561–570 of 1001 posts
I'm not assigning a cause, but US culture, these days, seems to encourage folks to treat others as "NPCs," and that can have rather bad consequences. It's always been an issue (sort of human nature), but it seems (to this battered old warhorse), that it's a lot more prevalent, these days, than it was, just twenty years ago.
"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels" I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone…
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
US citizens do not want this. Every news article descending into tangents on any other point than that is part of why we can't have nice things. The whole country has turned into some sort of lower primate improv troupe where whatever stupid thing comes up gets a "Yes and let's" diversion instead of an adult in the room standing up and cutting the crap.
I created a quick tutorial on how to backup and download all of your TikToks. https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1879568249261621572
Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website? I imagine this ban will go down exactly the same. Never underestimate a bored teenager's ability to bypass tech restrictions. Heck maybe this is what is needed to finally get a new generation out of the comforts of their tech walled garden and get their hands dirty.
Uhhh there are many websites that are banned in the USA. Otherwise working URLs that wont work in the USA. Mostly hostile state actor stuff.Iran, NK, etc. The fact that you don't know about it just says how effective it is.
Sure, VPN. But (serious question, not rhetorical) is that going to get the app on your phone? And are you going to go to the trouble when the algorithm thinks you're eastern european? When the user base is smalelr?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally. I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism, but as soon as something out-competes US companies, it gets banned: Huawei, DJI, TikTok. Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech" and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".
I cannot argue on the TikTok as strongly but I can see strong arguments on why Huawei and DJI are national security risks. Some of this is more educated guesses so not defensible with numbers. We know most major companies in the Chinese market have extremely close ties to the CCP. No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms but I believe the CCP takes it to a next level.…
I am not proposing a conspiracy, I am merely noting some irony in the fact that the US are doing protectionism here.
> No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms
Well, most of the Western Internet goes through the US, and we know for a fact that the US try to extract as much as they can from whatever they can (remember Snowden?). Also the US are very fine with US companies owning all the data of a big part of the world, and they would be really pissed if some country started banning them "for national security reasons".
> but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure
You don't need to connect the drone to the Internet. Technical solutions would most definitely exist, I am convinced of that. The reason DJI is being banned is because DJI is 7 years ahead of anyone else, and the gap is getting bigger every year. It really, really sounds like the US drone companies have been lobbying a ton because they just can't compete.
> Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the United States That’s probably a very stupid question, but is how this is a Chinese company when 60% are owned by American funds?
"Because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the PRC regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the PRC’s agenda and objectives. As a result, even putatively ‘private’ companies based in China do not operate with independence from the government. Indeed, “the PRC maintains a powerful Chinese Communist Party committee ‘embedded in ByteDance’ through which it can ‘exert its will on the company.’ ... the committee includes “at least 138 employees,” including ByteDance’s “chief editor”
...
"Even assuming that the law would recognize Zhang as a bona fide domiciliary of Singapore and not the PRC, ByteDance would nevertheless qualify as being “controlled by a foreign adversary” under one or more of the other statutory criteria. For instance, ByteDance is “headquartered in” China, which is sufficient on its own.... ByteDance also is “subject to the direction or control of ” Chinese persons domiciled in China (in particular, Chinese Communist Party officials), which likewise is sufficient on its own."
http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-656/336144/20241...
Perhaps other countries will also regulate or ban social media companies.
I'm not assigning a cause, but US culture, these days, seems to encourage folks to treat others as "NPCs," and that can have rather bad consequences. It's always been an issue (sort of human nature), but it seems (to this battered old warhorse), that it's a lot more prevalent, these days, than it was, just twenty years ago.
Can you elaborate on this phenomena?
We don't have to allow anyone other than ourselves, any agency or consideration.
That makes it very easy to reduce everyone else into one-dimensional caricatures, easy to attack, dismiss or neglect.
Like I said, this has always been a feature of normal human tribalism, but it seems to have gotten a shot of steroids, sometime recently.
I have found, for myself, that closely interacting with as many others as possible; especially ones that challenge me, has helped me to avoid that.
The migration app of choice appears to be .. xiaohongshu, or "little red book". I'm guessing this won't last since it wasn't intended to have lots of Westerners using it and neither government is going to be happy with that scale of unfiltered contact between ordinary Chinese citizens and US citizens. In the meantime, it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes.
for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language: The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was inf…
> The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.
I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.