[LocalH]

The so-called "legitimization" of predatory dark patterns is something that we collectively should never have allowed to happen, and which we should be demanding be changed.

But as seen by the recent rejection of Stop Killing Games by the EU Commission, society has apparently decided that more money means you should have more say. So the corporations (who would absolutely go to the extremes in terms of ensuring that they don't plateau and instead make more money than last quarter) become the defacto government.

Corporations are not people in and of themselves. They are groups of people at best (and with the way generative AI is going, that's not even guaranteed long-term). There are certain benefits to counting corporations as people for certain parts of contract law, but there is zero benefit to conferring free speech rights on the actual corporations themselves.

Meanwhile, the current US administration is all about finding whatever grift they can attach to and enrich themselves at the cost of founding values.

The biggest thing that pushes me towards idealistic communism is the actions taken by Western society. Maybe that's where we need to use the blockchain and related technologies, to enact the principles of communism without having the state be a proxy for the people. A documented, nearly unfalsifiable share of the means of production means that they'd have to resort to the $5 wrench to be evil in that context, instead of the massive corruption that historic implementations of communism have suffered while the frogs slowly boil. At least it might be a start, I don't know. I just know I see the path the world is taking, and right now the entire Western world is devolving into a weird techno-fascism that locks out any free thought