Comment by talkingtab
7 hours ago
Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.
There's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought about change would make the analysts less relevant.
It's a hard problem because it reduces to the fact that narcissists and sociopaths are a significant proportion of the population, and they're strongly attracted to money, power, attention, and status.
So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image.
Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.
Frankly, who are these people? Because this is just another "they" idle conspiracy theory.
"They" are against me.
Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other drugs as they age out - because being a trim fitness inflencer is easy in your 20s, keeping it going into your mid-30s is a lot more difficult.
I was thinking specifically of political pundits who are doing a roaring trade (in opinion columns, TV hits, book promotions etc) talking about authoritarianism and its many causal factors. They're curiously mute when it comes to discussing solutions, with very generic advice like 'go to a protest' or 'vote for the opposition' despite the abundant evidence from authoritarian regimes around the world of these tactics not being very effective. You never hear them talk about things like general strikes or mass civil disobedience campaigns for some reason.
reminds me of the college scene in the movie Tomorrowland where all the teachers going on and on about about the things that would end us and when she asked "Can we fix it?" and teacher is like "What?" "I get things are bad but what can we do?"
learned helplessness is really a problem, but personally all I have gotten is scorn and hatred for trying to make a difference/improve things that I managed/had control of. All people care about is precious number go up/ignoring the future while everyone around me is looking at me like I have two heads for not blindly following the insanity
what do we honestly do?
Find others likeminded locally and cooperate where opportunities present themselves.
What would you do? The system is very good at transmuting critiques of it into its own propagation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now
A learned helplessness as a diagnosis implies that there are things that can be done. But I can't see any. It may be because of a learned helplessness of course, so my inability to see what can be done can be a fact about myself, not about the world around me, but still... It is a catch 22, isn't it? Maybe not, but it is a self-reinforcing uncertainty loop. I'm not buying it.
Unfortunately the political movements most interested in the relationship between society and technology were wrapped up with Nazis and so the line of thinking is underdeveloped, as it has had to start again.
Ok. How do you propose one fights back? Do you really viscerally understand what it is you are fighting against?
fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork the internet.
The application layer has way more gravity than the networking one right now. You'd need to fork that for anything to happen.
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I mean, I've had pipe dreams of a parallel networking stack built on IPv6 with a killer app offering real peer-to-peer networking again. But who will deploy and maintain all the new IPv6 networking gear, infrastructure, undersea cables? This is not something within the purview of the average (or even above average) hacker any more; the encumbents are too firmly entrenched.
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But like...why?
This is basically "just don't use things you don't enjoy" and the trouble of our time seems to be the number of people who can't or won't do that.
It's somewhat an age thing but also definitely a lot of people in all generations never learn it: you can just stop using things. Walk away and suddenly find you never want to look back, and if you do it's entirely unappealing.