For humans, that's true with caveats. For the natural world of which they are a part and on whose continued health they depend for their future wellbeing - it is not true in any way, shape or form.
This sounds like an elaborate way of saying you want to blog.
Or, as the kids call it these days, "to post on my Substack". The two things being identical except that the latter sounds cooler and allows them to indulge their corporate Stockholm syndrome.
Order. Conformity. Mystery. Impenetrable language. Impossible writing. Eating anything that moves. Mindless nationalism. People who don't talk or even care about politics. Depressed single young people obsessed with shopping. Security cameras. Police. Airport-sized train stations. Electric scooters. Electric cars. Utopian-dystopian sci-fi.
Yes, I have been there multiple times.
PS: to be clear, I was very, very impressed by those trains and especially by the electrification of city transport. In Shenzhen the air is now cleaner than any big city in the West and with all the greenery and silence it really does have a utopian feel. The progress there is genuine, it's amazing, it deserves lots and lots of credit.
Once I planned to do just this, converting my Ubuntu into Debian (or maybe it was the other way round). I assumed it would just be a matter of changing the repos and then apt full-upgrade and boom! new distro. Still, I decided to do some research first - you know, just in case. Whatever I learned made me abandon the idea in a hurry. Perhaps I'll try again but this time skip the boring research step.
Very interesting perspective! And yes, I keep all my data locally, literally all of it, and the only bits of it that go on my VPS or - worse! - mobile device are either encrypted or not private. So your theory is right on the mark.
Worth remembering that the benefits of open source are less critical with server-side software compared to when it's your own personal computer. Personally, if it's SAAS then I'm not much bothered what they're running it on. Not to invalidate your general point.
But really more like 20 years, which was when it took off as the plumbing of the blogosphere (AKA the last form of social media that was arguably healthy for all concerned).
Or in fact you're not late at all given that you probably listen to podcasts.
PS: to add a useful tool recommendation to this otherwise ruminative contribution: RSSBox
Yes, I know all that and I completely agree. It's all but impossible to imagine that the USA will ever be an actually dictatorship, despite the ignorant shrieking around here. Because of its traditions of individual freedom and federalism.
But it's obviously looking less and less like democracy.
The USA is categorized by people who have studied this subject more closely than you (or me) as a flawed democracy. This is a dumb discussion. That's all I have to say here.
That's a balanced and fair-minded take. Unfortunately it won't be appreciated here, because what people are looking for in this thread is catharsis and confirmation of their biases.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a "dictatorship". Come on, be serious. Words mean things.
Second, America's two-party system also has internal factions and primaries, many of them completely open (you don't even need to declare allegiance to the party). The primaries are effectively the first round in a two-round electoral system (of which there are plenty in the world). The whole point is to create a binary choice in the final round. For some reason this always gets missed by otherwise informed observers. "There are only two parties" is just not a valid argument in this debate.
Of course, none of these facts will be popular here, since the real point of this thread is to allow participants to performatively dump on the shared hate-object. Classic social media, I get it.
Agreed, not that this will be "unpopular" (come on, when are we going to get some real unpopular opinions round here??).
Historically, polls are used as cheap advertising clickbait and as a way to talk up "interactivity" to the editors. At best, they're a conversation starter for a comment section, but these days that's invariably an unmoderated toxic cesspit, or simply deserted. The more savvy publications know that all this has become pointless in the era of social media, so they've turned it off.
But what they should be doing IMO is to start communities right here, or elsewhere using ActivityPub. With proper moderation, of course, and with engagement from the journalists. That could end up being a success for everyone involved.
For humans, that's true with caveats. For the natural world of which they are a part and on whose continued health they depend for their future wellbeing - it is not true in any way, shape or form.