Yeah, if only because Flash—Ahhhaaahhaaa—is the savior of the universe. You know, that Flash—Ahhhaaahhaaa—he’ll save every one of us.

What I meant by that was that many tech companies hire people, who frequently perform these tasks on a project basis for only short periods of time, and pay them a pittance for their work. Their numbers are likely to fluctuate greatly.

I was by no means trying to emphasise the fact that these people mostly live in countries where wages are particularly low and where there are virtually no labor protections; I was simply pointing out that they are usually hired on a short-term basis.

This exploitative practice, as well as other “gig-work” arrangements, is unfortunately quite widespread, especially in the tech industry, and serves to increase corporate profitability. Many tech companies use this approach to reduce the number of permanent employees—a practice that, of course, isn’t unique to the tech industry—but using these practices there are many tech companies that generate astronomical revenues with a comparatively small workforce.

Mechanical Turk

I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Of course tech companies have a lot of employees if you count all the “mechanical turks”. That’s simply misleading.

None of that has much to do with what my original comment was about.

You’re saying that it’s impossible for powerful, completely degenerate people to be capable of playing their power games.

My take on this is that a look at the history books proves you wrong. LinkedIn-style fairy tales about leadership and all that bogus doesn’t change much about that.

Because they have the money to do so. Those who have it simply pay good people. You should know this if you’ve ever dealt with large companies. It doesn’t take good management—just the money to pay the people who do the work. You should also know that giant online corporations like Meta have an incredibly small number of employees compared to industrial companies, and labor is the biggest cost factor in any business.

What do you actually do for a living? You claim to have insights. Where did you get them?

I’d be an idiot to say here what I do for a living, but yes, I regularly deal with CEOs -and it’s precisely this experience that makes it all the more likely to me that a conspiracy like the one mentioned above is underway. While I’m nowhere near that level, I’m still quite familiar with the politics in companies with 500 or more employees. For me, this is all the more reason to entertain such thoughts, because I know of hardly any company where performance or competence is even remotely appreciated. The people I know as “the decision-makers” should actually be the very last ones to make decisions—they’re self-absorbed, unscrupulous people.

This is a conspiracy theory, but is it really so far-fetched to assume that the most powerful 1% of the populations are joining forces worldwide to establish something like a global feudal regime?

It’s entirely feasible, since we’re talking about just a few thousand people here.

In any case, these people have one thing in common: they view democracy as a problem. This applies to Trump just as much as it does to Putin and Jinping. The same goes for their henchmen, such as Merz in Germany, for example.

It’s not that unthinkable when you consider the fundamental idea behind fascism, as shaped by Mussolini in his day: a brotherhood of the elites striving for absolute rule.

It seems to me that this is now the agenda, especially since in the U.S., with the pseudo-intellectual concept of “Dark Enlightenment,” there doesn’t even seem to be any attempt to hide it.

I’m not usually a fan of such ideas, but it does seem very, very suspicious to me, given that the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries are apparently doing everything in their power to undo the civilizational progress of the last hundred years—and are clearly doing so in a fairly well-coordinated manner.

The manufacturers’ reasoning here is presumably that the more technology is built into a device, the faster it becomes obsolete, and the sooner consumers will have to buy new devices.

This is a classic example of consumer-unfriendly design, in which manufacturers ensure that devices have a limited useful life or a purposely frail design. This is called planned obsolescence and can be achieved through both mechanical means and software.

What a valuable contribution from the co-founder and CEO of “Cooper AI”… on a platform for business-type show-offs who have nothing better to do than reinforce each other’s outrageous incompetence…

So this is the scope of “Cooper AI’s” operations:

Executives Who Use Cooper Make Better-Informed Decisions. Cooper uses natural language to generate insights and deliver the high-impact opportunities your executive team needs right now.

I think it’s pretty obvious from this sentence alone that this is nothing more than another front-end that forwards all requests to the actual cloud LLM providers.

It’s truly absurd that there are people who see any added value in this.

Reminds me of Claptrap

It may be that his death marked a turning point, in a sense: He had already been forced out of his role as CEO by business executives in 1985 and didn’t return until 1997, when the company was on the brink of collapse. He then truly turned the company around through innovation: first with the iPod, then with the iPhone—both products that changed the world. I don’t want to downplay this foresight at all, and I also think that Jobs was someone who cared about the cause—about products that are meaningful and useful.

Nevertheless, I don’t believe the start of enshittification can be pinned to the date of his death. Rather, he was one of those, who laid the groundwork for it—here’s an example: soon, Google will tighten the screws and design the Play Store along the closed model that Apple introduced back in the day.

In short: I think there are many other reasons. Jobs was an outstanding businessman, but he lived in a different world than the one we live in today.

I would rather consider Steve Wozniak than Steve Jobs. Jobs was undoubtedly excellent at selling products, and he was certainly a smart (and also ruthless) businessman, but the pioneer—and the one who actually “did the thing”—was Wozniak.

It’s true, of course, that Wozniak probably wouldn’t have been able to make his product a success on his own, but that’s precisely where the problem lies: Bill Gates is certainly no fool either, but DOS—the product that made Microsoft the billion-dollar-company that it is today—was developed by someone else, namely Gary Kildall. Gates’s achievement consisted mainly of making a lot of money from it. He did just that, and did it well, while Kildall was fobbed off with a ridiculously small sum relative to the product’s success, since he was in a weak position at the time.

Although Gates was far more technically adept than Jobs, his core qualities were essentially the same—a good sence for business and a utter lack of scruples: Kildall never received a bonus payment from Microsoft for his work that would have even remotely acknowledged his importance.

There are many people in the IT sector who are worthy of admiration, but almost none of those who truly deserve it are among those the industry or rather the public celebrates as pioneers or visionaries—these are almost exclusively businesspeople who played only a marginal role, if any, in the development of the products they market.

In my view, success stories like Apple or Microsoft are fundamentally no longer possible today, since visionary spirit, wisdom, and inventiveness have been permanently replaced by the inhuman logic of cutthroat capitalism, which the U.S., above all, embodies. Its heroes are always the wrong ones—not those who have advanced humanity through their achievements, but always those who have known how to exploit others particularly ruthlessly for their own ends. These people lead the Western world today, which is why it stands on the brink of total collapse, since these people know nothing but boundless greed.

They are utterly unfit to lead millions upon millions of people—yet that is precisely what they seek to do in their pathological hubris.

Yes, because of his financial success, he considers himself a genius—which he very obviously never was. This is a common trait among billionaires. Many of them are psychopaths who have amassed their wealth through utter unscrupulousness, irresponsibility in the form of an absurd willingness to take risks, and sheer luck.

In the case of Musk, Thiel, and various others, that stroke of luck was PayPal. That company was so successful that it made all of its investors immeasurably rich—it was more a matter of chance that PayPal succeeded, and everything that followed really wasn’t all that difficult because that kind of money cannot lose anymore no matter how ridiculous stupid someone might be.

That’s precisely the problem: We only hear about the people who bet everything on one card and won—they’re portrayed as geniuses, which they never were. We never hear anything about all those who failed miserably—and that’s the vast majority.

Billionaires aren’t geniuses or even above-average in intelligence. Their financial success has, in the rarest of cases, anything to do with intelligence.

I’m pretty sure it’s because he can’t stand losing. The man clearly suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder.

Are you serious? So you’re saying mods should be able to do whatever they want?

Yes, but a Tag wouldn’t restrict freedom in any way. It would just make things easier.

By the way: You should make a post out of your blocklist and include the keywords in the description - I think that would be very helpful to a lot of people, since it’s pretty obvious that something like what I’m suggesting here will never be implemented.

Yes, but is it really necessary to go to all that trouble?

I think the Fediverse would be much more appealing to new users if they could just tune out all the hate and the utter absurdity of the US—then there would be relatively few posts left, but at least those that remain wouldn’t portray the world as the US billionaires want it to be.

It would also be a step in the right direction, because it’s completely obvious what the US oligarchs’ tactic is: distracting from the real problems through misinformation and hate.

So why shouldn’t people who don’t want any of that have a very simple way to avoid it?

If the moderators are doing their job, there shouldn’t be any problems. As I’ve said before: Many communities have a “no politics” rule that actually causes more problems because it’s so arbitrary. The reason for this is essentially the completely absurd U.S. discours. It’s all about the insane spectacle that the U.S. regime passes off as politics. If that can simply be filtered out - provided no relevant tag has been assigned to a topic concerning the U.S. - then fruitful, civilized debates will once again be possible.

I think the Fediverse would simply facilitate better discussions if we could effectively filter out the clown show in the U.S. - those who are interested in this could still participate in it.

Why is that? It should be very easy for the mods to see whether a post deals with U.S. issues and whether the appropriate tag was used.