I feel like this would be very entertaining.

Ah, sweet! Man made horrors beyond comprehension.

Imagine picking a lawyer based on them backing the same insane insane conspiracy theories you do rather than their legal acumen and ability to get you out of trouble…

Slapping a shitty coat of paint over a complex and long-standing problem and claiming it’s fixed is an apt metaphor for the last 250 years…

I like to put the phone to my ear like it’s a voice call, then pretend to accidentally hang up, then refuse to answer again, then stop responding to texts.

this is an aircraft older than the typical US senator

Let’s not get too hasty, the B-52H variant was first produced in 1961, making it 65 years old. A 65 year old incumbent senator still has three, maybe four good decades left in office…

Some people who are utterly tech ignorant and unwilling to actively parent their children might feel better about handing their kid a device so they don’t have to deal with them.

However, this is primarily the end game of both targeted advertising and those who want wholesale surveillance of the population (who are often the same people). Tying the whole of your online presence to your unique offline identity.

Back when the anti-5G hysteria was at it’s peak, I wanted to sell cheap latex paint mixed with iron filings as a “high tech” coating that would prevent the 5G radiation from entering your home through the windows at the low, low price of $119 a gallon. (It also conveniently marked which houses the folks selling knives, magazines, and vacuums should visit.)

Sucks having a conscience sometimes.

Zugzwang strategy. You have to make move, there’s not even an option not to play.

It’s not just about capturing the mobile phone market and punishing alternate ROM developers, it’s also pushing people into the market that might otherwise choose to have a dumb phone, no phone, do things in person, via mail, etc. No android/iPhone? Good luck with online shopping, communicating with medical providers, checking your kid’s grades online, paying utility bills, taxes, etc. etc.

As the boomers die off, and fewer people do things the pre-internet way, there’s no incentive for governments, businesses, and so forth to maintain those processes and systems. Why would we have a receptionist take appointments by phone if she’s just typing them into the same web interface? Why print report cards when we can post them online? Why maintain a storefront and not just warehouses like Amazon?

Opt-in to surveillance or opt out of necessary parts of life, all under the guise of “convenience”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’re lonely and hurting, don’t fall in love with anything that doesn’t have a pulse. It’s only going to fuck you up worse in the end.

We already have answers for many of the things he’s trying to address, but they involve taxing the rich and using that money to support and educate the masses.

It’s almost like there’s an ultieror motive behind his desire to improve things for us dumb poor folks…

Never underestimate people’s ability to ignore inconvenient information.

We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.

The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.

You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?

What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?

Pre-fucking-cisely.

They sell travel sized rolls of that gorilla tape.

It sticks to just about anything, pretty much forever, and is totally opaque.

Should work like a charm.

Precisely, but you’re giving them too much credit by expecting them to figure it out from reading the lyrics alone.

Prejudice tends to lack a capacity for self reflection and an understanding of irony.

It’s the same with nazi punks and MAGAs who like Rage Against The Machine, they just want something that sounds loud, aggressive, and violent and rarely understand what they’re listening to or how it came about until it’s shoved right in their face. Then they get all offended about it.

Most of the time, the best they can make themselves is a cheap, talent-less imitation that lacks any sense of authenticity, and to try and overcome that they’ve resorted to something that can produce a finely polished turd that still lacks any sense of authenticity.

Was there ever any doubt? They’ve been trying to tie devices to identities for years now. This is just the end game.

The funny thing is, it’s kinda hard to prove that surveillance based ads actually work. Ad platforms like to throw numbers of how may people see ads around, but it’s hard to actually tie those numbers to sales. What’s worse is that the way these ads are bought, sold, and how ad placement is commodified means that everything remains intentionally vague to the people buying ads. In most cases, all they know is that “everyone is doing it” and “making lots of money” and if they don’t they’ll be left out of the revenue party.

Right now, enough people are still drinking the kool-aid that it’ll remain a safe revenue stream for companies like Meta unless something happens that hurts the cash flow of their customers. But, it kinda makes you wonder, if the vagueries of the online add ecosystem caused companies to reconsider the investment during an economic crisis, how would these ad platforms that have recently gotten very cozy with fascists make money?

If you want to get into how this happens, and the way it happens with other technologies, I’d suggest Neil Postman’s Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves To Death as a good start.

I’m not even certain that we even disagree on the fundamental principle, just the details of the example I gave.