Political Memes

One need not exclude the other, and the thinking is not based just on tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories.

Has anyone said this type of thing? Mostly no, but we do know that places like China and Russia have already implemented similar systems.

We also see trends toward software as a service, cloud-based computing, digital ID laws, and a slew of ongoing anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices over the last two years.

Again, no one has said that this is a plan, but if you told me that half a dozen billionaires were pushing it, I wouldn't be surprised. Any one of those things would be frustrating, but all of them at once? For most of these people, the goal is likely just "make line go up," but when that line inevitably goes down, what you have is a collection of infrastructure that is almost perfect for digital surveillance and control, not just software, but the internet at large.

I agree that most of this is just late-stage capitalism at work, but most of us here are pretty savvy. We're mostly in the tech, engineering, or finance sectors. We all have 20+ years of chronic online time, we self-educate, and we've watched the world change in fine detail over the last 20 years. It doesn't matter what the powers that be are saying. It matters what they'll have the capability to do when the AI bubble bursts, and what modern history, especially Russia, has taught us about market and state collapse.

Personally, I do think that some big players are doing this intentionally. The AI bubble is hurting the personal computing and hobby PC-building industries, and if any of these data centers actually get built, they can easily be bought out or taken over by something like Microsoft.

Market volatility doesn't just mean some people's pensions get wiped out. It means market change, asset transfers, and consolidation. Even without a data center being built, if the hardware has been built and it falls into Google, Amazon, or Microsoft's lap after a bubble bursts, then that's vertical integration and market capture.

There may not be money in AI, but everyone caught up in the frenzy is helping to push us toward a surveillance state, even if no one has said as much.

And it's not cool to ignore which way the water is flowing because people are panicking as we approach that waterfall in the distance.

Granted, we're talking about factors that I can't fully predict, but we do seem to be seeing heavy short- and mid-term investment in a restructuring of computing, and no one is talking about it because it is all being done in the shadow of AI and whatever political distraction is happening that day.

I know this is meandering, but my point is that we are moving in a very specific technological direction, even if not everyone with a hand on the wheel is driving toward the same goal. They're all pushing in the same direction (minus a few zigzags, obviously).

It's not a conspiracy to sound a major alarm about these things when we know for sure that the next hundred years are going to be devastating from a climate perspective. There is going to be some dark shit that happens, and I don't really know what that will be, but I guarantee that if I can see it, and all of the experts can see it, then someone with a security clearance and a budget has seen it too.

That aside digital surveillance prison already exists. Google, Meta, Amazon etc. know enough about their users to build a complete day-by-day activity list with high accuracy. Phones listen constantly, Windows logs all you do on their servers, the dystopian tech is already there. Whet most dystopian predictions missed is that instead of endless rows of Secret Service officers watching you, it's the advertisers who want to milk your attention.

Dystopian police state will start when police starts offering money for reporting crimes. Then all this data will pour into their hands, neatly tagged, packaged and sold.

What they are more likely building is regional processing centers. Meaning most people have a tablet, a laptop, and a phone. All with ram, silicone, memory, and resources that sit the majority of the time. The phone gets more usage. But what if those tools were access points to a larger computer that did the processing for you? What if meant instead of having a stronger chip on your phone you just had sufficient speed of transfer for a larger computer to do the processing?

That would reduce the production costs of everything. Be easier to manage the supply chain, require fewer rare earth minerals

AND they can control/monitor all of the throughput? Security against enemies.

literally

Probably not

two weeks in mass.

Bone apple tea!

• in mass - that's like boycotting Church
• en masse - as a group

I have heard many variations to this point but I would like to point out a counter example. The great depression in the US that lasted for a decade. The average income level for families fell by 40%. People regularly starved to death and even by WWII almost 50% of men were turned away from recruitment because they were malnourished.

Guess what? No revolution, no collapse just massive suffering.

They got Luigi because a McDonald’s employee believed the bullshit about there being reward money for narcing.

the ones they managed to populate with computers will be used for surveillance, the ones that are sitting empty will be the prisons

You think the concentration camps are going to be climate controlled?

We'll get the bare minimum heat in the winter to keep us from freezing to death too fast before they can get 'enough' work out of us. And absolutely nothing in the summer, not even ventilation fans.

You're talking about a colo. Larger companies will have their own datacenters dedicated to their own services.