• Christoffer
    2.2k
    I guess I'm out of touch. I don't know anything about that.frank

    Search around for long enough to get the algorithm going and you will be flooded with zealot influencers popping up everywhere. He bought Twitter and it's become his own town square, not the public's. He's shouting in there and getting feedback from his crowd.

    I wonder if dictator military marches on town squares work for the symbolic town squares of public online spaces? :chin: It would be an apt visual image to how he's being reviewed at the moment.
  • frank
    16.4k
    Oh. I don't go on Twitter or whatever it's called.
  • Christoffer
    2.2k
    Oh. I don't go on Twitter or whatever it's called.frank

    Don't... it's like a bottomless maelstrom for ships of rational people to drown in.
  • frank
    16.4k
    Don't... it's like a bottomless maelstrom for ships of rational people to drown in.Christoffer

    I have a friend who tells me it went to shit after Musk bought it.
  • Christoffer
    2.2k
    I have a friend who tells me it went to shit after Musk bought it.frank

    I don't even know why people are still there. Why it's still used as some official channel for many officials and celebrities. There's been a surge towards BlueSky instead, so hopefully people go there eventually. If people really need it at all.
  • unenlightened
    9.4k
    Take a deep breath, and maybe have a stiff drink at hand.

  • unenlightened
    9.4k
    Limits to growth came up in the climate change thread recently. Here is the US trying to overshoot the limits as described some math dude trying to reason with politicians.

  • Moliere
    5k


    Alas, spending the suffering of future lives for our present pleasure is the morality we oossians have decided to bathe in.
  • unenlightened
    9.4k
    And here is some more detail. This is a bit long, sorry. But worth your time, I think. The comparison with the decline of the British Empire is particularly telling.

  • Christoffer
    2.2k


    As long as society promotes and values stupidity over expertise and knowledge, we will have this kind of world.

    The internet eventually formed the best way for the stupid to be louder than the wise, and they are constantly loud because they have time for it as they do not engage with knowledge with the time and care that the wise are. So the wise aren't heard, the few who speaks are drowned out by the mass of the stupid people who flock online as its the only place they get the feedback they crave for.

    Stupid people have always craved the attention they emotionally feel is unfairly given to the wise, but previously, you had to be wise and know a lot in order to be heard. No one would invite a stupid person into a news studio in order to comment on a serious matter. But the internet didn't have such gate keepers.

    And even the most stupid person will find their audience; like emotional gravity clustering together people into bubbles.

    My prediction is that there's going to be a collapse in society, but I believe it will be these bubbles that collapse. At some point, the stupidity will become such a singularity that it collapse in on itself and then we will have the remaining stupid people craving for guidance by the wise. Making it a virtue again to be educated, wise and an intellectual.

    Especially since the stupid masses drive away these educated people, at some point those stupid masses will only have one of their own guiding themselves. And we're somewhat seeing this with Trump and his political allies. And we see that many of the people who voted for him are now suffering the consequences. -How soon will they crave a wiser person to guide them, to understand they are too stupid to govern themselves?

    The fall into deeper and deeper stupidity will not go on forever. The stupid are doomed to shoot themselves in the foot. The question is what world that comes after; what principles and morals.

    Will there be an increased intolerance against the stupid? A rejection of equality based on it? A new form of intellectual class division landscape in which society is portioned up by intellectual ability?

    While in the light of how the word is today, that sounds much better, it's obvious how such a society easily spirals down into oppression.

    Regardless, any historical polarization ends in some form of large conflict that lifts up the intellectuals who tries to form a new paradigm for society. When and how that conflict appears is unknown, but since the internet is borderless... it will be borderless.

    Maybe the next world war, is a civil war for the entire planet. No nations, but the gathered polarized masses of the entire world. A non-patriotic war, based on imagined narratives that clustered together through emotional gravity and bias. Until enough people die to wake people up.
  • unenlightened
    9.4k
    The internet eventually formed the best way for the stupid to be louder than the wise, and they are constantly loud because they have time for it as they do not engage with knowledge with the time and care that the wise are.Christoffer

    I agree. A similar thing happened with the invention of the printing press, which played a major role in a Europe wide witch hunt over the course of the following century or so.
    https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/social-sciences/printing-press-witch-trials/

    We seem to have somewhat adapted or learned the pitfalls of printed matter; perhaps we will eventually adapt to the internet. Or is it that the internet is exactly that witchcraft that the ancients were so afraid of? :scream:
  • Christoffer
    2.2k
    We seem to have somewhat adapted or learned the pitfalls of printed matter; perhaps we will eventually adapt to the internet.unenlightened

    The printing press had people of power misuse it and people in power eventually gets overruled by history and the people. Internet has no ruler or power above, so the only way to keep the stupids from continuously spreading misinformation and disinformation is to either regulate what can be expressed online, similar to what can be spread through normal media (press ethics) and what can be uttered in the street (law), and that the consequences of breaking it is as severe as to make the people self-govern their expression.

    If that is too much for free speech absolutists, it may be that people get fed up with the trash pile that these stupid people create. The absolute pile of garbage that gets bigger and bigger with each idiot who spews their bs onto it, and the bots perpetuating and exponentially making it bigger. So people will migrate away from any online sphere that cannot regulate this type of behavior, eventually maturing into online spheres that are able to regulate in a similar manner as society outside of internet operates.

    The latter is most likely. We're already seeing people trying to find some other existence online than the regular Facebooks, TikToks and X. Bluesky is an example of an attempt at something opposite to X.

    But I think that the endgame would be to create actual public service social networks globally. My concept for that would be a UN-funded (by international funding from all democratic nations), social media which incorporates a number of services that operate like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok etc. but doing so through a collaboration against disinformation and misinformation that is more extensive than the billionaires are able to. Since it will operate as a non-profit, it will not drive algorithms for that profit and don't pull people into addictive attention economies that fuel ragebait and hate content.

    Such a site would probably function using a sophisticated AI that is used to interpret hate speech, misinformation and disinformation in real-time and if spotted freeze the content for more in-depth analysis. The running of these social medias and the continuous cleanup of bullshit will be the main focus of the non-profit company and funded by all free and normally functioning nations of the world with the aim to battle against services which operate on the previous type of capitalist gaining ideas and political manipulation of elections.

    Such a service would essentially create a divide between the free market versions (like the regular Facebook, X and TikTok), and this new non-profit version. As governments will promote these over the older types, it will get into the hands of young people faster and be more of a service to society than operating on profit and the market. It will feature no marketing content.

    Governments could then also band traditional market-driven social media, especially for young people and only enable these non-profit social medias to younger people. As they grow older and are given the choice to move over to other more profit-driven services, I believe that the ease of use, the known standards of the non-profit system and the disdain for marketing material being blasted everywhere on the older type social medias, will eventually strangle out the older actors in this field and remove them from society.

    A way of dismantling social media and how it looks today without creating a void of no social media at all. It may be that when older generations die, we will see more of this as more technical understanding generations get into more societal power.

    But I may be too much of an optimist. However, any crisis of society and civilisation leads to people trying to build something better. When the bad actors swing and hang, there's a responsibility for the survivors to learn from the mistakes made.
  • unenlightened
    9.4k
    This is certainly the heart of the challenges that we face. And this site faces, for example here.

    But the threat to decency and wisdom is at every level, from UN to government to every social group to each individual. 'Flood the zone' disrupts every agency as can be seen. I don't think it can be resisted until 'stupid' learns the hard way. I know that sounds pessimistic, but that is what I see - that the world has gone mad from top to bottom, and most of us will be dead before it comes to its senses. Like WW1, but worse.
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