As much as I am not remotely bothered by the banning of TikTok (which seems like it may well not go through anyway), maybe we should start with banning the sites that literally funnel a bunch of heavy metals into people’s mailboxes and cause actual known physical harm both to the naive people who still buy this stuff and to their neighbors, family members, and postal workers?

I live in a very small city with a Walgreens and 2 CVSes, all within a mile or so of each other, and they all seem pretty busy. We also have a Walmart, a medical supply store, and a small neighborhood pharmacy, as well as two grocery stores. I think how busy your local drug store is is pretty variable. We do have a college in town and also a pretty active main street with a lot of shops and restaurants that bring in a lot of tourists and people from neighboring towns and bigger nearby cities.

But like, we have kind of a lot of CVSes and Walgreens around here and they all seem to do well enough. I don’t think it’s just that we’re in a college town. Though, again, we do have a lot of colleges in general.

The title gore of these headlines is a bit silly. I get that Amnesty International uses colons in its headlines, but burying the fact that it’s Amnesty International saying these things just makes it look like the group they’re talking about is the one saying it.

Eighty years ago a generation came together across 51 countries to fight fascism and put an end to a genocidal regime bent on conquering as much territory as it possibly could.

And then their children handed it all over without a fight over the next several decades in exchange for some trinkets and the promise of carrying their social and economic power to their deathbeds. What a fucking waste.

Is it actually a free speech issue, though?

It’s not as though SCOTUS is trying to rule on whether to ban short-form video or content from particular person. The allegation in regard to TikTok isn’t ‘dangerous speech’, it’s the platform’s collection of user data and the manipulation of available content via an algorithm that they claim is a tool of a hostile foreign entity. Neither of those issues constitute ‘speech’ whether related to a foreign or domestic company.

It seems to me like this is being framed as a speech issue to protect other vendors with hostile algorithms. If Google were forced to stop pushing AI and paid results to the stop of its searches, would that be a free speech issue? If Facebook were forced to put more weight on users’ choices about what shows up on their feed rather than pushing dodgy political posts and paid advertisements, would that be a speech issue?

Honestly, deciding that toxic algorithms are protected speech seems like a much more dangerous precedent to me than coming to a conclusion that a company that’s beholden to a foreign entity that may be forcing it to engage in hostile intelligence operations and soft power can be restricted.

If someone made a piece of malware that ropes your PC into a botnet and uses it to perform DDOS attacks, would banning it be a speech issue if it happens to come in the form of a blogging platform? A chat client? A music sharing service?

Just having speech on a platform doesn’t mean everything that platform does qualifies as speech and requires first amendment protections.

404 Media: we’re not like the rest. Except when we are.

So like, how about these big tough military guys stop hand-wringing and do something about it. Fulfill your oath and defend the fucking constitution.

You know what seems like a really good idea when we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions? A bunch of new satellite networks. We could get, like, one of the least trustworthy people on Earth to launch thousands of the things and then get everyone else to launch their own because he can’t be trusted. Literally just blot out the sun with them. No biggie.

There is a world of difference between being excluded from spaces where you’re marginalized (such as society on the whole) and creating spaces where you aren’t marginalized. Does that make sense?

Cool, another paywall.

I miss the old Internet.

Honestly? Good.

I don’t really see this as a free speech issue. TikTok isn’t being banned because of the kind of speech that’s on there, it’s being banned because it’s a predatory app created as a means of soft power by a hostile foreign nation. Does that mean we should also shut down Twitter? Yeah. Probably.

This isn’t some newspaper with dissenting opinions, is a foreign intelligence operation that simultaneously interferes with the normal operation of our democracy, puts our citizens in danger, massively inflates narcissism, and collects our user data to hand to a country that literally is actively spying on us.

Frankly, I’d be okay with tossing any similar social media with obfuscated engagement algorithms anyway. Make YouTube and Facebook bring all that shit above board while we’re at it. All this is is corporate regulation, and I fully support it. Fuck TikTok.

It’s good to hear that soon the NHS will be capable of launching cyber attacks again.

Yeah, buddy. I lost a bitcoin on an old hard drive too. That’s like, where most bitcoin are. So what?

That’s like saying that you thought about investing in Apple in 1995 but forgot to actually call a broker. Nobody cares that someone gave you a free bitcoin when they first came out.

Whether this is good or terrible honestly kind of depends on how they define social media. Is discord social media? Are forums? Is Reddit?

Arguably nobody really benefits from exposing children to feeds full of toxic and angry adults, but that doesn’t mean no communities should allow children. Like, there’s nothing wrong with kids dipping their toes into the Internet and learning and growing from it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing to just hand them the keys to the worst elements.

Also like, I prefer adult communities over all age communities by a long shot.

It’s generally easier to destroy something than to create something, and it’s easier to consolidate power than to take it when you don’t have it. Also the left tends to be principled, while the right tends to be focused on gaining and keeping power. There are things conservatives would happily do that are strategically valuable that we typically just straight up wouldn’t even if it meant a win.

If you want to build up social services and fight for the rights and well-being of common people, you have to be able to make pretty broad coalitions while also figuring out how to actually make things better and convincing people that you know what you’re doing. If you want to win power without caring about anyone else, all you have to do is ally yourself with those who already have power and not speak up when they hurt others.

The flip side, fortunately, is that eventually all that self-serving power ends up being used to elevate smaller and smaller groups of people as it’s consolidated. As resources and influence collect at the top, more and more people suffer as they’re left behind. Eventually the number of people harmed has sometimes been enough that it naturally begins to form the kind of broad coalitions needed to overthrow the most obvious sources of corruption and suffering, but keeping those coalitions once the immediate danger is over is another matter entirely.

It certainly doesn’t help that authoritarians seem to have gotten better at disruption and disinformation. Polarizing society in the way that we see with bot farms run by Russian and Chinese intelligence in the past few years means most of their work can be done without much actual precision. Get everybody angry and get them to disagree on what’s going on in the world and they stand a lot less of a chance of coming together to oppose entrenched power structures.

There’s still a clock on the whole thing, because they’re making the situation more dangerous for themselves by increasing instability, and eventually it’ll probably bite them in the ass. But, will it happen by the time the current crop of powerful authoritarians are dead? Eh… Maybe? Who knows?

Unfortunately we also have a clock running as a species, and if we don’t figure out how to get around these atomizing disinformation systems and start to dismantle all this consolidated authoritarian power (both in governments and economically), we may not have an opportunity to wait until we reach a critical mass of suffering.

Also, like, it would really suck to have to live through the process of getting there anyway.

The best we can hope for, as far as I can tell, is some alternate means of wide-spread awareness. Some kind of movement in art or music might be helpful, if it can be extricated from the existing economic and social power structures. Basically, something like what the counter-culture was trying to do in the 60s, or what punks were doing coming up a little closer on the turn of the century.

The power of those coalitions was pretty temporary, though, and both seem to have been co-opted by people who, once again, just wanted to consolidate power for their own ends. The extent of their impact is debatable, but I have a feeling we need something substantially bigger than either of those movements.

I would be stunned if the DoJ knows the difference between Chrome and Chromium.

There’s a joke about them being armed, and maybe another about them not being armed? It’s hard to tell from the tone of the article. Do these things have guns?

I get that it’s important to document this stuff, but to me this headline basically reads as: “Breaking News! Ocean Extremely Wet! Also Salty!”

A few weeks back I got a parking ticket because I believed a google search result. Parking is free on Sundays and holidays, but the city’s website doesn’t specify which holidays. Google insisted that Halloween is a holiday and thus parking is free, but it isn’t actually federally recognized, which I found out the hard way.

I was watching a talk debate on consciousness yesterday where they briefly touched on this topic. One of the speakers was contending that attempting to create AI that is even convincing to humans is a terrible idea ethically.

On the one hand, if we do eventually accidentally create something with awareness, we have no idea what degree of suffering we’d be causing it; we could end up regularly creating and snuffing out terrified sentient beings just to monitor our toasters or perform web searches. On the other hand, though, and this was the concern he seemed to find more realistic, we may end up training ourselves to be less empathetic by learning to ignore the potential suffering of convincingly feeling ‘beings’ that aren’t actually aware of anything at all.

That second bit seems rather likely. We already personify completely inanimate objects all the time as a normal matter of course, without really trying to. What will happen to our empathy and consideration when we routinely interact with self-proclaimed sentient systems while callously using them to our own ends and then simply turning them off or erasing their memories?