YearOfTheCommieDesktop

This doesn't apply to everyone, not on such a deep emotional level (I liked cars but I was never naming and hugging and kissing them) but when a car is a necessity, and you spend large swaths of your life in one, you definitely form a certain attachment, if not to the specific car, then to the general vibe and lifestyle. For say, a trans person in the american south... a car could be a lifeline, frequently the only thing between you and homelessness, etc.

I'm thankful to not need a car anymore, and I've developed a similar but different attachment to/fondness for transit, but cars still hold a certain comfort as someone who grew up in the sticks originally, and whose first real dose of independence and refuge from the world was getting a drivers license and access to a car. And while that shouldn't be allowed to block reforms to the urban landscape that make cars less necessary and less viable, it's worth being more empathetic to those with a strong connection to the car as that process progresses.

Maybe this isn't even a good video to explain what I imply in the title but I hope it makes sense, and it did get me thinking about the topic

dunk tank for Destiny not for TVLR ofc

This dude literally thinks sitting in a gamer chair talking arguing with pepes and nazis and shit makes him, and people like him (the good smart liberals), so much more qualified to govern than the dumb doo-doo-heads who take literally any other job. Dude has no fucking clue what an actual day in the life of any worker who does a real job looks like, but he smugly talks down to them with his elementary school understanding of their job anyhow

I hate liberals and I hate this country jfc

EDIT: wow thanks hexbear for not showing me the that u/Pluto already posted this everywhere until after my post went live. working as intended

this is more real than the slander against the USSR and DPRK it's pattterned after

image shamelessly stolen from r/dumbphones and mostly unrelated

I feel like we could almost use a comm for this specifically but c/technology will do

Anyone else here have luck with cutting back on smartphone/technology use in general, or feel like they need to try a change in that department? Or even just social media? Chime in below I'd love to chat about it.

I'm avoiding work rn and thinking about smartphone use. I had an android phone for many years and I think it was a really negative force in my life. Sure there's lots of times it's useful as a one-off but overall I don't think it was actually good to have on me all the time. I think the overarching issue with a lot of modern tech is that it reduces or tries to eliminate intentionality on the part of the user, and make the user experience completely frictionless. But some of that "friction" is important, intentionality is important, without it we are just mindless consumers at the beck and call of marketers and big tech companies. Music apps don't need to decide what you listen to and in what order, being able to get a mix based on a song or artist is one thing, but the tiktok-ified endless autoplay of songs with no user input is... not good. especially when you grow up with that you lose so much.

Or social media I think we all know is a toxic time suck and honestly just a mindless addiction for many, even this place can take on that role, I know it does sometimes for me, it's easier to scroll than face whatever stressful thought or situation is at hand... and fine, maybe that urge to distraction isn't going away, but on reflection I find scrolling to be the least-soothing way of scratching that itch... So it would be better if it wasn't quite so frictionless, to help break the feedback loop.

Push notifications (for things other than messaging) are another insidious way that such behavioral patterns are fostered. For the computer nerds, I think of it as like an interrupt for my attention, it breaks the flow of what I'm doing and demands I look at it, and frankly 80% of push notifications just don't deserve that level of priority. But because exerting any control or intentionality over those notifications is made to be extra effort in the name of UX streamlining, most people just have these annoying interrupts conditioning their brain at the whims of whoever controls the apps.

In such a tech dependent world, user control over software is way more critical than it's ever been, and for all their annoyingness and often mediocre or bad takes on other topics, free software people have been hammering on that for years and building alternatives. All that to say: I've been using a linux phone (pinephone pro) as my only phone for the better part of 6 months now and it's been a breath of fresh air. I'm reading again for the first time in years, I'm building a music collection that I actually own, I'm starting to cut the tether to big tech spyware platforms, but I'm not disconnected from the world.

The point is: it's not a dumbphone, it just has some extra friction in places, and that has enabled me to be a lot more intentional about my use. It's slower, and the battery life is worse, and lots of other tradeoffs, but in practical terms mostly what that has led to is me being more intentional about my consumption. I can always just go on a computer and browse to my heart's content, or put videos on the TV all night, but the device that's with me all the time is optimized for the things I care about, not for spying on me and robbing me of my attention and sanity.

(and fwiw linux phones aren't really non-nerd ready yet unless your requirements are pretty basic, but I could see the next gen of them being much closer to linux-on-the-PC levels of easy. It's getting better every month)

But the lower tech alternative is what you are seeing more and more on places like r/dumbphones (and I have adopted pieces of this as well): purpose built devices. Instead of one device that does everything (including a bunch of stuff you don't even want it to and don't get any agency over as an end user), people are rediscovering the utility of having different tools for different tasks:

• A small notebook replaces a huge power-hungry phone screen+stylus for taking notes
• A digital camera replaces the AI-mangled modern smartphone camera for high fidelity photos.
• A little game system replaces the microtransaction and predatory-mechanic laden cornucopia that is mobile games.
• A book or ereader replaces the eyestrain-inducing, sleep-ruining experience of reading long-form text on a bright little phone screen.
• A watch keeps the time, even when your phone would have long since run out of battery, and serves as a superior alarm clock for many circumstances, etc.
• A wallet holds cash (okay and cards... and I guess most people haven't abandoned these yet) that can be used to pay for goods and services, without the limitations of battery, internet connection, spying, etc. of mobile payment schemes. venmo/paypal/whatever are good to have in your back pocket, but IMO are really only like, revolutionary, if you're comparing them to credit cards and bank transfers, especially in the US where there's no other good system for easily transferring money digitally.
• wired headphones/earbuds can be much more durable alternatives to made-for-disposal hermetically sealed bluetooth pods, they are cheaper, they can sound better, they are available in a plethora of options and repairable when they break. Not that bluetooth is verboten, many bt devices are better, but the airpods and those modeled after it are pretty trash.
• if you are picky about such things, a dedicated audio player can play music, audiobooks, podcasts, for longer, in better quality, with less interruptions, than a smartphone. I'm less certain about this one personally, as even dumphones can usually have headphones and play music for you (some even support FM which is cool and saves battery over streaming), but it all depends on your preferences!
• And the titular dumbphones hold the potential to be much longer-lasting, more reliable makers of calls and texts, by virtue of being simpler. having a phone's primary purpose return to being communication makes it better at that role...

Now none of this is to say you should carry all this stuff and more all the time. But it's something you can be intentional about and tailor to your needs!

Maybe you're a theory-head without a rigid schedule: skip the games, camera, watch, headphones, etc and just carry an ereader, a notebook and a dumbphone

Or you're more of a direct action andy, you can leave the dumbphone (the only one that can be used to track you still) at home, or skip it entirely, or get a device with killswitches! Much harder to do if you limit yourself to the Apple/Android dichotomy

So yeah, point is you can pick what things you actually care about and bring those, when appropriate, and use them when you want to rather than doing, like, everything everywhere all at once with your smartphone. Yes you can tweak your smartphone to avoid many of these issues, and maybe that's good enough for you, (I encourage it, just give it serious thought, be intentional about what you really want to allow), but some are just unavoidable, and much like you are not immune to propaganda, none of us are immune to the baked in effects of marketers, big tech addiction-mongers. The simplest way to step away from the all-encompassing absorption machines in our pockets is to not have one, and to consider their replacements carefully, even if other paths are workable.

I'm pretty sure originally got me thinking about "friction" in this context, and this has all been marinating and steering my choices ever since, culminating with this linux phone that I can customize to my heart's content and does not have any of the built in addictive/harmful/spying apps that all my android phones always did. Oh and I can repair it rather than it becoming useless, physically and software-wise, in just a few short years.

I'm still a tech dweeb, I just want it to enhance people's lives and liberate them not make them worse and more dependent.

interesting vid, wonder if anything's changed in the last 18 months, and if there's any worthwhile left criticism of this perspective

Alternately :business-factory: but I would rather that be this one lol:

Lonk

I was more afraid of [3rd Precinct officers] than any community member I'd ever met.

-Former Minneapolis police officer

Unicorn riot documentary premiering now

Not a brand new article but it was new to me

Internal 3M documents show:

• In the 1950s, 3M animal studies consistently found its PFAS chemicals were toxic.
• By the early 1960s, 3M knew the chemicals didn’t degrade in the environment.
• 3M knew by the 1970s its chemicals were widely present in the blood of the general U.S. population.
• A 1970 study of fish had to be abandoned “to avoid severe stream pollution” and because all the fish died. After being exposed to a chemical, the fish couldn’t stay upright and kept crashing into the fish tank and dying.
• By 1976, 3M knew the chemicals were in its plant workers’ blood at higher levels than normal.
• A study of a chemical’s effect on 20 rhesus monkeys in 1978 had to be aborted after 20 days because all the exposed monkeys died.
• In 1979, a 3M scientist warned that perfluorochemicals posed a cancer risk because they are “known to persist for a long time in the body and thereby give long-term chronic exposure.”
• In 1979, 3M lawyers advised the company to conceal a 3M chemical compound found in human blood.
• In 1983, 3M scientists concluded that concerns about its chemicals “give rise to legitimate questions about the persistence, accumulation potential, and ecotoxicity of fluorochemicals in the environment.”
• Purdy wrote in his resignation letter that in the 1990s, 3M told researchers not to write down their thoughts or have email discussions because of how their “speculations” might be viewed in legal discovery.
• 3M told employees to mark documents as “attorney-client privileged” regardless of whether attorneys were involved, the state alleged, and minutes of meetings were edited to omit references to health hazards.
• In 1997, 3M gave DuPont a “material safety data sheet” — which lays out potential hazards — for a chemical. It read, “Warning: contains a chemical which can cause cancer,” citing 1983 and 1993 studies by 3M and DuPont. But 3M removed the label that same year and continued to sell the products for decades without warning.

It just goes on and on like this. fuckin grim stuff

The quote:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

And apparently it originates from the comments of this blog post, not from the commonly attributed CIA stooge: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

It's pretty lib subject matter on the whole and I'm not holding out hope that Mr Wilhoit is a marxist, but it actually maps pretty well. I was just talking to a friend about how the NLRB rulings against starbucks are doing literally nothing to stop them from union-busting and penalizing union workers, and this popped into my head:

It's almost like there's a class who the law protects but does not bind, and a class who the law binds but does not protect or something

Mr. Wilhoit was onto something but it's not celebrities or immigrants or whoever he meant it about, it's the working class and the ruling class. Also I really want to eventually get called a tankie for quoting some liberal blog reply guy. I just think it would be funny

PS: check out his music, it's not bad:

https://www.broadheath.com/mp3s.html https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgT0vSWjBh4gAtab6JZgVrA/videos

Vox is just downstream of mr beast now