While the number of wars is less than 20 years ago there is an uneven but increasing trend for the past decade. Last year casualties were also more than at least 89 apart from a huge spike in 94. Amount of refugees has also been increasing in the past decade a little bit faster than the world population has.
Despite these facts, globally things are not at least yet out of hand. At the same time, there are many countries, especially in the West where current politicians are dismantling social security nets and human rights legislation. We are also increasingly seeing the effect of climate change on conflicts and displacement. Famine is thankfully rarer than ever before but we are so badly behind on any environmental action that it is pretty much guaranteed to happen more and more. I might be less pessimistic if the climate crisis weren't staring us right at our faces. In general, historically things have gotten better and better with some lows. If we had time, we could probably sort ourselves out. There are also a lot of very smart people that could help with the existential threat but after the past decade, I don't trust that they will be allowed to fix it.
You can also only be almost completely anonymous if you know what you are doing. The majority of people don't know how. While data gathered from default users might officially be anonymized, the amount of data collected will often make you pretty easily identified.
Zero-click spyware that has already been used against political opponents while not relevant to most average Joes do exist.
The world can't be pulled up by your bootstraps. Most defeating is that you can do anything in your power and things still get worse. Yes, I might have more than a touch of secondary trauma but activism these days feels like hitting your head on the wall repeatedly. You can't stop people from dying. You risk ending up in jail in too many countries that you once thought were civilized. And you are once again marching again Nazis when they sit in parliament in too many countries.
the iphone was the beginning of the end. i remember getting an ipod touch around that time and simply having fun on it, downloading silly little games and apps, in pure awe that i could light a little fake lighter or pretend to chug a beer on the school bus. now you need a smartphone to participate in society
I don't know how many lemon parties you've seen, but I promise you that at some point of the roughly three hundred thousand years of human history some of your ancestors were gangbanging in the Village Elder Fuck Tent
White text on a black background reading "the internet was once a fun place for watching cat videos instead of monitoring the real-time collapse of late-stage capitalism"
Below the text is a digital rendering of Fatso, aka Keyboard Cat, from the 2007 Keyboard Cat upload of a clip from a 1984 video.
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Absolutely amazing. And a bit surreal, basically seeing internet memes play out live right in front of he.
After the show he stayed around to take selfies and chat with people. Being at the right time at the right place, I got to open a bottle of beer with a lighter for him. Real chill guy, pretty much as you'd expect from the videos.
like the big bang theory you know, now everyone just drifts away into their own little galaxies. like i did a similar web search on lemmy.world and found a lot of overlapse between lemmy and other reddit alternatives. so that's a niche. lgbt is another niche i'm sure. you get all these niches and the internet is more separated than before.