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Kindergartens

Because people are stupid. And sheeple.


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We like to think we've evolved. But we haven't. We're still the same cavemen from way back.

Human beings are supposedly capable of rational thought, but they goddam hate it. It's always better with a simple solution. Simple solutions for simple people, George Carlin may have said.

The war with 'political correctness' today is simply an attack on Thoughtcrime. Some thoughts are worse than others, and some people go to prison for thinking the wrong thoughts. Minority Report was fiction but...

Peering out at this pathetic race from inside the protected world of computer science, two (at least two) spectacular Kindergartens are immediately visible. The common denominator for both is that people would rather not think for themselves, that people would rather someone else did the thinking for them, that people are actually - as is often said - sheeple.

We once had a house on the Med. No, it was RIGHT on the Med. We opened our bedroom bay windows in the morning and there it was. And the water is really that blue.

And this wasn't some stupid dumbfuck piece of stacked real estate in Monte Carlo, where people are treated like cattle, no matter their purported wealth. This was a nice beach, actually in the shadow of a mountain.

One evening, early evening, we saw something curious out our windows. About 20-25 sheep, racing around hysterically, looping around, figure eights, one minute this way, one minute the other way, keeping to the same small patch of land in the shadow of the mountain.

The shepherd was nowhere to be seen, but he needn't have worried. The sheep were alright. They just kept following their leader.

But their leader didn't seem to know it was the leader. More like it felt it was being chased by the rest of them, the bastards! And it kept trying to shake them off by changing directions all the time.

There's a reason people are compared to sheep. There's a reason credit card companies and political parties and PACs and corporations and media companies can do so good. They can discern pack behaviour. Oh can they ever.

And although the human race could in theory take over control from the puppet masters, they most likely never will. They're too feeble-minded. And far worse than eschewing rational thought, most human beings haven't had a single original thought in their lives.

This sorry situation could be detailed, and to an extensive granularity, but the thought here has been to merely cite two somewhat related instances - spheres - where homo sapiens shines the brightest.

Apple's App Store

It's not only Apple today, but once it was. There was no such thing as a 'smartphone' before 2007. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in early 2007, and the product hit the market later that summer.

The world hasn't been the same since. And if ever a moniker like 'smartphone' was excruciatingly embarrassingly wrong... Mensa conducted a survey and discussion years back, to help determine why so many members fucking hated telephony. They didn't arrive at any good conclusions, but it was obvious that many members of Mensa fucking hated telephones. Really hated them. Our own telephones are regularly disconnected or muted. We can't fucking stand them. But today's 'smartphone'? Where 'computer' users use their opposable thumbs to tap-tap-tap? Yes, Steve Jobs solved the riddle of the 'appliance versus tinker box' controversy. Personal computers had been places to tinker. They were great for learning, for experimentation. Many of us simultaneously yearned for the 'appliance' era, when our devices would be 'just reliable' and 'just work'. And when that day finally arrived, we found it wasn't so good after all.

But the plebes loved it. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. It's everybody's drug. It's Aldous Huxley all over again. It's the best Xmas present the ruling class ever got.

Back on topic. The iPhone was a brilliant product, and a brilliant project, but what did Apple do after that? Two things of note. After issuing three grossly insecure point updates to the iPhone OS, they locked everything down, stopped everything running as root, and then:

  1. Cryptographically sealed all executable code
  2. Opened their dreaded App Store

Starting now, all apps on their iPhone had to be distributed by them. Independent software vendors were no longer independent. And talk about lame working conditions. Imagine having to pay the coal mining company $100 for the privilege of going down in the shaft. That's what Apple did. Imagine not necessarily making any money of a long day down below if the mining company didn't like the quality of work. That's what Apple did. Imagine not getting paid unless the mining company actually found something worthwhile to mine for that day. That's what Apple did.

And yes, the defenders will jump all over this. Just say 'boo!' They'll shut up. The issue isn't the iPhone, or the coal. The issue is how Apple's famed 'Mac community' took the whole thing - on their knees. They keep saying they don't like this or that particular rule, but they never dare call into question the system itself: the very existence of those rules.

Sweden once had a parliamentary committee who were to look into the idea of allowing cable television in the country. Anders Björck headed that committee. Anders really hated that 'sheeple' mentality, and told us blood-curdling stories of how the sheeple behaved throughout history. Such as arguing in parliament that free radio was a threat to democracy. His committee finally gave the needed go-ahead for cable services, but people forget where the country was not long ago. And the tabloids even ran surveys! Yes! They wanted reader feedback! Will we Swedes get too much freedom? For that was a major argument: having too many television channels to choose from is a Bad Thing™! Really!

This doesn't occur only in Sweden.

Social Media

Today's social media are the other Kindergarten. The acute reader may perhaps start by first looking up the etymology of that word. At, for example, a website known as Etymology Online. The interesting question of course is whether the people of this planet are real children or retards.

There is no freedom of speech online. Minds fails the test. Mastodon fails the test. Comment fields - the heralded 'Web 2.0' - fail the test, to the extent they even exist anymore. Rotten Tomatoes just removed an important user feedback facility. Things got too negative.

Media outlets stopped featuring comment sections when they found that their readerships really hated the crap they were spewing out. As their role is not so much to spread the news as spread the propaganda, they never considered trying to find out why readers didn't like their stuff - they already knew it. The most repressive establishment political voices in Swedish Twitter have few followers, but they don't care. They get crushed all day long. They don't care. They use their bullhorns a few times a day and let the rest of the media take it from there. The Swedish cabinet got themselves telephone hotlines to Facebook, Google, and Twitter before the last election. Anything popping up there that they don't like, and Morgan Johansson makes a call. Fixed. Just like that. They're putting little old ladies, desperate little old ladies, in the clinker for objecting to government policy. And to cap it all off, subscription to state media is no longer optional: today it's a tax. That everyone pays. Naturally the people had nothing to say about this. And, rest assured, Swedish state media is crap. But it's also obscenely expensive crap. Insiders will tell you how money is being wasted, staggering scenarios. But it doesn't matter anymore. People got rid of their television sets because they didn't want to be part of that parasitical circus. And how much are we talking about? 800,000,000 per year in US dollars. For a population of just over eight million. And the people who pay - today, everyone must pay - have no say in what's being shown. As with ordinary commercial media. The people have no say whatsoever.

Once there was a time when Sweden only had two television channels - one more than the other Scandinavian countries! Both were state-owned. They were called TV1 and TV2. And the government would regularly publish survey results to show what the most popular programmes were. When all they were doing was competing against themselves. No, that wasn't competition. That was an attempt to pretend there was competition. An attempt that worked.

Microsoft Windows was long the reigning champion on desktop systems in Sweden. 'More viewers than Jeopardy!' went the highway billboards. Gates came to Stockholm to pick up a technology award that he more or less bought because Linus Torvalds had won the year before, fair and square. They're afraid to go out, to venture out, the Swedes. They have their two brands of detergent, that's enough, we don't need more, things get too confusing.

The cable guys came to install cable television in our area. There was a pensioners house nearby. They told us what they found when they went to the pensioners house. The gits were all sitting in their fucking rooms, they had their television sets on, but because it was only state media at that point, and state media didn't give a fuck about them, only party up all the licence fees, these pensioner sat in front of their sets, stirring at their test screens. And the only thing moving on those screens is the TIME, ticking away, by the second. That's all they looked at, all they did. FOR HOURS.

But if you'd talked to a member of parliament - except for Anders Björck and perhaps a few others - they'd have dismissed you and said you just made it all up.

Social media got a newcomer recently: Dissenter. It's a product of Gab and Andrew Torba. And with Torba, free speech really means free speech. Yes, the sites have a reputation of being 'right wing', but guess why? And this is crucial.

Using the tired paradigm of 'left' and 'right', or 'conservative' and 'liberal', the one camp will always opt for free speech whilst the other, often sounding off from the University of Berkeley of all places, will always attempt to limit it.

Just listening to Clintonite Vijaya Gadde the other night on Joe Rogan's #1258 made it obvious. There are limits to free speech in her world, limits not even sanctioned by the government of the country she lives in, yet she continues, in her paranoid way, to limit the discourse in ways her own government strictly could not condone.

So what do you see as a result? And you really should see the entire show. But what do you see?

You see lots of people discussing how to change TWITTER RULES, but nobody - not a single motherfucker - even so much as suggests there be no rules at all.

And yet that's precisely what Andrew Torba's done at Gab (and now Dissenter). To be precise: Torba can't allow things that are illegal. The company is registered in the US and must therefore follow US law. But that's the extent of it.

Torba's got other tricks up his sleeve as well. But Torba can't do these things, because his goal has never been to make billions by hook or by crook, like Jack Dorsey. Dorsey ran up SMS bills in the hundreds of thousands before the board sacked him first time around. It's not likely Torba would do the same, as his goal has never been to amass a fortune. Gab is crowd-funded, and it works a different way too. And the fact that Torba will not pad the pockets of celebrities (as Twitter would seem to do) makes it a different ballgame.

For Jack Dorsey uses the celebrities to drive traffic to the platform. And you may think that controversy is bad for Twitter, but actually it's probably not, because that only makes the crazies crazier and keeps them coming back.

Whatever. No self-respecting celebrity is going to come to a platform where you can't block people FFS!

But can't you just mute instead? Ah. NO! For muting means 'out of sight, out of mind', and it's the sure-fire way to defuse any potentially violent situation on Gab, which is why the type of trash seen so often on Twitter rarely occurs on Gab. See some asshole in your comments? And it's a real asshole? Click 'mute' and it's done. The asshole is gone. And you can go back to enjoying yourself again.

That's not what celebs want. Their need is different. They need to keep negative stuff out of their own timelines. And if they don't insist, their agents will. Those agents live on commission. Same goes for politicians. Can't have someone accusing someone of this or that, and have that seen in a high-profile timeline.

But you can't get that on Gab. Blocking is fucking stupid. Blocking is done by morons. Remember the maniac from Sweden who went onto @sweden with her own block list of over 14 THOUSAND accounts she wanted to block? You can do that on Twitter. Oh hell yeah! Just export your own block list, log in to the other account, and import it. Voila. 14 thousand. Just like that.

Remember who she blocked? Bill Fucking Gates? Like she'd interacted with him? No, like she's sick in her fucking head and she just blocked him because she hates him!

Blocking raises the temperature, escalates the conflicts and the wars. People who are muted never see they are muted. They might suspect they are muted, but they'll only see this as an indication that the other party's lost interest. And that's good!

That model works. Gab is by far the best social media platform, not because they got so many far-right neofascistNazi whoevers - you never see them anyway, even if they're there, and not even really because they don't run death squads like Vijaya Gadde on Twitter, but because it's so peaceful. Yes, peaceful. People ask intelligent questions. They seem serious and educated. And come from all corners of any political spectrum anyone chooses to use. And they can be good for a laugh too. Because laughter is always good. There's very little negativity on Gab. If at all.

But that's not the way you make tonnes of money. Jack knows that. Jack's taken on an impossible task. Vijaya knows that too. They gotta keep the bullshit pretences going. More controversy, more heated discussions, more Kathy Griffins... Kathy Griffins make headlines! So easy, so easy. And Kathy's probably getting a cheque from Jack every week.

But do people on Twitter object?

Do people on Facebook object?

Facebook's gotta be the ultimate dumbfuck site. Nothing is as dumbfuck as Facebook. Isn't that the word Mark Zuckerberg used to describe his own users? Can you seriously use a site where you know the owner thinks you're a dumbfuck?

They take $1 for you to send a tiny image file to a friend. You can copy the image out yourself, and send it one way or another, for free of course, but Mark sells those small image files for $1 to his dumbfucks. And boy are they ever dumbfuck.

Facebook's had 'MK Ultra' type experiments. Change the message styles to influence behaviour and mood. Now they know.

The MSM are starting to suggest that social media in their present form are dead. And they are. And the MSM want that. And why have things come to such an impasse? Because people are stupid. And sheeple.

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