Normalising Dystopia Rule 1: Be Boring.

Huge thanks to ProtonVPN for sponsoring this doco (and for privacy): http://protonvpn.com/struthless
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Thanks for watching - I really hope you get something from this documentary... this took a little while to put together, which naturally led to me getting a lot out of making it. Information wants to be free.

cam xoxo

“When exposing a crime is treated the same as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.” - Edward Snowden

1:58 "let them rent cake" is an actual banger of a phrase

My daughter "bought" some movies from one of the streaming services she subscribes to. A couple of those videos suddenly disappeared. She called the service and asked why they had disappeared. The answer? "We don't have the rights to those videos any more so we had to remove them."  So the streaming service is selling something they don't actually own. I don't know how that's not fraud. No doubt there is a sentence 25 pages into a terms of service agreement that says you might lose your videos. It's still fraud.

This is what has pushed me to linux, physical media, self-hosting, and archiving.

“Treating people the way that mining companies treat the earth.” That hits hard.

It’s interesting that our future generations are basically being trained to never be bored… making it easier and easier to pass boring laws that slowly boil the frog more and more

The McDonald’s ice cream machine phenomenon there is no phenomenon at all. It has quietly worked its way into your cars, your home, your entertainment, your healthcare. Instead of the old adage “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” they’ve come up with a new one “it’s always broke and it always needs to be fixed”

DUDE.... I was fresh out of college and working as a paralegal for a law firm in 1987.  The US tax code revision called the TRA86 (Tax Reform Act of 1986) had passed and was now being implemented in waves over the course of the next decade.  We were re-writing the pension plans of the doctors and lawyers offices in the town. What I saw was EVIL on a tiny, local scale... we were taking retirement funds away from nurses and receptionists and legal secretaries who were working for these one and two person medical and legal offices.  I saw what was going on and it was making me physically sick, so I quit. I went back to grad school and got a Ph.D. in political science. I was going to do my dissertation on the implications of tax policy (particularly for education funding in the US) but I got derailed.  Tax policy was for economists, it was deadly dull, blah blah blah. AND YET... that was the beginning of changing the economic structure of literally the entire United States, and in some ways, the whole world.  Thank you for this vid... they've literally been trying to bore us into submission for 40 years. And I regret not doing the dissertation I should have done.

A big reason why the Internet is becoming centralized is because it’s gotten ridiculously difficult and expensive to run a website without using things like Cloudflare and AWS, because everything has become designed to need it combined with the constant onslaught of bot traffic. The general assumption in IT circles is that the bot onslaught has come from AI training but I’m starting to wonder if it’s just a scorched-earth thing coming from the companies which want centralized control to begin with, like an information-based protection racket.

I don't usually comment on YouTube, but sir, today I'm pressing all the buttons to let you know that this series is a brilliant idea and you're doing amazing. All the effort you put into the details and the research is seen, acknowledged, and genuinely respected. May you have the power and the anti-procrastination discipline to keep it going! 😂

This is the most excellent use of a thumbnail in the history of the internet. Kudos.

10:50 there is a wheelchair that locks high movement speed behind a paywall. a paraplegic woman who uses the chair made a patch for the software that unlocks this for free (because disabled people are usually on a budget) and was sent a cease and desist by the chair's manufacturer. she didn't end up having to take the patch off github because she is Canadian, lives in the EU,  but the fact that companies can pull this with wheelchairs to begin with is disgusting.

edit: I misremembered the developer's country of origin.

edit 2: the chair's model is an Alber E Motion M25. the base top speed of the chair is 3.7mph/5.95kph. that is roughly equivalent to a fast walking pace. the "enhanced" top speed is 5.3mph/8.53kph, equivalent to a run.

Compelled to comment that copyright law wasn't to prevent you copying DVDs, it was to ensure that the OG creator of a work had a period of time where they had the sole right to make money from their creations (i.e the right to copy the work). The first copyright law was called the Statute of Anne from 1710 and from memory was only 14 years. The origins were pretty noble, but your video is spot on re: how it's been warped to serve corporate interests, hoard art, strangle creativity and enshittify everything.

Insulin story is nuts. Its creator intentionally made the recipe cheap and free for everyone. And then some corpos stepped in and made a patent. Ironically, similar stuff happened with skibidi toilets.

"There's a wealth transfer going on, regular people's wealth is being drained to build infrastructure that will enslave them." ~Whitney Webb

Hi, I work tech support for an ISP and in the last year, I have had at least 5 phone calls from customers who came back from vacation or returned home from work and were upset that the internet was out because their smart devices weren't functioning during outages. And this is the point where I say what shouldn't need to be said: your dishwasher, your thermostat, your fucking SHOWER!? you do not need these things connected to the internet. Preheating your home before you get home is not worth the risk of coming home and not being able to heat it at all ffs.

It's not the death of ownership. Just the death of patronage. Yo ho, lads. 🏴‍☠️

the story of Aaron Swartz is an absolute tragedy and it chilled me to my soul when I got to that part of the video. thank you for bringing him to my attention, I had no idea. and i think it's this ignorance and isolation from each other that really plays a part in our oppression. we can't fight back together if we don't even know others are fighting too. also fuck Zuckerberg for not facing a single repercussion in the pursuit of profit and greed when Aaron died trying to do right by the people. there has to be justice for this.

The frog is being boiled