Pawlicker@sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party

Interesting effortpost dropped about institutional level internet censorship calling it the "closure of the internet". It's very tl;dr but it goes into detail what many of the top social media sites did from 2015-22, and breaks it down into two phases, the post Trump/Brexit era of 15-19, and the COVID lockdown era of 2020-22.

Also it tellingly mentions that it never ended, Twitter just dialed back and everyone else has the infrastructure in place.

Of course there are also people who will deny with a smile that this actually happened.

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet

arctotherium.substack.comThe Closure of the InternetThe Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Late 2010s
Q.U.I.N.N.@icedquinn@blob.cat

Replying to @⁨icedquinn@blob.cat⁩

@sendpaws basically we have known fail states which are few but well identified

- when food costs more than about 50% of day wages, peasant revolt is guaranteed
- when privileges are granted and summarily revoked, riots are very likely

its basically a long con of measuring out how much you can take back at a time, normalizing it, and repeating, the "boiling the frog" strategy, where by the time a resistance forms they implicitly accept most of your control anyway (they're arguing to undo your latest power grab, not that your entire paradigm of control was never valid to begin with)
Q.U.I.N.N.@icedquinn@blob.cat

Replying to @⁨icedquinn@blob.cat⁩

@sendpaws basically if you're in the USA and you say "i want to do $literallyanything" and just start trying to do it, you run in to invisible malregulation walls everywhere. in India they're just blatently bribe seeking, in the states its a little better hidden. It's still rent sought and lobbied to fuck and back, it's just that only business owners SEE it, so normies are allowed to believe it doesn't happen.

we see this a lot here with like EPA malregs that ban an american from making any kind of pollutant (it's impossible to manufacture without any pollution) but the tariff policy doesn't selectively cut by compliance, so it basically just takes american manufacturing behind the woodshed.
CaohuaK@caohuak@moon.lonewolf.zone

Replying to @⁨silverpill@mitra.social⁩

@silverpill @sendpaws >But everyone is still using centralized platforms like there is no tomorrow.

While things might be slightly better on decentralized platforms like Fedi, they aren't much better; the obsession with "censorship" has spread here too. If it hadn't reached this place, most instances wouldn't have such a long list of rules, but rather a simple code of conduct that everyone could agree on.

silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social

Replying to @⁨caohuak@moon.lonewolf.zone⁩

@caohuak @sendpaws I think there is a big difference between being defederated and being deplatformed. In fediverse you don't need to start from scratch, you can move between servers and you can start your own.

Some people may not like you and be very loud about it, but ultimately they only have as much power as others give them. The best strategy is to ignore the haters and keep doing your own thing.

alle_yoj813@theorytoe@ak.kyaruc.moe

Replying to @⁨silverpill@mitra.social⁩

@silverpill @sendpaws @caohuak

I mean on fedi, the moment you get on a defed list, its basically being deplatformed because of how lists get spread. Most new servers on the network import a bunch of blocklists from the getgo. Hell some stacks have integrated blocklists. There are clients with integrated blocklists (usually denying logins for certain domains). Fedblock has even spilled over into sysadmin abuse blocklists.
Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org

Replying to @⁨silverpill@mitra.social⁩

@silverpill @theorytoe @sendpaws @caohuak
>What this part of the network doesn't have, apparently, is people who will be interested in growing it.

If you know of people that won't destroy the culture of the network and seek power over everyone like in the great Twitter to Mastodon exodus over 5 years ago, I would be interested. Main thing this network needs is gatekeeping that prevents takeovers of the network. It has been taken over enough as it currently is.
Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org

Replying to @⁨silverpill@mitra.social⁩

@silverpill @theorytoe @sendpaws @caohuak

> In my opinion "the culture" is not worth preserving
The current one likely is not worth it. The one from 5+ years ago was, but now is too late for that.

>I nominate everybody in this thread.
I meant it in "Do you know someone that should be here, but isn't yet." way. Because I genuinely struggle with that, the only one I know doesn't care about social media besides following artists (he would hate misskey.io). You can grow the network with interesting features, but at this point I'm not convinced that if you make a good alternative to walled gardens, people will naturally come. We've had that already and it didn't end well.
Q.U.I.N.N.@icedquinn@blob.cat

Replying to @⁨sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party⁩

@sendpaws most people don't really know what the word "enclosure" is who probably should. it's exactly what the tech sector has been slowly being drug through post-dot com boom.

there's a book "technofeudalism" about it--amazon et all quietly becoming inescapable commons places (every photographer must be on instagram or doesn't exist, every product must be on amazon or doesn't exist) despite not being subject to commons-esque social regulation (amazon does what it wants and is backed by DOD money, making it relatively immune to boycotts)

i think open communication proved to be too powerful for nation states and its been a really protracted fight to revoke it without causing An Event. (i liken it to a game where controllers are trying to maximize the size of a shape without ever touching the death triangle; a shape that causes you to lose, but there is no way to know that you have found it, as intersecting it causes whoever does so to die.)
Pawlicker@sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party

Replying to @⁨icedquinn@blob.cat⁩

@icedquinn That's why this post is so good, it basically says that internet clampdowns did not change public opinion but rather radicalized people harder because "the jews did this" wasn't a funny joke anymore after seeing the people you like be targeted by the NGOs.

It also failed at a lot of goals, from keeping Trump out to the rise of the populist right in Europe, to trying to keep people up to date with the latest COVID script because turns out all it did was make people lose trust. Instead, those ended up happening because of how people felt about real world issues.

Q.U.I.N.N.@icedquinn@blob.cat

Replying to @⁨subnetter@shitposter.world⁩

@subnetter @sendpaws yeah but israel sponsors this particular narrative.

they need the hitler story to buy legitimacy and people have been exceptionally generous with selling it to them. the more the state starts acting like literal hitler i think the more people have gotten cross with this.

britain has even outright said shit like "they act in ways that make it difficult for their allies to support them"
Pawlicker@sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party

Replying to @⁨icedquinn@blob.cat⁩

@icedquinn the other thing with amazon is the wal-mart effect x10000

Your local Home Depot's fuses or something are just missing or have empty bags because someone ripped it open and shot it out the door, Digikey shipping is a gamble on what the shipping speed actually is....Amazon has some name you've never heard of and fuses that will not actually pop, with next day shipping, and then everything else you want for less than the price the store charges if they have it.

Also the snapper mower story happens quite a bit in the industries and I'm sure it does with Amazon too:
https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

Fast CompanyThe Man Who Said No to Wal-MartEvery year, thousands of executives venture to Bentonville, Arkansas, hoping to get their products onto the shelves of the world's biggest retailer. But Jim Wier wanted Wal-Mart to stop selling his Snapper mowers.
Q.U.I.N.N.@icedquinn@blob.cat

Replying to @⁨sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party⁩

@sendpaws the chinese arc is wild. i had to shrug eventually because the chinese clones finally surpassed the west, and the west heavily migrated out of engineering in to "laurel sitting."

the quality differential between an anker and a bose qc headphone is not much. my only issue is my head is too large for it (which anker could possibly have fixed in newer models, i don't know), but its 80% of the sound quality and also lets you turn DSP off (the QCs for some reason don't allow a "neutral" option, despite being 300$ MSRP)

i dunno that i'd credit amazon much for this. it's really just shenzen doesn't have a government trying to commit economic suicide presiding over it, which can't be said for the USA
:conga_parrot::conga_parrot::conga_parrot::conga_parrot:@mrsaturday@shitposter.world

Replying to @⁨icedquinn@blob.cat⁩

@icedquinn @sendpaws >i think open communication proved to be too powerful for nation states and its been a really protracted fight to revoke it without causing An Event. (i liken it to a game where controllers are trying to maximize the size of a shape without ever touching the death triangle; a shape that causes you to lose, but there is no way to know that you have found it, as intersecting it causes whoever does so to die.)
I think what's worse is they're choosing synthesis over surrender or fighting it, so now you have a public-private blend of oppression where the government part of it makes it inescapable and the corporation part of it makes it unaccountable, and it can shapeshift between the two as needed. See: Palantir and Flock