HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
To jump off of this post downthread about the vibe shift around tech vs. the-rest-of-society, with the TikTok ban fast approaching, I have some thoughts to share:
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This ban might be for naught: another app, known as RedNote, is being positioned as the next TikTok, and this app is more directly connected/controlled by China. This obviously seems like an own-goal. RedNote's developer is apparently hiring English-language content moderators to meet the rush head-on.
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Related to this: where has the rest of the US tech sphere been on this? Were they silently hoping that Bytedance would sell such a massive platform to one of them, or hoping that the ban would drive users to their equivalent platforms? Do they regret taking this stance since the ban sets a dangerous precedent and these potential upsides will likely fail to materialize?
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And related to that: will the vibe shift around tech post-Trump-reelection focus on "surveillance capitalism?" TikTok, as Fight For The Future likes to point out, was by far not unique in how it could potentially spy on users. Will the left laser-focus on the negatives of Big Tech social media now that Twitter and Facebook are staking themselves out as unfriendly territory?
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And finally: does the Motte actually think the ban will 100% go through, or will some last-minute hail mary save TikTok for the US audience?
Edit: Interestingly, RedNote apparently has zero geographical siloing, and the CCP has been quick to breathe down RedNote's neck about it.
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
I remember, back in the GamerGate days, that there was actually a statistic claiming that (slightly) over half of gamers were women--however, that statistic rows against the belief you described. The under-publicized explanation for that statistic was "women prefer simple, low-time-investment mobile games like Candy Crush and aren't playing COD or AssCreed,*" and I think failing to understand that is why bigger companies and gaming-related insititutions have spent the past decade flailing and floundering about with progressivism--the classic "things vs. people" gender divide.
*Not that there aren't women who are into traditional "hardcore" games at all, mind you.
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
To add onto the other replies, pronouns on the modern Internet contain much more information than the literal direct conveyance of gender identification. It's a potent nugget of information if you're willing to read between the lines...or letters, in this case.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Yeah...Hanania invokes Chavez and Morales, even though part of the problem is that, from the perspective of some Americans, the Dems were leading us down the same path as Venezuela and Bolivia anyways.
Trump is a flailing incompetent, I can't really argue with that, but why weren't his rivals that much better about governing convincingly? Not to deny any agency of Trump, but our present situation is the culmination, the natural consequence of billions of smaller choices that have led us to his second term and this tariff madness. The populist anger that defeated Harris at the polls is perhaps simply the wages of 21st-Century sin.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
I am starting to suspect the OP may be fishing for comments like yours to show how bad we are, or something like that. It's odd behavior if they aren't being underhanded, but are instead being sincere.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
the UN judge getting convicted of slavery in the UK
The what
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
Isn't one potential argument here that Ukraine was wanting to take the same route as Poland, but didn't have time to really do that before 2014? I think even Kulak made that argument early in the war, that Ukraine saw what happened to Poland and were like "Orthodox Jesus, I've seen what you done for the Poles and I want that for myself."
If the invasion were put off by like 5 years, maybe we'd see some actual progress towards EU-ification.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
I got my start in this sphere thanks to being exposed to Rat Tumblr and Scott Alexander in the 2010's, I for one have never even freaking heard of Ziz until now.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I guess it's time to drop this take: did we accidentally end up reintroducing slavery?
I don't say this lightly. The archetype/stereotype of the immigrant worker is a man who has come over to America to work for an illegally-low wage (that is still more than he could earn by staying in the corrupt shithole he fled from), and faces challenges such as: he can't get the law on his side if his employer abuses him (because then he'd be caught and deported), his failure to meld with the local culture places him at odds with the native population, and his children are pseudo-orphans because their parents are only able to raise them for as long as they aren't caught and deported. And what do we, the natives, get out of the exploitation of this man's travails? Cheaper products as a result of cheaper labor.
"Cheap labor" is the motivating force for capitalism, and business owners have always sought it out wherever it could be found. First, it was slaves taken from Africa and the Native American population. After the Civil War, it was the native-born blacks and dirt-poor whites who helped build the industrial cities of the Eastern US. Towards the end of the Cold War, it was overseas countries where quality of life, wages, and cost of living were all low. At some point, immigrant labor also gained a share of labor power.
Now, to an extent, I like the world that the Neoliberal World Order built, but all those blue-haired Adbusters-reading leftists are directionally-correct that we are addicted to cheap labor and ignore all the externalities that come with it. Is it right to just shut off the supply like Trump is trying to do? Should we not wean ourselves off of it now that the world is so interconnected anyways? Is it fair to keep racing to the bottom for more-work-for-less-paychecks even as we speculate about the wonders of total automation that seem so tantalizingly closer with every passing day?
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
I understand there'd be some friction between English and Boer, but you'd think that by 1965-ish and on, both whites and blacks in South Africa would draw much less of a distinction between the two.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
Yes, and while I don't want to bring them into these arguments because it might be seen as lazy, we have the Holodomor and Chernobyl to look at as prior examples of how Russian control ended up working out for Ukraine. Starving populations and irradiated no-go zones are probably pretty bad for GDP, you have to admit!
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
But so many companies expect employees to magically appear, fully formed and massively overqualified, and would rather hire for months than actually try to help somebody improve.
I'm under the impression that this isn't even confined to tech.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Eh, I thought the real backlash always started with those kids trapped in the cave and him calling that ex-pat diver a pedophile over being told that his submersible idea was bad. It wasn't exactly partisan, but I think that was the beginning of the polarization.
Plus, also, I think people were looking for anything to make Elon and Tesla's fanboys shut up, and it just escalated from there.
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
Something like "Health insurance companies spend too much money on goodies making your healthcare expensive. Healthcare Janitor comes in to eliminate wasteage and make insurance cheaper." Really it's like any capital efficiency, accounting, analytics job. Hire STEM grads to keep the activists out. Markets are happy cause it saves company money, people are happy because Insurance seems to have a watchdog, employees are happy because they are supposedly reigning in the greedy insurers.
How do we prevent this from succumbing to the same thing that caused insurers to become the hated avatars of bloat and inefficiency?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Shoutouts to Kontextmaschine's Reactionary Readings of Beloved 80's Movies.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Holy shit, wow.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
I think the perspective of many on this forum is that the bureaus are themselves staffed with wolves, so this is of no help, in their eyes.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
More concerning to me is how a former Green Beret can't even rig an improvised explosive device correctly.
"We trained him wrong on purpose...as a joke."
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Maybe it's some deep-rooted primitive instinct. Defectors in the tribe are supposed to end up dead, lest they end up destroying the tribe.
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
Sigma some very small number of genuinely mentally ill crazies
I might as well reply to your other comment here: I think part of why the 4B Movement has any legs at all in Korea is precisely because the expected "life script" of modern Koreans has become a crushing, zombified shit-show of a rat race for everyone, not just the women (as the men are similarly polarized). The culture war aspect is an unintended veil over the actual rebellion against the establishment, in my eyes.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
It does call to mind the comical depiction of the FBI in the movie Die Hard
Tropes often have a basis in real life, IMO. Much of the classic media we've grown up with was created by people who had the real-life experience to back up their storytelling, so it should figure that the trope of "fed-vs-non-fed tension" has very real roots in reality.
Thinking about stuff I loved from the early 2010's, and then how my gaming consumption habits shifted after that, I think you're onto something, and that something is "the changeover from the 7th console generation to the 8th console generation." The 7th gen was already a huge shock for the industry, leading to multiple studios closing down (and there were still the odd casualties of studios and game franchises even into 2012-ish), and the 8th gen doubling down on high-fidelity probably didn't help keep the AAA side of the industry from becoming a total rat race.
It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot.
I haven't touched console gaming in a long time, but I kinda miss this practice. I kinda liked seeing all the "Platinum Hit" covers for Nintendo, EA, and Konami games from the 6th gen. And I think it made a degree of sense, in that for some games, most of the revenue value was extracted more upfront when the games came out, so slashing the price to keep milking the long tail wasn't completely a loss for the publishers. It probably also helped pump up those impressive lifetime sales numbers to lower the price so that the kids who missed out on the launch wave could still buy in.
Like, I'm pretty sure that, right now, on Steam, you can buy the original COD 4 for just 10 bucks. 10 buckaroonies! For a game that was $50-60 new! Activision doesn't give a shit, they have the modern COD-as-a-service as their vehicle of avarice. Valve has similarly slashed the prices on their back catalogue of non-F2P games, literally the most expensive game of theirs right now is Half-Life: Alyx (still at like $60 or so).
Similarly, GOG also just added a bunch of games to their store that made their way there from the GOG Dreamlist (a relaunched version of their long-standing wishlist where people could vote on which games GOG should add), and a good number of them were part of their GOG Preservation Program, intended to make old games playable even on modern machines. Probably the standout here is Silent Hill 4, where they also went and added back in some cut content. Now, this is a game that GOG has put work in, and even gone above the call of duty in making available to their customers (ETA: and this game never even had any PC versions before this!). What do you think the price of this pseudo-remaster is?
The answer: $10. And they also had a sale on these GPP titles that ended yesterday, so you probably could have gotten it for even cheaper. Old games should be cheaper, period.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I am going to pre-register my position of "no major Happening occurs." It may well just be for the purposes of carrying out another flashy, expensive bombing run on the Houthis. Why strike Iran now and not before?
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
"If it don't make dollars it don't make sense" is an absolutely terrible heuristic for government spending.
This is pretty much the same argument made against things like trying to reform USPS. Yes, it loses money, but guess what? Life itself is inherently a money-losing enterprise. I think of Bostrom's phrase "a Disneyland with no children," and I feel like the spending-reform types are unconsciously drawn to trying to instantiate it.
I don't agree with your first sentence. As cliche as it might seem, I am coming around to thinking that it all kicked off with GamerGate, when lots of people started noticing that something was off.
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