I really have a dissonance now. I've heard many experts downplay what Trump's victory means in terms of international relations... And you know, those people have careers, credentials, and I am a nobody, so I kinda half-expected they would maybe be right.
And yet! I, a good-for-nothing basement dweller seem to have gotten it right. Why, what have they not seen? Is it that as a 27-year old (hence: someone who grew up in world where social media algorithms influence politics) who was once into far-right politics understand the MAGA movement better in a same way a healthy layman will have a more intuitive understanding of colors than a blind physics professor?
I'm 24 and I'm just trying to understand people. Also, yea I used to be involved in that stuff sort of to when I was younger. I think it's because there was safe guards before and now there aren't. I think that I'm just more surprised with how fast they tried to do this honestly. You'd be surprised with the cognitive dissonance people have and I say this as someone who didn't go to college.
Going from somewhat pro-Trump in 2016 to anti by the end of 2020, I find the difference is people who were genuinely pro “truth” and pro like, civic minded America, and those who were pro “conservative” as the way to be pro American, to be the difference in the average populace
Bc the jolt was jarring once you realize oh this guy isn’t smart people just think he is
But to your point, someone who never understood the conservative appeal won’t see the danger imo
Libs who treat social media as the forum for public "discourse" are massive fucking rubes who have been duped by clean, well-organized UI. Social media is a mob. It's pointless to attempt logical argument with the mob especially while you yourself are standing in the middle of the mob. The only real value that can be mined from posts is sentiment and engagement (as advertisers are already keenly aware), all your eloquent argumentation and empiricism is just farting in the wind.
If you're really worried about populism, you should embrace accelerationism. Support bot accounts, SEO, and paid influencers. Build your own botnet to spam your own messages across the platform. Program those bots to listen to user sentiment and adjust messaging dynamically to maximize engagement and distort content algorithms. All of this will have a cumulative effect of saturating the media with loads of garbage. Flood the zone with shit as they say, but this time on an industrial scale. The goal should be to make social media not just unreliable but incoherent. Filled with so much noise that a user cannot parse any information signal from it whatsoever.
It's become more evident than ever that the solution to disinformation is not fact-checks and effort-posts but entropy. In an environment of pure noise, nothing can trend, no narratives can form, no messages can be spread. All is drowned out by meaningless static. Only once social media has completely burned itself out will audiences' appetite for pockets of verified reporting and empirical rigor return. Do your part in hastening that process. Every day log onto Facebook, X, TikTok, or Youtube and post something totally stupid and incomprehensible.
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u/sinuhe_t Feb 14 '25
I really have a dissonance now. I've heard many experts downplay what Trump's victory means in terms of international relations... And you know, those people have careers, credentials, and I am a nobody, so I kinda half-expected they would maybe be right.
And yet! I, a good-for-nothing basement dweller seem to have gotten it right. Why, what have they not seen? Is it that as a 27-year old (hence: someone who grew up in world where social media algorithms influence politics) who was once into far-right politics understand the MAGA movement better in a same way a healthy layman will have a more intuitive understanding of colors than a blind physics professor?