Continue writing “2024” for the date for at least a week or so.

Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.

I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)

The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?

My adblocking doesn’t work on twitch anymore, so I stopped using it for everything but one streamer I’m subbed to.

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?

Removing humans from your side of the war lowers the cost of going to war and allows for even more centralized power. It’s a lot easier to do morally bankrupt acts if you don’t need to convinced a group of human soldiers to do it. Clearly you can anyway a lot of the time, but going for the robots is a lot cheaper/less risky.

It’s pretty obvious why powerful people would want this and why it would be terrible for the rest of us even without worrying about a hypothetical sky net future.

I think for memes and news I’m pretty much set with lemmy. For a lot of more niche topics like specific gaming communities, I do kind of feel left out. For now though I’m willing to bite the bullet. I stand by why I left Reddit. It’s nothing special technologically to warrant putting up with the shitty business practices. Eventually people will migrate elsewhere once the squeeze is tight enough, whether it’s to lemmy or not. For one of the games I play there’s already more activity on their forum than the subreddit for it. Not so much for others.

Half I guess? Graduated in a non technical field but I ended up taking a lot of CS and math classes. But now I’m not really doing anything since I’ve been depressed since college. There’s probably a lot of stuff I could do if I could get over the motivation hump.