• 0 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: December 27th, 2023
  • ineffable@sh.itjust.workstoNews@lemmy.world•Before the DC Plane Crash, Lawmakers Expanded Flight Traffic
    56·
    1 year ago

    “Did you hear about that crash in Washington?” “Yeah, the Republicans took $3.8m in bribes from Delta to let them cram in an unsafe number of flights, and now 70 people are dead”

    That’s it, that’s the response. No Republican will read this if you send them a link. Just give them true sound bites.

    If they say DEI, just ask them about the bribes. If they say terrorism ask them about the bribes. If they blame Biden ask them about the bribes. Don’t engage with any sentence that doesn’t include the word bribe.

  • ineffable@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.world•Never Forgive ThemEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    A summary (no AI, I actually read things then summarise them):

    The digital world is the real world - It’s where most people in Western society spend most of their personal social time, and a lot of other time (e.g. work)

    But it’s shit. It wasn’t always shit, but it is. Platforms don’t do what you want them to do, or even what they used to do. Cory Doctorow’s enshitiffication describes one mechanism, but really the problem is the rot economy - a mindset that causes technology providers to consider only growth and profit over anything that might be important to real people

    This has made technology (and by extension much of everyday life) traumatic. As a tech savvy person you may be aware of some or all of this, including the effects and motivations, and may even be able to avoid some - but by being in the readership of this article, you have to acknowledge you are in a privileged minority

    Take the example of someone buying one of the most sold laptops from a big retailer - a common and necessary way for large numbers of people to access the digital world. By the time you fight the kludge of Windows with its integrations and bloatware and updates, then try and use a browser on this underpowered machine, you’ve already been bludgeoned into accepting that everything digital is just terrible, with no way of knowing or understanding that this is not your fault

    This is not a trap you can easily escape, and any suggestion that these users are to blame because they bought cheap technology is just another example of the lack of economic awareness and empathy that lead to recent US election results. Similarly, blaming users for a lack of digital literacy when the technology is actively thwarting them would be inappropriate

    So what’s the answer? I don’t know. At the very least we need to be empathetic, be aware, and raise awareness that this is happening. Why is this important? Because the digital world is the real world, and it’s being stolen from us