wherewillitlead

I'd consider using a product like this and I don't give a shit about draconian politics. The issue is that remote work has downsides. One downside is dramatically less collaboration. I like collaborating with team-mates, not just drudging away by myself. If this could help create more of a spontaneous back and forth in-person feel, that could be valuable. I don't know how it would feel, I'd have to try it and see. But I think you and the other people in this thread are being way too negative and defensive. Not all of us love remote work and especially not the "remote work is better in every way for everybody and anyone who thinks otherwise is a reactionary" culture.

That has nothing to do with the product. If you don't want to be on camera in your underwear, don't turn a camera on while in your underwear.

It would be Orwellian if imposed by employers, of course. But for teams who really would prefer to be colocated, why shouldn't they use something like this as a next-best option? It should be up to the users.

I'm sure they are, but the opposite is also true: every disordered regime or pressured state points to foreign interference as the reason for strife. There are distortions in both directions and not really any reliable information.

The mainstream media seems shockingly Soviet now, too, perhaps with the difference that more people still believe it. Do you agree? I'd like to hear your comparison.

One difference from the USSR is that there remain plenty of alternative sources on the margins. They're shut out of the mainstream, but they're a lot more accessible than samizdat. It will be interesting to see if they get shut down. I don't think they will. I don't think the future is full-Soviet, but it may be neo-Soviet. We've come further in that direction already than anyone expected.

Another difference from the USSR is that it's a binary system (Dems vs. Repubs, CNN vs. Fox) rather than a monolithic one.

That's so far from accurate that I'm not sure how you got there. Both are squarely on the left and abhor Trump. Chomsky calls Greenwald his close friend, for example, and Taibbi wrote a book called "Insane Clown President" and was one of the strongest journalistic critics of the financial system.

Max from Oakland didn't think it was irrelevant to the topic at hand. Shouldn't he be heard? He belongs to the population being discriminated against. To me that makes his perspective relevant, and I can't see by what logic it wouldn't be, except conformity enforcement, which is scary and not likely to end well.

Bringing up concentration camps in that way is just a way of assuming your conclusion.

How do you situate Max in Oakland on this spectrum? Taibbi writes about him at length in the article - and his original comments were https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1268390704645943297.

I'm not asking a rhetorical question, genuinely interested in how you see this. It doesn't seem like to me like he falls in any of the categories you listed. Same with Lee Fang, the interviewer who got attacked for publishing Max's remarks.

Have you seen the news show "Rising"? They have been staking out this space for about a year now. Taibbi and Greenwald appear there regularly. This show is probably the most interesting new development in American political media. The hosts have jokingly described their philosophy as "let's hate each other less and elites more", and present as a mostly-friendly pair of left and right populists.

They were on Joe Rogan recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA9Tpf5Uuxs), so their audience will probably spike. I find that even when I don't agree with them, their smartness is usually a breath of fresh air from the fetid stupidities of the mainstream (both left and right) media. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts, and whether they will continue to be able to work together. Regardless of whether one agrees, they're managing to host a freer discussion for the time being.

If Taibbi is reporting accurately, that's not what he said, and the NYT even had to issue a correction to clarify that he didn't say that.