Be @be@fosstodon.org

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to blame individual users of these technologies here, because the conditioning is really insidious and I've been conditioned as well. The point I'm trying to make is that governments and other groups should try to regulate big tech from a position of 'we don't need you actually, agree to our terms or fuck off', rather than 'we need you and we're willing to sacrifice so much to keep you'.

The whole 'unstoppable big tech' narrative is really frustrating to me, because it implies that *at best* we can bargain with them/regulate them, when in fact we could reject them altogether and build something different.

It's really frustrating to me that governments etc try to deal with Facebook on Facebook's terms; accepting Facebook's false premise that it's a necessity and it's here to stay whether we like it or not.

In the news I see governments and think tanks wrestling with the problem of 'how do we regulate Facebook', and discussing it in terms of 'this thing we need' like it's a utility, like water/power. It's not. That's just successful marketing my dudes.

We really don't *need* all this shit technology and leaky, bad code, it's just been made easier to use it than to avoid it. The *internet* is a really useful utility but Facebook and insta and Twitter really aren't.

Orwell didn't really account for the fact that people will *happily* give up information about their every movement and interaction, as long as they are rewarded with cute cat pics and bleep bloop notification noises

The lesson of the internet over the last ten years is basically that people will willingly submit to constant, intense surveillance, as long as it's convenient and they get memes out of it

@be @marie_joseph yes. I personally think gov'ts should be collaboratively funding FOSS development because it now forms critical infrastructure (including competing implementations of key open standards)... that's my pipedream (that policy-makers would "get" this stuff).

@be this is why even software engineers need class consciousness

@marie_joseph And it's in Google's interest to keep expanding the scope of the web to eat all of computing so that nobody else could make a modern web browser.