I'm old enough to remember when the sci-fi notion of a disembodied computer voice waking you up in the morning, knowing enough about you to strike up a conversation, and accompanying you through your daily routine sounded wonderful.
Now it gives me chills. That old wonderful dream is actually possible now if I turned off all my malware blockers and let :lord-bezos-amused: fully into my home.
The future in general. I had bought into the whole "the arc of history is long and bends towards justice" idealism
edit: I now believe it bends towards climate wars
I used to play Civ games and believe the ideology of them, too. I looked forward to the science victory. :so-true:
Capitalism should be a required civic for both democracy AND fascism change my mind
There is no fate except that we make
While we're on the subject, the best ending to the Terminator franchise was Terminator 2. Everything after that outright threw away that lesson. :doomer:
Justice is a human idea after all- not a law of the universe, it only exists once it is created. I'll try to make it real, for you and everyone.
I feel this. I feel it hard.
It was one of the big things that turned me from liberal to communist. The promise of liberalism is slow, steady improvement through democracy and capitalism led by the "free world." It was a long and painful process to realize that this is and always was complete bullshit.
i remember the first time this really hit me. definitely a radicalizing moment
video games achieving wide cultural acceptance as entertainment and art form for everyone
This is me too. Also with superhero stuff. I think 10 year old me would have exploded from excitement had I known there's 4 marvel movies per year.
Yeah, I loved the idea of comic movies but then the movies reminded me of all the bullshit I filtered out back in the day. It's hard to tease the real good story out of the propaganda so I guess I just had rosy glasses. Like people wanting the 50's but don't know about the fascism and polio.
video games achieving wide cultural acceptance as entertainment and art form for everyone
if G!merGate had any silver lining at all, it was making it glaringly clear and obvious how irredeemable capital-G G!mer culture was, all along. They wanted games to be seen as art, but also didn't want it to say anything except :awooga: and :stalin-gun-1: :lmayo: :us-foreign-policy:
It's so weird, it's like art fans that hate the very idea of art.
They claim to be all about "free speech", but want games to be inoffensive, flavorless mush. Even Hades, a game about fucking GREEK MYTH was denounced as garbage because Zagreus could enter a same-sex relationship. Hell, they consider it to be too PC (and therefore dangerously subversive) for Thor to be fat and red-haired instead of a carbon copy of Marvel thor in the new God of War game.
Has it ever occurred to them, that they are NOT the target audience for a lot of games? Gaming is diverse and unique. You may not like every game and that's okay, there's bound to be one that hits just right. Fuck Gamergate for trying to gentrify it into being some Haye's code friendly, soccer mom approved, Walmartified version of my hobby. Meanwhile. claiming that they have a Monopoly on gaming culture (and in a way, they're kinda right now).
Ancient Greek stuff without LGBTQIA+ characteristics is downright offensive to me. It's such a grossly ignorant (or malicious and deliberate) distortion of the literature and mythos as it was written.
Has it ever occurred to them, that they are NOT the target audience for a lot of games?
Nope. Not once ever.
There's a bunch of sequels that I'd be happy to play and just don't I don't think it's by virtue of being lefty, I think it's by virtue of becoming a boomer. Though I had a moment while I was fiddling with my friend's switch. I thought he had bought the new Mario kart courses, but then I learned the game had updated to show you the courses even if you don't have them and then ask you to buy them. I thought it was incredibly unsightly and a poor design choice for a Nintendo product.
I feel like replaying Ocarina of Time is like rereading an old book and that you could get the same sensation of consuming artwork from it. Especially for me who likes watching speedruns and video essays about different bits of beta content and design stories. I think of three expansion packs I like and they're all blizzard games (TFT, TBC, and WotLK). I can't imagine a child being able to look back so fondly on a game that was incomplete and asking them to spend money. As an adult consumer, I get that they have a team of interns that work very hard on the courses and they're a luxury to be purchased. Fine. Whatever. But to sell to children like that seems like it loses some of that magic that I associate with Nintendo instead of maximizing it.
Like so many other concepts, outside of capitalism, it could have been a good thing. Now it's the prospect of superpowers for the already powerful.
Transhumanism for the rich, subhumanism for the poor. Thanks, Silicon Valley.
You jest, but I unironically fear that when I die, my consciousness will be placed in a robot body that's entirely immobile so I will only focus on doing single repeated task for all eternity because productivity for the sake of productivity is the sole moral value.
Yeah, I sure am scared of my own mortality, but the only people who can afford immortal robot bodies will be the Bezos and Gates types anyway so
It’s like edging – for years.
The post 9/11 "Osama bin Laden may or may not be in Afghanistan" era perfected that media trick.
The walls are still closing in on the Trump administration to this very day.
The only news I really follow is street level fash/antifascist scuffles. It's such a small subset of people in absolute numbers that it still feels like it's happening at a human scale. Like you can go and hit someone with a baseball bat and have a real, obvious effect on the movements and recruiting of a fascist street gang. Basically nothing else in politics happens at that scale.
Countries getting IMF loans. Used to buy into the premise that poor countries needed "development" and that we were gracious enough to provide it to them so they could join us in the wonders of the 21st century. Then I became a communist and learned that actually the IMF was used to reverse decolonization by razing the economy and burying the recipient under mountains of debt so they'd always be subservient to the first world.
Flying cars. Shit is going to be unregulated and dangerous.
I used to be disappointed by the "red tape" that was "holding back" the idea.
Now in the increasingly bazinga world, I see it as an inevitability that some treatbrain is going to be watching Gambo III in the passenger side of his flying bazingamobile, cranking his hog while he flies through the roof of a sleeping family and kills them in a lithium fire. And it will be seen as "a tragedy but one that will only improve the le AI!" :so-true: :elmofire:
:so-true: It was a beta!! And if you look at the logs, the flight module turned off seconds before impact, so this was 100% the drivers fault!! :so-true:
I can't believe I ever thought a 2.5 ton four-seater missile loaded with fuel in the hands of :grillman: was a good idea. Like when you just say it out load it sounds completely bonkers.
I used to look forward to watching Bill Maher every Friday night up until I hit the age of 19.
Now I'm 28 and I wish for Bill's physical body and soul to agree to disagree and part ways.
It is going way back. But as a nerd reading about space travel, the space race, and astronomy back as an 8 year old, and my father trying to get me into Star Trek TNG at a young age, made me hopeful to believe that space travel and an early Star Trek approximating future could be available in my life time. I think that very slowly faded, but died a final death when, still as a radlib, I entered college in a STEM field and realize that a very large fraction of my class mates were Libertarian dipshits, New Atheists, and had their highest aspiration being the CEO of a successful tech startup. The easiest way to stop believing in technocracy is to spend time around technocrats as someone with even a very primitive and rudimentary class and inequality awareness.
The tensions in stem immediately turn you into either a Peter Thiel wannabe or a raging LGBT+ communist.
"Smart" technology. It's a fun idea until it becomes inevitably paired to capitalism. Now its shit like your smart fridge telling your health insurance company you're eating unhealthily so they can justify charging you more.
It's a fun challenge to work on using FOSS and offline tech to do similar things if you're a
The more I learn about tech, the more I want to return to pre-smart tech life.
I know damn well I want my next phone to be a Pinephone and to switch to Linux ASAP.
The idea of the police state having immediate access to millions and millions of privately owned surveillance cameras and Ring doorbell cameras, and being able to use AI and machine learning to parse all that date in to something they can use to oppress people, is so horrifying that I mostly just don't think about it. Imagine an iPhone stomping on a human face forever.
I was just looking at NFC smart locks but I'm realizing whenever that stuff becomes easier to use and more commonplace it's going to all be tied to servers so some corporation can remotely unlock your stuff at the request of the government or because someone hacked it. It's so so easy to make a product that can't feasibly be tampered with or violate privacy or anything like that, but all these companies went ahead and connected every conceivable appliance in a home directly to their internet servers (and they didn't even make it convenient by using a single shared standard, every company has their own incompatible smart home ecosystem!).
When I was a R*ddit liberal in 2016 watching the Republican primary debates, I remember feeling hopeful and glad that the Republican party was dying and that the general ideals of the US were shifting liberal. I don't think I even need to touch upon why everything in that first sentence needs to be dunked on hahaha.
me in the past: Someday I will have a smart house that does everything automatically or by voice commands!
me now: the only pieces of technology I will own are my PC and a gun (in case the PC acts funny).
me now: the only pieces of technology I will own are my PC and a gun (in case the PC acts funny).
I've known many compsci/software engineering students back in my college days. The small percentage that I find bearable enough to still talk to are like that.
The rest are like this: :soypoint-1: :my-hero: :soypoint-2:
I still need to dig the cellular transceiver out of the console of my car so the NSA can't track me.
Making friends. Trying to forge relationships with someone to later find out that they’re reactionary is scary
A lot of people are saying "the future," but for me it's specifically climate change. When I was a :LIB: I had faith that one day governments would HAVE to take scientists seriously and do something about climate change. That hope is gone now. After coughing on smoke from fires 3000km away I don't believe that we'll solve climate change. Whether we can is up for debate, but we won't.
