dragonlover

Tumblr etiquette. You converse in the tags to not fuck up the main post, so that others can reblog it without adding your commentary in. But sometimes the tags are really good and get screenshotted and added to the post chain

Voip engineer / telecom

As a note about the "symbology of freedom" when it comes to cars it I think comes down to American centric shit again. When I lived in small town USA where there is nothing to do but meth and everyone knows everyone else's business the dream of packing your shit in a backpack and getting into the car and driving 4 hours away feels like freedom. You can go to a city or town and get away from it all.

Now you can do the same in Europe on a train but that won't sell cars so....

You can even see it in American car ads. There are two kinds of cars - the commuter, which focuses on luxury and style, and the "get away from your life" car, the SUVs you stick your camping gear in and go to the middle of nowhere to get away from your shitty life and experience nature in.

Cars are a symbol of freedom because there is no transportation options, so not having one feels like prison

Except it does. Because owning a digital copy legally speaking means you own a licence to a software, but not the software. Physical discs / flash drive / cartridges are owned, licenses can be revoked and are not owned in the same sense.

Username checks out

It IS a PC

When moving internationally I had my cat's ashes in its urn in my carry on because I didn't trust it not being lost. They of course flag it and thr guy roughly opens my bag and pulls the box out, sees the cast pawprint on top, which now has a crack in it, and very gingerly swabs down the urn and carefully repacks the bag for me looking guilty as fuck.

Didn't notice the crack until I got home.

It's not the average consumer spending thousands on tokens. Even my work just had a meeting about how "the free lunch is over" now that AI costs are expanding, and they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.

Linux is widely used in the enterprise world. It's the home consumer world that doesn't use it as much and even that is rapidly changing as things enshitify.

A phenomenon I've seen that's rather interesting is I moved from the US to Spain, and everyone here is friendly and far more trusting and kind to random strangers than the US ever was. My suspicion and anxiety around strangers has dropped significantly.

The number of random conversations I get into is much higher, people take an active interest in small talk even when standing in line, I've had more people randomly approach me to ask for help, and the idea of someone hurting you physically is an alien concept.

If you're from the US, I think the US is just cooked man. Spanish internet, at least from what I've been able to find, is also more civil, even in places talking politics. Now maybe I'm not in the myriad of WhatsApp groups where people are actually getting I to it, but the public facing side of things is far more civil, and I rarely see Spaniards in mainstream socials like reddit and whatnot. The joke I've heard is that Spain "hasn't really gotten on board with the internet yet".

I think that the modern internet is fed by a social media stream that incentivises devisiveness. Engagement is higher on negative posts, and engagement drives the algorithm. I've long been against algorithms feeding you content because those algorithms are slanted to keep you engaged longer, which means showing you content that will upset you, then calming you down with kitten photos until you're ready to get into another fight.

So to answer your question, I don't think it's a chicken and egg problem, I think it's a problem with amplification. I think the English speaking internet has long been US centric (or at least caters to the US unfairly) and the US has bred a suspicious and anxiety ridden society. Then corporations came along and figured out just how much gas to put on that fire to squeeze money out of people through social media to take control of what was once a free space of creativity and turn it into an engagement farm, where art and conservation has been converted to "content" and distressing news and devisive conversation has become tools to keep you invested in your feed long enough for them to build a consumer profile on you to ship you targetted ads on Amazon. This in turn amplifies the suspicion and fear already inherent in the meatspace sphere, which feeds the online polarization.

When you stop either one - either unplugging or entering a calm and connected IRL space (like I did) you break the amplification, and the anxiety stops. This is why "internet detox" is a thing people try to do.

The internet in its current form is addictive, and like a parasite corporations have learned exactly how much they can take from you and not kill you. It wants to keep you engaged and scared, but it is also exploiting societal issues that were already present to begin with.

That's legit. I have a burner account that is only used for things I absolutely have to, like my utility bills.

In many parts of the world Whatsapp is the dominate communication platform. My landlord sends me my utility bills through WhatsApp, as is my doctor's scheduling platform, and my vet's contact info, etc. It's basically impossible to do things without it.

This still does not fix the problem of "I asked you because I wanted your input, if I wanted to ask the chatbot I would have". The core issue.