But I figure it might be worth the $100. You never know

I think their shit is too fucked and they'd have to start their currency from scratch. Also you'd be paying the official conversion rate which is super inaccurate to the Bolivar's actual current value. If you can get enough bills it would be a fun novelty gift to give people huge wads though.

Fun to burn

XD what was that thing about using it as toilet paper cuz its buckets cheaprr

I'm in a weird situation.I'm in a weird s
I've started to volunteer for a local podcast trying to get off the ground and
to put it simply
the host is a literal black woman gender studies major
and both of her "bosses" are white male feminists
However, their goal is not specifically activism. My area has a lot of LGBT rights history and after the last leader of the foundation died they realized they never really catalogued his stories
So mission statement 1 of this cast is going to be to interview local gay geezers for their stories
But all of the phrasing the three used point to "we're two steps away from communists" left
The other volunteer and I agreed about that assessment after we left and when I get back from DC in two weeks I want to start to also push episodes where we do debates and discussions with our adience
it'll be broadcast from the local university's radio station
I'm perfectly fine with working with far-left people, but I'm not quite sure how to get on their level about stuff.
I mentioned a blog where I wrote a short article on JBP and one of the HuWhite men scoffed at it, and later called Lauren Southern an "alt-right darling"
...Granted, I then replied to that with something akin to "as a journalist I don't like that sort of phrasing. I don't know if you're right about that or not because I do not watch her content, so I would like to refrain on judging people before I know more about them than rumor and hearsay."
he gave me a look like I was speaking fucking mandarin
...Granted if this doesn't work out I'll be getting my foot in the door at that university radio station, and I need a volunteer job for my next semester at college. So. hey.
Thoughts?

On what you should do or what?

Kinda?

(censored) them! KC

Like, what exactly is your job?

We don't know yet

officially it's me, a volunteer, an unpaid volunteer host, and two other guys who srot of run it

What is expected of you, what rolls do you need to fill, and what do you not understand?

We're still settling that out

I'm just not sure how I'll work with this group

For the most part this'll help me get in the door at the university station

The best you can do is remain objective, and reveal nothing about your true beliefs or anything really you do in your free time.

🤔

I've casually stated some of the people I listen to but that my core goal is to objectively display the truths of whatever happens to be going on

They didn't seem to believe me much but hey

Don't post of social media, and just act fence sitty

State only facts.

That should keep you mostly under the radar

Ask people questions, let them speak without interruping them as much as possible, and report their words verbatim

Well yeah

that's what they taught me for the last two years in school

really? they don't teach yellow journalism?

I'm being taught by several ex-CBC writers

and one award-winner who's now got multiple books and has nothing but glowing reviews across the board

For that situation he was probably a little hurt by the fact that you called his opinion hearsay, despite the fact that it is just that.

Depends on how ground standing/good of a relationship you want with these people

I'm standing by my opinions without trying to hurt anyone else's feelings

It's not really that easy but I'm learning

The biggest issue is I'm not sure how receptive to opposing ideas these guys are yet.

I mean there are different ways to standby your opinions

For example you couldve said something along the lines of "thats interesting, i havent read/watched any of her content yet but ill check her out"

If they go on about wasting your time or not trusting them you can simply say the journalism requires legwork and you dont intend to skip it

The catch with "alt right darling" is that it can be commentary on either Southern herself or the Alt Right

It's not terribly honest

Even then though I find a lot of that stuff is bunk anyway. Wasn't that long ago that people pointed to satirical articles to try to paint Peterson as having a large alt-right/white supremacist following

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why exactly is „the following“ relevant anyway? The important thing is what someone says, not who is listening.

Guilt by association

Oh absolutely

if people who are bad likes the thing, the person saying it must be bad

The argument is that they're obviously saying something that doesn't fit the narrative

I love how JBP handles that argument. It usually goes sometihng like

Since all these shady characters love them

Reproter: most of your followers are men does that concern you?
JBP: Most of Youtube is men, statistically it makes sense.

Rinse and repeat.

Well and his response to the alt right one is that it just isn't true, and he's right

Most alt-right articles about JBP are calling him a *filthy secret hidden ninja jew agent*

You go to the comments on his posts and videos and memestate kids are raging at him

Calling him a shill and shit

ye

Guilt by association... really gotta love the Blockwart mentality.

si

Then again... not sure if Blockwart or Stasi-IM both fit.

Oh but don't forget, the evil alt right bigot Jordan Peterson just gives common sense self help advice

There's no point in listening to him since you should already know this stuff

Seriously though, JBP's rules should be common sense but that's part of the thing

due to a storm of various simultanious powergrabs and clusterfucks, his simple basic common fucking sense ideas for living smoothly have gone untaught in the last generation or so

Well... a lot of it is stuff you should know yourself, if you were raised correctly...

and by generation I vaguely say people from age 30ish and down, in mostly north america, without specific people in mind

You mean people who never left the house as children because letting them go on the internet is easier then taking them to a park or something?

Well I think a lot of it is the how

Like I know my generation has been bombarded with a lot of these messages, but in a very superficial, ends-focused manner

Peterson is almost entirely means focused, and doesn't just drop down to platitudes. You won't get a "just work hard"

You'll get "it's important for you to consistently re-examine yourself in a meaningful and critical way, and ask yourself if you're going in the direction that's right for you" and he'll also lay the problem at your own feet

In a world that seems increasingly afraid of assessment and judgement, a simple stern "maybe you need to fix this about yourself first" is probably what a lot of these people need

You can't make anything about yourself unless you have a solid foundation

Life is constantly about reiteration and self-improvement

https://youtu.be/EqC82zmHccU?t=157

^ a different take on the purge

WELP better go buy a soapbox and walk down to the public square.

I'm pretty sure everyone here is familiar with the Bakery that's under the spotlight again recently, as well as various other similar incidents.

I'm curious how you guys, if you do, differentiate their refusal to bake a custom cake and a social media ban. In essence aren't they the same thing? A denial of a service. Particularly since one's service is built around communication, a major pillar of society, so much so that it's protected by the Constitution.

yeah they are the same thing, it's both freedom of association for the company to choose their business interactions

Political beliefs are not a protected class.

it's a very unpopular type of freedom, and people who oppose the freedom of the business, emphasize the freedom of the customer, but imo the customer has no right to be served, no more than they have a right to force people to have sex with them.

i see a business interaction the same way as any other interaction, while others separate business interactions into some kind of special public good category

Aren't religious beliefs protected?

Isn't it illegal to feed pork to a unsuspecting Muslim?

I think offering a generic service is pretty different from offering a custom service. If I am an artist offering to take commissions I want to be able to say "no I don't want to do this for you".

the reason someone rejects service to someone is unimportant to me

Okay, but change the Bakery to Starbucks and the incident where one of their stores asked some civilians to leave because they weren't making a purchase. From their perspective they weren't customers so did they not have every right to refuse them the services of their building which would fall under a generic service. Take away the civilians' skin color and this scenario could still apply to anyone that doesn't purchase Starbuck's services.

imo if you own the property, you can decide who you want to invite

Gaining entry to a place of business and using it for whatever you please simply isn't the same as buying a pre-made cake

Sorry, I meant swap the cake for the place of business; comparing generic Starbucks service to generic Twitter public space service.

Trying to get a more like vs like comparison

in my view it's all the same thing because property rights. when you use twitter you're using hardware that twitter owns.

i think a place is only public if it's tax funded
but the law probably disagrees with me on all points

Not 100% sure on that front so I can't comment xD

tbh i don't really care what the law is, because law makers/politicians argue and the outcome is random

What if it's a company that provides a basic necessity in this day and age?

you mean like food?

Electricity? Food? Gas? Water? Housing?

i dont believe in the positive right to have any of this through means of forcing people to sell it to you

your claim to it isn't higher than the claim of the original owner

So if you start isolating people through these means by denial of such services, what option do you leave them?

it's a cultural problem, if the vast majority rejects interaction with people, you're fucked no matter what

because the government wont defend them either, but rather oppress them and segregate them even harder, since government and law is downstream from culture

which is why both the private sector and public sector oppressed black people back in the day until the culture changed

but in a culture where racism is frowned upon, racist corporate discrimination will be a bad business decision and hurt their profits

I believe I understand where you're coming from, but allowing companies that potentially hold monopolies to out-right deny you services because of what you believe just doesn't sit right with me. However, neither does forced labor. I guess I'll have to believe that the financial hit these companies will take will eventually discourage them from such extreme measures. The size of the backlash on Mastercard will either keep that hope lit, or extinguish it.

Thank you for your thoughts Native

And you too Schedrevka~

if government decides that social media is a public space and regulates it accordingly, i believe it cements their market dominance forever, rather than give them an opportunity to die off like myspace

i get the feeling people subconsciously in a way have a "too big to fail" mentality about these companies.

myspace used to have the social media monopoly

Yea, I recall, but it didn't have as much power as the current giants do.

Gaab looks like a potential contender, but with the issues it's having with being on Microsoft's Azure Cloud Servers do you believe any potential competitors can just as easily rise up and de-throne the big 3?

Or will they have to start from the ground up and build from scratch?

i think it all depends on the internet culture

how much interest there is in alternative platforms

the crypto currency industry is only growing because the interest in it is growing

i believe if people are interested enough, then you cant stop it

I haven't paid much attention in it in a while, is it still growing as strong?

More people are waking up, so maybe there is hope~

im looking for data

It'll come in time

"In 2017, the cryptocurrency industry saw record-breaking growth rates in the number of market participants and market capitalization. The total number of cryptocurrencies and digital assets on exchanges soared by 216%, from 617 to 1,335, and currently stands at 1,531.[v][vi] Total market capitalization increased by 3,363% in 2017, with Bitcoin’s market cap jumping 1,364% and the Altcoin side shooting 16,695%."

Oh, you meant like that xD

i wonder if theres any data on youtube competitors growth rate

Darn it @_@ GPUs are going to stay expensive TwT

Bitchute?

Or do you believe there's a stronger competitor

guess i cant post pics.
it looks like d.tube's traffic has increased 400% in a year

but the numbers are pretty small

lets see about bitchute

Haven't heard of DTube at all

But that's probably due to my social circle

looks like the competitors are down at single digit millions, going from about 1 million to 4 million in a year

but the graphs stop before the alex jones ban, i wonder if theres been any huge spike

I sure hope so

I'm sending an email to the Masterpiece Cake Shop in Colorado. I think they've been arguing their point all wrong, and want them to re-emphasize a point. Interested to see if anyone disagrees with me...

```Hi, I'm a distant supporter of yours. I've been watching your Supreme Court case, and the current case as well.

I believe a fair bit of your continued problem with the State of Colorado actually stems from the supreme court decision not being nearly as decisive as it should have been. As a spectator, I think it's due to the argument that your defense had made. They made a valiant effort to establish your work as Art, and I think she had a decent point, but she made the mistake of linking it specifically to what you do. I think there's a broader definition that can be made that would protect others in similar situations.

The Wedding Cake, itself, is a symbol for a ritual to start with - the rite of marriage. Whenever you are asked to create a custom cake to commemorate a wedding you disagree with, it's not so much that you're not willing to sell them a cake, but that you aren't willing to create a cake with the symbolism that they request. If someone orders a cake that's pink on the inside and blue on the outside, that is, in fact, a request that's just fine. But when it's given the symbolism of a transgender confirmation, that symbolism is what you object to. That very symbolism is what makes your cakes Art.

If a push was made to make that symbolism, or rejection of it, a part of protected speech, I believe it would protect you from these frivolous attempts to shut down your store. Just a thought.```

makes sense to me

Seems more or less sound

sounds good

feels okay

Tastes apt

Yeah, sensible

but I don't like that it needs to be done

Seems more like a workaround. Like arm straps on an AR pistol.

@RyeNorth I know you mean well, but the lawyers at the ADF probably have thought a good bit about the specific wording and are looking to get as broad a precedent as possible. I'd argue throwing something to the ADF is probably a better long term strategy.

So evidently, Discord won't let you log in if you use Tor. It appears to confuse their systems. Hm.

now they know you use tor

everybody knows sillicon valley and the gobt have a conjointed database of ppl using tors, they spy on them

now you

Well they cant prove what you use tor for

thats why they spy on you

if you want ot use tor, have a separate computer with nothing that can tie you with it on it

something you can light on fire or throw to the bottom of the ocean like in ted 2

Thats basically everyone with the brave browser

i mean , is not a conspiracy lol, thats why they want snowden and assange in jail

they leaked all this

Yeah.. im saying theres alot of people with installed

i wouldnt be surprised if brave is duping ppl into thinking they are safe

Not deliberately. Brave has it

Still its been decent with blocking ads.

''the people on brave are''

And faster than chrome

not after the altest chrome update

but right nto firefox is faster thant he 3

And well, its downright impossible to avoid tracking

Google has dossiers on everyones whos opened chrome I bet

I was playing around on Brave here.

I'm guessing Tor is not entirely unsafe.

It means they know you have used it but only really major actors will possibly know what you have used it for.

Actually, the more people who use it, the safer it becomes.

Because they can't hit everyone and wouldn't want to spill their hand on who or what they are monitoring.

And realistically, there's so many jumps involved in tracking, I'm not entirely sure if you could avoid getting identified with a second computer. The ISP is the weakpoint.

Google knows more about you than you do about yourself at this point.

yea, you just see people disapearing

or ''suicide'' with 2 bullets in the head

I just want to say that I love my life and have no plan on committing suicide and that Hillary is not a cunt *pls dont kill me*

Actually, that's an interesting idea. Is there a way to establish a network that would reveal if people are being "disappeared"?

maybe but it would probably disappear

A fair concern. But people knew people were disappearing in the USSR and China. The question is can it be detected before it gets so extreme.

Maybe some kind of collective deadman's switch?

Argentina had the missing generation thing too

And now Venezuela has a missing economy

lel

What's the consensus on Alex Jones being banned?

Seems to be that he creates a lot of shitty content that people don't like, but that if he were breaking the ToS of these websites then he should have been banned long ago, and the coordinated take down makes it seem like it wasn't because of rules violations, but most likely public pressure, and that's setting a bad precedent.

Also a lot of the press lied about him calling for violence with battle rifles when really the video was telling people to be prepared for the future with them, but that video was taken down which made it easier for them to lie

"which made it easier for them to lie" - basically sums up 2018

even Bill Maher stood up for Alex, that was surprising

I dont always agree with Maher but occasionally he makes good points

Private companies cant simply do as they please, thats why we have rules and regulations

In this case alex jones should be allowed to remain because as far as im aware hes done nothing illegal

Nothing that has a -phobic attached to the end of it should be grounds for dismissal from a public forum

Alex Jones is a nut. But he's no worse of a nut than the nuts who broadcast for several hours a night on Coast to Coast (must be listened to to be believed). Or make up the bulk of current cable network programs (think Ancient Aliens on "The History Channel"). Or populates the universities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14 if you want more campus madness, I can find other examples).

He should not have been banned. The degree to which he was attacked by basically everyone (including platforms from which he almost certainly had no interaction like LinkedIn) and the DDOS on InfoWars is a terrifying precedent. He won't be the last for the Tech companies to decide to dogpile and unperson. No matter where you stand on the left-right spectrum, seeing a massive coordinated takedown of a largely peaceful and nonthreatening person such as Alex Jones should leave you deeply concerned. Facebook removed Occupy London (a presumably left-win page) and they went after Dennis Prager (a very middle of the road, normal American conservative). The censorship is broadening. You could very likely be next. Discord has already removed a number of 'alt-right' discord servers.

---

I personally am of the stance the **only** solution is the regulation of very large platforms (Google or Facebook scale) by declaring them public squares (or something stronger). When Tim Wu wrote The Master Switch (and coined the term Net Neutrality) he actually singled out Google as a point of potential population control and related the story of the Western Union Telegram monopoly abusing it's power to leak confidential telegrams to elect Rutherford B. Hayes (the obvious implication being that it could very well happen again).

The Right should be opposed as this is a direct attack on them and several key parts of their platform that will likely become more important going forward. The left should be opposed as the use of corporate power to manipulate and control public conversation is an obvious attack on democratic processes and represents the dominance of powerful private interests over the people (and the tech industry is really, really rich too).

ADDENDUM: I bring up Net Neutrality and Tim Wu because the NN repeal and NN imposed by Obama did not impact the tech giants (only the ISPs to my knowledge it didn't even impact the DNS services which have been de-listing people too). The majority of the left is very pro-NN (ironically, the right generally isn't).

Battleforthenet and most of the NN lobbying groups have ties to the tech giants (particularly and notably Google, Facebook, Netflix and particularly Reddit). You will notice when the NN advocates show up they make a bunch of excuses why the tech giants should be exempt. This is because they are cynically protecting themselves from regulation while using it as a sledgehammer to attack the ISPs. Google will sidestep NN as a product of it's physical investments to be close to the key infrastructure of the Internet (as will many other giants). NN as envisioned by Google et al. is more a way to prevent having to ever negotiate with the ISPs.

It's the height of hypocrisy to accuse the ISPs of throttling and censorship while Google, FB, twitter et al. *actually* engange in censorship.

I was pretty anti-NN (title II is far too broad and potentially dangerous). But a demonstrated tendency to censorship, undue favoritism or selectively leaking information are cases that demands regulations. Particularly when you operate as a de facto monopoly or cartel as the tech giants have proved themselves to be. The issue with NN is that it appears to be targeted at the wrong people. Amusingly, Ajit Pai called out the tech industry briefly during the height of the NN repeal.

Quick note on Coast to Coast: George Noory is nothing compared to Clyde Lewis. Coast to Coast approaches weird topics as open skeptics. Clyde Lewis seems to host his damn show with a tin foil hat on every day.
In short, Coast to Coast guests sound crazier than the host. 'Ground Zero' guests usually sound a little more sane than Clyde.

>I personally am of the stance the only solution is the regulation of very large platforms (Google or Facebook scale) by declaring them public squares

please no.
do you want the large platforms to cement their market dominance? they *want* to legally and eternally be defined as the "public square".
why do we want to save these platforms by forcing them to make their policies acceptable?
let them keep shoot themselves in the foot and let them die like myspace.
it's just like bailing out the banks because they are too big to fail.

and lets say they do bring in these politicians with their infinitive internet wisdom and infallible heroism to protect what you and me think is free speech, do you really think the government is ultimately going to define alex jones as free speech rather than hate speech?
if you ask me, alex jones would be universally and legally banned from every single platform by law, rather than randomly by arbitrary policy enforcement as it is now.
we have the better deal right now, imo, when i can still go to infowars.com and bitchute to watch alex jones.

we live in a world where governments consider milk and pepe white supremacy symbolism ffs.

That argument hinges on the idea that they would be permanent institutions. They would only be permanent institutions if made so. I don't see why that has to be the case when it could be done in different ways like 'as long as you have x amount of the population' or 'you are a public square for 5 years and reevaluated after'. I'm sure those ideas have many holes in them, but they're what I came up with in 15 seconds.
Maybe they would have some advantage over the competition with this designation, but they may also have extreme disadvantage with the limitations that would likely be placed on them, and either way if a better platform came along people would move just like they did with myspace.

Really it seems like you're only imagining a worst case scenario here.

it's because the worst case scenario is usually what happens when you try to force things to be what you want

What if we just... don't make them permanent institutions? Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.

i'm pretty sure the regulators are not going to solve it in the way we want them to. you're talking from a position of you having control of what the regulation says, and it wont be lobbied by the corporations to support their dominance

I'm not even in favor of this being done, that just seems like a bad argument. "If you do the bad but unnecesarry thing it will be bad"

Well if I can have no input on it none of this discussion matters either way and I'm just gonna tuck into my sweet race car bed

it's kind of my point, we dont really have any say
we wave our signs in protest saying "help, government, protect our free speech from evil corporations"
and then they write up regulation in a closed doors meeting with shady industry consultants, and then they propose a thousands of pages proposal and give people 5 minutes to read it, but nobody reads proposals anyway and then they pass one more regulatory capture problem for the history books, and people wonder why corporations keep amassing more power

and even if the regulation is good and well, you have another problem of increasing regulatory burden that the platforms have to navigate to be compliant, and that gives the dominant ones an advantage, because they can afford an entire legal division to navigate it, while smaller competitors can't, so you keep raising the barrier to entry.
even if the law doesn't apply to small companies, they still have to do work to find out that that is the case.

They'd have to do what would be basic research on the law before starting a business?

well the more regulations we add, the more we're turning basic research into advanced research

When you make a company highly regulated like that of a public utility, you now make the cost of entry astronomically high. This means the only people capable of now competing is other companies of already beyond a certain size. The only way to not have this happen would be to create legislation that specifically targeted just facebook twitter youtube by name.

Anti-trust laws would be a better alternative before making them utilities

when you make them utilities you declare defeat and seal the market.

more over, these are global platforms. If they like being utilities they stay, if they don't, they leave and don't do business here. China is a MUCH bigger market and google is already showing willingness to go there anyway.

The issue is that the alternatives just aren't appearing. They're being attacked and the major players already control enough mindshare that alternatives just don't gain traction.

Google is smart. They won't take themselves out without MS taking themselves out too. But Google and Bing blacklisting a website can and will kill it. Everyone goes on about Gab or whatever, but if you can't install it from the walled garden that is Android, does it matter? The major social networks, Google, Apple and MS in particular, have the ability to blacklist your app or de-rank it into irrelevance (yeah, sure, you might reach 100 people or so but you don't matter in that case).

If only one or two was being censorious, this wouldn't be an issue. But in effect the whole of the tech industry is acting as a large collective hivemind (see Alex Jones). More to the point, the alternatives that are actually being creating (like Bumble) are even more censorious than the major players. The reality is that Silicon Valley is a bubble that is acting as a cartel. Breaking upt he major players wouldn't really change too much in the end. WeChat and the major players from China would come over (and they would have alot more resources). The small players would be very SJW in orientation and we'd just be beholden to someone else (and it would be harder to tell if someone is being censored).

----

As it is, the decision to regulate has already been decided in Europe. The GDPR is already cementing the market monopoly and it will be far from the last. The fact that GDPR could suppress the rise of alternatives has already been raised and dismissed. France is already pushing a fake news bill. Defeating the banning of memes was a close vote but it will not be the last.

Europe does not value free speech in the way the US does and if Europe regulates but the US doesn't, we will all be forced into a European level of censorship because it's cheaper and easier for all internet players (and don't say you're going to actually succeed in walling off your website to not reach Europe and still expect to grow to a size to challenge the current megacorps--it's simply not true). Even if you broke up all the players. Even if you created a viable alternative and managed to avoid getting harassed to your demise. You still have to deal with European regulations and censorious European attitudes. And Europe will not budge.

Addendum: We all have seen Stripe and Mastercard refusing to do business with people they don't like. If you think you can run a business without mainstream income sources, you're hopelessly naive. You *must* be able to take payment.

US-based Regulation forces the issue on essentially everyone. Want to know why parcel delivery services haven't gotten into the game? Why the telecoms haven't (to my knowledge) censored people or prevented people (even the hardest members of the alt-right) from using their phones? It's because they're common carriers and are basically not allowed to refuse service for non-economic reasons.

How can Android be a walled garden if all you need is an APK m8?

Google Play store is effectively required on any mainstream cellphone. Unless you activate developer mode and sideload apps (which, let's be honest, is not a common thing to do) you're looking at downloading things from Google.

Also, there's nothing stopping google from slipping in all sorts of analytics or blocking the use of certain apps or remotely disabling large parts of your phone.

It's true you can fork android. And it's true you can sideload apps. But that's *severly* limiting your potential.

I think people are going to have to learn the costs of convenience

That includes discord fwiw

so what you are saying is that government intervention has already fucked things up so we need more government intervention to fuck things up more?

And the non-google companies (mostly phone companies) have already complained about Google abusing the Play store to essentially mandate features and requirements.

@Grenade123 That's one way to interpret it. An unfortunate one, but a possibly necessary one.

Unless you have a plan to deal with Europe and China somehow.

@Beemann Spoiler alert: they won't.

I would say the solution needs to be user sought, or we're not solving the problem

Up until they're staving on the streets or something, peoplejust don't care.

If that means we have hordes of normies using shit platforms then so be it

That's not really true either though

People care once they're affected to a significant degree, as determined by them

For some people the fappening was a reason to not use the apple cloud. For some people Facebook being scummy was enough to leave the platform

For some people Alex Jones being on twitter was reason enough to leave

Also, why are we assuming Social media is all that important? "But the discourse is all on here" yeah, because its free and everyone is here. We lived before the internet, we can live without it again. If anything, it has aid out rage mobs, taken focus away from local issues and thrust them into parts of the world where you have no control. And they make money off of your privacy. They are not a good force. Let them ban people they dislike, it will only bring more surprises like trump.

I don't think a singular centralized platform is necessary for humans to function, or even a necessary part of the web

people will be forced to talk to their neighbors again. Heaven forbid!

conservatives at least. the leftists would still be stuck in the matrix

they will care about the shithole their town is becoming again. They will know their fellow humans are not as bad as they think because there is a face and a name they can relate to. They will have a shared interest.

so much focus has been put on global/national problems people ignored hte local and it will kill us.

social media is not important. not nearly as important as people think.

its a trend used by children who forgot to grow up.

a place where people project a fake version of themselves

and if it is a public utility, does that mean my internet needs to be even more regulated to make sure i can still get access to it?

because that is just what i want, even less choices for internet.

What, abandon the space? Let your opponents organize and recruit online and you'll sit aside in your tiny little circle waiting for them to find an excuse to shut you down?

Is that *really* your strategy?

organize in the open? thinking they are safe? yes.

how can i abandon a space i was never on?

You do know that the internet is a key platform and driver for basically all modern commerce.

trump didn't win because of facebook, or twitter.

"Trump didn't win because of Facebook or Twitter"

That means Nothing of the future.

Or are you telling me you plan to speak up at work.

You have a new organization to replace the role of social media among the young.