!fedimemes@feddit.uk

!bocchitherock@sopuli.xyz will welcome you.

Asking or being asked in a way that is menacing, because some couples find that hot as hell, is not mutually exclusive with “no” still being one of the options.

Fine.

I’ll leave you with this. Modern media might go through a hundred times more content every passing year.

But I think the average speed at which people can change their minds, or the number of times the average person does it throughout their life, is exactly the same as it was ten thousand years ago.

There is a maximum speed at which collective humanity can figure certain things out, and while some things are happening faster than ever, others, are happening at a fixed speed and at a scale no-one alive today will live to see.

I want you to think about what that means when it comes to the way mankind learns to apply something like social media, or any other technology, towards doing good.

The change I hope social media can facilitate, isn’t the kind that happens in 50 years. It’s the kind that happens over several hundred. Maybe more.

The warnings were there from the start, and experts in sociology and communication were warning from pretty much the full suite of effects since day one. Nobody listened, though. Mass media was fixated on the downsides of TV until two billion people were on Facebook using their pictures to train facial recognition and being roped into misinformation-driven frenzies.

I’ll quote my other comment here: Some things only change once every person who ever shared that thought, is gone. That takes several hundred years, at least, if it happens at all.

The stuff I think is at play here, is the part of human collective consciousness that is really, really, really slow to change.

Something people around here like to forget is that a bunch of that “Facebook incited genocide” stuff didn’t happen through algorithmically selected posts, it happened through Whatsapp and Facebook chatbooks that aren’t driven by their centralized engagement engines. The toxic patterns are built into the tech when applied en masse.

Not the tech. Us. This stuff happens, because that is how humans work. It’s where the word “meme” comes from. How we conceive ideas, spread them, and then alter them as we spread them, optimizing the idea to spread as effectively as possible, to the point it may no longer have anything in common with the original thought.

And yes, I think the core mechanics of this stuff are inherent to massive, instant peer-to-peer communication.

This stuff happens using the very first form of communication we ever used as a species. Word of mouth. How in the world can it be inherent to mass media, except in the way it amplifies it?

Overcoming our own flaws and the biological biases of our brains is one of the challenges we face as a species, and another trial that cannot be opted out of.

50 years is nothing. Its not even a generation. Tech might move faster than ever, but collective human culture, the REAL core of it? The truly basic stuff, like “anyone can learn to read”, is as slow as ever.

Some things only change once every person who ever shared that thought, is gone. That takes several hundred years, at least, if it happens at all.

Did you not understand when I layed out how global communication can facilitate learned compassion on a global scale, allowing for world peace? As well as the kind of decision making that doesn’t destroy the planet? That’s my “revolutionary application”.

How if, we can stop caring about whatever men like Putin and Trump care about, on a cultural level, then the way people like them navigate society can become utterly unacceptable on a socially fundamental level.

And before you say, “that’s stupid, it’ll never happen” that’s probably what the nobility thought about peasants learning to read.

I think that every person on earth has the capacity to be raised into a compassionate being that would not sacrifice the well being of others to enrich themselves beyond their basic needs. Or at least enough of us can be, that the ones who can’t, are too few to matter.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Or maybe, in a couple hundred years, it will be untinkable that children ever worked in sweatshops.

But social media was a mistake.

You honestly think there is no way to have the good without the bad, and that if we survive it, we’ll opt to leave it behind entirely, rather than figure out how to apply it to do good, the way we have done with every technology before it?

People waited to be enraged about the impact until they could attribute it to artificial intelligence.

I disagree. I was seeing the problems and thinking it needed to work differently from the day I started using it. The main reason I abandoned Facebook for Reddit over fifteen years ago was that Reddit was the most suitable platform to apply towards what I thought social media should actually be for.

People died. A LOT of people died.

Yup. And they have, and will continue to, this time, too. Mankind has not found a way to integrate a new technology into the way it functions without finding the no-no buttons by actually pushing them. Except maybe with nuclear weapons, and I’m still not sure we pulled that one off.

Now, I used to think the people at the time saying print was bad and had to be controlled (and there were many) were the equivalent of modern social media naysayers and the Internet would bring a similar expansion of human consciousness past the growing pains.

They were right though. Lives absolutely would have been spared, in the short term, had the printing press remained uninvented. We only know for sure that it probably ended up being for the better, because we get to look at it with a couple hundred years of hindsight.

And even then we probably CAN find a bunch of ways it could have been done with much less blood spilled!

I don’t necessarily think we can go back but I also don’t think that the upsides are nearly as many as with print.

We literally can’t know. And it’s a pandora’s box type problem, we are doing this, there is no undo. I think there’s a bunch of positives that social media can realize. I have absolutely no clue whether they will be.

All I’m saying is, social media isn’t its problems. Nuclear technology isn’t just bombs and waste, it’s also cleaner energy and life-saving warmth, and so many other things.

I don’t take issue with you saying modern social media is doing bad things (even beyond what commercial social media does). I do take issue with the kind of claim that goes along the lines “insert technology” is wrong in the first place.

Yes. That is like saying food is bad. Can it be? Yes. Does it have to be? No. Is it optional? No. This stuff isn’t going back in the box.

So then why attribute good/bad to the concept itself? Either you eat well, or you don’t. Not eating, isn’t one of the options. This has been true for every major paradigm shift in history. And not a single time has mankind pulled off not having a big bite of absolute trash while figuring out which is which.

I try to be one of the ones who figure out which parts are safe to eat. The more people are like that, the sooner we can stop chowing down on the poison. I hope.

As for the optimism you keep trying to attribute, please stop. I’m disagreeing with some of what you claim, not that things are shit and will continue to be shit. I fully agree there. People like to eat trash, and will continue to do so.

Telling you salads exist, isn’t exactly optimistic when I’m fully expecting the diets of most people to consist of 100% trash for the foreseeable future.

But there IS an option besides not eating at all. Which, when it comes to communication, same as food, isn’t optional. For you individually, sure, modern society, no.

Do you consider book authoring to be social media, then? Should print be abolished? How is modern social media more than just a supercharged version of writing down your ideas, printing a shitload of copies, and handing them out in the street?

Also, you keep trying to make this sound optimistic and making it creepy.

I’m fully aware. I’m not exactly excited about it, rather it’s something I think is necessary for human society to function at the scale it has grown to.

And we’re not going to become an actual hive mind. But unless it becomes “normal” to make decisions in a way that doesn’t screw someone over on the other side of the world, down from us as individuals, up to our representatives in government, the world will continue to be shitty. That’s what I’m referring to when I say “hive-mind” or “global” thinking.

We used to be able to live our lives within the confines of a tiny plot of land, and nothing you did within that plot of land affected anything outside that plot of land.

That is no longer the case. The materials of our homes, clothes and devices are made of, and the labor to assemble them. Our food, and the immense logistics around producing it just in time for us to consume.

All these things and so many more, and how they are achieved, have global implications.

As a species, we don’t get to go back to the simple life anymore. We have responsibilities now. Ones we will likely fail to live up to, sure, but responsibilities nonetheless. And I don’t think we can even attempt to function as a species without global broadcast communication, or whatever you want to call it.

That actually doesn’t mean individuals can’t opt out. If we can figure out how to make every t-shirt cruelty free, then yeah, you don’t need to think about which one you wear anymore. And even before then, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with some living life as passengers in society.

I have started blocking US media actively in my feeds to avoid those specifically.

That’s fine. The social media I think would be best for us is one that nowhere near everyone needs to engage with. Not everyone needs to connect globally, the same way you don’t need to know everyone at work, or every person in your city.

Everyone using it all the time is something commercial social media strives for. Because it needs to make money. And not just some, but ALL the money.

When it comes to communication, there IS such a thing as too much. If you only ever talk, then you never do. And if you refer back to my original comment, the kind of social media I want to see, takes very real effort to properly engage with. That kind of social media can’t be something you use every day. Or even the kind every person wants to, or needs to, use.

We don’t need to connect every person to every other person. But I think there does need to be systems that connect some people in every community, to a couple other people in every other community. And each connection doesn’t even need to be the same few people.

The part that matters is that if done right, I think social media could teach us to stop playing the prisoners dilemma by endlessly defecting on a planetary scale.

That’s something communication of all kinds achieves on a daily basis in millions of tiny instances. No-one has really built a system of communication around aiming for exactly that. In fact, most modern platforms very deliberately do the opposite.

You can also just compare it to communication in general. Maybe you can go your whole life never asking what other people think, but I can’t, nor do I want to.

And I can not only find out what the person next to me is thinking, I can essentially sample people any place on earth on their thoughts and feelings. I think that is beautiful beyond words.

But I’m hardly an optimist. I am fully aware that we have utterly missed the train on climate change. Food production will crash. Millions will starve.

If you take the time to actually read what I’m saying, I’m not discounting the issues social media has, but I simply do not agree with your assessment that social media and its problems are one and the same.

Now, if you want to discuss whether we’ll actually pull off solving them in time to not go extinct, that is a coinflip I wouldnt bet on.

But do you honestly believe that your comment, and mine, being possible, is a bad thing? Are the groups organizing relief efforts through social media after the LA fires, a bad thing?

I’m not sure how you define “social media” but to me it’s an extremely wide term. To say it’s all bad, is mad. You might say the good things can be done in other ways, but what are those other ways, that don’t fit the definition of social media?

We are a species of sentient social individuals, currently transitioning from national scale thinking into planetary scale thinking.

If the internet and social media can’t be molded into the tools we need to boot-strap pseudo-hivemind-thinking onto humanity, I don’t know what can.

Say what you will, but for us to take care of this planet, the individuals most in need, and overall just make better decisions on a global scale, we need that, badly.

That’s like saying food is bad. Most of society might be eating trash fast food with zero nutritional value, but that doesn’t mean a healthy diet isn’t possible.

I would posit that the fact I can converse with anyone anywhere at any time, makes the world a more connected and potentially peaceful place.

In fact I’d go so far as to argue, that thanks to the internet and social media, we are closer to global consensus as a species than ever before, in history.

Yeah, mostly because for a lot of human existence, we straight up didn’t know what was happening even a couple hundred miles away.

But now we do. THAT IS GOOD. And that applies to any thought, event, or experience, be it a natural disaster or the latest chapter of a furry fanfic.

It used to be that people only formed communities where geographic proximity allowed for it. Social media has the potential to remove that limitation.

Does that come with downsides? Yes, but only if we let it. And I wouldn’t even say that the immediately obvius downsides are the most pressing ones, not right now.

The most pressing issue with mainstream social media, is the fact it needs to make money, without its actual users being the customers. Instead of connecting people that wouldn’t otherwise have crossed paths, or maintaining connections that would have otherwise broken, commercial social media maximizes engagement, which coincides with maximizing critical apathy, radicalization, and moral outrage.

Algorithms impose artificial forces that act on human social behaviour. A really big one is that people are a lot less likely to form communities online with people they don’t already agree with about most things.

That has never been true in reality. People absolutely do come together and overcome differences. Reality often requires it. People who live or work together used to HAVE to figure it out, or go mad. Social media could be imposing that requirement globally.

Instead, because the effort required is a turn-off, commercial social media platforms are designed to not just let people avoid it, but to encourage them to do so.

We may be closer to global consensus than we have ever been before, but some of the systems we have built to supposedly facilitate communication, are actively taking us further away from it. But that’s not inherent in how social media works. It’s because of how it’s been designed.

Engaging with society for real, takes effort, and a lot of it. Every piece of difference between how you personally view the world, and how everyone else does, tires you. You have to constantly do mental and emotional work, in order to comprehend the people you are engaging with. When actually doing that, no one can spend all day online. It tires you out, even as you enjoy the exchange of thought.

But since that doesn’t make maximum money, who cares about connecting people across the world and facilitating mutual understanding!? Here’s a post that confirms what you already think about that other political party, that other state, and that other country, and those other people! Here’s two dozen more! Here’s content you didn’t even know about, and that is really a nothingburger, but which our algorithm has determined will flame up your feelings like a second coming of Hitler!!!

TBF, if it’s a small farm, they could easily list all the cows for a certain batch of product.

Also private equity.

If there’s a “right” amount of sleep, I’ve yet to figure out what it is.

There is on mine.

I just pet him a bit a pull him closer, and pretty quick he’s opting to snooze right along with me.

Oh I’m sure there’s still some super mean spirited stuff that happens today, but it remains interpersonal and fairly private.

The old timey stuff was more like the kind where some scientist would go out of their way to straight up publicly slander people with ideas they thought were bad.

The modern equivalent would be like scientists calling each other “smooth brained” on twitter for proposing new theories that didn’t immediately make sense.

Scientist trash talking used be savage af.

Nowadays though there have been enough “trashed” theories that later turned out correct, that people have learned not to discount any possibility.

Adorkability can be super effective. It’s just that you have no idea whether it’s working.

Why would it be retroactive?

If so, then sounds okay, as long as the person knows they have been blocked, would suck to write a well written comment in reply to someone who blocked you, and unknowingly your comment is hidden for everyone because you don’t realize you were blocked.

That’s exactly what should happen. If someone can just instantly know when they get blocked, nothing stops them from instantly signing up with alt account to continue bitching at someone.

This is less of an issue with centralized social media, but with federation you absolutely should take measures like this to curb at least some portion of targeted harassment.

And if you bothered someone enough for them to block you, not being allowed to stand on their soapbox anymore (not being able to make comments on their posts visible to everyone else) is a really weird thing to worry about.