Comment on PC upgrade woes
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 5 hours agoMusk bought Twitter after it became obvious social media was amplifying existing rage and the value of continuing to weaponize that anger for politics, social division, tribalism, and controlling the narrative. But again, this is nothing new. Rush was doing that in the 90s, newspapers were doing it before that. 4chan and Stormfront have been hotbeds for hate that predate Facebook, and there were hate forums and Angelfire/Geocities before that. Aryan Nations were having parades in the 90s, Rodney King was getting beaten by cops, Matthew Shepherd was beaten and left to die on a fence. If the term incel had been around the Columbine Murderers would have defined angsty, Nazi-obsessed, white male loserdom turned violent.
Modern social media normalized open bigotry that used to have to hide in the shadows. The people who own those sites definitely picked a side and choose to allow it (along with just enough dissent to keep the arguments rolling) because of revenue. Fighting with words online keeps both sides of the masses happy because they can get in their zings and hot takes and feel like they’ve won, when in reality there’s nothing gained, nothing lost, only words. Meanwhile the banter is filling Elon’s pockets and he’s looting the government while we bicker with some dude in Malaysia over Confederate Pride.
People are impressionable, but they still have agency. They pick narratives that they’re comfortable with. There’s also never been a shortage of white, straight, Christian male privledge in America that never died, just steadily declined in functional importance until “your rights are being stolen by everyone not like you having rights” became a bankable campaign slogan. Combine that with twisted nostalgia for a peak America that never existed outside Hollywood concepts like “Leave It to Beaver” and you end up with Boomers making a desperate last stand for themselves and a generation of youth who think they missed out on something grand even though it never existed. You don’t need a psyop when allowing people to shamelessly indulge in tribalistic, entitled narcissism, you just have to give them a target to punch down at. Get them onboard with that and they’ll let you rob them blind while fighting tooth and nail to keep their overlords from getting taxed on their billions they’re making platforming their hate while they wait in line for the foodbank.
The people like Zuck and Musk have a hand in what’s going on in this country, but they are not the source of it any more than Trump is. All of them are but the visible tumors of a cancer the left keeps trying to ignore. We share this country with a lot of people who choose to hate. Taking away their platforms and leaders is like cutting the tail off a rattlesnake. It’s still there, now you just don’t know where it is.
Man_kind@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Yes, because he was already doing it before he bought it. Russian money and maga money was already paying influencers, getting data from Facebook and stuff, placing ads. You can make a video, and call it an ad, and pay meta to place that ad, to any demographic yoi want. So, they initially just used money to spread hate on these platforms, and then they outright bought them all.
Yes, many came out of the woodworks. Many narcissists people prone to be hateful. That obviously helps spread it, but it also shapes people. You raise people in a hateful world, they will be hateful. If you raise them in a loving generous kind world, then they are trusting and kind.
But there are always some people that are naturally hateful, and selfish, and greedy, and only care about themselves. The narcissists. And they will seek power, and try and spread hate.
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 16 minutes ago
The world is full of people raised in loving, kind, caring homes that go on to become rapists, murderers, child molesters, and regular old assholes. There are also people raised in abusive, neglectful, violent, bigoted homes that go on to become decent, kind, generous people (albeit probably carrying some trauma).
Very, very few people are raised in such isolation they don’t have some exposure to society. Even the Amish know and understand there’s a whole diverse world out there. We grant teenagers the benefit of inexperience as they develop and explore their personal identities, sometimes guided with love but still rebellious, sometimes an effort to escape abuse but still labeled rebellious. But eventually we expect individuals to be accountable for their own choices, actions, and beliefs.
Bigots might have networked on social media, and those platform’s owners might have seen an opportunity for profit and power, but they remain angry because their digital bubble gets popped everytime they go out in public and are reminded that real society is not reflective of that. “Woke” is just a by-word for everything outside their worldview. The world’s always been woke because no two people share exactly the same beliefs, some of us just know how to navigate life among others. Propaganda only works if you want to believe it despite a lived experience that says otherwise every single day.
How one was raised and the values impressed on them at an early age might give some indicator of the kind of adult they will become, but time and again we see that it’s no guarantee. We’re more than lived experience, we’re also how we reacted and survived those experiences, how we organize our thoughts and feelings and choose to go forward (or not), whether we stick with the family we were born into or abandon them for peers, and sometimes our genetics and brain chemistry. It’s the double-edged sword of why liberalism can’t eradicate conservatism and conservatism can’t eradicate liberalism; people have free will. They choose what they want to believe and the only universal truth is that people will continue to choose what they want to believe even if every fact, logic, reason, and experience says “you’re wrong”.
We’re at a cultural tipping point because for the past 250yrs in America the white Christian patriarchy has been losing the status they enjoyed as a majority and they’re making a desperate last stand to reclaim it. Most of them know they’re not in the same class as the oligarchs, but money talks and the middle class patriarchy will accept being second rate if their leaders will force everyone else to recognize the hierarchy. They can make the world a miserable place but can’t ever lock it in perpetually. Look at how many Boomers tried to indoctrinate their Gen X and Millenial kids into their bigotry, and how many now have adult children who despise them and don’t allow them to spread their toxicity to their grandkids.
Hold individuals accountable for their own beliefs and actions, otherwise we’re treading dangerous waters pawning off responsibility on phantoms and boogeymen. Blaming social media is like blaming Goebbels for the complicity of the German populace even if they didn’t personally commit an atrocity. You really think they couldn’t see what was going on around them? Those who support it, those who endorse it, those who fail to do even the simplest act and speak out against it, they’re just as responsible as the ones they empowered to do it for them.