The whole trend of teens rejecting phones for dumbphones is making sense now. If you can't fight big mainstream technology, then fuck big mainstream technology!
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.
Don't remember whose quote it was, maybe Hannah Arendt, that the real tragedy of tyranny is not when people self-censor what they say out loud, but when this leads them to filter out those thoughts from arising at all
That's the surveillance panopticon, they know they are being watched, but not when.
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This is also why (I think) that younger people don't like going outside. Cameras are everywhere. There's no privacy. We've become a world of creeps. Not really for the most of us. But if I was 10 years old I'd think everyone as creeps.
Now corporations are forcibly creeping into the classrooms. Yuck!
The world is turning into one giant shitty customer service experience.
We are living in the shittiest kind of cyberpunk dystopia. Can't wait for AI-induced cyber-psychosis once people implant Musk's chips into their brains and give MechaHitler full access to their subconscious.
The good news is newer chips go on the OUTSIDE of your head because it turns out, you can't market brain surgery
I can't say for certain because I wasn't given one but I can't imagine me and my friends would have been willing to communicate with each other on devices provided by our school. Even in the early 00s it would have been filled with spyware.
I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.
Yeah for sure. My friends and I were completely paranoid about stuff like that.
“I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,” said Patterson.
Seems like the Gaggle CEO has a good view. They're still an enabler in these situations. Be it poor guidance or training. With the impact they have, taking responsibility would be tracking and ceasing contracts that do not follow this soft response approach.
Human nature dictates we do things before we discuss if we should do things.
To me it starts getting into a philosophical discussion but unfortunately I don't think as a species we are mature enough yet to have these discussions.
A good real world example of this is in Canada the separation movement by Quebec vs. Alberta. In Quebec there have been years of open public discussion before they ultimately took a vote. They were painfully away of all the nuance that came from leaving Canada. They did it right to a large extent. Compare that to Daniella Smith in Alberta and she's hammering through the mechanisms for a vote to happen meanwhile the public has absolutely no understanding of the ramifications of if they do vote to leave Canada. They're doing it wrong.
Human nature by default seems to want to change the front tyre while doing 120 on the highway. This needs to change.
Imagine it's 1995 and you're an average person. You don't know all that much about separation, you just know that the coming referendum is about it and you don't want to separate. You likely are not a college/university graduate and a significant amount of the people you know haven't even graduated high school. You probably don't have a personal computer or internet access even if you do. Your primary news source is likely the odd updates you get on the radio while driving to or from work, and you haven't been following and aren't familiar with how people talk about separation. You show up to vote and you get this question:
Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
French:
Acceptez-vous que le Québec devienne souverain, après avoir offert formellement au Canada un nouveau partenariat économique et politique, dans le cadre du projet de loi sur l'avenir du Québec et de l'entente signée le 12 juin 1995?
What the hell are you even voting for or against here?
The Québec referendum on separation was so confusing people remarked they didn't actually know what they were voting for. The situation resulted in a law (Clarity Act) that forced all secession votes to pass some tests to be considered valid, and also indicated that a secession requires amendment of the Constitution of Canada, which makes it incredibly difficult to actually do.
I really don't want to give Québec undeserved credit on this, they handled it quite poorly tbh and the whole thing felt like it was exploiting the ignorance and anger of a minority population that had even less education and literacy than the average Canadian at the time. That said, Canada has since devolved further into being a neoliberal anglosohere shithole so perhaps they were on to something.
Thought control
I was already glad being out of school before widespread take-home laptops and required after-school logging in to check for homework and shit, but this AI-driven surveillance is on a whole other level. Sometimes I'm wondering if it's just me getting old and doing the old people thing thinking things were better "back in the day" but is this current state not objectively worse, being monitored so much and having no way to really disconnect from school?
Citizen, Friend Computer has detected Bad Thought ^(tm)^ in your area! Please do not be alarmed! Remain where you are, a team of selected Troubleshooters will begin deploying Martin-Marietta neuron adjusters as quickly as possible.
Do not worry about side-effects: Martin-Marietta's studies have shown most people respond positively to having their neurons rewired! Plus it feels good.
Is this a Paranoia reference out in the wild? Amazing. Well done!
Heh, thanks. I see more and more similarity between Paranoia and the real world, as well as all the dystopian 1970s sci-fi I grew up on...
Its not a technology issue, its a capitalism issue.
Idealy, people should be able to afford their own devices and just log in via a browser, but capitalism fucks everyone and kids are too poor to have their own laptop and has to use the school-issued one which is obviously managed and surveilled because they can't have you watching porn on it.
Also, #SaveSnowDays, stop forcing an online meet if its snowing and they cant get to school, just let kids have a day off once in a while.
I'm no fan of capitalism, but nothing in it requires public schools to install surveillance software on laptops. This seems purely like an administration issue, which is often the source of problems in general, not just in schools, but also in other sectors like healthcare, where they put in stupid policies while sucking up funding for themselves and their pet issues instead of towards the core purpose of that sector.
Agreed on the snow days. In fact, I think we should reduce the number of school days (and work days, for that matter) in general.
I mean pretty stupid to write that in the schools chat app, use signal or shit just regular iMessage
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Anything with a very low rate of true positives applied to a large population is going to have an insane false positive rate. EG a 1 in 7M issue applied to 70M students with a 1% false positive rate would produce 700k false positives. Worse people who are actually planning a school shooting may be more likely to avoid telegraphing their intentions. So you could damage 700k kids futures and traumatize them without even catching many or any of the killers.
Some good news here is that if they apply this to society as a whole the jails would be too full, keep saying the no-no words online!
Sounds more like they are maybe using ML classifiers on all the communications they are spying on by conventional means. To me that's not the same as using AI to spy but whatever.
Isn't this the plot of Shimoneta?
Shouldn't they have used AI to collect the messages and then have a human manually intervene?
no paywall https://archive.md/1lSRA
I got a captcha on the archive, but was able to read the original just fine. I guess archives are not necessarily lower barrier.
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