If you think the liberal desire to take away everything from you and the rollback of general purpose computing are unconnected, you are wrong. They are all part of the same comprehensive project of control. Not sure how to write about that without sounding like a conspiracy theorist (because it’s not a conspiracy in the classical sense), but it is nevertheless true.
Day: September 19, 2021, 12:55 PM
No Rena
Y'ever get struck by how much of "the tech sector" is built around treating general purpose home computing as a mistake?
I'm serious. From closed app stores to restricting screenshots while streaming to cloud based storage & subscription software.
— Clarissa Littler (@ClarissaAdjoint) September 17, 2021
It has been a tragedy, but a predictable one. Powerful corporations and the media (in the most general sense) have always despised general purpose computers and have been on a decades-long campaign to root them out. Now they have almost succeeded.
A large part of this has been by a very effective campaign to snooker the rubes by claiming it’s all been done for “security.” Even some of my very smart friends have fallen for this flimflam. (Sorry, friends, but if you believe they need to remove the ability to install what you like has anything to do with “security,” this is only true in the sense that they want to make the computer secure from you, the user.)
There was a brief time — maybe 15 years — when information became more widely available, computers were powerful and free of tampering and censorship, and there was no limit on the possibilities of what one could do with them. That world is gone now and not coming back. The great project of the last decade and now this one too is stuffing the information genie back in the bottle, and then burying the bottle under two miles of rubble.
Unsense
Saying "pregnant people" functions for the cultural left as saying “the election was stolen” does for the cultural right: the willingness to publicly aver such utter bullshit represents a “costly signal” as to your commitment to a tribal political identity https://t.co/Xx10e4oIgp
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) September 18, 2021
I do think the trans movement as it is now is largely harmful to women, and is getting worse all the time. Luckily, most people will rightly reject this nonsense just as they reject biological males dominating women’s sports.
Matchup
My favorite tennis match of all time. When Sharapova was playing uninjured, she was such a beast. The shot she hits about 18:55…what the fuck. There’s nothing better than watching two players so well-matched and so insanely good.
Going On
For me, the male Sally Rooney is Terry Pratchett. I bounced off Pratchett’s books as hard as I bounced off Rooney’s.
Whatever’s going on there in both cases is not for me.