alt Hacker NewsWhen I was 11, on 17th Nov 1989, in Czechoslovakia, my father was watching the evening news on our (black and white) TV, as usual.
There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"
This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..
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Something similar happened in the 1988 President Election in Mexico which is widely considered to have been stolen. There was a very memeable phrase, “se cayó el sistema” which was used to describe how the computing system to count votes was glitching out or failing.
I think history has shown that this is a fruitful intuition to have
You don't understand.
Its different: _they_ were doing it. The Bad Guys. Now _we_, the Good Guys, are doing it. Therefore, the thing itself is no longer Bad - it is Good.
The comment above was ironic. I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people really think that way: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
They used to not even bother to hide behind technical difficulties, so this is an improvement: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/tiktok-pledges-to-do-more-t...
Lets remember that tech bros have been explicitly funding the oppression
25 Million donation to MAGA from Brockman alone! I suspect he is a single issue donor (AI infra above all)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...
Its insane how immoral people can be - anyone can see Trump is a conman
As a fellow Eastern European of similar age, I suddenly feel quite nostalgic.
I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.
US is nowhere near as bad as it was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but it's on a fast track to it for sure.