And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)

There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Reddit API fiasco. Practical issue since I didn’t want to use Reddit’s shitty app for my phone browsing and it was just the writing on the walls.

Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.

2 things:

• Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

• People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.

Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.

So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.

Did I miss something and they dismantled the mass surveillance state, reigned in the police, and stopped funding endless imperialist military ventures while I wasn’t looking?

Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

God this is peak liberal policy:

• Take a real problem: Tech companies fucking with people’s brains for profit.
• Create a needlessly complicated policy to “address” it.
• The policy only applies to this specific group, between these hours, if they haven’t filled out some forms… etc. Thus leaving everyone else to still deal with the problem.
• It ends up not solving the problem even for their narrow target.
• All because the goal was never to actually solve the problem, it was to accomplish whatever, in this case more privacy violations.

Just throw a committee in somewhere and we have bingo.

It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.

This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.

Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.

Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.

Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.

Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

• In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

• In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

• In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

• Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.

I agree we need to get organized to make this happen, but I’d push back on the idea that Biden/Democrats would be somehow more amenable to the development of movements that have genuine power to change things.

Just some of the concerning things to have happened with Democratic support in recent history:

• They’ve continued to expand the military, which aside from being one of the major sources of pollutants is also a tool to secure more oil/resources and when needed, push back against the protests of the masses and any of the other consequences of climate change like mass migration.

• They’ve continued to expand the surveillance state, both in capabilities and by eroding legal protections to privacy/security such as attempts to get companies to give them back door access to people’s secure devices, attacks on encryption, etc.

• When faced with a choice about how to respond to police violence, they decided to support the police.

• They’ve labeled left wing activists, including climate activists, as potential domestic terrorists.

People talk about how electing someone like Trump would slide us into fascism as if they can’t see the infrastructure of fascism being built before our eyes. It’s not really a matter of revolution being easier or harder under democrats or republicans. The establishment will push back against challenges to the system with violence regardless.

Admittedly I’m less familiar with the specifics on the gradual climate change argument, but to my understanding, it seems like there are some things that would make it very difficult to go back from once we let them happen. Various positive feedback loops. Major shortages of water, arable land, and food causing mass displacement. More frequent and intense disasters like storms and wild fires will present major disruptions to organized human life that will make it more difficult for us to build the infrastructure we need to solve our problems. Etc.

If we do a few small things, but ultimately fail to stop the world from getting to that point in time, are we not still doomed? Scientists have been sounding the alarm bells about this my whole lifetime. Through 2 republican and democratic administrations. And the problem has only gotten worse. It’s borderline suicidal to put any faith in the system that has continued to fail to address the greatest crisis of our time for that long.

Even if want to pretend that things get better under democrats and worse under republicans, the very fact that our system is built in such a way that allows for such frequent and profound losses of progress is a critical failure of it. To consider this another way: What would you do if Trump wins? Let him do what he wants for 2-4 years and hope you’ll be able to do something next election? Adhering to the rules of the system is killing us. You can’t play nice when the stakes are this high.

I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

Incrementalist policies could have worked if we started decades ago. We’re now at the point where it’s become a catastrophe in progress. The best we’re hoping for at this point is mitigating the disaster if we were to make big changes starting now. It’s kind of all or nothing at this point. Either we do what’s necessary or we don’t.

The article acknowledges the administrations failures and says that activists need to “hold his feet to the fire” … by voting for him unconditionally? People who take this stance have no concept of power. They think that they can get the government to do what they want simply by writing strongly worded letters and going to the occasional conflict-free protest to hold up signs and then go home.

If you’re not serious enough about the problem to break away from civil politics and lesser evilism,then we’re doomed. At some point people need to start breaking things.

With their shitty AI this belongs on not the onion.

No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.