Civil liberty and privacy advocates have been saying that surveillance capitalism and dragnet mass surveillance aren’t just a direct attack on our civil liberties, but were a trojan horse that would be used to attack and dismantle democracy if they weren’t heavily restricted.

Neoliberals and conservatives have spent the last 80 years building big brother FOR fascism, and the fascists used all the tools built by surveillance capitalism to stage their coup. Rather ironically, if the tens of trillions spent to build it went to social services instead, fascism 2.0 may have never materialized.

It seems most don’t know this is a socrates quote

I’ve been saying it since 2015, but it bears repeating!

The global conservative propaganda machine — lead by the US and Russia — is using all of the data obtained from surveillance capitalism to target, A/B test, and iterate on psychological warfare across social media in real-time (as close to as the platforms allow). The most criminally corrupt and sociopathic benefit the most, as there is no limit to how depraved they will go — bots, lies, disinformation, deep fakes, utilizing actual criminal enterprises and scam operations, illegally obtained data — they will do whatever it takes to succeed.

There really isn’t much difference between persuading you to buy a product and persuading you to vote for a political party; they both attack similar weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and the process of building the data pipelines and statistical models is nearly identical. People who knew history were always saying that this is what surveillance capitalism would lead to eventually. I don’t think any of us thought it would happen so quickly, but the lack of regulation and highly centralized nature of social media meant that a relatively small operation could access 90% of the Internet using population.

• American Republicans are considered far-right fascist authoritarians to the rest of the developed world, and rarely get more than a few % of votes.

Global capitalism will lick the boot of fascism. I guarantee it.

🤨… You ever heard of a place called China?

This is expected. A hallmark of fascism is state capitalism — a fusion of the corporation and the state — with corporations administered more like org units of the fascist party.

Many of us have been saying that this is the natural end state of capitalism all along, if it’s allowed to run its course.

How about you go research the projected vs actual cost of historic NASA projects, instead of commenting on something you apparently have not researched at all, and know nothing about?

Wait until you find out how much more most IT and military projects cost than projected…

It doesn’t matter that he has several hundred billion more votes than anyone. Money is speech bro. Legalized bribery is democracy. Well it was. Now fascism and dictatorship are democracy. That’s called Freedom™️!

The difference isn’t whether or not NASA could do this. The difference is that NASA’s been funded by an anti-intellectual plutocracy who’d prefer to get rich bombing peasants in the middle east than do anything which would actually benefit humanity.

SpaceX engineers were people inspired by NASA, and would’ve likely ended up at NASA if the 4 year election cycle didn’t sabotage most projects.

Decomposition is irrelevant. Nothing you flush decomposes by the time it gets to treatment (or the ocean / fuck the environment amirite). The main problem with these wipes is they don’t even break apart. Their little sabotage trojan horses that corporations injected into out sanitization systems, and we continue to let them falsely advertise, instead of fining them for ALL the damages they cause.

Yes, and I’m saying that the fact this could even be viewed by Microsoft as something that is worth going to trial, and being argued in court = hyper-capitalist dystopian dictatorship.

In a sane world not “by and for corporations”, this tactic would not even be in the realm of plausibility.

Why yes … I am aware 1+1=2

For anyone who thinks that was some incredible accomplishment… NASA has been landing rovers on Mars using truly incredible engineering that makes SpaceX look like a bunch of kids eating Baby Ruth bars in the sandbox.

You’re belittling and attacking the thousands of engineers and scientists who really built SpaceX, because their financier is a fascist sociopath. If you knew anything about this at all, you’d understand how exceptionally ignorant, naive, and disrespectful this is.

They do this because they are mentally ill.

This would be no different to you ordering food in a restaurant, them bringing you the wrong meal, you refusing because you didn’t order it, then they tell you to go fuck yourself and charge you for it anyway.

If this argument is valid in your judicial system then you live in a clown world capitalist dictatorship.

Testing ground for 5 eyes secret police mass surveillance

I expect it to go the way of Germany one century ago. If conservatives make authoritarian, bloodthirsty, change too quickly they run the risk of an armed revolution and civil war.

If they go slow and calculated over the next 10-20 years, like a serial killer, they can gradually shift the overton window to where your neighbors not only vocally support murder and terrorism, but actively facilitate or engage in it. In that time they can indoctrinate Gen Alpha to be the executioners, and follow through with a level of grotesque psychopathy Gen Z and millennials were never capable of.

No post mortem. Blind support for neoliberalism is the only way.

“Now’s not the time”

“Nobody could have predicted this”

etc…

As one of the dozens of people who are not American, I was chatting to my cousin the other day, and he said that after seeing the amount of dead kids that have come out of Gaza this year, and taking a mental health week off work due to the anxiety of watching the world not give a shit, he hopes Trump gets elected and America collapses into civil war… That Americans suffer for what their government has done, and is doing. He’s not a bad guy. Bad guys don’t have breakdowns from watching foreign children murdered.

I can’t logically support his view, but I completely emotionally understand it. He knew Trump would be objectively worse for humanity, but is a fascist genocide that kills 2 million people better than a fascist genocide that kills 5 million people? At that point you’re really just splitting hairs between failed states, and systems that deserve to be burned to the ground. After enough chances, opportunities, and desensitisation, you want the schadenfreude of watching the American electorate who voted for Trump shooting themselves in the face, destroying their livelihoods and lineage, along with all of their false patriotism and exceptionalism. I still suspect the conserva-russian PsyOps to be the main source of Trumps win, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s genocide is the straw that broke the Dems back.

That’s the entire point of capitalism. To generate as much profit from as little expense as possible. Unfortunately capitalism is predicated on a human workforce earning income to pay for goods and services, so at some point the economic engine will shutdown and capitalism will have killed capitalism. Either way, once the level of robotics + dumb AI is more cost effective than the available workforce in any role, that role will be eliminated. Once general AI is achieved and (especially once) the robots can build and repair themselves, the proles will either get star trek or whoever commands the killbots (including an AI) will rule humanity and inherit civilization.

NOTE: could happen at any time, but my bet’s on it not happening for many decades; possibly not for hundreds or thousands of years.