the criminalization of porn as a means of threatening prosecution of anyone with a digital device an a hard on.
- Comment on The TikTok Ban Paradox: How Platform Restrictions Create What They Aim to Prevent 5 days ago:
But… It would be a massive surprise to me if the average user was going to change their habits.
Visiting TikTok every time you’re bored isn’t a habit?
Literally no-one cares. And they won’t listen.
Some of this stuff is functionally non-negotiable, at least from a practical perspective. If your OS is harvesting your data, there’s only so much you can do without completely rooting the device. If the only way to access the internet is by signing up with a satanic ISP, you’re not simply going to go without and still function in a modern economy.
But this isn’t businesses doing “Treats with Strings Attached”. This is nanny state conservatives putting up relatively easily evaded barriers to said treats in order to tell their paleocon base that the problem of pornography in their state has been solved.
I see no way this is going to change
I see things changing day by day. Just not in the direction I’d prefer.
But there’s always a breaking point, there’s always a backlash, and these institutions only have a reach up to the scale of human labor they’re willing to commit tot he task
- Comment on The TikTok Ban Paradox: How Platform Restrictions Create What They Aim to Prevent 5 days ago:
I seriously doubt the average TikTok user even knows what a VPN is.
Given the number of internet services that have been targeted for censorship or banning (Pornhub, anyone selling contraceptives across state lines, digital libraries like the Internet Archive) they’re going to be encouraged to learn.
Plenty of TikTok content creators have been working “How to get my content once the service has been banned” explainers into their feeds. And its not like this is a revolutionary new technology or one that’s difficult to implement on your machine.
- Comment on Pornhub Is Pulling Out of Florida 5 days ago:
I did not realize Bing was a big distributor of pornography.
- Comment on Pornhub Is Pulling Out of Florida 5 days ago:
Genuinely curious to know if their numbers are going down as a result or if people are just piling into VPNs to use porn.
I had one already for… uh… safe and legal downloads of movies/shows I definitely already own. But I have to assume this is cutting into the audience to some degree.
- Comment on The Witcher IV revealed with Ciri as the protagonist 1 week ago:
They’ve been building her up for the entire series. She’s playable in 3.
That’s why complaining about this would be such a joke
- Comment on The Witcher IV revealed with Ciri as the protagonist 1 week ago:
People will call it Woke
- Comment on Most Amazon workers considering job hunting due to 5-day in-office policy: Poll 2 months ago:
I guess the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen among all my peers and social networks contradicts those numbers
Definitely possible that Silicon Valley is in some kind of IT recession. They’ve been swinging for the fences at crypto, VR, and AI going on six years and wiffing like crazy.
But if you’re just a glorified digital accountant (like me), I’m here to report that IT is doing perfectly fine. You can earn a high-five / low-six figure salary at any number of mid-cap businesses. Even basic SQL experience is in high demand. Tons of legacy infrastructure to support. Tons of interfaces to build and data to massage between systems. Tons of new applications to deploy and customize. The real work is endless. The phony baloney bullshit work is what ran out.
- Comment on Most Amazon workers considering job hunting due to 5-day in-office policy: Poll 2 months ago:
Currently, tech unemployment is under 3%. Salaries are 2x-5x the national average depending on specialty. If this is a slump, I’m hard pressed to imagine a boom.
You have to keep in mind we’re coming off a decade of industry growth, particularly in the wake of COVID. These 500,000 jobs are a fraction of the IT jobs created annually.
statista.com/…/increase-reduction-of-technology-t…
Demand for IT even in 2023 is up yoy.
- Comment on Most Amazon workers considering job hunting due to 5-day in-office policy: Poll 2 months ago:
Those workers looking for new 100% WFH jobs are in for a rude awakening. The market is not what it was a couple of years ago.
Gotta disagree. The demand for tech workers continues to be voracious. And most employers don’t have the abysmal administrative policies of Amazon.
You’re far better off at a mid-cap firm with management that doesn’t jerk off to Ayn Rand novels than one of the AI obsessed FAANG firms. Take a small salary cut and enjoy a large improvement to your work life balance.
- Comment on Most Amazon workers considering job hunting due to 5-day in-office policy: Poll 2 months ago:
I watched co-workers quit over a 3/2 hybrid schedule.
- Comment on Paramount is shutting down its TV studio as part of a new wave of layoffs 4 months ago:
The industry continues to evolve
A thing I say as I’m being chewed up and swallowed by the newest apex predator of venture capital.
- Comment on If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe 4 months ago:
That’s already the case