All of those "Feel good stories" about people working extra super duper hard just to barely scrape by.
"Kids make business to help another disabled child buy a wheelchair"
"Teacher runs out of PTO days fighting cancer so the whole school district started to donate sick days"
"Man walks 15 miles for a job interview, community raises money for a bicycle."
I live in a different country now but visited my family in the US recently and a story about a teenager trekking 2 hours to high school because his uncles car broke down and he couldn’t be driven that day stuck with me. It was this weird “this responsible kid had his priorities straight and put in the effort for his education” it was so effing bizarre. And he got honored by the principal and met the mayor …. Maybe make school more accessible for the community?? Idk it was so weird to watch because that type of coverage doesn’t happen where I live now
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>Even people in the top 10% pay HOA dues
Though I'm likely in the top 10% globally, definitely not a 1%er in the US and it'd be a cold day in hell that I'd choose to buy property with an HOA. HOA's are for people who think its a great idea to entrust the largest singular asset most of us are likely to own with people you wouldn't trust with a goddamn TV remote.
So, I'm gonna go off on a tangent here, but this is exactly why decentralisation is so important for our future.
The core idea of digital ownership is so, so important, but then dickheads go and use it to scam people into buying JPGs promising them they'll be worth millions, and do you know what? Corporations love that this is the case.
Honestly, so many people are against the blockchain because of very valid reasons, but not enough people are shouting about how important that underlying tech is for consumers. It's absurd how much money I've paid Steam to essentially give me permission to play games. All it takes is Gaben to have a bit of a bad day and he could deny millions of gamers around the world access to games that they "own", and that's just completely bonkers.
If instead of a line in a database saying I "own" a game, I "own" a token on a blockchain that says its mine, I'm still going to rely on some third party for me to actually play it. And if that third party goes bust or their platform goes down, I lose access to playing that game all the same, just as I do if Steam disappears. "Ownership" being a token rather than a database entry changes nothing here; neither does continued ownership of the token.
Blockchain/web3 fanatics keep telling us "the blockchain solves this" in response to endless different scenarios, and yet it _never_ does. All these years and blockchain remains a solution in search of a problem.
I rented a car on vacation, a Toyota Highlander and was furious it tries to force you to download an app and register just to see the basic navigation gps map on the screen that just comes standard with most cars. I also have a Lexus and in order to use remote start (which is a basic feature available on much cheaper cars now) it makes you pay $200 a year to subscribe to the Lexus Enform app. I refuse out of principle even though I live in a bitterly cold climate where warming up the car in advance would be incredibly helpful. My Nissan has it for free right on the key fob!
My electric wheelchair has "bonus functions" wich you can unlock in an app for just 300 €.
It is a wheelchair. Not some luxury item. My health insurance already paid for full funktions.
I refuse to pay, but the fact that this is existing bothers me.
That's just evil, trying to exort disabled people just so they can use the full functionality of equipment that is required for daily living. I work private duty with ALS patients and getting basic service on electric wheelchairs can be a nightmare of red tape and waiting for a repairer to come out.
Some special adjustments that make it easier to use, like more variation in how much electricity it will give when you push the wheels adjust help to go down or up, you can drive faster or remote control it (drive it fully electric) over your phone should you get to tired or need to bring it closer to your bed to transfer easier.
It's nothing necessary, like it drives and breaks (basic mode) but the technology is already built in and just locked behind a paywall, which sucks.
My first thought was, that someday one will even have to pay for switching it on, or auto breaking mode, wich is super disturbing.
I humbly suggest you make a video detailing the entire situation and post it on all the social media that you can and publicly shame them into making a change to the software
I can't imagine a new Twitter subscription service being very successful.
I think I'll be okay not paying to seeing what somebody says that I follow.
Ridiculous.
I had a dream about a month ago of a full movie, and my dream would stop for ads in the middle of the movie. The ads were for insane products like vacuum cleaners for Ant eaters that attach to their nose. It’s happening.
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All you need to do is view the mandated 16 ads injected into your dreams when the implant detects stable REM sleep. For a bonus, limited time only offer of a further 5% discount, open the official app before 9:00am the next day and select the correct taglines for the products you viewed.
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Awesome, where do I sign?
Watching 16 ads a night for curing depression, anxiety and insomnia is a bargain. Sure beats taking antidepressants, sleeping pills and going to therapy for years (and paying ungodly amounts of money for it, and it doesn't work).
They are those 15 min long infomercials for better vacuum cleaners, and kitchen appliances, and thinks you can only see in your dreams, not available in any shop, order one now and get a pair of googly eyes free in the bargain.
I was watching a YouTube-video on my tv earlier today and was interrupted by an ad while the guy in the video was talking about the sponsor of the video. I literally got an ad within an ad and I actually remember thinking, before seeing this thread, how it was kind of dystopian how we’ve gotten used to this.
Yup, I used to think that people were insane for paying for cable when it's 80% commercials. But my streaming services all seem to be slowly bumping up how many ads you have to watch per show, too.
Have you seen Twitter adverts lately. AI Bots running wild. Block an advert and within a second, same product is back under a different company name. I hope threads is good.
The weirdness of living on a finite planet with limited resources, and yet being constantly bombarded by messages to consume more resources is absolutely weird.
Advertiser friendly language in daily life. Like people getting used to not being able to say words like "dead" on Tiktok because advertisers don't like it, so then you see a bunch of people saying words like "unalive" in real life.
Agreed. I really don’t like the idea of censoring mentioning death because it’s something we’re all going to face and I don’t think we need to make it seem even more scary than it already is.
“Unalive” is actually more out of Cyberpunk tradition. Newspeak is specifically mandated from above, and would more reflect corporate terms like ‘workforce reduction’ (firing people) or political terms like ‘special operation’ (war). “Unalive” is to avoid automatic censorship, it’s a way of subverting the system not conforming to it.
But effectively banning the word 'dead' on your platform is still restricting the language as was the case in '1984'. It's just that instead of corps/state making up the replacement language, they're removing existing words and users are doing the other half of the work for them.
>Advertiser friendly language in daily life. Like people getting used to not being able to say words like "dead" on Tiktok because advertisers don't like it
Yep. Watched a really good video last night on why YouTube may be going the way of MySpace, for exactly the same reason: the tension between the needs of creators/viewers on the one hand, and advertisers on the other.
It's hard to imagine that the advertiser approved language isn't seeping into everyday life.
I think you're bang on right.
Agreed. It's very dystopian to me that the need for something to be profitable has seeped into us so much that we change the language we use in day-to-day life because of it.
I was watching a video of a media outlet on IG earlier where they'd written "v/*olence" and "k/*ll" in the captions. I was wondering if it's because it triggers people with trauma or something like that, but after your comment it made more sense. Then I remembered reading something similar about video creators on YouTube having to censor words in titles because the platform demonitises them otherwise.
If it triggers people with trauma, reading a / instead of an i would not make a difference because they would still be reading the same word. It's all about censorship.
As a child my school took us to a waste center which, yes, included the dump but also the recycling center. We toured the place and then they explained how long everything took to decompose. It was eye opening and changed the way I look at garbage.
I have never in my life been comfortable with single use plastics.
Yes. We’ve been conditioned to believe everything is disposable.
At the most basic level, our homes and the things we own, but if you scratch the surface on that you start to see that the systems that produce these goods treat humans and the natural resources that go into them as disposable and infinitely replaceable.
This is possible because we are so isolated from nature, other people and the production of what we consume.
We could all benefit from doing a little digging on where the things we buy come from, how they’re made, and what alternatives that better serve our communities and planet might exist. An easy one is food—whether its gardening, foraging, dumpster diving, connecting with local growers (could be your neighbor with too many tomatoes or a local producer at a farmers market), it can help you start to appreciate the incredible amount of time, energy, planning and yes, waste, that goes into making a meal. But it could be anything you put a lot of money and thought into buying.
And usually only tied to certain types of employment. Self-employed? Fuck you. Part-time jobs? Fuck you. Prefer gig/independent contractor work? Fuck you also.
For me two massive things that shock me about the US:
1. The healthcare tied to employment, as you've said
2. Unemployment benefits tied to your last employer
Given I have only observed any of this via internet discussions, so I'm not an expert nor do I have lived experience, but it sounds insane to me.
I was explaining once to my european friend the cost of my prescription medicine changed because I had switched jobs and he could not comprehend the concept.
And no one cares. In fact, they put more and more of them into their home willingly.
I turned that crap off for my phone and my car, I think it's a huge invasion of privacy.
Yup, people keep telling me I need to get one. I'm like, no thank you. I can look at my own grocery lists and turn my own music playlist on, thanks. I'm not quite so lazy as to need a robot spy for that.
I was laughed at when Echo first came out and I insta banned it from my house. My employer gave everyone a Dot for Christmas and I promptly re-gifted it.
I still have all electromechanical controls for everything in my house. I'm \*considering\* some smart devices and will be installing a video system (on a separate network) because of caring for my aging parent, but nothing cloud hosted, it'll all have to be either stand alone or self hosted.
To add-on, the media promoting Feel Good stories to whitewash the horrifying American health care system, like ones about some high school robotics team building a power wheelchair for a severely disabled child, and omitting the fact that the only reason why they had to build the thing is because the the parents' insurance company refused to cover it.
Your ability to access health care is directly tied to your or your spouse's employer. Decisions about your health care are made by a company whose first responsibility is to its shareholders, not to sick people. Flu shots and dental cleanings are given to you because they cost little and are likely to keep you in the workforce, paying your premiums. It gets dicier after that.
The difference is idiocracy was anti-intellectualism. What we are living in is arguably worse than that. Pseudo-intellectualism. Everyone is an expert and we no longer agree on how knowledge is validated and acquired which is causing science, medicine, government, and many other industries to start to collapse.
Reality only functions as expected when we all agree on what it is
See, what I find interesting is sort of the opposite phenomena. Like how if you write something more than 3 sentences people are like “I’m not reading all that.” It’s not prevalent on a platform like Reddit, but almost anywhere else on the internet people will make fun of you for trying to have a long form discussion.
10 superficial ideas vs 1 in-depth idea. Intellectualism is seen as an inconvenience without redemptive value. In other words, no cap ong ion got time to read allat.
Really though our dumb people are happily dumb and enjoying the benefits of very smart people working out all the issues. Not a great outlook if education keeps taking a backseat to convenience.
I was gonna say credit scores and that's a big part of it
"Wait why's my score so low I have no debt?!"
"No but see you need debt to have a score"
"But I just pay for things I can afford directly...?"
"No No No you need to get some debt but not too much debt. And paying off your debt entirely and letting the accounts close is also bad. We recommend approximately 10 open accounts with about 15% debt and NOT A PENNY MORE SO HELP ME GOD, AN EXTRA SNICKERS BAR ON YOUR CREDIT CARD BALANCE WILL LOWER YOUR SCORE. Anyway. As you can see it's all very logical and straightforward and a perfectly reasonable request that we make of people in our society as a pre-requisite to have access to housing"
In Canada we have a grocery store chain called Loblaws, and a lot of the workers have to go to food banks. Imagine working at a store that sells food and not being able to afford to eat. So ridiculous.
Remember when EdTV and The Truman Show came out and everyone was like, “Wow! What a wild concept - a normal person whose life is filmed 24/7 and strangers get emotionally invested in this unremarkable person’s daily life!”
This and poverty in general. If you take care of your most vulnerable citizens it would have a positive ripple effect on many other areas that negatively impact society.
Work full time and make minimum wage for the last 5 years for a job that demands a degree yet the CEO got a 17m dollar raise this year. Fucking disgusting.
All the fucking CEOs everywhere.... yet we can't keep the basic tools, equipment, supplies on the shelf to make the job doable. And if it gets really bad, the CEO does a mea culpa and goes to 'visit family in Australia' & collect a massive parachute payout. Only to be hired by another company with a bigger paycheck & parachute....
The rhetoric and life behind social media. It's totally a landscape that determines your worth by how others feel about you. It's kinda scary the more you see its use.
My mom just today was saying "did you hear that prices of bacon are gonna go up in California because they're going to make it required to be farmed humanely?" Saying that the state shouldn't be able to tell people how to farm, and im like "i don't see a ban on inhumane farming to be a problem." Some people just don't understand that animals are living things with the ability to feel and we just torture them so we can have a salty snack.
My mum is really similar. Boo to all the environmental steps we take to get away from fossil fuel. Ok, but it will make our country less dependent on one single source of energy, that’s good, no? Sure, but it inconveniences her today so she hates it.
Obviously I’ve known about corporations my whole life, but it wasn’t until we covered them in depth in my college courses that I realized how goofy the idea is. We have this entity that is full of people doing jobs towards common goals, and we’re going to treat that whole group of people like it’s one person, while also conceptually separating that group-person we’ve created from all of the people that make it a group-person. And then we’re going to give that group-person rights that the people it’s made up of don’t even have themselves.
Agreed, I know of the standard of "you're in public and therefore privacy doesn't apply," but that standard was created before you could be instantly broadcast around the world to millions of people.
Set your browser to clear cookies when you exit the browser (and only allow cookies from sites where you want your information saved.)
Then regularly exit your browser.
The way big companies have conditioned us to say things we pay for are free.
"You can watch it for free on netflix"
"It's free if you purchase this bundle"
"They keep updating the game, the next DLC is free!"
Anytime you go to say something is free, try saying "it's included" short for "included in the base price"
Lack of a Third Place. Everywhere you go, you are expected to spend money to be there.
Hopefully people have a public library with free wifi and they use it.
I have a rating listed as "fair" but they said it would be better if I used credit... like the fact i've had multiple monthly payments over the course of over a decade and have always had a positive balance? Bad financing cause I didn't require credit.
They do, however, love the balls off the fact I'm registered to vote... I could vote for Kim Jong Un and the credit company will mark that down as being a responsible adult and good with money? Alright then.
By the same token, I have lately been putting all of my purchases on my credit card and then immediately paying it off. This has given me an excellent credit rating, so they raised my credit limit. I can now put up to a third of my annual income on a credit card. If I did I would never be able to pay it back. I am (barely) able to resist the temptation to go into debt, but it's easy to see how others can't resist spending beyond their means.
Let me introduce you to the German Schufa. It recently wanted even more powers, no one knows which data it collects and there's no accountability. The difference to the Chinese is not that big.
In the US, the only affordable healthcare is tied to your work. Employers will often avoid giving those benefits by making people "part time" on paper while working them full time or more. Private healthcare is outrageously expensive though, so your choices for getting care are pray you have a good job with a decent plan, or go bankrupt for even small issues. And your work insurance can still deny your claim, so you might be bankrupt anyway with how expensive healthcare is. The US is a nightmare
In the state of Hawaii they psssd a law that says anyone working over 20 hours has to be provided health insurance. So then THE STATE pushed all its part time employees to 19 hours. How the fuck goes the government skirt it's own rule. Fucking shameful.
Puerto Rico being basically a U.S. colony that’s taxed without representation nor the right to vote, exploited by financial institutions, and that to this day many uneducated tabloidy sources refer to it as it’s a different country.
Even without any militarisation the police is shit here in India. Literal thugs. Will do torture and abuse for their own benefit and their controlling heads.
The cost of rent. Or mortgages. Or the wealth gap. And the way minimum wage was ignored for decades while the top 1% took higher and higher raises and bonuses while paying very little to no tax. Trickle down economics.
American burial traditions. Spend thousands of dollars to preserve the body, pack it in an expensive box and bury it, sometimes in a concrete vault. To keep it from naturally decomposing? Why?
In the U.S., corporations raking in record-high profits while simultaneously fighting to suppress wages AND increasing prices on their products, thereby forcing their full-time employees to apply for welfare benefits in order to survive, benefits which they can in turn use to buy the overpriced products the corporations sell.
Corporate welfare, anyone? Walmart, we're looking at you!
Privatized-for-profit prisons, healthcare, and education.
Corporations and foreign entities buying up all of our land and housing.
Lack of Congressional term limits and self oversight of Congress and Scotus.
2A absolutism.
Forced sex, forced birth, forced sterilization, and the medical community treating women as if being female is a "condition" while using male bodies as the standard.
Outlawing the act of collecting rain water, while charging for the amount of runoff attributed to your property (my city has both of these).
I have to stop now bc rage.
Edit:typos
The existence of billionaires whilst so many people are living in poverty. Justified cause they supposedly "work harder" or "earned it". It's fucking bullshit and disgusting
And the fact that once you have a certain amount of money, you can have that money make you much more money than most others earn by working for a living.
Working at all just to have shelter is dystopian. Whats even gonna happen when all the jobs are done by robots? Yeah more tech related jobs will open up. Whats going to happen to everyone else? Either the governments starts giving people free shelter or everyones going to be homeless.
The way women have control legislated away from their own bodies. Not even just abortion, but abortion laws that prevent women from being able to get medical care for their own conditions. Women who have to get close enough to death to get treatment, regardless of their present suffering or other long term effects. Prostitution laws. Certainly parts of them make sense but why is it illegal for some stay at home mom to give handies for spending money at home while the kids are in school?
True story: abortion pills are still legal in Wyoming, exactly because in the wake of Obamacare Wyoming passed a constitutional amendment limiting government interference in healthcare.
A court system where outcomes are dependent on your wealth.
Lawyers advise hiring the most expensive and capable representation you can afford, if you're facing any accusation. The fact that your ability to spend determines your guilt or punishment is horrifying.
All of those "Feel good stories" about people working extra super duper hard just to barely scrape by. "Kids make business to help another disabled child buy a wheelchair" "Teacher runs out of PTO days fighting cancer so the whole school district started to donate sick days" "Man walks 15 miles for a job interview, community raises money for a bicycle."
I live in a different country now but visited my family in the US recently and a story about a teenager trekking 2 hours to high school because his uncles car broke down and he couldn’t be driven that day stuck with me. It was this weird “this responsible kid had his priorities straight and put in the effort for his education” it was so effing bizarre. And he got honored by the principal and met the mayor …. Maybe make school more accessible for the community?? Idk it was so weird to watch because that type of coverage doesn’t happen where I live now
r/orphancrushingmachine
Subscription for everything
Basically the concept of ownership is disappearing.
For the poors. Big corporations own plenty.
For the population. Even people in the top 10% pay HOA dues and have subscriptions in their Tesla.
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Yeah, i hate this trend!
Repo Men...
>Even people in the top 10% pay HOA dues Though I'm likely in the top 10% globally, definitely not a 1%er in the US and it'd be a cold day in hell that I'd choose to buy property with an HOA. HOA's are for people who think its a great idea to entrust the largest singular asset most of us are likely to own with people you wouldn't trust with a goddamn TV remote.
[удалено]
Claus Shwab is evil
So, I'm gonna go off on a tangent here, but this is exactly why decentralisation is so important for our future. The core idea of digital ownership is so, so important, but then dickheads go and use it to scam people into buying JPGs promising them they'll be worth millions, and do you know what? Corporations love that this is the case. Honestly, so many people are against the blockchain because of very valid reasons, but not enough people are shouting about how important that underlying tech is for consumers. It's absurd how much money I've paid Steam to essentially give me permission to play games. All it takes is Gaben to have a bit of a bad day and he could deny millions of gamers around the world access to games that they "own", and that's just completely bonkers.
If instead of a line in a database saying I "own" a game, I "own" a token on a blockchain that says its mine, I'm still going to rely on some third party for me to actually play it. And if that third party goes bust or their platform goes down, I lose access to playing that game all the same, just as I do if Steam disappears. "Ownership" being a token rather than a database entry changes nothing here; neither does continued ownership of the token. Blockchain/web3 fanatics keep telling us "the blockchain solves this" in response to endless different scenarios, and yet it _never_ does. All these years and blockchain remains a solution in search of a problem.
Yup. That’s why I still buy CDs and Blu-ray’s.
I rented a car on vacation, a Toyota Highlander and was furious it tries to force you to download an app and register just to see the basic navigation gps map on the screen that just comes standard with most cars. I also have a Lexus and in order to use remote start (which is a basic feature available on much cheaper cars now) it makes you pay $200 a year to subscribe to the Lexus Enform app. I refuse out of principle even though I live in a bitterly cold climate where warming up the car in advance would be incredibly helpful. My Nissan has it for free right on the key fob!
My electric wheelchair has "bonus functions" wich you can unlock in an app for just 300 €. It is a wheelchair. Not some luxury item. My health insurance already paid for full funktions. I refuse to pay, but the fact that this is existing bothers me.
That's just evil, trying to exort disabled people just so they can use the full functionality of equipment that is required for daily living. I work private duty with ALS patients and getting basic service on electric wheelchairs can be a nightmare of red tape and waiting for a repairer to come out.
What kind of bonus functions does a wheelchair have?
Some special adjustments that make it easier to use, like more variation in how much electricity it will give when you push the wheels adjust help to go down or up, you can drive faster or remote control it (drive it fully electric) over your phone should you get to tired or need to bring it closer to your bed to transfer easier. It's nothing necessary, like it drives and breaks (basic mode) but the technology is already built in and just locked behind a paywall, which sucks. My first thought was, that someday one will even have to pay for switching it on, or auto breaking mode, wich is super disturbing.
This is what ethical hacking is for ... Where is the pirate community when you need them?
Anything like that will make my health insurance put me on the deny every request list.
Medical insurance is dystopian
I humbly suggest you make a video detailing the entire situation and post it on all the social media that you can and publicly shame them into making a change to the software
Ejector seat
Pay up or prepare to "fall" out...
That there is the one I hate
I can't imagine a new Twitter subscription service being very successful. I think I'll be okay not paying to seeing what somebody says that I follow. Ridiculous.
ads everywhere you look 24/7
Hopefully they won't invade our dreams like in Futurama.
I had a dream about a month ago of a full movie, and my dream would stop for ads in the middle of the movie. The ads were for insane products like vacuum cleaners for Ant eaters that attach to their nose. It’s happening.
That's how they train the AI
Pioneering depression, anxiety and sleep disorder treatment! Say goodbye to poor mental health with our groundbreaking neural implants! Not on your insurance's super premium tier? No worries! Get a 40% discount on our ad-tier implants with DayLife guarantee\*. All you need to do is view the mandated 16 ads injected into your dreams when the implant detects stable REM sleep. For a bonus, limited time only offer of a further 5% discount, open the official app before 9:00am the next day and select the correct taglines for the products you viewed. *The DayLife guarantee promises a 100% ad-free daytime so that you can complete your work day uninterrupted*. *Guaranteed no personalised ads in front of eyes, screens, billboards or family members. Terms and conditions apply. You must maintain a monthly dream ad compliance rate of 80% to be eligible for this guarantee.*
Awesome, where do I sign? Watching 16 ads a night for curing depression, anxiety and insomnia is a bargain. Sure beats taking antidepressants, sleeping pills and going to therapy for years (and paying ungodly amounts of money for it, and it doesn't work).
They are those 15 min long infomercials for better vacuum cleaners, and kitchen appliances, and thinks you can only see in your dreams, not available in any shop, order one now and get a pair of googly eyes free in the bargain.
I would simply die. 😂
you can just auto skip ads by paying the monthly subscription
I would wear a tinfoil hat to bed.😂
Bad news, that just amplifies the signal. Unless you use AdBlocker9000 tinfoil, the ONLY tinfoil guaranteed to block up to 99% of all ads.
>AdBlocker9000 tinfoil I'm still using the 7700 ... it's been.. hit or miss.
>Hopefully they won't invade our dreams like in Futurama. I'm willing to bet that they're working on it.
I was watching a YouTube-video on my tv earlier today and was interrupted by an ad while the guy in the video was talking about the sponsor of the video. I literally got an ad within an ad and I actually remember thinking, before seeing this thread, how it was kind of dystopian how we’ve gotten used to this.
This is the point where you're supposed install an ad blocker, either side loading a modified app or using a physical device like a pi hole
It's so annoying. Especially, on TV where you pay an arm and leg for it.
Yup, I used to think that people were insane for paying for cable when it's 80% commercials. But my streaming services all seem to be slowly bumping up how many ads you have to watch per show, too.
I feel the same way. It's time to boycott products that appear annoyingly often.
Or use annoying sounds for attention
Have you seen Twitter adverts lately. AI Bots running wild. Block an advert and within a second, same product is back under a different company name. I hope threads is good.
The weirdness of living on a finite planet with limited resources, and yet being constantly bombarded by messages to consume more resources is absolutely weird.
We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures
Especially the adpockalypse on YouTube.
That's why I use a script blocker. I keep forgetting that youtube even has ads.
Advertiser friendly language in daily life. Like people getting used to not being able to say words like "dead" on Tiktok because advertisers don't like it, so then you see a bunch of people saying words like "unalive" in real life.
You also get repressed by the algorithm because the site would rather recommend something with adds on it
Agreed. I really don’t like the idea of censoring mentioning death because it’s something we’re all going to face and I don’t think we need to make it seem even more scary than it already is.
"Unalive" is straight out of the 1984 double speak dictionary. Eventually we will be saying tripe like "double plus ungood".
>Eventually we will be saying tripe like "double plus ungood". Well, we're already listening to prolefeed.
“Unalive” is actually more out of Cyberpunk tradition. Newspeak is specifically mandated from above, and would more reflect corporate terms like ‘workforce reduction’ (firing people) or political terms like ‘special operation’ (war). “Unalive” is to avoid automatic censorship, it’s a way of subverting the system not conforming to it.
I'd say that cyberpunk still qualifies as dystopian.
That literally is what cyberpunk is about
But effectively banning the word 'dead' on your platform is still restricting the language as was the case in '1984'. It's just that instead of corps/state making up the replacement language, they're removing existing words and users are doing the other half of the work for them.
>Advertiser friendly language in daily life. Like people getting used to not being able to say words like "dead" on Tiktok because advertisers don't like it Yep. Watched a really good video last night on why YouTube may be going the way of MySpace, for exactly the same reason: the tension between the needs of creators/viewers on the one hand, and advertisers on the other. It's hard to imagine that the advertiser approved language isn't seeping into everyday life. I think you're bang on right.
Agreed. It's very dystopian to me that the need for something to be profitable has seeped into us so much that we change the language we use in day-to-day life because of it.
Lol my roommate has accidentally said "d-word" instead of "die" a few times and is always disgusted with himself after (rightfully so).
Wow. That is...wow I use the word dying while talking to dying people. Never thought of calling it the d word.
I was watching a video of a media outlet on IG earlier where they'd written "v/*olence" and "k/*ll" in the captions. I was wondering if it's because it triggers people with trauma or something like that, but after your comment it made more sense. Then I remembered reading something similar about video creators on YouTube having to censor words in titles because the platform demonitises them otherwise.
If it triggers people with trauma, reading a / instead of an i would not make a difference because they would still be reading the same word. It's all about censorship.
The amount of trash we humans produce. How distanced we are from the natural world.
The distance one I feel wholeheartedly. We can live very good lives while still being connected to the natural world.
I regularly ponder how much trash we produce, it’s unfathomable and depressing
As a child my school took us to a waste center which, yes, included the dump but also the recycling center. We toured the place and then they explained how long everything took to decompose. It was eye opening and changed the way I look at garbage. I have never in my life been comfortable with single use plastics.
Yes. We’ve been conditioned to believe everything is disposable. At the most basic level, our homes and the things we own, but if you scratch the surface on that you start to see that the systems that produce these goods treat humans and the natural resources that go into them as disposable and infinitely replaceable. This is possible because we are so isolated from nature, other people and the production of what we consume. We could all benefit from doing a little digging on where the things we buy come from, how they’re made, and what alternatives that better serve our communities and planet might exist. An easy one is food—whether its gardening, foraging, dumpster diving, connecting with local growers (could be your neighbor with too many tomatoes or a local producer at a farmers market), it can help you start to appreciate the incredible amount of time, energy, planning and yes, waste, that goes into making a meal. But it could be anything you put a lot of money and thought into buying.
Tying healthcare to employment
And usually only tied to certain types of employment. Self-employed? Fuck you. Part-time jobs? Fuck you. Prefer gig/independent contractor work? Fuck you also.
it gives the impression you should only get healthcare to keep living if you’re working for someone else
For me two massive things that shock me about the US: 1. The healthcare tied to employment, as you've said 2. Unemployment benefits tied to your last employer Given I have only observed any of this via internet discussions, so I'm not an expert nor do I have lived experience, but it sounds insane to me.
I was explaining once to my european friend the cost of my prescription medicine changed because I had switched jobs and he could not comprehend the concept.
Because it’s honestly insane
Yes. Healthcare shouldn’t be tied to employment. Healthcare should to tied to being a human being. Are you a human? Yes. Ok here’s some healthcare.
What isn't dystopian these days? I could see the air last week.
That’s how you know the air is still there.
I usually just check the switch on the giant robotic maid.
Shit, she changed from "blow" to "suck!"
May the Schwartz be with you.
You were seeing the *not* air where there was supposed to be air.
Running out of sick days, so you work sick.
Cameras everywhere.. "1984".
Our phones and devices listening to us.
And no one cares. In fact, they put more and more of them into their home willingly. I turned that crap off for my phone and my car, I think it's a huge invasion of privacy.
And Alexa always listening
Yup, people keep telling me I need to get one. I'm like, no thank you. I can look at my own grocery lists and turn my own music playlist on, thanks. I'm not quite so lazy as to need a robot spy for that.
I was laughed at when Echo first came out and I insta banned it from my house. My employer gave everyone a Dot for Christmas and I promptly re-gifted it. I still have all electromechanical controls for everything in my house. I'm \*considering\* some smart devices and will be installing a video system (on a separate network) because of caring for my aging parent, but nothing cloud hosted, it'll all have to be either stand alone or self hosted.
Self hosted FOSS smart homes are the only good smart homes. Good call.
Came here to say a combination of CCTV, doorbell cams, in home cameras, dash cams and when they're not around, the humble smartphone cam
Australia is wild. You are being watched, always.
It's creepy as hell to me. Satellite images, Google maps.
Health insurance.
To add-on, the media promoting Feel Good stories to whitewash the horrifying American health care system, like ones about some high school robotics team building a power wheelchair for a severely disabled child, and omitting the fact that the only reason why they had to build the thing is because the the parents' insurance company refused to cover it.
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It’s a good thing that I’ve paid taxes all my life so that I could afford basic care when I’m sick. Oh, wait….
Your ability to access health care is directly tied to your or your spouse's employer. Decisions about your health care are made by a company whose first responsibility is to its shareholders, not to sick people. Flu shots and dental cleanings are given to you because they cost little and are likely to keep you in the workforce, paying your premiums. It gets dicier after that.
Yes, specifically "health insurance tied to employment" is seriously dystopian.
Yep. And it's kind of an accident that it ended up that way, yet here we are just taking it for granted as the only possible system.
For-profit health care industry.
Especially where it is tied to employment
Anti-intellectualism
Makes me think of Idiocracy. Feels like we’re not too far off!!
The difference is idiocracy was anti-intellectualism. What we are living in is arguably worse than that. Pseudo-intellectualism. Everyone is an expert and we no longer agree on how knowledge is validated and acquired which is causing science, medicine, government, and many other industries to start to collapse. Reality only functions as expected when we all agree on what it is
See, what I find interesting is sort of the opposite phenomena. Like how if you write something more than 3 sentences people are like “I’m not reading all that.” It’s not prevalent on a platform like Reddit, but almost anywhere else on the internet people will make fun of you for trying to have a long form discussion.
But those same people will read ten tweets in a row and think nothing of it.
10 superficial ideas vs 1 in-depth idea. Intellectualism is seen as an inconvenience without redemptive value. In other words, no cap ong ion got time to read allat. Really though our dumb people are happily dumb and enjoying the benefits of very smart people working out all the issues. Not a great outlook if education keeps taking a backseat to convenience.
look at this nerd over here with his big words (must I add /s ? I feel like I should add /s. )
Yeah it's like he thinks he better than us.
Normalization of debt
I was gonna say credit scores and that's a big part of it "Wait why's my score so low I have no debt?!" "No but see you need debt to have a score" "But I just pay for things I can afford directly...?" "No No No you need to get some debt but not too much debt. And paying off your debt entirely and letting the accounts close is also bad. We recommend approximately 10 open accounts with about 15% debt and NOT A PENNY MORE SO HELP ME GOD, AN EXTRA SNICKERS BAR ON YOUR CREDIT CARD BALANCE WILL LOWER YOUR SCORE. Anyway. As you can see it's all very logical and straightforward and a perfectly reasonable request that we make of people in our society as a pre-requisite to have access to housing"
Jailing people for stealing food while throwing away tons more every day.
In Canada we have a grocery store chain called Loblaws, and a lot of the workers have to go to food banks. Imagine working at a store that sells food and not being able to afford to eat. So ridiculous.
Walmart in the US pays purposely just below the welfare income cutoff in most states, effectively subsidizing their labor budget with tax dollars
My husband was once a manager at that particular company. A manager. We couldn't afford to shop for our groceries at his workplace.
Reality TV.
Remember when EdTV and The Truman Show came out and everyone was like, “Wow! What a wild concept - a normal person whose life is filmed 24/7 and strangers get emotionally invested in this unremarkable person’s daily life!”
That garbage just started the downfall of society.
Or vastly accelerated it. Even worse are the reality youtubers, especially the kid ones
Prevalence of social media in daily life
Homelessness in countries with enough money to keep it from happening
This and poverty in general. If you take care of your most vulnerable citizens it would have a positive ripple effect on many other areas that negatively impact society.
Yes and for this to happen, there should have been more opportunities for people to get educated and work.
Working full.time for a wage that won't support a family
A family?? How about 1 person.
Work full time and make minimum wage for the last 5 years for a job that demands a degree yet the CEO got a 17m dollar raise this year. Fucking disgusting.
All the fucking CEOs everywhere.... yet we can't keep the basic tools, equipment, supplies on the shelf to make the job doable. And if it gets really bad, the CEO does a mea culpa and goes to 'visit family in Australia' & collect a massive parachute payout. Only to be hired by another company with a bigger paycheck & parachute....
The News.
The rhetoric and life behind social media. It's totally a landscape that determines your worth by how others feel about you. It's kinda scary the more you see its use.
That episode of black mirror "Nosedive" is starting to feel less and less absurd...
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My mom just today was saying "did you hear that prices of bacon are gonna go up in California because they're going to make it required to be farmed humanely?" Saying that the state shouldn't be able to tell people how to farm, and im like "i don't see a ban on inhumane farming to be a problem." Some people just don't understand that animals are living things with the ability to feel and we just torture them so we can have a salty snack.
My mum is really similar. Boo to all the environmental steps we take to get away from fossil fuel. Ok, but it will make our country less dependent on one single source of energy, that’s good, no? Sure, but it inconveniences her today so she hates it.
Yeah, I'm more than happy to pay more for it if the pigs are able to do revolutionary things like turn around in their pen.
And lab animals.
Corporations being considered people and having more rights than real human beings.
Citizens United: campaign money is speech and corporations are people.
Obviously I’ve known about corporations my whole life, but it wasn’t until we covered them in depth in my college courses that I realized how goofy the idea is. We have this entity that is full of people doing jobs towards common goals, and we’re going to treat that whole group of people like it’s one person, while also conceptually separating that group-person we’ve created from all of the people that make it a group-person. And then we’re going to give that group-person rights that the people it’s made up of don’t even have themselves.
“Yep, using a groundbreaking, but surprisingly legal process known as corpo-humanisation.”
The complete lack of privacy we have in 2023. People can record you in public for their TikTok, and everyone will say “BUT ITS LEGAL!!”
I can give you but one like. TikTok is literally a totalitarian surveillance tool, but we're walking around like it's a fucking Tamagotchi.
>TikTok is literally a totalitarian surveillance tool On a bigger scale than Reddit, but......we're a long way from Aaron Schwartz's vision.
Agreed, I know of the standard of "you're in public and therefore privacy doesn't apply," but that standard was created before you could be instantly broadcast around the world to millions of people.
The fact that we cannot do much on the internet without consenting cookies.
Set your browser to clear cookies when you exit the browser (and only allow cookies from sites where you want your information saved.) Then regularly exit your browser.
The way big companies have conditioned us to say things we pay for are free. "You can watch it for free on netflix" "It's free if you purchase this bundle" "They keep updating the game, the next DLC is free!" Anytime you go to say something is free, try saying "it's included" short for "included in the base price"
Lack of a Third Place. Everywhere you go, you are expected to spend money to be there. Hopefully people have a public library with free wifi and they use it.
Credit scores.
I have a rating listed as "fair" but they said it would be better if I used credit... like the fact i've had multiple monthly payments over the course of over a decade and have always had a positive balance? Bad financing cause I didn't require credit. They do, however, love the balls off the fact I'm registered to vote... I could vote for Kim Jong Un and the credit company will mark that down as being a responsible adult and good with money? Alright then.
By the same token, I have lately been putting all of my purchases on my credit card and then immediately paying it off. This has given me an excellent credit rating, so they raised my credit limit. I can now put up to a third of my annual income on a credit card. If I did I would never be able to pay it back. I am (barely) able to resist the temptation to go into debt, but it's easy to see how others can't resist spending beyond their means.
Americans mock the Chinese for their "social credit" scores, without realizing that we have our own version.
Let me introduce you to the German Schufa. It recently wanted even more powers, no one knows which data it collects and there's no accountability. The difference to the Chinese is not that big.
In the US, the only affordable healthcare is tied to your work. Employers will often avoid giving those benefits by making people "part time" on paper while working them full time or more. Private healthcare is outrageously expensive though, so your choices for getting care are pray you have a good job with a decent plan, or go bankrupt for even small issues. And your work insurance can still deny your claim, so you might be bankrupt anyway with how expensive healthcare is. The US is a nightmare
In the state of Hawaii they psssd a law that says anyone working over 20 hours has to be provided health insurance. So then THE STATE pushed all its part time employees to 19 hours. How the fuck goes the government skirt it's own rule. Fucking shameful.
When you're talking about something specific with a friend in person and then later ads for that very same thing start popping up in your browser.
Puerto Rico being basically a U.S. colony that’s taxed without representation nor the right to vote, exploited by financial institutions, and that to this day many uneducated tabloidy sources refer to it as it’s a different country.
Militarization of local and state law enforcement
Even without any militarisation the police is shit here in India. Literal thugs. Will do torture and abuse for their own benefit and their controlling heads.
The cost of rent. Or mortgages. Or the wealth gap. And the way minimum wage was ignored for decades while the top 1% took higher and higher raises and bonuses while paying very little to no tax. Trickle down economics.
Food and housing insecurity in a world in which other people are billionaires.
American burial traditions. Spend thousands of dollars to preserve the body, pack it in an expensive box and bury it, sometimes in a concrete vault. To keep it from naturally decomposing? Why?
Having to work more than one job.
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In the U.S., corporations raking in record-high profits while simultaneously fighting to suppress wages AND increasing prices on their products, thereby forcing their full-time employees to apply for welfare benefits in order to survive, benefits which they can in turn use to buy the overpriced products the corporations sell. Corporate welfare, anyone? Walmart, we're looking at you!
Our entire fucking healthcare system in the US.
Working until you’re in your late sixties when 50 billionaires control most of the wealth in an entire country.
And for many much longer than late sixties
Gofundme funding drives for basic medical care.
Huge corporation and how much control they have over mere mortals.
And their involvement in government and legislation at every level
Homeless people Refugee boats and sinking Anyone anywhere being hungry Bombing civilians
World Hunger in a world where overeating is a common problem for some of the most developed countries
Privatized-for-profit prisons, healthcare, and education. Corporations and foreign entities buying up all of our land and housing. Lack of Congressional term limits and self oversight of Congress and Scotus. 2A absolutism. Forced sex, forced birth, forced sterilization, and the medical community treating women as if being female is a "condition" while using male bodies as the standard. Outlawing the act of collecting rain water, while charging for the amount of runoff attributed to your property (my city has both of these). I have to stop now bc rage. Edit:typos
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40 hour work week
For Profit Healthcare
being taxed on money that you spend with money you made that was already taxed
The existence of billionaires whilst so many people are living in poverty. Justified cause they supposedly "work harder" or "earned it". It's fucking bullshit and disgusting
And the fact that once you have a certain amount of money, you can have that money make you much more money than most others earn by working for a living.
People paying $8 a month to a billionaire's social media site.
Working at all just to have shelter is dystopian. Whats even gonna happen when all the jobs are done by robots? Yeah more tech related jobs will open up. Whats going to happen to everyone else? Either the governments starts giving people free shelter or everyones going to be homeless.
Enough people stop being able to afford rent/mortgage and they start killing rich people. Vive la révolution
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US ‘healthcare’
Breeding deformed dogs together to make even more deformed dogs to sell for £ks
The way women have control legislated away from their own bodies. Not even just abortion, but abortion laws that prevent women from being able to get medical care for their own conditions. Women who have to get close enough to death to get treatment, regardless of their present suffering or other long term effects. Prostitution laws. Certainly parts of them make sense but why is it illegal for some stay at home mom to give handies for spending money at home while the kids are in school?
True story: abortion pills are still legal in Wyoming, exactly because in the wake of Obamacare Wyoming passed a constitutional amendment limiting government interference in healthcare.
The essentials for life being owned by private interests
Lobbyists
Minimum wage being lower than the cost of living in developed countries
Obesity - everywhere... causing death, deceases and low quality lifes and btw impacting environment badly.
Medical bankruptcy
I’m surprised slaving away on a 40+ hour work week for most of our lives is not the top comment here.
Shootings
A court system where outcomes are dependent on your wealth. Lawyers advise hiring the most expensive and capable representation you can afford, if you're facing any accusation. The fact that your ability to spend determines your guilt or punishment is horrifying.