Me too.

My point here isn’t to shit on the left just to shit on them. It’s to at least get discussion if not find others who see it too. I think we’re asleep. Maybe hoping if we just play the ethical long game that maybe it’ll all return. In my mind we’re standing on the beach watching the tide recede after an earthquake. Like most thing stuff is weird, but they’re not really tracking that they need to start acting now if it isn’t already too late.

My hope is people get a fire under there ass and first admit that we have fucked up and it’s time to start firing up our own grass roots efforts. Download gimp. Get back on social media since we were never going to make a dent in their profits. Start using all these tools even AI to resist and present a front against these modern nazis. Play fucking dirty if we have to. People bitch about money but that money is only doing what we do for fun. Instead of obsessing about beans and moths, let’s get back to being political and taking ground.

Lemmy could be a staging ground with the way it is built. Because when a site is a threat, they’ll use every capitalist lever they can to squash it. They’ll bring in moderation teams. They’ll bring in ads. They’ll bring in the tools we didn’t resist. And if they do, we stand up a new instance without that shit. But we gotta do something to fire us up or it is only going to get worse.

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Which goes to my point. You fought wrong. What i see is that the left is very likely manipulated by right wing interest groups way more than people want to admit. I think for decades now, they have targeted leftist online for issues we traditionally dominated and redirected people into areas that were very ineffective. Meanwhile they socially engineered the right side and MAGA to actually effective social engagement. After decades the left is just a dead in the water idea with people who no longer know how to use the internet correctly for social engineering and engagement. The only time the left rallies is when the effort is the most high effort, high energy, low reward movement people could possibly imagine.

The left in the past were intelligent intellectual building and innovating things. That is no longer the case. We’re resting on the laurels of the best and looking around at lemmy should make it very obvious how true this is.

The sad reality i think people need to understand its the MAGA isn’t winning just because of money. They’re wining because they’re putting effort in areas that the left don’t even realize are important. They are playing chess and the left aren’t even playing because competition makes the left feel anxious.

I have multiple people in my life on the right who spend all their time online posting and networking and planning. They will shit post all day. Between the 3 of them, they probably create tons of content. Let alone sharing and promoting others content.

People on the left I know will read an article. Can’t be bothered to share or even upvote. Maybe they’ll write a comment like “This sucks, Trump is stupid” and then they go look for star trek memes all day. Give this behavior 20 years for the kids today to grow up. The global cultural image of the left right now is a weak, gutless screaming loser who nobody wants to admit to being outside of small circles. Kids today hate the left. It’s going to get so much worse.

Yea it’s so crazy. Lol

Everything is fine. Nazis are marching in streets again primarily driven by online recruitment. Billionaires are investing in removing leftist from digital spaces to facilitate this. But because I care, I’m obsessed.

I’ll just choose to hang out here with the people who say they oppose this stuff but really, they’re just what, posting about beans and moths while nazis take over the government, March in the street and feed children their content through multiple pipelines that are growing because there’s fuck all resistance. After all the “resistance” is busy trying to decide which hole they want to hide in.

You would be a supporter of capitalist. The capitalist needed to take the internet away from the left. It was hostile to making capital. Early days people were much more aware of defending it against capitalist which like you said, people were tracking how capitalist ruined all other frontiers and left them dried out husks that stifled originality, creativity and actual innovation. Look at the leftovers from the early days. Websites from them were focused on free use and sharing information freely, gnu, Winamp, VLC, sites like reddit, digg, Wikipedia wouldn’t exist with today’s internet if they were created today. Capitalist took over.

Keychain just a stand in for anything. More like how someone making videos of making key chains used patent trolls to build tools to scan all the videos they can in order to find users they can take down. Just one example. The little lefty entrepreneur was used to beat the old school leftists into the dirty on behalf of the corporate interests. Now everything is owned by corporate and we lost the internet to racist nazis. There’s a moment 20 years ago things could have been different that we’ll never get back. Frontier was new and we needed to rally around the wagon to defend the frontier. Instead we sold out.

And now all the lefties are in the smallest corner of the internet and the rest of the internet and social media is owned by the capitalist and nazis. It all started by forgetting the roots and in favor of selling our key chains and trying to build a market rather than a collaborative space.

It should have been anyways. Like what the fuck were you all doing on the internet. Trying to sell your stupid art. Helping corporations steal data and build pay walls so you can earn $500/month selling your kitchy Garfield key chains. The internet should have always been about data replication and sharing. It’s too late to put that cat back in the bag. It was suppose to be stopped 20 years ago. Now we have all this stuff ruining the world and bringing back nazis. But at least the lefty capitalist artist sold some key chains

I think we have way more ability to shape things then people believe. I remember at one point reddit said something like only 10% of users comment. Even less posted. Those were us. It was the nerds.

And no we weren’t short sighted because the early days of the internet everyone knew about data scarcity and how eventually the people who ruined cable and movies and every other media platform would come for the internet. There was so many people yelling that we needed to safe guard against that. But then Metallica sued Napster. Pewdiepie made millions. YouTube introduced ads. Instead of fucking them up, we all just went with it and forgot.

But it could have been different. I just think we were responsible for the culture. This stuff was inevitable. But we had the ability to shape the culture and instead they dangled a trinket in front of us and we forgot and they captured the new frontier like they did with others.

But now maybe if we can reflect, find out what was done, create awareness and vigilance to fight them in the next frontier whenever that is

WUT? Why?

Monetization is the root of a majority of our issues. Without monetizing you don’t get data scarcity, profile tracking, Meta, Cambridge analyticals and eventually data that feeds into the current political systems. There is a direct arrow to our current problems that goes from early days of the internet up through the monetization into data scarcity, data collection and all the marketing tools that eventually feed into modern propaganda. Safe guarding against scarcity by creating a hostile internet and culture to monetization would have prevented all of this going on currently. We can’t ever go back to that. We only ever had one chance. New frontiers do not show up every century. Our job was to keep the people who ruined everything else away.

Hear me out. From day one we all needed to collectively reject any effort to make any profit online. I don’t care if you built something cool, sold furry art or create some neat SAAS. Day one everything should have been stolen and replicated. Everyone should have been terrified of putting anything online out of fear that the monetary value would go to 0 as it was digitally recreated. We wouldn’t be in this situation today with Trump if we stood our ground. We’d have flying cars and world peace

What is an influencer?

Since you said I’m wrong, what is the inflection point that I’m describing?

Did I say he flashed his wealth?

I do expect people to be aware of their impact, directly and indirectly, especially on kids. The more people you can potentially impact, the greater the responsibility to be aware.

Is data collection, exploiting children to sell products, and the consequences of profit-seeking something that we weren’t aware of at the time PewDiePie became famous?

I agree PewDiePie didn’t sell things to children. He didn’t need to. He was the product. I’m against commercial pressure on the internet, which seems like a radical concept now. PewDiePie didn’t need to hawk products to kids i know he did a good job with that. But he was the product. He was the point at which kids saw they could become a gamer and help commercial sites collect people’s attention and sell it to advertisers. That model is what broke everything. It turned the internet into cable television 2.0.

We already had corporate-approved media that was just a way to sell our attention. The internet, for a brief moment, was something for us. It was as close to a gift economy as we could get. It was the difference between a lawn sprayed with glyphosate to kill anything that wasn’t good old American Texas bluegrass devoid of originality, beauty, or color but looking neat and a lawn allowed to grow wild, full of weeds but also flowers, plants, and life.

PewDiePie wouldn’t have been the only one to make money, but he was the first to hit that milestone, and everything changed after that.

He laid the groundwork for those shitty influencer. He had the attention of young people who looked up to him. The minute they saw he could make millions by becoming the walking embodiment of a Nascar fender he set the attitudes and aspirations of a generation.

Would YouTube continue without him? Yes of course.

Could he have pushed back and created helped influence a generation of kids to reject the selling out of themselves to this influencer culture? Absolutely.

There were a few influencers in those early days that could have changed things or at least maintained the zeitgeist that we had then. Nobody did. That money was too good. Everything after he made that first million would change how the internet worked.

He was the inflection point. He could have impacted everything going forward. He could have told kids that these companies were stealing their data. That they were soliciting gamers to use as Trojan horses for what would eventually make everything worse.

I mean the name of the people who are originating these ideas. We should be putting names like who are the executives.

They get away with this stuff because they’re faceless organizations or higher ups beyond consequences.

I just see so many systems in place that are there to allow these things to trample us and nobody in this generation challenges. Like the opposition to authority in this generation just seems like they’re apart of the authority. They’re also playing they’re role.

You think not having total control of an organization means he’s free of blame. Would you say that your MAGA uncle doesn’t control Trump so isn’t responsible for his actions.

Pewdiepie is literally called an influencer. He warped what many young people belief they can become today and that belief is what ushered in a world of influencers chasing the all mighty dollar. That has given all these corporations fuel to create content and that content is stealing our data, eliminating data scarcity and used to influence politics.

He’s not the cause of it but he was an inflection point and could have went in a different direction to push kids to reject this new paradigm. Instead he was the face of it.

How come there’s never a name attached to these things.

He helped usher in this new enshittification. He was the Trojan horse. First one to reach a million

😆 I saw this posted and thought of lemmy immediately

Use both at the same time. It’s a fun party trick

Good thing about ai is it’s never down. Code much better with it than stackbullshit