This problem won’t stop until law enforcement starts treating deepfakes of minors as possession of child pornography with all the legal ramifications that come with it. Young boys need to understand that their actions have consequences.

In the meantime, no one under 18 should be on social media. I wish AI, deepfakes or in general, could just be illegal, but laws aren’t catching up and people are being victimized.

Isn’t this already covered with extensions, though?

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In America, even if you live in a city with good public transit, there’s frequently no way to get from one city to another. Greyhound routes are extremely limited, Amtrak seems to just loop around major metropolitan cities extremely slowly, and the price of a rental car has gotten out of control after COVID.

So even if you live in a city with strong infrastructure, you still have to buy a car unless you’re willing to be stuck in that city 99.9% of the time.

Sometime in my lifetime, I’d like to see America catch up with the rest of the world.

Individual Christians are okay, but I don’t approve of their immoral lifestyles.

I observe Yule, but overall I have good associations with Christmas since most of the people I’m close to celebrate it. I know it justifiably gets a bad rap as a consumer and religious holiday; the “war on Christmas” stuff in America is just exhausting. For me it’s just a way to spend time with the people I love and enjoy delicious baked goods. I enjoy the sentimentality of the gift-exchange aspect of the holiday when it’s not overdone, there’s a few Christmas songs that are really catchy, and I read Gift of the Magi every year because it’s adorable.

But that’s about as far as I take it. I was never brought up believing in Santa Claus, and I hated the long sermons I was dragged to as a kid. I think if no one in my life observed Christmas, it would just be another day for me, honestly.

In America in 2025, I’d say they’re right*. Flock has cameras all over cities, Palantir has scary face recognition data that iirc uses social media info up to a decade old, DOGE made a database of everyone’s social security information that other bureaus probably have access to, ICE uses Israeli spyware that bypasses end-to-end-encryption, and state governments are trying to push VPN bans and ID checks to use web services. On the federal level, both MAGA and Democrats are pro-surveillance, so you can’t just vote this out, not completely. You also can’t vote with your wallet since the most dangerous surveillance tools exist at the infrastructure level. We’re one step away from turning into China.

*By and large, there’s nothing Americans can do about those things other than protest, normalize pro-privacy rhetoric, try not to support privacy-invading consumer services, and call local- and state-level elected leaders when new anti-privacy legislation is introduced.

In most cases, privacy efforts can help for some use cases, but there is no perfect threat model anymore, and it’s mostly a symbolic act of protest these days, which is useful. Lemmy is the only social media I use these days, Linux is my daily and only driver, I’m boycotting tech oligarchs like Google, and I gravitate toward privacy-focused products and services. We need an active privacy advocacy bloc that will support causes and alternative technologies if we ever want things to get better, if not today than in the future.

One big thing people can still do is evade targeted ads. I probably have an ad profile stored somewhere, but I use adblock and enough FOSS apps that I haven’t gotten targeted ad in years.

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Hey, go for it! If c/mensliberation became men-only, I’d support them! There are some communities where women wouldn’t have anything to contribute, and that’s okay and wouldn’t be sexist.

But just don’t go full kiwifarms with a men-only community and I’d say that’s fine.

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Maybe this could work, but only if you divide the military across the committees. If it’s just an advisory role, it’s meaningless. That’s the problem we’re seeing with the Supreme Court and Congress in America.

Even with those safeguards in place, what’s to stop the committees from working together to turn on the people? Maybe this doesn’t happen immediately, but what about in 300 years across many changes of power?

We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.

Any system that has any hope of being sustainable, after the destabilization of heirarchies, needs to distribute resources across and not from the top down. It’s exhausting watching capitalists and democratic socialists fight against each other in western countries, with little to no anarchist presence whatsoever, when they both miss the point in a pretty glaring way.

I’m not an expert or an economist, mind you. I’m also jaded after America’s change in power. It’s a noble idea and a step up from capitalism. But while capitalism ends in mass surveillance and police states so the wealthy can profit, communism is similarly likely to lead to centralized identification, albeit with benevolent intentions. Allocating resources from the top down requires a system of administration, which is a hierarchy and an unchecked power. But Classification is the first step to genocide, and we’ve seen multiple times now that any country can fall to fascism in the span of 15 years. Just because you have a wonderful benevolent communist government now doesn’t mean it’ll always be that way.

Maybe there are ways around this. Part of me wants to say that only names and dates of birth (not race, gender marker, country of origin, income level) should be recorded, but even names in many cases can reveal a person’s gender and sex at birth, which is itself a form of classification. Maybe you could have a single-blind ID system, only including a name and DOB, where only citizens have access to their IDs, and governments do not store that data centrally. The hope being that if people’s needs are taken care of that the incentive to steal another person’s identity goes away. There are flaws, I know.

Again, maybe there are ways around this. I’m more partial to anarcho-syndicalism because it can more easily exist without a centralized ID system. Having traditional government functions decided democratically among and between the worker-run syndicates also helps stop fascists because if any one syndicate goes fascist, they get cut out from everyone else’s resources and get starved out.

However, if a communist government can exist without collecting data, then I’m potentially in favor of it.

If organizations want to make actual change, they need to stop it with the one-day boycotts. We shouldn’t ever be giving these companies money. The longer you go without using Amazon and Target, the easier it gets.

If a 2028 Democratic presidential candidate has any platform other than arresting Republican figureheads, I will not support them. Lawbreakers and criminals belong in prison.