None of this matters in a ubiquitous surveillance state, which is either here now or a couple years off.
They barely mix with us, peasants. They will probably follow this trend and live in inexpugnable, extremely well defended citadels. Apartheid, in a word.
I work in the municipal office of a tiny city that’s an enclave for the super rich. We’re entirely surrounded by a major city, but we’re a different jurisdiction.
Of course, I don’t get to live there. Literally every resident is a millionaire or better. The average new house being built there is about 8 million dollars, and we have a lot of housing churn.
That is, people will buy a 5 million dollar house and tear it down to build a 12 million dollar house.
All that to say that I interact with these people all the time. They almost invariably don’t realize how out of touch they are, because their neighbors are also millionaires.
You’d think it’s a super nice city, but other than the houses it’s fairly run down. They don’t want good roads or sidewalks because then people would use them. The city was essentially founded to prevent bus lines from the major city from having stops near the fancy district.
Over half the municipal employees are cops, and their main job is keeping homeless people away.
All this work goes into isolating the rich from the poor, and it’s worked so well that most of the rich don’t even realize it’s happening.
That never works though. Like literally it’s never worked.
I hope so. I really really hope so. If not, then we’re headed for an incredibly terrible future of the kind that used to exist in dystopian fiction.
We can only hope.
Oh yes, let there be blood.
Terroristic threats! Bake him away, toys!
Imagine how much good could be done if we just took Elon Musk’s stuff and used it to fund public education, public healthcare, poverty reduction, drug abuse treatment, and the like. Instead that shit strain is hoarding all that money that came from our pockets.
EDIT: Like…instead of letting him DOGE NASA for the benefit of SpaceX, what if we just took SpaceX and folded it in to NASA?
I am going to be extremely sad considering the amount of research and science that’s about to become privatized. Not just NASA but other government agencies and research grants.
Ya, Bill Gate started the trend with “donating” to research for “exclusive rights to everything coming from the research”, with Zuckerberg et al all doing it now.
Sprinkle in a million dollars in publicities and people believe they are the good guys too. So infuriating.
Yeah, that’s not donating, that’s buying.
We all need more Luigi.
The rich already control the narrative and peoples mind. They effectively got whole nations to vote against their own interests. They are absolutely fine. This is copium.
Or just rich people getting stronger and ever more lethal security teams…
Adam Smasher incoming.
So we need a new money?
The money we have now works for Luigi defense funds
Musk has all of the new money too. We need a new new money.
Ya, not some crypto shit too
Musk’s feds would like to know your location
We still out number them by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to one.
There are 2781 billionaires in the world. I say we eat them.
No thanks! I heard they taste like smegma.
So…what you going to do about it?
Educate, agitate, organize
I’m having a meeting this week to decide what we do next.
Just in case you need: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
If I learned something over the years, is that people are FUCKING STUPID, as in no matter how vile, greedy, treacherous pieces of shit are the candidates, they will always vote for the same person because they truly believe that they’re doing the right thing. And no matter how much proof or information you give them, they will delude themselves that you’re trying to trick them with propaganda.
At the end, I simply gave up on the idea of people not being brainless pieces of meat.
I think you’re right but incomplete. There are idiots who vote for the same people no matter what, and there are idiots who place their lofty principles above getting results - in this case refusing to vote and blaming the Democratic Party for not supplying good enough options to click on - that’s their reason Trump got back into office, not because all they personally did was bitch and moan online and stick their hands in their pockets when they could have stopped him. There are people dumb enough to delude themselves that way.
Don’t underestimate the amount of people that vote strictly based off culture war bullshit as well. I’m Canadian and I see a lot of working class people that happily vote for the cons to fight “wokeness” and “dei” because god forbid non white/straight people exist. Seen lots of comments complaining about how white people are “villainized” etc in my local sub (yes I still use reddit for niche stuff that isn’t here) and tons of dog whistles about minorities, especially us indigenous people.
As long as they target people they don’t like, an unfortunate amount of people will happily vote against their own interest just in the hope of making “the wrong people” have a shittier life.
All very true. People vote against their own interest for all kinds of reasons. They also refuse to vote when the refusal goes against their own interest - but that’s forbidden talk here.
I mean, I want to have hope, but the major first world nations of the world didn’t build a god damned surveillance state over the last 40 years for nothing. Those fourteen eyes are watching.
What’s coming is Hitler’s Shutzstaffel on absolute fucking steroids. We used to say, regarding the Patriot Act, that the tools being developed were the kind the Nazi SS would have fucking wet dreams about.
Anne Frank wasn’t followed by a GPS tracking unit & surveillance device in her pocket tied to her real name and address that she regularly used to talk with friends. Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about heat-scanners that find people hidden in walls. Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about the internet at the home she was being hidden in was monitored. Anne Frank was still found and murdered by the Nazis, with much less surveillance, and much lower tech.
I’m not gonna drown myself in hopium and copium. I’m ready for our ramshackle poor-man’s cyberpunk world to pop off and start the Water Wars. Because that’s sadly way more likely than humans getting their fucking shit together.
EDIT: You want it to get better, start organizing, even for things as simple and small as local mutual aid networks, only using encrypted channels. No, people won’t like it. Yes, they’re hard to use. If you want to not be constantly infiltrated by people trying to stop you doing good works, go ahead and keep organizing in cleartext. If we want to actually make headway against corrupt governments and corporations yes that means you’ll have to learn to do some shit on your own and it won’t be as fancy and clean as the corporate option. Stop relying on the groups oppressing you for the tools to fight your oppression by them. The groups oppressing you will never give you the tools to dismantle them.
Yeah, I’m soon going to be testing out technologies like Meshtastic and ensuring I have a basic survival kit in case natural disaster, revolution, martial law, or some other shit hitting the fan.
If we can’t trust the people we’ve put trust in to do good for us, then we have to re-make every aspect of our society from the ground up.
(Honestly speaking about my government, I have faith in my province and city, but if PP gets into federal office I will be very worried).
This is the way.
Whether we like it or not we rely on modern technology these days. I’d like to see more Mutual Aid Group activity driven to build community mesh-networks and the like. Bring back the ideology of the barbed wire phone networks and community communications. We sold off every bit of communications to corporations, and that’s a problem.
LoRa texting devices are also pretty dope, too.
from the ground up.
An important point. Real change never comes from the top down. Stop looking for leaders and start being a community.
Uuuhh, just like anything that transmits RF, Meshtastic nodes can also be tracked, even if you set location info to some very low precision level.
It is perhaps less likely to be tracked than a phone, but it still can be.
Yeah of course. You can also seclude yourself in the mountains but planes and drones can track that too. That’s not really the point though.
The point is that we have to rebuild communities on new trust networks, not the ones operated by billionaires that work in concert with government. With those, information is readily handed over. With smaller locally distributed networks, they have to deliberately take it from us. This tacit censorship and manufactured consent is what I’m trying to defeat. Taking on the surveillance state is far too much of an uphill battle to go alone or in small groups.
As an analogy, it is trivial to scrape my and other users’ posts off the fediverse, but some actor for the government, data broker or AI has to create the tool or ask every server admin for information rather than a central entity (such as dessalines). This data is less valuable commercially because it is not exclusive to whoever collected it, anyone of the public can too. It is also difficult to just remove us all off the fediverse, because simply taking the site offline doesn’t removes its copies from others. A federated purge would is needed which is harder to acheive on a large scale.
My dream is that one day there will be community run mesh networks in every major U.S metro, all federating with each other. A network of interconnected organic ecosystems that serve and fuel the local economies they hail from, rather than all of the wealth and data generated within them being siphoned into silicon valley. Who knows, maybe such a network could be configured such that it redistributes wealth.
I mean, I want to have hope, but the major first world nations of the world didn’t build a god damned surveillance state over the last 40 years for nothing
Tinfoil hat
I’m 100% convinced the drones in the news lately are prototyping a new mass surveillance program to be kicked off after Trump takes office, likely funded by Musk, likely for purposes related to his planned mass deportations, and so little is being done about it because folks are being told Jan 20 isn’t that far away, you better not.
/Tinfoil hat
My slightly less tinfoil hat option B is that it’s only your garden variety mass surveillance program being piloted, kicked off under Biden, and that will be unlikely to be curtailed under Trump.
Because as a veteran, I refuse to believe that craft the military weren’t intimately familiar with would receive nothing but a shrug in reaction to this, yet that’s all that has happened.
I’m actually with you on both of those possibilities. It was some of the first stuff that came into my head in regards to that issue, as well.
They’re watching, but here’s the thing: at a certain volume, seeing everything actually becomes a detriment as the noise creates false positives and drowns out useful data.
If EVERYONE is pissed off, angry, and posting about it online etc then sorting out “angry enough to do something” gets harder. It’ll be interesting to see what the “right to bear arms” folks in government come up with when they’re the ones in the crosshairs rather than schoolkids
Correct.
When it comes down to the necessary facts, it’s a numbers game. There are so many more pissed off people than there are in power and wealth. They’d essentially have to massacre incredible amounts of people without destroying their own means of making income.
Guess how much a health care insurance org makes without people to insure?
$0. Interestingly, the same amount we believe it should make with people to insure as well.
poopium
Industrial society surely sucks.
#doubt
Most people live comfortably enough that they won’t radicalize, we’re far from France before the revolution
Panem et circenses. It worked for thousands of years.
Im hoping the nutjobs who become school shooters for attention realize they will get WAY more attention if they are a CEO shooter instead.
I’ve always wondered how this wasn’t always the case. You’re pissed off at ______ to the extent that you’re willing to commit murder and sacrifice your freedom over it, so you go and shoot up… a bunch of elementary school students? Dafuq? Why? Target the source of your problem, not some random kids…
Target the source of your problem
Has it occurred to you that a lot of school shooters are mobbing victims and the “random kids” are quite literally the source of their problem?
*cancels dance mob intervention plans*
Um. Uh, yeah! Totally, yeah - that was like the first thing I thought of!
I’ve thought about this and the only thing I can come up with is that school shooters are so pathetic that they only go after kids who can’t fight back.
Nah it’s more likely just that younger kids have, even those in highschool have a smaller world. They don’t have medical issues often and they only think about their peers.
Yep, teenagers are fucking idiots. I’m sure in 20 years, if I’m still around, I’ll say people in their 40s are idiots.
They’ll rightfully say we’re the idiots because of the weather in 20 years.
Yes the median income is something like 80k. The mode however is still firmly buried in the 35-40k segment. Fun fact, you only need 1% of the population for a region to conduct a viable insurgency. Less for highly concentrated places like NY and LA. You need 10% to provide material aid like money and shelter. Which is a different, lower level, of radicalization.
So NYC by traditional standards would need 82,000 people to be radicalized enough to commit violent acts. In reality because it’s so dense they could easily do it with a thousand, and several thousand supporters. And this is for big boy insurgency stuff where the police have to engage in extended firefights just to get into a neighborhood. For terrorism campaigns the numbers are even smaller. 2 people paralyzed the entire state of Maryland and Northern Virginia in 2002. A couple hundred dedicated people not trying to hold territory could easily shut down wall street until the NYPD turned it into the Baghdad Green Zone.
The rich haven’t even begun to find out yet. And they sent the working class for a 20 year premier education in asymmetric warfare. This is why some of us are so pissed at them. We’re going to be living in the next Afghanistan if they don’t take their boot off the neck of the working class.
That median is for a household, median per person is under 50k if I recall correctly
Median per person is tough to find from year to year. It seems to be inconsistently reported or just given as household median/2 which isn’t a rigorous method.
About the mode, which you gave as $35-40k. I latched onto that because it doesn’t mean a lot.
For those who don’t know what a statistical “mode” is, it’s the most common data point in a sample. Mode is most useful when there are a small number of possibilities, like answers to multiple choice questions. Incomes from zero to billions have so many individual values, the single one that occurs most often is meaningless, so statisticians usually give a modal range. I couldn’t find data on the exact range $35-40k, but on statista only 10% of Americans are between $35k and $50k, so your range is more like 3% of the people. The point is, saying half of Americans make more than $80k and half make less seems a lot more significant than saying a small number are “buried” in a very narrow zone.
Anyway, I totally agree that the wealthy call the shots in America and it sucks. But really what’s the point of some exciting stuff that happened in Maryland and Northern Virginia in 2002 when it’s 22 years later and those place don’t look any different? People can fantasize about action-packed clashes with NYPD in the streets, but the long-term result (or lack of it) is what we should be thinking about. Most people are law-abiding and don’t want to live in the Wild West. When your radical heroes start shooting, the vast majority won’t be dodging bullets and cheering, they’ll hide indoors and call the police. Lasting change has to be done in an organized way. I don’t know how to make that happen either, but a bunch of badass video game characters ain’t gonna do it.
I saw it in BLS data. And it’s important because of the insurgency numbers I brought up too. 3 and 10 percent are high enough numbers. Plus everyone below that range as well.
I want to be very clear about something. I am not trying to recruit for the barricades. I would like to avoid this scenario very much. I agree that most people are going to stay indoors and call the authorities. That’s how these things go at the start. But humans are weird. The longer it goes on and authorities seem unable to keep order, the more support an insurgency gets, as long as they keep bystander casualties low enough and they stay on message. So doing things like abducting and killing police officers with a history of complaints would be productive to their cause. No matter how horrifying it is on it’s own. Things like blowing up the Stock Exchange are productive to their cause.
What happened in Maryland was a punitive campaign of terrorism. I bring it up, not because it changed anything, but to show how easy such things can be. If you can lock down an entire state, then you can certainly lock down the executive class in an area; make it deadly to commute to work in a suit, town car, or helicopter.
But these things never stay on track. Just like extremism, there’s always more, because it’s not a monolithic group. Even the Taliban was four large groups and hundreds of smaller ones. Especially when other radicals perceive it to be working. Groups like ELF are already established and may decide to join the violence instead of just targeting property. And that’s nothing to the KKK and Neo Nazi groups deciding it’s the race war they’ve been preparing for. All we need after that is any one of fifty Governors going full dictator to fight back with state sponsored terrorism and the descent into failed state will be complete.
These fucking idiotic rich people think they’re above consequences and they’re going to drag our country into a pit from which it cannot ever emerge intact. They’re going to blow the lid off all the extremism in our country because they just had to buy another trip to space.
Those targets are pretty broad - personally I’ve always made sure I can wear aloha shirts to work, but lots of perfectly nice people have jobs that require suits. The people you’re after don’t actually have to commute anywhere if they don’t want to, If they feel endangered they’ll just work from safe places and make their lackeys cannon fodder. You can paint a nice morally perfect scenario where the well-meaning shooters “keep bystander casualties low enough,” but once they get frustrated and redefine “viable target” as whoever looks the part, people will die for the crime of not being able to afford getting fired. And like I said, in 20 years the world will look the same.
Yeah they’re broad because I’m not trying to do planning work for someone who wants to do this. But I spent a decade of my life fighting and training to fight insurgents. They aren’t going to let a little bit of travel stop them. And when the angry people with guns say to stop wearing suits, you stop wearing a suit.
When people with guns say jump you jump - and then when those badasses win their moral victory they stop saying jump? Yeah good luck wit dat.
Well if you don’t like them you hope they lose or you join the effort against them. You don’t commit suicide by challenging them as a civilian.
It got snuffed, but it’s worth remembering that 13 years ago, Occupy Wall Street did happen. The path from self education to understanding the real villains has been roughly identical for most of recorded history, and right now if you still read books the truth is pretty much everywhere and undeniable.
Ever since OWS was unceremoniously snuffed without actual reform, I’ve been waiting for a nice blue shell thrower to show up. It’s been the only remaining path available the entire time. One person walks that road, and suddenly it becomes vastly easier for others to follow…
Can’t have kids. Can’t have property. Nothing to loose than a comfortable meaningless life.
And yet you haven’t done anything
If anyone here has done anything, please don’t brag to us about it. Be safe.
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That comfort will quickly slip away as society starts to crumble.
<pfft> Let them eat cake.
And they will probably try out of fear to take Americans’ guns, which is going to be hilarifying
