Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

Tiktok has a rich mix of content that's silly, educational, political, impressive, sexy, etc. The amount of things I learn on Tiktok and bookmark is incredible. And Tiktok's features like stitches, duets, and shared audios make it really easy to keep a conversation going, letting creators reference each other async. Tiktok has its own unique multimedia language, using audio and visual composition to express memes. Creators choose the tone they wish to present a meme (eg use a joke audio like 'insert cash or select payment type' but pair it with serious commentary on how mental health professionals request payment at the end of a therapy session). That's why it's endlessly interesting and engaging, and to me that's the real 'secret sauce' that the copycats never can capture.

This is the "Helpless Voice" aspect, 'democracy' allowed you to scream at the top of your lungs about how it sucks, giving you the illusion that you're more free than you really are. Imagine if Putin made it legal to insult him on the streets, would that make it any less of a totalitarianism ?

>Btw, what is a perfect system for you?

I'm not sure there is a word for it, anarcho-primitivism is the closest thing, although I don't necessarily agree with them that technology is fundamentally centralized or coercive. Basically, I think that all the ills of society is due to the fundamental idea, the preversion really, of living with people you don't know. That is, to fix society, you have to destroy society, it's a fundamentally unfixable idea. You can't make people who don't feel kinship to each other play by any set of rules. Here's me arguing this from an older comment of mine:

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>>>I'm a techno-primitivist, I believe political units should be extremely small, extremely numerous, with an emphasis on blood ties as the ultimate guarantee of group cohesion and loyalty. I have a burning hatred for and deep distrust of any political unit with more than 1000 persons. There is no way to make a social organization of >1000 persons consistently fair, the rules are always arbitrary and ad hoc, a few assholes always play the meta-game and find ways around them, and somebody is always oppressed and bullied and consistently given the shorter end without a way to be heard.

Family is different, affinity for genetic similarity is deeply hardwired into your lowest level circuits, very few assholes can find their way around the rules evolution built. Every single social organization is a prisoner's dilemma come alive, why cooperate with that stranger you're never going to see again? The answers are always arbitrary and subject to abuse and evasion : Because God, Because Emperor, Because CEO, Because General. Family is the only social unit where the rules stem from your very being : Because Evolution, the very factory that built you, that encoded your love and respect for your own flesh and blood as deep inside as it encoded your liver and kidneys.

In another, and better, universe, we never built nations or states or parliaments or public school systems, every family is an autonomous unit under the leadership of its bread winner, and federations of families handle cross-cutting concerns in a way that leaves as much power to the families as possible.

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Here's another comment of mine from a different forum, arguing the same point in a slightly more colorful (and angry) tones :

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>>>Imagine You live in a cramped and inferior society among countless nameless millions like farm chattel. You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States, composed of people like animal bodies are composed of cells, caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells : not at all, unless relevant to their survival.

You were not built for this perversity, for hundreds of thousands of years your ancestors lived among people whose very flesh and blood was molded out of the same language as them. Nobody needed to craft rules on how to live with each other; or rather, nobody needed to craft rigid and easily exploitable set-in-stone (or paper or computer memory) rules. You started with the willingness to live with each other, and a natural affection only life born out of itself can hold, and the rules trickled down and evolved as needed. You look upon ants and bees, they are marvellous in their numerousy and organization, but you're not like them, your place is to live among a hundred or a thousand of your kin, governing no one but your kin, and being governed by no one but them.

The society you live in is a poor imitation of ants and bees. Everytime you complain someone points to some numbers and explains how they have gone up, how it's good that they go up, how your complaints are misguided and irrational because the only thing that matter is numbers going up, and the societies you're nostalgic for are societies where those numbers have not gone up, and thus can't be worth living in.

Can you imagine that ? Some of us don't have to, because we're living it. If you're not, count yourself lucky that you adapted to the life of ants and bees, but don't dismiss or make fun of those who long for the long lost life of humans.

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You've defined capitalism circularly to your argument. A steady-stage investor, whether a sole proprietor or outside investor in a business throwing off healthy dividends, is by definition not a capitalist by your book. Fine. Let's abandon the word for now.

The broader system of private ownership--the one we have in America. That doesn't require growth at all costs. Neither do outside investors. There are entire categories of outside investors who specialize in zero-growth or negative-growth companies. We can call it capitalism, as most people do, or private property or peanut malanga, the system and its mechanisms remain the same.

Growth-oriented investors need growth. And if you've spent your life around leveraged folk and venture capitalists, it may seem that's most of the capital in the world. But it's not. They're called alternative assets for a reason. The main universe of assets broadly accepts–in fact seeks-preservation of real value plus income.