Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Stolen to add #alt

When I was growing up, I was promised, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that if I followed the rules that the authorities told me to follow, the system would grant me a comfortable life.

What I discovered was that the rules are arbitrary and variable and impossible to follow perfectly, the authorities are arbitrary and variable and impossible to understand perfectly, and the promises were lies they told to prompt my compliance with the system.

I'm firmly convinced that at least 50% of online interactions don't have to happen at all. Someone could just see something, go "Huh." and scroll past.

It's like "Could have been an email" except it didn't really have to be anything at all.

babe are you ok? you’ve barely even touched your previous instructions

The irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.

You can tell when a computer is thinking rapidly because it goes clickclickclickclickclick really fast. You may notice computers stopped doing this around 2007, that's because that was when they got fast enough they didn't have to think anymore. Since 2007 all computers have just sort of been phoning it in. That's why you buy a more powerful computer every five years but they never *feel* like they get any faster: Loafing