They can run 100’s of scripts on a single page from every identity broker. They employ the best data scientists, to figure out every possible way.
The impact of this is probably greatly reduced by anti-JS measures like NoScript. Some sites probably still bundle fingerprinting code into their own scripts, but the really big players contract that out to companies whose entire purpose is data-harvesting, and that's easily defeated by denying scripts from outside domains
A very compelling narrative, thank you for sharing! Based on my limited understanding of history and economics and sociology, it feels true. But I'm no expert :)
The one point that I don't really understand is:
It is not possible to work, or be compelled to work outside of society. Until we have socialism nothing compels us to work outside of social classes. I wouldn’t be working if my bourgeois didn’t compel me to.
This doesn't make sense to me. My functional definition is that work is just expending energy to transition something from one state into another. Moving a boulder up a hill is still work, regardless of motivations of the actor. How are you defining "work"?
Good question. I have my own opinions, but I'd be more interested in hearing what reasons you can come up with (and any counterarguments you have to them), so I'm gonna challenge you to do that while slogging through all my disorganized brain droppings.
My biggest issue with "let people be exploited if they want" is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum. If the world was two people, one who seeks to exploit and the other who seeks to be exploited, then I don't really care; in our world, it's a bad basis for society to allow for injustice simply because people can be convinced to want it.
In such a world, the exploiters (whether individuals or organizations) would seek to control whatever systems of education, media, and ideology they could to convince as many people as possible that being exploited is good for them. This would allow for them to centralize power, and that power would enforce a class divide; anyone who didn't exploit others would be relegated to being one of the exploited class, anyone who willingly exploited others but didn't work to convert more into "wanting to be exploited" would never amass as much power as those that do.
Besides the perverse incentives, that division would create a power imbalance that attracts (into the positions of authority) individuals and groups who are both indoctrinated into the system, and more efficient at subjugating others. That means there is a filter naturally built into any such system that selects for people who view others more as statistics and resources than people with inherent value, and are skilled at both convincing them to want exploitation and exploiting them.
Being the real world, people will not be perfect, so any lack of skill in one domain will require compensation in the other. If someone cannot be convinced to be exploited willingly, the authority will need to find other ways of enforcing exploitation.
Lifeforms being how they are, not all of them will be brainwashable; that means oppression will be necessary, as dissent is a threat to the amount of power an authority has amassed and imposes "soft" limits on how much power can be amassed—that is, limitations that can be overcome with enough effort (as opposed to physical limitations like the total amount of living beings). And any threat to the power imbalance is a threat to the system itself, a threat to the society.
We have thus specified a system that selects for abusers and oppressors in positions of power, without once having to speculate that unjust and cruel people would begin in such positions.
Now one might claim I'm just using a slippery-slope fallacy, that we might be able to specify such a society that accounts for the aforementioned flaws, and implements some sort of system of checks-and-balances to keep from the balance shifting so egregiously. And to that, I want to point out how any such system constitutes an aforementioned "soft" limit on power, but does not remove the incentives at the core of the system.
Meanwhile, in a just society, anyone who wants to be exploited and anyone who wants to exploit are given the knowledge and resources necessary to overcome such primal desires. Maybe they are educated, or maybe given safely contained environments—e.g. VR, or LARP, or BDSM—to exercise their desires without negatively impacting others/society.
I would also challenge the assumption that there is some naturally-arising desire to be exploited. Put another way: assuming a perfectly just society, whence comes the desire to be exploited?
The problem I have with "voluntary" is that someone can still fall into the category of being exploited, either willingly or without their knowledge, and still happily and voluntarily participate in an unjust relationship
I meant moreso that it compels us outside of the structure of a society, which also precludes any social classes. One cannot be bourgeois if one does not live amongst others whom they can subjugate.
of course, however what makes a societies differ is exactly what gets filled in to the “…”
Ha! I was trying to refer to the idiom without being verbose, not leaving those blanks as variables.
I guess my take is that what determines a society is more how "ability" and "need" are defines, that way the social structure is not oversimplified to a single one-sided relationship. E.g. a feudalist would claim the serfs need protection from thieves and bandits, and a lord has the ability to provide such protection; the lord, conversely, needs grain and the serfs have the ability to farm it
funnily enough, that is exactly what capitalism postulates.
Well yes and no. I guess it comes down to how you define participation in society. Capitalism only accepts production of commodities, whereas I meant it in a more broad sense. E.g. non-monetized hobbies are classified as entirely consumptive behaviors by capitalist societies, but if you look at the benefits conveyed by an open-source, volunteer project like lemmy you quickly see how much of a misclassification that is.
Even not in the extreme there are broad misclassifications under capitalism. You bring up the example of those of us on welfare; capitalists might agree with you that they are non-participants, whereas I don't think it's illogical to claim that services like raising children or advocating for change or community-building or maintaining a home or even just providing emotional support are ways that people contribute to and participate in society. I'd even go so far as to boldly claim that welfare is simply the way the bourgeois convey wages to such people, and then they have the gall to propagandize it as charity to make themselves look better, while simultaneously vilifying this subset of the working class
Or maybe microsoft should focus less on gamifying coding and turning it into an activity done for social credits, and make github more of a platform for... idk, version control and programming?
Consent is a bad metric because it ignores externalities—stuff like economic incentives, implicit threats of loss of basic needs, propaganda, trauma. Someone can be said to consent to exploitation, even if they only did so to continue surviving under oppressive economies/states. I "consent" to have the value of my labor extracted, pooled, and distributed to business owners in the same way I "consent" to the privacy policies (and the sale of my Personally Identifying Information) of the software the company I work for requires us to use (to remain employed)
That's why I prefer focusing on exploitation. Someone doesn't have to know they're being exploited, agree that they're being exploited, nor even want to not be exploited for it to still be unjust to exploit them and identify when it is happening. Veganism is a stance against animal exploitation.
Nature compells us to work for food anyway, that's not exploitation and coercion, that's just survival.
The construct of society is predicated on the idea of "from each... to each..." That saying often gets conflated with left-wing politics, but that's just the point of animals (humans included) grouping together; after all, what's the point of living in society if it doesn't convey any benefits to the individual that they could not provide for themselves? That would be exploitative of the individual. But if they are benefitting, then it is only fair and just to also give back to the society one extracts benefits from, otherwise it is exploitative of the others.
Put another way: no one should be obligated to participate in society, but then society should likewise have no obligations to the non-participants.
Services as subscriptions: fine. They are ongoing agreements that require an unspecifiable amount of labor, it makes sense to pay as you go.
Subscription goods? Fuck that. If I am in posession of it and responsible for maintaining it in a specific state of operation and quality, I basically own it anyway.
Charging me monthly for a pocket-sized computer with the added stipulations that the seller gets to dictate what I'm allowed to do with it, probably installs spyware on it (on top of the OEM and OS spyware), and if I break it (or otherwise violate the terms of use) I have to buy it anyway and they still get to keep it? They've basically reinvented a mix of payphones and library PCs, but more invasive and more expensive
What about you? When did you choose stability over the rolling release?
This is such sloppy engagement baiting. If it was just a hot take shitting all over one of the larger linux communities, that would be one thing, but to follow it up with a "let me know in the comments" just makes it all feel disingenuous and like somebody is being sponsored by NordVPN or Incogni to post their ragebait
The flipside of this is what a friend once dubbed "terminal uniqueness." Just because you aren't in the exact same situation as others does not mean their advice won't work for you, your life isn't that unique
My secondary laptop had an issue where the time would be wrong whenever I booted it up. I'd make sure the system was set to the right timezone, but it always required me manually setting the time, even restarting ntpd (and making sure I had internet) didn't work.
The problem was pretty clear, because the time would be off by years: the issue was that the hardeare clock was set incorrectly in the BIOS, because I use it so infrequently that it would lose all charge in the interim and the BIOS would be reset. Setting the hardware clock correctly fixed everything.
Oh then yeah, probably. Popular comedy was really "edgy" (bigoted) in the 00s; people probably got away with even worse in the 80s and 90s, but I wasn't around for much of it to say for certain
Not to be that gal, but... the GNU site's Bash Reference Manual documents everything you could ever want to know right up until you get into weird edge cases and abusing bugs/unintended behaviors for your own nefarious purposes.
For that, others have pointed to YSAP, whom I will also recommend. I can't find it right now, but I swear in some videos he mentions a website or forum where people discussi Bash extremely in-depth, and that is end-game stuff (the stuff you learn right before you start auditing the code yourself or editing the source to enable your own custom behaviors)
Borat is explicitly a parody of USA stereotypes of Eastern Europeans, made to clown on the "stupid americans" who are too ignorant to realize this person is clearly too one-dimensional to be a real human.
But based on the post's title, I'm guessing they are referring to Da Ali G Show, which I haven't seen, so I'm not poised to defend nor critique it.
I will however, share that Ali G's wikipedia page says this of him
A faux-streetwise poseur from Staines-upon-Thames, Surrey, England.
So presumably he's intended as a parody of native brits who appropriate the style of other cultures to seem cool, and not a racist parody of said cultures. However, it's worth noting that intention != outcome. In that case, one might also point out that people, like Mr. Baron Cohen, can learn and grow from who they were 22 to 26 years ago, and hopefully he has.
I avoid screens (with one exception mentioned in a bit)—especially social media (including fediverse)—for like an hour ahead of time, read a book, make sure I'm well fed and hydrated without eating too close to bedtime, wear a sleep mask, and put on some soothing music, podcast or (mostly audio-based) video—with the screen off as soon as I hit play. Sometimes I even resort to my noise-cancelling headphones—or earplugs, if the sounds of my own breathing, swallowing, and bloodflow don't bother me too much that night. It helps to meditate and/or make sure to exercise/work hard enough to wear myself out each day.
Comfort helps. Finding the right position, having the right sheets, mattress, pillow, getting the ac/fan/heater so the room feels perfect, maybe cracking a window for fresh air. Feeling secure and safe where I'm sleeping, confident that I'll make it through the night without rude awakenings. Each isn't very powerful on its own, bit all together make a big difference in how readily I drift off.
Finally, I just try not to worry too much whether I fall asleep or not; if it's not looking like it's happening, I'll try to write a story for myself or draw a masterpiece in my minds eye. If that doesn't work, I'll focus on invoking some Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming instead: forcing myself to lie perfectly still with my eyes closed, not even shifting for comfort nor to scratch itches nor swat flies, letting my mind wander wherever it wants to and just going with the hypnagogic hallucinations (they can get a little uncomfortable at times). This rarely has the intended effect, but I usually do end up waking up later, realizing I fell asleep without knowing it.
Disclaimer: my routine won't solve insomnia, it won't fix neurological disorders that affect circadian rhythm, it probably won't work on the first night even if you don't have the aforementioned issues. But adding any part of it to your routine (if you can) will make it just that much easier to fall sleep, when you can get around to it, even if you do have underlying conditions.
Also, at the risk of sounding like a boomer, screens are really bad for sleep. I grew up with them: my family had a habit of watching tv until bedtime, I trained myself to fall asleep while staring at my laptop (which I often have on my bed), or I'll pick up my phone after I put the laptop down. Nowadays I can feel how awake my brain gets when I check lemmy or read news around bedtime. If I have my phone near me, I'll have this nagging feeling to do "just one more" check of all my socials.
And it always keeps me awake until I will myself to turn it off and close my eyes.
The impact of this is probably greatly reduced by anti-JS measures like NoScript. Some sites probably still bundle fingerprinting code into their own scripts, but the really big players contract that out to companies whose entire purpose is data-harvesting, and that's easily defeated by denying scripts from outside domains
A very compelling narrative, thank you for sharing! Based on my limited understanding of history and economics and sociology, it feels true. But I'm no expert :)
The one point that I don't really understand is:
This doesn't make sense to me. My functional definition is that work is just expending energy to transition something from one state into another. Moving a boulder up a hill is still work, regardless of motivations of the actor. How are you defining "work"?
Good question. I have my own opinions, but I'd be more interested in hearing what reasons you can come up with (and any counterarguments you have to them), so I'm gonna challenge you to do that while slogging through all my disorganized brain droppings.
My biggest issue with "let people be exploited if they want" is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum. If the world was two people, one who seeks to exploit and the other who seeks to be exploited, then I don't really care; in our world, it's a bad basis for society to allow for injustice simply because people can be convinced to want it.
In such a world, the exploiters (whether individuals or organizations) would seek to control whatever systems of education, media, and ideology they could to convince as many people as possible that being exploited is good for them. This would allow for them to centralize power, and that power would enforce a class divide; anyone who didn't exploit others would be relegated to being one of the exploited class, anyone who willingly exploited others but didn't work to convert more into "wanting to be exploited" would never amass as much power as those that do.
Besides the perverse incentives, that division would create a power imbalance that attracts (into the positions of authority) individuals and groups who are both indoctrinated into the system, and more efficient at subjugating others. That means there is a filter naturally built into any such system that selects for people who view others more as statistics and resources than people with inherent value, and are skilled at both convincing them to want exploitation and exploiting them.
Being the real world, people will not be perfect, so any lack of skill in one domain will require compensation in the other. If someone cannot be convinced to be exploited willingly, the authority will need to find other ways of enforcing exploitation.
Lifeforms being how they are, not all of them will be brainwashable; that means oppression will be necessary, as dissent is a threat to the amount of power an authority has amassed and imposes "soft" limits on how much power can be amassed—that is, limitations that can be overcome with enough effort (as opposed to physical limitations like the total amount of living beings). And any threat to the power imbalance is a threat to the system itself, a threat to the society.
We have thus specified a system that selects for abusers and oppressors in positions of power, without once having to speculate that unjust and cruel people would begin in such positions.
Now one might claim I'm just using a slippery-slope fallacy, that we might be able to specify such a society that accounts for the aforementioned flaws, and implements some sort of system of checks-and-balances to keep from the balance shifting so egregiously. And to that, I want to point out how any such system constitutes an aforementioned "soft" limit on power, but does not remove the incentives at the core of the system.
Meanwhile, in a just society, anyone who wants to be exploited and anyone who wants to exploit are given the knowledge and resources necessary to overcome such primal desires. Maybe they are educated, or maybe given safely contained environments—e.g. VR, or LARP, or BDSM—to exercise their desires without negatively impacting others/society.
I would also challenge the assumption that there is some naturally-arising desire to be exploited. Put another way: assuming a perfectly just society, whence comes the desire to be exploited?
The problem I have with "voluntary" is that someone can still fall into the category of being exploited, either willingly or without their knowledge, and still happily and voluntarily participate in an unjust relationship
I meant moreso that it compels us outside of the structure of a society, which also precludes any social classes. One cannot be bourgeois if one does not live amongst others whom they can subjugate.
Ha! I was trying to refer to the idiom without being verbose, not leaving those blanks as variables.
I guess my take is that what determines a society is more how "ability" and "need" are defines, that way the social structure is not oversimplified to a single one-sided relationship. E.g. a feudalist would claim the serfs need protection from thieves and bandits, and a lord has the ability to provide such protection; the lord, conversely, needs grain and the serfs have the ability to farm it
Well yes and no. I guess it comes down to how you define participation in society. Capitalism only accepts production of commodities, whereas I meant it in a more broad sense. E.g. non-monetized hobbies are classified as entirely consumptive behaviors by capitalist societies, but if you look at the benefits conveyed by an open-source, volunteer project like lemmy you quickly see how much of a misclassification that is.
Even not in the extreme there are broad misclassifications under capitalism. You bring up the example of those of us on welfare; capitalists might agree with you that they are non-participants, whereas I don't think it's illogical to claim that services like raising children or advocating for change or community-building or maintaining a home or even just providing emotional support are ways that people contribute to and participate in society. I'd even go so far as to boldly claim that welfare is simply the way the bourgeois convey wages to such people, and then they have the gall to propagandize it as charity to make themselves look better, while simultaneously vilifying this subset of the working class
Or maybe microsoft should focus less on gamifying coding and turning it into an activity done for social credits, and make github more of a platform for... idk, version control and programming?
Consent is a bad metric because it ignores externalities—stuff like economic incentives, implicit threats of loss of basic needs, propaganda, trauma. Someone can be said to consent to exploitation, even if they only did so to continue surviving under oppressive economies/states. I "consent" to have the value of my labor extracted, pooled, and distributed to business owners in the same way I "consent" to the privacy policies (and the sale of my Personally Identifying Information) of the software the company I work for requires us to use (to remain employed)
That's why I prefer focusing on exploitation. Someone doesn't have to know they're being exploited, agree that they're being exploited, nor even want to not be exploited for it to still be unjust to exploit them and identify when it is happening. Veganism is a stance against animal exploitation.
Nature compells us to work for food anyway, that's not exploitation and coercion, that's just survival.
The construct of society is predicated on the idea of "from each... to each..." That saying often gets conflated with left-wing politics, but that's just the point of animals (humans included) grouping together; after all, what's the point of living in society if it doesn't convey any benefits to the individual that they could not provide for themselves? That would be exploitative of the individual. But if they are benefitting, then it is only fair and just to also give back to the society one extracts benefits from, otherwise it is exploitative of the others.
Put another way: no one should be obligated to participate in society, but then society should likewise have no obligations to the non-participants.
Services as subscriptions: fine. They are ongoing agreements that require an unspecifiable amount of labor, it makes sense to pay as you go.
Subscription goods? Fuck that. If I am in posession of it and responsible for maintaining it in a specific state of operation and quality, I basically own it anyway.
Charging me monthly for a pocket-sized computer with the added stipulations that the seller gets to dictate what I'm allowed to do with it, probably installs spyware on it (on top of the OEM and OS spyware), and if I break it (or otherwise violate the terms of use) I have to buy it anyway and they still get to keep it? They've basically reinvented a mix of payphones and library PCs, but more invasive and more expensive
This is such sloppy engagement baiting. If it was just a hot take shitting all over one of the larger linux communities, that would be one thing, but to follow it up with a "let me know in the comments" just makes it all feel disingenuous and like somebody is being sponsored by NordVPN or Incogni to post their ragebait
The flipside of this is what a friend once dubbed "terminal uniqueness." Just because you aren't in the exact same situation as others does not mean their advice won't work for you, your life isn't that unique
My secondary laptop had an issue where the time would be wrong whenever I booted it up. I'd make sure the system was set to the right timezone, but it always required me manually setting the time, even restarting ntpd (and making sure I had internet) didn't work.
The problem was pretty clear, because the time would be off by years: the issue was that the hardeare clock was set incorrectly in the BIOS, because I use it so infrequently that it would lose all charge in the interim and the BIOS would be reset. Setting the hardware clock correctly fixed everything.
Oh then yeah, probably. Popular comedy was really "edgy" (bigoted) in the 00s; people probably got away with even worse in the 80s and 90s, but I wasn't around for much of it to say for certain
Among the same audience as Borat, but in 2026? No, not even the sequel was as well-received as the original
Not to be that gal, but... the GNU site's Bash Reference Manual documents everything you could ever want to know right up until you get into weird edge cases and abusing bugs/unintended behaviors for your own nefarious purposes.
For that, others have pointed to YSAP, whom I will also recommend. I can't find it right now, but I swear in some videos he mentions a website or forum where people discussi Bash extremely in-depth, and that is end-game stuff (the stuff you learn right before you start auditing the code yourself or editing the source to enable your own custom behaviors)
Here's the direct link
Borat is explicitly a parody of USA stereotypes of Eastern Europeans, made to clown on the "stupid americans" who are too ignorant to realize this person is clearly too one-dimensional to be a real human.
But based on the post's title, I'm guessing they are referring to Da Ali G Show, which I haven't seen, so I'm not poised to defend nor critique it.
I will however, share that Ali G's wikipedia page says this of him
So presumably he's intended as a parody of native brits who appropriate the style of other cultures to seem cool, and not a racist parody of said cultures. However, it's worth noting that intention != outcome. In that case, one might also point out that people, like Mr. Baron Cohen, can learn and grow from who they were 22 to 26 years ago, and hopefully he has.
Posted the day after the Harambe incident
I avoid screens (with one exception mentioned in a bit)—especially social media (including fediverse)—for like an hour ahead of time, read a book, make sure I'm well fed and hydrated without eating too close to bedtime, wear a sleep mask, and put on some soothing music, podcast or (mostly audio-based) video—with the screen off as soon as I hit play. Sometimes I even resort to my noise-cancelling headphones—or earplugs, if the sounds of my own breathing, swallowing, and bloodflow don't bother me too much that night. It helps to meditate and/or make sure to exercise/work hard enough to wear myself out each day.
Comfort helps. Finding the right position, having the right sheets, mattress, pillow, getting the ac/fan/heater so the room feels perfect, maybe cracking a window for fresh air. Feeling secure and safe where I'm sleeping, confident that I'll make it through the night without rude awakenings. Each isn't very powerful on its own, bit all together make a big difference in how readily I drift off.
Finally, I just try not to worry too much whether I fall asleep or not; if it's not looking like it's happening, I'll try to write a story for myself or draw a masterpiece in my minds eye. If that doesn't work, I'll focus on invoking some Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming instead: forcing myself to lie perfectly still with my eyes closed, not even shifting for comfort nor to scratch itches nor swat flies, letting my mind wander wherever it wants to and just going with the hypnagogic hallucinations (they can get a little uncomfortable at times). This rarely has the intended effect, but I usually do end up waking up later, realizing I fell asleep without knowing it.
Disclaimer: my routine won't solve insomnia, it won't fix neurological disorders that affect circadian rhythm, it probably won't work on the first night even if you don't have the aforementioned issues. But adding any part of it to your routine (if you can) will make it just that much easier to fall sleep, when you can get around to it, even if you do have underlying conditions.
Also, at the risk of sounding like a boomer, screens are really bad for sleep. I grew up with them: my family had a habit of watching tv until bedtime, I trained myself to fall asleep while staring at my laptop (which I often have on my bed), or I'll pick up my phone after I put the laptop down. Nowadays I can feel how awake my brain gets when I check lemmy or read news around bedtime. If I have my phone near me, I'll have this nagging feeling to do "just one more" check of all my socials.
And it always keeps me awake until I will myself to turn it off and close my eyes.