#fuck monopolies

[the-tired-tenor]

[squiglluwu]

learning about powerline connections has made me hate capitalism even more

There's no way they are allowed to market like up to 500 mb/s when it literally goes at 5 mb/s like DUDE if I bought an electric car and they said up to 500 km I wouldn't expect it to die at 5 km

[mtlupy]

HBOMax/Max has now removed all of Ben 10 from their platform. Glad I cancelled my subscription. This service is only destined to get shittier. Be prepared.

[pastelispunx]

Man FUCK ticketmaster

I've been selecting tickets for Hozier for over an hour now only to be met with sorry this is sold out sorry this is sold out over and over and over I'm so mad but I don't even use Twitter anymore to complain!!! And they don't have a goddamn phone number!!!!!

[morkgray]

A Requiem for the End of the World

Somewhere in the World - 0/1/1

Today marks the 12th anniversary of the End of the World. It was a subtle thing, nobody expected it to be like the way it went.

Some people were saying it was a Mayan prophecy. That we would evolve into a new spiritual state. That the poles would shift. That the ghost planet Nibiru was going to collide with us.

We would burn, die, evolve, rebirth, transcend and fade away. Any of them, all of them, all at once.

All because of a calendar that was, ending. A calendar that ends… That was always something that baffled me. How… would someone believe a calendar would… end?

I mean, in all number systems you NEVER run out of numbers, you always have one more. But… there we were. With people thinking that some ancient people had ran out of numbers… And that THAT, meant something.

We all waited mockingly and giddily for the day to come. And lo and behold, one day, that day came. December 21st was a pretty uninteresting Friday. We all sat in our office desks, talking about our plans for Christmas. Nothing burned, nobody died. At least not more than what they usually die on any other day.

And that was it right? Today we commemorate the Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event. That's all that happened, right? Am I right?

WELL, ACTUALLY…

We never realized what was going on at that time. And like everything in life, it was not an binary event, it didn't happen in a single instant. It was something that had already started cooking earlier. And that took me almost 11 years to actually put a name and a date to it.

But today I can state without a glimpse of a doubt, that December 21st 2012, was a day when the World died, at least the World that existed before.

In the last 12 years, monopolies gobbled up everything, companies put a tiny price tag for everyone's creativity and everyone flocked behind metrics optimization. We stopped doing what we enjoyed and started doing what converted. Put your hands up if you want CTR! We all partied and danced in the KPI parade!

And you know what?

FUCK METRICS

SEO, Walled Gardens, Marketplaces, Ad Networks! "CONTENT"! "CONTENT"! "CONTENT"! The death of the Open Internet, the emergence of Data Driven "art".

Slop factories everywhere.

We all colluded in a rigged game of offer and demand and self fulfilled prophecies. We encroached in a Negative Feedback Loop of staleness, ever growing tighter and tighter. It turns out metrics can never predict the future, just repeat the past.

THE AIR BEGS FOR SOMETHING NEW

We need to make things differently.

Make what you enjoy again. Enjoy what you make. Be weird. Be counterintuitive. Make physical stuff. Make virtual stuff. Make ephemeral stuff. Engrave a piece rock and bury it.

Whatever you do, just make sure you put it into the world.

Does that mean that we need to reject all the platforms, all the technologies and all these rigged systems that suck? Should we go full Luddites?

NO (and actually Luddites were pretty amazing)

Use everything at your disposition. Use all the tools you want. Hack EVERYTHING. Just remember, anything you use, it works FOR YOU. YOU DON'T WORK FOR THEM. Don't believe their shit. They want more "content creators" on their platforms to be able get rid of the current ones. To pay everyday a bit less, if you don't like the deal, they hope the next moron in line will do.

Let's punch through the carcass of the corpse of the rotten monsters that ate us all. Let's make a new world. One wetware at a time.

NOW GO AND MAKE SOMETHING

Love yourself - sasha

[lazylittledragon]

they just got to have a sleepover and nothing bad ever happened at all

[biologistblues]

Heeyyyyyy y'all had a Rogers moment!

(For reference, Rogers- the horrifying telecommunications attempted monopoly in Canada shat the bed on July 8th 2022. It wiped out phone service, internet, banking, our debit card transaction service, the ontario lottery & gaming corporation, 911 calls, and several federal government services. For several days in some cases. I was in Toronto and the city went into moderate fucking chaos.

Also, all the rogers systems that folks were trying to fix ran on rogers. And all the teams coordinating responses? Were using Rogers. It was a clusterfuck.

Meanwhile, in 2023, Rogers has now acquired Shaw, reducing the number of major telecommunications providers in Canada to two.

Yay.)

If you're in Australia you'll already know this, but for our international readers, basically the whole of Australia ground to a halt today because one of our two mobile/internet networks - Optus - just completely shat its dacks for about 9 hours, taking out the country's phones, internet and banking.

The funniest part though, is that apparently when the national broadcaster tried to reach out to find out what was going on - they discovered the quite forseeable problem that everyone at Optus used Optus for their phone and internet, so there was basically no way for their company to contact anyone inside or outside the company to work out what was going on or to try and fix it.

What a country.

[the-irreverend]

My own stupid-ass way of celebrating our long-awaited ownership of Mickey Mouse.

Yes, I'm a Nimona fan, shut up y'all.

[aardvaark]

the leverage team would have had a games night… once. everyone cheated so much and in such increasingly extreme ways that all mentions of monopoly are banned in their headquarters (this makes talking about marks who monopolize the market very confusing)

[deadtiredghost]

Can we make Team Red a thing?

i think they would get along like a house on fire. we need more fanfic of this trio.

^^ how i think they might bond.

[nando161mando]

Why are things expensive?

4 companies control 55% to 85% of the meat market.

4 airlines control 80% of air travel.

3 companies control 92% of the soda market.

3 companies control 73% of the cereal market.

Why don't I hear about it?

6 companies control 90% of the news.

[astrowarr]

are we really surprised, though, that scar obeyed grian's order?

of course scar gave his heart to grian; as if it ever belonged to anyone else. because that's how the two of them work: scar goes in looking to take, but somehow, inevitably, impossibly, he always leaves with his heart torn out and his hands empty, removed of the cards he keeps up his sleeve.

grian strips scar down to his barest, most vulnerable form. the most haunting part of it all is that scar, in his endless devotion, is always happy to do it. scar gives grian his heart, again and again, because was it ever really even his?

[harlequinchaos]

Tiktok going dark for not even 24 hours after the CEO had reposted MAGA shit on his profile, and Americans are welcomed back with a message explicitly thanking Tr*mp, and the CEO's profile no longer saying CEO.

Americans: omg yay tiktok is back

meanwhile:

[hiemaldesirae]

train ride

[periodicallyaperson]

If he gets caught I hope he at least gets to pass go and collect $200

[ashertickler]

porter solaire did you kill the united healthcare ceo in new york. cos you're so real for that