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It's depressing to think that after the abuses people suffered during the lockdowns the response has been to embrace authoritarianism even more. It makes me fear how far this could go before people realize how bad it is.

Fundamentally I think that liberal democracy won't be able to survive compute, communication, and storage being cheap, combined with asymmetric encryption. I really think there should be an article illustrating just how much that last one is fundamental to making the apparatus of control cheap and effective in a way that 20th century regimes could only dream of.

It can do both that’s the beauty. You can use it as a portable desktop sometimes and as an all day laptop other times all in the same device.

I love my M2 Max on long haul flights when I can plug it in. Crossing the Atlantic I can just load up a game from steam and play for 5 hours and then I’m back home in the US.

The part you are leaving out is that you also need to set up something like a pihole (which you can just run in a container on the homelab rather than on a pi) to do the local DNS resolution.

It is as Aristotle said, the average person is a natural born slave (to their emotions, and thus to the rhetoriticians most skilled in changing them). That is why democracy always fails in the end. Americans just had such good geographic and historic luck to delay this reckoning by a century or two.

If you see politics through this lens then the 'democratic backsliding' that has been universal across the world for the past two decades is entirely unsurprising.

Vae Victus.