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Your pal Al 🪴📝

@alsmth.bsky.social

153 followers 384 following 46 posts

Director of Fundraising @torproject.org • In-progress ceramicist & occasional fiber crafter • Oxford comma enjoyer • Fan of the internet • Anti-fascist transgender menace • Seattle, WA 🌈🔗⚡ 🐘 Mastodon social.coop/@al

Posts Replies Media

Your pal Al 🪴📝 @alsmth.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

oh boy, some good stuff in here

img from Mac User 1987 showing a hand doing Graphic DesignTM on a Macintosh Plus screen with... an xacto knife?

img from Amiga World 1992 of a desktop with speed lines behind it, indicating its FAST

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Your pal Al 🪴📝 @alsmth.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

There it is.

"Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it’s not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructure—from hospitals to banks to traffic systems—failing globally for an extended period."

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Your pal Al 🪴📝 @alsmth.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Fight for the Future's analysis and understanding of what's to come in tech under the Trump administration is right on point. touchgrass.fightforthefuture.org/technology-c...

As an organization focused on technology and the rules governing it, we see what’s coming: Trumpists in power will weaponize the U.S. surveillance apparatus––built on top of the profit-driven data harvesting of Big Tech––against immigrants, communities of color, journalists, dissidents, and anyone else they decide to target. Trump-led federal agencies will be overrun by hand-picked elites who will quickly abandon hard-won policies like net neutrality and AI regulation. They will attempt to censor the Internet, criminalize speech, and block access to knowledge. Their tech policies will not really be “tech policies” at all. Instead, Trumpists will use technology to enrich themselves, and to isolate and oppress immigrants, political dissidents, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else they deem to be “other.”

And most Big Tech, crypto, and AI leaders will cheer them on. Even before Trump won, people like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk cozied up to the Trump campaign. Now they will become even more complicit in its authoritarian aspirations, hoping to be rewarded with government contracts, legal protection, and the preservation of their monopoly status. “Crony capitalism” will be an understatement.

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