I was counting from when Facebook et al. became a clear problem — because, again, while I’m glad the EU is looking at this, it’s the US that has needed to take action. Their refusal to do so has left it to the EU to try to do something, and I’m skeptical that whatever they end up doing will make a difference. Like, if the price of the crime is a fine, then the crime is legal for a company as big as Meta.
Justified? Absolutely. Timely? Hardly.
My point was it’s more than a decade too late, and all the EU will do is levy a minor fine that Meta won’t even blink at. The only country that could impose real consequences is the US, and they have no interest in anything that doesn’t benefit these nightmare cyberpunk megacorps.
This is like an article declaring, “EU Investigates MySpace for causing child addiction and harm” – the people they’re trying to protect don’t use that product any more. The time to do this investigation was fifteen years ago, and the US government should have been the ones to do it.
Don’t get me wrong – fuck Facebook. I hope they have to pay billions. But the people that company is harming now are adults and the elderly. I’m sure fifteen years from now, once all those people are dead, there’ll be an in-depth investigation and legislation about it.
The FTC will take ten years to accomplish nothing of value – and even whatever fig-leaf ruling they issue will be sued into oblivion, or voided by the Supreme Court.
Privacy is dead because killing it was in the interest of too many wealthy and powerful companies, government agencies, and individuals for it to have ended up any other way.
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Don’t buy shitty Chinese EVs, buy the somehow even shittier American EVs!
Head Tap Meme Can’t get called out by game reviewers if there’s no functional games media.
There’s very little decent media criticism of any kind left thanks to the ongoing media implosion, and games media is especially unprofitable.
Yeah, if it says Crypto on it, it’s a scam. Full stop.
Almost no one reads the fucking article.
You are describing the human species. Through its entire history.
“Unknowingly”
I don’t know why, but my Shorts feed is nothing but weirdo right wingers, huge muscle dudes, and conspiracy videos – and I’m a middle aged liberal woman who mostly watches sewing tutorials on YouTube. And there’s absolutely nothing I can do to convince YouTube that these people can fuck off. It’s a nightmare.
The main difference is the quality of the algorithm serving up the videos. YouTube Shorts is the worst, most piss-poor shit I’ve ever seen. Like, it’s “someone should probably be fired” bad.
I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that the spirit of the times has turned toward chaos and away from stability. These sorts of vague political commitments no longer have the power to avert the disaster we’re facing. We are fully in the grip of vast, impersonal historical forces again, and just have to see what happens.
It has no chance of becoming a reality
You could have just stopped there. Every item on this list is antithetical to the interests of the people who rule us.
That’s fair – those aren’t things I ever used.
Do these people proclaiming Reddit’s data as a “treasure trove of human-generated information”, or Spez claiming “We know your dark secrets” not realize that most of what people say online is at least partially a lie? Most Reddit comments were either low-effort echolalia parroting old memes or outright bullshit of the, “Yeah, that happened eyeroll” variety.
I’ve reached such a state of pessimism politically that, reading this article, I came away with the assumption that declaring the NLRB “unconstitutional” is basically a fait accompli at this point, and there’s very little anyone can do about it.
My schematic for interpreting the news has become, “Imagine the worst case scenario. Make the impact 10% less severe. Put the stupidest person you’ve ever met in charge of the solution.”
They can release as many headsets as they want — they’re still Facebook and they can still get all the way fucked.
Well, you’re more optimistic than I am, but I hope you’re right.
The whole internet feels like it’s in a state of irrecoverable rot, and the last ten years have really tanked my confidence in governments to do anything about the clearly harmful, consumer hostile behavior inflicted on us — mostly because they seem to benefit a lot from letting Meta et al. do whatever they want. Like, EU fines, to date, have looked more like the organization wanting to wet their beak rather than fixing anything. I don’t know.