I find it interesting, from my own experience, that video games often are comprised of structured problem solving within clear boundaries and with explicitly stated goals: In many ways it closely resembles something we’d describe as work. Do a unit of work, get a point. Get enough points, you win. Only, the real world is nothing like that. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly less like that with corporate intermediaries and algorithms that are added on top of everything, e.g. empoyers’ Applicant Tracking Systems that automatically throws your job application in the trash because it didn’t include some keyword, or whatever.

I think focusing on the dopamine kicks from the games’ rewards misses part of what make video games effective escapism from many alienated youths and adults. It’s the game themselves that are the escape.

Yeah, taking the service down is an acceptable solution, but do you think Open AI will do that on their own without outside accountability?

I’m sure that’s true in some technical sense, but clearly a lot of people treat them as borderline human. And Open AI, in particular, tries to get users to keep engaging with the LLM as of it were human/humanlike. All disclaimers aside, that’s how they want the user to think of the LLM, a probabilistic engine for returning the most likely text response you wanted to hear is a tougher sell for casual users.

Every country is moving towards this and there is no fucking stopping it, it seems.

Honestly, it feels more sinister. Sure, they say they want to eliminate this privacy tool because children could use it to watch porn, but realistically they’re not a fan of anybody using a VPN.

You are right that there are no perfect democracies, but the EU really isn’t even close. Rather the EU should foremost be considered a technocracy with some formal democratic underwriting.

In most cases, that’s totally fine and not a problem in terms of democracy. Most policies, especially in the matters the EU was originally formed to make decisions on, there isn’t a huge interest for citizens to get involved – national interests (governments) and organized interest/lobby groups usually offer enough avenues for input on things like technical agricultural export standards. However, as the Union expands into things like organizing mass surveillance under flimsy pretexts, and whatnot, private citizens aren’t adequately represented – a stronger popular mandate is required for the decisionmaking to truly be considered democratic.

Formally, I, as a citizen of an EU member state, can influence the decisions of the EU in two ways: By voting for my country’s parliament every fourth year and by voting in the general elections for European Parliament every fifth. So let’s examine how far that goes.

Where I live, the main opposition party and the largest government party generally agree on most controversial issues pertaining to privacy or individual rights, e.g. Chat Control. Together these parties control a majority of the seats of parliament. Those parties gain the bulk of their support on domestic issues, such as tax policy, crime prevention, etcetera. Thus, question like Chat Control are essentially dead on arrival in terms of parliamentary politics. Now, my country is also not a perfect democracy, but comparatively it would (justly) rank quite high and parties can be responsive to popular opinion and outcries. So let’s say a citizen group managed to put Chat Control on the agenda, to the point where parties feel vulnerable on the issue. What then? Then that amounts to one vote out of 27 in the European Council, which is only meaningful when that is enough for a veto.

But the ubiquitous vetoes are what truly undermines the EU’s standing as a democracy, in my opinion. Notably, vetoes are pretty much the best you can get from your EP vote as well, in terms of the parliament’s decision making powers. In reality, the only thing citizens of the EU can rally behind is stopping proposals by, chiefly, the supreme technocratic body, the Commission. There is no cross-border party mechanism with pan-European campaigning on the council level. Voters do not influence majorities. And on the EP level the party mechanism, built on “political groups”, is opaque and not truly cross-border. Cohesive citizen involvement is foreign to the EU decision making process.

That is not to say that the EU is a nefarious body, or that the democratic deficiencies are intended to alienate EU citizens from the decision process. It’s just that it is glaring, especially in the context of Chat Control, that public opinion isn’t in the driver’s seat.