Things that were better in the 90s:
The weather was less shitty because climate change had 3 less decades to do its work.
Light pollution was less in where I live. I went from seeing 15+ stars to <10 stars lol
Gaming was genuinely more exciting, mostly because gaming hasn't matured as an artform and undergone enshittification yet.
Average household devices were slightly better quality although nowhere near as good as stuff made in the 70s/80s.
Cost of living was cheaper.
I thought about this, and my conclusion is that personal computing itself has to be completely overhauled. Personal computing started out as a petty bourgeois hobby. Your average prole wasn't fucking around with mainframes or PCs during the 70s and 80s. The closest thing to a computer that an actual member of the working class interacted with were arcades in third places.
My sketch of what needs to happen:
Computing goes back to the mainframe-client model. The mainframe would be various servers set up to service a particular physical community (town, suburb, city) and the client is a smartphone.
The community-issued smartphones are all connected to a community intranet that's handled by those servers and only connected to the community intranet, with exception being its basic functionality as a phone.
Average people are restricted or banned from almost all other computing devices and peripherals (consoles, PCs, printers, smart devices). Exceptions would be something like a software dev being loaned a laptop to hone on their coding skills or disabled people getting smart devices to help with their disability.
"Classic" computing devices will all be stored and maintained within a community center, perhaps in the same place as the community servers. So, people can still play videogames or do film editing, but instead of doing it at home, they would do it all in a third space. Convenience is sacrificed for the sake of deatomization.
The "classic" computing devices will be maintained by hobbyists and professionals. So, instead of building an individual gaming PC for their own individual use, the PC gamer would be in charge of building multiple gaming PCs. This has an added advantage of training people.
The computers within the community center has access to the internet instead of just the community intranet. This is where "classic" social media could still exist.
This sketch isn't perfect (it doesn't have a good answer for privacy concerns), but the current status quo has got to go.
For a very long time, the Internet was seen as a place for cranks that fortunately didn't spill into real life. It's still the place for cranks but now real life is online as well.
reread my comment
Okay, that came out a lot more unhinged than how it sounded in my head lmao
I'm sorta the opposite: social relationships are so shallow and superficial in late stage capitalism that most social relationships can be replaced with a chatbot. If your social relationships can be summed up as water cooler conversations with coworkers and catching up with your drinking buddies, you might as "socialize" with a chatbot instead. Say what you will about a chatbot, but at least a chatbot won't stab you in the back like the case of socializing with coworkers or turn you into a functioning alcoholic like the case of socializing at a bar.
If your social relationships are limited to having pointless conversations about the weather or traffic or your favorite sports team, then what is the point of the social relationship in the first place?
I just assume they're Hexbear or Lemmygrad alts lmao
I just assume a large percentage of his viewers see him as a freakshow and are watching him purely for the novelty of seeing a human cockroach, but many of them will turn because their main form of social interaction is him and his chat.
Yeah, what's the point of having a lawn in the backyard when they would presumably have a lawn in the frontyard already? Are they so lawn-brained that they still need two lawns lol
People don't understand warfare and don't understand logistics.
On Contradiction
On Contradiction was written within the context of the Warlord Era when China was de facto ruled by various military cliques. With China being ruled by various military cliques, these questions had to be answered:
Which warlord can you win to your side?
Which warlord can you threaten into joining your side?
Which warlord will toady up to you once you're strong enough?
Which warlord do you have to ruthlessly crush and make an example out of?
It does not follow that the communists had to declare war against every single warlord. By far the biggest example against this was Zhu De, who was a warlord until he was persuaded by Zhou Enlai to become a communist instead. And when Zhu De became a communist, his troops under his command as a warlord joined the communists as well. By the end of the Century of Humiliation, Zhu De was the first of the Ten Marshals and first commander-in-chief of the PLA.
I suspect this "pre-party formation" will meet the same fate as all the other "pre-party formations."
I still get a kick how the US got all the important Nazis through Operation Paperclip while Canada got the leftovers and cheap knockoffs like Banderites.
mfw the environment in which I live in can simultaneously change and be changed by me