• 18 Posts
  • 141 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 4th, 2023
  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.world•AnonymityEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I hope that doesn’t sound too pessimistic. I wouldn’t say all is lost, especially since there are definitely positive developments, of which the Fediverse is just one example among many.

    Overall, however, I fear that technology alone will not change society, since it is always embedded into society itselfs and therefore functions according to its inherent logic.

    So in Western countries, I unfortunately have little hope for the “mainstream internet” with its ruthless platform economy, because real change for the better would either require meaningful antitrust regulations or has to be forced by the consumers themselves —both seems highly unlikely, as the past 20 years have clearly shown in my opinion: Today, there are even more and even more powerful global monopolies, while people just won’t stop to buy their stuff at Amazon because it is usually a little cheaper and so convenient that hardly anyone is willing to even consider all the comparable offers that do exist.

    The same seems to be true of the media: fewer, but even more powerful conglomerates with significantly greater reach than before and platforms that can pretty much do whatever they want without losing too many users (x obviously censoring many viewpoints and run by a open fascist, reddit killed it’s API as if it wasn’t important so on and so forth).

    In short, I fear that unregulated turbo-capitalism has done to the internet what it always does once monopolies have formed: Enshitification.

    And this “enshitification” of our most important media channels is now showing it’s ugly face in all the negative impacts on most democracies worldwide. I mean democracy only works with free discourse, the willingness to compromise, and reasonably informed voters. Unfortunately all of this contradicts the logic of today’s so-called social media—at least when it comes to the few major platforms with their own political agendas and their greed for profit.

  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.world•AnonymityEnglish
    27·
    2 months ago

    It’s almost like a large-scale social experiment, with the result that there seem to be many profoundly evil people whose malicious beliefs are artificially pushed by billionaire “gatekeepers” to a point where they can appear socially acceptable, a few good people who have less and less say due to social media logic and content overload, and a large majority who just stand by and watch civilization go down the drain because they’re too lazy to change their habits and just rely on someone else to fix this mess, if they even recognize the problem in the first place.

    In this context, I think the definition of public opinion established by political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann back in the 1980s is once again highly relevant:

    “Public opinion is the opinion dominant in public which can be expressed without risk of social isolation.”

    The spiral of silence : public opinion, our social skin (1984)

    Noelle-Neumann emphasized that public opinion is not just any opinion, but specifically those views that are visible, vocal, and supported by the majority, making them safe to express in public. This ties closely to her “Spiral of Silence” theory, where individuals may refrain from expressing minority views due to fear of social isolation.

    The great problem of our current media situation seems to be that these public opinions are increasingly artificially constructed since they just seem like majority opinions, even if they are not, because they get pushed so hard by the influential crooks controlling major parts of the Internet (social media and search engine monopolies and so on).

    So I think today’s web has become almost the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind.

  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•ooo.oooEnglish
    61·
    3 months ago

    The guy is a psychopath without any empathy. I don’t think there’s much difference between media persona and reality here. Someone who acts so immorally can only be a bad person. There can be no excuses for this.

    I mean, is anyone interested in who Hitler actually was? Does it matter at all? Maybe for pathological psychology, but little else really.

    In any case, anything but a pleasant conversation partner, I would say. Especially because his hatred and his excessive stupidity are definitely not an act.

    I think you give him too much credit.

  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldOPtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Are people in the US aware that they are now definitely a rogue state, or is this fact covered up by the usual patriotism somehow?English
    6·
    3 months ago

    Yes, that’s true. I’m more concerned with whether US citizens, whose past administrations more or less invented the term, can now recognize for themselves that they are no longer on the side of the “good guys” with this administration at all, but are now the “terrorists” themselves - the very thing that past US administrations denounced (at the time, of course, already completely speciously).

    Edit: Trump himself has even brought the term back to a certain extent - and he is not only the personification of evil for the governments of other countries. I just want to make it clear that it’s the same here as with almost everything he does: it’s projection - whatever he accuses others of, he and his corrupt gang are the ones doing it.

    Edit 2: Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this because I believe that Europe, for example, would be much better - I’m saying it because I’m from Germany and we have the history that you all know. It’s not too late to put a stop to Trump and his Nazi colleagues, but it will take civil resistance. If there is no vehement resistance, I fear that history will repeat itself. Nobody in their right mind can want that.