From what I’ve been told it’s still a pretty persistent cultural problem, but I’m not Indian, so take that with a grain of salt.

It would be perfect for them. We have so much empty space because we already finished our genocide!

It’s very debatable, but I also think it’s not that relevant. The world doesn’t exist in a static, idealized form for all eternity. Things change over time through their interactions with other things. That’s at the core of dialectical materialism. It can be useful to analyze the past and how particular forms of social and economic arrangements influenced the development of human societies, but I don’t think it really says much about what we should be doing now. We don’t have the counterexample of a world that developed differently. All we can say is what happened. The world developed that way, for all the good and bad that came with it. But we don’t live in a world where most people are illiterate hunter gatherers or peasant farmers anymore. We need to analyze the reality we exist in as it is now without presuming that this represents some natural state.

I guess it depends exactly what you mean by “social media.”

If you mean the general ability for people to communicate over the internet with each other in a public way: No. It is unequivocally good for people to have more access to information and be able to communicate freely with people around the world. These kinds of developments in communication and information distribution technology have always lead to big, usually positive social changes. The prime example of this is the printing press. By greatly lowering the cost of mass producing books, it allowed more people to become literate and rather than relying on the church or other authorities handing down knowledge to them, they were able to read directly from the source as well as produce their own works. This can be considered a heavily contributing factor to the social movements that followed over the next few centuries, The protestant reformation, the enlightenment and the revolutions against feudalism that it inspired, etc.

Did people print books with misinformation? Yeah. Did governments print books which tried to reinforce their rule? Of course. Does that mean books were a mistake? You would have a really hard time convincing me that they were.

Similarly, social media has allowed us to get our information and talk to each other free of the old gatekeepers. Corporate news media used to be the only way to know what was going on in the rest of the world. They chose what to cover and how to frame that coverage. While you could learn some things from it, what they omit is often more important than what they report. Before liberating the camps, most Americans had no idea of the full extent of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Today, we see the cold hard reality of the genocide going on in Gaza and that has done much to shift people’s opinions on it and start to take more action.

Before social media, your ability to talk to people was pretty much limited by who was immediately around you or who you knew the phone number of. It’s hard to organize people like that. It’s hard to empathize with people far away who you’ve never met. The gov can easily stoke xenophobia because they were entirely in control of the way people perceived and interacted with that population. They could convince people that those people in some other country are all crazy people who hate us and hate freedom and wish to destroy us even to their own detriment. With social media, you can just talk to a lot of these people directly. You see that despite some cultural differences, they’re normal ass people like us who go about their lives just like us and want the same things as us. They watch the same movies as us. They play the same games as us and even play with us sometimes. It’s a lot harder to hate someone once you know them like that.

But now we reach the crux of the issue which is specifically talking about corporate social media. The profit incentive always leads to decisions which compromise the very purpose of the thing. Algorithms are a borderline necessity to manage the unfathomable amount of information uploaded to the internet every minute. However, personalized advertising and the mass surveillance that it requires can chill speech, warp what kinds of discussions and content go on these platforms, and corrupt search results and algorithmic recommendations. They can show things that are beneficial to advertisers, they can optimize around engagement to get people to spend more time scrolling through ads, creating addictions, they can optimize around negativity because people respond to that more than positive or neutral things, etc.

And that’s just the pure capitalist logic side of this. Obviously governments and other interest groups see the power of social media to shape perception of the world and they are terrified of losing their monopoly on “truth.” So they make use of it themselves or worse: They collaborate with the tech companies to mooch off their mass surveillance or tweak algorithms to guide conversations.

This unholy nexus of capitalist interests and government surveillance and propaganda IS a problem. I’m not entirely sure I would call it a “mistake” though. Most of these sites didn’t start out this way. They did the anti-competitive thing where they started out offering a good service at a low price (usually free) and as they gained a dominant market share, they slowly shifted to less user friendly policies. That plus the network effect made concentrating internet activity on these handful of sites less of a decision and more of an inevitability. What we do from here likely requires regulation. As much as I like the fediverse, it seems very unlikely that people will move en masse to networks that barely have any people or content. Of course such regulation can’t really be expected to solve the problems while our governments are controlled by capitalists. So there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

But I think despite all of that, they trend is broadly moving in the right direction. It might not seem like that if you look at our governments and corporations, but fascism is ultimately a reaction to the threat of popular will taking away the ruling class’s power and privilege. The very fact that we are seeing this backlash from the top means IT’S WORKING. We are getting closer to class consciousness. Like I said previously, humans have a negativity bias, so it can be easy to focus on the bad participants of the internet. However, the thing to keep in mind is that a lot of that is bots/astroturfing or people being duped by them and that algorithms focus on negative news and interactions to boost engagement, all of which create a warped sense of scale for how much of the internet is reactionary.

You need to understand all of that if you want to effectively utilize social media for all of the benefits it can provide.

I guess we could do it once nobody born in the 20s is alive anymore. There are people alive as old as 117, although obviously this is an outlier. I wonder what % of people born prior to 1930 are still alive?

My cat too. He’ll roll over to specifically ask for it. The other thing he likes is chin rubs and he’ll tilt his head up and look at me when he wants that.

I’m more charitable in my interpretation of the average human.

There’s a difference between being greedy or selfish and taking the path of least resistance out of necessity.

As far as being “idiots,” I just want people to cut people some slack. It can be easy to despair about all the things people don’t know or are misinformed on, but take a step back and look at how big and complicated the modern world is. There is a massive amount of knowledge that makes up our society, more that any individual can ever personally know. So instead we build a kind of collective knowledge through our relationships with one another. You might not have gone to the moon, but someone else did, and they shared their experiences with the rest of us. Most of the people involved in the supply chain needed to build a computer almost certainly don’t know how a computer works or how to design and build one from scratch, but that’s ok because through everyone doing their specific part of the process, it still gets made and we get to use it.

However, a critical component I think people forget about this collective knowledge is trust. You need some reason to trust that the information someone else has given you is accurate or that the product someone else made for you works. Without the tools and expertise, you have no way to personally verify every claim made, so you must decide whether or not to believe the source of the claim.

There are all sorts of reasons that you might form such an information trust relationship with another, some more valid than others. You may know the person personally and believe they wouldn’t lie to you, but they may also be wrong. You may know that the person is accredited by some reputable institution, but that just kicks the can down the road to whether or not you can trust the institution. Ultimately this isn’t about people being stupid or uneducated, it’s about how people choose to trust various sources. What makes one more valid than the other?

One way to somewhat break out of this issue is to build up a foundation of core knowledge through education that can act as a framework for evaluating how reasonable claims are, even if you don’t have specific knowledge about them. You might not know the details of how someone’s supposed perpetual motion machine works, but if you know the basic physics rules about energy, you’d know such a thing is impossible. But the problem with this is that it once again kicks the can down the road back to how you originally learned the information that goes into your framework. If you start with incorrect information, you will not be able to properly evaluate later claims. For example, if you grew up religious and were taught that god created the universe and then someone comes along and tells you that actually there was a big bang that created the universe and that evolution is responsible for the development of life, then those claims would seem absurd to you. I wouldn’t call you inherently stupid for rejecting those ideas based on your prior incorrect understanding. It’s incumbent upon us to find ways to build that trust such that we can educate you in the correct information.

When it comes to climate change, there are various sources of information that also overlap with each other. Scientists, news media, governments, NGOs, corporations, etc. They all have different expertise and motivations. They all use different methods to communicate with others and build trust. It may seem obvious that the output of the scientific community should be relatively trustworthy if you have previously learned the processes involved in generating scientific consensus, but if you aren’t familiar, you might not get why one scientist says this, but these other scientists say this. If you thought you could trust your gov or news outlets, then them telling you climate change isn’t real seems trustworthy. It may seem obvious why corporations can’t be trusted to someone who is familiar with how capitalism works, but if you don’t have a firm understanding on that and say, grew up in a country that absolutely idolizes businesses and business people, then you might look at these successful companies/CEOs and think that they must know what they’re talking about.

There’s a reason the right is constantly attacking education. There’s a reason why businesses spend tons of money on advertising, lobbying, etc. They know what they need to do to keep people from agreeing with each other on correct information. You can lament that people are led astray by them, but it clearly isn’t a trivial endeavor.

The point is, throwing your hands up in the air and saying that people are just “selfish idiots” is little more than doomer shit. If that’s true then there is genuinely no hope. But if you understand the systems and dynamics at play in producing the world we see, you can better work to change it. How do we do that? Fuck if I know, but it’s what we have to figure out and do.

I’m sorry, who has the hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on buying elections, lobbying politician, and putting out propaganda to make sure that policies continue to favor consumption of fossil fuels, use of cars, lax environmental regulations for businesses, wars, and growth at any cost oriented consumption?

Is it the people driving in the cars on their way to work because they can’t afford to live close to where they work and there’s no adequate public transportation to get there? Last I checked it wasn’t.

People do have a responsibility to organize for collective action, but simply blaming them for living in the environment they were born into is missing the point on both moral culpability and practical action.

I always find it really funny when they don’t even bother with arguments anymore. They just present left policies as is, but say it in a way that shows they think that it’s obvious why these are bad. Like they shouldn’t even have to explain themselves.

As someone who has never been on a date but has watched a lot of romcom anime: a recurring theme that I see in them is about how you can’t be in love with someone if you don’t also love yourself. If you don’t believe you are worthy to be with another person, how can you ever accept their feelings even if they do come out and say it?

I’m not really going anywhere with this. It’s just something I’ve noticed.

Found the engineer.

Organic intelligence. Non GMO. Gluten free. *(may contain traces of lead and microplastics.)

I just ask the room full of magic talking lemmings. Although a lot of the time they’ll give you solutions that involve using the olde magiks.

EDIT: I keep thinking of additions to this joke, so I will shamelessly edit them in:

• Some of them are arch wizards and they will let you know this.

• Mugix

I’d say that I’d think I’d know if I had dyslexia, but I had a friend in college who didn’t find out until after he was in college. It’s hard to understand how that’s possible. He just said his school sucked and they thought he was just dumb when he had trouble reading. Somehow got into a top school though, so I guess he found a way to work around it or something.

That said, I don’t think I’ve really had a problem with reading. My best class was history and most of that was reading tons and tons of textbooks.

This has some 4chan green text food horror story vibes.

There are two characters like this in Little Witch Academia and one of them literally rides on a flying roomba.

Anime is trash and so am I.

That and making cold things hot and hot things cold.

Yes, because I view it as part of being a socialist. Uniting the working class means uniting ALL of the working class, and we can only do that through mutual respect and acknowledging and trying to remedy existing biases.

Unfortunately liberal feminism co-opted the movement at the mainstream level and has used it to legitimize the status quo. The fact that there are TERFs or people who call themselves feminists but support capitalism, which impoverishes women, and imperialism, which kills women around the world is insane. It clearly shows that those people don’t actually understand or care about bigotry. At best they want to make their own lives better and at worst they use it as cover to justify those things.

So yeah. I’m more than happy to associate myself with anyone willing to fight for equality, not so much girlboss “feminists.”

EDIT: Also on a personal level, I think something people misunderstand about feminism is that it’s not JUST for women. Men are also hurt by the patriarchy. The flip-side of the societal expectations for women to be passive, emotional, and attractive homemakers is for men to have the pressure of working outside the home, exposing themselves to violence in wars, suppressing emotions and self expression because those are associated with being feminine and if women are lesser, then that also makes them lesser, hence transphobia and less extreme versions of gender policing.

Feminism is good for men too. It’s good for trans people. It’s good for non-binary people. It’s good for anyone who doesn’t fit the rigid expectations society has burdened them with since birth. Even if you consider yourself to be a heterosexual cis man, do you never feel stifled by people not taking your emotions seriously or looking down on you for having them? Do you not wish that you could stay home and see your kids more?

Even for purely selfish reasons men should want to be feminists.

Personally I liked D3 after it got rid of the AH bullshit. For the same reason that a lot of people disliked it: It’s relatively low complexity. People will look down on that as dumbing it down, but to me it’s just getting rid of uninteresting filler. I can’t stand those giant skill trees full of +x% this and +y that. It’s boring AND overwhelming. I have no interest in trying to make my own build in those games. D3 had a small number of choices that for the most part felt distinct enough to understand why you’d choose one over the other.

I also really liked that brief period in WoW where they changed the skill trees to those sets of 3 choices each level breakpoint. It was really interesting thinking about which choices would be most useful for any given situation instead of just looking up a guide then forgetting about it until next expansion.

Alas, they went back to boring number increases because people mistake complexity for depth. This is why I really enjoy roguelikes. The well designed ones give you those bite sized choices with big impacts on your run and the depth comes from understanding the system and your current situation rather than mathing out the optimal set of stat increases.