Just took em a second to figure out how.
Turns out all it took was algorithms promoting hate speech, conservative view points and other rage bait.
As soon as the algorithm become engagement based, instead of “positive reaction” based,
ie. algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative, when it used to promote posts based on positive reaction.
So now ragebait dominates most social media algorithms.
Yeah, it’s precisely why I stopped using every social media except the fediverse. It was toxic to my mental health.
I feel safe assuming it’s been similarly toxic to everyone else’s, just some people haven’t zeroed in on that being the problem.
algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative
ESPECIALLY if those reactions are negative. Rage and fear are THE top engagement drivers and engagement means retention means ad impressions means dollars.
That it also means the end of democracy is immaterial to the billionaire ghouls in charge, of course.
It wouldn’t be hard to enact laws regulating how algorithms are allowed to use views, reactions and downvotes. Metrics like “Controversial” and Reddit’s “Hot” (that sums upvotes and downvotes like they’re all the same) would be forbidden and governments could demand deactivation of metrics, algorithms or even the entire platform.
Of course such “anti-ragebait” regulations wouldn’t fix the issue but I believe it would significantly mitigate the overall state of nowadays internet.
People love to talk about how ‘the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.’
It’s easy to talk about big dramatic battles.
The truth is that it’s really a never-ending struggle that requires sweat.
How many people bother to show up for primary elections? How many are willing to get a petition signed to get a good candidate on the ballot?
I do those things constantly and the fact that other people don’t infuriates me.
It’s like a group project and I’m doing my part but we still all fail because nobody else gives a damn.
I hate democracy and people now.
On one hand I would love to kick the collective ass of all the people who sat the election out.
On the other, I know that I don’t have the power to change things without them.
Back in WW2 a lot of people had to accept that the British, the Soviets, and the Americans were the only thing standing between them and the Axis. They had to give up control of their forces and hope for the best.
The quote is that the tree is “refreshed” with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we’d be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won’t take even the simplest of actions until they’re forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it’s desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who “aren’t really into politics,” by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn’t enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.
Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”
America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has entered the chat…
Look up the New Deal. Pretty good blueprint for a place to start.
The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We’ve never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren’t all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don’t.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
We weren’t vigilant. Quite the opposite, in fact.
reminds me of this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Note, though, that the Panopticon is also referred to as a “prison design”. So, quite the opposite of “freedom”, depending on how you see it.
if we want a breather we gotta upend the system.
not keep struggling with it.
Let me count the ways that upending the system isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
For the system to be upended in a meaningful way first means you’ve got an organized cadre in place. Savvy political operators who can make things happen.
The Left failed to get past the DNC twice with a popular candidate. The idea that the Left could get past the US Army is ridiculous.
Next, let’s look at what ‘upending the system’ would actually look like. Look at the hyperinflation in Germany after WW1. Or the Depression. Or maybe just the riots of the 1960s. Life isn’t a video game, and when the system fails the most vulnerable people are the ones who suffer the most.
Finally, do you really think that companies like Blackwater are just going to step aside and let themselves be swept away?
If the system goes down, it will be replaced by something much uglier.
none of the examples you came up with have anything to do with a worker revolution. yes, silly, it does takes time. and no, democrats have never been leftists.
do you have an actual idea to save the rest of that broken democracy? because its already being replaced with something uglier. you seem to think fascism is gonna stop itself?
What did the Arab spring give the people in the end?
Syria? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Lybia? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Tunesia? temporary improvements now to be revoked by a new authoritarian
Egypt? temporary improvements followed by an US backed coup installing an even worse military dictator
Maybe we were just naive in thinking that social media back then wasn’t already doing the bidding of governments against people.
One could say the same about the Liberal Revolution of 1848. It failed, and yet it took many years before much of the liberal and progressive values became culturally ingrained.
“The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”- Martin Luther King Jr
Good or bad, that’s why any ideas never die. That’s why the powers-that-be love to censor.
The conclusion: as soon as a country is destabilized, you can bet your ass the US is going to come in and fuck up any democratic progress in their own favor.
Tunesia is the only one with a success story where the mass protests were successful in creating reform (new president and constitution). In the other countries, the mass protests for reform were violently suppressed, and still are in the present day.
Summary of each country
What has happened since the so-called Arab Spring? Eight years later, human rights are under attack across the region. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, have been killed during armed conflicts that continue to rage in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The Syrian conflict has created the largest refugee crisis of the twenty-first century, humanitarian crisis.
Tunisia is the only relative success story. It has a new constitution, some justice for past crimes, but human rights are still under attack.
In Egypt, peaceful activists, critics of the government, and many others remain in jail. Torture and other ill treatment are rife. Hundreds have been sentenced to death and tens of thousands put behind bars for protesting or for their alleged links to political opposition. However, we saw that the current president was just authorized to stay in power until 2034.
In Bahrain, the authorities are silencing dissent.
Libya has turned into chaos. There are many armed conflicts all across the country, and all sides have committed war crimes and serious human rights abuses.
In Syria, the region’s bloodiest armed conflict emerged in response to the brutal suppression of mass protests by the government. Atrocious crimes are being committed on a massive scale. Half the population has been displaced.
Yemen is an ongoing tragedy, with a Saudi Arabia–led coalition (principally with the United Arab Emirates), but with the US supplying arms, providing refueling and intelligence, and so forth. Here’s an interesting Tucson connection. The Emirates just bought $1.6 billion of arms from Raytheon, so the Tucson economy stays strong. The Saudi Arabia–led coalition air strikes and shelling by Houthi forces have killed more than ten thousand civilians, forty thousand wounded. Ten million are now in jeopardy of famine and disease. Some of the attacks amount to war crimes.
The Arab Spring, which started out as an enormously hopeful movement for progressive change, has now largely been subjected to brutal repression and pushback from the forces of the status quo ante. It represents a poignant and tragic example of social struggle.
- Consequences of Capitalism - Chapter 6 - Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone
Democracy implies a system to translate people’s will into action, and that implies both physical institutions for collecting information relating to the demands of the population, physical technology for processing that information, and physical institutions that can act on those demands.
The problem is that westerners treat political systems as if they’re entirely built upon vibes. You can go to the poorest place in the world and as long as you have good vibes, as long as you get enough people to say the right “democracy” slogans and do the right “democracy” rituals, then you can introduce a true utopian democracy.
The problem is they ignore that we live in a physical world and not a vibes-based world, all societies are built upon a particular material foundations. The idea that you can go to a country that is so ridiculously impoverished that barely anyone can even read, like in Afghanistan, and then through good vibes convert it into a western-style democracy, is just completely ridiculous. The institutions just aren’t there, it takes decades to build that.
Westerners then use their vibe-based politics as justification to destroy these countries. “If you don’t agree that we should go to war with them, you’re just a dictator lover! You have bad vibes!!” Even westerners took centuries to actually evolve to their pseudodemocracies they have now, but they refuse to let other countries go through this same process. They insist they must skip this development process and just become western-style democracies right now, or else they’ll get bombed into the stone age, or the CIA will foster some sort of coup or color revolution to overthrow the government and plunge it into civil war or a military dictatorship.
But all this endless war does is make it harder to develop, so in reality western countries end up being the biggest barrier towards actually moving towards democracy. They keep destabilizing them, either through war, coups, or color revolution, which destroys the physical foundations of their society, destroys their institutions and infrastructure, and this makes it more difficult for them to actually progress as a society, and then westerners condemn them and paint them as genetically inferior for not having progressed as much.
You still assume, that western countries would like to establish democracies as they would consider democracy in itself a value.
But you have plenty of cases where actual democracies were overthrown violently in order to install a compliant authoritarian regime. Iran, Chile, Egypt…
It is never about democracy and the “vibes” are just a farce. It is about installing compliant regimes that grant cheap access to their natural resources, labor, trade routes, markets…
There’s a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don’t pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
Anarchism is the worst social order, except for all others that have been tried.
Anarchism can’t defend itself. That’s the point. Either it gets coopted and recuperated under capital, or it gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes.
While Marxism-Leninism gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes and gets recuperated under capital after that.
I mean, anarchism was the initial state, so it has been tried. It seems that it is not very resilient against being replaced by other systems, so it can’t really be the best system in the real world.
Unlike the resilient anti-capitalism of Marxist states amirite.
It’s almost like you need to learn and evolve from the mistakes of the past to create systems that work in the present.
For example, when white colonizers land on your shores, don’t ignore them and start an escalating series of tribal wars to sell them war-slaves.
Also, maybe don’t have slaves.
See? We’ve already improved on proto-anarchism.
The anarchists love to come out of the woodwork whenever democracy is having a bad day, then they disappear whenever someone mentions medicine being more of a global effort.
Yes, I’m sure an entirely fragmented world full of companies protected by privatized militias would be extremely cooperative, with the added bonus modifier of there being no borders.
Yeah, how is that going in the Arab Springs countries though? Was that actually a glorious people’s uprising, or just another despot using an angry mob to do his bidding?