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Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.
Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.
If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.
Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it’s what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.
Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn’t be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.
Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.
Schools included.
Many students today don’t touch a personal computer a lot outside of school and then workplace.
My conspiracy theory:
I suspect that’s the desired effect of “smartphones”, and also the reason “smartphones” without keyboards are such an industry consensus. Not them being cheaper. Not them looking nicer. First, keyboards can be very sexy (think ZX Spectrum, or Blackberry for PDAs), second, however they look, touchscreen UIs are PITA, third, they are not that more expensive.
The strategy thus is that entertainment personal computing should be pressed out to devices hardly usable for work. So that “normal” people would gain their experience with that, and thus not gain the experience accompanying normal personal computing. As in - tinkering, customization, creation.
Because I remember how in my childhood any kid with a PC at home would do some tinkering and exploration. Today’s kids scroll, and scroll, and scroll.
Mind-boggling actually, my sister (now kinda helpless with computers) was making websites and RPGs with RPGMaker2000, my younger cousin who is a designer was - I actually don’t remember what she was doing, but something connected to editing amateur films they were making with my older cousin, who’s a software engineer now.
Getting back to various pressures, this reduces the space for personal computing free from corporate and governmental policies. And this also reduces the unwanted effects from more creative entertainment - people who do something as a hobby are a direct competition to corporate gaslighting. The contrast is like between an 18yo girl on a rock festival and a Soviet propaganda poster. The latter never wins. And such a situation sadly negatively affects the chances of people getting the kinds of hobbies corps wouldn’t want them to have.
Automate terra forming against climate change. I want big machines and swarms of drones doing 24/7 regreening and planting forests in the desert.
#NO
Repairable technology with encouragement to repair things that break by designing them to be fixable.
Open source technologies becoming the rule, rather than the exception (this is already the case in some ways, but I truly mean EVERYTHING).
Open Standards that make interoperability easier by removing walled gardens (iMessage, G-Sync, etc).
Raze Silicon Valley to the ground and start over?
No: the bad guys will build another one.
However if 250 million Americans each spent 400 hours less on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the next 12 months, the shareholders might have the heads of many members of those corporate boards on pikes.
That just makes it even easier for Wall St to enshittify whatever comes after
Ugh I hate that you’re right. Until we figure out capitalism we’re fucked.
I think you wanted to write “democratic communism” 😏😂
Don’t need to take things further than market socialism to fix the problems with capitalism.
Taking patent, trademark, and copyright laws to what they were in, say, 1790, might be a good start.
Regard today’s billionaires with the same contempt that one does of criminals.
Wait at least 5 years before buying a new computer.
Don’t pay by credit card.
My almost six year old 9900k machine is still playing everything amazingly, with a video card update being my only change. I love it so much.
My iPhone is also six years old and the only reason I’m upgrading this month is to get 120hz, USB-C, and a better low light camera for cat pictures. A terabyte would be nice, too.
Don’t pay by credit card.
This is bad advice for anyone with good credit and spending habits. A credit card with rewards is just free money if you’re responsible with it. I haven’t paid interest in over a decade and have made thousands from rewards.
Yep, the rich are rich because they borrow other peoples money. 0% free interest lines are about the best discount you can get on anything. I get to make the interest while you hold the loan? Sign me up! Siri, remind me in 11 months to pay off the X loan.
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Depends on the situation honestly. We offer financing through my work for our clients and the 0% option is still a good deal. Not all of them are designed to screw people.
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I haven’t paid interest in over a decade and have made thousands from rewards.
I’m not too familiar with credit cards, do you mean this in a literal money sense or something more complex, i.e. the value of rewards & money?
We pay for EVERYTHING on our credit card, shared account with my partner. 2% money back. Pay it off in full every month. Zero interest paid, thousands of monies back.
One of the better credit card rewards is a small percentage cash back, so literally free money. Money is fungible though, so any discounts on things you were going to buy anyway are effectively the same thing.
You pay with your data lol
The reason why corpos been able to price gouge the peasants is particulaly to tp them having access to data this granular. Same reason why they want dynamic pricing schemes.
Fair enough, but they know what you bought.
Yes, but you can also do a chargeback if the company you purchased from sold you a lousy product and isn’t being reasonable about returning it. If you had paid with cash, that cash is GONE.
Each method has its pros and cons.
If you had paid with cash, that cash is GONE.
not if I have a receipt.
And? How has that harmed you overall?
Not saying I like that they track everything but I’ve yet to see it impact me personally.
Not to mention the security that comes from being able to not pay if you get scammed for whatever reason. I paid for a course at a community college with a credit card, but then my schedule changed so I tried to cancel the class before it even started. The college gave me a whole runaround, and whether it was willful or just simple incompetence, I wasn’t able to get a refund. So I called my credit card company and explained the situation to them, and they resolved the whole thing for me. Sometimes even mentioning that you’ll refer such a problem to the fraud department at your credit card company is enough to get someone to back down and give you a refund.
Credit cards have issues, especially if you have problems with using them responsibly, but that’s one particular way in which they can save you a lot of headache.
There are no free money. These are loans. And making them attractive with cashbacks and rewards is done to trap unresponsible spenders. 95% of the time you don’t need to borrow money from the bank, unless you are in emergency or you are to invest these to achieve some payback (e.g. a loan to open your business).
These are loans. And making them attractive with cashbacks and rewards is done to trap unresponsible spenders
I am aware, which is why I specifically said
This is bad advice for anyone with good credit and spending habits.
For people who aren’t irresponsible spenders, it’s a bad financial decision not to take the short term bank loan. Sure, I don’t need to spend the banks money because I have enough in my checking account to cover it. But by not doing so, I lose money on any transactions that don’t charge me a fee to run my card.
If you’re not responsible enough to use a credit card and not destroy your finances, absolutely do not use them. But for those of us who are, it’s a dumb idea to eschew it just because you have the money on hand. Like I said, I haven’t paid interest in a decade and have made thousands from my normal spending habits.
If I followed your advice, I would be objectively worse off, because I’d be losing money from my rewards for no benefit whatsoever. And I can guarantee I’d be materially worse off, since my credit card is the reason my credit is as good as it is, and that bullshit has a pervasive and perverse effect on your life. It’s not only loans that are impacted, but insurance, housing and employment can be as well. So maybe I should have left good credit off, since responsible spending will build your credit up even if it is bad currently.
TL;DR - responsible credit card use is a good thing, and foregoing it just because you have money on hand is a bad financial decision. Pay that shit off immediately and there’s no material downside and you still get all the benefits.
Irresponsible vs responsible is how the credit card companies frame it, but I think most of the time it’s about luck. The kind of luck where the primary income gets hit by a car or someone in the family gets cancer.
“AI will make all of your work obsolete, there’s nothing we can do about it. Shame…”
I’m fine with losing my job, it’s tedious anyway. I’m not with losing my income though. Let automation and programs do the work and share the fruit of their labor to the people. Get rid of CEOs.
Then we can talk about optimism.
AI-CEOs should be a thing to work towards.
Who decides their programming? Are they bound to ethics or shareholder wealth? Better get rid of shareholders as well.
Ah yes, like a CEO but for the workers.
I can live with that
If people stopped using tech to exploit people they would stop feeling exploited by it
“People” is a great word. Who do you mean exactly for these roles? Who’s doing what here?
As usual, most people who have control of how technology is used on a broad scale are in positions of power suitable for exploitation. That is, the people I’m talking about are business owners and high-level executives (and the government) using technology to exploit workers. To be fair, that’s not always the dynamic-- “normal” people can exploit each other too, and businesses and the government can as well. But it is the most pressing issue imo, because of the power imbalance. See also rent comtrol algorithms, automated insurance claim denials, etc.
Reduce tech bro and VC headcount via analog French method.
Is this the same method the guy who discovered Oxygen was subjected to? If yes, I’d smash the “Oui” button.
Uh, NOT put surveillance and extremely questionable AI into everything? I don’t need my toilet tweeting how healthy I am
Most of the venture capital that fueled the techno booms were Russian - hence all this dumb “Let’s make everything family friendly!” (anti-LBGTQ, anti-NSFW) mindset. Now that money is going … elsewhere.
Source: my tinfoil hat
No, you don’t understand. The tin foil hat protects me from the government brainwashing 5g cell towers.
Those things are useful as fuck. At first they blocked mind controlling aliens. Then it also worked against mind-reading NSA. And now it blocks brainwashing 5G. The DoD must be spending trillions to bypass tinfoil technology.
Open source.
Break up the mega corps. Enact user privacy-by-default laws. Market dominance via “free product” followed up by bait and switch tactics should be outlawed.
This would be a great start. Strong Antitrust = Competition.
Build anarcho-communism, thereby removing any incentives to enshittify.
I always find it very funny when someone suggests anarcho-something as a solution to all of capitalism’s problems. How exactly do you plan to enforce that? Do you think social pressure & shunning will do anything more than create a class of extremists with an oppositional philosophy?
It’s a rather bold claim to be able to create a system where you can achieve more power honestly than cannibalizing others. It’s a good ideal goal, of course, and people are optimizing for it, but no, that’s not a realistic solution.
Well first we kill all they
lawyersInvestment Bankers.Then all the lawyers.
Any time anyone is able to claw back some scraps of justice or get some kind of recompense for wrongs or - here’s a big one - change the law: that’s lawyers too. The characterization of all lawyers as sharks and assholes has done more to exacerbate the justice gap then help.
Yes! The whole “lawyers are evil money grabbers” is a corporate psy-op. They want you to think it’s unreasonable for a person to sue a corporation when the corporation’s actions are harmful. They also want you to think defense attorneys are people who just look for technicalities to free guilty people.
They created armies of lawyers for themselves, while making americans distrustful of the ones fighting for normal people. We used to think of lawyers like Atticus Finch or Perry Mason. But now we just think of Saul Goodman and Lionel Hutz.
or Perry Mason.
Loved those books. Maybe he’s too perfect a character morally, but still.
