Kinda what I meant by plastics

I’m more worried about the plastic, pesticides, degraded pharmaceuticals and heavy metals myself

So I just learned this recently, but apparently after the whole Victorian “smash and grab” thing where Britain stole all the art that was or wasn’t nailed down (there’s a lot of feet and footless statues lol), archeologists went to sites and realized how much knowledge was destroyed by their predecessors who only cared about impressive finds they could show off

Technology and techniques are always improving, so now when they find an archeological site, they excavate only a fraction, leaving the rest for future generations who will have better tools.

Obviously, non-destructive methods are still on the table, but I found that pretty interesting

The fourth pillar of American democracy, media.

By buying out news media they control the narrative. Now they’re coming for the platforms to control the narrative of public discourse

There’s protection for these things from government ownership, because these are how democracy works. If you control the flow of information (or worse, convince them of false facts), you can warp the consensus in a certain directions

One side is advocating all sorts of crazy shit (much of which they don’t actually want) and spreading easily consumed nonsense to justify it, and the other side is pointing at them and going “this is who will be in charge if you don’t go with us”

This whole thing is a performance - sure, they’re actually competing and have slightly different goals, but all this fighting over social issues is just a way for them to act freely on the issues that actually matter. They don’t actually care about abortion or trans people, they care about the money.

They just use hot button issues so they can give us a choice between people who are going to lie to our faces and screw us over, and we’ll fight each other over them instead of attempting to actually change anything. The effects may matter for us, but no matter who we choose-they’ll win and we’ll lose.

When someone gives you a false choice, the only right choice is to attack the contrivance that took away your choice - we need to take back our media and organize

This. We don’t all need to be one big happy family… Federated does not mean a single site decentralized. It also doesn’t mean isolated.

There’s a million flavors of in between they the fediverse let’s us explore, and hopefully instances will rise and fall as we find what builds the best communities. Some will over-moderate, some will be totally unrestricted, some will be safe spaces and echo chambers who carefully manage what users are exposed to, some will vet their users carefully, and most will probably be open to whatever their users ask for

The goal is that instances become all sorts of different places, and users can freely move if they like somewhere else better

I’m making a Lemmy app, and I’m pretty good at convincing media to work even when it’s reluctant (and as I’m making the app I want to use, everything should eventually be able to auto play)

Could you break down the specifics for me? Preferably with links and any other details/thoughts you have on hand