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submitted 2 months ago by sundray@lemmus.org to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
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[-] MudMan@fedia.io 63 points 2 months ago

That last panel hit me like a truck because... yeah, that's what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.

They really buy like a paper book once and go "ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now" while he makes another billion.

We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it's complaining about.

In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn't need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.

[-] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The comic is hyperbolic and not in a good way. "They wouldn't like it" - yeah, if millions of Americans did the same. And it isn't even necessary to go pre-digital or pre-internet to "cut out the middleman".

I agree with you on most, but this:

which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?

is hyperbole on your part.

First of all, by-default internet connected cars haven't been a thing until relatively recently (10 years max I guess). And then, gas guzzling does not necessarily correlate with age. Cars consuming less than, say, 5l/100km have existed since at least the 80s (1st hand experience, and the car was already 20 years old at that point).

[-] TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 8 points 2 months ago

Your comment made me remember how 25 years ago it was unthinkable, even illegal, for a company to spy on you without consent. Tech isn’t the problem, regulation has also become a joke, that’s what gave tech bros free reign, as long as they make loads of money fast so rich investors can concentrate even more wealth.

[-] RodgeGrabTheCat@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Big tech does have consent. They hide it in the TOS that hardly anyone reads.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 3 points 2 months ago

I guess the car thing comes from the use of "pre-computerized". Cars have had computers in them much longer than they've been connected to the Internet by default. I guess my mistake was taking the panel at its word there.

Also, man, I appreciate the alignment, but the "millions of Americans" really made me feel icky. Beyond the moral and political refusal to give Americans primary decisionmaking power on these things, these trends and companies are global. Even in the US you probably would need tens of millions to make a dent, but some of these userbases are in the billions. Millions of Americans decided Facebook was for old people and left it and it's still the biggest social media platform on the planet by some margin. That'd be the collective inability to gauge scale in a dystopia of global monopolies I was talking about.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago

Also, it's getting harder and harder to live without modern devices.

Try living in the modern world without a cell phone. It's hard to do almost anything without one. If you get a flip phone that can handle text messages you can get a bit further, but it's a matter of time before that's not enough.

And sure, you can listen to cassettes on a walkman. And maybe you saved some tapes from 40 years ago, and maybe they still work. But, how do you get more music? Sure, you can probably find a place to order tapes online. But, then they want to verify your account and that means texting a verification code to your phone and...

As for print media. Sure, you can still buy paper books. But, if you want a real newspaper, good luck. There are a few that are still around, AFAIK you can still get the NY Times in print. But, I really doubt you still even have a local newspaper, let alone a newspaper that prints on paper.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 3 points 2 months ago

All but one of the major papers where I'm from have a print version. I imagine that changes in different countries.

But... yeah, point taken. Over here you can't even not have a Whatsapp account. Some businesses and transactions just... assume you do and default to it for communication.

An interesting wrinkle is that some of that legacy media is part of this loop, too. You can, in fact, buy new tape players and tapes and you can put new music into them. It's all just very expensive trendy, hipstery small run collector stuff that costs a lot of money and sells to privileged people with a nostalgic desire for posturing. Which does put a lot of where this message ends up in context, I suppose.

this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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