Reality

[jfz9580m]

4. I think media play a big role H20 Man

Nothing I am saying is wildly original. But still, given your aptly titled post, it’s worth pointing out.
Many tech critics from Nicholas Carr, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, Evgeny Morozov to Ed Zitron and my personal favorite Yasha Levine have pointed out how the media that define so much of our politics, communications and information absorption/transfer, warp and distort reality.

You are an educator and post about the importance of education so you would appreciate the point. They worsen attention and memory wrt normal academics. I don’t like the word “addiction” as I prefer non-pathologizing terms that don’t subtly blame the victim ( especially given the predatory nature of the companies and their CEOs pushing this stuff on us). But certainly they grab our most precious assets-time and attention, which in turn affect one’s income earning potential and quality of life. On that head, Ruth Cain wrote my favorite piece in The Conversation on mental health in this neoliberal hellscape. That piece is 5-10 years old and the nuisance has only grown.

I have reason to know first hand as an early victim of some technologies like AI I suspect, how subtly manipulative or mind numbing it is.

And the shills in the pay of the accelerationists pushing more and more of this stuff, gate-keep discussions on the topic propounding their (largely) non existent merits and blaming users for lack of self control. All while legitimizing every new intrusion with mockery of the notion that somehow these things are different from the humble printing press.

The pooh poohing of all valid criticism as “just those old fuddy duddies and Luddites who were always around in every generation with these predictions of doom ”.

It’s some sort of inability to comprehend scale. Endless, mindless, bullish, dead-eyed “optimism”. It’s like saying that because 100, 1000 and 10,000 or 100,000 are all multiples of 10, something with a 100x nuisance factor and one with a 100,000x nuisance factor are no different.

A noxious little twit (my apologies-you are very civilized :-/..I am less so these days) called Nir Eyal is a typical example.

In this environment Trump is very much a man of the times and a symptom of all these societal diseases. His only real claim to fame is reality tv, a style of entertainment, which unlike Reiner’s scripted films, was known for lowering the bar of decency from the start.

And with all the negative real world effects from doxing, mobbing to misinformation/desensitization characterizing this era, his or Musk’s indecent and bullying style are very much in the spirit of the times. And why everything is falling apart. Musk is truly a mad billionaire worthy of this obscene period.

EarlG’s post after the election addressed a similar point. We are battling an algorithmic nuisance which is potent though dully trashy rather than like a glamorously evil Skynet (I have never seen the movie, but I assume Skynet is more glamorous than these bots and other virtual junk heaps).

I am not 100% anti-tech. Even I get some utility out of it after all. DU for instance is an old school message board and a valuable resource. I am myself drafting a post for Activist HQ, to leave an anon digital trace in a part of the political web I trust.

But I could never abide by these sites like Facebook/Twitter where you drop your rights to your status as a private person. It makes no sense when you are not in media, politics or a similar public facing role and have the right to privacy/anonymity that say a politician who affects a lot of people does not to the same extent.

It is all getting worse with AI and other technologies the general public/lay people like me have a poor understanding of. I scoff at gate-kept, lightweight “studies” by people in bed with the worst offenders that keep confirming that these technologies suck, gobbling up what little research funding exists, without any serious fixes.
Someone like Yasha Levine addresses it most honestly.

But to get back to your post and title, wouldn’t you say that Trump is what is expected even? Now Kim Kardashian is treated like a serious person because she makes some politically appropriate and repellantly hollow and trite noises about justice reform, but she like most other “influencers” was a reality show star ridiculed for being famous for being famous. The net is killing a lot of decent professions and labors and causing a proliferation of this type of junk economy. My term for it is junk capitalism. And such persons are ignorant conspiracy mongers who are obscenely wealthy, while many DUers post about struggling to make ends meet.

And all while the public sector and education and healthcare, publicly funded science, public television etc are under attack like never before with the technofascists installing Trump and making Project 2025 a reality.

Sorry…these rants get away from me constantly now as my stream of consciousness gets more overwrought :-/…