Heat Death of the Internet - takahē
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the pric...
Opinion immediately discarded.
Yeah, pal. Welcome to the end of Internet 2.0. We lamented the end of internet 1.0 when you could have a quick link to a web ring that led to a free website you created specifically for your pet as an example, if you felt like it, on one of at least 4 or 5 webspaces available. Geocities was a big one, but there were others.
And I'm sure BBS / Trapline people lamented internet 1.0's creation where you had to remain connected online at all times and couldn't just dial in to make a post on someone else's PC via a phone number.
Now if you want your own space, you have to go to one of the few approved (corporate controlled) social media sites and shill your tiny web space to get any eyes on it, other than google bots and random bewildered passersby who mistyped a URL they manually typed. if they let you, that is. They don't want you leaving their space where they get to control your every word.
Thanksgiving is canceled. My smart BBQ is refusing to cook until I do a firmware update. Oh the firmware update is stuck, I guess I need to call the manufacturer. The manufacturer is out of business.
Okay, that was kind of a fun essay. I have no idea how the title relates to the subject matter, though.
For academia, it’s fucking wild how controlled that space is now…
Literally the entire “student experience” is just a walled garden, and if you attempt to publish a study questioning current narratives on stuff (say… vaccines, or “gender”), best of luck getting that shit published.
The few prominent examples you see are extreme outliers, and the vast majority of those studies would never get past the ethics committees and “funding oversight committees” at the institutions I’ve been involved in…
Pushing everything online just made all of that so much worse.
My parents live near a university. We call the area the bubble because the students and people living in the actual town rarely hear about things happening to the other.
Of course the same could be said about here in Orlando. The waitress that served me today was shocked to hear that Universal Parks was across the street. It seemed so ordinary on the outside. I even though the same when walking through the space coast and realizing no one cared that Disney, Universal, and many lesser parks were just a 50 minute drive away. They had the ocean and tourists for that, who cares?
In Seattle, I knew people who didn't know the city outside of Amazon controlled areas. They genuinely thought anything outside of it held evil ner do wells. Redmond with Microsoft was even more intense. You got on a Microsoft run bus, through streets run by Microsoft, with stores and shops semi owned by the company. This is if you even left the campus at all.
The campus bubble seems to be something used by companies, universities and governments entirely to control what their followers see and hear.
Yup. I lived in a residential cult, in Sweden, for three months last year (unintentionally, but no one intends to move into a cult), and I can confirm, 100%, that this is a tactic that they use...
Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for me, I kept leaving. I left every weekend, and every chance I got, to go out and explore the wider world, meet people, have conversations, etc. So I very quickly realized that these people were insane. And so I left.
The others there, who didn't have that same experience of "going outside", regularly, stayed, shunned me, got really, really nasty when I told them I was leaving, and then got duped into giving the cult more money...
A cult which already starves and overworks "participants", and which pulls money from donors and the government, in addition to what we ourselves paid.
It was a very eye-opening experience, I will admit.
And that particular one has been going for 16 years, plus it's not even the only one in that same town, so...
That's a more extreme example of the phenom, obviously, but yeah, this is definitely a thing, in my experience...
Recognizing how the extreme works helps when you see the tactics in more subtle ways.
Lol also, the part about the lazy ChatGPT asshole colleague is exactly how group projects at Uni go, so that’s amusing…
It’s fucking appalling how lazy people have become, with “writing”, for shit that actually counts, like that…
This is written very weirdly, for someone ranting about ChatGPT and fake information on the internet:
Fuck they/thembies.
A nice enough modern day take on Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues.