Comment on get sum
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoOk, sorry to double post, I’ve fixed up the original comment more, to hopefully make more sense.
But uh, yeah.
It is really weird to be in the position of having grown up as an awkward tech dork… and now like, I have uncommonly good interpersonal social skills by the standards of many Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A.
It is just a mindfuck.
I realized in about the mid 2010s that algorithmic based content platforms just were pushing the most extreme and outrageous and infuriating kinds of content, because that is the content that best results in user retention…
And when I realized this, I swore off much of it, deleted a bunch of accounts, and highly constrained and curated what was left.
Most other people did not realize this and allowed it to normalize, and now, at least in the US, the result is a largely illiterate, immature, and anti-intellectual society that is highly conspiratorial, and treats all of reality … as if it was a reality tv show.
People call me crazy, but I say that our society has been mass brainwashed, basically mentally neutered, acting increasingly neurotic and violent and irrational.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
No i’m not calling you crazy, i actually see it the same way. Social Media is a mass brainwashing tool.
The reason why elon musk acquired twitter is because he saw it as an “social engineering” challenge, after having already taken up classical engineering challenges (tesla). the reason is because the rich see it as exactly that: society is a system that can be manipulated and twisted into shape.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Oh I didn’t think you were calling me crazy.
I’ve just been told that by many Americans who are actively losing their minds trying to balance their car payment, insurance, recent medical disaster, loss of income, etc, all while spending 6+ hours a day on whatever particular algorithically designed and manicured for them slop content app telling them who to be angry at and what items to buy to give them the desired personality.
I very much agree the fediverse is very important…
But I think that Elon actually primarily bought Twitter out of a massive, massive sense of insecurity.
He needs to be widely loved and adored and seen as ‘a cool guy’, so he just bought the platform so that he could be in control of his own personal adulation/worship machine.
In my opinion at least, everything else is secondary to, is an outgrowth of, is a cynical tactic that may shift at any time… all to primarily prevent his own ego from collapsing.