It’s a text generator. All these people, were they to live in Antiquity, would jump ship to ship trying to visit every oracle and prophet in the Mediterranean asking questions about universe and seeking deep meaning in short texts of the Chinese fortune cookie kind.
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.
Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.
Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.
Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.
I agree it’s an unsolved problem, but have you contracted police to, well, police your area? Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?
It’s rather between the two. In fact it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power, but there’s a lot of effort to conceal it as an imperfect market.
Yes, thank you for explaining the same thing politely, I had a slight hangover yesterday.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
The advantages of the Internet as it came into existence for us were disadvantages for some people. Trapping people inside social media with one entry point and having the actual communication there allows for control which the initial architecture was intended to make hard.
It wastes shadowbanned person’s time, so it’s not.
Similar to vote obfuscation.
Which sucks just as badly.
The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.
Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.
I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.
So? Every part of a web ring is a site the webmaster of which can remove that banner at any moment.
How do you poison them.
Eh, how’d you do that?
I’m feeling myself old and I’m 28.
Cause in my early childhood in 2003-2007 we would resort to search engines only when we couldn’t find something by better (but more manual and social) means.
Because - mwahahaha - most of the results were machine-generated crap.
So I actually feel very uplift due to people promising the Web to get back to norm in this sense.
Yup. I have my own prediction - that humanity will finally understand the wisdom of PGP web of trust, and using that for friend-to-friend networks over Internet. After all, you can exchange public keys via scanning QR codes, it’s very intuitive now.
That would be cool. No bots. Unfortunately, corps, govs and other such mythical demons really want to be able to automate influencing public opinion. So this won’t happen until the potential of the Web for such influence is sucked dry. That is, until nobody in their right mind would use it.
These things became shit around 2009. Or immediately after becoming sufficiently popular to press out LiveJournal and other such (the original Web 2.0, or maybe Web 1.9 one should call them) platforms.
What does this have to do with search engines - well, when they existed alongside web directories and other alternative, more social and manual ways of finding information, you’d just go to that if search engines would become too direct in promotion and hiding what they don’t want you to see. You’d be able to compare one to another and feel that Google works bad in this case. You wouldn’t be influenced in the end result.
Now when what Google gives you became the criterion for what you’re supposed to associate with such a request, and same for social media, then it was decided.
They can all be parts of the threat.
The threat itself is that governments and big corps have a comprehensive strategy on censoring and controlling the Web. Since the Web is nowadays the only media space that has preserved some appearance of freedom, this is bad. The end goal is so that nobody would hear you scream. I mean, they’ve already succeeded for most part.
Parts of that strategy are (I tried to separate them, but they intersect):
Attracting people to centralized controlled recommendation systems, which obscurely determine what you’ll see and what you won’t. Since your ability to process information is limited, this simply means that no outright censorship is even needed. You just won’t ever see “wrong” information or discourse or even emotion on something, if you don’t search for it intentionally. That’s Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, search engines, now also LLM chatbots when used instead of a search engine.
Confusing and demoralizing people out of organizing outside those. That’s a softer version of the first point, as in “maybe we won’t decide what you think about, but we will slow you down”. There are actions and laws and propaganda most efficient in that direction. Apathy is death.
Market pressure - businesses use the Web in a particular way, so small nudges for that culture to be on the track particularly convenient for control are made.
Fake progress and complexity race - yes, maybe enterprise software has to be complex. But Web technologies and Web browsers don’t. Most of the “new” things are apparently intended just to cut off the competition with smaller resources. Also oligopolization.
Legal climate endorsing oligopolization.
Then there are outright censorship and prosecution and bullying.
And then there are likely cases of mafia-style assassin sh*t, which we wouldn’t know about anyway. I think Aaron Schwarz and Ian Murdock may fit here.
I remember it already was, but everybody knew it was, so search engines were the brute force approach. The intelligent way was to use web directories and to ask friends.
The enshittification of the web is just one aspect of the enshittification of humanity.
WDYM “again”? What are you arguing against?
I don’t get your thought process. The original incidents were Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Ah. No, I’m against any surveillance. At the same time I’m for all the transparency of government one can have.
It’s basically about how hierarchical the society is.
A lot of clueless people want power structures to have their secrets, while citizens can be surveilled, cause it’s to some good end (/s).
The more hierarchical it is, the more corruption and abuse of power there are, and make no mistake - people making it more hierarchical aim for that only and not for some noble goal.
I’m just saying that this same tendency which inconveniences people in the West with surveillance and legally dubious harassment, simply kills people elsewhere in droves.
Such an idiotic comment really.
I’m saying this whole phenomenon hits you and your part of the world less than any other.
I said that in a more subtle way, because I never expect people who fail at reading to blame that on me.
Sucks shit because he’s the only valid option.
Also Gecko’s development is led by people thinking that it being usable outside of Firefox\Thunderbird is a bad thing. There was a time when Gnome’s browser was based on Gecko, not WebKit. And in general it’s influenced by bad practices.
SerenityOS is an amazing project, of course. To do so much work for something completely disconnected from the wider FOSS ecosystem, and with such results.
So it’s cool that they’ve decided to split off the browser as its own project.