cynetri (he/any)

vr enjoyer and occasional gamedev living in ohio, usa who uses arch btw

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2022

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  • Of course ByteDance is influenced by its government, every company is. And to more of an extent in China, because China is governed by a communist-inspired party who seeks to crush bourgeois influence.

    My point is that this instance is much more likely an example of ByteDance doing pretty normal, if stupid, private company things. Hell, TikTok itself doesn’t even exist in China. They do have a very similar sister app, Doiyin, but operations between the two are ultimately separate.

    According to the article in the post, this suppression of the writer’s strike was related to its effort to remove QAnon-related content from the platform. Apparently some QAnon acronym has WGA in it, and sure, you can dismiss that statement as deflection, and I wouldn’t fault you for it. But then I raise this question:

    What does China stand to gain suppressing information about a strike in the US?

    It doesn’t help anyone here be more pro-communist, if anything they would push pro-union content for that. China’s image isn’t being emboldened in the US for this, as your comment clearly shows it makes it worse. It makes far more sense for TikTok’s US operations to be suppressing pro-union information, whether at the request of other companies or their own enrichment. But even then, that would easily be spotted and called out, as it did even still. I believe China has far more to gain with its existing spy operations and suppression of internal affairs such as Xinjiang than it does with a labor strike in an entirely sifferent country that its own citizens likely have little, if any, knowledge about.

    I don’t like China’s government, by the way. The reason I say all this isn’t to defend them, the reason I do it is because people tend to blame all of Chinese companies’ bad decisions on China itself instead of the companies. Intentionally or not, it absolves the companies of wrongdoing and puts it on China. While China obviously deserves plenty of criticism, from people of all ideologies, this situation just isn’t relevant to that discussion. I also suspect the mass panic surrounding Chinese influence is in no insignificant part manufactured to make the US populace okay with going to war over Taiwan. This isn’t anything new, remember Iraq’s WMDs? I want people to focus on fixing our own, very significant issues, here at home before turning attention overseas. This applies to other countries too but that’s out of scope for this discussion.

    That being said, you’re right, I’m not going to continue. Not because I’m not interested in good faith discussion, as my wall of text implies, but because you straight up insulted me and that’s a dick move. My comment might have sounded stern, and I apologize for not clarifying my tone, but you didn’t need to go full Reddit warrior at the end of your comment either. To assume you’d “win” a discussion, instead of engaging to learn the other side, is pathetic and insulting.



  • cynetri (he/any)@midwest.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlEvery third post on Lemmy
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    1 year ago

    The prevelance of computers are inherently linked with the corporate desire to minimize cost and maximize productivity and profit. The origin of computers comes from military use; first seen in WW2 to calculate angles for artillery use and crack codes as with Enigma. Later, financial and educational institutions saw an ability to reduce labor cost by using computers to automate some record keeping. Why would they be interested in reducing cost? Capitalism, of course! And who were the ones programming these machines? Mostly, wealthy white men. You see, because computers were still giant, expensive machines, they required a college education to learn to use them. At this point, this was the 50s/60s, and non-white people had very little wealth due to, yknow, all that discrimination stuff. Plus, wealthy people especially back then were also very misogynistic (“i hate my wife” jokes, anyone?) And these wealthy whites were sometimes passionate for the industry, and as computers miniturized, they brought these minicomputers home, where they could use them for much more casual use. Enter the 70s, and these computer users start to make video games. Companies for this new fad start to show up. Fast forward a decade and people start making these new home computers play recorded audio and videos too, and before long, the baby dances. But not everyone had the money for home computers in the 90s, so not everyone is aware of the baby - which is where the discrimination part plays in. Most of the people who experienced the dancing baby in its prime were wealthy, majority white families, so the experience was unfortunately not universal. Or fortunately, idk lmao

    Of course I’m stretching super hard, but politics are everywhere when you look into it.