Thank you for your kind response, I’m sorry if I came off really hostile. I’ve had bad experiences with people that have similar ideas to you in the past, and I’ve spent most of the last three years in severe chronic pain. You seem nicer and more humble in your comments and I really appreciate that.

Re: public self-model — I try to create as little difference between myself online and in meat space, because I think it’s healthier, more honest, and leads to better self actualization, because if I want to be something in the freedom of cyberspace, then I want to try to be it in real life too if I can. And, here is as real as anywhere.

The poor snoo look at its sad face :(

You’re trying to bootstrap objective meaning and morality and something like truth out of nothing using a mishmash of tired ideas from various rationalist or adjacent schools of thought like Kant, Aristotle, Rawls, Plato, etc, while dismissing the schools of thought you disagree with (e.g. postmodernism) using tired cliches.

I’m happy for you if this framework you’ve constructed works for you, in fending off the derealization and depersonalization you speak about. I’ve had many of the same struggles, and for a few years actually spent time doing precisely what you’ve been doing — trying to bootstrap an entire rigid philosophical framework out of nothing using phenomenology and ontology and concepts from across philosophy, building a huge ediface with its own healthy helpings of people like Kant and Rawls. But for myself, as I became more familiar with Stirner, Nietzsche, Novatore, Daoism, post structuralism, and Wittgenstein, I found a better way for myself, where I wouldn’t have to forever keep fighting an ultimately self-deluding battle defending a framework built on the rickety foundations of rationalism and, ultimately, nothing at all.

I’ve realized that my inclination to do so was born out of a few fundamentally false assumptions left over from the death of religion in our society, which I had unknowingly bought into, and which were desperately reaching out to trying to reestablish a religion around themselves because it’s in their naturetod do so, in the process using me, becoming my masters. But I also realized that, iltimately, it was I who was choosing to listen to these ideas and give them power, so I could just stop.

I think there’s a better (and more intellectually clearsighted) answer instead of “reconatructing” the very same ediface that’s been crumbling for the last century or so.

How about instead realizing that there’s nothing inherently absurd or unlivable about living without objective meaning, morality, or truth, because there never were such things in the first place, just ideas that you gave power. Learning how to immerse yourself in the fluidity of self and existence and finding joy within it? Instead of “taking yourself captive,” learning to listen to yourself and your deeply-felt needs and desires, as they emerge from the creative nothing at the center of your being, and enacting them, so that action feels as inevitable and necessary as no action at all? Learning how to see that meaning is just a stance towards a thing or idea, and therefore that you can grant things meaning as pleases you, because ultimately you give meaning to things anyway, so why not own that? Become a conscious egoist, it’s fun! We have cookies and hugs at least

I started with open curiosity, but the more I read the worse it got. I’ve spent too much time on the internet reading overconfident pseudophilosophical religious rationalists’ arguments and dealing with their grandiose statements and unfounded assumptions to want to deal with any more of that, and the distinct lack of coherent argument and connective tissue anywhere on the about page and principles page (that proof of objective meaning!) convinced me this was more of that. It really reads like the time cube thing, or that one guy on reddit who thought he “disproved math.” I understand what you’re saying, and it’s not worth engaging with seriously. Naive and effortful engagement is not owed you. I am very tired, and don’t have a brain effort and space to waste.

This is… something lmao, I can’t tell if it’s serious

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I mean, there’s a whole huge contingent of “feminists” getting popular these days who have explicitly and extremely bioessentialist misandrist beliefs, TERFs, so sadly I’m not super sure you’re right, but it’s entirely possible. You do tend to have to look holistically at people’s actions and speech to figure out what they really believe, oftentimes.

How is itexpressing your feelings if you didn’t write the prose with your own feelings and imagery informing it? This feels cyberpunk, but not in a good way, in a bad, dystopian way lol

Fair enough, I see your point. But like I said, that’s background worldbuilding, instead of being dealt with directly by the narrative.

Right, like I said, it exists as a backdrop

Exactly!

Can you have this post to an existing lemmt community? Like, pipe /r/WoT to wheeloftime@lemmy.ml?

I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the ‘cyber’ part then the ‘punk’ part.

Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of “what it means to be human”, which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.

That’s why, out of all visual media, it’s really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It’s the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That’s probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?

I don’t know. I’ve just always felt like it was weird to come up with a term for “normal” people. I don’t understand why it was necessary

Would you be fine with a straight person saying “I’m not straight, I’m normal” then?

Or would you realize that by choosing one aspect of the human experience to label as normal, instead of actually having a name for it, you are automatically labeling the others as abnormal — which means they’re not just a naturally-occuring human thing, but something that’s disordered or wrong or unnatural? If you decide to label being trans, but just call cis people “normal,” then that’s the implication.

Moreover, “cis” is a label for understanding a way of identifying regarding your assigned gender at birth, same “trans.” I really don’t see how it makes sense for it to be okay to have a word for one option — trans — but not the other. If it’s okay to have a label for one option so we can accurately communicate about it, why isn’t it okay to have a label for the other one, just because it’s more common? That doesn’t make sense. We have labels for all sorts of common things. Moreover, having a word that designates someone as not-trans is extremely useful for linguistic clarity: now instead of saying “normal” and having to infer from context in what respect the person is “normal”, since that could refer to a million things, cis gives us a way of actually saying what we mean. Scientists label both common and uncommon options for things all the time.

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m getting old, but I don’t understand the obsession with labeling everyone and putting them in a well defined box

Unlike for conservatives, labels for the LGBTQ community aren’t about putting everyone inside a well-defined box at all. Unlike conservatives with their traditional gender roles and expectations, our labels are actually not rigidly defined like that, they’re fuzzy, socially constructed, often with multiple shades and versions of meaning and ways they can be understood. Neither are they supposed to be normative — if you associated with a label once, that doesn’t mean you have to always do so (or have to have always done so), and if you don’t perfectly fit a label, that’s totally fine, you don’t have to “live up to it.”

(Except, I guess, in terminally-online Tumblr “discourse.”)

And the fact that labels, at least how the queer community uses them, are not “boxes to put people in” is a function of how we use them: they’re crucial tools to be able to communicate aspects of the incohate mess that is our experiences to others, and therein find community and solidarity with others, to know you’re not alone because there are others that share those experiences, who can comfort you and even guide you, and so you can use those words that helped you make people able to finally understand you as a rallying point.

We need the words to describe ourselves.

Taking away our language, the language we need to explain some important part of who we are or the lives we life, is fucking horrible.

Do you know how painful it was to grow up without labels like trans and cis so I could understand what was happening to me and why I was different from others? The first moment I found a word that seemed to describe what I was feeling, even though it was a wrong one (crossdresser), I clung onto it desperately. And then, when I finally found the word to describe what I actually was, it was a watershed moment.

Have you stopped for a moment to listen to the queer people who will tell you that finding out there was a word to describe what they were going through was one of tbe most powerful moments in their lives? Remember, without words for things, its difficult to have concepts for things, and that means its almost impossible to think them.

I think this is a pretty good analysis, but I want to add onto it a little.

From where I’m standing, it seems like the reason they care so much about riling up their base is because their actual policies and interests hurt the working class rust belt people that are their main constituency. So they have to come up with some huge overriding cultural battle for their base to get really invested in fighting, to make them feel like they have to vote Republican and oppose the Democrats no matter what, and to distract them from the underlying social and economic issues that are the source of their undirected frustration in the first place, and deflect their anger onto a scapegoat that they can blame for all society’s ills without actually changing the system.

Because if they didn’t, their base would continue going down their populist route. They might start actually realizing how bad capitalism is for them and fighting against it in their own weird way. Some might see the benefit of Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps to working class people, or taxing rich more and the middle class less, and go over to the Democrats. And that could actually be pretty unprofitable for the elites and their donors and lobbyists.

Not to say that this would be exactly a good option either, though, because I think there is still a ton of genuine nationalism, traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and so on among today’s right wing, it isn’t all trumped up by their leaders, and that’s going to tinge their social and economic understandings, so even if they went down this latter route, it would still end up being a conspirational populism that looks disturbingly like fascism.

You should watch this video about how much invasive user data MacOS collects and sends (in plaintext) to Apple’s servers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMc5zgALLiY

And this one, about App Store tracking and them ignoring privacy settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=016QGxOsjQY

And read this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/apple-iphone-privacy.html

E2E encryption and key data being stored only on device

That’s for iMessage. And you can get identical functionality from Signal on any Android phone with a secure element (like a Pixel). They don’t encrypt iCloud backups, and regularly turn that info in to the government. And, ironically, those iCloud backups include messages, which aren’t stored on their servers encrypted! According to the NYT: “Apple also has access to text messages that it says are otherwise encrypted when they are backed up in iCloud, a workaround that’s apparently necessary to aid law enforcement.”

it’s the best privacy story around

Not remotely. That would be GrapheneOS on a Pixel or CalyxOS on another Android phone. Apple is good in comparison to other stock vendors, sure. But it isn’t the best option. Also, maybe read their privacy policy sometime: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww. It’s enlightening stuff. They collect a lot, and use it for whatever they want as long as it doesn’t leave Apple (or the businesses its partnered with).

They don’t make money by selling you or your data - they make money selling hardware to you.

Maybe not: “Apple is also building out its own online advertising business, portions of which a French privacy watchdog said may run afoul of European laws. The agency said that Apple doesn’t appear to require users’ consent for tracking, as it now does from other app makers, meaning it could benefit from the targeted advertising that its do-not-track feature is meant to hinder.” (From the NYT article)

After all, why would a megacorporation turn down the opportunity to milk more profit out of their very captive (have you ever tried to get an Apple person to leave their walled garden?) income source? Remember, this is /c/cyberpunk lol

Key info:

Only 41% of Republicans say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable, according to Gallup. That is a 15% drop from 2022, the largest single-year change since Gallup began asking the question. Democratic approval also fell from 85% to 79%.

I’ve always said that ultimately the only people we can rely on are ourselves, the queer community.

Apple’s made privacy a fairly large part of their value offering recently.

The problem is that that’s mostly marketing smoke and mirrors. They define privacy as not giving your data to third parties (who aren’t subcontracted with them), not actually refusing to collect in-depth data or link it to your personal identity. There have been a number of pieces of evidence released recently that show that they actually collect as much if not more data about you then Google does, and tend to ignore your privacy settings.

The amount of effort required to root a phone hard enough to where apps couldn’t stalk me wasn’t helping.

Depending on your phone, you could use GrapheneOS (which is super easy to set up compared to rooting and basically the best security and privacy you can get in any smartphone) or CalyxOS. Both easier (and more effective) than rooting, and certainly better than Apple.

I haven’t read it yet, but from what I’ve just read on the Wikipedia page — and other things I’ve heard about it previously — I’m very interested in reading it! As a cyberpunk, a queer, a trans woman, and a feminist, with an interest in poststructuralism, I think there’d be a lot of interesting things I can glean from it.

(I’ve always felt that challenging essentialized notions of gender, and engaging in radical body-modification and self-expression, is a pretty cyberpunk, and feminist, thing to do)

Non-PDF version for those like me who can’t stand PDFs: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto