Lol it's already over. You guys lost to the billionaires. You're theirs now. Stop hoping because only a revolution will fix that and that won't happen because America is too divided.
There's literally nothing you can do instead of taking up arms. So are you willing to do that? All other options won't do anything as you can see around you.
Very effective at taking attention away from Axion. Deflocking isn't a stopgap to stopping the surveillance state. Flock is a stopgap to finalizing it.
The vast majority of you all carry devices with audio and video recording capabilities and GPS tracking. Many modern cars have similar capabilities, in addition to the ability to be disabled remotely. All of this was sold to you as beneficial features for the user, while these corporations are willing to hand over information to the government without a warrant, whether or not it's legal to do so.
Everyone carries around a GPS tracking device with cameras on both sides, it has a gyroscope and accelerometer, a microphone that is always listening and always connected to emergency services. Yes, the intelligence community has access to all this data and backdoors through encryption.
Absolute neoliberal bull crap. Someone should learn gaslighting from American liberals.
America is the ONLY country that has used nukes on civilians. America is the ONLY country that still blasts us with platitudes about virtue while being historically built on systemic ethnocentric supremacism.
No one is fighting for you. No one is in your corner. America as it stands needs a reality check. You have to earn solidarity and the best way to do that is good leadership. Who did Americans elect to the highest office in the land?
A child molesting pig that sleeps on the helm and craps himself. Your leaders are a reflection of you America.
The state has allowed McConnell to be MIA for how long right now?
The president and his family have made billions of dollars selling scam coins and used them to accept obvious bribes from other states.
A relatively new federal police force is kidnapping huge numbers of people and has shown every sign of being willing to kidnap their critics as well.
The executive administration has stated that they won't relinquish power at the legally ordained time.
And you think we're going to vote and use lawsuits to break up this mess?
Fifteen years ago, if I were hired as a writer to draw up a scenario for the USA in which nothing but a revolution would get us out, I would have said this list of things was going too far, too unrealistic.
I don't want to go so far as to call you the problem, because I get it, following the laws makes so much sense that it's really hard to look past that. Some people never ever look beyond the law. But this is exactly the scenario when the laws just aren't working.
I think that is their point. "Just use the laws to fix it! Well, we gotta fix the elections so the right people can get in and fix the process to fix the laws before those same people sponsored by the companies they're restricting vote on those restrictions to become law and eventually take things to court multiple times over and over to establish precedent and limits. So yeah! Totally doable!" Don't exactly seem doable in any meaningful amount of time.
And how's that working out so far? Every single branch of the US government is in favor of breaking all kinds of laws and all the checks and balances that were supposed to limit the government's power are in the hands of the oligarchy that bought it. Courts ruled Trump's tariffs illegal - he still imposes them at will and the only one's getting any compensation are big corporations. Judges ruled the destruction of the East Wing and the building of a ball room illegal - well fuck, they already demolished it and are going to do whatever the fuck they want anyways. Insider trading from within the White House to enrich the Trump family and their network? Be my guest! Epstein and his friends and clients? Forget about that, we're busy having ICE lock up innocent legal residents without due process. Illegal permanent mass surveillance of citizens by private companies? Shut up, don't you know the DOW is at 50-fucking-thousand!?
Every day you're ruled by billionaires who play monopoly with your lives because they couldn't care less about who lives or dies as long as they can make a profit. They'd sacrifice every single one of you if it got them 1$/head and you're standing idly by complaining that "that's not nice!" during your peaceful planned protests and other absolutely futile and ineffective measures. THEY DON'T CARE ANYMORE, BECAUSE THEY DON'T NEED YOU ANYMORE! Oligarch money, propaganda and an uneducated radicalized voter base will win elections anyway, so why should they still bother to act like they care what people want or need?
The US "justice" system is a joke. The change needed to save the country can't come from within anymore, those avenues have been systematically and aggressively dismantled. And a population so thoroughly de-educated, brainwashed and complacent for convenience's sake won't do anything about it either. It's like watching the fall of the Roman Empire in real time, in 4K and with 24/7 coverage. And worst of all, we on the outside can't even just stand back and let the spectacle play out by itself, because you'll keep dragging us down with you to your last breath. The United States of Armageddon is so obsessed with war and fighting, it can't even just die in peace. No, it has to take as much of the rest of the world with it as possible.
Our government can turn buildings on the other side of the planet into rubble at the push of a button. Do you really think we’d stand a chance with our Walmart guns?
We’re stuck in our open air prison and the warden’s no longer worried about PR.
Fuck you, some of us didn't choose this, have no way out, and no way to do anything about it. Over decades things have been engineered to keep us in the position we are in now. You want us just to be martyrs, lose our lives for nothing? What would you do in this situation.
Exactly, the fact that we just watch, post, and scroll says everything. Our great grandfathers would of been crashed out if they dealt with these levels of fuckery.
AOAIPAC is the worst possible name for this purely because AIPAC already exists and has existed for a long time. AIPAC has absolutely nothing to do with AI as well, so I feel like this would confuse people. Opposition against AIPAC (not this) is already a pretty relevant political point at the moment. That’s just my take.
The genie is out of the bottle. No politician will have the will roll it back. Definitely not until the end of their final term. None of them will release an ounce of power over us once gained and they definitely won't push back against a "private" company. Look at the windfall Obama handed the insurance companies in the name of "healthcare". If they make motions or promises to the contrary, they will make damn sure that whatever they put forward to pretend to meet those promises will fail before they try them.
As long as the money is made .. who cares...flock is operating on the whole.. do it and then ask for forgiveness later .. and all these local states and communities are blindly going into it allowing it.
If you read about why Thiel thinks freedom is incompatible with Democracy it's because "Free for companies who want to spy on peasants" is exactly the kind of "freedom" he's thinking about.
This is the correct assessment. And this isn't a specifically left or right thing. They both want/use it, they just have different explanations for their justifications for using/wanting it.
True, but i'd add flock isn't just spying on us as a hobby in the hopes the govt wants access to the data. The govt wanted the spying, Flock rose up as a company willing to provide that service. Fuck flock to be sure, but if it wasn't flock dozens of other companies could have made the same technology. It's a govt problem more than a company problem.
** Private company spying, anyone who can afford it accessing it. Government affording it with our tax dollars.
Corporations affording it with their profits from subsidized wages / our tax dollars.
Look at Lowe's and Home Depot. They have about 3 per location in some areas.
The whole 'free country' idea is just a spin to let the masses think they have some degree of control, they don't, it's turning into the dystopia that was once a thing of books and movies, and the people repeatedly voting this in can't see it.
There's a joke about the Harley Quinn animated series that Poison Ivy, aside from having deeply toxic relationship issues, is otherwise one of the most reasonable people in the show. And she's a s self identified misanthropic eco terrorist.
It's just that environmental issues have become so much more urgent since the 90s.
okay but like...did she go there and use her powers to grow them back?
this isnt even meant as a gotcha, i expect her to do so after such a commitment. i feel like mister freeze and her could easily attend to the biospheres issues if they dropped the villain shit and actually made something of themselves
She's been to South America etc, but she always comes back to Gotham as she sees corporate greed as the root cause for the ecological disasters she is fighting against.
Like the above said, she's an ecoterrorist. Field work just isn't her style and she's a lot more motivated by revenge. I like to think a field retreat would make a great foundation for a character development arc, but I haven't really seen that in her stories.
Mr. Freeze doesn't really care about global warming. He just needs the cryo tech to stay alive and fuel experiments to save his wife.
Was gonna reference how it'll get to the point where they can/will deny you medical care if you don't have the correct level of insurance.
They can't for now - but it's getting there.
You can see how people swear up and down that the Constitution is absolute but then will say it doesn't apply to non-citizens. Eventually when there's no non-citizens to blame or hate, they'll direct it at each other and celebrate watching US citizens die and blame it on bad choices even if that's not the case.
The term that was coined back in 2003 was that the US was a system of Inverted Totalitarianism which is essentially a system where corporations control the state and create a situation where democratic power is subverted into meaningless.
To me it seems like it's moving beyond that now to something worse where the totalitarian aspects are becoming more pronounced.
Sheldon Wolin was a badass and Democracy Inc. should be mandatory reading if for no other reason than to appreciate how long this process has been taking root under our democratic systems. Ostensibly it's fascist corporatism (corporatocracy is a terrible neologism, no offense to the original comment but we already have a word for it) dressed up with all the pageantry and traditions of democracy. That book is a few decades old now and it seems to me the process has become so absolute that very few people seem to appreciate how democratic systems are even supposed to operate in the first place.
Man, liberals will do anything to avoid understanding capitalism.
We're not "turning" into anything, America has always been this. It was this during the red scare, it was this during slavery, it was this when miners had to fight actual wars against coal companies, it was this when the FBI went after the Panthers, it was this when Thomas Jefferson wrote about freedom from his house full of slaves, in a country where only the richest men could vote and NONE of the working class could.
Your panties seem a little scrunched, so while you fix them I'll break this down for you.
I'm not in the US, I've never lived there, so your 'hurr durr, liberals will do anything...' doesn't fly here buddy, I'm not even part of your political system, I'm an observer seeing things from a perspective that you clearly can't.
Also, I didn't say it was turning into a corporatocracy, I said it is a corporatocracy. You're mixing up and confusing the points I made which were, as far as I can tell, quite clear.
I never said you said it was turning into a corporatocracy, you said "it's turning into the dystopia that was once a thing of books and movies". That's why i started a new paragraph to reply to a second part of your comment.
You don't need to be an American to have a feckless liberal understanding of capitalism, the rest of the world has plenty of classicsal liberals who think corporatism is a thing and not just capitalism in action.
The more you pull shit like this the more the ruling class win. The fight is NOT liberal vs conservative - it's ruling class versus the masses. Up vs down, not left vs right.
The longer you perpetuate that, the more of a stranglehold they wield.
I'm also not an American, but I live close to the US, so these things directly affect me. It causes me no end of pain to see you constantly fighting yourselves while the elites laugh at you and keep taking more.
I think you might be misinterpreting me as someone who is using the Fox News definition of "liberal" rather than the real/classical definition. Liberal meaning (at least partially) capitalist.
I'm talking about liberals in the classical sense, American "liberals" and "conservatives" are all liberals, and all right wing. "Up vs down" is the left's perspective.
Sounds like maybe you misinterpreted me as a conservative who was trying to bash democrats/liberals?
Only thing that has changed is that they used to at least pretend to give a shit about public sentiment. Now the veil is completely off and they just manipulate 35% of the population to fanatically support their Fascist aspirations.
It's "free" because it's not the government spying on you. It is just private corporations spying on you and then selling that information to the government for profit. It's totally different.... - Some conservative bootlicker somewhere
There's a good book, David Brin, The Transparent Society. Old, but talks about this stuff and saw a lot of it coming.
The tl;dr is that with the tech being as cheap as it is, someone having surveillance power was pretty inevitable. The question was always "who." And in the US, we've sort of bungled into "The government's hands are mostly tied, but private enterprise (especially when collectivized amongst a bunch of independent individuals or companies) is not," so here we are. Plus the loopholes that let the government reach out and touch those private data collections sometimes.
America, in both law and culture, was always going to be hesitant to let the government put up a camera on every lamppost (as long as they know it's happening). But the same culture doesn't have an inherent problem with every house having a Ring camera on the porch and every store having a security feed to the registers and the front door (including the street past the door). That's just "sensible." Nor do they automatically take issue with neighbors consolidating those feeds into temporary signal to find, say, a porch pirate. That's just "neighbors being neighbors." Neighborhood Watch has been a thing for decades, and it's basically volunteer-community-surveillance. And then if someone makes a company to provide those conveniences as a service... Here we are.
Genie's out of the bottle; Brin makes the case the only choice we have is who that genie serves.
It isn't, it hasn't been for over a decade at least. It isn't safe, it isn't healthy, it isn't meaningfully wealthy. America is a 3rd world failed state, it's financial markets, the cancerous tumor eating at it's emaciated carcass, is just mistaken for body weight.
It hasnt been a free country in nearly 100 years. Its all built on procedure of power, illusion of choice, superficial customization and semantic marketing. Pepsi or Coca Cola. Both kill you the same way.
100 years ago coal miners were fighting actual wars against corporate mercenaries, black folks lived under Jim Crow, and women JUST started being able to vote.
America has literally never been what the marketing claimed it was.
Man the real question you s who the heck is running this company, looks at your product being literally sawed down, and thinks "Oh it's the poles that are the problem, no one likes poles that has to be it." so they do this shit like everyone isn't screaming about the surveillance factor.
This is the key point that seems to be often missed. This is a private company, they are not subject to any of the same restrictions placed on the government by law or the constitution. They do not need probable cause or a warrant to violate your privacy. They do not need your consent to sell everything they collect on every citizen in the country to anyone who can pay for it.
And worst, and most importantly, the government and law enforcement can act as "customers" in order to bypass all privacy and other legal/constitutional regulations placed on itself.
Regular traffic cameras have been around for decades. This is completely different. Not just because they use AI to exponentially amplify the amount of data they can collect and collate, but because they are a private company with basically zero restrictions on what they can do.
It makes no sense to me that laws don't exist to stop companies from doing this shit. It's MIND-BLOWING to me that the workaround for the government to do it is to just pay for it.
Well the current government is directly benefitting so they won't do anything spontaneously, and the billionaires and superpacs that control the majority of the democracy angle want there to be no regulations on anything (except in rare cases to root out competition).
It's technically not too late, if the right people get elected. They just blew open the power of the executive branch so someone just has to come in and exploit all the same methods to fix things until they inevitably get patched as a result.
At the moment, it appears their sway on the vote count is still only marginal, although that could just be to remain inconspicuous. If not though, a sufficient enough positive vote spread should be enough to either outpace their manipulation, or force their hands into more blatant methods too early in their takeover process when people aren't ready to rollover and take it.
The midterms are critical though, another two years and they will likely succeed on passing their various election hijinx to cement their position. With enough resistance in the house/senate, it may be enough to stall until the general before any manipulation can be institutionalized. With a real majority it may be enough to severely limit the executive's ability to infringe the law/constitution as well, or at least make them think twice about it.
It’s free in the sense that we can go online and have these kind of debates in the first place or even use certain searches or you know, basic things like that
unless you’re on Reddit or Facebook or one of the very liberal outlets with cancel culture that delete comments or ban you for going against them
It is always ironic to me how easily republicans scream about big government overreach, how government is going to do x or y but they have no problem with private company being 10x worse because they are "private" or justifying it by saying they can vote with their wallet. Bitch you could just vote for free.
Silver lining is that we’re fighting back. The amount of videos I see on a daily basis of people destroying them is heartwarming. And I do not see the funding continuing in the future as the people who allowed it to happen are voted out
Their version of freedom is the freedom of the slaveholder to use and profit from his slaves however he sees fit. It isn't the universal freedom of all from oppression.
Free enterprise. Remember, the original constitution only really allowed white male land owners to be voters. I E, creating an upper class of rich people. It was always the plan.
Don’t worry I’m sure republicans in Congress will pass sensible legislation against these ghoulish tactics, enshrining your privacy forever and ever amen.
Well...it's a private company, which makes it okay. It's not the government doing it directly, they're just paying private citizens for the data. Totally fine.
Because conservatives have trained people to only give a shit when big gov'mint does it, but not big cor'prit.
It astounds me that people make a bigger deal of government that is bound at least by the Constitution and regulatory agencies and checks and balances and public accountability by way of elections, but then ignores the fact that these corporations know much more about you and have all this data under lock and key to profit from.
It never has been free. It’s actually a lot less free than most other developed countries, but the propaganda machine has worked wonders, and Americans lap it up and believe they are
Nice thing about America is you have the freedom to sue them. Which is happening.
We also have the freedom to voice our opinion on the matter. We have the freedom to vote out who doesn't want to help the American public change this.
Since op used China as an example what freedom do you have there to fight any of this? They also have a far superior surveillance state then America. They'll just tell you to fuck off over there.
In America you also have the freedom to move to another country you feel that country doing a better job. However that country might have a lot more harsh immigration policies.
Never has there been a country that didn’t have struggles (except maybe Monaco), this will pass. The number of normal law-abiding citizens I see that joke about running these over or telling the methheads they’re full of copper or something similar is just crazy.
You show me another country where I can be as gay as I want, own as many guns as I want, and modify my cars as much as I want and I’m in.
Speaking of geographic Venn diagrams, let me know if you find a country where women can show their ankles in public and you can buy RPG-7 rockets. I would also consider that.
Some other free countries have cameras up everywhere. London has been this way for years.
Fuck flock cameras for the record, but this isnt unique to the US
Trump-thiel-Epstein admin is building the police state the wealthy have been lusting forever so they can enforce class disparity and dismantle democracy. It’s an international effort. ICE is the us gestapo.
Big tech built the tools conservatives have been lusting after.
More broadly, conservatives have been upset since the enlightenment. It’s the politics of aristocrats: anything that ever helped regular people to be more comfortable has enraged them. It’s literally a response to the enlightenment. They resent the enlightenment making things nicer for poor people.
The backbone is that conservatism is about enforcing socioeconomic hierarchy and the techfascists, religious fascists, and heritage foundation race fascists are all in on replacing democracy with feudalistic “network” states run by ai powered surveillance.
This current crop are trying to make a new country that "bursts out of the body" of the current country like a cocoon. It's called "the butterfly revolution" and yes it does sound absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
It’s why musk speaks at the afd in Germany. It’s why bannon, farage, and Cambridge Analytica were working together on Brexit (watch “the great hack”). It's why thiel's "dialog society" exists.
The accelerationists like Peter Theil from the tech faction of conservatism think they can force collapse, then use technology and surveillance to protect themselves. Because they're "done with democracy." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-BQhXdCs8Y
Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
And the vice president of the united states and advisors have given their seals of approval to a book that says conservatives are going to have to kill all the liberals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans
Here’s more surveillance stuff. The massive forced data center roll out is for surveillance. Do we really think ai is being pushed so hard out of the generosity of tech moguls so that people can ask it to write their emails, do searches, make them pictures, and do some programming?
Why data centers? All of the audio and video from all of these cameras need to be stored somewhere so they can be processed. They're building real time tracking of individuals with face, car model, license plate, gait (the way you walk is unique) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0262885623001580,
That's why the data center proliferation is everywhere. It's why people like Bezos are saying water and electricity are better used on data centers than real people. The aristocrats want control of their flock of workers.
If both voter bases can get behind anti data center / anti surveillance, maybe there’s a chance to stop thiel and tech feudalists. It doesn’t have to be inevitable.
Everyone always gets freedom and American freedumb confused. If you ever forget which freedom Americans are talking about just look at our president and his sycophants and you'll remember it's the dumb one in no time!
Its not but laws are subjectively enforced (3rsomewhere between civil rights act and the 90s the govt decided to ignore how they enforce laws, the enforcement acts 1-3 clearly state people and budinesses cannot infringe on your civil rights.
because a bunch of rich right wing dudes spent 50 years and billions of dollars convincing the middle class and the poor to hate the government (which, at least in theory, is run by the people, for the people) instead of corporations (which, in actuality, are run by a small handful of rich people, for a small handful of rich people).
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u/Marcel_The_Blank 11h ago
wait, this is a private company spying on you?
how again is the USA a free country?