also the pinkertons

this is also what i came into the thread wanting to know

yeah i didn’t even know this happened, so i guess i’m in the unaffected half

yup. the right wing adjacent studio bosses chased off everyone who made the game special. the groups working on spiritual successors though all seem to wish each other success

it’s 7 card monti but with the gambling replaced with strategic decision making. the fact that lootboxes aren’t considered gambling, but removing gambling from poker is, it just puts on display how the big corporations are desperate to keep us locked into their entertainment machines and away from innovative art

passage of the PATRIOT ACT

we’ve been living in 1984 since 2002

i think it’s clear from this these regulatory bodies primarily function to help the industry make money. indies can sometimes get co-signs from these bodies, but only if they stay in their lane. balatro has been a huge smash hit, and it feels like this body just wants to keep it down that little bit

and the most delicious kind of money of all: dark money! ooooh it’s so good because the sources of the dark money offer you a lot of it, and they specifically ask you not to ask questions, which is so good for you because these bloatware programs make your device sell worse and provides no value as a sales platform because it turns out that billboards and radio spots are, surprisingly, the most effective form of advertising.

but! you have a sense of solidarity. you have faith that by never offering a phone without bloatware, your entire industry will ensure that all phones won’t have bloatware. you rest easy at night knowing your phone won’t sell poorly, at the end of the day, because every phone is like this. your contributions to a surveillance and propaganda machine that should punish you in the market because won’t because all your peers are your allies in this.

and it gets better! every time someone else’s phone gets more bloatware and more dark money attached, then everyone else appears comparatively better, allowing them to get worse. ooooh you love it so much when you get to take more dark money. and all it costs you are several thousand lives far away from your big mansion. you don’t even have to see the suffering

Yes. Using kids to drive engagement on YouTube is exploitative. Parents who do that are exploiting their children

Its exploiting child labor and the impulsive brain chemistry of adolescence.

Bruh the more light we can shed on media literacy in this election year the better…

Anyone who just wants content, never mind the ethical outcomes of continued presence in a billionaires plaything to amplify rightwing voices