Submitted 1 year ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
For better or worse, this seems to be way less of a problem on the Fediverse. I can’t tell if it’s because it’s federated OR if it’s because corporate America hasn’t woken up to it (yet?!?). I find way more interesting discussions on lemmy than anywhere else on the net. Hopefully it stays that way!
Doom scrolling is facilitated by ad-optimised algorithms that push low-nuance, emotive content that gets a reaction, for views. (Thinking particularly of twitter and Facebook here)
The fediverse doesn’t have that, and has no reason to, because as soon as any provider starts pushing ads, people will switch servers. So I think it WILL stay that way.
Also, I think as a consequence of having less combatitive content up front, people are generally in a less heightened emotional state as a baseline, and are able to approach more nuanced content more thoughtfully.
I straight up hate that so many people are just now brushing up against the fact that everything is marketing. Everything is purposeful. Everything is sinister. Goddamn.
For those who are feeling disheartened or numb and want/need a little push to get things started, you should check out AOC’s video she posted. It’s like an hour and a half long but she does a good job breaking down the situation, acknowledging the challenges, but also provides examples of things you and everyone else can do to resist.
In her own words/examples, you don’t have to feel like it’s all on just you to rollback illegal FAA staff appointments, to stop musk harvesting USAID, etc. There are specific concrete actions you can take within your capacity to make a difference.
Disagree. Calling leftists Nazis for not voting for Harris is basically the same thing as Stalingrad
You can’t even get Lemmings to leave Facebook because “muh marketplace” or “muh Auntie I haven’t seen in a decade.” Good luck. Y’all are addicted to this shit.
Shamelessly reposting this here, because it seems relevant:
Negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf
Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:
www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4
independent.co.uk/…/social-media-facebook-twitter…
And so, negative headlines are getting worse: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/jour…
But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: psychologytoday.com/…/the-psychological-impact-ne…
So it’s important to try and stay positive:
www.goodgoodgood.co/…/benefits-of-good-news
If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:
And here’s 35 more: news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/
Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:
Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or ‘burying your head in the sand’: learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positi…
www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism
And doesn’t mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: www.goodgoodgood.co/…/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling
thanks for the links, looking forward to checking them out.
You’re welcome
I feel personally attacked, I agree with the article, but painfully so.
100000000% agree
I am trying to get people I know personally to stop posting and reading and instead begin to focus on the very basics of actual organization.
I have collected and written up information for them with the consideration that they are non-technical, pertaining to secure and private communications primarily, but also many more potentially useful emergency-scenario information and data which I will not speak about here.
The package I have started giving to my friends contains information such as:
I firmly believe that the majority of Americans will not do anything until someone is actually showing up at their door, coming after them in the street, or destroying the regularities of their personal day to day life, so my intention is to disseminate materials which they can turn to when the fear sets into them well enough that they are scared to talk about such things openly.
It is clear to me that most of my American friends at least, at this point, still only feel superficial fear and outrage. The other day I asked them “If you had to vandalize a public space with a piece of art, what would you draw or paint? Let’s say it is the side of a bank”.
One said “tits”, one said “flowers”, one said “a fox”.
Even in a fantasy, they would not express fear or outrage in a public setting.
Let’s see that package
I can’t share it all here for reasons I can’t detail.
I may do a second write up at some point for public distribution and if so, I will share it with you here.
That’s what she said
i have been trying to look for any organization that would try to do something. I know i cant found anything like that myself so best i can do is support someone else. I have no idea where to even look or are there even such groups in my city or even country.
Only one i know of (extinction rebellion) are basically glorified facebook group(at least their local group, no idea how they are in general) that might occasionally do something that causes slight outrage and not even about the issue, just against them.
Is signal not good enough or something? I basically switched to signal.
It’s good, but it’s centralized. Let’s say an authoritarian regime shuts down the central Signal servers. Then what?
The revoltion will not be televised - Gill Scott Heron
Even people agreeing with this are wary of any revolution which is not in some way being televised. And more trusting to television than to what they can see with their own eyes.
LF leftists in Kansas. Organize
They’re dozens of us.
literally just don’t doomscroll, go read my recent post over in eudaimonia.
You literally just don’t have to do it lmao.
that requires effort to move away from platforms that force you to doomscroll with their algorithm. For many people that is very strong chain. If you relinquish your mind its not easy to even see the reason to take it back on your own.
it requires effort for sure, but even if you don’t want to permanently do it, just spend like a week, without using tiktok or something.
It’s worth it. At least let yourself understand both worlds fully.
Sounds like a complicit media attempting to absolve itself.
I can’t upvote this strongly enough. Social media is doing everything in the establishment’s favor - especially ingraining the habit of glancing at a news item and making an instant value judgement with minimal thought before scrolling along to the next item. It’s not just the endless scrolling and venting vs taking real action, it’s the encouragement of superficial thinking, which is solid gold for con men like Trump who depend on people jumping to stupid conclusions. People who get all their knowledge from memes are easier to fool than people who take time to think.
Why read the article (especially if there's a paywall) when you can read - or even better *make* - the comments? 😜
Seriously, if the goal is that sweet sweet dopamine fix, then this is the most efficient means to achieve that end...
Thinking is hard, hence just don't do it! Better yet, downvote those who do as being "pretentious".
It's far easier to talk rather than listen over others.
Social media is doing everything in the establishment’s favor
For about half a second, people used social media to organize. Then the fascists saw how to manipulate and control it, and jumped at the opportunity. At this point social media – especially corporate controlled social media – is just part of the fascist apparatus.
To a lesser extent, as this article talks about, the coping mechanism of posting allows you to vent enough to prevent you from having the discomfort necessary to actually do anything. It’s not nearly as harmful, but it’s not good either.
They have done the same to liberals, just in a different way. Why do the harder thing when the easier thing is just as good? Most liberals already believe bullshit just as convenient for Trump.
How you support or not support an idea is not less important than what is that idea.
After working with computer software most of my life I’ve come to understand that if success relies on people ‘paying attention to something, making an informed decision and then performing an action’ that it is nearly impossible to get the desired outcome more than half the time.
We’re so fucked.
in my workshop I keep safety glasses at each station, and then some more just around. I bought 6 pairs of the same model after trying out 8-10 different styles so they fit and work well also. I still need to force myself sometimes to take 3 steps to put them on.
The people who sit down to put together a solution for our mess will need to plan this way too. They will need to factor in how to make it easy for people. How to get the desired path of the chaotic group to align with the solution.
For an idea, I have been thinking a lot about decentralization like here at lemmy. What if, the government, was social media. What if each post was a proposal, and the up and down votes were actual votes. It could replace all politicians. No more lobbyists paying $5k for policy implementation. They would need to bribe us all, which would just be us getting better quality of life. A system without centralized power.
If it was in the top 3 apps in the mainstream repositories millions would stumble into it on their own.
Also in that field, but… I think you have to acknowledge that being, usually, in your example 1) at work and 2) on a computer, make people that much less interested in giving a shit. Compare to various systems people use in their free time, and you probably see that people are pretty good at attending to the things they think matter.
Capitalism, or, at the very very least, unfettered capitalism, are the real problem, not people writ large.
Agreed. After 30 years working in IT for various companies from 40 employees to 300,000 employees, I believe about 70-80% of the corporate work force has an elementary school level of reading comprehension at best.
In the last 10 years of my career I stopped writing emails with more than 1 question, because otherwise most people would reply and only answer the first thing I asked (often poorly), ignoring the entire rest of the email.
I agree.
“Planet’s burning up, another genocide, fascism on the rise… ugh… where are the funny memes.”
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
apathy is the tool of the strong in the times of the weak.
And boredom is a crime.
It’s probably boomers’ fault for inventing PCs so GenX could create the Internet. They should have seen this coming!!!
I’m afraid you can’t vote or protest your way out of fascism. Only way out is to shoot.
Ignoring all the times that violence did in fact help won’t help.
Except you won’t, because you are already coping on Lemmy
For sure. This is all hypothetical. No real threats of violence here.
I’m on lemmy. Just got back from working with firearms at my camp today.
Turns out some mags need oiled, a dead scope battery (no extras on hand!), new shotgun strikes light, need to adjust the trigger pull (again), new 10-round AR mags are a dream, not sure about the red-dot, but it puts steel on target as far as I’m able to shoot.
As always my Colt 1911 Government Model is flawless with every mag. Compact Ruger 9mm fired flawlessly, hard to aim a 2.75" barrel. About my crappiest gun, the Taurus Spectrum, actually ran perfectly. Weirder things have happened. (It always runs perfectly, just jams on the last round, every time.)
Rotated out some old ammo, had more than I thought! Guess I was being extra conservative on holding. :)
Not enough ammo…
They have the popular vote, most gun nuts are right wing. And they have the military, most of which voted trump. Are there even enough people who are left of center to fight against that?
The US has experience being beaten by smaller, poorly-armed forces.
That’s just what they want you to believe. Most of the country does not support the capitalists. Support for Luigi remains bi-partisan.
You are correct. These people won’t be stopped with words or rational arguments. They are past the point of being able to cooperate. We will be killing each other before long. Sorry to say, but if you don’t have the tools and skills to do that, you might want to learn. Or be prepared to be owned or killed by those that do. Adolph Musk and crew want to OWN you or DESTROY you depending on how you look. Start preparing for what that means.
I fucking hate that it’s coming to this, but without a major change of direction (that I see no evidence of yet) that’s where this ends up. The red menace was in our own country the whole time.
I am an infantry veteran and I will be fighting on the correct side of history until I can’t anymore. I do wonder how many of my fellow comrades I might come into conflict with once this all kicks off.
As someone who is outside the US, the best I can do is share important information with people inside the US.
I would be very surprised if any of our US-Allied governments call out Trump. I would be overjoyed, but surprised.
Reminder that the USA has a nationwide strike at State Capital Buildings TODAY.
Organising to do what exactly? A majority of the US population wants this nightmare. The Trump administration is expected to destroy norms and institutions to bring about their bigot’s utopia, they ran on that promise.
It’s really that dire. It’s beyond the reach of the checks and balances that have kept things somewhat on-track up until just after 9/11. Checks and balances are precisely what the voters want to delete from the courts.
If Trump wants a 3rd term, he will get it, and his voters will not be moved by marches or sit-ins or AOC exquisitely calling out the scum and villainy from the floor of the senate. Either talk Luigification, or let the people post their fucking memes in peace.
Barely 50%, and not even, and let’s hope a significant, even if it’s just small it’s significant, percentage didn’t want all the chaos and corruption, that they falsely believed he would be good, and when he isn’t will flip back to being more rational. Let’s hope, and let’s try to convince them.
A third term implies the constitution is still in place and don’t see them passing an amendment without doing something ridiculous like creating a bunch of extra states.
Far easier to just never end the second term. Claim a national emergency and suspend elections/the constitution.
What will matter in the end isn’t what you put online.
It’ll be how good your memory becomes when ICE comes knocking on your door asking about your neighbors.
Not a comment on the merit of the article, but a tangential thought: Fediverse has presented the same amount of doom to scroll as the algorithms. I open my phone to get a break from work, life, etc, and any app I think to open for social or news, presents the same anxiety of “I just can’t deal with that type of shit right now; where can I bury my head in the sand?”
For anyone interested here is the CIA’s publicly available field manual for simple sabotage. Dated, but mostly still relevant.
The field manual was to cripple the nation (Nazi Germany) so it could be conquered by other nations.
The USA being conquered won’t reduce fascism in the slightest.
I suspect the vast majority of people turning to social media as a pressure release valve feel disempowered, and honestly don’t know what more they can reasonably do. How can a fly meaningfully change the orbit of a planet?
This article is insightful, but practically useless. I think it would be better if it also presented specific actions and achievable goals that would lead to shutting down encroaching fascism.
Voting can never be enough when you have two choices at best.
It’s super helpful to identify the issue.
Vast numbers of people feeling disempowered … sounds like the Trump crowd when he appeared and proclaimed himself their savior. Liberals are in for the same treatment from someone with a different sales pitch. Some people think that’s who Kamala Harris was, I truly believed in her, but maybe that was the whole plan and it’s already like professional wrestling - you win this match, I’ll win the next one, and we both take home the money. I dunno.
How about joining the Fediverse?
And ad blocking.
Seriously. Participation in Google/Meta/Tiktok/Whatever and their manipulative algorithms is what makes all this go around. Break their ad revenue, and you break their manipulation.
It’s easy. It’s free. And it would draw devs into developing/hosting more.
in warhammer40k there was some saying about “armor of contempt” against influence of chaos. Imo, you need something similar against corporations to resist their shit.
Well at least the article validated some of my feelings and gave me a sense identification of the problems I have been sensing around me with the flaccid liberal rebellion.
Hey wait a sec! Dammit!
Most concrete action I can think of is some posts I remember seeing about coat-hanger do it yourself frontal lobotomies. I’ve seen plenty of very low IQ Americans with economic status as bad or worse than mine somehow perfectly happy with all the fascist shit that is going down. This seems like an opportunity to join in their bliss.
People need to know that posting doesn’t actually do anything!
posts an article about it
Posts comment about it.
TLDR - We need more Luigis against the techbros
Sure you can. Fight online propaganda with online propaganda.
I have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying _I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.
It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.
But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.
I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.
People even knowing their next door neighbors NAME is leaps and bounds ahead of where we are right now.
They’ve been censorious for over a decade. It’s just the old target was “acceptable” to most denizens of reddit and similar social media. Now that the censors are expanding their reach, we see umbrage? Come on now.
“bread and circuses” has been a effective strategy for thousands of years.
which is why i refused to pay for tv/movies. I refused to spend my hard earned money on their “circus”
Even violent fantasies about putting billionaires to the guillotine are rendered inept in these online spaces—just another pressure release valve to harmlessly dissipate our rage instead of compelling ourselves to organize and act.
ahem lemmy
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet”, allegedly - Andreessen
zealshock@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
Funny, I find this in my doomscroll app. I just want out, man