this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Technology
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There's nothing wrong with the technology, it's who is running it all that needs to be fixed, with the general f*ckery that is through everything now I miss my 2400 baud modem that was bigger than my computer and dialing in to a BBS.
You have my permission to write fuck on the internet. On the fediverse, Zuck is the more offensive four-letter word.
What the zuck....
Language!
I'll take the Zuckwit over Bozos or Ellison.
Why did you censor 'fuckery' tho?
I like the star in it, reminds me of a sticker, which is an odd mental association but I swear like a sailor while dropping that in fuck.
Fair enough!
Yup, almost 70 and tech is fine. Just use what you need and ignore social media is what I do. I also of course do Lemmy. I ran a few BBS’s back in the day. Oodles of fun.
Algorithms that are specifically designed to addict you are pretty wrong technology in my eyes. Wouldn’t matter who is running it, that tech is harmful.
Okay, but booze, nicotine, and crack were also pretty addictive.
Idk if I'd trade The Algorithm epidemic of the 2020s for wood grain alcohol from the 1920s
And heavily controlled, regulated and legislated. Algorithms aren't
Only took a century or ten
Yeah, those are also harmful technologies that harmed societies more or less depending on the historical and geopolitical context.
Right now, the algorithm is more harmful than those because everyone is addicted to them. The sheer amount of time waste and collective brainpower that is being degraded or never even being developed is staggering and will stunt our society for decades to come.
Even fentanyl, while incurring a much more dramatic and tragic cost on individuals, has a fraction of the impact on society that the algorithm will have due to the scale of our collective addiction.
It’s like how wage theft has a relatively low impact on individuals but combined represents significantly more money stolen than all other crime nationwide.
The effects are spread out over many individual people, but it has an overall dampening effect on the growth and development of communities.
Again, I don't think you're acknowledging the difference between chemical addiction and social habit.
If you spend a week without cell phone reception, you don't die from withdrawal symptoms.
The distinction is not really worth considering except in the context of managing withdrawal symptoms during recovery. Any substance/behavior addiction can be devastating, and trying to say that someone's addiction is less valid than someone else's just prevents them from seeking help.
Seems like one hell of a caveat
I mean, it is important, but detoxing is probably the easiest part of actually stopping an addiction. The majority of people who go to rehab later relapse, so it’s not actually getting clean and managing withdrawal that determines recovery success, it’s the long term plan for replacing the addiction with healthy behaviors.
People have commuted suicide, though.
Just because it's not a physical addiction does not men it can't be as extreme, and generally a physical addiction will end up with nausea, exhaustion, and mood swings rather than death. It takes deep or long-term addiction to be fatal.
They are deployed to addict, there is some benefit to them, Google used one back before they dropped "Don't be evil" to enhance the relevance of search results.
Now they use it to censor, and sell shit, but it was not a bad technology before it was corrupted.
There is a reason I specified algorithms that are designed to addict. Algorithms in general are not bad technology, but these specific ones are.
Glances at the legacy fossil fuel infrastructure
Idk about that.
A lot of the historical nostalgia is based on biased accounts of past eras.
"I wish I lived in the 80s" is a thing you say when you're not told about the airborne lead fumes or the acid rain. "I wish I lived in the 50s" is said by people who would feel very differently if they were being drafted to the Korean War.
Yeah, it's nice that they fixed the ozone and acid rain, but now they've gone and walked back what stopped it, so we'll see it again soon enough.
At least in the 80s there was potential for improvement, in spite of the problems, rather than an eternal spiral into oblivion.
We also were still able to rely on legal protections rather than having it all privatized and laws bypassed by T&C.
We don't talk about the irreconcilable damage inflicted during the earlier industrial era. We don't talk about what modern fossil fuels and plastics replaced.
Nothing about this is eternal. We are no closer to oblivion today than we were during Operation Plumbbob or the Black Plague.
You won't live to see the end. You won't live to see the beginning of the end. You won't even live to see the end of the beginning.
We're all living through a single footstep on an endless road.