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This is doomed to failure. More of something that hasn't previously worked doesn't solve anything. There's a saying, the definition of insanity is doing the sam
by than3 4y ago
This is doomed to failure. More of something that hasn't previously worked doesn't solve anything. There's a saying, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
The main issues revolve around two things, lack of education about malign influence campaigns and their tactics and targeted blindspots, and structural issues that allow a many to one communication while giving the illusion that its one to one (i.e. bot accounts posing as people to amplify or de-amplify). A large portion of our identities are developed through reflected appraisal, and when you interfere with core identity, and you see it everywhere, this becomes distorted, and can induce demoralized psychological states that include both radically violent states, as well as unresponsive states. Now if you have a destabilizing event, very few resources are actually needed to topple governments as was seen in 1953 with the Shah coup.
People generally act and do crazy things when they are isolated and marginalized, its illegal to treat animals that way, and that hasn't stopped technology which allows the perfect weapon to do just that to people, often without their knowledge.
This at its core is what political warfare is all about, winning at any cost without war, and there is a very detailed book which has been written and is available for free from US Marine Corp University's Publisher.
If you can't identify malign influence, then you are doomed to be a victim of it.
The Russian's have called it ideological subversion, the Chinese call it the destruction of national will. Its all the same, and because we value free speech it has been allowed to fester and poison for several generations.
You even have people pushing socialist policies now without even knowing its socialist themselves, and without any true understanding of the structural deficits inherent in what they are pushing, such as corruption, shortages, economic calculation problem, and a number of other areas that inevitably make it an unstable system over time.
This and other interference is what drives a lot of these issues. Its not rocket science.
There's a reason those countries are enemies. They have used malign influence to corrupt and subvert, targeting future generations to destroy our civilization. We as a country largely dismantled our political warfare machinery back in the 70s, at least according to multiple history books I've read, while they haven't stopped, and have in fact developed it even further in scale and scope.
- mixedCase 4y agoHow does your comment explain that smaller communities are doomed to failure? It seems you disagreed and went on a very wild tangent far away from the idea the GP brought up, and in fact may only reinforce it.
- than3 4y agoIt should be fairly obvious that communities are dynamic, they either grow, or they shrink. When was the last time you saw a community stay the same... ever. There are times of population accumulation, and distribution. Growth leads to being a bigger target, once you have a certain population, it makes sense to target them. If you have a community with access to something, it may make even more sense at a smaller population size. Shrinking eventually hits an unsustainable participation point where content becomes stale, and/or benefits erode. This is the standard lifecycle of a community, you either grow, or you shrink, and bots are cheap and provide downward bias with a well resourced adversary. As soon as it makes sense as a target, you then have disunity, chaos, toxic behavior, trolls, fake accounts, and bots often targeting those that contribute most because volunteer psychology says you stop volunteering when it starts costing you personally. The agenda is as I previously mentioned and progresses from there. If you are too busy putting out fires, you're too busy to notice important targeted shifts.
- pksebben 4y agoUnbounded growth is a fundamental evil. Our system of corporate organization has been creating troll accounts for a lot longer than the Internet has been around (they just call it marketing, but a pig by any other name...). Nationalism is anachronistic and hasn't been anything but an infected social appendix since the Internet. I wonder why it is that at the same time, you're so seemingly rose tinted about the situation domestically as you are paranoid about the situation internationally. I don't mean to say that bots, trolls, and psyops don't exist; they do.. But we perform them on our own people anyway and it's not as if the goals of the government are aligned with the people in it anyhow. The effectiveness of these campaigns is about on par with that of what journalism has unfortunately become - mostly bullshit and everyone knows it but what are ya gonna do? They keep putting it out and it's not like you're going to convince those still locked to the cycle that they're living in a cave. I think size is a major part of the problem.