That's literally the strategy of the Likud, who undermined the more moderate Fattah to allow the extremist Hamas to reign on the Gaza strip, hoping that one day the 7th of october would happen, and would let them unleash a genocide...
I mean, almost entire society participates in (what they believe is the "most moral") military service. It is scary to think folks with murderous tendencies might not be minority.
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
Technology is not a form of control at all. Technology is the practical application of things you know, to achieve things that don't happen naturally. Here's what the wiki says:
> Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.
By this definition, the earliest wooden and stone tools, use of fire, wheel, agriculture, housing and clothing were all legitimate technology. It's no more 'a form of control' than medical science, any form of economics and commerce or any arts are.
It's true that technology is being used as a tool of oppression. But there are several reasons for it. Controlling its access is one of the easiest ways to control a society - either by gatekeeping access to its building blocks or through draconian legislations. This is possible and done with medical science and arts too.
We can live quite comfortably without the 'modern technology' that only the rich can control. But we are subjected to peer pressure by statements like "you can't compete in this era without smartphones", " you will be jobless without AI", etc. And we fall for all of it without any questions. It enrages me when I suggest that people should choose freedom over convenience, and people reject it flippantly citing market forces and supporting the abusive companies that make them.
Mischaracterizing and vilifying technology in response to its hijack like this will not serve us in any manner. People already have a negative response when they hear technology. But it's a discipline that we must own, instead of being the just the consumer of. Technology is one of the components we need to fight back against control.
Stone tools, fire, the wheel and farming are forms of control. You learn that from prehistory; stone tools and fire provide the baseline for manufacturing, trade and warfare. Farming and transport creates a backbone for logistics and taxation. Each invention contributes to a greater degree of state-sanctioned control; "the people" rarely ever win.
The mischaracterization comes when people get comfortable assuming that technology cares about them. Your stone axe does not want to keep you alive; your iPhone has no self-preserving motivation to maintain privacy. Making these kinds of hopeful-but-foolish assumptions is how people become disenfranchised with progress and associate it with evil.
One of the first tasks I had for Claude was to build a protected KV store out of keepassx.cli. Out of the box I got a beautiful gui for seeding initial secrets while giving me a nice scriptable, non-interactive tool for injecting secrets into infrastructure bootstrapping.
"also" is a strong word for a project this young. It was started in October 2025, does not have any issues (at all) and is completely vibe coded. Not starting a discussion about security & vibe coding now, but I wouldn't blindly recommend such a nascent project if compared to something mature like SOPS.
Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:
- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution
- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
1. Your prediction is that soon browing the web for a few hours is going use >30,000+ Wh (based on the "equivalent" you mentioned)? (For comparison to that 30,000+ figure, the energy use from using a laptop for a few hours is 75 Wh, all per OP source.)
2. > most of this will be done just to sell more ads
Are you predicting that the value of ads is going to increase by a number of magnitudes? Because 30,000+ Wh of electricity has a quite significant cost, and even a video ad currently only earns pennies, so I'm trying to imagine how the math would work in this scenario?
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