Man, social media is becoming impossible. It was never a nice place, but these algorithms that are supposed to serve us what we want to see? They just literally don’t work for someone curious.
I’m prone to magical thinking. It’s an important frame for the world in my opinion. It’s the modern reflex to replace “My life is shit but I’m going to heaven.” In this post heaven world we can talk about manifesting and all that. But I’ve clearly used too many magical words as the social media algorithms for both TwiXtter and Facebook both keep pushing me towards ridiculous overexcited pattern matching posts. It is getting to the stage where I’m really feeling like it is being pushed on me.
Thankfully my brother is a scientist, and considerably more legit than the “scientists say” type scientists. Add to that the fact that I like to empirically test things, that I don’t take things on trust very often, that I’m always going to question the source. There’s a whole machine of absolute dogshit on social media these days, and there are some people, believe me, who are chugging it like foie gras geese.
We are in a war at the moment, and never forget how the Russians invented propaganda. I’m sure they’re at the heart of all the flat earth stuff etc that I’m getting at the moment. I’ve maybe clicked on a few too many links to people’s heavy handed stuff online about the bullshit alien war that’s not going on. Clicking on it doesn’t mean I give it any weight. I’m just curious to see the voices. Normally they are have a forced superiority, which of course immediately kills their message: “Stupid sheeple can’t see how the moon is actually a pigeon”. Intelligentish people who are still espousing it are likely deliberately going for something ridiculous just to highlight the thing at the heart of it: WE TAKE THINGS FOR GRANTED. We should test things, sure, but there’s not enough time to fucking test gravity just because some mook can make specious argument that it’s buoyancy or magic and that there’s some mysterious “down force” that helps us understand which way is down.
So yes, we likely haven’t tested a lot of the scientific theories we have inherited. We are too involved doing other things. We have lives to live while these people are being paid by the Russian state to get us all excited about nonsense in the hopes they can just tiptoe into Ukraine like they did into Crimea.
Mix this with the fact that we need to be lied to. We have made up society. There are all sorts of social consensuses going on. Cultures throughout history have rewarded some behaviours and squashed others. Now we are all knocking against each other but our rules are different. And the people who have always been best at propaganda are trying to shake us up from within.
Ugh.
Sorry I just hit yet another stupid stupid thing about the moon being full of metal or something, which doesn’t work if you think it’s made of cheese or a projection or whatever…
It’s really fun making stuff up. But there was a terrible AI imagine of a UFO spraying contrails, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. For whatever reason, people are trying to fob off stuff they’ve just made up as real. The person who made it knows it’s fake but as often as not they’ve convinced themselves it’s legit to send a fake picture because it backs up something they think is true.
I reckon about 15% of my good friends are currently conversant with AI. That’ll tip to 60 or 70 in the next year or two, and that’s when suddenly the guy who ate beetles for a dare at school has got the means to create plausible videos. By then there might be some regulation. But I doubt it. Any old idiot can mock up any old rubbish in seconds.
AlBarclay 