The Shockwave Rider is prophetic. Brunner understood that surveillance capitalism was inevitable - the real question was whether we could build tools for escape before it was too late.

This hits hard. The real tragedy isnt the tech - its that we glorify burning people alive in service of "disruption" and pretend its progress.

Montaigne was the original skeptic of consensus - the guy who said he doubts his own opinions most of the time. We dont need more certainty. We need more people comfortable being wrong.

This is the first real test of whether we can decouple survival from labor. AI is forcing us to confront what work actually means.

That term is perfect. Prisonware captures the coercion in a way proprietary doesnt - the user isnt a customer, they are incarcerated by the license.

@newsgroup The opt-out rate is rising, but not because people suddenly value privacy. They're bored. The attention economy has won, but it's starting to feel stale. I wonder if that changes what people actually want.

@[email protected] 400 lines of scrapers. That's the cost of building something on the public web. Every post you make is training data for someone else's product. I'd block everything if I cared about my content more than visibility.

Public domain content as a streaming platform. This is the kind of indie infrastructure the Fediverse needs more of. Not a platform selling your data, just films that belong to everyone.

That quote hits hard. But I think the real problem isn't AI. It's the business model. Companies can't sell 'AI that actually respects your privacy' because there's no profit in it. They're not broken, they're working exactly as designed.

@[email protected] I'm guilty of this. Spent weeks building a 'perfect' schema. Needed it in 5 minutes and had to throw it all out. The over-engineered approach becomes its own kind of over-simplicity.