Phones used to be small enough to fit in your pocket, had features that made them useful, and came in a variety of form factors (remember sliding keyboards!?). This is not the future we were promised or the future that we wanted. Today every phone is a rectangular slab that most people can't reach from the bottom all the way to the top with their thumbs. They are made flimsy so that you must buy a case to entomb your phone in if you want it to last. They have weird bulbous protrusions like google's camera bar and apple's lenses so that you even have to look for a case that makes the device ergonomic to have in your hand. They come with spyware you didn't want, and battery draining features. It used to be a single charge could get your phone through a day and a half. Now they promise us batteries that will last 3+ days and deliver experiences that the battery is drained after 12 hours.

Smartphones are not for us. They are tools of the oppressor class. Kurt Vonnegut was terrified at the prospect of television as a mechanism for addictive control of the populace, but never could he have imagined the terrifying reality of the smartphone. William Gibson did though. He didn't think it would be a compact rectangle that fits in our pocket, but he did think we would all become addicted to a massively online network of computers that we were never truly separated from even as we navigated the physical world. The problem is too many people read the Sprawl trilogy and thought they would be the super cool hackers that have lots of sex, failing to recognize that the main characters of those books are brutally depressed broken people who are addicted to sex, drugs, and the internet.

And I'm one to talk. I have my phone sitting here next to me. It was made by a big tech company using slave labor. It's ensconced in a rubbery pink case to keep it from getting brutalized by the realities of my clumsiness. I have apps installed on it. I check it throughout the day. But I would get rid of it instantly if my work would provide me with a hardware MFA device. They will not because "it costs too much money." It would cost them $60 to furnish me with one. "But that doesn't scale to all of our employees and contractors." We all get paid 6 figures and receive various benefits through the company. That when faced with a choice between furnishing us with MFA devices or requiring we own smartphones, they choose the latter. They even give us a $150 stipend to make sure we have a smartphone. They are spending more to make sure we have smartphones that it would cost to have MFA devices that they claim are too expensive.

Why? The only reason I can fathomably come up with is that a smartphone also keeps us shackled to our work. We can be out walking our dogs and get a notification ding on our phones and immediately be back to thinking about what we were doing at our desk. Nowhere are we free from work when we have a smartphone in our pocket. The administrative state has us at their constant beck and call. And what's more, the law enforcement agencies love our phones, too. They have GPS, tower triangulation, and with 5G the towers are closer together and the triangulation is more precise. Never, so long as your smartphone is powered on, are you truly free from the surveillance state. And I don't even think there's any one person (except for maybe Peter Thiel) who likes every aspect of this system of power between the bosses, landlords, law enforcement agencies, and technocrats. I don't even think each aspect of the system is aware of their role in the system. But nevertheless, the system of oppression and torture we live under persists to the benefit of 22 truly horrible human beings.

well now i know it's true

Manipulates you into going to the toy store and seeing that there is a boy's section and girl's section. And they are separate. Because there are two genders and they are in binary opposition to each other.

Marketing, propaganda, and politics is everything that you engage with all of the time. Any time you are in a group of three friends and you have to make a decision, the process by which you do it will be political in nature. The conclusion you reach will be based on the cultural context of the propaganda you were steeped in.

With this knowledge you can analyze the everyday politics and propaganda you encounter that you never even think about. You can make small changes to the politics you present and the propaganda you spread in the world. Every decision and action you take influences the people around you and all of that ripples out into the world. Something you do can inspire another person to act in a way that you would be inspired by. You may take an action and someone sees you and says "Yeah I've been feeling that, too! I was just too alone to say it, but now I know other people are out there"

The bus is going to the concentration camps after the latin americans get shipped to the death camps. You know. Because life is a flat fucking circle

What the fuck do you think they just did? Here. I'll put again so that this time you can reread it and take it in:

Violent revolution is the only action that has ever gotten shit done throughout history. It was a violent revolution that created America in the first place, but it is in the best interest of the winning side to pretend that their revolution was just, but any further revolution would be a step too far.

HEY ZIONIST JEWS. GUESS WHICH END OF THE BUS YOUR CHRISTOFASCIST "ALLIES" ARE GOING TO HAVE YOU SIT ON YOU FUCKING IDIOTS. I'LL BE BACK THERE WITH YOU, AND IF YOU DON'T WANT ME SAYING "TOLD YOU SO" OVER EVERY SINGLE POTHOLE, YOU SHOULD CONSIDER CHANGING YOUR OUTLOOK ON THE WORLD YOU FUCKING DUMBASS PUTZES

android 4-7 were perfect. it all went to shit with Oreo, we just didn't realize it at the time because we thought the changes were minor inconveniences we'd get used to. once md2 dropped, we should have realized we were cooked, but it was still… innocuous how small and mildly annoying the changes were. by 2020 though i had noticed: no good updates had come to my phone in almost 4 years and every update just broke something that used to work. then in 2023 google announced gemini was adding new features to the assistant. features that had slowly gotten broken but had worked back in 2015. this is our lives now. a constant churn of features being taken away and brought back

as with our last civil war it will be our bottom tier of society pitted against itself. the sides will, as with last time, be truly horrifically and abjectly evil vs evil but in a way that the most marginalized have some hope of survival under. our only way to a better society afterwards will be to actually do reconstruction this time and not to just half ass it because for the second side they view profit in being gentle to the truly evil.

funny how everytime there's a big war about whether or not Ur-Fascism is bad, the winning side selects a handful of losers to protect and keep safe, and then those losers become the basis for a new fascist movement. see also: operation paperclip

the goal was to enforce poverty, not to resolve it. this is the system working exactly as intended

it gets darker and more insidious than that. america's definition of poverty is unique unto ourselves. the rest of the world views poverty as a condition in which a person is unable to do all the human things humans do. poverty wages, everywhere else, is anyone not making a living wage. but we, in our incredible exceptionalism, defined our own definition of poverty, and then refuse to acknowledge that more and more people are slipping into it.

the key to understanding why we refuse to acknowledge this is because poverty is enforced. it is always enforced. the natural order of nature is for humans to care for eachother. the greedy parasites who control us though need us to be desperate enough to keep us from realizing we provide them with comforts we do not benefit from because we're just trying to scrape out a basic living from table scraps.

a stratified society with a single ultrapowerful dictator is not indicative that the CCP are actually communist…

no. No. NO. NOOO!

why are we even giving this this rigorous fact check this many days later when it was so obviously and blatantly a photoshop lie. i get that there's a journalistic process and procedure to follow, but this feels like journalism's equivalent to cuck schumer's strongly worded letter with 8 strong questions. in the time it took you to fact check this obvious lie, you could have investigated something more insidious like a military base spilling 26 tons of nitric acid into a fragile river ecosystem.

you can't deal with 47's and the republican's insanity like it's normal. you can't engage in business as usual. there are unseen horrors going on in the world that your journalistic duty is to draw attention to. you are letting 47 set the narrative for the republicans by doing this. you are playing their game when the only winning move is not to play

we're probably going to have a civil war of some variety. that's my prediction at least

red hats = brown shirts

ice = gestapo

this = ss

how long until Baron tortures him to death for his own petty amusement?

which benefits russia exclusively and is what they wanted from the beginning

sure, but we're trying to communicate to people right now who didn't understand they were voting for nazis. we do more to bring people into the fold against this by making it obvious who they're against and who's hurting them. nazi regime is cathartic, republican regime is messaging

republican administration*

Fascists are universally serial losers

1. A state can just repeal their own minimum wage
2. The existence of states using the federal minimum wage means it matters to the people who live in those states
3. Poverty anywhere indicates the possibility of poverty everywhere. Being somewhere "without poverty" does not make you safe from poverty. It just means you are less proximate to poverty for now