Unfortunately, I cannot find the original source for this. This version I modified to add a representation of my own attempts to be cool ending up in cringe.
A common lie about the development of anything valued is that the people making it were cool the whole time, that they knew it would be perfect and loved. This leads to pushing people away from creation because they think they can’t do bad on the road to doing good.
Bad art is essential for good art, and this applies more broadly to just about anything. You don’t make progress on success, you make progress on iterative failure, repeatedly getting just a little closer every time, until you find success.
This is a video I made about a large collaborative piece of bad art that was deleted for profit, rather than serving as a place to continue to grow and learn from.
In a group chat I’m in, the following was said (details modified/removed to protect anonymity):
I haven’t searched for topic in Google. I searched on a privacy-protecting search engine. I talked about it with a coworker on an internal chat tool. And now, on my personal device, YouTube is showing me a video explaining topic.
Shadow profiles are like accounts, but created without permission for tracking purposes. They do not always uniquely identify a person, but they usually do. I am confident YouTube builds these and tracks connections between users (signed in or not), and tests their presumptions about identity by showing videos recently watched by someone related to you. It confirms these relationships by your interactions.2
That may also not be the cause, because ultimately, YouTube’s algorithms are a pattern-matching machine sifting through a hoard of data. Relatedness can be found in unknowable ways. It’s spooky to us because we cannot imagine how these connections are made, but they are nonetheless real – or made real by the machine.
They are definitely doing shady tracking because suggestions are too precise to only be accounted for by spurious connectivity.
Have you ever looked into browser fingerprinting?
It’s shockingly easy to identify users3 from standard data available to anyone. You as an individual can’t fight it because when you genericize your data using privacy protection features, you are put in a group of similar users so small that the remaining traces (like loading times) become enough to uniquely identify you anyhow.
As an individual4, use privacy protecting features whenever you can, because they only work when we all use them, but know that we must also fight back as a culture. We need systematic change to regain privacy, and that only happens with laws and social movements.
Lobbying is evil, but necessary in the world we live in. There are many organizations that call themselves privacy advocates, but most of these are actually fronts for business interests. Startpage’s Privacy Organizations You Should Follow is a list of organizations actually interested in preserving privacy instead of controlling access to privacy.
you keep saying “privacy protection features” like I know what that is
The easiest first step is to use a browser that protects you by default, like Vivaldi or LibreWolf5. Conversely, Chrome is the worst browser to use – it’s the most popular because of a concerted data collection effort by Google. Brave has a number of issues6, but is likewise strongly marketed as privacy-focused. All warfare marketing is based on deception.
Another easy step is to install a VPN. Use Private Internet Access, as they are the only VPN to consistently be proven by legal actions to not collect user data. (They’re also the cheapest!) Despite popular VPNs claiming to offer full privacy just by being installed, VPNs only hide one small part of how you are tracked online. They are a good tool, but do not offer that much protection, and they do slow your connection somewhat.
If you want to go all-in, I’ve stumbled across A Comprehensive Guide To Protecting Your Digital Privacy by Thessy Emmanuel. Even by a glance, I can tell it’s a pretty good resource, and it even covers things you may not expect like how cities track you.
I say this from personal experience. I have used a wide variety of devices in a variety of locations with different levels of privacy protection enabled. Across all of this, YouTube is able to accurately associate video recommendations with either no data – the first time YouTube is loaded – or very little, such as after watching a single video.
The title of this article is misleading, but it is very thorough.
I really need to write something about how and why individualism is a poisonous concept (archived copy). Ever heard of “divide and conquer”? That is the reason why most articles present options to you as an individual person, and frame things as your responsibility. By focusing on your choices, we absolve the guilt of those truly responsible for societal problems – companies, institutions, organizations.
LibreWolf is superior in terms of privacy protection, but does have minor usability issues as a result, and I do not recommend it unless you are already comfortable dealing with minor technical issues from time to time.
You’ll notice quote the rebuttal to the claims made at the top of this forum thread. Some of these are accurate, some may not be. I chose this as my source to highlight these issues because to me, it is more important to acknowledge that Brave has regularly made bad decisions and then reversed them, while Vivaldi and LibreWolf have not made these blunders in the first-place. A team truly devoted to making the best browser for you does not keep making these kinds of mistakes and having to error-correct, they make good decisions from the start.
Updated 2025-06-23: Well, this is unexpectedly timely.. here’s a video talking about VPNs specifically, and how they don’t protect you nearly as much as VPN companies pretend they do:
Recently I saw a video (When Your Hero Is A Monster) talking about the general response people have any time a celebrity is revealed to have been doing sex crimes. A common response is to claim you always knew something was up, as a way to process your grief at having been misled into believing they were a good person. The video suggests that this impulse is harmful because it signals to others that they aren’t “good enough” because they didn’t see it coming. But this is usually post-fact rationalization, not a belief that was held before the reveal.
When Your Hero Is A Monster isn’t really about Neil Gaiman, it’s sorta about how we are misled into believing celebrity is good, and have an unhealthy relationship with finding out the truth.
It made me think about how Honey blew up recently (How Honey Scammed Everyone on YouTube). I never installed it because it seemed suspicious1, but I never called it out, so now me saying so is exactly the same knee-jerk response. It doesn’t actually help, whether or not it’s true that I felt there was something wrong, because now it’s too late to have warned anyone. It made me realize that I should be more forthright in saying when I think something bad is going on. At the very least, I can point to proof and say “yes, I did actually suspect” and know that I’m not making false memories, but it also is helpful to talk about misgivings because that’s how you can work out whether or not your concerns are justified, and maybe even help others.
Everyone credits MegaLag for exposing this, and while they definitely made the video that got everyone talking about it, it’s a long video and Mental Outlaw‘s video not only explains it much easier and quicker, but also manages to cover similar suspicions/problems with VPN companies, how Linus Media Group unintentionally helped Honey stay incognito, and even mentions a sort of successor to Honey to be on the lookout for. I think this is the best summary of recent events.
This also made me think about COVID. In March or April 2019, I correctly predicted exactly (within a few months) how long it would take for vaccines to arrive, and how people would pretend it stopped being a problem despite becoming endemic. But I didn’t say anything publicly. I told close friends and family what to do to be safe, and what to expect. I made my dad take precautions and took over riskier interactions to help keep him safe. I should’ve told more people. It’s my only regret from all of 2019. I could’ve helped more people, but I didn’t.
When you are unsure of something, or you feel that is something wrong, talk about it. Markiplier called out Honey’s suspicious activity years ago. Through dialogue, you learn whether or not your fears are misplaced, you help others remember to stay vigilant, or even help others recognize something is wrong long before it becomes popular or common knowledge. This is a mistake I keep making, but I’m trying to improve. When I see something important to discuss, I should call out. It’s not about being correct, it’s about communication.
Markiplier Predicts Honey Scam In 2020 (there’s also a response he made being very excited about how right he was, and a very amusing animatic of part of this rant)
Footnotes
Linus Media Group pulled their Honey sponsorships over suspicions a long time ago, but didn’t talk much about it. One could easily argue they are partially to blame for not speaking up, but it’s also easy to argue that it was a private business decision, and they didn’t know how important it would be to say something. (Hell, they could’ve even been under contract requiring them to keep the secret2. We would never know.) They did post a response to the Honey situation. That’s also a class-action lawsuit underway, spearheaded by LegalEagle.
Ironically, I was suspicious of it primarily because of privacy violations (tracking any shopping you do, but possibly also just everywhere) and because I assumed it worked through backroom deals with sellers to give out discounts in exchange for customer information – allowing a company to keep its image clean because it wasn’t the one who stole your private information, it just bought that information. As we now know, that’s not at all what was happening.
Being under a secretive contract is always bad. You don’t get to know what secrets you’re required to keep secret without signing the contract. Because of this, it’s hard to blame someone for being required to keep a secret. Obviously, there are many secrets that are highly unethical.. but it’s understandable to value your life more than revealing such secrets.
Is it still footnotes if you’re just posting semi-related thoughts?
They want you to despair and die. They want you to kill yourself because then they can pretend they aren’t the cause. It’s critical that you understand this: Despite any pain we endure in the near future, it’s nowhere near over and we will fucking survive.
I am not making an optimistic assertion when I say this cannot stand. Fascism always destroys itself. We may end up living under a fascist dictator, but the world has survived powerful fascists before, and it will again.
This is a Learning in Progress post. Contents are brief and accuracy is not guaranteed.
Observing propaganda is useful to see how it is constructed. I just got through watching a video that claimed California is being taken over by “the drug-addled violent homeless”1 due to decriminalization of felonies and stringent building codes. In case you need the reminder: Homeless people are victims of landlords, a lack of rent control2, and a lack of social services. And the felonies in question? Minor crimes like drug possession and petty theft, the kinds of crime done by the desperate or disadvantaged. In other wods, crimes that never should have been a felony in the first place.
(They also claim that providing medical services to drug users increases harm. I remind you that the purpose of medicine is to reduce harm.)
California’s population peaked in 2020 at 39.5 million people3. At the time, there were approximately 151,000 homeless people living there4, and 711,679 housing units were unoccupied5 – enough for every homeless person to have 4 homes! (This mirrors a larger trend in the USA, where there were 16,883,357 vacant housing units in 20196, and 1.5 million homeless people7.) By 2022, California’s population had dropped by 0.5 million and there were 2.4 million more housing units (from 12.2 million5 to 14.6 million)8, which is plenty more space, despite the increase in homeless population to ~181,000 people9.
A preliminary estimate shows the homeless population in California has grown by 2% since that figure, which still doesn’t strain the available housing units10. However, the source of that claim is one of the least reliable sources available, so the real difference may be higher.
Underreporting & Accuracy
The USA has always had very reliable census data. The numbers regarding housing units all come from census data, and are accurate. The information on homeless populations that I found broadly comes from 3 categories of sources, with varrying levels of accuracy.
“Continuum of Care” sources (commonly abbreviated CoC) seem to be the least reliable, first because they count homeless people at a single point of time (which ignores the magnitude of homelessness by omitting people who are frequently homeless for brief periods of time repeatedly), and second because they only count homeless people participating in a homelessness preventation program (which are often highly exclusionary, tunring away most homeless people). For example, the HUD’s CoC sources claim that in 2019 there were only 279,327 homeless people11in the entire country instead of the 1.5 million7 I stated above.
The Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) seems to still fall into the trap of only counting people at a single point in time, but as far as I can tell actually does try to come up with an accurate count at that moment in time. The 9th and 11th items in my footnotes/sources are these reports, whose numbers are close to the PIT estimate in the 7th item (so I consider them related / roughly equivalent in accuracy).
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) only counts homelessness based on children during a school year. Despite this, it captures a much more realistic estimate of the magnitude of homelessness by accounting for families over a significant period of time.
It would be fair to take these sources as a lower bound, average estimate, and upper bound. Operating from that assumption, I note that the difference between the lowest estimates and the highest is about 5x, while the difference between the average and upper is 3x. I think it important to consider this when looking at the numbers presented earlier, specifically the comparison between California and the whole USA.
There Were Always Enough Homes
When I want to make a point clear, I take the estimates most against my position, and use those to prove my perspective valid even under a worst-case.
California has 1/3rd the homeless population of the entire country. The estimates I found for California match the average estimates for the USA. If we assume that the average estimate is wrong, and the upper bound is correct, there are 3x more homeless people in California than I said above.
In 2019, the highest count I found was 181,000. If we presume that there are actually 543,000 homeless people, that the 2.4 million new housing units don’t actually exist, and that 500,000 people didn’t actually leave California… there are still 711,679 housing units available for them. There have always been enough homes for everyone.
Footnotes & Sources
(Note: All resources are archived using the services linked to on Archives & Sources.)
An important signifier in any conversion about disadvantaged people is how they are spoken about. A specific flag to look for is the usage of terms like “the homeless” vs terms like “homeless people”. The first is dehumanizing, the focus is on a group of “disliked things” whereas the second acknowledges these are people of a categorization. While this language usage does not necessarily coincide with how a presenter values the people being discussed, it is a hint at how they perceive of a topic.
