Easily one of my favourite "tech" TV shows. But now I'm curious, has anyone recently found something similar to HCF that they similarly enjoyed? I've never found anything I've enjoyed quite as much as HCF.

Interesting. Extremely interesting.

reclaimthenet.org appears, at first, to be a pro-free speech site.

But they only publish stories that support the current US administration's stance that conservatives are being oppressed and persecuted.

And there are absolutely no stories critical of the steps the current administration has taken to curb free speech and expression.

And on several articles (I read a lot of that trash, unfortunately, trying to analyze it) they refer to efforts to install solar panels as "trying to block out the sun". Two different (apparently) authors used this very specific phrase as a stand-in for "solar panels".

And every single author I looked at appears to be fake with just "Cam Wakefield" having any other editorial presence on the entire internet, at a Christian anti-lgbt ragebait AI-slop website.

And the authors are very prolific, thousands of words a day, every day, non-stop.

All of the articles are the same approximate length, read very similarly, and very, very, very few of them (that I've seen and I've seen a shit-ton) have any links whatsoever to any website except other pages on reclaimthenet.org leading to loops of ragebaiting.

And there are absolutely no traces of who is behind the site, how it is funded, and the only common threads I can find, sprinkled judiciously just enough to be noticed but not enough to turn off normal people who don't look deeper, to try to explain what this site is is an obsessive (and secretive) focus on Great Britain and the United States and attempts to tackle hate speech and bigotry from the far Christian right.

My final analysis, especially based on the authors' off-site posts, is that they really, really, REALLY hate from the bottom of their hate-filled hearts, any trans or gay person and they hate even more when companies, governments, or other individuals say: "hey you're not allowed to write 'trans people should kill themselves' that is against our rules". And that this entire effort is fake, designed to stir up outrage to build pressure or support for legislative moves designed at first glance to "free da speech" but are really designed to limit peoples' right to say "gtfo bigot".

Or, cynically, it's just a rage-fueled fundraising exercise for persons unknown.

Very interesting.

Uninstall social media.

At this point I’m pretty convinced that social media is a net negative for humanity with little redeeming quality.

There was a time when it did connect people, like you could meet people or find old friends, but that was long ago deprioritized or even stripped away. Now it’s just a pure chum feed that serves up either brain rot trash or political fear and rage bait.

TV was always full of crap but it also gave rise to great shows, to art and lasting culture. It was a medium of mixed value. Social media doesn’t even have that going for it unless some day people celebrate the great Pepe memes. Everything it creates is disposable low effort trash. Nothing worth keeping. You could delete it all and everyone would forget a week later.

Virtual networks (dn42, tor, etc) or Virtual Private Networks (Tailscale, Wireguard) would be my knee-jerk recommendation. Adding a core abstraction at the network layer immediately fouls up all but the most diligently-coded AI bots out there, as does an abstraction at the Transport layer that's different from the traditional internet. In the short-term, I expect more humans to retreat into these sorts of enclaves as scrapers and AI slop make the public internet untenable to use.

In the long run...I couldn't tell you. This feels like the sort of schism Cyberpunk stories are made of, when a utopia of data sharing is perverted into a swamp of automated bots and agents, blindly following obsolete programming and untethered from the controls of their creators, harming whatever infrastructure is connected to the public internet without adequate security. I'd like to think smarter people than myself (shoutout to Xe Iaso for Anubis) will create tools to protect humans and our online presence from the bots, but I'm not super hopeful of their success in the face of present profit-motives for AI Companies to defeat them.

Perhaps the answer is to simply devalue the internet as an entity, and thereby destroy incentive to scrape or pollute it at such a scale. Maybe it's yanking services offline and putting them back in the real world, or privacy laws and insurance companies making data hoarding untenable and unaffordable for companies to engage in. Maybe it's identity validation at the point of connectivity, verifying smart cards or identification before you're allowed online (incredibly dystopian and the stuff of Pal*ntir's wet dreams).

I honestly couldn't tell you right now what the long game looks like. Only to find your humans, build your digital fortresses, and help each other as best you can.

Forums worked (and still do) because they're small niches, like the budding Internet. As soon as they become big, they lose their sense of community, and become profitable to spam.

So, maybe we have to choose between isolated human islands vs. an ad-and-SEO-infested world?

I'd be interested in building a curated and moderated web. A special browser with an address whitelist. Some kind of democratic curation of content with a small paywall to reduce the noise.

Or alternatively, improve pagerank to exclude low quality content and pages that contain ads.