In America in 2025, I’d say they’re right*. Flock has cameras all over cities, Palantir has scary face recognition data that iirc uses social media info up to a decade old, DOGE made a database of everyone’s social security information that other bureaus probably have access to, ICE uses Israeli spyware that bypasses end-to-end-encryption, and state governments are trying to push VPN bans and ID checks to use web services. On the federal level, both MAGA and Democrats are pro-surveillance, so you can’t just vote this out, not completely. You also can’t vote with your wallet since the most dangerous surveillance tools exist at the infrastructure level. We’re one step away from turning into China.

*By and large, there’s nothing Americans can do about those things other than protest, normalize pro-privacy rhetoric, try not to support privacy-invading consumer services, and call local- and state-level elected leaders when new anti-privacy legislation is introduced.

In most cases, privacy efforts can help for some use cases, but there is no perfect threat model anymore, and it’s mostly a symbolic act of protest these days, which is useful. Lemmy is the only social media I use these days, Linux is my daily and only driver, I’m boycotting tech oligarchs like Google, and I gravitate toward privacy-focused products and services. We need an active privacy advocacy bloc that will support causes and alternative technologies if we ever want things to get better, if not today than in the future.

One big thing people can still do is evade targeted ads. I probably have an ad profile stored somewhere, but I use adblock and enough FOSS apps that I haven’t gotten targeted ad in years.

Maybe this could work, but only if you divide the military across the committees. If it’s just an advisory role, it’s meaningless. That’s the problem we’re seeing with the Supreme Court and Congress in America.

Even with those safeguards in place, what’s to stop the committees from working together to turn on the people? Maybe this doesn’t happen immediately, but what about in 300 years across many changes of power?

We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.

Any system that has any hope of being sustainable, after the destabilization of heirarchies, needs to distribute resources across and not from the top down. It’s exhausting watching capitalists and democratic socialists fight against each other in western countries, with little to no anarchist presence whatsoever, when they both miss the point in a pretty glaring way.

I’m not an expert or an economist, mind you. I’m also jaded after America’s change in power. It’s a noble idea and a step up from capitalism. But while capitalism ends in mass surveillance and police states so the wealthy can profit, communism is similarly likely to lead to centralized identification, albeit with benevolent intentions. Allocating resources from the top down requires a system of administration, which is a hierarchy and an unchecked power. But Classification is the first step to genocide, and we’ve seen multiple times now that any country can fall to fascism in the span of 15 years. Just because you have a wonderful benevolent communist government now doesn’t mean it’ll always be that way.

Maybe there are ways around this. Part of me wants to say that only names and dates of birth (not race, gender marker, country of origin, income level) should be recorded, but even names in many cases can reveal a person’s gender and sex at birth, which is itself a form of classification. Maybe you could have a single-blind ID system, only including a name and DOB, where only citizens have access to their IDs, and governments do not store that data centrally. The hope being that if people’s needs are taken care of that the incentive to steal another person’s identity goes away. There are flaws, I know.

Again, maybe there are ways around this. I’m more partial to anarcho-syndicalism because it can more easily exist without a centralized ID system. Having traditional government functions decided democratically among and between the worker-run syndicates also helps stop fascists because if any one syndicate goes fascist, they get cut out from everyone else’s resources and get starved out.

However, if a communist government can exist without collecting data, then I’m potentially in favor of it.

I’ve been seeing a fair amount of discourse lately that Gabe Newell might be the only reason why Steam is a benevolent monopoly, and it’s why I only buy games on Steam when there’s no other option, when they’re not otherwise available on GOG and Itch.io.

Because Steam says for now that they’ll have a failsafe in place to make our games playable even if the company goes under. Steam doesn’t nickel and dime people, for now. Steam is doing important work for Linux, for now. Our profiles are fun and customizable like the internet used to be, for now. Steam’s DRM is so light it hardly exists, for now. But what’s going to happen to our huge libraries when Gabe retires or dies?

I hate that I even have to think this way, but I for one don’t want to have all my eggs in one basket, especially when the competitors’ policies are doing more to protect users right now.

Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it’s not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.

Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn’t have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.

I’m part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it’s a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.

And I wonder if it’s just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I’ve done that, it’s a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.

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I am so glad I had the foresight to use yt-dlp to back up most of my favorite videos. Not all of them, but I just thought we’d get more time.

But yeah, I knew this would happen. The age verification thing was really controversial, so Google would have had to expect that people would try to find other ways to access YouTube. They won’t stop here and will go after Deno and NewPipe.

I’m pretty much done with YouTube. It’s just not what it used to be. All my favorite YouTubers are either gone, have changed for the worse, or are on Nebula. It’s mostly just slop, and I won’t miss it.

First of all, I love everything about this, including her works cited page where she includes her own paper dated in the future on why her boyfriend is “Proof of Freud’s Darker Theories.”

Second of all, climate change kind of ruined winter. Where I live, it’s too icy to bike and too cold to go camping, but there also isn’t consistent enough snow for skiing and snowmen. So winters for me and my partner have turned into hibernation mode with slow-cooked meals and long RPGs.

Was Chad, um, right all along? 😅

Yeah, I think the most that would be possible is running Duckstation or something using a VR headset and controller, and not being able to turn in-game using motion controls.

Cool! I want to play Baroque on PS1 in VR someday, if that becomes possible.

I’m holding out hope for a good Linux build of the 360 emulator. Because, like, I love Fable II and would like to eventually finish Lost Odyssey, but not enough to keep an entire console in my collection for.

The original XBOX emulator struggled too, but now runs well on Linux, so I think we’ll get there before long.

I kind of love the GBA Fellowship of the Ring game. My parents got me a GBA SP when I was very young, and this was the first game I ever had on it. The beautifully crafted world, especially in the early part of the game, sucked me in. I’d find out later that every NPC’s name is based on an actual book characer in Tolkien’s lore. I loved the riddles, I loved the puzzles, I loved having to play music on stumps to summon Tom Bombadil and the elves. I figured out the money duplication glitch all on my own, without the internet or guides.

The SNES and GBA eras of games were a wonderful era where games were text-heavy without voice acting, and this game along with any others jump-started learning to read, and actually really helped me out in school. Eventually this game would get me to read the Lord of the Rings books, which is to this day my favorite book series ever.

I wouldn’t have gotten into turned-based RPGs without this game. It’s a little janky, sure, but I really like how the minimalist mechanics encouraged an almost Resident Evil-style resource management mindset. And, especially by the time you got to the Barrow Downs, every encounter was a serious threat and you would want to avoid them whenever possible, unless they were blocking where you needed to go. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this game is one of the better-executed, um, horror RPGs that I’ve played, and it did a wonderful job of invoking the same dread the Hobbits felt in the books when they left the shire.

That would be awesome! I love my Steam Deck, but it’s too big for my taste, and I keep it docked all the time. So it’s my “desktop PC” lol.

I’d totally get a retro handheld if they made a good one around the PS Vita’s size and ran on something like SteamOS.

I used to pick up remasters of games on Steam, but now I’m almost 30 and find original hardware and non-remastered games really nostalgic.

The PS3 and Wii are such an all-star combo for playing Sony and Nintendo’s huge back catalogs. Hacking them gives me access to nearly everything up to the seventh generation. I also play a lot of fan translations and mods on the original hardware, and it’s a treat to the ears to play MSU-1 SNES games using SNES9x on Wii. Both consoles’ retro games look amazing on CRT TVs too. The Wii and especially the PS3’s UIs are really special to me, and hearken back to an era where users were allowed to heavily customize the vibes of their devices. I have a DS and PSP for handhelds, too.

I also have the Sega Genesis Model 1 with an Everdrive, since that’s the best way to experience those games’ music, with the Genesis soundchip not emulating well on modern consoles. Plus I love the headphone jack. More consoles should have that!

I used to have a bunch of old consoles hooked up, but I sold them because the Genesis, Wii and PS3 work together to create my ultimate minimalist retro setup.

I do still buy remasters and emulate games on PC occasionally, but it’s on a case-by-case basis. I use my PC to A) fill in gaps in my retro library, B) play a rare remaster that’s actually the definitive version of the game (which doesn’t cut content or downgrade the experience in any way), and C) if a game really benefits from upscaling options only found on PC emulators.

I would love to see less America doom and gloom on lemmy. Why should we be the center of everything? More European- and Canada-centric posts, please.

Same thing with the idea of “use a monopoly growth model”. What is the alternative? Actively making a product worse because everyone else is? Because that is collusion.

This question really highlights the danger of the growth-at-all-costs model in forcing every company to race to the bottom when one company does. The future of the human race may one day depend on killing technological progress and emphasizing stability over profits.

A huge problem with America’s and many other economic systems is that companies are incentivized to undercut the competition, use a monopoly growth model, acquire or push out competitors, and then screw the customer when the competitors are either gone or irrelevant.

Without guardrails, the bubble will burst and some other “affordable solution” will just show up to replace streaming, and then we’ll start all over again before it enshittifies too. But there won’t be guardrails anytime soon, and most refuse or are unable to vote with their wallets, so we’re just screwed.

I don’t know what the solution is, but as a consumer, I’m exhausted. I wish there were options to just buy products, sometimes more expensive ones to keep a steady, sustainable business model, for piece of mind that the company won’t stab me in the back someday.