I2P is still around? I remember experimenting with it a decade ago. Sounds like it’s still a slow experience.

There didn’t even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.

Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.

Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.

Apple decided that people don’t need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.

A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.

Is it bad that I read this and immediately think “my God it’s mid September and the Australian cops have only murdered two civilians this year?”

I think the US hits that number within 5 minutes past midnight on the New Year.

Wild… in Sync, it reads as a continuous quote. I guess you’re using a different interface

“Wait, why is there a passport control here? There’s no national border here on this map.”

The article was a fun read, but for readers who don’t have time, I believe Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” describes the same problem with marginally fewer words. My favorite excerpt, though, really nails exactly the BS your article mentioned:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.

Peterson’s writings are worse than Orwell’s own parodies.