Denying profit to corporations is theft, so using adblockers will be put on the same level as digital piracy. How dare you consume content without letting your eyeballs get force-fed ads.
Using ad blockers is piracy, insofar as you’re avoiding paying the price the content provider has set for that content. The price is watching the ads, rather than being something directly monetary, and you’re not paying it.
That said, neither that nor piracy are theft, and in both cases I gladly pirate because the prices in most instances have gotten away too high for what you get. Either in terms of subscription cost, or the time and quantity of ads delivered.
If blocking ads is piracy, then ad-viewing is equated to money and showing ads while either failing to provide the service the user wanted or not providing any at all is theft.
Who pays first? The user, the content creator, or the content host?
I couldn’t care less. If my adblocker is that final straw that caused a company to go out of business, brings on the collapse of the internet as a whole, and ultimately the breakdown of western civilization, then all of it deserves to die. With that knowledge, I’d still update by block lists and donate to adblocking projects.
It can certainly be both. A worse service might be worth a cheaper price. And people will pay extra for good service. That’s literally the airline ticket business model.
It was also 100% a payment issue back when I was a broke student and paying for things simply wasn’t an option. The fact that Steam offered a more convenient service than the pirates at the time was irrelevant because I couldn’t afford it.
If you cannot pay, then you either pirate or not - you don’t buy, because you can’t. In either case, the producer loses nothing, because there is nothing to gain.
In the other case where you could pay, but doing so is much more painful than pirating, the producer is the idiot - they made it painful to buy. They are losing sales not because people don’t want to pay but because they make buying the product painful.
To this day, I have never bought something because of an ad. I get the concept of letting people know your product exists, but I know Raid Shadow Legends exists already and I am not interested, so fuck off.
So you admit that you’re a thief? If you see an ad it’s MANDATORY to buy that product otherwise the owner of the ad spent money for that ad for nothing!!!
after all that capital invested in marketing people better fucking buy. coca cola now spends more on marketing than on producing the products. they are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise the best know brand in the world.
Absolutely right. In fact, it should be illegal to see a product for sale and not immediately buy it. How dare you see a helpless corporation in need of money, freezing in the streets, and not immediately empty your wallet in exchange for trinkets that they so lovingly engineered to break in a set amount of time? You monster!
The monkey’s paw curls. New AAA games now feature thousands of individual rock models, among other labor- and space-saving measures being forgone in favor of realism. The game is 400 GB and the devs have worked 110 hours per week for the last 3 months
There was a game that came out a few years ago that scanned in most of its rocks for photorealism. I can’t recall the name. EA was the publisher, I think?
Tons of games do that now. Usually they get scans and models from other companies, like Quixel Mega scans. It makes for a relatively fast workflow. Pretty much any photo-real game is doing something like this, it’s just more affordable than paying people to digitally sculpt rocks by hand.
Setting aside that asset production is genuinely one of the most expensive parts of game dev, if they’re smart they can use some clever GPU instancing to improve performance by reusing assets
What annoys me about this meme is that it is the same relationship that underpins all business relationships. I understand you are not happy with the state of things but showing a drawing of “capitalism” at work in nature isn’t really making the point you think you are making.
This might as well be a pic of two guys in suits trading on a stock exchange floor with the same caption. Or add this to a caption to a pic of a lion eating a baby gazelle while its mother watches from the tree line. What point are we even trying to make here??
Business relationships may be mutually beneficial to those who willingly enter them, but unlike symbiotic relationships, they’re usually detrimental to the ecosystem as a whole.
but that’s not an inherent symptom of buisness relationships but rather of the ones conducting them. symbiotic relationships are not usually harmful to their environment because they are usually specialized for that niche and can’t just move somewhere else. humans (for themost part) can and thus aren’t as immediately affected by the detrimental effects of their buisness relations (or we actively ignore those detrimental effects)
Are you talking about broker taking commission when buying and selling stock? They provide service of buying/selling and the commission is the service fee. Why is it not their labor?
Moving fake numbers representative of labor is not in itself labor. It’s extraction of labor value from someone who actually provided something useful to society.
Moving numbers or information representing anything or nothing is a service processed to the one who purchased the service - to the person or institution that wants to buy or sell stock. Why is it not labour? Do you not count sales person actions in a store as labour?
It’s an interesting argument but I think it is stretching things too far. Also isn’t a little anthrocentric to assume that our relationships are unique and different than all other living things here.
A pine tree drops needs that are so acidic few other plants can grow near it. Is it damaging the ecosystem?
Our relationship with bovines is weird right. probably the most successful large mammals on earth. Their success is completely due to being a great machine for turning grass into human food. It’s symbiotic in a lot of ways: we clear pasture and kill predators for them, but also, we eat them. Great for the cows and us, sucks for the trees and wolves.
Ants and aphids have a similar relationship. Great for the ants, and the aphids, not so much for the plants.
If you want to conflate human economics with the natural world, you would have to admit that nature is the domain of the most ruthless of capitalists. Christ, the whole point of a lot of leftist thinking is that we must “rise above” our animalistic nature.
Back in the early 2000s (when Apple Minis were introduced) there was a rare system error that you could get that ended in a wall of script/code. What has stuck with me to this day was the screen ended on the line “panic: we are hanging here”.
Because that’s like them having to become HIPAA compliant. The amount of work with the potential of breaches and lawsuits isn’t worth it by any means.
Also, I can’t recommend Mullvaad enough as a VPN. I’m on the east coast of the US and can exceed 1gbps down with a connection in Sweden, or max out my bandwidth on servers closer to me.
You looked at the original blueprints for hot dogs and said “too much protein, not enough carbs” instead of “I refuse to make two identical sandwiches in parallel”. Both fascinating observations :)
Cute, and forgive me for getting serious in a humor thread, but I can’t stand how the term “incel” has come to functionally mean “any guy who exhibits entitlement towards women.” I’m not blaming OP for this nor really anyone else, it’s just a disappointing thing that’s happened in society IMO. Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them. Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.
Anyway, sorry for ruining the mood if I have, I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.
It stands for “involuntary celibate.” I’m not sure I agree that it started out “innocent,” though. I’ve yet to meet someone who identified as an incel that didn’t at least partially blame women for the situation they were in.
I heard about it early on and actually went to visit the sub out of curiosity when it was still somewhat innocent. There were definitely misogynistic posts there already, but plenty of innocent ones as well that didn’t blame women for the outcome. I remember later on there was even a post made by one of the mods about how he was retiring from the sub, because it had been taken over by the misogynists and no longer served the purpose it was intended to. I would bet you have met men that qualify under the original definition, but who don’t identify with the label now because of what it’s come to be associated with.
Just like how r/fph wasn’t originally about hating on obese but really pointing out the flaws in logic they use to justify over eating. But we all know what it turned to which got it banned. I’m not sure it was ever as bad as the admins claimed…I think it was more to set an example.
It’s a misnomer mate… Like how r/trees isn’t about trees and r/tiktokcringe isn’t about anything cringy.
Fph was originally about the broken logic used. Not about hating fat people. Not to say it didn’t turn into that and the misnomer sub name surely didn’t help.
No prob! Yeah, it’s kinda sad–I’ll bet you’re not the only one who doesn’t know about this, because the shitty misogynist group completely stole the spotlight from the original.
I thought it was actually a lesbian woman who started the first incel group? Either way yeah it’s interesting because as usual, there are people who are wronged (or treated unfairly) by society, and people who wrong society and then feel wronged because of natural consequences.
That would certainly be interesting if that’s actually the case! I visited the subreddit a long time ago out of curiosity and all the posts I saw were straight men complaining about not being able to get a girlfriend, so I dunno, but maybe. There’s certainly no reason the term can’t be used for someone regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
The first website to use the term "incel" was founded sometime between 1993 and 1997.[25][7][26] The website was created by a university student living in Toronto and known only by her first name, Alana, to discuss her sexual inactivity with others.[25] Titled "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project", the website was used by people of all genders to share their thoughts and experiences.[7] During 1997, she started a mailing list on the topic that used the abbreviation INVCEL, later shortened to "incel", for "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time".[27] During her college years and after, Alana realized she was bisexual and became more comfortable with her identity.[26] She stopped participating in her online project around 2000 and gave the site to a stranger.[28][29] In 2018, Alana said of her project: "It definitely wasn't a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years". wiki
E: just seen this has already been shared, don't mind me...
Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.
Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.
The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project" as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. It wasn't for men, the term wasn't about men, and it didn't start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.
Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.
Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don't think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the "true definition" is doing either camp any favours. The "involuntary" part of the label isn't trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply "celibate, but not voluntarily celibate".
One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn't care why someone was an incel, ie "it's OK if you're celibate because you're into horses, but that's illegal" that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.
I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.
I think that in light of this, it's even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.
Interesting. Thanks for the history lesson. I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.
I’m not sure I agree with you though about how the term should be used. I see your point, but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior. Even if this Alana you mentioned feels otherwise, I still stand by that. People who feel entitled to sex from the people they’re attracted to are not celibate involuntarily in the same way that people who aren’t that way are. One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.
I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.
That's fine, but remember you're doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.
I don't think that it necessarily was "all" or "most" but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it's one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.
Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.
I bring that up in this context because I don't think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it's associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they've been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming "a community" centered around a shared label.
but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.
I've used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big "if" that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we'd be having a different conversation. But it's not true.
The simple fact is that it's a self-identifier. It's a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they're "not a true incel" or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don't see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are "suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they're in." No matter how much your or I might see them and think they're clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.
One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.
To me? They're the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren't. I'd say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.
The "logic" that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.
But it wasn’t coined to express some unfortunate external circumstances; it was to express any circumstances. And the most misogynistic of incels still believes they are being mistreated due to external circumstances. She even gave the example of someone who wants to fuck horses as part of the core.
I understand feeling empathy to those who are lacking intimacy or romance because of an unfortunate circumstance beyond their control, like a profound disformity. I can also appreciate wanting to support that group but not the larger set that self identify as incels. But there is no salvaging what has long been a group of antisocial people fostering the same dangerously hostile worldview in others.
The term was always cringy because it’s putting the lack of sex in a vacuum and completely ignoring the relevant factors.
I was there when /r9k/ was born so I feel like I got a good first hand look at how this modern incel ideology developed. The people you are describing need a better term and that’s been true from the very beginning.
The misogyny incels have is based on the “a slut is a girl that’ll fuck anyone, a bitch is a girl that’ll fuck anyone but you”. I guess I can kinda commiserate that if every girl I asked out said no, I might get a pretty bad attitude. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s understandable.
It is not surprising that a community that associates and labels itself with a negative aspect of themselves would devolve into an irrational and hateful space. “Involuntary” means against one’s will, which in this context implies an entitlement to sex. No one is entitled to love and affection. And instead of working on themselves, or going outside, “incels” choose to feel bad on the internet and congregate and reinforce their beliefs when they should be meeting new people and socializing. The only social interaction they’re getting is from their classmates, many of which are physically active horny guys who are fucking lots of different girls and naturally that leads to envy. Most of these guys I guarantee are perfectly normal dudes, but they game all night as soon and they get home from school. It’s not uncommon for these guys to lose their virginity in their 20s when they start working for a living and the odds even out.
It is not surprising that a community that associates and labels itself with a negative aspect of themselves would devolve into an irrational and hateful space.
So, a community about depression or addiction is doomed to devolve into irrational hatred? I don’t think I follow your logic here.
“Involuntary” means against one’s will, which in this context implies an entitlement to sex.
??? I definitely don’t see how “involuntary” implies entitlement. It just means you want it, but for one reason or another haven’t been able to get it. Entitlement reflects the attitude that you deserve it, which I don’t think the term implies.
As for your characterization of the group, when I visited the subreddit years ago, I saw posts from men complaining about overwhelming anxiety stopping them from approaching women they were attracted to, feelings of low self-esteem or body/facial image issues, and even disabled men trying to contend with how their disabilities limited their options. You’re probably right about some of them, but definitely not all of them.
While it is sad that the terms meaning has changed to something so disgusting: It is what is now. It makes no sense now to act like it still has the old meaning but I agree that it is a good idea to think about the topic as a whole.
It makes no sense now to act like it still has the old meaning
I mean, yes, there’s no sense in refusing to acknowledge the present association, but the meanings of words can change, and it isn’t impossible for the term ‘incel’ to return to it’s former meaning if enough people are made aware of its history.
Those “hostile takeovers” and stigmatization of communities appear to happen rather often.
Like “hacker”, where the original hackers have dispersed and sought refuge as “makers” or “DIYs”, after being labelled “dangerous and malicious”.
Or “feminists”, which has become more and more synonymous for “feminazi”.
Or the whole lgbtq+ stuff, which I feel is self-inflicted, but that is likely because I’ve met one of the black sheep that every community has and which allow this exact phenomenon to happen.
But that it happens a lot, does not make it any less annoying.
The humanoids we evolved from were at one point, not the only humanoids around. We coexisted with other, different species (neanderthals being an example). Homosapien is just the one that survived.
I mean, racism has as much reason to exist now as it ever did. “I’ll protect me and what’s mine” has been the dividing line between species for thousands of years, and we have to choose whether we’ll continue it. A “Kill or be killed” mindset might keep you safe, but you’ll never know if the person you killed did indeed mean you harm, or if you could’ve instead lived without killing, and broke bread with a rival. The logic still applies
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