70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Hit them where it hurts.

Anyone who voted for trump is so fucking stupid it’s absurd.

As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.

We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “information wants to be free” and “the internet circumvents censorship”, but also “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we’re talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.

To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.

And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.

Oh Blockbuster, who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy memory

Thy storefront come

Thy movies return

On Earth as it is in Heaven

Give us this day our daily movie rentals

And forgive us our shortsightedness

As we forgive those who exploit us for money

And lead us not into micro-transactions

But deliver us from enshittification

For thine is the Weekend

The Power and the Vibes

Forever and ever

Amen

closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review

(⊙_⊙)

How??

How does one reach even more than 20 accounts?

I’d always get paranoid that they’d revert the changing your details like reddit did when they undeleted mass-deleted comments before.

For this to be practical you need to audit and control the code the runs in the data center. I think that was a hangup with some Chinese based services that offered to host in the EU.

You’d think the few global AWS and Cloudflare outages would have worked as a warning, but most people just went from “nah it couldn’t ever happen” to “well, it did happen, but surely it wouldn’t ever last all too long”.

That’s the thing, we’re all so tightly involved in those few platforms it’s near impossible to correct the situation in the short term.

In our company we’re also documenting the risks related to US services and it’s pretty bleak. And even if we magically untangled ourselves from all that, we’d still be screwed when all the suppliers, the local infrastructure and literally everything is still on top of those. Honestly I’m not even sure if we’d get through the doors or have electricity in the whole cities we operate in if all went out at once.

The best we can do in short term is to not make it worse and choose wiser with new projects, migrate everything that can be done cheaply and hope for the best until we can get everything lifted off US governed services. Even with the risk recognised, it still doesn’t warrant that magnitude of investment. So we at least plan and document everything as well as we can.

I feel you dude

UpCloud is nice but ever since I started using UpDog I don’t think I can go back.

Yeah also did that for my recent site using StaticBuilder and Codeberg. Took longer but well worth supporting smaller businesses.

Btw, if people are passionate about this topic. There is a community and website on !purchasewithpurpose@lemmy.world .

It starts somewhere, and it’s people leaving one by one. Good onya putting your money where your mouth is.

This is definitely a specific problem with the US too.

The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed.

The textbook explainer for the existence of the internet was (at least) two fold:

• Provide a high speed communication between research universities for conveying large amounts of digital data

• Devise a system of redundant communication such that any major node going offline would not cripple the international data infrastructure (specifically with an eye towards major natural disasters or nuclear wars).

But the evolution of the system, from a boutique international data exchange for government enterprises to a business-heavy commercial data system to a retail facing SaaS model degraded both original goals.

Data is no longer supposed to be public and freely traded. It is jealously guarded as a commodity controlled by a handful of privatized tech giants. And due to the continuous, voracious digital harvesting performed by these tech giants, more and more of the information needs to be siloed, encrypted, and otherwise shielded. This clogs the vast redundant network with overlarge choke-points designed to filter out unwanted traffic and shield the identity/data of its users.

This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.

The stupidity is a directly result of how the US private sector repurposed tools layout out by the international public sector. Unregulated solicitations and chronic system intrusions by malicious actors aimed at a naive retail user base, combined with the gluttonous privatization of research data, has inverted the core function of the network.

And because of the Tragedy of the Commons, there is no single actor who can fix the problem through their own virtue. You can’t unfuck this chicken with a Meshnet or through voluntary individualistic commitments to ideological principles unbound from the central rules of network communication.

You need the heavy hand of national scale regulators and industry scale redevelopment to re-engineer how the root layers of the internet function if you want to get back to its original design.

Or… if we’re moving in the direction it seems that we’re moving… we’re going to end up with a wholly proprietary loose confederation of Walled Gardens that look more and more like the Anarcho-Capitalist model of civil government (ie, The Network State).

The Internet is still distributed, it’s the ownership (and thus also the command and control) that is super inbred. Cloudflare, Google, Aws, they all have hardware distributed in every city.

The internet should have been nationalized under the purview of national postal services globally with private options through telecoms.

Maybe it’s not too late?

Correct. And everyone needs to remember the actual problem, not the symptom. Its like leaving one social media platform for another then when it too goes to crap complaining. Oh how can this happen again!?

to be honest, it might have a significant impact. the US tech today serves a global market, but if that market gets reduced to just the US, that is probably a significant cut.

If most US websites are garbage this can’t happen soon enough. You can’t even trust basic search anymore thanks to AI bs. People complain about nobody reading articles when they are ad-filled crap usually written by AI, I’d rather spend my time playing video games.