I mean, the kind of person who will actually notice the coercive nature of the governing structures of other platforms and seek out a different space like this one here tend to be ornery. There are some bad politics sometimes to be sure but I think they’re organic.

They’re real people and honestly I think they make reasonably interesting music, but I could name a dozen bands/artists off the top of my head who are just as interesting and who didn’t blow up like they did

I mean, yes, but

Shady marketing and propaganda aren’t new, of course, but what is new is that the entire infrastructure of public conversation has been quietly captured by both.

I don’t think I agree that the entire infrastructure has been captured, but I do think we’re at a new stage in the neverending conflict between observation and persuasion

You’re a cynical shit!

For real though, I’m probably an overly optimistic shit, but I think your second analogy is closer to the truth, but even still a bit short of it. You’re right about hidden crevices becoming havens, but life doesn’t just survive in those havens, it mutates and evolves. Inevitably it grows out of those havens, and usually it gets eaten by some predator at that point, but sometimes that can make a predator really sick, maybe even kill it. And the forest overall can start to change again. So really I don’t think the Internet is a forest as much as it’s one big organism, and we can be the viruses.

To torture another metaphor, give a million monkeys typewriters and I think it’s inevitable you’ll get monkey Woody Guthrie and there will be a monkey revolt, because creating any kind of art and thinking artistically rejects the premise of objective valuation that capitalist logic has as a necessary premise. Art does not have inherent value like a tool or other made objects do, and it continually resists and undermines its own abstracted commodification in its pursuit of novelty/originality/authenticity. Disney tries to copy paste a Star Wars plot and only succeeds in setting a pile of money on fire, but people will be talking about Sinners for years even though nobody knew they wanted a Jim Crow horror film until it was a thing.

The fact that throughout human history and all sorts of different social conditions the impulse to make silly useless valueless art rises up again and again tells me this social structure of capitalism is built on quicksand.

Nah, some dead cells and scar tissue in a few places maybe, but the immune system and cognitive capacities are still there I think

♫ Will the circlejerk be unbroken, by-and-by OP, by-and-by? There’s a better joke awaitin, in the replies, oh in the replies ♫

e; no for real tho, I love how each generation finds their own way to be dumb

I want to live in a world where Drake is irrelevant

Fair enough, this article might be more of what you’re looking for - https://poprant.indiatimes.com/trending/spotify-under-fire-as-streaming-platform-accused-of-inflating-drakes-streaming-numbers-over-bts-for-biggest-2026-song-debut-army-refuses-to-buy-the-apology/articleshow/131157267.html (arc)

Seems like that lawsuit was mainly about Drake accusing Kendrick’s record distributor of defaming Drake by publishing that song, and that lawsuit got dismissed on free speech grounds

He has been accused multiple times and there have been a couple of lawsuits against Spotify for allegedly letting it happen, but as far as I can tell nobody has been able to definitively prove anything because Spotify just waves their mandatory arbitration clause around and shuts down lawsuits before discovery can happen

The real story here is Spotify almost definitely got caught frauding streaming numbers to prop up Drake’s career, but since we don’t have their CEO confessing to literally doing that in 8K everyone’s going to run with Spotify’s “oopsie” story about this and get distracted watching k-pop and hip hop people bicker with each other

I would vote for someone who promised to legalize duels again. Having roughly half as many bloated egos to deal with seems way more manageable.

In this economy?

Yeah, I just did a quick search that turned this up as the most likely place to find more info

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile,_ca1870.png

but I’ve seen this photo probably hundreds of times in a bunch of different textbooks and articles over the years

More recent related story, “Trump Administration Says Immigrants Can Be Denied Green Cards for Expressing Political Opinions, Including Posting About Israel: Report” (arc)

Anybody make one of those Tesla “I bought these before they went evil” bumper stickers for shoes?

Me neither, I feel like all the publications talking about how it’s so popular are gaslighting me or being taken by some bullshit bottled streaming numbers

Did it? I mean, it may have bought President Pedo the couple of months he needed to win an election against a historically awful opponent, but given his 32% approval rating and being stuck in a war that was supposed to distract from the detention camps that were supposed to be a distraction from the tariffs that were supposed to be a distraction from DOGE which was supposed to be a distraction from the pedophilia, I think it’s fair to say that buying a mouthpiece isn’t a durable solution to the problem of being objectively stupid

Doesn’t seem to be what this article says

To some readers, even choosing Outlook as a part of a spacecraft’s communications portfolio would seem to be an anomaly. However, it is a standard part of the “Commercial Off-The-Shelf” (COTS) software astronauts use for their day-to-day operations.

To be clear, the spacecraft and primary flight systems will run on specialized radiation-hardened hardware and rigorously maintained software. COTS just complements this with a friendly layer, like Windows and Outlook, so astronauts can check schedules, indulge in personal communications, and so on, in a familiar way.

Sounds like Microsoft products are running on the same hardware as critical systems are

Eh, that’s what they’re trying to do, but that’s always what groups like them have tried to do throughout history and it never really works for very long. We aren’t reaching the end of anything, it’s just the next stage of the game.