circuitfarmer

I agree with all this, but I think it is all to say: ISPs support Net Neutrality when it behooves them.

Shareholders demand ever increasing return. There is only one way any of this goes, and we are witnessing a total systematic collapse. It is a mathematical certainty.

You cannot squeeze blood from a stone.

Many are childless because they have been beholden to corporations and rich people far more than their parents were. They never had an opportunity to give their kids at least the life they had, so they opted not to have them. It’s not that they didn’t want them. They responded to the situation they were given.

I see these folks with generational wealth who have 16 children. It must be nice, but they’re just another side of the same problem.

Chiding people for being childless is possibly the most tone-deaf take ever, and even more so from rich, corpo pawns.

It’s certainly possible. I do get ads that don’t seem relevant for me pretty regularly. But this last time I’m referencing: one of the first ads I saw that night was for our discussion topic.

I’m not disagreeing with you, so I’ll just mention it’s safe to say: whether it is digital fingerprinting or mic listening, the surveillance level is absolutely off the charts.

They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to.

I don’t deny that fingerprinting is powerful. But, I also have started to wear a tinfoil hat on the “mic always listening” issue. I have experienced (several times) ads for random things that I have only discussed – never searched for or had other interaction with in any way.

It wouldn’t be in my fingerprint, so the only other possibility is that others with a similar fingerprint to me had already searched for the same thing. Frankly, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, I just find it far less likely that we have such a hive mentality that everyone with similar digital fingerprints ends up having the same “random” discussions. At that point, “they’re always listening to your mic” seems downright practical.

And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.

Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.

Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.

And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.

Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.