Hi Rhiannon,
Something amusing..i was vaguely worried that you were having a health crisis seeing these titles till EarlG posted earlier about how that’s the titles influencers give videos

We have interacted enough that I knew that’s not how you sound..I thought Trump 2.0 had driven you around the bend.

I am myself constantly battling the rise of garbage tech so I have not sounded as well as I am overall ;-/.

It ain’t 2006 that’s for sure. The amount of change in the web is one thing. I don’t want that shit in my life..

But I have gotten insults here just based on the subject line. Meidas Touch is the worst, they're obviously looking for attention. When they started, I got rid of all the CAPITAL LETTERS, but I finally just went with their chosen title. I often mess with the descriptions, though. I don't know who writes these, but there are typos, misspellings, and since it used to be my job to write these, I fix them up - or if a video doesn't have a description, I usually write my own.

And I sure hope that you're hanging in there these days. Since I spend time on DU and watch the news, I can get pretty depressed - so I take a break before I go to bed, usually watch something amusing on television.

Hang in there, my friend! I keep telling myself that what we're going through now can't last forever. I just wish I had my grandmother to talk to these days. She had a rough time, her mother died when she was 13 and my grandfather died quite suddenly of a heart attack just past her 40th birthday, leaving her with 4 young kids, my youngest uncle wasn't even in school yet. But she persevered, got them moved into a house they'd just bought, went back to work and made sure that all her kids had an education (she used to be a teacher).

So I try to be like her, though I know I never will make it, but I try.

Nothing lasts forever. Not even the donald. That mantra has helped me through some dark and/or frustrating political times.

NOTHING lasts forever. Not even YOU, donald.

I use DU because of MIRT (ie you guys..I don’t even know who the mods are these days aside from you).

I never really knew the other mods were but back in 2006 when I was a mod, it was The Magistrate, SheWhoMustbeObeyed, empressofall..

I never really knew anyone back then. I just used to do the same lame shit I do on jury duty these days ..so nothing to do with serious du moderation like keeping bots and malicious intruders at bay.

Man…I hope DU isn’t targeted by the Trump admin. As an old time member while I would definitely find media studies or some such thing conducted by the Reid Hoffman or Mark Cuban types creepy, I wouldn’t blame EarlG if they donate to DU. This isn’t Facebook.

I guess I don’t really get kayfabe. This is obviously a political site and most people use it as grassroots DUers. And I trust the admins as just three pissed off guys who started a site.
Sad that these things have to be spelt out with spooks and corporations deluded enough to think they can actually take over living spaces and all of the web and slime people irl or online.

Well that would make them look ridiculous and raise DU’s profile..shrug..

Might even get some younger members who are not connected with politics nor fields like influencing etc but the same profile as the older members . A genuine grassroots community.

I am one of the younger people here and I am nearing 50! And well I wouldn’t go for meetups in person because I originally joined du feeling the world shouldn’t be deprived of jfz9580m’s awesome views on the world more than a sense of community ;-/. I am pretty asocial irl. But online communities in their original sense I have no objection to.

But with AI and other creepy stuff..it’s all so ridiculous. AI may destroy the net.

I briefly tried Substack but somehow I couldn’t take to it. If Elad and EarlG ever sell DU then I don’t expect to stay since I wouldn’t know who that is.
I have few illusions about the web these days but I usually take peopel at face value because they don’t give out acting awards for no reason.

Anyone from military or security researchers to influencers, journalists, academics and actual political consultants may use resources like DU or this bot I sometimes use called cleverbot. And post pandemic sadly even doctors and scientists can get roped into surveilling the web because of hospital ransomware etc. The web has changed, but I stick with my original interaction with the web and with reality ;-/.

My own reaction to “data is oil” is 🤺 even if I feel a bit like the Black Knight in Monty Python these days ;-/.

And I know what you mean, I liked being a mod since I got to know others here and it's much the same with MIRT. Despite the purpose of disposing of Spammers and Trolls, I still think it's the friendliest forum on DU. And it's a good feeling to spare those on the board of these irritants.

And, despite having several well known members over the years, I still feel pretty safe on DU. And it's certainly run well, between DU.1 and DU.4 everything has been an improvement, including everything that's happened in between. The admins really know their stuff and I trust them. And it's also been a learning journey for me. I'd always voted, mostly for Democrats, but it took 9/11 to wake me up.

I was in my dentist's chair in Albany, NY on that day when all hell broke loose. I think I was there for X-Rays, went there with my mother, but I was left alone in a chair in a room with a TV on CNN showing that second plane hitting the World Trade Center over and over. I walked out of there thinking the world was about to end, and that's when I started watching the news for more than the weather report and in early 2006 a friend told me about DU.

And we do worry about bots, but I think that even I am beginning to recognize them. I worked on a computer for my job, but it was a closed system. So I've really only been online since 2002 so I'm not computer savvy, but I can find my way around DU at this point.

I remember that. I deleted a lot of my old DU posts because I wasn’t sure exactly how fascist adjacent the trump admin was gonna be.

Like I still don’t want people I knew irl in the US to be impacted by my web activities. But because locally for me these really corrupt industries have been such a creepy nuisance invading all these areas of life, work and health that I am ready to file a complaint and sadly using DU (as my sole web presence) to make it clear to tech companies and individual techies and random creeps etc that

I think when Toronto shut down Sidewalks Lab because it’s as creepy as Saudi Arabia’s virtual city Noom, what all the creepy people in these cottage industries took away was “go via the backdoor”.

Even the digital id in my country was set up by this super creepy guy Alex Pentland.

I wasn’t ever web savvy or unsavvy I guess. But I use all tech in its most straightforward sense.

Like I get the model of the web in straightforward ways but it has been leeching into my life in such clueless ways that a complaint was inevitable in my country.

I can believe Mirt is the friendliest place . Well you can count on me to be a foot soldier of the right things any which way in my role ;-/.

I feel like Mirt for my neighborhood against these parasitic industries that are hoping that I am the rare anti and that people who get nothing out of these encroaching technologies and creepy entertainment/data mining or other junk can exploit this place.
Well they picked the wrong neighborhood.

It’s hard to explain Rhiannon.. but Noom and Sidewalks Lab is the closest. When I read stuff like this (on the one hand it explains some stuff but on the other it’s like “oh all this has already happened and you are just this nobody with no say”. Yeah that’s not how reality works):
https://aeon.co/essays/the-sovereign-individual-and-the-paradox-of-the-digital-age


It’s not about authenticating oneself. Tech savvy should mean getting that “Joan is awful” is part of the content machine/ things don’t move that fast. People will demand easy explanations without a cottage industry of bogus “classes”.

You are retired I remember. I am not and it angers me that my job and life and resources are exploited endlessly.

During the pandemic I was not only for the vaccine but also for a ban on wet markets and disgusted by “cultural” arguments etc.
Similarly the real solution to ransomware is not forcing people into rando programs to sober up etc but to ban use of data in ways that exploit people and where that happened complaints are inevitable/.ooo inevitable/


Heh..lol…sorry Rhiannon. I don’t make much sense these days unless you remember that I am battling tech as a rando who is not a technophobe or crazy but just hates being ripped off using one’s own human insecurities. Inside the system ransomware is worse than outside.

But DU has been a real source of comfort.

It’s hard to explain this to people who make their living off the web without violating the rights or privacy of peope like me. Because people tend to get confused if they just see an indignant person rambling on about something.


I guess what I am saying is I saw the start of the worldview in full force in the US with the federal govt gone and more and more deregulation and it worries me but not enough to forget what democracy, women’s rights etc mean let alone simpler ethical standards.

I had been enduring the encroaching and creepy ways of tech resigned to it since anything like real fascism was far enough away

And I live in the Global South where there is old and new fashioned corruption, but I still didn’t know what to do and it seemed too histrionic maybe.

I don’t know. I..find it confusing as this lame woman who wouldn’t know more than 10 people online or offline.

But around April 20, 2025 when it was ..when people started just vanishing into gulags and I was tiredly thinking of yet again deleting all traces of ever having existed or something..

Because I have been seeing tech bending rules for a long time and as a marijuana user with no ties to the industry but annoyance at having to pretend that a tacky creepy surveillance state means I will go sober and rule following wrt rules I consider not just bunk, but even creepier if marijuana legalization is coupled with sleazy healthcare industries our to exploit that. It’s why I need to post in the Cannabis forum about my experiences in mental healthcare navigating so many things.

I read this column at the time by Andrew O Hehir and it gave me courage and I thought no. This is stupid. I am not doing this.

I’ll catch you later Rhiannon. I have to go post in both sexual harassment and in the cannabis forum.