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Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, Social Problems

I feel much better now, thank you. How are you?

Oh btw if you’re, like, 15 and you’re confused because you’ve seen pictures of Steve Huffman, don’t worry, you’re not having a stroke, that’s Ned Beatty in Network (1976).

Yes, I regret using the sensationalized language. Reddit is not “dying” so much as it is “continuing its transition into the same homogeneous para-social media service as the other tech giants in that space.” The elements that made Reddit special are continuing to slip away in a series of predictable corporate moves. Everybody taking out their frustrations on Huffman is par for the course, but it’s not his fault. This is just the way of the Eternal September. It will come for the ActivityPub systems eventually. The people who created ActivityPub (the federation protocol underneath Lemmy, Kbin, et. al.) have actually already moved on to the “next next” generation of social media architecture: https://spritely.institute/

Reddit is dying. Its goals as a growth-oriented corporation are inherently contrary to its original nature as a community center. I have to give them props for dragging it out as long as they have (and will). All the factors that made Reddit possible and desirable still exist; in fact, the ActivityPub federation protocol enables an even more powerful form of collaboration that transcends a lot of the negative aspects of Reddit’s design.

Give it time. Make content! Tell people about this wonderful new generation of media. Consider it an opportunity to engage with the glory days of a new form of internet media. Which it is.

Only if being “entitled to the fruits of labor” does not preclude the state (or any state-like entity, don’t even start with me) from seizing and/or arbitrating the value of that fruit. If that’s the case, what is the value of the so-called entitlement?

The reason private property is vital to a just society is that we do not know the ultimate purpose of society. We can not even estimate the size of the universe; claiming to understand the role of mankind without knowing its position in the cosmos is like claiming to understand a blood cell with no knowledge of the circulatory system. We all have exactly the same right and cause to determine the purposes of our own lives. Different life goals lead to different evaluations of goods and services. I do not eat flesh, listen to K-pop, or ski. To appropriate the value of my labor for the benefit of these systems for which I have no use is a violation of my natural right to determine the purpose of my own life

The abolition of private property.

I suspect we may be operating on slightly different definitions of communism.

I’d love a longer bio. I can only fit a few links in there right now. It’s definitely code, not config, but I haven’t found if it’s set in lemmy-ui or in the API/DB. I could also understand if that’s too expensive, but would like to see it addressed.

You kinda get what you deserve for doing real politics in 196

Try not to take it too personally: the commies are extra sensitive at the moment because they have to share the fediverse with a giant influx of liberals. You’d probably be upset if they were pouring into your space. Not that anybody owns it, but we all take things for granted. It’ll cool off.

edit: the gears of this sarcasm machine are lubricated by Marxist tears

For a split second I was like, “What is wrong with your cats?!” Thanks for sharing, friend.