LukeAlmighty 🇨🇿 @LukeAlmighty@gameliberty.club

@meso I've seen it for years but the last like five or so it's been beyond the pale. People hard refuse to use anything that doesn't exude corporateness, saying it looks "sketch" or "unprofessional" etc. The worst example of this I would say is social media and chat software. They will reduce the whole thing to the UI/UX. If you try to even broach the topic of federation it will not register at all. What they care about is if you can open up the image and then swipe left or right to go to the next one. Those kinds of things are the only issue normies will even consider when choosing software on their phone. And frankly, I'm not even sure it's really about that. I actually think it's really about not wanting to accept software written by Some Guy as legitimate. It must be overproduced bloatware by a big corporation or else it's gross and icky.

You have to know the mentality I'm talking about. I can't be the only crazy person who has noticed this

@thelioma @p @revvy @coolboymew

@coolboymew Bro, I swear, normies have a literally magical ability to sniff out non-proprietary software like a hound so they can reflexively reject it.

"Um sweaty?? Is this some of that geek foss crap???? Ew. I want my iPhone"

@meso @thelioma @p @revvy

Tales from 4chan
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I actually agree, just coming from another angle. Very long post incoming.

We allowed this culture of "big tech" to take over the minds of normies. We glorified these "self made tech entrepreneurs" who came up from "nothing", selling the dream to young people. Wow, so much money so fast, look at these guys making electronics in their basements now they're super rich! People love a good story. What an american dream story, that could have been me.

Only, it didn't happen for everyone, right? As it doesn't nowadays, either.

I remember watching the Zuck movie and was getting pissed off as it went on. I resented that little shit in the film and his success. I could program his "amazing" friend network he started this all with at uni when I was 11. I built a multi-modem BBS system from scratch at 12. I know people who were even better. A friend created a hex editor in assembly at 11 yo. With it we cracked simcity's copy protection with freaking DEBUG on DOS in 3 days back then. We just were born in the wrong place at the wrong time (no big VC investors or silicon valley in Greece or any entrepreneurial mentality). I always felt guilty about resenting these guys, thought I was being petty and jealous. Probably am but life is not fair and jealousy can be a motivator, too. I was simply lazier than them, right? I did OK.

Well, after a while when I read Steve Jobs' biography and read about Bill Gates and the whole hacker scene back then I realized what was pissing me off about these guys. It's that serendipity and luck is the biggest success factor, coupled with being ready to jump on the opportunity and BE AN ASSHOLE. I met many smart and capable people that didn't get anywhere because they never got a break or because they didn't want to be assholes.

So, we made heroes of these people, a large percentage of whom are psychopaths and sociopaths, and they used this to humanize these big tech brands they created, these global for-profit over-your-dead-body conglomerates, that now control communication and culture even more than the mass media. The small companies of hackers we all admire transformed into this goo of PR experts, UI/UX designers and accountants and we just let it happen. We all went to work for them cause the money was good and we gave them our talent and they painted it with their logo. Now that they're laying off all the layabouts and removing the 'juice bars' at work and all that mythology is collapsing around their ears, what with the pandemic and remote work being rolled back into the corporate money barn, we'll learn. I hope.

So we may shill the fedi but that's IMHO still not perfect, either because it's very susceptible to corporate takeover, just like email. At least it's better than the other shit that's around. But we'll never get the "hero" prestige these people got, we're fighting uphill in the minds of normies. Big tech = good, free and good capitalism. Open source = cheap, unpolished, unsupported. But that's collapsing, too.

I'm rambling.-

my most favorite moment of Cyberpunk 2077 connecting the game narrative and gameplay was the optional mission in which you're to do something bad to a random mid-level exec who ran over someone's child in a car and got out of it with just some minor fine (on that someone's payroll), that was supposed to present some kind of a moral dilemma and commentary, except on my way to do that side quest, i ran over some pedestrian in my car and had to like hide behind a garbage bin for a little police icon next to minimap to disappear

@nugger