This is essentially market manipulation via speculation. The artificially create scarcity to drive up demand and price. They do it with food, they do it with housing, and they do it with healthcare. The basic things we need to survive are being held by fewer and fewer owners; then held hostage by those owners via monopolization; just to squeeze more from us. The earth is a fucking resort for the 3000 billionaires in this world, and the rest of us are allowed to work here at the pleasure of our overlords.
wuffah@lemmy.world 4 days ago
We went from mass surveillance to hardware confiscation real quick.
These companies are so large that they don’t need the consumer market anymore. The consumer is now the competition. They can essentially purchase the entire planet’s output of computing hardware years in advance to force us out of the market and lease it back to us at inflated rates. All while using all that tensor compute to make everyone’s life a living digital surveillance hell.
Forget Internet freedom, computational liberty is now at risk. Who needs all that expensive legal and technological architecture to steal your data, report on you to the government, and enforce DRM when you can only use rented and approved corporate cloud hardware?
We need to elevate the prosecution of anti-trust to religious inquisition, and burn these companies at the stake. They’re using AI to literally enslave humanity, and it’s working.
Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
wuffah@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Everything seems to eventually link back to class war.
4am@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT
I’ve been screaming this since Crucial closed up
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
People have been screaming this since right to repair, since FOSS, since Microsoft in the 90s, since stallman. Consumers consistently lose because the vast majority of people don’t give a shit and politicians that could regulate our way out of this are easily purchased.
shoo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
To be honest I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about. It’s value is only derived from its ability to identify + track me, either for my convenience or for the highest bidder’s. Computational liberty is only an issue because we’ve made everything digital out of convenience and that mindset has leaked into critical social functions (taxes, law, logistics, healthcare, etc…).
Software and data bloat is more astronomical than most people realize. Only about 10% of persisted data is ever touched again (don’t look up the ecological implications). Amazon could capture 90% of all compute hardware and the entire human race could get by just fine on 10%. We wouldn’t have access to niceties like app stores full of niche apps, 24MP phone cameras, 4k movies, 10 sluggish layers of software abstraction, 15 years of photos you never look at, etc…
But you could run a simple message server on basically any scrap of IoT e-waste. A highly available static website can be hosted with an old phone and a solar panel. Any device (fridge/watch/calculator/pregnancy test) can run Doom. All of Apollo 11’s source code is a fraction of the size of most web pages.
We’re continously expanding our hardware usage for infinitesimally small gains. We should demand that our governments legislate digital austerity for dozens of reasons, just pick what resonates best fit you. Personal privacy, energy usage, ecological damage, corporate capture, information rot, brittle supply chains, national security, etc…
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
Yes, and also - if something was normal in 80s, it won’t stop being possible in 2030s. In some sense our civilization now is just reveling in the sea of computational power used wastefully.
There was a moment when I moved from an old PC with 512 MB RAM which seemed nice, but was becoming a bit weak for games and all, to a newer C2D PC with 2 GB RAM. I felt it can do anything I’ll ever need. And web aside, it still can do most.
And that old PC, if we compare it to a machine good for year 1999, was very powerful. And 1999 is around Matrix and Phantom Menace, and the X-Wing: Alliance game, and ICQ popularity growing.
More and more resources spent for the same or less social satisfaction. People like talking in money and graphs and industry slang, but honestly social satisfaction is a far better optimized mechanism than these.
Adopting a kitten seems still more satisfying than computing, but the gap in year 1999 was subjectively less than now.
T156@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The old technologies that we used to use for websites never really went away. They’re still around, and you can use them to make websites again if you want.
It’s just that it won’t be as fancy looking as a newer web-site, but you don’t lose too much on functionality.
wuffah@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Fantastic alternative insight, thank you.
biofaust@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
We made physical toys and games into something expensive for adults and kicked kids out of the equation.
Now all they have are videogames and the most affordable ones (the ones on PC) are soon to disappear.
Butterphinger@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
projecting
biofaust@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Oh, even I create maps with my cousin still. Playing though…
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
Good luck killing off older games, though.
biofaust@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Or indie games.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 days ago
Older games will play via emulation on a damn phone. They’ll practically play on a potato.
Might be playing Balatro and such rather than the latest iteration of AAA whatever, but I mostly play games closer to the former than the latter already.
redlemace@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about
Genuin question. How do you classify your photo’s ? (That’s the data I care about most. almost everything else can be reproduced or is just a pitty if lost)
shoo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Photos are the same as most other data, you can store them pretty easily long-term in a physical medium. Of course, capturing an image is much easier and more convenient with a digital device, but that doesn’t mean it has to live digitally indefinitely. It’s simple enough to have an instant digital camera with a built in printer and access to a high quality scanner.
If you held a gun to my head I could pick out a few dozen personal photos that I own that are worth saving physically. If you allowed me a modern flash drive’s worth of storage (64-128GB, ~5000 good quality images), I could pretty easily store every picture worth a second look from my entire lifetime.
Apple’s marketing driven perception that every single person needs a cinema quality camera (and cinema sized storage) in their pocket is ludicrous. Only a tiny fraction of people actually truly need that. Let them borrow that gear from a library if we want to preserve fair access.
Rigal@lemmy.world 2 days ago
At this pace they will make owning a compyter illegal. Being everything a remote service governments doesnt need to preoccupy by cryptography and business will not have to worry about addblockers and user profiling will be easier.
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I can’t agree with this more, but what’s the plan exactly?
astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 3 days ago
Sounds perfect for some trust-busting action. If only we had a capable government…
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 3 days ago
First we need to trust-bust the government until we get a government that is actually representative of the people, not representative of the wealth.
It’s not that the government is not capable or as inefficient as they are so often portrayed. They are actually quite capable and frighteningly efficient. They’re just not working for us anymore.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
more like if only enough people actually cared about what is going on in life. Most governments with this issue atm are facing massive apathy in regards to actually voting on what they want. They either don’t vote at all, or blind vote not bothing to research anything. I wish I could say this was strictly a US issue as well but, I believe most democratic governments are having this issue. I know for sure Canada is.
cv_octavio@piefed.ca 3 days ago
Ok. One more time for everyone in the back. Ready?
Tax.
The.
Wealthy.
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I couldn’t agree more, but they’ve said no, and the politicians are being bought, so as a citizen, besides not buying their shit slurry, what is there to actually do about it more actively. I guess it’s just local politics, ultimately I don’t know in the aggregate how much it helps with these guys who have so much money they just wield it like a hammer. Not that that should be a good enough reason to do nothing
Keeping the issues in the conversation is good, but ideas and words only work so well, eventually someone has to enable mechanisms to do these things in reality, otherwise its just corps sucking each other off at the common person’s expense all the way to hell
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Well there’s a vast landscape between ‘citizen’ and ‘not buying’!
As a participant in state and local politics, you do what you can. I learned during years of NGO work that the longest lever for the non-owner class is policy.
That means working on specific issues by directing persuasion to policy makers, and often you catch those flies with honey. Appeal to the cooperative side of politicians and bureaucrats, make them feel like leaders and other ego things. Also, usually, pressuring with risks, like looming financial or political losses. This seems like very unsatisfying work because it is far from the front lines and providing direct relief, but systemic change is easier when protests aren’t necessary.
Meanwhile it’s also possible to start the Transition to a new economy, without fuss. Cooperatives are all around you, join them. Find every little opportunity for mutual aid, and take them when you can. Make non-commercial transactions normal. Participate in repair cafés, and develop thrift economy, like clothing exchanges and toolshares and small buying clubs. Electrify and find more efficiency. Group study. Build small organizations and ventures.
And crucially, participate in a little Direct Action, for your sanity and honour. What that means, whether it’s food charity or illicit art, is unique to you.
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 3 days ago
It’s not going to get resolved overnight, and it’s not going to be a smooth and direct road without any violence or suffering, we’ve seen plenty of the violence and suffering already. There will be more. But pay careful attention to the resistance that is forming, keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to resist, and until those opportunities present themselves, do what you can to make yourself and your families, loved ones, and communities more resilient and better supported. Give as much as you can, until it is time to take what we are owed.
There are protests happening. There will be more. There is active resistance. There will be more. There is civil disobedience. There will be more. There are people forming labor unions. There will be more. Labor strikes are planned. There will be more.
Don’t despair, prepare. It’s almost certainly going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better… but it will get better. Even if it takes years of effort, and maybe even a lot of violence and suffering to get there. The USA is the country that threw a tea party to overthrow a king. They will do so again, sooner or later. And keep in mind that historic event, also, did not happen overnight, it was the culmination of years of public anger, organization and preparation. It doesn’t even have to be a single definitive event. The stuff that is happening in Minneapolis right now, is changing the balance point on the scale. It may not be what tips it over, but it doesn’t have to be. The undercurrent of change is always moving even when it’s not visible. When it becomes visible, it usually gets pretty dramatic pretty quickly.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Sorry, best I can do is a 40% tax break for those making 1m or more annual revenue
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
stop funding their bullshit
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
A men
LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Stay aware. Keep up with happenings. :3
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
You know, I feel that’s causing a lot of distress, and not just for myself. I think maybe they also want desperate people, which might be why they’ve built their bunkers
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Me: sits on 7 different low budget but sturdy PCs 😎