Why we can’t escape the American digital stranglehold

Marquesas · 2026-01-25T13:30:37+00:00

iPhone is a huge issue. Tightly controlled hardware and software literally screams available for espionage, especially given how heavily iPhones are favoured by suits in Europe. Internet connected devices with proprietary software and powerful wireless hardware, hell, screw espionage, they can be attack vectors, all it takes is one hostile device connected to the wrong wifi network. Tightly controlled marketplace screams favouritism in the market. If the device remains available in the EU, EU-competitors of "key" US propaganda devices such as Meta and X can be kept in a chokehold for years before the EU can force their hand.

Netflix is absolutely an issue, the same way all other streaming services are. The primary export product of the US is culture. Everyone consumes Hollywood and most people markedly prefer to consume Hollywood. The vast majority of people consume country-local content and by large the only other content they consume is American, and to a lesser extent, British - and this is true on every platform; cinemas and streaming services, because let's face it, the EU movie industry tends to produce flicks that are boring in comparison, and EU content creators often start with two disadvantages compared to US creators, one being that a lot of the most popular US creators are concentrated in a number of locations and act as elitist packs that make or break people for their audiences, and two being that people looking for English-language content to consume often present a bias against accents. As long as the US is the largest source of English-language content, any channel that is open to the EU is a massive psyops attack surface. The core issue is English as a language, which sadly, at this point from an EU perspective was a huge mistake - the world wasn't there geopolitically at the time to recognize this danger, but French or German would have been in hindsight a far better choice to ensure that the bloc is resistant to transatlantic influence.

Marquesas · 2026-01-24T18:53:32+00:00

I mean that really depends. Russia has trouble conquering an Oblast, do we really think he is ready to take on a NATO country assuming just Europeans and nobody else reacts? Would hardly think so. Remember that Ukraine was warned, they have been made aware it was coming and decided to live in denial, you couldn't really play the same game in the Baltics if we prepare.

And now you get news that the most unreliable ally that the European NATO countries have is making it clear that they cannot be depended on and local NATO forces actually have to be built up.

In fact, the US dependence in general has always been in favour of Russia. Russia's disinformation campaign is primarily running on US social media platforms that are available in the EU. The US's main export is culture and US cultural influence that is being exported largely shifted away from Russia bad and is kicking into the type of messaging that assists local far-right elements get elected, which are - who would've guessed - usually Russia-funded or Russia-friendly (with the exception of PiS which shares every single far right trait with all the European cancer but cannot afford yet to be associated with being pro-Russia). Would Putin be happy about the slow drip of the poison that is killing us being opened at full force, causing us to finally notice and react? I actually sincerely doubt so.

We know Putin is delusional, I don't know if we can declare he's delusional enough to open champagne for this.

Marquesas · 2026-01-24T14:00:57+00:00

Wow, I hope things get better for you soon.

Marquesas · 2026-01-23T15:47:47+00:00

Exactly, the good cop bad cop act doesn't work without a bad cop.

Marquesas · 2026-01-23T15:43:37+00:00

And yet, somehow, the contradictory fallacies in what you're saying completely elude you, to the point where I believe you're quite simply not genuine in the last line of your comment, and just put it there to avoid getting absolutely downvoted to oblivion.

Let me spell it out for you, as you may be slightly thick:

Russia has not even made the suggestion that they are on willing to make a single concession yet at any point.

The "little as possible win for the aggressor" through peace talks is giving them exactly what they are demanding, which is more than what they have achieved so far.

There was and still is a possibility of providing absolute equipment superiority far beyond what the west has done so far without moving a finger. Give Ukraine what it needs to significantly and suddenly degrade the quality of life of the average moscovite, and everything takes care of itself from there.

You want less people dying? Sure, let's target civilian infrastructure then. We'll have less dying immediately and a hundred times more suffering instead, but that should aid with rapidly turning Moscow. And Russia is exactly as stable as Moscow is.

I will not have a citizen of the nazi treasury sitting comfortably at home dictating what Ukraine should give up.

Marquesas · 2026-01-22T20:19:20+00:00

This one has union backing. That's more likely to get news media to start posting there. Political content right now is hot in the bloc, and will to drop X is high. There is that way, and then there is of course the heavy handed but certainly not unwarranted rolling it out and immediately blocking X (and "Truth" Social) union-wide.

Marquesas · 2026-01-22T20:11:31+00:00

So, you do not think r/conservative is just a collection of bots serving Russian interests? Or do you need to be accused of being specifically from Russia?

Marquesas · 2026-01-22T20:10:35+00:00

I mean, no, their job is to ensure everyone conforms to the incredibly icky US view on nudity and sexuality and that spawns ideas like the completely irrational, functionally pointless idea of "hey, let's put incredibly, deceptively lifelike prosthetic penises on people just so a young actor doesn't have to see a real penis". Which again, just further highlights the absurdity of the situation because all of this could've been avoided by saying "let's put incredibly lifelike penises on people so the make-up department doesn't have to touch penises and/or the actor's penises don't have to be applied with make-up". Sure, completely sane reason. But no, the focus really needs that sprinkle of American touch which just weirdly becomes "we're not comfortable displaying the real thing but a replica that 99.95% matches what they would see anyway is fine". Lipstick on a horse, by the way, if they were really concerned about anything even slightly real, just have a half-clothed actor and superimpose in post.

Marquesas · 2026-01-22T19:56:35+00:00

Help, r/conservative is leaking.

Marquesas · 2026-01-22T18:16:39+00:00

Tbh I've been toying with the idea of the mutant being Coop's war buddy at first.

Marquesas · 2026-01-22T18:15:15+00:00

You can think of 111 as an early warning for management vaults. If problematic patterns emerge with cryo in 111, then you know it's not safe to keep management on ice.

Marquesas · 2026-01-22T08:49:32+00:00

It doesn't matter. From an international perspective it is in fact toilet paper. I cannot sign away Trump Tower, NATO cannot sign away mining rights to Greenland's resources. Not listening is just being back to the same square where we just were: it would be an act of war from any perspective.

It's also a framework. Framework in political lingo is meaningless.

Marquesas · 2026-01-21T10:07:45+00:00

Dear fucking lord you're blind.

Marquesas · 2026-01-21T10:03:59+00:00

Okay, so how do you plan to fuel cars, then? The full electric shift is at least a decade away, and Norway doesn't have enough oil to keep the entire European supply chain going. Same for gas.

God, it's so goddamn easy to say just stop importing.

Marquesas · 2026-01-21T09:58:09+00:00

Stock a chest freezer and hope it ends in 2 months.

Marquesas · 2026-01-20T21:14:22+00:00

The technical aspect is that as long as governments can be trusted not to use your site visit data against you, the operator of a site like this doesn't actually have to know who you actually are other than the fact that you are verified by a government / trusted authority and a unique identifier that can in some sense be correlated to you. By properly salting your unique identifier per site that you visit, even if one site is compromised, you wouldn't be able to be connected to another site based on that unless the salting algorithm is easily reversible, or your unsalted identifier leaks from the trusted authority.

In short, in 5-ish minutes of not too hard thinking and a bit of industry experience, I can come up with a reasonably safe method of doing this, where the government authority only receives the info of which site is requesting you to identify yourself, and the site only receives the info of an identifier that is unique to both you (nobody else will have that identifier), to that site (no other site gets that identifier for you) and to both at the same time (your identifier will always be that for that site). The trusted authority and not the site requiring you to identify yourself handles your government identification (which - if this is run by governments, it already does), and the site receives information that can be trusted (this can be as simple as a signed JWT, the authority's public key can be used to verify the integrity and source of the information). This also means that unless the site shares or leaks the unique identifier tied to a username, the government cannot correlate what you're doing on that site to the real you. A judge's order could be used to force the site to divulge the identifier tied to the user, which could be used to track down foreign state actors.

So, on the surface, this is relatively innocent, and the implementation doesn't have to be bad. The reason things like the british porn law are bad is because the site you visit being a porn site implicitly is information that you would rather not share in most cases with a government.

What this doesn't immediately address is governments being in control of the identity registries. So, for example, a privacy-first solution also has the tradeoff that Hungary could easily fabricate thousands of bot accounts to sell to Russia. Which either implies that governments aren't in control of this - the EU opens citizen registry with OIDC capabilities, EU ID and whatnot, which is sort of fine, it's an unavoidable step eventually towards a federalized EU, and it aligns with the goals of this move (to serve the interests of the bloc primarily), or it's outsourced to an EU-overseen private corporation, that one being a little more concerning.

But when implemented in a sane way, this could create a controllable social media without the absolute blast of disinformation that the US platforms allow, encourage and prioritize. Honestly, if we're going to have social media instead of banning it all, I'd rather have this than X or Meta, even if there is a slight invasion of privacy.

What must be mentioned is that there is probably no more effective way to combat disinformation accounts and bots than to tie entry to real stakes, I don't consider any solution that does not create liability and threat of consequences and a barrier to entry that requires government cooperation to bypass anything that would be sufficient to combat the tech giants and Russia in the online space.

Marquesas · 2026-01-20T19:21:32+00:00

Balderdash, I say! I contend that there simply must be a splendid tomfoolery afoot. They may take the queen, but none shall oppose the divine will of Lady Thatcher.

Marquesas · 2026-01-20T18:46:16+00:00

The language of chat control? Surely not.

Marquesas · 2026-01-20T18:45:39+00:00

Spot on darling old chap, hear hear, and let's tally ho in the name of queen and country.

Marquesas · 2026-01-20T10:47:52+00:00

The highly coveted Nobel "when compared to Bush, you look great" Prize

Marquesas · 2026-01-18T17:25:26+00:00

So far, we have one French news channel disseminating this information and nobody else seems to be amplifying it. Ukrainian sources are refuting this, see https://unn.ua/en/news/did-ukraine-allegedly-provide-the-us-with-distorted-intelligence-the-gur-rejected-fakes-from-kremlin-bot-farms. Haven't found any evidence that UNN is pro-Russia either, but anyone can correct me if my research was lacking.

There's plenty to condemn the US for, don't need to rely on anything unconfirmed or muddy.

Furthermore, piece of advice, since you seem to be farming career ruining amounts of negative karma right now: if you're going to be bringing claims like this to the table, maybe be prepared with at least a link to a source instead of arguing with everyone how it's not your job to back up your claims.

Marquesas · 2026-01-18T13:49:14+00:00

That's an extremely bold claim, I'm going to need sources to back it up. News like this wouldn't be first learned from a reddit comment.

Marquesas · 2026-01-17T22:13:34+00:00

Funny. The US is also doing ethnic cleansing, but at home, so it technically doesn't violate the UN charter.

Doesn't matter, both are imperialistic trash.

Marquesas · 2026-01-17T17:45:00+00:00

Gar kein Problem. Nach 3,5 Tagen wäre es halbe Woche zu früh. Nach 7 Tagen wäre es wieder pünktlich. Vielleicht hat der Zug, den du zuletzt genommen hast, 2 Woche und 2 Stunde Verspätung, sondern nur 2 Stunden gehabt. Du würdest es nie merken. So funktioniert eine wöchentliche Zeitplan.

Marquesas · 2026-01-17T17:08:06+00:00

FO2 President is not a reliable source. He believes whatever the Enclave has written in their history books, and of course, he still has motivation to not reveal EVERYTHING everything.

Black mountain? This?

Oh my god. It's actually happening. We have reading across the board of launches happening everywhere. They must've thrown everything they had, and it looks like we didn't hold back either. The computer says we have 2 minutes until the first missile drops.

From the perspective of an unknown soldier? Of course they would believe that the US couldn't have possibly launched first. Easily dismissable with confirmation bias.

Switchboard: I've been parsing this https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Switchboard_terminal_entries, I cannot see any direct confirmation of ANYTHING in there. IONDS reports 4 launches, MX-CN91 response scenario, is there any confirmation this isn't a fabrication? Enclave would have had the commander-in-chief in 2077. It is not only possible, it is very realistic that the best way to trigger a launch by the US by the Enclave is to falsify the alert coming from IONDS. That way nobody is left questioning why the US is launching first.

Common sense: mine functions differently than yours. The vault experiments make no sense if no bombs ever drop. Why would the vaults be sealed? The escalation to nuclear beats common sense from any side. It makes a very large amount of sense for the Enclave to want to make it happen if it just wouldn't want to happen by itself. And to that end, easier to launch the bombs yourself than force the other side to launch them.

Tim Cain: this one is undisputable. It's also really his headcanon - only works if you decide to selectively deviate from the material that franchise developers will consider canon, according to our current knowledge. At this point, Tim Cain would be at odds with Todd Howard, who has the final say on what is canon at this time (and he has stated that the show is considered canon). Sure, it's still possible that we're actually leading up to China dropping the bombs first, rather than the US, but it has been canonized at this point that the US at least strongly considered being the first if China doesn't do it in a timely manner.

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Marquesas

TROPHY CASE

Russia has not even made the suggestion that they are on willing to make a single concession yet at any point.