Submitted 23 hours ago by Zip2@feddit.uk to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jan/19/information-dark-age-elon-musk-donald-trump-jeff-bezos
Bleak as the world may be, Stewart’s writing always gets a smile and a laugh out of me. He’s got a remarkable ability to put the absurdity of our moment into simple and funny English, his famous “thrown in jail” sketch being perhaps the best example.
He’s absolutely right, too. We’re all here so on some level we already know that. This is no time to dilly-dally, we need to cultivate our alternative online spaces and cooperate and work together.
So sit your kids, and their grandparents, down. Tell them not to believe anything they see on Facebook, Twitter, Threads or Amazon TV without checking it somewhere reliable. Make your family into a little Lindisfarne for this era of lies, somewhere we can wait out the information dark age, like monks poring over illuminated manuscripts as the black dragon sails of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos flutter on the horizon, until the future fascists either tear themselves apart, or slaughter objective truth wholesale.
So keep our heads down and hope it will all blow over? Classic British response but I’m not sure it’s good enough. A boycott is wise as it looks like all the large social media sites are bending the knee to Trump but that also doesn’t bode well for the future as they can distort the political landscape because a lot of people only get their news from them. Unfortunately, abandoning all social media means they can get organised while everyone else bunkers down. Does that make us the resistance? Now there’s a responsibility and a half!
Its a good point but my own take on it is that you can’t be the resistance in an environment they totally control. There are plenty of places to organise away from the billionaires control.
I walked away from all Meta platforms under my own name recently as I choose not to have my participation used as tacit endorsement, data collection or ad-money generators for them. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped participating in organising resistance, just that I choose not to do that in a place they have absolute power in.
You do know it is absurdist humor, yes?
Life?
If it’s any consolation, I’ve got you lot.
But I dunno, it just feels like a bunch of us just want to be told what to think, what to be happy about and what to be angry about, while ignoring the real harms and injustices being perpetuated.
The one thing I hope people will come to realize is that to overcome the giants, we must stop relying on them. Rebuilding the functions they controlled from the ground up, starting from the common folk around you.
StarlightDust@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
The Guardian undeniably contributed to creating such a climate with its obsession with platforming anti-trans ideology
Zip2@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
I keep hearing these rumblings, but I think I might have missed seeing the evidence with my own eyes. Can you elaborate?
StarlightDust@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
They even have a union-like entity dedicated towards furthering anti-trans narratives: https://transwrites.world/guardian-writers-and-editor-set-up-group-to-make-guardian-more-transphobic/