Credit to Chris Williamson for coming up with this though. I just found it worth sharing.

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
    31·
    3 days ago

    We got the meteoric rise of Obama, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street from the democratization of information.

    It was devastating to the old guard. But then they realized they could use the same tools we’d used to spread information to spread disinformation. Then when people called them on their bullshit, the regular propaganda stopped being the goal.

    No longer was the purpose to make us believe what they had to say. It was too make us not believe anything at all. They flooded the world with so much bullshit that nothing seems true anymore, and in the confusion they’re openly enacting fascist policies while pretending the news is fake.

    • 🔍🦘🛎@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.

      [HyperNormalization] describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.

      -Wikipedia

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    63·
    3 days ago

    I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

    1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
    2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
    3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

    - Douglas Adams

    • TwanHE@lemmy.world
      9·
      3 days ago

      Yes you’ll cope better with technology you grew up with, but technology is also an exponential cure. For about 5500 years a guy on a horse was the fastest messaging system, then we went from beeps through a cable to video calls within 200 years.

  • NineMileTower@lemmy.world
    64·
    3 days ago

    The internet has the right amount of information if you can just moderate yourself. But I’m also the kind of guy that goes out for a beer or two and arrives home with no clothes on.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    3 days ago

    Do we need like a philosophical thoughts community? Shower thoughts to me are more like “if you have a PhD all meetings you go to are doctors meetings.”

    Meanwhile, on Lemmy its like “The undulating nature of the universe can be predetermined based on a set of twelve isotopic values.”

  • kryptonidas@lemmings.world
    23·
    3 days ago

    Governments used to want to control the narrative, now they’ll spill out so many narratives that people are overloaded on trying to figure out what is actually true. This has been going into overdrive with machine learning improvements and it’s probably just picking up traction.

    • LifeOfChance@lemmy.world
      8·
      3 days ago

      This is the exact reason using Google to look anything up anymore is insanely more difficult if you don’t have the skills to parse through all the different waves of information. No matter what side of the argument you’re on Google will guide you into being “right”

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    More like, there was a brief window when the growth of the accessibility of information outpaced the growth of our ability to abuse it.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 days ago

    You can turn it off, at least.

    I don’t use FB, Twitter, TikTok, etc. I use federated social media but federated social media is moderated, has no algorithm, and no ads, so it’s a very different experience.