4Chan / Twitter values "For the lulz" nation who thinks Fox News is hilarious, a 78 year old "edge lord" leading the nation as a shit-bird Tweet king on the toilet is funny. As long as everything keeps people entertained with technology.
“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT 1974
What's interesting is that you want to remove the voices of the idiots and morons who share ideas. Go across the whole world and force them shut up with guns or something? They can't publish a book and it not be allowed to be imported into the USA?
I far more concerned about the people who seek out bad. Doesn't matter if ChatGPT or some other artificial intelligence generates a bad idea. It is the people who line up to consume it that is the population that concerns me.
Oh, we found a lifestyle that wastes 10x the resources and keeps factories running day and night... oh we created social machines, so flock to dehumanization messages every hour of every day.
The people who wake up every day and say: Twitter turned the USA to shit, you know what we need: even MORE Twitter. Let's do Bluesky. Anonymous no-identity shit talk of Americans insulting Americans and calling each other dumb and stupid each and every day. That's what the world needs in year 2024 and year 2025. Short-length junk shit-talk that has throwaway accounts and reaction responses that scroll off the screen for a new round to start every 4 hours in refresh.
Disposable trash content, that's what we upvote on Bluesky, Lemmy, Reddit, Twitter / X, HDTV news networks, everywhere.
“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
::: ___________
"The truth is, it's getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality," The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: "I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is." - October 19, 2024 - America's gullibility crisis, Zachary Basu