Are you trying to imply that the US doesn’t already do this? They’ve overthrown democratically elected governments all over the latin americas (and other places, like hawaii) and imposed more fascist ones for access to their raw materials. Sure it’s not exactly using loans to do that, but the real end-game is fascism anyways once markets are fully saturated and there are no more ways to generate capital.

Have you tried reader mode? In both firefox and chrome (i think, I haven’t checked other browsers) there’s a button usually in the address bar that you can click and it’ll format the article into a readable page instead of a bunch of ad-riddled garbage. It works pretty well generally.

Am i mistaken in believing that cloud computing naturally lends itself to only having a couple of big players in the space? The whole point of the technology is to have someone else do the hosting for you, and the people doing the hosting win out by economies of scale.

This would be a different conversation if they found evidence in the software that it was throttling smaller competitors, but without any more information this seems like a lot of nothing?

Okay that makes more sense. I do think that “online dating is awful” is a very different statement from “well it used to be good but now it sucks” and the two phrases come with very different qualifications and conclusions.

The former phrase is a pretty blanket judgement on this aspect of society in relation to the whole. But the latter statement has more to do with the enshittification of the internet and the capitalist systems woven inbetween. The latter statement is a historical comparison while the former is a value judgment of society.

As for your opinion itself, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. The nature of the internet has paradoxically connected more people than ever before while simultaneously isolating us more than ever before. I personally don’t think that online dating really differs from that mold. I think that this is one small part of a larger problem where capitalism has commodified almost every aspect of humanity, which is accelerated by the internet.

That’s not what the original comment said if you read it at all. The commenter was making the point that okcupid was pretty good before it was enshittified. There was no direct judgement about whether the world is better with or without OLD. And the subtextual judgment seems to be positive or at least neutral, so I’m not sure what you actually have a problem with.

I found this mostly to be a satiric nothingburger that doesn’t make any meaningful observations at all.

Based on the title I expected it to go a little bit deeper into how “AI” technology will destroy society if it doesn’t get regulated, but instead it was just a couple of short quips about how some of the big tech companies nowadays have changed what life looks like nowadays.

I felt like I was reading a boomer say “get off my lawn! Kids these days…” without any additional nuance or context.

When people are starting to starve and there are no more monkeys that can entertain the masses, the spirit of rebellion starts to rise from the ashes.

So the established powers that be have two options: violently suppress the masses. Or acquiesce some level of control, power, or ultimately capital.

The powers that be would rather die than give up their money. So fascism it is!

Because we’ve hit the point of capitalism where the system is imploding on itself, and so those in power turn to fascism in order to protect their capital.