Credit to Chris Williamson for coming up with this though. I just found it worth sharing.
The internet has the right amount of information if you can just moderate yourself. But I’m also the kind of guy that goes out for a beer or two and arrives home with no clothes on.
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
- Douglas Adams
We got the meteoric rise of Obama, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street from the democratization of information.
It was devastating to the old guard. But then they realized they could use the same tools we’d used to spread information to spread disinformation. Then when people called them on their bullshit, the regular propaganda stopped being the goal.
No longer was the purpose to make us believe what they had to say. It was too make us not believe anything at all. They flooded the world with so much bullshit that nothing seems true anymore, and in the confusion they’re openly enacting fascist policies while pretending the news is fake.
HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
[HyperNormalization] describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.
-Wikipedia
Do we need like a philosophical thoughts community? Shower thoughts to me are more like “if you have a PhD all meetings you go to are doctors meetings.”
Meanwhile, on Lemmy its like “The undulating nature of the universe can be predetermined based on a set of twelve isotopic values.”
I keep wanting to make a post in shower thoughts asking how the hell other people remember they need shampoo, but by the time I leave the shower I forget both the shampoo and the post.
I got shampoo today, because my husband remembered, and I therefore suddenly remembered the post, though I no longer need it.
Governments used to want to control the narrative, now they’ll spill out so many narratives that people are overloaded on trying to figure out what is actually true. This has been going into overdrive with machine learning improvements and it’s probably just picking up traction.
