Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • Thats what I am talking about. Of course it would not in the long run ‘work’ or ‘make sense’, but it would be essentially Waco 2.0, with the potential this time to embolden various other armed and dumb and violent right wingers all around the country, of which there are more, and they are more extreme and angry than during the Militia Movement 90s.

    I grew up with a dad whose politics were heavily shaped by Ruby Ridge in WA.

    While that situation was obviously a use of an absurd amount of force and arguably entrapment, such people like my dad now spend their days manufacturing/assembling illegal firearms in their garage, as they blather on about how Antifa did Jan 6th and Tom Hank’s son kills rapes and eats babies for their adrenochrome, and i strongly get the impression there are a lot of similarly extreme and delusional people doing similar illegal dangerous nonsense all around America.

    Powder keg.



  • vexikron@lemmy.ziptoLord of the memes@midwest.socialMy one true love
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    1 year ago

    At this point in the evolution of internet culture, I am going with either Tumblr, 4chan or 9gag users.

    The most terminally online, disconnected from the real world people.

    Sure, you can be addicted to Facebook, Insta or TikTok, but those people basically /might/ know that urban dictionary exists, but the idea that /they themselves can post to it/ is unlikely to occur, due to years of addiction to /only the platform i am on matters/ ideology.

    Could possibly be Twitter users but those people also seem likely to fall into the /one true social platform/ kind of thinking and fail to realize there are other intractable elements to internet websites outside of what is extremely popular.


  • vexikron@lemmy.ziptoLord of the memes@midwest.socialFroda
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    1 year ago

    I met him in a Shire, straight edge and dutiful, no pipe weed for him, but you know that he’s goin’ higher-

    Froooooda!

    Fr Oh Dee Aye Frooohda!

    He spoke in a curious yet humble way, always modest with surprises, you know that he’ll save the day-

    Froooooda!

    Fr Oh Dee Aye Frooohda!




  • I completely agree regarding mobile OS’s.

    I am currently writing this on an Android phone that is basically as de googled as i can get it via installing f droid, then the aurora store and neo store to replace everything I can with open source stuff, remove as many permissions for everything as possible such that it still functions, etc.

    Problem is my computer was trashed, and I cannot risk accidentally bricking this phone right now, so no safe way to root this thing, using only itself, in a way that is 100% guaranteed exists, at least as far as I am aware.

    Anyway… good luck explaining any of this to non tech savvy or non tech nerds. Quite literally the vast majority of them have already had their brains rotted via aforementioned social apps…

    Basically we more or less live in a kind of cyberpunk dystopian zombie apocalypse: nearly all social media apps are equivalent to hard drugs that cause dependency, ruin attention spans, and generally drive nearly all users into echo chambers that cause extremism of some kind or another, steal much of your attention, alienate you from real world interactions, and as you mention are functionally both mass spying devices for governments, and for corporations to perfect market research and become even more effective at selling what is nearly always overpriced garbage, or laughably mundane and unoriginal ‘content’ of some kind.

    Try explaining this to people, and that the only way to avoid it, not even to fight this but just to avoid this is to… learn things and give up their digital drugs?

    In my experience they nearly always respond with emotional violence, social ostracization, and sometimes even physical violence.


  • So, Dunbar’s number comes into play here.

    Super summarized, in 1993 an anthropologist (guess his last name), made a compelling argument that the average person cannot maintain more than about 150 meaningful relationships.

    This idea has since been generally embraced by many scientists, and to my knowledge, the basic concept has been reaffirmed many times.

    A more recent study in 2021 criticizes Dunbar’s original methodology, but functionally reinforces the main concept, just concluding that via a more comprehensive statistical analysis along the lines of Dunbar’s methodology, the 95% confidence interval is basically between 3 and 520 people.

    https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158

    Anyway, yeah, the phenomenon of celebrity fame, and more recently parasocial relationships very clearly show that many, many people are seriously changed and challenged by being surrounded by, and interacting with a functionally endless number of fans, who are also critics.

    The internet is, at this point, replete with people who turn into extremely shitty people, develop mental disorders, in some cases kill themselves, etc, because of the way that having a large ‘following’ warps your mind.

    But, fast forward almost 15 years after Malcolm Gladwell largely popularized the concept of Dunbar’s number amongst academics, intellectuals, Social Media went from a curious internet phenomenon seeming like it might be neat, might be a fad…

    …To basically warping the fabric of reality itself via cutthroat and extremely exploitative business decisions causing more or less the ‘norm’ nowadays to be constantly flooded with content and constantly pressured to post content.

    Especially in America, but obviously also in many other regions… many, many people suffer serious mental health problems from using popular social media apps, but it has become the norm… because they have been intentionally designed to be addictive.

    To conclude: go touch grass basically, but maybe also try to remember the before time, and just uninstall apps that control you and make you mentally unstable.