You’ll find that these professions have a vested interest in maintaining network effects, and as such will view Mast/Blue as threats to their networking infrastructure. They don’t want to dilute the importance of the platform their patronage systems rely on (let alone destroy it) - in fact its centrality is why they leverage it to advance their careers. Artists I can see understanding platform agnosticism to some extent, but for the other two groups, it’s simply not in their DNA. The gatekeeping is a feature for them.

‘The medium is the message’ as a Canadian theorist once said.

The domain is leased to SEO lizards https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/

Lots of banned artist and album names that will return zero results, unless you do something like search for a song or two that’s on the album you want and finding the data that way.

The only objectionable hurdles are the insurmountable ones

Let us share products, offers and rewards you might like to help stores personalize your shopping.

This sentence is a masterpiece of omission.

Smear campaign

A smear campaign, also referred to as a smear tactic or simply a smear, is an effort to damage or call into question someone’s reputation, by propounding negative propaganda.[1] It makes use of discrediting tactics. It can be applied to individuals or groups. Common targets are public officials, politicians, political candidates, activists, and ex-spouses. The term also applies in other contexts, such as the workplace.[2] The term smear campaign became popular around 1936.[3] [Wikipedia[

YT will likely attempt to play creators and viewers off one another. Similar to how hospitality does so with patrons and staff re: tips. You could see a FUD campaign aimed at anyone republishing their work on competitor sites.

A good example of this scam that sticks out to me is plastics recycling. The marketed goal is a circular, sustainable^TM plastic economy. The real goals are uninterrupted plastics manufacturing and the maintenance of tax receipts from plastic goods consumption. Industry and government simply do not want less plastic in the world.

Characters like him are targeted because they are both successful and anti establishment

Not silly at all. It’s a ship of Theseus situation, and the ship has helmsmen with bad attitudes. Bad attitudes engender bad decisionmaking.

2035 2028: Browser content is piped to a local AI that filters junk and noise then feeds the result back into the browser for screen display

All problems are user’s own. Yes enshittification sucks. You’re free to disconnect as much as you can.

Wrong attitude. Only atomization and further exploitation lies that way. The solution is to get vocal and demand higher standards.

Always cut out the intermediaries.

(I’m glad this story was published. We may roll our eyes, but it’s a contribution toward raising normie’s consciousness, which is welcome.)

Users: Do you realize what Windows is subjecting us to? MS board of directors: Windows? We don’t even use PCs

Bell curve meme:

Grug: A file on my computer (/Desktop/passwords.txt) Matty Midwit: Cloud connectivity! Phone numbers! Biometrics! Just install the app! Less than a cup coffee per month! Backed by FAGMAN^TM! The monk: A file on my computer (KPXC)

Context is king. If there’s vital/time-dependent correspondence you’re waiting on, notifications can matter. But email in 2024 is pretty darn transactional, in which case a daily check is enough for most. Notifications for something suggest that I need to drop what I’m doing and attend to whatever arrived. That just doesn’t apply for service provider marketing, purchase receipts, etc.

And then the opsec angle comes into play: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/06/apple-google-requests-push-notification-data

Notifications are overrated. I turn them off for the bulk of apps.

Devote one or two small time windows each day for life admin. Outside those windows it shouldn’t be seen or heard.

The purpose of the piece is to smear the notion of individual control and development of AI tools. It’s known as ‘running propaganda’.

I’m happy with outgroup x being able to develop their own AIs, because that means I’m able to develop AIs too.

Staggeringly naive, tbh. Your profession will be made obsolete as a self-sustaining for-profit enterprise either way. The difference is that the tooling can either be owned exclusively by megacorp, or it can be owned by people.

It’s better to be a bard relying on the charity and small custom of others than a literal sharecropper fueling Universal’s proprietary model for next to nothing. At least in the former case you’re free.

Advertisers working in your native language cannot hijack your attention when foreign language videos are running. Subtitling facilitates that, and encourages site activity that differs from consumption, such as broadening one’s horizons and being inquisitive about the real world.