I originally joined Twitter way back during the Arab Spring. It really felt like the world was turning a corner and everything was getting better for everyone. IT was like, as a collective whole we had come together to celebrate throwing off the horrible yoke of oppression and we were rejoicing with our Arab cousins that were rejecting the hardline oppressive regimes.
And then the techbros came along and fsked it all up, undoing almost 80 years of societal progress.
Under the false flag of “Ultra nationalism”, The murdochs run all of the worst parts of the fascist news arm. Zuckerberg turned Facebook evil by allowing foreign agents to overturn an election, thinking it would help is favourite politican, but he was so stupid he didn’t stop to think “Wait, why do russians want the republicans in power?”… Duh, Mark, think about it for 30 seconds you idiot.
Then Google turned evil, spying on everyone, which was, frankly more disappointing than worrying. I remember when they claimed they would never “do evil”. :-/
Then Microsoft started its long-anticipated march towards locking everyone into their ecosystem with cloud-based desktop, TPM, and needing to have your desktop password authenticated in the cloud…. Coming Soon, AI Spyware to a desktop near you!!!!
Finally Elon Stupid Musk, the polyp on the anus of the tech society trying to drag the world back to Apartheid. How anyone thinks he’s any good is anyone’s guess. We’re not on Mars (despite him saying we would be years ago), we don’t have Vacuum-tube trains revolutionising the world (despite him predicting they would be), we don’t have flying cars, helper robots or even fully self-driving cars which he’s predicted as “within the next six months” for a decade now. Seriously, people. The man couldn’t predict the sun coming up if it was midnight. He just says what you want to hear, people! Wake Up! He says the most optimistic, dumb schoolboy sci-fi nonsense he can think of, and whatever sticks, he orders his employees to make happen by living in tents in the office. Of COURSE it’s going to turn to sh**! That’s not how you make the future! You can’t just throw a million darts at the “stupid idea” board and then yell at people to make happen.. That’s how ACCIDENTS happen, and they ARE by the BUCKETLOAD.
But, despite literally everyone pointing and yelling that he and his other techbro friends are all idiots, the people with money STILL keep throwing more and more money at them!
Well, if you want to build a bridge, there’s two ways, right? You can pay for an architect, and hire an engineer, then buy metal girders and concrete blocks, and build it. Or you can just keep pouring cash into the hole until there’s no more hole in the ground. It feels we’re still bringing in the lorry loads of cash, but the hole just keeps getting deeper as the techbros keep siphoning more and more of their investors’ cash into their own pockets.
All of this is so disheartening, I just can’t take it any more. Even the BBC has now bent the knee completely, every article is written in a way that leaves whether the well-researched science is correct, or the random opinion of some foreign-paid-for politician is correct. They clamp down on all the reporting of current events which lean even slightly left…. So all BBC apps and programs are removed from electronic devices, and I’ve uninstalled all the social media apps. Plus, I no longer buy anything from Amazon unless I have to.
Amazingly, I’ve found that buying local is SAVING me money. It turns out it’s cheaper to buy all the stuff I need from the local supermarkets or off Ebay! I went back and looked through my Amazon emails, and found they’d been slowly ramping up the prices over the last few years… a few pennies here, a pound there… and suddenly I was paying about 20% more to get it delivered by Amazon… gah!
In return, I’ve got way more time… I’ve finished two books, and I’m halfway through a third, I’ve started this blog back up, I’ve taken 9 training courses, finished two games and had way more time to spend with the kids. All of these can only be good things! My mental health is so much better.
Maybe I’ll go back to social media when society slaps itself REALLY hard and the fash are dealt with the way our grandparents dealt with them.