How can it be unfair? People are free to do what they want with their money. I think it would be unfair if you would be the judge of which projects I am allowed to donat to. That, if anything, is unfair.
If you want equal fame, invent your own programming language that will be used widely, and surely, you will get interest and people investing in your ideas. Just sitting and complaining however, is exactly the behaviour which would signal to me that I will never invest in your projects.
Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write. Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other).
At least we now know that the EU and China are closer in terms of ideology and control than we first thought. It is sad, but such is life.
>Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write.
Yes, they just made a big step in that direction by requiring age verification on social media for everyone :(
> Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
That is not happening though. But they are building the machinery to do things like this.
I don't think we'll ever see an EU law specifically mandating disconnection / imprisonment of individuals who disagree with the prevailing narrative.
An EU law that puts large fines on social media companies for doing entirely unrelated things, like, let's say, personalized advertising? A law that makes it almost impossible to operate profitably in the EU if enforced, but one that the government can enforce selectively? A law that lets the EU commission brand certain companies as "Gatekeepers" if it so wishes, while leaving others unbranded? A law that could, perhaps, be enforced far less strictly against companies which, due to their outstanding moral principles and care for humanity, choose to ban (or, better, algorithmically deboost) certain individuals, or maybe entirely voluntarily act as concerned citizens and report them to law enforcement, with no official duty to do so? Now that sounds a lot more believable.
> An EU law that puts large fines on social media companies for doing entirely unrelated things, like, let's say, personalized advertising?
But this is not about fines on companies. It is to force age sniffing onto people.
The state sniffs for ID here. That's the new part.
> care for humanity, choose to ban (or, better, algorithmically deboost) certain individuals
I think in France there is the three-strikes crap law. After that people are forbidden to access the www.
This is terrorism by a state. And censorship. Typical for a dictatorship. The label
democracy is just equally as fake here as Putin's Duma "elections" auto-awarding the genocidal dictator with "now I can mass-mobilize people and kill many thousand people more".
But sadly they are building the perfect infrastructure to support a genuinely totalitarian state. If, in a future election somebody gets elected who wants to put this structures to use, I guess then we'll be in trouble!
> requiring age verification on social media for everyone :(
This is not the end goal though.
The end goal is forcing this onto everyone. Show ID, show what
you visit, otherwise you will not be able to access the internet.
That is the real agenda. They just use salami steps, by trying
to convince people that this is about the kids. It was never about
the kids and never will be - kids are just the excuse, similar to
other laws claiming protection against terrorisms. These are all lies.
> Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
If there's one thing that distinguishes leftist regimes it corporate friendly property law policies to enable free markets.
> The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other).
That sounds better to me? Civil society spaces shouldn't be for making money and vice versa. Surely we can't look at what's happened to twitter where you basically get corporate sponsorship for rage baiting on the internet and think that's an improvement? The most effective political action recently has been hyperlocal neighbourhood groups getting mad and turning up to data centre meetings en-masse and letting local representatives know that they are all know where they live. Spouting off on the internet has been weaponised to force people into inaction and is easily corralled as there are so few of these mega platforms and they're easy to buy and manipulate centrally.
leftist != Liberal. And the EU leftists aren't liberal in any real way. That's why terms like left and right don't mean anything outside of a specific place and time and even then, its just shorthand. If they were liberal, none of this would be happening.
Being liberal is hard but saying you are liberal is a great way to hide socialist and authoritarian tendencies. And that's the problem. If they were actually liberal, they wouldn't be censoring the Internet. Liberals believe in free speech, socialists don't. Its a big tell as which kind of leftist you are.
I am from EU, leftist, socialist and liberal (the left parts), and I can assure you, (a) most leftists (90%) are as liberal and antiauthoritarian as it gets, and (b) we are as powerless to change these things as you are.
Possibly, if you choose to believe me, things can change, but it's on you.
Liberal doesn't mean supporting liberty, it means some interpolation between supporting free markets (neoliberal means just this one), and pretending that as long as we just follow the established institutional norms everything is fine and there is no need for radical change. It's synonymous right now for "centrist" - note that political labels drift over time.
Liberalism has both economic (free market) roots and political roots. The first "leftists" were the French revolutionaries and they wanted (political) freedom as well. The reason liberalism is in the "center" is because both left and right tried to appropriate it. (Although I think liberalism, in the sense of individual freedom, is a distinct value from other values such as conservative/authoritarian or socialist/communal.)
In the EU the leftists have no significant powers so not sure why we even talk about them here. The EU right now is ran by mostly centrists and right-wingers.
The real things that kill the internet is tech bros who learned you can make money with the internet and ofcourse AI which will make sure the internet becomes bots who communicate with other bots.
Pinephone is close to useless. Fairphone 5 I think is as good as it gets if you want to avoid android. It is annoying though that fairphone 6 is not working with linux.
We don't, and sadly accept the cost of our principles. What I generally do, is to put on the blinken lights, and try to hurry up. Up to about 20 minutes or so, it generally works alright.
Make the AI companies responsible for all destructive use of their tools, and they will shape up. Imagine a million or a billoion dollar fine per hack, and they will correct mighty fast.
Add to that, that just like AI:s are good at finding security holes to exploit, they can just as easily be used to protect sites. So once IT-security managers start to use AI to hack themselves, and plug the holes, the average security will spike up, and AI-fueled hacks will become more and more rare.
That does however imply, that AI is released to everyone and not kept away to a few secret actors who can use it. That is why open weight/source AI is so important, and why we must have many AI companies competing. No single actor must be allowed, through regulatory capture, to get a government monopoly on AI. That way lies disaster.
Because EU is a socialist and authoritarian project that will lead to war and disaster. Only the nationalist right has realized this, and the people are angry. It's boiling under the surface. The EU will either slowly sink down into irrelevance, or if noting is done, and the evil expands, it will lead to outright war.
If you want equal fame, invent your own programming language that will be used widely, and surely, you will get interest and people investing in your ideas. Just sitting and complaining however, is exactly the behaviour which would signal to me that I will never invest in your projects.
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