I wonder how many examples of corporations making life miserable for normal people need to be made public before enough people realize we are in deep shit to start protesting.

Crony capitalism decays everything it touches for the sole purpose of shunting the lion’s share of our nation’s wealth into the pockets of the already obscenely rich.

Its funny but every authoritarian regime kind of thinks the same thing not long before rough music starts.

Your argument about the downsides of tiktok (attention span and laziness) applies to anything

Lol no, Bytedance hired a whole think tank of psychologists to create a second filter standard for non-Chinese users that is differently curated from their Chinese user set. I’m not even wasting the time to detail it more because it has been in the news for years now

And I’ve found that facts have been largely irrelevant in nearly every level of social discourse for the last 15 years.

Especially when it comes to government.

I know it’s comforting to believe that isn’t the case, that humanity is at base level rational and reasonable.

Unfortunately this is a lie. The significant majority of humanity only follow rationality as far as it will help them achieve their goals.

I cannot even count any more how often I have been objectively, factually right and was dismissed for not saying it in a way that they would like, which is abandoning factual accuracy to preserve certain comfortable illusions.

So I’ve largely given up on wasting my time and effort to bring objective facts to people on the internet and in my government.

I find that the best way to change things for the better is to get out in the streets and shout a lot.

I bet you think if you lick that boot good enough they won’t step on your neck with it.

So fucking naive.

Also I already reported your sockpuppets, enjoy the ban.

So many fucking government bootlickers in this thread, starting to think you’re all sockpuppets.

You don’t need to simp for an agency that spies on innocent civilians, you really don’t.

If people feel that this should be illegal they should write their representatives

Waste of time and paper and you know that. Our representatives that would support us in this, and not just reply with a form letter, already know and push the issues but they are a minority in congress.

If fireworks become illegal on July 5th I can’t be found guilty for shooting them off on July 4th.

I’m more concerned with making sure it doesn’t happen in the future. If that means everyone being shitbags in the past get a free pass, maybe that’s worth it.

The headline implies the NSA broke a law that does not exist,

It sure would be nice if the PATRIOT act hadn’t fucked everyone’s opinion on privacy.

then maybe you should limit your ‘chilling effect’ replies as to not damp down the fervor for change that is starting to develop in response to government overreach.

Arguing that it isn’t unconstitutional isn’t productive if you want to see it changed.

You don’t have to be a Devil’s Advocate for bad government policy.

Good fucking point. Next time I’m out I’m getting a prepaid burner to stick in the bag.

Thanks for the advice.

Just because one thing is bad doesn’t mean other things can’t be.

Tiktok is bad because it weaponizes short attention span laziness and feeds depression.

TOR is bad because there is a good chance the government has stripped away its privacy capabilities.

Frankly in my mind that makes Tiktok a fucktonne worse.

Most of the people ‘harmed’ by TOR exit node scraping are pedos and illegal weapons dealers.

Most of the people harmed by tiktok is literally 2 generations of youth.

Can you not see the difference?

TOR was originally a DARPA project and everyone seems to forget this.

I mean, it’s caught a ton of pedos so I can’t really be angry but anyone who thought a DARPA project wasn’t going to be massively salted with 3 letter agency tracking servers are just plain naive.

Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if a ton of those bitcoin doublers weren’t NSA agents making some sidecash.

Well if a thing is immoral and unethical, then isn’t it reasonable to call for it to be MADE illegal?

Well it is better in the cases of actually innocent people getting convicted as it can later be overturned but there are some monsters that really shouldn’t be allowed to stain the earth with their existence that we have zero doubt as to their guilt.

They are the party of hypocrisy and bigotry, it’s that simple.

Everything they claim they are, they do the opposite of.

Everything they rail against, they do in private with practiced ease.

The fact that they have the power they do proves that humanity in general is not rational or logical and we really need to stop pretending that everyone is.

This is one facet how authoritarian behavior is unsustainable.

You can only punish victims for so long before those victims pick up a rock and bash their abusers heads in.

Unfortunately it can sometimes take centuries to get to that point.

Some would argue they were early pioneers of it, basically became a daughter killing factory after the 1child policy.

Rage and clickbait.

This is essentially a civil case turned into something bigger because the person who got hit with a rock was a cop.

Had it just been another protester, there would be no call to undermine the 1st amendment.

And if SCOTUS goes that route, they will lose a lot of support from their politicians.

I mean of course since current SCOTUS is mentally deranged and highly partisan, they may of course still do it.

And I have a protest bag already packed and waiting if they do.

Remember the important supplies: Bottled water, masks and rags, first aid kit, baking soda to dilute to treat pepper spray

Leave your phone and IDs at home

This isn’t hyperbole, you have SEEN what SCOTUS is doing and it is time to rattle their rafters with a unified voice.

without browsers, I don’t think there would be a need for most of that, as there would be no need to create the visually compelling but ultimately ridiculously overmoduled live documents.

Esports would still exist just like normal sports existed before the internet. Technically esports predates the world wide web as coin op competitions already existed and sometimes even made it into international news.

Again streaming sites would still exist as mentioned due to the high serving costs, and esports could easily be part of their lineup.

How would we be viewing simple stuffs like blogs then?

There is still place for documents on the internet without the WWW. back in the BBS days, we’d download text file magazines to read offline (lol sometimes having to save days and days of download credits just for a TEXT file! Man dialup was crazy. That said, without having to have one (kinda) standardized way to view documents those file formats would evolve beyond just text into something more like OpenOffice document formatting, again without the capitalism-driven effort to make snazzy, eyecatching but ultimately useless dynamically served document formats.

Honestly I think the dynamically served aspect of modern WWW documents is such a ridiculous waste of resources and bandwidth that not having it may just as well constitute a technical advancement over what we have today.

Well, back in the day you’d have a series of different services, usenet, irc, email, and for articles (at the time usually scholarly articles) you could use Gopher or follow certain usenet groups to find FTP sites hosting the docs.

So if we didn’t have a unified web browser, and those technologies advanced at the pace of other similar services, here is how I see it:

Most services would be accessed by discrete apps, one for your email, one for your chat, one for your remote and local documents.

We wouldn’t see the proliferation of siloed services, platforms like Facebook that offer all of these services but only within their subscribers. They just simply wouldn’t be able to compete with the established services or add nuance or extra value.

Discord would also likely have come into existence a lot earlier and unified some of those services, but again if they chose to silo it as they are doing now, they wouldn’t gain market dominance over already existing wide communities.

Without the profit incentive, existing services have no reason to tie their users to their platform or inhibit cross platform interactions.

Streaming services would still come into existence and fragment and silo like they are now, but that’s only because of the cost of providing reliable HD video content isn’t easily dispersed across unsiloed userbases.

Web advertisements would be non-existant but you’d still get spots in podcasts and videos.

Frankly I think it would be a better internet than what we have now.