So crazy that this guy built his career on being Matt Damon adjacent.

It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.

Every museum is a smell museum and every piece of art is scratch-and-sniff if you’re brave enough

I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.

Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”

Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.

it was a matter of Chinese control outside of US government control

TikTok was controlled by a private company based out of Singapore, with investments from a host of international funds including both the US and China.

The “China is controlling our internet” narrative was always bullshit fear-mongering, fully disjoined from the actual business structure. What TikTok enjoyed that Facebook and YouTube and Reddit did not was a sufficient distance from US policymakers such that TikTok’s policies weren’t dictated by Western oligarchs.

not bringing it under US billionaires specifically

That’s exactly what Biden (and then Trump)'s forced sale intended. Bring the US branch of TikTok under American control by awarding it to exclusively American financial interests.

Superman has never died from Kryptonite but he has died from getting punched in the face by a big dude with boney hands.

Gavin Newsom was enthusiastically in favor of forcing the sale of TikTok to US-aligned billionaires under Joe Biden.

Wonder what changed.

But so much of the content is uncreative.

Enshittification, baby. Once people know where the feed bar is, they just keep slapping it until pellets stop falling out. The Algorithm rewards imitation, not invention.

A lot of these services really hinge on a tight-knit community of active content producers who fuel engagement and reap some kind of dividend on the back end.

Loops is a technology but it’s not much of a business. The company is literally run by just two guys. They’re not going to bring on prolific content producers without a much more aggressive marketing strategy.

We’ve further mechanized the process of sales and marketing in an industry that we’ve been at the forefront of since the turn of the 20th century.

Modern anti-AI guys would have been eating up Adbusters 'zines 30 years ago.

So much of the modern political landscape is just suburban white people waking up and realizing they aren’t exempt from the police state that’s been harassing everyone else since the nation’s founding.

Admittedly, this is how you get class consciousness. So it’s not bad, per say. Just a bit ironic that Trump’s War On Woke is radicalizing entire municipalities at a breakneck pace.

Everyone thinks they’re above it, that they can detect the bots or remain unmoved.

I’d say the bigger problem is that there’s nothing “to be done” at an individualist level. Bot swarms are going to exist and you’re going to be exposed to them either directly (via your social media diet) or indirectly (via traditional news, casual conversation with people who consume social media, and the public policies that inevitably emerge from these trends). Simply “being aware” isn’t a defense. You’re still going to have your priors chipped away by these tidal shifts in public discourse.

Look at the impact the High Protein diet fetish has had on every fucking food retailer. Seems like every product has to include a sticker telling you how many grams of protein is in it. We went through the same diet fad exposure with GMOs and saturated fats and fiber. We got deluged with crime statistics in news, entertainment, and politics at every angle to justify the War on Crime. We’re still eating tons of shit from the anti-vax trends of the Bush Era.

But that won’t stop society from imploding.

Society isn’t ending. It’s always doing this shit. When you were young, the baseline felt normal because its all you knew. Now its changing under your feet and you’re struggling to rectify your childhood awareness with an evolved landscape as an adult.

You’re the one imploding, as you try to reconcile the contradictions of your past and present.

If this was all they were doing, I’d agree

It takes an enormous amount of ultra pure water to make a micro chip

Israel has some of the most advanced desalination facilities in the world

Yeah, that’s the problem with this picture.

He looks like he’s bending over to get railed.

Not unlike his predecessors from the 1860s

No no no. That can’t be the comb. That’s bullshit.

So, is the pizza pan the clock? Or the plate? I see a couple things that could just be a circle.

I will say that the Real Mozzarella Cheese was almost as hard to find in the art as it is in real life.

But the reason why most of that food is thrown away is not lack of refrigeration, cheaper refrigeration will not solve that problem.

I think “cheaper refrigerators” is an oversimplification. People without access to a functional refrigerator often have bigger problems than a mere absence of a single appliance.

But the energy savings is a big deal. We’re not just talking about food refrigeration but AC, which is a much bigger deal especially as we suffer a warning planet