This is not about petty politics and frankly I think your topic shift is completely out of place here. What this is fundamentally about is preventing any idiot with money and/or power from purchasing/capturing and then proceeding to ruin our townsquares like some wannabe totalitarian asshole. And some people will say that “it’s ok, because it’s a private platform and he bought/built it”. Ok, now it’s a million private platforms, he can go buy each and every one of them and we’ll make new ones and move to the ones he hasn’t bought yet.

Your anger is completely misplaced and weird af. Even with you complaining about specificly “woke”, soy, EVs and similar.

Feel you with being unable to keep up. The thing is, most of the outrage is artificial; have to remember the incentive structures of media etc.

If its any consolation, I reckon the average person being unable to keep up with stuff during periods of rapid change has always been the case historically. Most conversations, discourse, etc that have shaped society have been either among small groups of powerful people motivated by various interests, or stuff like pamphlets, polemics nailed to church doors, talking points, buzz words. This riles people up and is effective at getting stuff done but not effective at all at having an actual conversation. So the average person just gets swept up in the tide.

I am not an expert in political history by any means but I can’t think of a single example in which people just talked to eachother to decide the direction of society. Seems like it has always been ‘waves’ or ‘trends’ or ‘forces’ and then ‘backlashes’ driving things. Historical developments and transformative change seems to just ‘happen’ and suddenly you live in a fundamentally different world.

Like, did we ever have a conversation, as ‘a society’ (if it can even be considered a singular entity) which resulted in the decision to put big tech corps in charge of running the main platforms we use to communicate with eachother?

Of course not; it’s like we woke up one day and suddenly heads of state are issuing diplomatic communications via goddamn Twitter so we all just use that now. Again, not a historian, but I think it was a similar thing with major historical shifts like industrialisation etc.

And then we get hit by the consequences, and are totally unprepared, as if they were unexpected. A small group of random people having a conversation over drinks could have anticipated pretty much every single issue we now have with big tech running our social platforms, and probably could have anticipated many of the pitfalls of industrialisation or globalisation (not saying these don’t have positives; but we’re dealing with the pitfalls now so it is what it is).

I think this kind of approach to discourse and societal decisionmaking is very vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in the modern world.

I recently read ‘The Word for World is Forest’ by Ursula Le Guin, and am reminded of this part in the introduction: “They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such areas as television and nuclear physics.” (Context: the Senoi people of Malaysia).

We haven’t developed our ‘social technology’; we’re operating on the same kinds of social tech in the past, which is simply not equipped to deal with a connected globalised world. I think this extends to stuff like academia and journalism. We desperately need an approach to making sense of the world in a calm and thoughtful manner; but since our social tech can’t really facilitate that, we’re doing… whatever it is we’re doing rn.

And coming back to capitalist incentive structures: inflammatory stuff generates more engagement, ad revenue etc.

I am holding out hope that smaller, FOSS alternatives which do not have such incentives will lead to better conversations

This is entirely my observation but the conversations I’ve seen on this platform seem more like actual conversations vs the almost-artificial ‘talking past eachother instead of talking to eachother’ I used to see on Reddit and Twitter.

Sorry for the ramble. My first post on any public-facing online thing since I quit posting on random forums like 15 years ago. I always lurked on Twitter and Reddit but feared that actually posting and/or getting into arguments would drive me insane so avoided it. Hello everyone; let’s be humane to eachother and enjoy eachother’s company. There’s enough alienation in the world as it is. Thanks for reading to whoever is still reading.

Man, I feel you on that part about things becoming a political minefield.

I remember when you could say anything on the internet and just not worry about it. Now if you piss off the wrong person you’ll have a mob knocking your door down in no time, having combed over every piece of information about you to find more things to be angry about.

When I was a kid I really did expect that to die down with religion, but it hasn’t. I expected people to have more relaxed attitudes but they don’t.

It has given me interesting things to think about. How do we contend with our nature which is completely unaware that we aren’t wandering around in small groups hunting any more? How do we find balance when our instincts are geared toward finding our group and taking out groups who are potentially threatening?

I’m just an idiot, but sometimes I feel like an alien watching our species.

I don’t wonder about whether I am woke enough or whether I should eat meat, but I spend a lot of time wondering about why we get hung up on things like that.

I think (and again, I’m an idiot) that our survival instincts just don’t know what to do in a world with so much information and so many members in our tribe. We aren’t built to deal with it. It comes at us so fast and we don’t want to be shoved aside and discarded and left to starve on the outskirts of society. Our brains can’t comprehend that we won’t be, that resources are plentiful, and so we struggle to keep up with pleasing our tribe while being terrified of the others.

This group is spying because this other group is a threat. We gotta get them before they get us. We have to convert as many people from their side to ours as possible because they will kill us, or, they want our resources.

I don’t know. I haven’t slept in two days and I’m working a double shift at Stop n’ Shit so I don’t know if I’m on the same page as you haha.

I don’t know if we can get past this point though. We were born from chaos, we struggle for order, and everyone is struggling against us for various ideas and feelings about what order is.

In less than 100 years most of us will be dead and we take ourselves so seriously it’s like we don’t comprehend that and we believe (juuuuust enough) that we’ll live forever.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to make things better, just maybe that we shouldn’t get so hung up on every little detail of it.

Honestly I don’t even remember what I was saying. I’ve typed too much to back out now haha. Cross your fingers that I’ll get some sleep tonight. :p

You hit the nail on the head brother

Sometimes I wonder if 4Chan’s model is really the one we should be implementing, somehow. Remove individuality via the profile names and avatars people use to post under, and things seem to largely work themselves out (speaking as an infrequent visitor that has surface-level knowledge of the politics of 4Chan).

Sure, you can do something similar with throwaway accounts on places like Reddit, but it’s not quite the same.

Having smaller communities helps, a discord I’m in for a gaming clan has a wide group of people from all around the world and many different political groups, but in the last couple years I can’t think of a single incident of fights or people being rude.

Depends on the type of community. Hobby/niche communities tends to be apolitical, people are there to talk about specific subjects, there’s rarely margin for real world politics.