You’re right, and what you need to understand is that the reason half of our idiots voted for an idiot is because we allowed corporations to atomize society so people didn’t mix anymore, we don’t have shared perspectives of the world anymore, everyone gets their information about literally everything algorithmically. This atomization of society is what took down the USA and it’s coming for you next if it’s not already happening wherever you are.
Almost every American just wants to stay home and play video games, we didn’t want any of this. We wanted healthcare.
The problem is culturally, they didn’t see a need to fight for it because of apathy.
Thank god we don’t have to worry about that happening he- err… fuck.
I think a big problem is we aren’t really sure what we’re looking for in social media. We see things that give us satisfying dopamine boosts and want more of it, but also feel the hollowness of it. It’s exactly like eating processed carbs when you’re starving. You end up addicted with cravings for more even as the stuff you’re consuming makes you sick.
I was there for the start of it all, I’ve seen the space evolve over the decades. I was out in the pioneering days championing free discussion and moderating huge communities. I love reading someone debating an idiot more than anyone arguably, I get the same sense of satisfaction seeing groups connect and share great ideas and jokes.
But I also know the pleasure gained from that kind of community is as contextual as it is fleeting. We are not the same people we were when we first read some chain-post replying in stupid memes until it got so absurd we’re laughing so hard we can’t breath and we’re waking up our housemates. We’re just not “that people” anymore. Even the younger people now are living in a different time, we are so desensitized to imagery and text on a screen that it won’t ever have the same impact on us, but it doesn’t stop us from looking everywhere for a hit of the ol’ drug.
I want to be able to say what In think and read what others have to say even if it hurts my feelings / views.
I promise you, after two days moderating an actual large discussion forum, you will implement sweeping rules about who can say what about who. The only places people enjoy chatting anymore are places that are moderated.
We can complain about youtube and facebook taking down messages critical of power or corporations, but places like Lemmy are managed by people. It’s not censorship, it’s going into someone’s house and abiding by their rules. It’s a whole other topic if what you want to read/say is popular enough that you can find someone’s “house” that centers around that topic and is also large enough to have meaningful interactions.
And if you’re looking for debate, that shit is dead.
The fact that every community is now insular and bubbled echo-chambers is a result of human tendencies, we gave people total freedom on the internet and instead of using it to learn more and include more people in more conversations, our instincts turned the place into a curdled honeycomb of walled-off communities which were ripe for the plucking by corporate interests.
I’ll deliver this reply in Choose Your Own Adventure Format:
If you want to make a reference to Donald Trump being at his birthday parade and thus exposed, vulnerable and in the open and presently not looking up, turn to page 89.
If you rather make a reference to how we should leave the Devil be because the Devil himself is more respectable and honorable than any of these monstrous despots who murder out of spite and wrap themselves in scripture, turn to page 322.
I would wager that a lot more do.
My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.
Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.
A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.
Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.
I’m pretty sure we’re now in a situation where most of our society’s contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.
And there’s not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.
This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven’t been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.
And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.
A few old-fashioned morons go a parent-teacher meeting and scream “We never had all this psychotherapy bullshit when I was a kid!” And everyone mummers to each other that yeah, we can’t impose our reason-based evaluation of reality on someone else’s ignorance, that wouldn’t be American!
I absolutely condone the use of violence against fascism.
hell fucking yeah brotha. We did it before, we should keep doing it.
Nobody understands a thing you’re saying, I think you don’t grasp the concept of “context” like so many internet drones. I’m blocking you now, have a good day
I say let it stand as a testament.
I know you’re joking around, but I’ll take advantage of the moment to rant on a tangent for a bit. I legit saw this attitude spreading through the moderator space on reddit a decade ago, as they started getting influenced by users to let slide more and more horrible takes so that “the community can judge for themselves” as tender, shut-in lads and lasses who were trying to manage our largest discussion forums without pay were suddenly being bombarded from all sides by people trying to subvert the subreddits and control them for their own agendas.
And largely, it worked. Many, many times I’ve seen subreddits and forums on other sites fall because the mods got compromised, the other mods got too burned out or emotional to keep doing their tasks, and as a result the conversations started allowing more and more incel-bait, tired tropes of persecution and misogyny, foulmouthed, delusional teenagers who have never left their houses suddenly making profound statements about the state of gender dynamics, and a whole ARMY of foreigners pretending to be normal Americans or Europeans on both sides of every argument, just screaming their nonsense louder and louder until the only users left were the ones who agreed with the delusion. I wish people understood that some of the most famous horrible subreddits and sites started as jokes and were gradually co-opted and hijacked to become unironic hate-spaces.
This was the plan all across the internet and it worked. We are all so tired of every argument and issue that most people don’t engage anymore. We don’t even try to correct anyone because we assume either other users know better, or will sort it out for us, or who cares anyway, what’s even real? Just tune out, keep scrolling.
So now I say, no. We need to be far less tolerant of intolerance, we need to burn them out of their nests and dens. Reddit didn’t go nearly far enough with banning the incel subs, they should have banned incel ideology, they should have banned redpill rhetoric entirely. I once would have balked at that kind of “censorship” but I’m now watching my nation dissolve under the stupidest movement ever created and I’m somewhere between shaking with rage and shaking with exhaustion.
Social division as a result of people not socializing anymore has driven a massive wedge between the diverse and beautiful spectrum of people who used to find appreciation and joy in each others differences.
Now every time you meet someone with different feelings than yourself, the internet has trained you to feel attacked.
This is why we’re all alone, we’re afraid of being attacked, and somehow our definitions of what an attack is has been radically subverted.
I get called a conspiracist for linking the actual reports and investigations into this, but this was by design.
Almost every authoritarian/fascist uprising on record has started with the indoctrination and isolation of young, sexually insecure, lonely men who feel disenfranchised with the system because they’re depressed, horny and have mixed-up ideas how to be liked by others. It’s incredibly easy to peel off a massive chunk of this population and get them to start blaming the government, society broadly, science, knowledge, literally anything but their own need to improve their social skills and gain some emotional intelligence.
These are our dumbest, angriest, loudest men, and thus become the major influencing factor on their peers, online and off. They set the tone and everyone else just kind of goes along with it, or leaves them to grow and gain power in peace.
This is unhinged and nonsensical, either you have poor English reading comprehension or this is a troll post. I’ll let mods decide.
Hey now, he didn’t say he was working close with Trump, he said he was working closing with Trump.
I’m sure there’s a distinct difference.
To stop insisting upon itself for like, five fucking minutes.
Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”.
Bruh, it’s not game of thrones. People just need to work.
China, now the leading global super-power, took drastic measures decades ago to make sure their population wasn’t getting indoctrinated by outside influences.
They also used this power to cover up genocides and such, but I feel like a healthier balance could be maintained if we could just get our population to understand that their unfettered access to literally anything is like opening up a wound to the world’s bacteria.
When the corporations start dividing your population and guaranteeing their own interests over democracy, look at what happened to us and learn from it. It doesn’t stop here.