And then I read about someone’s smart bed that got stuck in an upright position on heat mode because of the outage. Makes me feel like all that time sourcing devices that run locally was worth it.
Are we just digital preppers?
Edit: I get it, you aren’t preppers, I’m sorry I said that.
From reading your comments I have gathered that you simply want to be ready (not prepared!) for when a free service becomes paid or they shut something down that you use or you simply don’t like the idea of the gubbermint or the corporations being able to look though your data.
Many of you seem aware that your concerns are considered far fetched or like non issues by the average person.
well you are preppers, I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
Either you are splitting hairs or do not understand how precarious our way of life is.
Running out of food, water or fuel is not some hypothetical future bad thing. It happens all around the world, sometimes even in western countries.
In Australia we had a fire at one of the gas processing plants in the 90’s and the whole state was without gas (actual Liquid natural gas, for cooking and heating) for almost a month, back then literally everything was run on gas. hot water, ducted heating, ovens, many cars because it was so cheap and plentiful). It seems ridiculous considering we are one of the biggest producers in the world.
You think you are tacking ‘real’ issues with your servers, but to the average user you seem just as crazy as a guy with a basement full of beans and piss jugs, screaming about the government is watching us constantly.
But now we know that they are watching, and pushing people towards specific ideas using social media and many other things we though were just crazy talk.
I’d have a bit more sympathy for the preppers if I was you.
I’ve been incredibly concerned about this for more than a decade. Watching r/the_donald in action was incredible and validated all of that fear.
And it’s still happening. On all social media, including here.
Certain narratives are pushed hard, and it’s effective. Some of it is fully genuine. Some of it is/was seeded artificially and picked up some genuine steam, and is still being reinforced. The stuff that’s fully artificial seems to be dropped fairly quickly most of the time these days.
After the artificial narrative picks up and gets genuine sentiment mixed with it, it becomes hard to tell the difference. If you can mix it in with existing emotions, like anger that we’re in this situation, and add in some seeds of truth it works even better.
Propaganda works. On all of us. And just by being here, we’re being exposed. But I’m afraid to leave, too. The more real people leave the easier it is to manipulate the remainder.
It’s just all so easy and effective and actually happening. And the alarm bells about it aren’t loud enough.
remember Cambridge Analytics? no one else seems to…
The government is watching us constantly. There’s no doubt about this and if you think it’s not, you are the crazy one living in fantasy land.
At the same time, how do you think a basement full of beans would help? The entire path from “the government is bad” to “therefore I’ll have a hole full of food where I can live by myself for years” is dumb magical thinking that can be shown to not work by simply looking around or reflecting about oneself for a second.
There are many valid reasons to be concerned about a disaster. And yet nobody doing your traditional prepping for anything larger than a tornado deserves respect.