No Kings and No Caesars Either | Hacker News Reader

No Kings and No Caesars Either

overturned.substack.com

The same impulse that drives us into the streets to declare ‘No Kings’ could also drive us to withdraw our labor—in this case, our digital labor of content creation and attention—from those who would crown themselves emperors of our online lives.

I think it is futile, and platform-owners know that. Unless you are willing to abandon iPhones, Macs, Windows PCs and Android devices, the United States and it's technocracy can still leverage the full extent of their surveillance, censorship and suppression mechanisms.

Your consent towards using certain services is really just virtue signalling. In a lot of ways you're contributing to the monoculture problem by relying on Substack (or HN, for that matter) to propagate your opinion.

I appreciate this argument, and where are the limits of it? Where can we feel empowered to remove the equity we bring to the most harmful digital ecosystems until they make changes? Meta is a leader and standard setter and hides behind PR, smoke and mirrors, while they harm kids and bank billions.

bigyabai: "You must be absolutely pure in every respect of your life, or it's all in vain. Don't you see it's pointless? Give up, now."

Yay, I guess?

That, but unironically. You're not "fighting the man" in this arena. You are a gladiator fighting for the man. Threatening to leave by joining progressively less-popular centralized social media is a war of escalation you literally cannot win. It is wholly zero-sum.

It's as true for Twitter as it is for Bluesky as it is for Substack as it is for Hacker News. If you've invested your identity into any of these sites, you ought to realize that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Negotiation is all for naught, you either own your words or you don't.

As much as I appreciate the difficulty this

> Unless you are willing to abandon iPhones, Macs, Windows PCs and Android devices

might pose for some, in my particular case to abandon these things I'd first have to take them up.

* To clarify, I do have Windows OS images in VM's that are either isolated or remote and I do have Android OS in two dumbed down smart TV's that are network isolated to either live TV signal from air or local network digital media.

Yes! I mean the President is only important because people devolve 99% of the time they spend of politics to National politics whereas they should be focused on County and City level which has the most impact on their lives.

A street becoming a one way street or a replanning might not be as sexy as what happens at the National Level especially with Trump in the WH (and in the past Clinton) but it actually has an impact on people's lives and it gives people impacted a relatively high capability of influencing what happens compared to National politics which is the equivalent of urinating in the ocean

>How do we share life without enriching billionaires?

Indeed, How can we live life without enriching billionaires? You can’t even get sick without doing so. And that is the problem with this late stage capitalism. Every aspect of our lives is subject to exploitation, and it has become difficult to opt out. As a result, the share of our total wealth owned by the richest keeps growing. (https://inequality.org/article/billionaire-wealth-concentrat...)

> > How can we live life without enriching billionaires?

We should open the LLCs registries so that when they have to actually spend the money the seller can know that they are loaded and ask them for 1000x the price.

I know it seems like something out of a Banana Republic but when Musk or Bezos Gulfstream G800 is approaching to land it seems crazy to me that Tower doesn't shoot its shot and keep them in air indefinetly until they send a wire through.

When I say tower I mean both the airport infrastructure as a whole as well as individual Air Traffic Controllers.

Every worker these people encounter during their lives should shoot their shot because one successful "blackmail" could make them set for life and unlike the employees at the multi trillion dollar corproation they presede a say ATC is a unique point of authority who holds power over the billionaire at that determinate moment

Same with cops etc.

See interaction between Ellison and cop in Hawaii :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj-8UqcSJDY

With open LLCs registry people could be effectively able to check the ownership of every credit card and adjust the price of every good and service according to the pockets of the person or entity buying it

Call me, text me, or see me. No platforms there, no ads. It’s glorious. Real life gets my attention and excitement.

HN is my only social media now but I’m considering moving on — I just enjoy the tech info and occasionally talking to strangers.

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