see, this just makes you come off like a jagoff.

the rampant consumerism in nerd spaces seems to disprove the Lemmy title in the large, even if this specific example indicates the opposite wrt marketing by software firms aimed at developers.

the only thing I could think of with a smart fridge is being able to check the contents from your phone while you are at the store to see if you need milk or whatever…but that’s not really a problem that justifies ads and the absolute invasion of privacy and the fact that the thing is likely about as secure as a wooden fence on a bank vault

if you bought a smart fridge, you get what you deserve

consider the Dot Com Bubble: the internet obviously didn’t disappear but that doesn’t mean there weren’t serious economic consequences.

I’m not saying that I think roblox should be protected from a lawsuit, I made a bad joke about how roblox exploited child labor with their outrageous percentages on their store (I have no idea if that still happens because I’m perpetually ~10 years behind everything in pop culture)

I think I worded that poorly; Roblox is infamous for exploiting the labor of children, in the form of user-created content, to generate a shitton of money on their store by taking a (rather large) percentage of the sales.

Would be pretty silly if roblox lost a lawsuit for letting someone else exploit children through their platform.

Just to clarify:. I am not saying that it would be silly if roblox lost this particular lawsuit but rather the possibility that the law holds negligence to be somehow worse than the direct exploitation of children that Roblox openly participates in through their less-than savory user-created content store

Self-hosting is your only safe option

but then nobody gets your emails because you aren’t one of the big boy domains.

Email was not designed for the modern internet and not just on the security front. But we just kept beating at it with a hammer until it was a vaguely square shaped peg and put it in the hole anyways.

What a coincidence; I’ve been seeing no roku laetely

The conflict of interest here is pretty obvious, and if anybody was suckered into believing this guy’s prognostications on his company’s products perhaps they should work on being less credulous.

through the secret force technique of “who gives a fuck”

deleted by creator

his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is also well worth a read.

I think his ideas on concentration camps/prison camps slot in nicely with Deleuze’s ideas about Control Societies and the ways that technology is being used to extend the Foucaultian ideas of discrete enclosures to never-ending enclosures in all aspects of life.

And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich’s work. He’s another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he’s another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.

many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)

A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control”, which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.

The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn’t always the most accessible

there’s a lot of mid-century French theorists spinning in their graves right now

IRC continues to demonstrate the superiority of protocols over platforms. Unfortunately, the modern internet is entirely dominated by centralized platforms and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

is there currently any work being done to do that though? It’s great that that is possible but if nobody is doing it, it’s only a cute hypothetical.