Don’t forget millions upon millions of low-information, low-empathy voters and non-voters who let it happen, many who still lazily believe that corporations are our friends, that “what’s good for walmart and Exxon is good for 'Murica”, that they are still the client and not the product, and the far-reaching implications of this.

The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign

That’s too subtle a statement. It is a willful, bad-faith, full-on attack on objective reality via the rewriting of historical facts, redaction of massive volumes of information and constant aggressive, knee-jerk silencing of voices.

As such, it can also be described as a malicious assault on the mental health of individuals and society as a whole. Their actions a clear example of the type of repressive, miserable society they would have us live in, if given the chance by hook or by crook.

Remember when the web didn’t suck?

No, I don’t. Not since 2000, when I logged on from home for the first time. The majority of it has always sucked. Then the web can suddenly do new things… and finds new ways to suck.
It has, however, always had excellent little areas and corners.

I once knew a guy who peeled and ate a full garlic like one would do with an orange or mandarin, while walking and talking casually.

Have you ever been to an oil and air filter warehouse?
Some are more common than others, but there are hundreds of different types, and some of them vary by a millimeter in diameter from the more common ones.

They couldn’t design the inlet to fit a pre-existing filter already in circulation, no sir, instead of any sort of compatibility they felt compelled to make up their own fucking specification and parameters that varied by a tenth of a percentage point.

That can only be the work of engineers, and from the looks of that oil filter warehouse, or from the different types of electrical sockets, the contrary bastards are everywhere, they REFUSE to meaningfully communicate with each other, and will NOT listen to reason.

More recently, look at crypto. For every well-meaning and thoughtful endeavor like Bitcoin or Ethereum, there are ten thousand shitcoins. Many are just greedy con jobs, but many are also due to stubborn and petty, noisy squabbles over minutiae. Suddenly the whole damn space was a hive of useless noise and confusion.

Yet one more item in an endless exhibit of how mankind is unable to standardize anything at all. Get TWO engineers together to agree on ONE standard plug and the assholes will come out with THREE separate plugs, completely non-compatible with each other, of course.

It’s almost like a miracle that we got the world to agree on certain things like time and timezones, a system of coordinates, the metric system.
All of them received initial pushback, and some to this day. Noisy, noisy fucking humans.

Did you know that for a few decades, every town in the UK kept two different times on adjacent clocks? Back when their railway grid was expanding everywhere. Local time and London time.

required components that protect your privacy

Talk about doublespeak. Double-plus-good, eh?

…and Hail.

I noticed that a little over a month ago, many of these memes you could frame and hang in a pop-art gallery and Daddy Warhol would be proud.

Wenn ist das git und slotermeyer?
Jah! Baierhundt das oder die flipperwald gershput!

Sonic Youth - “Total Trash”

Inflexible, defensively aggressive knuckle-draggers.
“wHy DoN’t ThE wOrLd LoVe Me? (also, I hate everyone who doesn’t look and think exactly like me)”

Fuck Xavier.
Where, oh where have you gone, Pakalu Papito? Just when we need you the most.

“Think different.”
“YES! WE ALL THINK DIFFERENT!”

In unison, of course, like Life Of Brian.
Bonus points for bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.

The original modern meme! First instance of that particular type of template that we know of.