You forget the French, who inspired Marx's exhortations to practice "revolutionary terror," the "only way," [0] with their own public executions of the rich [1].
I don't really give a shit at this point. In Toronto it's legal to even record into your condo neighbor's unit 24/7 and livestream your recording to the Internet, unbeknownst to the inhabitants. It has been demonstrated that nobody will enforce anything.
At this point I am a privacy nihilist, and I expect all information about anyone to be exploited all the time. Everyone should do the same.
I live in America so I can’t speak to Canadian laws, but what you’re describing is the same in the States. If you are in public, or can be seen by someone who is in public, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It’s how paparazzi work.
This is one of many factors that precipitated the Soviet collapse.
Turn on the news and you know the language being spewed has no relation to reality. A society full of liars where people say the exact opposite of the truth. Now that LLMs can produce infinitely many words for free, trust in language is falling to all-time lows.
Eventually people just stop believing in words, the fundamental unit of human communication.
I can't recommend Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation more than ever.
> What emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real.
> Everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation."
Apologies for the naive question (because I haven't read the book). I grew up with the Evil Empire waiting to nuke me until Gorbachev provided a brief respite before the KGB returned. As I recall, they were presented as an enemy with almost but just barely not quite unlimited capacities. I still don't understand what happened in terms of global geopolitics in the last forty years.
Does the book suggest that the Soviet collapse was caused by rather than delayed by their Orwellian perversion of language?
HyperNormalisation (2016) is a documentary film by Adam Curtis; the word/concept is from a book, so maybe that's what you're referring to? I have only seen the film myself.
As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.
> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.
I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.
In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.
> Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.
> Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.
Almost 10 years ago, I used to have materials delivered from the Builders of the Adytum to my door in Little Portugal. They were bulky letters with a rather striking sender address.
Torontonians obliged themselves by opening these letters, multiple times, out of a communal mailbox, to see what they were all about. This is an indictable offence in Canada, but neither common decency nor the rule of law actually exist in this country so that's ok.
... Unless, of course, you are Portugese - then the law is fully on your side, as a Canadian white.
As if I needed another reason to despise this continent. Who actually wants to uphold, work for, and build these systems in our society? This is seriously the kind of nation you want to inhabit?
Bitcoin "increased" over multiple five year horizons. That doesn't mean it solves a problem or actually has a concrete use case beyond gambling, which is precisely the point of the article - that you appear to have missed.
You're absolutely right it's volatile. But people are happy to kick some money into that asset and let it bounce up and down. Something is better than nothing for this use case. If they ever want to cash out under non-rushed circumstances, well it's volatile so just wait 6-12mo for a reasonable high.
Lots of economies and industries are volatile too, or subject to volatile politics.
Parking somme $$ in bitcoin in case you have government problems is no different than shoving money into land or gold in case you have stock market problems. The return is beside the point, it could be crap for all you care. The point is at least all your assets won't go to shit at the same time. It's damn near the opposite of gambling.
The stupidity of people sinks to new lows every day. It's astonishing just how ignorant people are of table stakes, basic technological concepts.
You just gave an AI destructive write access to your production environment? Your production DB got dropped? Good. That's not the AI's fault, that's yours, for not having sensible access control policies and not observing principle of least privilege.
Firstly, Twitter has an upper bound on the complexity of thoughts it can carry due to its character limit (historically 180, now somewhat longer but still too short).
Secondly, a biased or partial platform constrains and filters the messages that are allowed to be carried on it. This was Chomsky's basic observation in Manufacturing Consent where he discussed his propaganda model and the four "filters" in front of the mass media.
Finally, social media has turned "show business [into] an ordinary daily way of survival. It's called role-playing." [0] The content and messages disseminated by online personas and influencers are not authentic; they do not even originate from a real person, but a "hyperreal" identity (to take language from Baudrillard) [0]:
You are just an image on the air. When you don't have a physical body, you're a
_discarnate being_ [...] and this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It
has deprived people of their public identity.
Emphasis mine. Influencers have been sepia-tinted by the profit orientation of the medium and their messages do not correspond to a position authentically held. You must now look and act a certain way to appease the algorithm, and by extension the audience.
If nothing else, one should at least recognize that people primarily identify through audiovisual media now, when historically due to lack of bandwidth, lack of computing and technology, etc. it was far more common for one to represent themselves through literate media - even as recently as IRC. You can come to your own conclusions on the relative merits and differences between textual vs. audiovisual media, I will not waffle on about this at length here.
The medium itself is reshaping the ways people represent, think about, and negotiate their own self-concept and identity. This is beyond whatever banal tweets (messages) about what McSandwich™ your favourite influencer ate for lunch, and it's this phenomena that is important and worth examining - not the sandwich.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
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