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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • ‘No one’s spying on me, I’m not interesting’ is more pernicious than Nothing to Hide. Most adults can kind of sense the idiocy of the latter refrain. But ask the utterer why advertising is a trillion-dollar industry if their attitudes and behaviours aren’t interesting, or why a data broking industry even exists, and you’ll typically be asked ‘why care?’

    What’s harder to work out is whether the utterance is a genuine failure to comprehend the nature of surveillance capitalism, or a grasping denial of its impact, as though they’re only 80 per cent convinced of their footprint’s worthlessness. It’s difficult to convince someone to turn down their data faucet when they barely acknowledge the faucet’s existence to start with.



  • Call me a cynic but I suspect the biggest ‘contributor’ to r/product will end up being product’s marketing department account, likewise with r/country and party-political apparatchiks. The move is elegant in a way: Reddit Inc can ruin true democratic operation of subs by turning subscribers into shareholders (which wards off repeats of mod activism) and simultaneously provide further cover to astroturfers (lots of points = Time and Effort™ = good faith actor).