Where is your evidence of this?

Everywhere? Every decade humankind becomes more uniform worldwide, but especially last few decades.

What? Do you not listen to music? Or enjoy art? Do you not watch theater or tv? Do you not enjoy going to local craft shows and seeing local artists? No matter what happens in the 2000s, the 1900s will be remembered as one of the most artistically prolific, free and diverse periods of human expression and art. Yeah there is censorship, yes western culture is very conservative in ways it doesn’t want to admit sometimes, but in general the shear volume and variety of art created in the 1900s is immense.

Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.

Where is your evidence of this?

It is a mistake to think pushing everybody to talk only in private will increase the diversity and quality of discourse. It will NOT, it will collapse conversations into simpler more reductive narratives.

Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.

LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion where tons of smart people are mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days… instead of being a boring, lame regression into fuedalism.

yawn

Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing.

Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.

If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.

That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums/the fediverse are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.

quit whining tho?

Yeah, I don’t post private shit on forums, I discuss things publically so I can collectively have a conversation with countless other people.

If you want to have a private personal conversation sure use a private chat room, but I need that public space to discuss and learn, active publically accessible forums / lemmy / other equivalent communities are goldmines of information that benefits all.

No, it isn’t.

Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.

By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.

Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.

Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after “anonymizing” the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.

Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.

This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all… dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.

Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.

Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…

What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.

Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.

Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.

Fuck Discord

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” - Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses by James Joyce.

Nanny Ogg from Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett.

I just really want to get drunk with her, it would be fucking hilarious I wish I lived in a universe where I could actually get wasted and be totally ridiculous with Nanny Ogg.

I think things become much more chaotic and prone to quickly escalating to lethal applications of violence if there is the constant threat that anybody could be concealed carrying and more importantly that if someone felt the need to carry a firearm that they would likely conceal it.

Bringing a large visible rifle into a situation still escalates the threat of violence, but at least it does it in a clear and unambiguous way. There is no excuse to shoot the teenager dressed in basketball shorts and a wifebeater with absolutely no where to hide a rifle because you saw somebody else nearby with a rifle and you think the unarmed teenager might be concealing one. (There really is almost never an excuse to shoot anybody unless they are holding a gun and aiming it at you, and maybe even not then if you are on the one antagonizing them).

The US is a country where police not unregularly shoot innocent people, often unarmed black men or other minorities, and handwave away any responsibility for the needless violence by suggesting there might have been a handgun…

With a hunting rifle or shotgun there is no ambiguity about your intentions in a space or how you will potentially react to lethal threats of violence. There is no conveniently conflating other innocent and unarmed people with the people holding rifles or shotguns and easily getting away with it. On the other hand there is no surprising people by entering a space under false pretexts about your capacity or intentions around violence with a rifle or shotgun, since carrying a large weapon immediately identifies you as someone carrying a large weapon.

My point is, concealed carry is only effectively a right or privilege if society gives you the permission to arbitrarily carry around the means to end many peoples’ lives in your pocket, which is something really only extended willingly and consistently to white, christian conservative men. Carrying around a hunting rifle or a shotgun is a different story.

Look at the way handguns are used in US media, they are treated as status symbols of power and righteosness. Shows and movies constantly rely on the revealing, obtaining and losing of handguns to portray changes in the power of characters (lazy fucking writing but that is another rant…). To US culture the handgun is the ultimate object of empowerment and of personally distributed justice and that says everything you need to know about handguns really.

(also, if you are someone who actually needs to protect yourself with a handgun, you already know who you are, this conversation is irrelevant)

As a USian, while I think gun violence is a preventable mass tragedy that unfolds daily here I also think that when minorities, indigenous people, women, queer people or really anybody who isn’t a white christian rightwing man talks about wanting to own a gun to protect themselves while living in this country I can’t disagree. If you don’t understand the very real threat of police violence that you can’t resist or stop, and the very real threat of other kinds of violence that police will NOT step in to stop because of who you are, you can’t really argue against owning guns in the US to people that have no other choice than to take this kind of thing seriously.

I think handguns should be made much much much more illegal, since the handgun is actually the tool of state violence and oppression, it is the tool of surprise murder and intimidation. On the other hand if you carry a rifle you have to state your capacity for lethal violence, there is no hiding it or revealing it like a powertrip or gotcha card, which isn’t to downplay the terror and violence that evil rightwing terrorists have wrought upon the US with assault rifles, but at this point I don’t think owning a hunting style rifle or a shotgun as somebody who lives in the US is an unreasonable idea, especially if you have become a convenient political and literal target for the right.

To be clear, the whole stupid idea that owning an ar15 with a 30 roung mag, bumpstock and quick change mags somehow makes you safe to a home defender that breaks into your house at 3am when you pull it out and proceed to shoot 30 rounds erratically in the general direction of something you hear, sending bullets careening through the walls of your neighborhood and more likely killing somebody’s kid sleeping in their bedroom than doing anything to make you safer IS pathetic and spits on actual real gun culture.

Also I want to note that people who roleplay as mil-sim types by spending actual thousands of dollars on pseudo-military equipment to live powertrip fantasies are by and large hilariously pathetic, especially because they are usually completely and utterly blind to (or worse directly supportive of) forms of authoritarian violence (state or otherwise). See lots of loser white dudes showing up in 24k worth of weekend warrior dress up GI Joe gear to defend the incredible threat to civil liberties that society expecting people to wear masks during a pandemic represented… Good job chuds! You saved the day!

Bernie Sanders can pronounce it however the fuck he wants, with as thick of a brooklyn accent as he wants.

He has earned at least that much lol