Comment by emptysongglass
4 years ago
Dumping Facebook and its products as I and others have done is one strong step forward but people can't even manage this. It's deeply disappointing. Techno bears its seeds in rebellion but everybody throwing techno parties is coordinating on what is essentially an Orwellian state. Punks too, they're cozied up to this framework of oppression and can't see it for what it is.
I think people have a hard time seeing the ethics in the technology they choose to use. Maybe the next wave of net-natives will be able to rediscover that common thread of rebellion and resist. It's insidious, I'll give you that. It's not obvious what is being surrendered with every participation on these platforms but it doesn't take a genius to see clearly.
> Dumping Facebook and its products as I and others have done is one strong step forward
A strong step forward that gets nullified when Facebook buys the alternative app you're using, or when the app you're using does things as Facebook does.
You can propose all individual options you want, this is a collective issue that won't get fixed just by calls to individual action.
facebook is not going to buy my fediverse instance or my XMPP server. "they will just buy whatever gets used" gets thrown around too much as a sort of impotent defeatism. I don't see them buying instances on federated networks running open source software, and these networks are growing. we have to stop having this 2007 mindset that it is still okay to try to dump millions of people into a large centralized microblogging site.
Tech(or more specifically, cloud technology and social media) is the modern "opium of the masses".