Comment by SoftTalker
10 hours ago
> I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation
Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.
Cheap distribution makes manipulation easier, not harder. The time it takes for a bad actor to capture attention is much smaller now. It used to be you'd read one news article about a story once a day in a newspaper and maybe once more in the evening news. In between you could think about it, talk about it with other people you know in real life, etc.
Now you're getting meme after meme of the same story multiple times throughout the day, twisted in so many ways. And since we all have our feeds/algorithms adjusted to suit our own tastes we're all getting our own silo'd view of things and can barely rely on a shared set of facts.
All that makes manipulation of people much easier.
And the memes are all just one sentence gotchas with no real substance. And that's how people ingest the news. Headlines and Memes. Who needs actual articles?
> it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.
As a 52 year old my life experience disagrees.
It is much easier now because information flows both ways and "They" have a lot of information on you (and everyone else) and can use that information to manipulate you with algorithmic ragebait, and to extract maximum rents (in all aspects of commerce, not just literal rents) from you, etc.
Not that things were ever perfect in the past, they certainly weren't, but increasingly so much of everything is literally just an outright fucking scam these days and all of it is being turbocharged by various forms of "AI" adjacent technology and increasing deregulation.
I really didn’t experience the early internet that way.