The thing is, when you don't give the benefit of the doubt, and extrapolate the future (not one year, but 10), and assume malice, you get labelled a luddite, a tinfoiler or an extremist.
Just look at Richard Stallman: in 1983 he couldn't hack his printer, extrapolated, got called all sorts of things, and now, 40 years later, we cannot run unauthorized software on a general purpose computer we all have in our pockets.
Many warned about the ongoing platformization of the Internet, and here we are, a few decentralized nerds remain, yet even those post on substack...
Nobody listened to Edward Snowden about privacy.
Your wallet has no power.
You building something might. (stallman and GNU)
You becoming a thorn in the side of corporations could. (Louis Rossmann's activism)
I look in a mirror, and I do not like what I see... how about you?
This is a great article that points to the truth a lot of people are ignoring. We all have a role in perpetuating the society that we live in.
I do take issue with your last sentence, however. You say "we need to acknowledge that our attention — and our wallets — are our power, and when unified, they are how we can elevate or eviscerate companies that cross the moral and legal lines that are most important to us."
This attitude -- that the power of ordinary people lies primarily in our purchasing power -- is exactly the problem that needs to be addressed. As you write, there are different systems of justice for wealthy corporations and un-wealthy individuals. While the idea that money = power is true, it means that the people who are hurt the most also have the least amount of power. It should not be this way. In a democracy, the amount of money that we have is supposed to be irrelevant.
We need to take back the power that we have as members of "democratic" societies. Our primary power is that we are citizens. We vote for representatives who should hold tech companies to account. And if they are failing to do their jobs, we need to hold our elected officials to account. They need to hear our voices, or be replaced with people who WILL do their jobs.
Corporate control of journalism and politics is obviously a barrier to doing so. That is exactly why corporate control of journalism is so dangerous -- it undermines democracy itself.
Life is too short to waste it on unnecessarily drawn-out useless distracting walls of text in the name of an oh-so-great attention span for a false argument that millions of people give companies the benefit of the doubt (as if they wrote THE laws).
btw
>and our wallets — are our power
is a joke, people have no money and therefore no power because the capitalist system is set up that way
that politics can be influenced with money is not an accidental mistake
>They're all out. Big tech doesn’t have another thing. Google doesn't have any ideas. Meta is so out of ideas that it changed its name to another, worse idea, one associated with Mark Zuckerberg burning $45 billion for no reason. Amazon has never been in the ideas business — it’s the founder of the cloud storage cartel with Microsoft, Oracle and Google. Big Tech is lazy because they've all agreed to compete only a little, never coloring too far out the lines, because doing so might expose big tech to an actual risk, like regulation, or having to hire people that built new things versus exploiting current customers.
>trillion dollar companies all bumbling into each other like the three stooges, billions of dollars in cash falling out of their pockets. It's a disgrace.
If someone has to write to me in an essay what he has written at some point in order to get to the beginning[!] of his point, then I feel like I'm being made a fool of because it's pointless nonsense
Keep staring at walls if that makes you feel so great.
Yeah, the point about wallet-power needed a good chew before swallowing, I agree. After reflecting, one could take it charitably to mean seeking out, using and promoting alternative products, ones which support smaller, more ethically-inclined, less rapacious businesses. Shop local, so to speak.
Matt Hughes is as angry and fed up as all of us, yet hasn't succumbed to despairing resignation, which seeps visibly from your haemoragic reply. He instead uses his talents and platform as catharsis at the least, and as a reminder we aren't alone; there's many like us - a call to arms.
people are treated preferentially by the system if they don't do that so you have to change the system not your attitude
>hasn't succumbed to despairing resignation, which seeps visibly from your haemoragic reply.
If that were the case, I wouldn't answer you at all.
The point is that every fucking idiot has to understand this, and it takes time, and the longer you waste time distilling pointless, long texts down to their core arguments, the longer it takes.
Be glad I'm not writing a lecture here about where I grew up, what I do all day, and what I've written to others about it.
independent of the above written
text without point is a worthless waste of time
and I'm not writing this to annoy you, you should understand that
The thing is, when you don't give the benefit of the doubt, and extrapolate the future (not one year, but 10), and assume malice, you get labelled a luddite, a tinfoiler or an extremist.
Just look at Richard Stallman: in 1983 he couldn't hack his printer, extrapolated, got called all sorts of things, and now, 40 years later, we cannot run unauthorized software on a general purpose computer we all have in our pockets.
Many warned about the ongoing platformization of the Internet, and here we are, a few decentralized nerds remain, yet even those post on substack...
Nobody listened to Edward Snowden about privacy.
Your wallet has no power.
You building something might. (stallman and GNU)
You becoming a thorn in the side of corporations could. (Louis Rossmann's activism)
I look in a mirror, and I do not like what I see... how about you?
I didn't go premium,, the vino informs, but maybe the sub will help. Godspeed, sir. Document and evident.
This is a great article that points to the truth a lot of people are ignoring. We all have a role in perpetuating the society that we live in.
I do take issue with your last sentence, however. You say "we need to acknowledge that our attention — and our wallets — are our power, and when unified, they are how we can elevate or eviscerate companies that cross the moral and legal lines that are most important to us."
This attitude -- that the power of ordinary people lies primarily in our purchasing power -- is exactly the problem that needs to be addressed. As you write, there are different systems of justice for wealthy corporations and un-wealthy individuals. While the idea that money = power is true, it means that the people who are hurt the most also have the least amount of power. It should not be this way. In a democracy, the amount of money that we have is supposed to be irrelevant.
We need to take back the power that we have as members of "democratic" societies. Our primary power is that we are citizens. We vote for representatives who should hold tech companies to account. And if they are failing to do their jobs, we need to hold our elected officials to account. They need to hear our voices, or be replaced with people who WILL do their jobs.
Corporate control of journalism and politics is obviously a barrier to doing so. That is exactly why corporate control of journalism is so dangerous -- it undermines democracy itself.
tl;dr
Name: abridged. Attention span: imperceptible.
Life is too short to waste it on unnecessarily drawn-out useless distracting walls of text in the name of an oh-so-great attention span for a false argument that millions of people give companies the benefit of the doubt (as if they wrote THE laws).
btw
>and our wallets — are our power
is a joke, people have no money and therefore no power because the capitalist system is set up that way
that politics can be influenced with money is not an accidental mistake
https://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2025/05/obscene-wealth.html
>The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.
>The top 10% of US households hold 67% of all the wealth in the US.
>The top half of US households have secured 97% of all US wealth.
also:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/
>They're all out. Big tech doesn’t have another thing. Google doesn't have any ideas. Meta is so out of ideas that it changed its name to another, worse idea, one associated with Mark Zuckerberg burning $45 billion for no reason. Amazon has never been in the ideas business — it’s the founder of the cloud storage cartel with Microsoft, Oracle and Google. Big Tech is lazy because they've all agreed to compete only a little, never coloring too far out the lines, because doing so might expose big tech to an actual risk, like regulation, or having to hire people that built new things versus exploiting current customers.
>trillion dollar companies all bumbling into each other like the three stooges, billions of dollars in cash falling out of their pockets. It's a disgrace.
If someone has to write to me in an essay what he has written at some point in order to get to the beginning[!] of his point, then I feel like I'm being made a fool of because it's pointless nonsense
Keep staring at walls if that makes you feel so great.
Yeah, the point about wallet-power needed a good chew before swallowing, I agree. After reflecting, one could take it charitably to mean seeking out, using and promoting alternative products, ones which support smaller, more ethically-inclined, less rapacious businesses. Shop local, so to speak.
Matt Hughes is as angry and fed up as all of us, yet hasn't succumbed to despairing resignation, which seeps visibly from your haemoragic reply. He instead uses his talents and platform as catharsis at the least, and as a reminder we aren't alone; there's many like us - a call to arms.
>Shop local shop ethically -> solves it
>a call to arms.
people are treated preferentially by the system if they don't do that so you have to change the system not your attitude
>hasn't succumbed to despairing resignation, which seeps visibly from your haemoragic reply.
If that were the case, I wouldn't answer you at all.
The point is that every fucking idiot has to understand this, and it takes time, and the longer you waste time distilling pointless, long texts down to their core arguments, the longer it takes.
Be glad I'm not writing a lecture here about where I grew up, what I do all day, and what I've written to others about it.
independent of the above written
text without point is a worthless waste of time
and I'm not writing this to annoy you, you should understand that
>if that makes you feel so great.
Sorry if I assume that it's because of your feeling, I just don't know what you can find in it because you haven't written anything about it yourself