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While riding home with my son this evening, I found myself apologizing to him. This world today--the people--are a profoundly unbelievable mess. He brought up things he's read in the news and I hardly know what to say. We both understand how insane it all is, but people still believe it... truly...
I get it. The world has always been a mess. This mess today is simply uniquely ours at this time in history.
But...
My gods...
What...
The...
sighs
I'm approaching my sixties now. I've been through a lot of the messes of recent history. The world today (and it is the world, its not just the US although that is the most flagrant example) feels genuinely different. Just the sheer amount of misinformed hate and self-destructive uber capitalism feels like its reaching a crescendo. What comes after that is worrying to think about.
50 something also chiming in.
I think the nutcases have always just been there. Hiding in plain sight. They just never had a platform. It was always "uncle jerry in the back, spilling nonsense while drinking his beer. Dont mind him."
And that was the end of it.
Uncle Jerry now has twitter , facebook and all those other bullshit channels for furthering his bullshit. And some of us just eat it up.
I work in IT, which is more then anything else, a business of truths. Its binary. It works or it don't. 0 or 1. Yes or no. A lot of highly trained and educated people work in IT, which is a field which only exists because of science... and blatantly ignore that same science about society, environment, immigration, economy, chem trails and god knows what else.
It's baffling. There are a lot, i would say 1 in 10, who will spout the most insane bullshit after a few beers. About stuff "the government doesn't want you to know." what exactly is the government ? I work for the government but apparently I'm excluded. Im good government?
we haven't been on the moon. Chem trails are real. Climate change is just a fad, covid is a way to control us, vaccines give cancer, polio isn't a real disease, its made up.
Da fuq.
I truly believe that social media, and I mean all social media should be banned. People should not be allowed to spew their bullshit. We as a people are really not ready for this. Maybe China is right with their "social score" system. Maybe stuff like the bilderberg group is really needed. We seem to need guidance. We, the normal civvies, seemingly are too hell bend on watching it all burn. And are too stupid to stop it. People like trump, inciting hate, spraying unlimited bullshit, should be thrown in jail. That's not politics. That's rage baiting.
The path we're on leads to 2 things: the capitalist dystopia, think blade runner and a total melt down of our ecosystem which, ultimately, will lead to our dinosaur moment.
We are living, this moment, in a great filter event. I truly believe that. Wanna know why we don't see, hear other planet wide civilisations? Look around you. See where this leads. Connect the dots. "do your own research." ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I agree, mostly, young people start with tiktok (or whatever the platform du jour is) and the algo pushes Andrew Tate at them. Xitter is now a cesspit of hate. There are FB Groups and Insta accounts monetising 'news' and YT accounts pushing hate as 'news'.
Simplistic populism is easy to digest and easy to understand. No matter how ludicrous it is, the idea that the root of your problems is muslims/the dems/women/trans folks/the gays/whatever is simple, easy to understand and easy to communicate. Its made for algorithm driven content.
I don't want to be that old cunt at the back of the room harping on about the good old days but we live in an age when truth is irrelevant and easy to understand but utterly wrong information gets spread far and wide. Facts are usually complex, nuanced and not easy to present in a soundbite type way and nobody listens to explanations that last more than 5mins.
People of my generation invented this info hellscape and are profiting from it. The young are the ones paying the price.
On the algo front, outrage drives engagement by multiples compared to any other emotion, Facebook literally did the research. So comments and posts that cause outrage get more likes, more retweets, more comments, they've literally gamified outrage generation.The big social media companies have way way too much power.
We are living, this moment, in a great filter event. I truly believe that. Wanna know why we don't see, hear other planet wide civilisations? Look around you. See where this leads. Connect the dots. "do your own research." ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
My favorite people are the evangelical Christians that tacitly understand this point and want to accelerate things.
The amount of people who i saw actually EXCITED by war in Israel specifically because of some biblical prophecy of the end times was utterly terrifying.
I truly believe that social media, and I mean all social media should be banned. People should not be allowed to spew their bullshit. We as a people are really not ready for this. Maybe China is right with their "social score" system. Maybe stuff like the bilderberg group is really needed. We seem to need guidance. We, the normal civvies, seemingly are too hell bend on watching it all burn. And are too stupid to stop it. People like trump, inciting hate, spraying unlimited bullshit, should be thrown in jail. That's not politics. That's rage baiting.
Haha, that sounds like something I would say. I wonder if it's an IT guy thing to say "fuck it, this is broken, no more doing this for anyone anymore" " and by the way, how did you even break this?".
But yeah, this is probably an overreach. If you banned all social media, you'd have to ban all forms of Internet mass communication, forums and message boards, comments sections, all the way down to group emails...
Also, practically, you'll never get any law that limits speech that much passed in the US, is just not going to happen.
I wish I knew what would work to start addressing this problem...
I don't think there's more disinformation as before in terms of % of info being wrong, but a lot of people have gotten really good at calling it out. The best example on-hand is the "cigarettes are good for you actually" and "we will buy tramways put of every city in North America and tear them out, then sell you a car!"
It's always been like this.
Is anyone else starting to wonder whether Orwell was a time traveler trying to warn us?
It couldn't possibly be that Trump and his handlers are using it (edit: 1984) as a road map and his followers are stupid enough not to notice.
Orwell's writings were inspired by what he had experienced in Burma and Spain. The issue isn't that he was particularly prescient, it's that nothing has changed.
Besides, of the two dystopian novels, we're much closer to Brave New World.
Orwell wrote that book based on his personal observations from how the government already worked decades prior. All he did was 1+1=2 and he was visionary because of it. Same with Marx. Or Verne.
There's a reason dystopian fiction has reigned supreme for over a decade now. We're obsessed with our inevitable fate.
It's more that Trump read a book:
Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
"Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?" I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. "Who told you that?"
"I don't remember," I said.
"Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew." ("I did give him a book about Hitler," Marty Davis said. "But it was My New Order, Hitler's speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish.")
Edit: I'll note that this appears to the only time Trump has been observed reading a book.
No time travel, it is just that Orwell and the Repubs are both basing their content partially on observations about Nazi Germany.
Orwell was writing specifically paranoid delusions about the USSR and it's really funny to me how his work actually more accurately describes capitalist countries today.
I believe the framework Warzel is looking for is something like:
'Mass Delusional Narcissistic Sustained Psychosis at a Societal Level'
Gotta have the ol double-think.