I'll legitimately be moving to Linux today. This just broke the camel's back for me.

Living in Australia means piracy is essentially legal - individuals can only be taken to court for the cost of one physical copy of the pirated media, so companies don't even bother as long as you aren't distributing. The more things in this area get worse, the more justified I feel in filling up my 10TB HDD.

This is what those who have never experienced genuine depression will never understand. Everything can be going perfectly in your life, but you still can't find the energy to bring color back into your world no matter what you do. The overwhelming numbness just eats away at you, and you withdraw even further. Some of us may even turn to substances to just feel SOMETHING, regardless of how fleeting the escape may be, and how much worse we know we'll feel afterwards. You are unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the future is bleak, and you will die alone in a world that doesn't give a fuck, so what's the point?

So you finally find the courage to confide in somebody, and they tell you that you just need to "get past it, think positive!" and that they also "get depressed too"... and the worst part is, you are unable to describe to them in any way how it truly feels, because they've genuinely never felt it themselves, so now you worry that you're just coming across as dramatic, furthering the desire to withdraw and keep your thoughts to yourself.

I'm currently going through a depressed period, if it isn't obvious. I'll be okay in another week, but it's fucking horrible, and I wouldn't wish this on anybody.

"I don't expect to see any change in how we do things."

Oh, this is going to age like fucking milk. You belong to the shareholders now, mate. They'll MAKE you change how you do things, and you'll love it.

"These aren't windows, they're just sophisticated high resolution 3D monitors. NASA has had this tech for decades, they've just never let the secret out. You're not seeing the Earth, you're seeing a video. Why can't we go see it with our own eyes outside? Exactly. Seems very convenient we're being asked to wear suits with image projection helmets."

You will never win with people this fucking stupid.

I'd still prefer to wait 5 seconds than have to watch a fucking sanitized corporate advertisement trying to sell me bullshit I don't want and won't buy with annoying fucking music, voiceover, and footage of people pretending to be happy.

Fuck off, Google. Good thing this will be easily bypassed anyway.

Horrifying for this millennial too.

The question I have is where does the world go from here? I can't foresee a future where these attempts by government to enact a kind of all-encompassing control and monitoring of citizens' lives just suddenly stop and we return to a time when our every movement wasn't watched. It seems like they will just keep trying, taking any pushback as a sign that their social engineering just needs a few tweaks and a little more corporate/media brainwashing before they try it again. The only winners are government and their corporate buddies.

We're entering a world that myself and a not insignificant percentage of humanity are fundamentally incompatible with. I don't see a reason to remain optimistic about the future, to keep building upon what I've got going on, to strive for more, when we're staring down the barrel of a technofeudalist nightmare dystopian future that it seems most people don't give a shit about eventuating because they've "got nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to worry about."

Somebody give me a reason to think things will get better.

If this passes, the rest of the world will follow. This CANNOT be allowed to happen.

2014 wasn't a decade... ago, oh my fucking god.

It's a good day to be a Mullvad user. Switched over from Surfshark a while ago, and I love it.

100% this. For everyone that takes their online privacy and freedom very seriously, there are literal millions of others who couldn't give less of a fuck and proudly parrot the "if you have nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about" bullshit, like they're some enlightened cunt atop their own tower who conveniently ignores the consequences of every company that experiences a major data breach.

These people are the reason the internet has devolved as hard as it has, and it makes me sick to know there's nothing that can be done to stop things from only getting worse - the masses enable the surveillance capitalist machine, and what's worse is that they've become convinced they need it to survive. Meta pushing their fucking nose into places it isn't welcome, like the fediverse, just further proved it to me. These big tech firms will not stop until they own a piece of every free region of the internet, and they know that no matter how vocal their opponents are, that the lobotomized fuckwits that make up the bulk of their userbase will just lap up anything they put out.

Social media was a fucking huge mistake.