This meme was made by a “know it all”.

Honestly, and I may be wrong, I think Thiel is the one who owns everybody. Musk is nothing more than the court jester and he is too narcissistic and stupid to realize how he’s as much of a puppet as trump is. Maybe even more so. Thiel is really scary because he’s actually smart enough to know how to play the game and keep a semi low profile. I think he’s happy Musk steals the show.

It may be a conspiracy and I want to wait and see before I commit to it, but there has been some talk about how Thiel’s end goal is to destroy old civilization and create techno states where people like him are the overlords who have complete control and freedom to do as they please without any legislations and restrictions getting in their way. He has been talking about this since 2009, maybe even further back, of how he wants his own techno state that is separate from the laws of the rest of the world.

It sounds so fucking insane to me that I haven’t really talked to anyone about it in case I’m just falling for some crazy conspiracy shit, but looking at what they have been doing since trump got into office, it certainly looks like they are in the process of actively and knowingly dismantling and destroying America. Musk said as much: that they were going to tear down and rebuild the nation. But fuck it if I know what the true end goal is. It might as well be a bunch of rich boys who have collectively lost their minds and think they are living in a cool action movie and are too stupid to understand what they are doing.

Reminds me of how millennials and generations onward have learned less and less maintainence skills to the point where most of us can’t sow or fix shit if it’s broken because we grew up in a consumer culture where you just buy a new one when the old one breaks. The quality of products have decreased too so they break quicker which gives people incentive to buy a new one instead of fixing.

My parents generation hold on to old items and they patch up their clothes and know how to fix shit around the house but they didn’t teach me any of that because the culture shifted and it wasn’t really needed.

We are not only losing skills and tactile learning and understanding, we are also rapidly torpedoing out planet into a massive trash heap. Which is a bit of a duh, I know, but still.

I for one have noticed the insane decline in the quality of clothes after covid. It is shockingly shitty now and tears faster than ever. Shirts and leggings I bought ten years ago still hold up while similar shirts and leggings from a few years ago already tear or unravel. It is shocking. I guess this is what will eventually happen to art too.

Put out an arrest on Peter Thiel too, since he is the real puppet master of all this bs.

I dunno man. Depending on the age and person, it can be pretty difficult to get into how computers work. It really isn’t as much of a given as we think it is. I’m sure there are some older people who are just lazy, but I don’t think it is the case for everybody. Some older people don’t use computers unless they have to. They don’t spend time on them in their spare time to get more acquainted with how they work. For many it wasn’t a part of their lives for the first fifty years they spent on this planet. I’m in my mid 30s and I have areas of modern technology where I have just accepted that I can’t and won’t keep up because I simply don’t have the time, motivation or patience for it. I will learn if it is a necessity, but I also have limits to how many new things I can take in at this point while also having to earn money and pay my bills and maybe live a little on the side. So it is with that in mind that I think it is very much appropriate to cut many older people some slack and maybe have a little bit of empathy for where they are coming from.

Yeah. I think this is a pretty good point you are making there! Zoomers may not understand the tech language we grew up with, but in turn, we don’t understand the tech language they have grown up with either. It’s kinda like slang. It evolves over time and makes communication between generations awkward haha.

I think, for me, I feel uncomfortable relying so much on the tech doing a lot of the work for me. There is a loss of control in a sense even though it may make life more convenient in some areas (and not in others). It’s kinda like having to use a dishwasher for the first time and not really understanding how to operate it and then washing dishes by hand still, because that’s what you’re comfortable with.

Can’t blame a generation that wasn’t raised on computers as well as you can’t blame a generation that was raised by algothrims. I’m a millennial too, one of the older ones, and I have felt my tech literacy decay over the past ten years as the cancer that is silicon valley has spread and dominated the internet. It is to the point that I feel so trapped when I try to do anything online that becoming passive feels like the only choice if you play their game.

I have the benefit of remembering what the internet used to be like and what it still has the potential to be in the future, but the youths of today never experienced that. To them the internet is a feeding machine that encourages nay grooms them into becoming passive consumers. I can’t blame someone who literally never got the chance to learn because some tech bro scumbags in America decided that they should abuse their power to turn people into addicts.

For real. My preferred forum was closed I’m 2015 after 13 years active. Facebook killed it. I will never understand why people chose Facebook over that forum. You could blog and post pictures and chat with people in peace and quiet without having to deal with the entire world looking in on your cringe teenage angst.

Generally, I just remember how all these forums and blogsites that used to make up the internet were pretty much dead and gone by 2017. The art community went from having good platforms like Tumblr and deviantart to having to deal with the nightmare that is Instagram and Twitter. There still hasn’t been a good alternative to artists posting their artwork since Instagram took over. It was a shittification then and it has only gotten worse since. But people now have grown up with this bullshit and therefore they don’t question or demand better. They don’t know what it used to be like to be an artist online. It was fun and inspiring. AI slob hasn’t helped the matter either.

Danish

Pancakes = pandekager

American pancakes = amerikanske pandekager

Also:

SocCeR = fodbold

foOtbaLL = amerikansk fodbold

Fair enough.

I have talked to some Americans who claims that sperm + egg = baby and I want to place an egg in front of them and ask them what it is and if they say anything other than a chicken, I will laugh.

Also, thank you for the distinction. Kind of insane to call embryos babies. It is shit like this that makes me feel like my brain is shrinking when I talk to some people online.

I’m sure he will do his damnedest to dismantle everything, but I don’t believe he will succeed. He may get away with it for a little while, but this shit isn’t going to last.

I fully believe it will be the wake up call America has desperately needed for a very long time. Countries like Russia and China never really had democracy and they never had freedom as a value so that is why I don’t think trump will be successful in the long term with his little stunt here. It will get worse before it gets better and America is currently in the finding out phase that we learned in Europe in the 40s.

That is how I look at it.

The short answer: yes.

The long answer: it will take a long time to completely dismantle a democracy in a country as big and complex as America. You don’t just do that in three months.

All trump has done so far is move as fast as possible to make as much of a mess as possible in the hopes that some of his nutty ideas goes through once the system catches up to him. And the system will catch up to him and Musk and all the other cunts who are having their little ego fest currently.

I have patience. Kind of. I look forward to seeing the consequences of their actions come to haunt them. I also hope this period in American politics will be the wake up call America needs to hopefully bar politicians and political parties from taking donations from big corps essentially try to buy the government and weaken true democracy from flourishing. The US isn’t the only country with this problem, but it is certainly neck deep in one of the worst outcomes of letting big corporations take ownership of a government.

Totally agree! I’m not 100% opposed to your idea, I’m just not a good sales person so if I tried to convince people on Facebook to move away from that platform, I would most likely end up being seen as a conspiracy theorist or something like that.

Before I left facebook I did post a comment in my feed where I announced I’d be leaving Facebook within a certain time frame and that people could find me this and that place, at this or that email and on the phone if they had my number. Wrote a bit about why I had had enough of Facebook, didn’t make it political, but focused instead on how Facebook no longer felt like a place where I could interact with family and friends, but more like an advertisement platform where I may be lucky to see one or two posts from people I care about inbetween an endless scroll of ads and brainrot content.

My biggest surprise was how quick some of my friends were to reach out to keep in contact and some were eager to move to Signal so we could still talk conveniently in the future (lets face it, text isnt always the most convenient communication form lol). That was a surprise because I literally thought no one would care that I left.

I will do my best to share things like Signal and the European alternatives with people I care about irl and leave the online convincing to the pros xD I could probably spread the word about feddit on reddit since I haven’t deleted my profile yet, just the app. I feel like reddit would be more open to this since more people on there are invested in online communities unlike most people on Meta who just use those platforms to connect with people they know irl already.

Too late for me haha. I already went off the grid. I think over time I will talk friends into using things like Signal and with family I’ll just let them know how and why I left Meta. Almost no one I know uses reddit or even know it exists so it wouldn’t make sense trying to pull them onto Feddit.

Most of my family members use Meta platforms and are generally indifferent to the problems with that. It is easy and convenient for them and I don’t think they care all that much about it. As far as I know, I am the only one in my family who is “terminally online” for better or worse and most of my family members have a very superficial relationship with the internet - for better or worse. I will only say something about why I left, how I left and what alternatives are if it ever comes up at family gatherings. No one wants to listen to someone who’s trying to push something on them, so casually talking about the hows and why’s I did this and that will be my strategy.

The only one in my family who has always been based (if that word is still okay to use) is my dad. He has been ahead of his time with almost every single issue we all deal with today. Environment, politics, social media, you name it. He told us all super early when Facebook was still new that he wanted no pictures of him on that thing because you never know what they will use people’s information for. He regularly sends me pictures over MMS of articles about current events and today he sent me a list of american products to boykot. I still believe the most important American products to boykot is social medias and not coca cola, toothpaste and body wash. Sure those products are american originally, but they are produced locally by local companies with a license so we would probably hurt local businesses more than american businesses by boycotting them.

Online platforms however, is directly given and monitored by America and leaving them would take away Zuckerburger’s, Bezo’s, Musk’s and Pichai’s power. And by extension America’s power. They have an almost monopoly on the internet today, have discouraged us from seeking and destroyed the growth possibilities for other platforms. In that sende I am grateful for Trump that he is such an insufferable cunt that some of us has finally had enough.

I think, though, that the change will have to happen organically. I will rather talk with friends and family about it irl than return to Meta and play missionary for people who either don’t care or don’t understand what is actually happening right now. I believe the big shift will happen among the youths. They are the future of the internet after all, and they already have made the move to walk away from American platforms and are mostly on tiktok today. I’m sure that if they find that there are other alternatives that restrict them less and allows them to create and speak their minds without massive censorship, they will go there. I have faith in the youth.