Thread by @gravislizard

a crucial thing about opt out ads is that at the current rate, by 2022, every four seconds we will have to opt out of something, and the thing is, i consider that wrong in a philosophical and spiritual sense

i used to have a bit i did about open source which I've now forgotten but it focused on how cathedrals and bazaars are both hellholes

the cathedral aside, we are firmly inside the global bazaar, a place where nothing is predictable, you can't learn who's who. there's a constantly changing cast of people, all interested in taking your money and then evaporating. you never see the same person twice.

i wish i could remember who it was, but someone on here once said "i have been blocking every brand i see for four years and there are still more brands, and i recognize them all. how many brands are in my head? how much of my memory is brands?"

there are countless brands. all of them are screaming at you. we create regulations, and now we're even more acutely aware of how many fucking brands there are. i haven't clicked a link in recent memory that didn't ask me to agree to save cookies.

every single day i have to agree to save cookies. i have to agree to share my location or not. i have to opt out of info collection. i have to click, click, click, click on so many I Agree. i am deluged in EULAs. this is a horrible life. this is detestable. this is revolting.

our lives are lived half in computers, and that half is immeasurably worse than the one we live offline. half a century ago many people wrote of the poison of advertising, how it infests our lives and forces its way into our vision. computers are so much worse.

advertisers are not chasing you down the street screaming "SIR! SIR!" and LITERALLY not giving up until you turn and say, in clear english, "I Am Not Interested, Thank You" but websites do. Apps do.

You can't get upset. You're denied that freedom. You can't scream at websites until their "polite" but incessant demands are cowed and slink away. You are forced to choke down your anger and calmly decline.

Computers are our roads and buildings and public spaces and books and vehicles now, and they are all holding a clipboard asking for a moment of your time. We are permanently trying to exit a Safeway without being noticed now.

The clipboard holders have been standing at an intersection I pass through on my way home from work for four years - this part is a true story, not a metaphor - and it's never the same people. It's new ones. They have 100% turnover.

I do not care what their issue is. I'm sure they work for grifters of some stripe but maybe not. I've never spoken to them. The point is that I keep having to decline. Their eyes and their fake smiles lock on to me, and then I am forced to say no.

They put me in a position where I am not remembered when I really fucking should be - it's MY stomping ground, why is it not theirs? I work there, I have been through that intersection over 5000 times, and these people are permanent professional strangers.

We could talk about cities being too big to know your neighbors, and yeah that's part of it. I don't care about the greater phenomenon and it's causes right now, i'm just saying it's fucked up and it feels like a violation that my path to work is one that alienates me.

Well, that's the internet. I have told the home depot website that it can use my location literally thousands of times and for some fucking reason it doesn't remember. I have to agree every single time. And that's a website that can actually USE that info.

I WANT them to have that info, and still it isn't remembered. I have to be reminded every single time I go there that I'm opening a security hole. And so every single time I go to almost any fucking website now, I have to click Decline, and I'm even MORE acutely aware of it

But now it's spreading, into the real world. EULAs are all over, and will only get worse. There will be more and more and more EULAs. Paper EULAs, LCD screen EULAs, EULAs you can't decline without physically leaving places that used to be safe and NEUTRAL.

Businesses could have put up signs that said YOU ARE BEING AUDIO RECORDED FOR MARKETING PURPOSES in the 50s, but they didn't do that because it wasn't cheap. They had to spend money to make money. Now they don't.

I am realizing these days that the incredible ease with which extremely detestable things can be deployed to all corners of the fucking world is a good thing only for bad people, and doesn't make things any better for most good people.

I still won't go back to fucking re d ro bin because their little tabletop ordering devices have cameras in them for no earthly reason, and it's disgusting to be in a place where i should HAVE TO ASK THE QUESTION "am I being recorded"

I yelled at the company and they told me "well if the camera's on the light next to it will be on" and my reaction was basically "it's absolutely inhuman that you think i should be reassured by that"

i do not wish to live a life of saying no. i do not LIKE saying no. i do not ENJOY saying no. it is not a NEUTRAL activity for me. i do not want to be hounded, harassed, fucking followed, and the fucking brands are trying to wear us down so that we don't have that reaction.

i am tired and i am getting more tired every day. i do not want my life to be consumed by saying no, constantly saying no. like a child begging for candy. "what about now? what about now? what about now?" you keep saying "no" and two seconds later they act like they forgot.

and always saying no to someone new. the same old people, and new people. every day new people. a constant, unending stream of new people waving shit i don't want at me and shouting in my face

you can't raise the energy to yell at them. sure, there's no way to really yell at them since they aren't people anymore - they stopped being people after the industrial revolution, after chain stores, after all the bosses hid in their castles and stopped doing any work

but if you could, there's just too many. it's not just one brand shouting in your face - it's fucking millions. if you shouted back, you'd look unreasonable. hey, it's just one little "no thanks" why are you being so shitty about it

but to YOU, that's the HUNDREDTH "no thanks" today. they're all fucking conspiring to target you, to make your life a kafkaesque nightmare where day in, day out you are constantly fending off tiny pinpricks of irritation, of "polite" just-a-second-of-your-time "requests"

sure, we can't shout in their faces, but we could do SOMETHING - we could encourage their employees to quit, or take control of the company in some cases. okay, and start where? there's fucking millions of them.

who should we target? amazon? yeah they're horrible, but it'll take EVERYTHING WE HAVE, literally years of EVERYONE pulling as hard as they can to tip this shit on its side. great, one down, MILLIONS to go.

we are fucking outnumbered, because the force amplification it takes to stop a business from doing something is unholy, and we can't attack all of them at once. and so far the legislation we create is fucking toothless, because it's just going to make more EULAs.

opt-in or opt-out, sooner or later we will be opted in to everything because we're just too tired to keep saying no. because it's the easy route, to just let them take over.

there will be so many cameras, and the route to get them turned off will be so dehumanizing, and they will start recording before they ask for permission and we will all, individually, say to ourselves, "oh hell, the damage is done, why bother now"

what i am saying is that no amount of legislation or regulation will change the fact that as a civilization we should agree that it is reprehensible to want to collect information about millions of people to help you make money. that wanting to do that is intrinsically immoral.

the problem is not a legal one or a technological one, it is a social sickness. when people want to make enormous amounts of money by doing extremely fucking weird and intrusive things we do not adequately recognize that as a personal flaw that should be excluded from society.

we live in the heyday of the scam, the scheme, the grift, the era of millions of Showbizzes figuring out how to cross the country entirely by free airport shuttle. our society is completely fucking built around scumbag Kramers who have been crashing on your couch for months.

We should hate these people and hate what they do, and most people should leave the room when these awful, terrible people enter. Anyone who wants that kind of Money For Nothing. Advertisers and information merchants.

it's awful that we made rules that say websites have to ask to steal your information. it's awful that we have no local control over these people. it's awful that when they tried it, they didn't get abandoned by everyone they know for being horrible.

we can't fix these problems with laws. these aren't things that laws are for, we're already using laws for so much shit that should have been handled at a social level, by everyone in town refusing to speak to the person who did the shitty thing.

but the town is ENORMOUS. it's the entire fucking PLANET. interstate, let alone international commerce is killing us as much as anything else.

you could get ALL OF CALIFORNIA to refuse to go to a website and for a tremendous number of websites it just wouldn't matter. they would just shrug and advertise somewhere else. we cannot unify the entire country or the entire world against a business, it's IMPOSSIBLE.

the problem, the SPECIFIC problem is that they have too many customers. that is it. that is what's wrong. businesses are too big and have too many customers and their markets are too large. this has to stop.

our problems are not going to be solved with laws because the problem is that our entire society is structured completely wrong from the ground up