It just feels like that shit has ramped up. Like it’s gotten particularly scummy and bad lately?
Capitalist countries have always covered everything in advertising, sure, but lately it seems even spaces that used to be safe from it are being poisoned by the most scummy adverts.
For example, I can’t believe people are paying sometimes more than $1000 for a phone and then, boom, there is advertising in the settings menu.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of products and services are just openly scammy now too. Like really fucking bold in being greedy in a way that was at least slightly covert in the past. It’s hard to explain what I mean, but just as example look at this:
“Pay us $200 for the opportunity to pay us another $150 and for a security app that probably is the same as the one the phone comes with, also customer support that we should be doing for free?”
The proliferation of AI. Windows adding advertising directly into their OS. You lift any modern device out of sleep mode and that shit has a push notification telling you to buy. Subscription streaming services that have the gall to charge you an overpriced subscription and then insert advertising and lock some shows behind a second paywall? This is just becoming like a parody you’d see on Futurama. It’s just suffocating.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I’ve noticed there has been an increasing trend to shame people for not using a certain product. That’s always been a thing, but it’s getting worse. Like people saying that using a card to pay for things instead of a phone is for boomers. Like it’s literally the same thing except if I use my card Google might get a little less predatory advertising data from me. People are increasingly not giving a shit that corporations are making a profile of what you buy, when and where you buy it. All data that can be used to flood you with advertising or even bought by scammers. You’re treated as weird for caring about this kind of thing, even as the US is making collecting “lists” of trans people and “illegals”.
I’m particularly worried that young people might be becoming more consumerist but I have to remind myself that when I was younger I was trapped in the same mindset. It just feels like there is less of a counterculture to consumerist BS these days.
Yeah the enshittification is very real.
One thing that’s been on my mind lately is how much bullshit that we put up with just to not upset the landlord class. All the homelessness and poverty which seems to just get worse every single year.
Why do we keep losing music venues? Because of the landlords.
Why do small businesses keep going bankrupt? Because of the landlords.
Why does the working class have less disposable income every year? Because of the landlords.
Why do the tent cities keep getting bigger? Landlords. Fucking landlords.
But no, we cannot dare question the sanctity of private property, because capital is sacrosanct and the line must always go up, no matter how much human suffering it results in.
Sorry I know this wasn’t exactly related to your post, although the root cause is the same (line must go up).
Georgism yesterday, the full star trek by… Friday?
A lot of my hobbies have me staying at home and avoiding them because they’ve gotten so enshittified. Even before covid, I was losing interest. For example, I’ve played Magic: the Gathering since 5th. Edition. I’ve never completely quit the game, just played less frequently.
But that’s changed. I’m seriously considering selling off all my cards for the first time in my life and leaving it altogether. I used to play multiple tournaments a week. Now I play only one prerelease every few months and only because my friend uses it to get out of the house and socialize. It’s only a matter of time before they replace everything with AI artwork.
And it’s like this with everything. Hobbies/games aren’t even necessary. The stuff that really affects people (like food, healthcare, housing, etc.) is infinitely worse. Some of my interests would be tolerable if it wasn’t for my disability and the lack of proper care for it. Anymore surgery or treatments are completely off the table since my insurance won’t cover it.
yeah i should sell my cards, hasbro isn’t going to turn around it’s just going to get worse as the shareholders demand more and they break the dumbass reserve list.
does anyone even give a shit about “current” rotating formats? i heard they figured out EDH is the wildly most popular thing and they’ve been ruining that for ten years too
The reserve list needed to go a long time ago. I used to play Vintage in paper circa 2003 (though I owned no power) because people were still able to afford it. Even up to 2013, a white bordered Black Lotus could be found for $800ish. Now? It’s over $10k for a damaged one. Even if people could afford it, nobody wants to be carrying around the price of a house in a small box that can be easily stolen.
Currently, the non-reserve list formats (Standard, Modern, and Pioneer) are all a hot mess. There’s a turn 3 kill in Standard right now, the first one since Kamigawa block, that is wildly consistent and WotC refuses to do a ban because it would mean admitting their mistake. There have been more bans since 2019 in Standard than the previous 25ish years combined, including the initial ban list when Type 1 was separated from Type 2, Urza’s block, and Mirrodin block. Playtesting has been poor due to the increased number of releases (over 6 sets per year as opposed to 4 from the previous rotation schedule), resulting in bad design.
Modern has been “soft rotated” by power creep due to Modern Horizons. Previous format staples like Cryptic Command, Path to Exile, Phyrexian Obliterator, etc. are all unplayable. Even Tarmogoyf is barely holding on. What’s worse is these straight to Modern sets have resulted in a bunch of bans because they’ve resulted in non-games.
Legacy is actually in a decent spot because the more powerful cards in other formats aren’t stronger than what already exists. For example, in order for them to power creep Brainstorm, they’d have to make something that straight-up draws 3 cards with no drawbacks. We already have that card, it’s Ancestral Recall. And even WotC isn’t stupid enough to print an Ancestral Recall that draws 4 cards. But again, the Reserve List means fewer people are able to play the format how they want. Burn and Death & Taxes are still cheap as shit, but even decks like Elves have gotten expensive due to shit like Gaea’s Cradle going for $1k.
EDH is actually going to be taken over by WotC soon. With Sheldon passing away, the Rules Committee wants to hand it off. There was a bunch of drama a while ago over Mana Crypt (I made a post about it because the reactionaries were having a meltdown and it was hilarious), but I think people are actually kinda relieved because we’ll get a banlist that makes sense. EDH is a deeply unserious format people want to play competitively for some reason. Sol Ring and Demonic Tutor are legal while meme cards like Sway the Stars are banned. WotC is taking a harder look into things and will have “brackets,” sort of like point-based banned lists.
There’s all kinds of other shit, but those are the main ones.
oh shit sheldon died? damn. i liked his writing. i thought they had already absorbed oversight in the last year or so though. hardly matters because they fucked over the format after the first round of purpose-made cards as usual. They did their best work for it with the bigger sets designing cards for a multiplayer format that nobody actually played instead of the one people do.
i’ve thought going back to since i knew what competitive play was that it should be governed by a body not answerable to wotc but you can’t have that with corporatized sports.
Yeah he died a while ago from cancer on September 7, 2023.
dang
i figured magic the gathering was fucked once I saw licensed franchises with MTG cards
Crossover shit is just advertising people pay to see. It’s getting into everything since making new IPs is more expensive. You see it mostly in video games, but capitalism is running out of space so it’s spilling over into everything else.
I don’t mind some crossover stuff but the whole thing about MTG is it having its own developed lore and art and stuff and suddenly having X Men MTG cards or whatever is really imo immersion breaking. But i don’t play MTG so idk that’s just my opinion
Yeah a lot of us feel that way, myself included. It’s especially bullshit because they’re doing it to avoid commissioning artists and writers. The new Final Fantasy set had promo cards where the art was just screenshots from the games, on top of using concept art done in traditional media.
More and more protections keep getting stripped, allowing them to be increasingly more and more brazen about things. Ai is becoming increasingly worrisome in this regard and it keeps getting shoved into our devices without our consent. It’s only a matter of time before they decide that Ai is competent enough to make decisions for us and start buying shit “for us” without our consent.
“Of course user would want me to purchase a lifetime subscription to Goons R Us. They’ll be so happy when they see I’ve purchased it for them.
It’s only a matter of time before they decide that Ai is competent enough to make decisions for us and start buying shit “for us” without our consent.
That’s something I didn’t even consider, but they absolutely would put that in phones and things. Goddamn.
I don’t think it’d be put into the phones, but into digital storefronts like Amazon and maybe as a condition to for birck&mortar reward card systems.
However it manifests it is going to be used to abuse the fuck out of old people and sap their social security or whatever pensions people get these days if that even still exists for ZERO effort on the part of the scammer. Every old person I’ve ever known near the end of their lives it turns out were paying for like 20 different cable television packages and other complete nonsense that no one knew about until they passed. That will go wild with AI buying things for you.
Yup. Welcome to the endgame of capitalism. This has all been predicted by the immortal science of Marxism, and will continue to follow the predictions.
Additionally, we are in a literal climate apocalypse. Every piece of current data and every projection shows the world in active and accelerating collapse. If every human on Earth simultaneously turned communist and decided to save the world, we could reverse it. But anything less and it’s all fucked within our lifetimes.
These two pieces combined are what the world’s ruling class know. Just like they knew about leaded gas and greenhouse gases. They see the numbers, the worsening quality of life.
And yet we must persist, so I do. Stay armed and loosely organized with stocks of food supplies (or a garden if you have land) and persist within the system while helping others when you can. I don’t know what else we can do individually. The alternative is to be destitute and homeless and unable to help anyone, which apparently makes me a Fed to say. /shrug
If every human on Earth simultaneously turned communist and decided to save the world, we could reverse it.
I don’t think we could, tbh. We’ve passed so many tipping points, lost so much stuff. Everywhere you look it’s shit like “nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a rate that far outstrips the pace of natural processes to replace diminished soil.” (Actual quote from a guardian article)
Yeah me too.
(more detailed rant)
I feel completely doomeristic to be quite honest. It’s next to impossible to get a job. Porky keeps getting pickier and pickier and every other candidate just is more and more impressive and porky has a strict “unicorns only” policy for jobs.
Even going back to college seems completely futile. What’s the point when there’s no more jobs? Every job market is so saturated, and I’ll never match up to the literal millions who were literally born better than I could ever hope to be. I could at least tolerate biding my time under capitalism if porky would at least give me permission to work for him, but now employers refuse to even do that.
And that’s not mentioning porky’s insistence that everything except for labor should be a luxury item, particularly housing and education and arguably, having a job is becoming more and more of a luxury. But I’ll end my rant here.
TL;DR: I am not too lazy for capitalism, capitalism is too lazy for me. Porky, get off your ass and make some jobs already. Us westerners have been ever so patiently waiting on you for years for you to finish your widdle napsie.
My job applications are making me speak to a chatbot and then asking me to retype all the information I gave the chatbot on a different form. All of the information is of course in my resume
I would refuse to deal with any AI interviews but thats fast becoming all interviews
Unfortunately I need a job quite quickly. Don’t have the luxury of choice rn
Yeah mood. I feel ya.
I’ve had this too. It’s like they have organisation level questions, then job level questions, but they’re both the same because no one checks. Then you need to fill this shit out in a shitty chat interface when it’s already in your resume
Absolutely. The amount of ads creeping into places they’ve never been before, it’s getting harder and harder to endure. I’m clenching my jaw a lot these days.
Capitalism has always been “ramping up” and will always be “ramping up”. Having colonized the world two times over and having raised productivity fourfold without actually paying anyone more, having turned everything into advertisement and having sold everyone’s attention span to the lowest bidder, the endless extraction of profit continues on unabatedly, slowly eroding all substance anything and anyone ever had.
Australians love their monopolies: JB, Bunnings, Woolies, arnotts. The fucking Bluey bunnings tie-in for a shitty tool shop with plastic sausages that sells invasive species by the truck load and has car parks that would make a yankee blush. We laugh at americans with their walmarts, Starbucks and hobbylobbies or whatever while thinking ours are treasured national icons. Nobody would notice the irony.
On computer (everything is computer). Helping a coworker now who just bought herself a new laptop amd talking about alternatives to microsoft and adobe for publisher work and she’s recounting how many times the sales rep tried to upsell her on integrated AI til her head was swimming, and I had to just say no you’re not going nuts it is just a baldfaced upsell. Like the basic items you need to interact with the daily world are just vehicles for predatory software (aside, massive respect for you going over to linux, I’ve only ever played around with jt on virtual machine cos i can’t decide on a distro).
And after all kf this, the go-to-joke is ‘i just want milk that tastes like real milk’ thanks another bloody advertisement masquerading as culture. I’m tired
That ad is only remembered because it played on every ad break on TV for like a decade and a half. It isnt even a good ad
Now the reading and writing hotline has a good ad
1300 6555 06
It could change your life.
this isnt even mentioning the proliferation of straight up scams after stuff like tai lopez, then metaverse, then crypto.
Holy shit, JB is really getting that bad? I remember when their one year warranty was like, $10 and they’d replace a device, no questions asked. I swear that was only a couple of years ago too.
I know what you mean, the capitalists are squeezing as hard as they can and it’s just a question of whether their companies collapse or the people they’re squeezing collapse first. Buy canned food, stock up.
stay with foss, linux lineageos and adblockers if you want any peace from that bullshit.
its only gonna get worse as corporations squeeze ever more profit from their services, and antitrust is dismantled.
i feEl GreAt
I’m surprised JB is still selling that extended warranty. I think Choice or someone else proved it was worthless
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