I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.

Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”

Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.

it was a matter of Chinese control outside of US government control

TikTok was controlled by a private company based out of Singapore, with investments from a host of international funds including both the US and China.

The “China is controlling our internet” narrative was always bullshit fear-mongering, fully disjoined from the actual business structure. What TikTok enjoyed that Facebook and YouTube and Reddit did not was a sufficient distance from US policymakers such that TikTok’s policies weren’t dictated by Western oligarchs.

not bringing it under US billionaires specifically

That’s exactly what Biden (and then Trump)'s forced sale intended. Bring the US branch of TikTok under American control by awarding it to exclusively American financial interests.

Superman has never died from Kryptonite but he has died from getting punched in the face by a big dude with boney hands.

Only if it’s a lesbian who dyes her hair.

105% of the time when someone in a public space says “Let’s not talk politics” or “Let’s not make this political” they are horrible MAGA-aligned morons or incel chuds who have outrageously stupid or hateful ideals.

Might just be where I’m from, but they’re more often neoliberal “don’t rock the boat” ghouls who care more about profits than any kind of ideological mission. Shit can suddenly get very political when it scratches their personal itch. They just don’t want anyone else arguing about politics when they should be putting up billables.

you absolutely never see someone start spouting anti-equality BS in a game subreddit and all the leftists go “whoa whoa, this isn’t the place for that, can’t we all just enjoy our games without making it political.”

Not in those words, but I definitely hear the periodic “okay, tone it down, this is different” whenever a hobby treads into the problematic. The fall-back line of “No such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism” was a balm for whatever it is you were doing that wasn’t ideologically kosher.

On the flip side, I’ve seen people blow up at one another over a political divide - even a purely rhetorical one (arguing whether Dark Elves or Orcs are a racist trope, complaining about the implications of Monopoly or Catan, getting on a high horse about a popular movie or song). The debate over whether “Let It Snow” condones date rape is a popular college age struggle session.

Eventually people just don’t want to hear it rehashed for the thousandth time.

Gavin Newsom was enthusiastically in favor of forcing the sale of TikTok to US-aligned billionaires under Joe Biden.

Wonder what changed.

But so much of the content is uncreative.

Enshittification, baby. Once people know where the feed bar is, they just keep slapping it until pellets stop falling out. The Algorithm rewards imitation, not invention.

A lot of these services really hinge on a tight-knit community of active content producers who fuel engagement and reap some kind of dividend on the back end.

Loops is a technology but it’s not much of a business. The company is literally run by just two guys. They’re not going to bring on prolific content producers without a much more aggressive marketing strategy.

We’ve further mechanized the process of sales and marketing in an industry that we’ve been at the forefront of since the turn of the 20th century.

Modern anti-AI guys would have been eating up Adbusters 'zines 30 years ago.

So much of the modern political landscape is just suburban white people waking up and realizing they aren’t exempt from the police state that’s been harassing everyone else since the nation’s founding.

Admittedly, this is how you get class consciousness. So it’s not bad, per say. Just a bit ironic that Trump’s War On Woke is radicalizing entire municipalities at a breakneck pace.

Everyone thinks they’re above it, that they can detect the bots or remain unmoved.

I’d say the bigger problem is that there’s nothing “to be done” at an individualist level. Bot swarms are going to exist and you’re going to be exposed to them either directly (via your social media diet) or indirectly (via traditional news, casual conversation with people who consume social media, and the public policies that inevitably emerge from these trends). Simply “being aware” isn’t a defense. You’re still going to have your priors chipped away by these tidal shifts in public discourse.

Look at the impact the High Protein diet fetish has had on every fucking food retailer. Seems like every product has to include a sticker telling you how many grams of protein is in it. We went through the same diet fad exposure with GMOs and saturated fats and fiber. We got deluged with crime statistics in news, entertainment, and politics at every angle to justify the War on Crime. We’re still eating tons of shit from the anti-vax trends of the Bush Era.

But that won’t stop society from imploding.

Society isn’t ending. It’s always doing this shit. When you were young, the baseline felt normal because its all you knew. Now its changing under your feet and you’re struggling to rectify your childhood awareness with an evolved landscape as an adult.

You’re the one imploding, as you try to reconcile the contradictions of your past and present.

If this was all they were doing, I’d agree

It was a vastly better situation than a lot of wandering tribes had it back then.

No it wasn’t. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.

Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That’s why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.

Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.

But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.

Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We’ve congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.

They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well.

The Pharaoh’s government would take a tithe of the farmer’s crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh’s was the pinnacle).

Idk what “treated well” is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.

I wouldn’t call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.

It takes an enormous amount of ultra pure water to make a micro chip

Israel has some of the most advanced desalination facilities in the world

Yeah, that’s the problem with this picture.

How would a sybian kill anyone?

Repeated contusions resulting in sever damage to the body and uncontrolled bleeding would be my first bet.

Couldn’t find any reports of an individual killed while riding the Sybian. But I’m willing to bet something like this has happened already

He looks like he’s bending over to get railed.

Not unlike his predecessors from the 1860s