Infinite Thunder

We are on the fast-track to the end of the era of private, anonymous internet use. Instagram's (Meta) announcement of ending E2EE on May 8th is not just a coincidence...it very much fits into the bigger picture we're seeing in America and around the world. 🟠Encrypted messaging is being phased out because platforms and government will need visibility to enforce new laws. 🟠KOSA & COPPA 2.0 require platforms to detect AND monitor AND intervene. Can't do that with E2EE 🟠State level age-verification laws require ID checks, behavioral monitoring...can't have user privacy and do that 🟠OS level age-verification would essentially make encrypted spaces "non compliant spaces" 🔴This won't just be Instagram - all Meta messaging will follow, as will every other messaging platform...like dominos. 🔴This has nothing to do with "protecting kids." It's all about Big Tech and Big Government having full control.

It used to be that you could get fired and land a new job the next day. In 2026 you can send 1,000 applications and not get a single interview. The economy didn’t just get worse. It got crueler.

@jozivsjozi Africa wins again . . .

37 Soper Road. Johannesburg. South Africa. 2009 vs 2025

@KennyCarmody ACtually, the problem is that not ENOUGH has been happening in real life, even though there is plenty of vague drama and steady increase in economic and social inefficiencies and weird political taboos.

I am fully convinced that 2019 was the last normal year we will ever have. Not normal in the sense of perfect. Not normal in the sense of without problems. But normal in the sense that there was still a shared reality. A baseline. A world that, for all its flaws, still felt like it operated according to recognisable rules. That world is gone. Since 2020, something fundamental has shifted and most people feel it even if they cannot name it. A persistent low-level anxiety that never fully lifts. A sense that time is moving both too fast and strangely out of sequence. A feeling that nothing quite lands the way it used to that experiences, connections, even ordinary moments feel slightly hollow, slightly off, like a frequency that no longer quite tunes in. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is overwhelmed. And yet nothing seems to slow down long enough to make sense of it. The anchors are gone. The institutions we were raised to trust have revealed themselves. The social fabric that held communities together was deliberately stressed and in many places snapped entirely. The relationships that did not survive the last five years left silences that have not been filled. And underneath all of it is something that does not get said enough. Grief. Grief for the world that existed before. For the innocence of not knowing what we now know. For the relationships that were lost not to death but to division. For the version of the future we thought we were building that has quietly been replaced with something none of us voted for. 2019 was the last year most people lived without the constant sense that the ground beneath them could shift without warning. But we are living in the aftermath of something enormous and we are being asked to pretend that we are not. You are allowed to grieve what was lost. And you are allowed to say that the world as it was is gone — because it is. Look around.

Worth noting that this excuse is completely fake. The military can even court martial its retirees for non-military crimes committed after retirement (eg see the recent cases US v Torres & US v Larrabee). It can also prosecute civilian contractors (US v Ali), or detain terrorists

Major cover-up, it would appear to be.

@UnwantedBlog I stopped reading SF when Clarke and Crichton died, and Yudkowsky stopped writing. I'll probably give up fiction entirely when King kicks the bucket. I wish there was a way to find readable writers out there, but there is no such way. AI just tells you mainstream platitudes.

1/ I weep for the future of our civilization. My most recent example: A couple days ago I stopped at the local Barnes & Noble and dared look in the "Science Fiction" section. At first glance, it appears to be *largely* fantasy, not SF... and *crap* fantasy at that. Behold:

@alkalinebro1 @PulpLibrarian If only

@PulpLibrarian "Today is March 14 19126"

Geocities (1994-2009). Its passing marked the end of Web 1.0 "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Education could easily be made ten times faster than it currently is.

@theutus1 Yes. Ebert was a fool. I recently read his reviews of my favorite 10 movies and he loathed ROAD HOUSE (1989). Deserved a throat pull for it. Wait... didn't that happen?

Alright, time to explain my absence the past few days. I was hit by the exact same report spam brigade that’s been targeting other anti-India, anti-H1B and anti-immigration accounts. A number of my posts about immigration and remigration were flagged, and a few had to be deleted. I got a 7-day ban but quite frankly, I got off easy compared to some others. This is an unacceptable state of affairs, that foreign cartels operating bot farms can effectively silence and censor criticism because their coethnic hindutvas have managed to embed themselves in Western tech companies that CLAIM to be for free speech. The baseline solution to this is to allow people to restrict by region and AppStore who can see and interact with their posts. There is nothing I have to say to Indians, there’s no reason why they should be able to rape our public square by trying to silence anyone who dares to notice how they choose to live and behave. I’m not going to quit the app over this, I weathered far worse under Dorsey and enjoy seeing art from around the world. That said, again, this is unacceptable and tantamount to foreign interference in elections. Anon posters do have influence in their local elections by how they post and organize here, silencing discussion of one sacred cow because a cabal of eternally assmad losers can’t handle getting called out is ludicrous, especially when that one sacred cow is the most critical issue of the time, and one which is unifying to normal people across party affiliation.

The reason they won't fix this stuff is because a bunch of subcontinentals work at X and have a vested interest in not fixing it. Hell, half of them (or their families) at least run slop accounts to rake in revenue and get boosted with their admin powers and bots.

X is currently pretending that they're fighting spam when realistically they need to lay off the massive chunk of Indian replacement workers they hired and geoblock all of India. Mass report campaigns via Indian state funded groups currently happening.

This is a genuine crisis for X. People didn't quit Twitter like this even during the dark days of 2017-2022, when you could be banned at will and had to buy TracFones in order to get a new account. I don't need X. I have a job and before I came back to this site, I ran a successful publishing company. I do this for the love of the game. Between Indians abusing the system to get their critics banned and Substack also censoring me, I don't see why I should fight an uphill battle. I can make more money with far less hassle back in the corporate world than I can here. Either X shuts down the Indians abusing their platform or the most popular accounts leave and this place becomes a Threads-tier ghost town of slop posters trying to scam other slop posters. Then revenues collapse and the boss man is forced to sell X off to cover mounting losses. Rajesh Poojah is not making this site any money with his illiterate posts about cricket.

@crusade_enjoyer Excellent, I strongly approve of recycling! Dead is dead, it's all over. These metals belong to the living, and should be brought up.

A virtually unmentioned issue is the illegal salvaging of WW2 sunken ships, specifically those made from metal smelted before the Trinity atomic tests. Since the first nuclear detonation in 1945, all metals have had minute residual radiation levels, making it difficult to produce the most precise components needed for complex medical devices and other sensitive equipment. These illegal scrapping operations are concentrated in the South and Central Pacific. Not only do these wrecks belong to the Western nations that lost the ships to the Japanese Imperial Navy during WW2, but they are also war graves. Asian nations primarily China, is my guess are desecrating American, British, Australian, and even Dutch war graves to build their medical device and precision instrument industries. These dead sailors and marines deserve better.

One of the best accounts on X just protected their account and logged off after publicly calling out mass reporting abuse and coordinated efforts to silence Americans. This is the fallout. High-quality accounts with real reach are leaving because nothing's done about weaponized reporting gangs.

Things men slowly learn as they grow older: - No woman loves you for who you are, she only loves for what you can do for her -Nobody is coming to save you -Discipline beats motivation -Money solves many problems -Silence is better than arguing - Nobody cares until you are rich or dead. -Respect is earned, not begged for - No woman is ever yours - You can do everything right and still lose. - Your colleagues are not your friends - Your father is the only man who wants you to be better than him

@ObviousRises There are still a few real non-bot websites out there, but they are at the very bottom of online visibility and user rankings. Ask me how I know.

Hacker 4chan explains how Dead Internet Theory backfired on Big Data.

Major cover-up continues in the death of Gursimran Kaur, who was burned to death in a Walmart oven in Halifax, Canada. Asking questions about how she died is a way to get quickly banned on Reddit. Honor killing or something worse?

Chilling and deeply concerning.