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We're living in the disinformation age, where people silo themselves in media, including news, that reinforces whatever they want to believe. Eventually their views will run into cold, hard reality, but even then some will continue to live in denial.
Yep. I try not to do that. Discussion is good when done in good faith. It's too bad the disinformation age also has AI agents and censorship. Man. It's just wild. The censorship. We educated ourselves and now we have the next generation growing up in slop but not knowing their in slop. Or worse, knowing but having know way to escape it as all methods of escape are cut off. So many sides of digital enlightenment being attacked. I don't know if we'll escape it. Information has become entertainment. Activism is just performance.
People aren't mad enough.
I hope you're right though. I hope we find a way. Likely the US is fucked but that doesn't mean humanity is fucked. Action still has inpact. It's hard to remember that, but it does.
Things tend to turn in cycles, and we are experiencing the end of a cycle similar to that which occurred in the late 1920s and led into WWII. Billionaire Ray Dalio put out a nice ELI5 type video a few years back summarizing his book "Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order" that basically puts into the context of history what we are currently going through. I had read his book back in 2022, and things have significantly progressed precisely as anticipated in the 4 years since it came out. In my opinion, things will come to a head this year, probably in the fall. I believe that we are currently in the late stages of excess, similar to the late 1920s, and that we will have a "blow off top" in the stock market and the biggest financial crisis of all time, and I'm not the only one. Look at what has been happening to the price of gold, which is currently over $5K/oz and has been on the greatest bull run of all time, which has largely been driven by purchases from the world's central banks. This is the world shifting away from the dollar as the reserve currency, which will only accelerate as the dollar collapses. My greatest concern is that Trump will use the chaos that erupts to nakedly seize power and dispense with the ruse that he's a president and not a king.
Ironically, sites like this very one we're on now seem tailor-made to enhance that effect.
Like what someone said? Upvote and respond with supportive comments. Don't like it? Downvote, denigrate, block, defederate. Eventually people sort themselves out into communities where they "belong" and stop seeing what other people are saying, and they start to think that everyone shares their views.
I try not to lock myself into a community like that. I like data and fact supported by evidence. I tend to filter myself as needed. Federation has a tribalism problem but I haven't seen it as toxicity present in most of the main spaces. The fringe server like hexbear...sure. I keep my nose there too. They're funny. The smart phone and social media in general has wrecked our ability to self regulate in public digital spaces. And the algorithm broke the upvote system that used to help show a level of class solidarity between people in different backgrounds. I can't say how much was intentional and how much we slipped into, but we all need to make an effort to regulate ourselves.
Tribalism is the enemy of progress.
Even more ironically, my point is illustrated by my comment itself. It's already getting downvoted heavily.
Guess that's not an opinion that people want to see here, eh?
Yeah, I'm tired and got snippy myself. It's late and I should be asleep. There's a thread-bare line between keeping a line of dialogue open and being suseptible to brainwashing. It's hard to self-regulate sometimes.
Sorry about that. The instinct to just bark at someone online is pavlovian. Trained into us by doom scrooling and positive reinforcement from having the behavior upvoted.
I wrote a paper on it actually. More people should try to be aware of how many ways they're getting happy chemicals from comments and upvotes.
I try to keep social media (in general) framed as a casino.
There are plenty of reasons to not want to engage with the "other side". Exposing yourself to different viewpoints in general? All well and good. Having a discussion with people who think a fascist bombing Iran means Biden is responsible for rising gas prices? What exactly does that add to my life? Until MAGA cultists can prove they understand basic reality their opinions are useless (at best) cult propaganda lies that should be shunned from public discourse.
Granted there aren't too many trumpets on the fediverse, but in light of the gas price comment OP of this thread I don't think lemmy shows the echo chamber you accuse it of.
To be fair, the vote ratio on the comment I above that I said was being heavily downvoted has now recovered; it initially got hammered with nothing but downvotes but now it's at about a 2:1 upvote:downvote ratio.
The subjects that get "filtered" vary from community to community, but it's pretty easy to find non-political topics where it's clear that there's no desire to "expose yourself to different viewpoints in general" in most Fediverse communities. You can't just dismiss them all as being "well that particular viewpoint is just cultist propaganda" without that being exactly the thing I'm pointing out as a problem.