naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.
This is too much heat, not enough light. Please don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I'm not going to dig up the post where you made this "joke," but one way to follow the rule requiring charitable interpretation is to take people seriously even when you're unsure about them.
I'm not going to dig up whatever post it was where you did this, but if I see you doing it, I'm going to moderate you for not speaking plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
The HBD movement uses that as a motte to silence critics, but it's not their actual project or purpose - their project and purpose is about policy geared towards acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies thereby.
This reads to me like deliberate weak manning. At minimum you should probably reference a more specific example than "the HBD movement." For example Charles Murray is probably credibly part of any putative "HBD movement" but if you described him as "acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies" then I would say you either didn't read him, didn't understand him, or are willfully misunderstanding him. I assume there are some people out there using the (as you suggest) "trivial fact" of HBD for purely racist goals, but I have never personally encountered such a person.
I'm here to tell you that you are being used as a useful idiot by a project you don't agree with.
I wasn't going to actually moderate you for the earlier quote but when I got to this one, it pushed you over the edge. I suspect we all get to be someone's useful idiot, sometimes, but "the only reasons you could possibly disagree with me here is that you are evil, or stupid" is not really a permissible discussion posture under our ruleset.
I think maybe the advice I want to give you here is to try to keep your arguments addressed to other arguments, rather than making them about (general or specific) people.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?
Well, maybe. Back on the subreddit, for a while Zorba set a cap of 1 year on bans. We still perma'd spammers and the like, but the idea (IIRC, this was a while ago) was basically that most users who eat a 1 year ban just won't ever come back, and those who do may very well have changed for the better in the interim. What actually happened was, the best posters who ate a 1 year ban just never came back, while the worst posters did come back, as bad as ever--or worse!
At that point the "perma" slowly crept back in, partly because, as it turns out, there's not really any such thing as a user ban--only an identity ban. On reddit, anyone was free to roll up a new user account at any time. We have a few more tools available here on the Motte, but still it's the case that a determined user could probably find a way to roll a fresh alt. There are costs to that--posts have to be manually approved for a while, for example--but a permaban doesn't strictly mean that a person has been kicked off the site. Rather, in this reputation economy they lose the benefits of being a known quantity. And a new user with no reputation has a harder time getting away with the kind of posts that degrade discourse.
It's far from a perfect system--and even here away from reddit, as a moderator my actual options for responding to posts are extremely limited. I've got a carrot that many people don't care about (AAQC reports) and two sticks (warnings and bans). Beyond that, the only way I can hope to modify anyone's behavior is through direct appeal, which takes a lot of time and doesn't always land the way I want it to.
In the instant case, the user just had a long string of bad posts uninterrupted with anything like an AAQC or other valuable contribution. We don't like to lose interesting perspectives, but at some point the amount of harm someone like that does to the discourse just becomes more than the mod team thinks it's worth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Welcome to the Motte!
This is a Culture War post; feel free to post it in the Culture War thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I apologize that it has taken this long to respond to the reports on this comment, but the mod team discussed it and is very broadly of the view that this is a terrible post. It's antagonistic, primarily, but also stuffs a lot of words into other people's mouths. It doesn't discuss the culture wars, but merely wages them. And this will be the sixth time you're banned for it.
I entertained the idea of making it something long term, like maybe 90 days--we used to do a fair number of those back on the subreddit. But some mods suggested a permaban, and it seems nobody could think of a good reason to not permaban you. So, that's what I'm doing.
"Humor" is often a tough moderation call. I don't know if you have many interactions with children, but "just joking!" is not an uncommon protest from kids who want to say something they know (or suspect) they shouldn't say, because it is actually unkind, or otherwise objectionable, but they understand that humor can sometimes help one speak more plainly than is normally permitted. Well, most of your joke was basically fine. This is the specific part that I found troublesome:
y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms
This is something people actually claim in earnest about their outgroup, particularly when their outgroup is the alt-right or something similar. So "come on, I'm just joking" becomes a convenient cover for reinforcing a weak man stereotype. If you didn't mean it that way, like... great! Now that I've pointed out the problem with letting "I'm just joking around guys" tempt you to make reductive claims about this community, maybe you can avoid the mistake in the future.
And, I suppose, to take the meta up a notch--there is at least one moderator who has already raised an objection to my moderation here, so don't imagine yourself to be on the wrong side of the mod team or anything. Apparently a lot of people here think you are reddit user darwin2500, in part because you appear to have claimed to be darwin2500, even though on reddit darwin2500 implied (though admittedly did not outright say) that he had left this space and found it amusing that people still imagined him to be here. I do not know whether you are darwin2500; I am actually skeptical because you have yet to post anything approaching the quality and insight that darwin2500 brought to the old subreddit when he wasn't eating bans for various rule violations. But whoever you are, one way to get charity weighing more heavily in your favor in moderation cases is to post good stuff. It would also help if you developed a reputation for posting honestly, instead of a reputation for posting dishonestly. One reason your posts get so heavily reported is that you have taken on darwin2500's burden, whether you are actually him or not: darwin2500 was a notorious troll who repeatedly refused to engage honestly when it became clear that he was wrong about something. Whether you're him or not, that is a behavior you also appear to exhibit here.
In other words--the kind of self-critical humor that you were exercising was not, in fact self critical, as far as I could tell. If you'd been poking fun at yourself instead of everyone else, well, it would have been easier to let that slide.
ETA:
If certain mods have made up their mind or are going to be swayed by number of downvotes and reports, then there's no behavior I can take that protects me.
This is bullshit. No one on the mod team has it out for you; if anything, I think you have a couple mods acting somewhat protectively of you for "affirmative action" reasons. The behavior you can take that protects you is to follow the rules. In particular, I actually have very little time for moderation these days, so unless I see you trashing the community I'm very unlikely to moderate you. Stop imagining yourself to be separate from (much less above) the group, here, and you'll be fine.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
A number of users have reported this as "antagonistic" and I rather see their point. We've talked about your trolling before, and while I can appreciate its artfulness, even gentle sneering constitutes objectionable disdain.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Or, if you prefer--you're not venturing into the lion's den, you're just another lion. I don't know if you and I have had this particular discussion before, but I've had it with many others: I will always enforce the rules more strictly when the target of criticism is this space and the people in it. That doesn't mean we can't be self-effacing and self-critical, but it does mean that such posts require maximum charity and effort. This post doesn't really cut it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Does anyone know how old is Jim of Jims blog infamy is?
This is a fine "small question."
Even though I think the world would be a better place with him dead and he goes against basically everything I value I am begrudgingly astounded and impressed by the sheer volume of vitriol in his heart to be able to keep posting pure hate for 4+ decades.
This is unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, and inflammatory. If it's exaggeration, then it's not plainspoken. If it is plainspoken, then it is too heated. You can say that you vehemently disagree with someone without all the rhetorical sneering.
And if this were your first rodeo, I'd leave it at that.... but in the last five months you've drawn four warnings and two tempbans for unnecessary antagonism. This time you're banned for a week.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?
It would not!
Well, I suppose you could probably find a way to argue that is antagonistic or obnoxious, but just the fact of arguing by itself wouldn't reach that level automatically. This is a discussion website, so generally argument is not only permitted, but encouraged!
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?
Er... I'm "liberal" in the classical sense, most Americans would not identify me as "a liberal" but maybe sometimes as "a libertarian." Even then I am a little too comfortable with government action for the tastes of partisan Libertarians. My progressive friends tend to think I'm too conservative and my conservative friends tend to think I'm too progressive so I don't think it would be wrong to call me a centrist, even though nobody ever does. Maybe it would be better to call me a "skeptic."
Like @Amadan I don't remember making any statements regarding mass migration specifically, in Israel or anywhere else. Even the political philosopher John Rawls (who was liberal and probably also "a liberal") believed that nations possessed qualified rights of exclusion (though I don't know if he ever elaborated on the qualifications). As a classical liberal I am skeptical of the wisdom of ethnostates, but I also see examples in history where soft ethnic cleansing seemed essential for long term peace (e.g. Greece/Turkey) and also where mass migration has collapsed empires. I conclude that I should therefore be neither "for" nor "against" mass migration, but merely open to understanding its likely impact in specific cases.
Do you believe in any ‘supernatural’ stuff like ghosts or psionic powers?
Not as such, no.
What are the most convincing things you’ve seen/read one way or another?
The cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God are pretty compelling to me, especially when paired with arguments about living in a simulation. Why does anything exist? Why does reality follow orderly laws? Occasionally a physicist or astronomer will make a bunch of noise about how it isn't mysterious, here have some equations about quantum vacuums or some shit, case closed, but from a philosophical perspective that's no answer at all. If the laws of the universe are themselves responsible for the existence of the universe, you still haven't explained why there are laws. The answer "well we have to stop somewhere" is an admission that they haven't accomplished the god-killing mathematics they've been using to sell their book after all.
On balance these arguments get you a lot less than most theists appear to think, since it seems like an intentional being capable of creating at least one universe is probably so alien that treating it like a loving father figure who wants to help you find your car keys is a stretch, and more than a stretch. And maybe there are just "fundamental laws" that are how everything is and how everything always will be--how could I possibly know? I can't even begin to check. But in my experience, nothing comes from nothing, and infinities exist only in the realm of mathematics, so the fact that I nevertheless find myself existing in a finite universe is pretty damn surprising.
Arguably, then, the most supernatural thing I have any experience with is me and my conscious existence, which for some reason goes away for a while every night. Emergent properties are kind of spooky!
So, closer to home--leaps of intuition and the generation of new knowledge are often kind of spooky. Occasionally--not more than two or three times a year, sometimes every couple of years--I will realize something and at the same time know it is true. (Trivial things, usually--so-and-so is pregnant even though she's not showing yet, they fired that guy because next month the board of directors wants to do this other thing, etc.) Sometimes this involves the prediction of future events. These realizations are almost never mistaken, and they are always arguably discernible based on facts that I actually know, but that I hadn't specifically put together in context. This seems like good evidence that there is a part of my brain that is making connections or processing information without my conscious effort. But I can understand why some people might treat that "aha!" feeling as a revelation from God or something.
But that's not the spooky part. The spooky part is how this sometimes leads to weird coincidences like Leibniz and Newton inventing calculus at the same time. The obvious hypothesis is that there was enough overlapping knowledge accumulated in a particular place at a particular time to generate these ideas, so multiple people arrive at the conclusion simultaneously. But then I read about, like, Anaximander realizing the rudiments of evolution (but not natural selection) in ancient Greece and notice that it took thousands of years for anyone to really do something with that idea, and I find myself re-puzzled by where it is we actually get "new" knowledge.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Treat life as a game, and you’ll build something real.
If you haven't read Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper, then... do, I guess.
It's hard to describe, but the thesis is something like "in utopia, all that will be left to us is games." But along the way he defines games (the consensual pursuit of a lusory goal through the overcoming of unnecessary obstacles) in a way that has been extremely influential on the philosophy of games, even though when he originally published the book in 1978 the world of board games, video games, etc. was much smaller than it is today.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.
My theory is that this is just the struggle between the Berners-Lee Web (a vast network of intellectual interaction) and the Consumer Web (a powerful tool for buying and selling). (Social media arguably sits between these, as it is primarily concerned with buying and selling human interactions.) Whitespace is mayonnaise: it helps you swallow whatever you're being fed. Phones (and to a lesser degree, tablets) are not Berners-Lee devices; they are consumption devices, which may explain why you find web mayo more palatable when you're on your phone.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I guess you just want to play childish games.
No: I want you to stop pouring your disdain on this community, and I'm quite serious about that. It's one thing to raise legitimate criticism in a charitable and effortful way. It is something else entirely to go about darkly hinting that mere racism rather than legitimate reason is at the heart of any group's political concerns, but especially the group you're directly talking to, of which you are a part.
And if somehow it was not your aim to air your disdain--though if you said so I could plausibly accuse you of playing "childish games"--then you need to speak plainly. You're a very sharp and educated person, so even if you do this sort of thing by accident it just isn't credible to make that excuse. This is the curse of competence.
So just knock it off. Your comment was out of line, contributed no light, only heat, was not worded plainly, was low effort, take your pick and take the L. I'm not going to get into a philosophical debate with you over what it means to be "bad" or whether there is a difference between saying someone is bad and just hinting at unflattering characterizations with two winks and a nod. I'm telling you, don't post like that, or I will mod you a second time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Right. By means of ostensibly saying that the group was bad, right? Jesus, what is the point of claiming you didn't say what you said?
You didn't--as you were for some reason anxious to point out--say that anyone was bad. Remember? This is you:
I didn’t say anyone is "bad."
That's true! And it is true in very much the same spirit in which I didn't say that you said it.
It doesn’t undermine your broader point, which is that you don’t want people opining about the motives of members.
No. What I don't want you doing is weakmanning any groups, but especially not this one.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
What did you mean, if not that I was saying that the group is bad?
That you had violated the rule against weakmanning.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I didn't say that you said anyone is bad.
Yes, you did: "Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is."
Which word in that sentence you quoted is the word "say" or "said?" Can you bold it for me?
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I didn’t say anyone is "bad."
I didn't say that you said anyone is bad. I modded you for violating the rule against weakmanning. Since you were apparently confused by the shorthand, here is the rule in its entirety:
There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
Avoid posting solely about gaffes, misstatements, or general bad behavior from prominent people. Discussing policy implications is always fine, and concrete criminal or impeachable offenses are also fair game. For example, "Look at Congressman Jones being a jerk" is not OK; "congressman Jones is under suspicion of taking bribes" is fine, as is "congressman Jones's employment law is bad for these reasons . . ."
Sometimes we get good discussion about the consequences of gaffes, misstatements, or general bad behavior; for example, "here's Congressman Jones being a jerk, let's talk about the underlying reason why congressmen do this sort of thing regularly". In most cases, these should stand as valuable posts regardless of whether they refer to Congressman Jones or not.
Links to news stories should generally follow the above rules, although cannot be expected to adhere to them exactly. For instance, a news story which uses an anecdote to introduce a concept is OK (this is a very common framing discussion), a news story which is about tweets from non-prominent people reacting to some event isn't ok.
You broke that rule, and in particular the group under discussion was this forum, which I am particularly protective of, as we have discussed.
Don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I haven't assumed anything. But if you're suggesting that Gdanning should have been modded under "speak plainly" instead, your suggestion has been noted.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
This post and this one are a bit too far into "rant" territory. While each has its merits, it's presented in such a blistering way as to drown the light in heat. Snappy rhetorical questions, pithy comparisons, passionate appeals, none of these things are forbidden, exactly, it's just that you've turned the rhetoric dial too high. Please dial it back.
@gattsuru's original comment:
Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality
There's a joking-not-joking post, a while back, from JonSt0kes. At the risk of pulling the setup apart from the punchline, the setup is what I'd like to highlight.
It's a bit of surrealism, and probably intended as foil to comment on more immediate political conflicts outside of the scope of this discussion.
There's certainly people who'd love augmented reality avatars, and while none would want to force them on others, well, tomorrow is another day. It's not even really possible right now. VTubers are a small genre focused on presenting a virtual avatar to their viewers, sometimes in surprising genres, but they generally depend on carefully calibrated cameras and nearly-ideal lighting conditions to correctly recognize precise pose details. Body tracking (and even estimation) works, sometimes, for incredibly controlled environments. Even the best augmented reality systems are too bulky and have too short a battery life to be worn around all day, or even for long parts of a day. And heaven help anyone who wants to implement a standardized communication protocol that works between different headset vendors without a ton of unreliable jank. Some of these technical limitations might not be solvable, period: modern tech has done amazing things with microlenses, but optics are a cruel mistress.
There's spaces where these technical limitations don't exist, or can be maneuvered around. Hence the many references above to tech driven by virtual reality gaming, primarily but not solely chatrooms like VRChat. You can control lighting, and have multiple calibrated cameras at set distances and angles, and have everyone in a room wearing multiple inertial measurement units all speaking the same language. There is little background noise that makes audio transcription and voice manipulation jank in the real world. Far fewer chances for reality to break the illusion, excepting when you find furniture the hard way.
In those environments, it's not only common to define how you and others are presented, and where. It's often unavoidable. In VRChat specifically, some clients ("Questies" and more recently cell phone users, as opposed to those using full-blown computers with connected VR displays) can't see more complicated avatars or even enter some environments, if they use too many resources to be practically implemented on their headsets. Individual users also have a complex system of less direct control through a privileged user system, as well as more traditional block/mute capabilities.
And that, if anything, is the low end: VR environments tend to think of a person's self-presentation as sacrosanct, and as a result, it's much harder to make someone into something they aren't than to hide them.
That's just not some fundamental part of technology.
As a comparison, Final Fantasy XIV is an (acclaimed) MMORPG. Like many MMOs, it officially prohibits third-party modifications. Like many MMO mods, they still exist, and unless you're cheating on a world first race or being incredibly obvious about it, there's not really a lot that the game-runners want to do. There's actually some fascinating technical work being done here; where earlier tools swapped references to asset locations on disk while the client is closed, modern tools can dynamically reload or redraw on arbitrary triggers at arbitrary times, and there's even a tool for synchronizing between users in certain configurations, even transferring mods from one user to another (with accompanying security concerns). This can quickly get bizarrely recursive: there are now mods that exist solely for the purpose of overwriting other people's vanilla glamours.
Some of this goes exactly the direction anyone who's seen Skyrim modding would expect, and there's no small amount of comically oversized dick and/or boob mods, sometimes even for different genders. Some of it's more subtle modifications down that path, as the default models are about as featured as a ken doll even above the hips, or to smooth things out when desired.. Sometimes it's weirder than you would expect [bonus for those willing to log into the site (cw: no genitals or female nipples, possible spoilers? SAN damage for those familiar with those spoilers?)].
But a good portion of it's far more expressive. Tired of Dark Knight being Shadow The Edgehog? Swap to Devil May Cry, floral, or light-themed. Instead of naruto-running as a Ninja, you can practice your gun-kata. A lot of design-space exists and revolves around fluffy tails, goofy dances, capes, bizarre accessories, even posture. And then there's pages after pages of hairstyles, or mods that just turning on hats. Want to get rid of Lalafel or replace every PC with their alternate universe Roe version? There's a tool for it!
Yet it results in a world that's not just distinct from the what the developers designed, or what some unaffiliated observer might see, but where multiple people in the same room might have wildly different worlds that they're interacting with, even when sharing some mods. And there's some easy objections, here.
Sex is the easiest. Someone running male nudity mods in FFXIV will find out the hard way (hurr hurr) that several comedic quest chains normally involve a very animated older gentleman running around in his smallclothes, who is now Very Happy to see you; someone aggressively doing so can change every single player and (humanoid, non-special model) NPC into their desired gender and species. And, of course, someone who wants to do something intentionally has far broader space available.
There's no small number of other ways to embarrass people, of course. If you think a three-foot dong would be a little beneath your standards, there's some political statements that could have far more impact. And that's at the low end of the discussion space, and going into video games is the lower risk environment. Trace has spoken about someone beaten as a nazi in part due to time spent with a (stupid) Garry's Mod avatar. It's easier to think of things that offend Blue Tribe sensibilities that can play that role, over Red Ones, but it's not actually that hard to come up with Red Tribe or more general offenses. As ironic as "don't misgender me" will be when it's some social conservative getting involuntarily catgirl'd, I'm not sure what'll happen if thirty people start passing around screenshots or video of a well-known person's character marching like a member of the SS, but we're probably going to find out eventually. And you don't have to be Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow to come up with heavy-handed approaches that these technologies could use.
From the other direction, this (cw: censored 'female' nudity) particular description of events could genuinely reflect someone with neither correct boundaries nor behaviors, and maybe that's more likely than not -- minors getting into adults-only spaces, and adults not acting responsibly in unsecured or insufficiently age-gated areas, have been genuine problems on the internet since usenet. But it could also have happened if the interviewer running default settings was the only person in the room seeing everyone there.
Of course, VR(/AR/XR/spatial computing) is doomed. MMORPGs are funny, but they aren't going to change society, and game mods, no matter how technically impressive, are even less likely to do so. Beyond that, there is an argument, and not an entirely wrong one, that these environments are 'fake' in some philosophically important way. People (mostly) exist playing VRChat, but they don't actually live in VRChat. FFXIV has a single source of truth on its servers, but they're probably stored as a mess of position information and arbitrary numeric values, and definitely not some litrpg virtual world. Even if this expands to other purely-digital or even digitally-augmented fields, why should you care if someone does the 2028-equivalent of a lazy photoshop? This isn't even as life-like as deepfakes, or as humiliating as a really dedicated adversary could go -- the possibility someone on the other end of a conference might be putting your camera feed on top of some nudes would be offputting, but the risk of someone Toobining it has predated modern telephony.
Who cares?
And, perhaps worse:
There's an old joke, by modern standards, about how once one could be certain that the man in a corner of a subway angrily shouting into the air at a person who wasn't there was a schizophrenic, until cell phones and bluetooth meant that could just be a businessman talking to someone you couldn't see. What happens when ten million people see something you don't? Can't?
To cut to the chase, quite a lot of things that you care about either aren't real (do you think your bank account is a bunch of coins in a safe?) or hasn't reflected the real thing, already. There are already tools, some of which you should already be using (get uBlock!) to filter what you see, in your normal usage of the web. An increasing and surprising amount of your world will be passing through these sort of mediators, unless you put increasing efforts into avoiding it.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this! The hallucinating cameras are just trying to get the picture you wanted to take. Blocking results you were never going to check in Google Searches can be one of the few ways to avoid the Dread Pinterest. There's a block function on this site, after all. I try to avoid blocking as a matter of principle, but there are definitely ways that has hurt, rather than helped, my ability to seriously engage with both reality and some political perspectives; it's not something I would recommend for everyone or even most people. And there are defiiiiiiinitely people and tags even I block aggressively in, say, the context of a certain furry booru.
The bare concept is not even new. Filter bubble was popularized as a term in 2010, with Eli Pariser writing a book on it. BlockBots date back to 2015, if not earlier, and filter lists to the usenet era. From the other political valience, progressive views on talk radio or Fox News as a conservative bubble aren't entirely right, but there certainly are a lot of people who even then only listened to (and later, watched) what they wanted to hear.
But I think we're going to see things no one thought anyone would want to implement in 1997, or 2010, driven by forces far more varied and far more subtle than anyone expected.
St0kes mostly highlights the filter bubble from the context of politics, even if he sees, rarely, where it breaks against him. Eli Pariser considered algorithmic (and business drives) toward the separation of filter bubbles. There's no shortage of modern-day writers discussing AI, and a Dead Internet where people find it easier to talk with carefully-tuned ChatGPT instance rather than fight increasingly-useless Google is definitely a possibility.
I think they all overlook the power of human meat and spite.
As far as I know, there is no tool that will filter your Google Map search results by the political donations and rumors thereof. Yet. There is no flight planning website that drops flights where layover or transfer involve states with undesirable gun or gender politics. Yet.
I don't know of a crowdsourced tool to check your phone contacts and Facebook friends for (alleged) criminals or bad actors or meanies. Yet. There's no way to crosscheck a dating profile against social media phrenology. Yet. No off-the-shelf tools to use Nextdoor to hide the neighbor with the yappy dog from my phone or doorbell. Yet. No headphones that noise cancel people you don't want to hear from. Yet.
And a thousand, thousand other things that could be possible, as we invite others have more and more influence on how we see the world in the most literal sense, and make it harder and harder to avoid doing so.
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