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I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yo
by tonfreed 6y ago
I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster"
Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.
- top_post 6y agoI completely agree with you.
- sebmellen 6y agoThe Social Dilemma movie highlights this brilliantly, as does Tristan Harris in his Joe Rohan interview https://youtube.com/watch?v=OaTKaHKCAFg https://youtube.com/watch?v=OaTKaHKCAFg
- andrewon 6y agoI would add that the pandemic make us skip the part of telling friends. And the invention of twitter... most sane people don't talk. If they ever say anything, it is too common sensual to be retweeted. But if someone say something explosive it got exponentially retweeted. The character limit also eliminate the possibility of any nuance in position.
- vitiral 6y agosensual -> sensical I like the idea of common sensual, but I think we all might have slightly different tastes :D
- steve76 6y agoThe errors of modern leadership: Celebrity: To be unknown or unreachable is to be invincible. Pettiness: Completing the journey needs to provide the answer. Knowledge and discovery need to provide more than cynicism and irrelevance. Cruelty: Empathy first made us human, practical telepaths. Criticism provokes people, poking mental burn victims. Fights devastates. Fighters eventually miss the people they just wholesale killed. Ignorance: Force people to fix telephone poles. Spend decades ignoring their requests for mobile. Overnight fire them for not having mobile skills, a practical death sentence. Universal healthcare has wait times and job guarantees have relocation requirements. What's the minimum you need to call yourself a government? People telling other people what to do all the time from far away? No matter what you stand for, your subject to your own laws, or else there is no law, just bullying and everyone should ignore you as best as they can. Laws themselves have their own rules. You can't tell someone what to do when you can't even do it yourself, like speak perfectly for one. You do it. If it works, I'll look at it and start doing it myself too. If you mess up, best just to walk away. Leadership belongs to others, not just just you.
- AussieWog93 6y agoNot more of this anti-toaster-fucking bigotry! It is _completely_ normal for a grown man to seek a consensual, carnal relationship with any electrical appliance of his choosing. Just because you can't understand the deep, intimate bond that comes from inserting your genitals into a toaster, it doesn't give you the right to shame others. I've shared your post with my good friends at the Toaster Fucker Support Group. Expect to get doxxed within the next 48 hours, bigot.
- croes 6y agoSo it's not the internet but social networks.
- missedthecue 6y agoTheres not really a difference. In 1995 it was a Usenet newsgroup, in 2005 it was a vBulletin forum, today it's a Twitter or Facebook community, tomorrow, it will be something else. Facebook and Twitter get tons of hate because they make money hand over fist and founders/insiders become richer than god, (unlike Usenet or forum sites) but the internet has always been this way.
- jevgeni 6y agoThere were higher barriers to entry into those groups in the 90s.
- missedthecue 6y agoThis is true, technology certainly has progressed and lowered the barrier to entry for this and many other things, but my point is that the internet is nothing more than a social network. Also, you might be overestimating how high the barrier to entry was. There were over 200,000 usenet groups at the peak.
- croes 6y agoRemember, remember, Eternal September
- Dirlewanger 6y agoYeah, but tech-illiterate baby boomers weren't sharing fake news articles in Usenet groups.
- hanspeter 6y agoDon't forget about Reddit. Reddit is designed around grouping people in echo chambers and users come to it for this reason. Facebook may still be more impactful due to the sheer volume of users, but I don't think Reddit's impact is negligeable.
- themark 6y agoInternet or population?
- eecc 6y agoYou had me until the Che, I didn’t get that reference. What’s that?
- 8note 6y agoPeople on the right think very poorly of Che Guevara with not very strong evidence, so they make fun of people who wear shirts with his face on them
- tonfreed 6y agoI mean, it's not like he killed gay people and wrote incredibly racist stuff about black people. But my point was the people that idolise him online and think they're going to carry out a violent revolution are inevitably the same people that tweet abuse at Adele for losing weight.
- raxxorrax 6y agoSo they dislike an actual Marxist for once.
- officialjunk 6y agoother countries also have internet access. the impact on them doesn't appear to be the same. why is that?
- proggy 6y agoI dunno. The UK got whipped into an online frenzy prior to the Brexit vote. Notably, there was possible Russian interference during that campaign on Twitter, similar to the US [1]. And Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil, largely due to manipulation on WhatsApp. Roughly 47% of the country uses WhatsApp, and of the top fifty images circulating at the time of the election, only four were real [2]. Social media has proven itself to have massive impact on the zeitgeist, and it has been weaponized the world over to serve the interests of those willing to manipulate others in order to further their own (often misanthropic) goals. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia-run-fake-accounts-posted-bogus-brexit-tweets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia... [2] https://www.cfr.org/blog/whatsapps-influence-brazilian-election-and-how-it-helped-jair-bolsonaro-win https://www.cfr.org/blog/whatsapps-influence-brazilian-elect...
- overallduka 6y agoBolsonaro was not elected because WhatsApp, this was a fake news and the journalist that spread that lie was condoned by spreading fake news.
- raxxorrax 6y agoMost of the Russian stories were pure election stories, there is almost no merit to it at all. This is actually one thing I don't understand about the alleged progressive side and many people share this view. You could be made to believe basically anything the same way Trump supporters believe a communist overtake of the US is imminent. Furthermore the support these stories got from intelligence agencies point to very serious problems that do indeed influence democracy in a very bad way, far worse than Putin can imagine in his dreams. Of course it might put a smile on his face, that much is understood. True that the zeitgeist has influence, but it is mainly driven by western companies, not by the Russian government. Aside from the language barrier you cannot name one talking point this alleged Russian propaganda contained. You do understand the implication if you decry any opposition to EU integration as Russian interference? Because any political discourse stops right there with you. No, there was honest dissatisfaction with the EU in Britain. That might be wrong or not, but the Russian thing just made people reinforce their views, because that actually makes sense now. Russians, seriously... Brazil is another story here, although I think the facts have to be checked.
- thirdsun 6y agoOf course it's not that one-sided. Let's not forget that the same technology that provides a safe haven for toaster fuckers also enables people with more sane, progressive yet equally niche ideas to find like-minded peers and escape the problematic offline environments and tribalism they may have been brought up in.
- rewgs 6y agoSure, it's a double-edged sword, but that doesn't mean the comment you're replying to is wrong.
- thirdsun 6y agoOf course not. I just wanted to provide a glimpse on the other side of that coin.
- hunter2_ 6y agoContinuing the analogy, it comes down to the impossibility that such tools only be used for good. We can't approach 100% without draconian censorship, but we can probably get to 90% with better education. Apparently we're currently around 50%.
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoYou certainly did not have to live with those around you before the internet, and were sometimes very much encouraged not to. It isn't like the LGBTQ+ community was treated well. It was perfectly acceptable to not hire a queer school teacher, nor was it such a bad thing for students to shun a queer classmate. Or you could look at marriage between "races" and the slurs you got from them. A core teaching of a number of churches is to surround yourself with other believers instead of the non-believer next door. And certainly make sure you fit into your gender roles. Best not to have communist or socialist leanings in the 50's, nor be asian in the US in the 40's. In so many places, it was outright dangerous to have dark skin. Sometimes you would just accept those around you because that was all you had access to, which is true... so long as they weren't in the wrong group lest you be treated like the minority. Social media amplifies some bubbles, but it also breaks a few and some things are more difficult to ignore.
- tonfreed 6y agoFound the toaster fucker.
- _qulr 6y ago> I blame the internet. The irony of this ahistorical claim is that it comes very close to "Make America great again". Think about the Vietnam War. The civil rights era. The McCarthy era. The list is almost endless. The Civil War, of course. The US has almost always had major polarization. If anything, the internet reveals what had been hidden by the whitewashed corporate Big Three TV network monopoly, which was itself an historical anomaly. You know the Pulitzer Prize for journalism? Well, Joseph Pulitzer himself was unapologetically partisan. As was William Randolph Hearst, et al. The whole idea of "objective journalism" is not much more than a naive blip.
- tonfreed 6y agoI agree, the difference now is that we have direct access to the information, it doesn't have to filter through a journalist now. All these twitter/facebook/youtube bans are trying to put a genie back in a bottle, Parler is gaining steam and Bitchute recently hit its funding goals. Also, yeah, the term yellow journalism refers to Pulitzer's rags. Completely on board with that as well.
- Fjolsvith 6y agoLook at what the press was saying about Lincoln before the war. Nothing new these days.