Part of the zeitgeist. Self-congratulatory for every little thing. Used some childhood references for your artistic endeavor? New genre. Rephrased a tired trope as a meme? Biting cultural criticism.

Likes are the new participation trophy.

And now- bring a different distraction because you are finally sick of the dead internet? Analogue bags.

That... isn't what it means? It's not simply "I wish my boss paid me more because then I could also be a lazy slob like him"

It's an observation that a system can be set up such that it gives the illusion of choice and freedom to those who are in it, while simultaneously undermining them if they attempt to do anything other than proscribed actions, all while creating excess value for an oligarch or a group of shareholders. It's an observation that certain types of capitalism systems are just financial feudalism in disguise.

Would you split less hairs if it was referred to as 'wage serfdom'?

Yeah I miss the GNAA trolls... not.

Much of the early web was an open invitation to create something cool with nary a thought as to how it was all going to be paid for.

Eventually money wins over cool, whether it be music, movies, or the web, and oh boy! in the past few hundred years have we gotten exceedingly adept at extracting every red cent from the punters.

Yes yes yes, the wonders of capitalism and all the wonders it has to lead the masses out of poverty.

But there are trade-offs, and commodification doesn't even begin to describe the hellscape of modern culture.

Somehow I imagine you are perfectly fine with corporations making political donations that may be contrary to their shareholders' or workers' politics.

Criticizing one without the other ("but money is speech unless a union does it") is just the mark of a sycophant.

We've heard it before.

When did the US attempt to invade Cuba again?

OHHHHH Maybe you shouldn't have drawn attention to that.

You're not getting it.

Can't speak for Texas but I caught an interview with the sponsor of the porn bill in Kentucky, and he made clear one of the effects he was after was to drive such content from the state.

PornHub has proposed methods to verify age that are less onerous (tying age to a device, verified at point of sell), but they have been shot down as not being stringent enough (as if sending a copy of an ID isn't easy enough to spoof).

This isn't about "for the children" inasmuch as soft banning certain types of content.

It's the same playbook from decades ago with the same arguments.

Stop trying to make fetch happen

No.

We always came here for the shitposts in the comments and gossip about reg articles. From time to time someone who actually knew the topic first hand to give a detailed breakdown out of sheer rage at the ubiquitous journalistic misrepresentation of tech work.

What exactly were you expecting from an aggregator in the first place?

The inverse is also true

He was only able to get into power because of one party's consistent partisan operations over the last 50 years, and it wasn't the guys in opposition right now.

There's a difference between blame and attribution.

Certainly not in being performatively offended, a field in which the US is recycling old material at a dramatic rate.

Well... lets think about it. What would that take? How would you write it?

in reality, in the situation where this actually happened (in Indiana, in 1897)... the motivation appears to have been a pure narcissistic push by a man named Edwin Goodwin to go down in history as "the man who squared the circle", in defiance of the existing mathematical proofs that said this method of determining pi was not possible. He relied heavily on rhetoric and the limited logical understanding of the legislature, conflating the math that showed it was not possible to do what he was trying with the idea that "these noted problems had been long since given up by scientific bodies as unsolvable mysteries and above man's ability to comprehend". Regular old American 'self made' hubris.

It turns out the proofs were correct, and math isn't actually just a battle of wills between men with waistcoats and mustaches. There are some similarities here, in that someone is trying to elevate their legend at the expense of those around them... but the net result of that will be... economic.

I mean yeah... you can also legislate that pi equals 3 if you want. We had a parliament a few years back that thought they had a legal framework for 'banning encryption'. Physics and tech aren't actually undermined by authority, no matter how hard they stamp their feet... and sometimes in the process they spend a long time explaining how they just don't understand even concepts associated with planning around stuff they rely on. No amount of public opinion will ever override that, no matter how many times they explain to themselves that public opinion is the only thing that matters.

I do think it would be entirely typical that the US tried to ban VPNs but still couldn't put in any kind of reasonable firearms restrictions in without having to creatively misunderstand the words 'mental illness'... but I don't think it's going to play out how any authoritarian imagines it will and the rest of the world will see that, just like we're seeing how your cargo cult dictator isn't actually handling things, is increasingly confused by simple things, can't use that confusion as leverage already... and maybe wont last his whole term.

I've seen politicians try to ban VPNs before

It's very funny watching them try to work out ways to do it that don't criminalise banking software, business operations and their own secure channels. The best they can do is tack a 'for criminal purposes' on the end, which is redundant in any jurisdiction that already has wire or carrier based laws.