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Rational argument is difficult to scale (certainly more so than memes and propaganda bots), but not impossible. Real social progress takes real work, but it’s w
by electrograv 9y ago
Rational argument is difficult to scale (certainly more so than memes and propaganda bots), but not impossible. Real social progress takes real work, but it’s worth it.
Your last two paragraphs sound an awful lot like the book 1984. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you check it out.
- angry_octet 9y agoI think Trumpism and climate denial are good counter-arguments to that. I think we (humans, not any one society) are fundamentally vulnerable to propaganda, and we've opened a Pandora's Box of next level propaganda tools (micro targeting, social distribution, anonymous participants) but have not evolved educational defences yet. "You can fool some of the people all the time," as said by Unknown -- probably not Lincoln, but one of the things continually misattributed to him, in an earlier style of meme misinformation. It is ironic that people thought that the internet would purge misinformation (by making sources easier to check) but instead it has made it worse, by bypassing expertise, analysis and references altogether. 1984 isn't really about tribal groupings using computerised social credit systems, but I take your point. From the authoritarian POV, China already has nascent systems to score each citizen's thought correctness factor.