A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
We went from mass surveillance to hardware confiscation real quick.
These companies are so large that they don’t need the consumer market anymore. The consumer is now the competition. They can essentially purchase the entire planet’s output of computing hardware years in advance to force us out of the market and lease it back to us at inflated rates. Then, they turn all that tensor compute against us to make everyone’s life a living digital surveillance hell.
Forget Internet freedom, computational liberty is now at risk. Who needs all that expensive legal and technological architecture to steal your data, report on you to the government, and enforce DRM when they control bare metal access to your rented corporate cloud hardware because consumer PC equipment is too astronomically expensive to afford for the average person?
We need to elevate the prosecution of anti-trust to the level of religious inquisition, and burn these companies at the stake. They’re using AI to literally enslave humanity, and it’s working.
This is essentially market manipulation via speculation. The artificially create scarcity to drive up demand and price. They do it with food, they do it with housing, and they do it with healthcare. The basic things we need to survive are being held by fewer and fewer owners; then held hostage by those owners via monopolization; just to squeeze more from us. The earth is a fucking resort for the 3000 billionaires in this world, and the rest of us are allowed to work here at the pleasure of our overlords.
To be honest I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about. It’s value is only derived from its ability to identify + track me, either for my convenience or for the highest bidder’s. Computational liberty is only an issue because we’ve made everything digital by default and that mindset has leaked into critical social functions (taxes, law, logistics, healthcare, etc…).
Software and data bloat is more astronomical than most people realize. Only about 10% of persisted data is ever touched again (don’t look up the ecological implications). Amazon could capture 90% of all compute hardware and the entire human race could get by just fine on 10%. We wouldn’t have access to niceties like app stores full of niche apps, 24MP phone cameras, 4k movies, 10 sluggish layers of software abstraction, 15 years of photos you never look at, etc…
But you could run a simple message server on basically any scrap of IoT e-waste. A highly available static website can be hosted with an old phone and a solar panel. Any device (fridge/watch/calculator/pregnancy test) can run Doom. All of Apollo 11’s source code is a fraction of the size of most web pages.
We’re continously expanding our hardware usage for infinitesimally small gains. We should demand that our governments legislate digital austerity for dozens of reasons, just pick what resonates best for you. Personal privacy, energy usage, ecological damage, corporate capture, information rot, brittle supply chains, national security, etc…
The old technologies that we used to use for websites never really went away. They’re still around, and you can use them to make websites again if you want.
It’s just that it won’t be as fancy looking as a newer web-site, but you don’t lose too much on functionality.
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
We made physical toys and games into something expensive for adults and kicked kids out of the equation.
Now all they have are videogames and the most affordable ones (the ones on PC) are soon to disappear.
Good luck killing off older games, though.
FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT
I’ve been screaming this since Crucial closed up
People have been screaming this since right to repair, since FOSS, since Microsoft in the 90s, since stallman. Consumers consistently lose because the vast majority of people don’t give a shit and politicians that could regulate our way out of this are easily purchased.
I can’t agree with this more, but what’s the plan exactly?
Foe me its make your own.
If the big companies wont make the things we want, im going to make it myself. Kinda already am with my bespoke laptop I built…
Ok. One more time for everyone in the back. Ready?
Tax.
The.
Wealthy.
I couldn’t agree more with this either, but they’ve said no, and the politicians are being bought, so as a citizen, besides not buying their shit slurry, what is there to actually do about it more actively. I guess it’s just local politics, ultimately I don’t know in the aggregate how much it helps with these guys who have so much money they just wield it like a hammer. Not that that should be a good enough reason to do nothing
Keeping the issues in the conversation is good, but ideas and words only work so well, eventually someone has to enable mechanisms to do these things in reality, otherwise its just corps sucking each other off at the common person’s expense all the way to hell
stop funding their bullshit
A men
Sounds perfect for some trust-busting action. If only we had a capable government…
Stay aware. Keep up with happenings. :3
You know, I feel that’s causing a lot of distress, and not just for myself. I think maybe they also want desperate people, which might be why they’ve built their bunkers
E: shit, I don’t want to be more of a downer than I have to be, been there for too long, not helpful. There’s no way to win a war other than keep up the morale, thanks for the cat face, it did make me smile for what it’s worth lol ˄_~
And to be helpful this was something I came by last week in case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, it’s about as optimistic a thing that’s come about recently. And I’ll add it took me a hot minute to find it on my phone, despite knowing exactly which video I was looking for…
[redacted]