this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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That last panel hit me like a truck because... yeah, that's what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.
They really buy like a paper book once and go "ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now" while he makes another billion.
We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it's complaining about.
In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn't need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.
The comic is hyperbolic and not in a good way. "They wouldn't like it" - yeah, if millions of Americans did the same. And it isn't even necessary to go pre-digital or pre-internet to "cut out the middleman".
I agree with you on most, but this:
is hyperbole on your part.
First of all, by-default internet connected cars haven't been a thing until relatively recently (10 years max I guess). And then, gas guzzling does not necessarily correlate with age. Cars consuming less than, say, 5l/100km have existed since at least the 80s (1st hand experience, and the car was already 20 years old at that point).
I guess the car thing comes from the use of "pre-computerized". Cars have had computers in them much longer than they've been connected to the Internet by default. I guess my mistake was taking the panel at its word there.
Also, man, I appreciate the alignment, but the "millions of Americans" really made me feel icky. Beyond the moral and political refusal to give Americans primary decisionmaking power on these things, these trends and companies are global. Even in the US you probably would need tens of millions to make a dent, but some of these userbases are in the billions. Millions of Americans decided Facebook was for old people and left it and it's still the biggest social media platform on the planet by some margin. That'd be the collective inability to gauge scale in a dystopia of global monopolies I was talking about.