I dunno if I would call it an endorsement. It was more so to show how impossible it is to have privacy online, lol. You’d have to go to extremes to avoid having any information about you end up online. And honestly, even if you went off grid in a cabin somewhere, there still is no guarantee that you will succeed in keeping yourself offline entirely. Kaczynski is probably also a bad example as you can find pretty much everything there is to know about him online. A selfinflicted fate.

Anyways, the point is that privacy doesn’t really exist if you own a phone, tablet or computer.

Yeah, exactly. I just always found it to be silly and arrogant to assume that I could ever outsmart agencies, organisations and companies that not only specializes in getting my data, but also built the tech and the systems I am navigating.

And I mean, I have enjoyed true crime since the Forensic Files were still explaining to normal citizens what DNA is and how that technology is applied in crime cases. I have casually followed the development of forensic sciences for at least two decades and let me tell you, there ain’t no way you can hide online. The ones who can either have the right connections, are unbelievably skilled and cautious with tech or they don’t use technology at all and live in an off grid cabin somewhere, where nobody uses smartphones.

I mean, I think the best rule of thumb is that unless you’re a tech wizard, you don’t have online privacy. At all.

I don’t believe anything is super safe and secure online. Not even Signal.

I always treat my online activity as if I am being surveilled because I probably am. Luckily I’m a boring bitch, so I don’t really have anything to hide, but I do appreciate that I can stay in touch with friends and family without having to linger on Facebook anymore. So there’s that.

The only time I feel annoyed about people talking about Signal is when they talk about it as if it’s this super sketchy app that shares your data when literally every single friggin platform online does that and the same skeptical people use them all the time without question.

That part annoys me because people keep acting like we aren’t already completely naked and our information owned by companies who do god knows what with it. If people are aware that everything they do is being surveilled and used for whatever purpose, then I don’t really mind, but it doesn’t seem like that is the case for many people. I genuinely still cannot believe how many people jumped on the DNA test trend, for example. Like holy shit, just give them your firstborn too, while you’re at it. XD but hey, we all make stupid mistakes now and again. I remember my first smartphone having a thumbprint lock and I just did that throughout my early to mid 20s without thinking about it. At least they only have one of my thumbprints but yeah. It’s so insidious, the way the tech world has lured us into giving up our information willingly.

The worst thing anyone can do when they are online is to believe they have any privacy. That is hubris.

This is what people don’t get when it comes to that story about the journalist. You literally have to go out of your way to invite someone into a group chat. That does not happen on accident on Signal.

I had to explain that to a few people who heard that story and were super skeptical about Signal being dangerous. Which is ironic because the same people would be using messenger and think nothing of it.

True. I remember two ads specifically in my country that pissed me off so much I vowed to never purchase anything from their company. Both were phone service providers.

One was an ad where the guy gets the message of the ad out in 5 seconds and then the rest of the ad is him sitting in silence for 25 additional seconds, eating some food. That ad pissed me off enough to contact the company and let them know what I thought.

The second was this stupid bint sitting in a pink room, smugly wringing her hands and going: Oooh, you really want to get to your video, don’t you? Here it comes! 🤪

I was like: I don’t give a fuck if your phone service provider is the best in the galaxy. I will never use it ever.

Technically I have a third ad that made me despise charity for life, but that was before the time where ads online were what they are today and this ad did not show up online. I’ll tell the story anyways because this is the type of ad that every charity should avoid if they want people to donate:

Rewind to 2012. My boyfriend and I were dirt poor. Literally had to borrow money from our parents to have enough for food. He was a full time student and I was sick with a mean depression at the time.

We get some birthday money. I forget who it was from and who it was for. Normally, we would spend birthday money to pay bills but this time there was a tiny bit left over and we decided to go to the cinema for once. Have a date night. We only had enough for tickets. No snacks. No drinks. Just the tickets, but we didn’t care because the fact that we got to go to the movies felt like a massive luxury.

Ads pop up on the big screen. One of them is this close up of an African child with flies on his face, looking real sad. Across his face a text appears: “How much was your movie ticket?”

That singlehandedly made me boycott that specific charity for life. Fuck them forever. Worst part is that i used to actually volunteer for that charity and help them collect money by going door to door once a year with a friend. We collected so much money for those assholes. Haven’t bothered with volunteering since. It wasn’t solely that ad that turned me off charity, but a series of gross experiences that just made me fucking hate charity and the vultures who use it to scrape money from normal everyday people who think they are helping little impoverished children in third world countries.

I have seen similar charity ads on social media after the terminally online realized that there is a neverending war in Gaza. So many ads with obvious scammers prematurely blaming you for skipping their ad and leaving them to suffer. My reaction? 🖕👁👅👁🖕

There for sure are good and honorable charities out there and I have no ill will towards them, but I see the vast majority of charities as guilt tripping scams where they try their best to make people feel ashamed for being born in a privileged country and wringing money out of them while exploiting children in poor countries who will never see a dime.

In short: I hate ads too and the more they annoy me, the more their company or charity ends on my permanent shit list.

If he were to reply to your comment I know he would say “I’m not optimistic. I’m realistic.” Haha He’s great. Genuinely one of the best people I have ever met. Everywhere he goes he makes friends, inspires people and helps them improve themselves. So effortlessly kind and accepting of others. And he always believes things will be made right even if a situation is bleak. The shit he deals with on the daily in his job has broken most people, but not him. His psyche is made of titanium, I swear. No matter what type of day he has had or what he is carrying in silence, he always has emotional bandwidth to be there for others. I love him so much.

Yeah, thats why I’m so impatient for this shit to end NOW. I don’t want to see innocent people have their futures utterly annihilated for years to come. It is so frustrating.

Their ideology: man is boss. Woman is kitchen. God is science. Money is God.

Amen, my friend. My spouse keeps telling me to have patience wait for the consequences to hit these clowns. I am just very impatient because I don’t want them to succeed in ruining more things for other people before they get what’s coming to them.

Then they just need to figure out how to use the non-cancer-gene from those blind naked African rats who can run equally fast forward and backwards, look like a wrinkly penis with legs and teeth and are friends with Ron Stoppable and we will have figured out a cure to cancer while regenerating body parts left and right. It’ll be great.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t talking to you, then :)

Hate to be that asshole, but antisocial = psychopath. Asocial = not into hanging out with people. There is a difference and unless I’m misinterpreting your comment, I don’t think you belong in the former category.

I’m glad I don’t live in North Korea because I wouldn’t want to traumatize their poor government with pics of my face and body in the morning. There are limits to cruelty.

You know what? You’re right. Let’s cancel medicine because it is eugenics. Let nature take care of those who are too weak to live. Fuck em.

Fuck vaccines, fuck lifesaving surgery, fick meds, fuck gene-editing that can save a baby from a life of suffering due to severe genetic disorders.

Fuck them all. We wouldn’t want to change anything for anyone because that might make some ignorant Karen think that medicine is eugenics.

I assumed they did. Maybe not all, to be fair, but I am pretty sure they have produced audio recordings of books in the past(?)

Maybe I’m just tripping, I dunno.

Dude, I know how you feel xD back in 2009 I bought an audio recording of the first Twilight book because I was curious about ehat the fuss was about. It was in Danish, as I am Danish, and the narrator, bless her, had a very Danish way of pronouncing the word “flirting”. In Danish we don’t have a modern word for flirting so we just use the English one with English pronunciation, but this lady, who already sounded like she was in her 60s, just went full Dane on that word and it completely took me out of the story and had me yell at my ghettoblaster “FLIRTING” everytime she pronounced her mutilated version of that word. I don’t even know how to write a phonetic version of what the fuck she said, but I’ll try.

Fleert-eh

Fuck me, it’s been almost 16 years and just spelling it out made my skin crawl.

I also hated that book, but that wasn’t really the narrator’s fault. Had to pause the fuck out of it several times and rage clean my apartment. Nobody had told me about how it romanticized abusive relationships and I had JUST gotten out of one of those so to say I was triggered was an understatement. The mispronounciations of flirting were just the garnish on top, lol.

Sure, but it is still lame for a company like Audible to expect people to pay for their service and then they decide to cut costs by switching to AI voices. They can afford to hire actors to read their books. They have no excuse to go do that.

Meanwhile what you’re talking about if books and stories that may not get to be picked to be narrated and well, I can see where ai voices could be a benefit in those cases. Especially for people with dyslexia.

I just disagree with a company that sells itself on narrated books and then they go and have robots read their shit? Why should anyone pay for that? Because I’m sure their prices wouldn’t go down either.

And when all is said and done, personally, I just prefer that a human being is reading to me. Especially if it is fiction.

I prefer listening to real people. No matter how good AI voices become, I still like knowing that the one reading the book to me understands what they are saying.

It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.

Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.

I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.

It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.

I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative “social media” like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn’t suck ass like they do nowadays.

But at some point, there will be no skip button. You know it, I know it, we all know it. This is like the creepy uncle who starts out by giving you candy and playing football in the yard. Then he wants you to sit on his lap before candy or football, but you can jump off whenever, until the day, he won’t let you. That is what these companies have been doing. I still remember the arm twisting they did when they took over youtube and we all liked youtube so much, we ended up giving in to it.

The end game for them is to own all your personal information and have total control over your online activity. Them giving you a skip button is a fake comfort. They probably already know where you live too.

For my part, I have just accepted that my basic bitch info is out there. Whatever I haven’t shared myself, have been shared either by a phone book service in my country or by databrokers who have sold my info to random companies and scammers.

Anonymity online is an illusion unless you are a very tech savvy which most of us are not.