WatDabney

I don’t think it’s the case that people are rewarded with power, then somehow turn into pstchopathic fuckwads, but that only psychopathic fuckwads are willing and able to do everything it takes to gain that sort of power in the first place.

Think of all the compromises someone has to make and lies they have to tell and asses they have to kiss and backs they have to stab to fight and crawl up the ladder to that sort of position.

No truly sane and stable and honest and empathetic person would or even could do all of that.

A motivation that hasn’t been mentioned yet:

Every successful attempt so far by the US government to control what Americans may and may not access on the internet has been rooted in pre-existing legal restrictions on the content, or on access to it. It’s just been things like piracy, CSAM, drug trafficking and the like - things that are illegal in and of themselves, so banning sites that are involved with them has just been a response to thecrxisting illegality.

This is the first time that the US government has succeeded in banning a site without pointing to violations of any existing laws, but simply because they’ve decided to do so.

That’s a significant precedent, and to would-be tyrants, an extremely useful one.

We could well be heading towards something interesting in the not very distant future.

I’m not sure if Musk sincerely believes his wealth makes him untouchable or if he’s too self-absorbed to even consider the matter, but it works out to the same thing either way - he’s likely wrong.

He can get away with a fair bit manipulating an emotionally stunted egomaniac like Trump, but when he starts trying to butt into European politics, he’s going to find himself running up against families that have been pulling political strings for centuries now, and who don’t fancy crude upstarts with nothing more than money going for them, and if he proves to be too much of a problem for them, they’re going to squash him like a bug.

I’ve been looking forward to this actually.

As far as I’m concerned, automatically avoiding Reddit just by avoiding Google (which I already do) is a welcome bonus.

If I had my way about it, I’d have a tree planted over me, but I don’t expect to know the difference, so I don’t really think about it much.

I am a ghost.

I’m extremely introverted and non-confrontational, so if a situation is too unpleasant or stressful, I vanish. It’s what I’ve pretty much always done. I have no idea how many times I’ve had someone say to me, " Hey - what happened to you? I just looked around and you were gone."

It’s sort of a trap. A lot of it is that, in addition to being introverted and generally non-confrontational, I’m hyper aware of people’s emotions, so if I expect that they’re going to be angry or hurt, I especially don’t want to deal with it. But of course, then I introduce the chance that they’re going to be angry or hurt because I “ghosted” them (or as it was most commonly known before the social media era, I “blew them off”). And yes - I feel bad about that.

All in all though, it’s still generally less unpleasant than the alternatives.