Post #2382703

2025-10-07 12:41 UTC

@fen@zoner.work The reason is a combination of things. First, people is angry. Everyone is angry. Prices are surging, affordable housing scarce, finding jobs is complicated, the population density in the big cities is increasing, overall the world is becoming more competitive but in the bad sense. This of course makes people more grumpy and angry, which makes them more prone to embrace extreme point of views. Second, misinformation. We all know how platforms like Youtube, TikTok or X are optimized to serve people content that they know is going to generate engagement. And this content is usually extreme or shocking content. So people give away extreme opinions often without any scientific or statistical basis, skewing reality a little bit to generate a little bit of urgency. And the algorithm spreads it because it generates engagement. If not, don't worry. Engagement farms are cheap and will trick the algorithm into doing it. "The immigrants are stealing your jobs!" "The woke are allowing the immigrants to steal your houses!" You know what kind of shit they promote. People is angry because they can't get a life so they believe them. It's easy to believe. Immigration is surging, I see articles in the news every day about immigrants doing bad stuff, so it must be true (That's literally their train of thought, I've seen the argument 'you see it in the news every day' a lot). So they believe it. Politicians of course knows this, and instead of combating this they are actually using it in their favor. Trump, Milei, Abascal, Victor Orban... you know their names and faces. And the fact that they are now trying to control the flow of information through these platforms is no better. But now you can't get this people back because they have 0 critical thinking and they've been brainwased to believe that everything people says against them is "woke propaganda" and even if they are proven wrong with actual factual proof, they prefer to dwell into their ignorance than admitting that they are actually wrong. Even if their countries are dying because of this. And don't even get me started on the foreign countries that are actually using this to damage the west. So yeah... the result is we're back to the mid 30s fascism because people.

Replies (1)

@fen@zoner.work 2025-10-07 13:03

@enigmatico@mk.absturztau.be Thank you for your response and insight. In general scope, I'm not saying to break down walls and build bridges and reach across the aisle and so on and so forth. The ability to do that is increasingly more difficult. I'm not saying kindness will win back the bootlickers. That's just not going to happen. They're going to have to have their own personal revelation that isn't going to happen within the realm of spirited debate. They have to fix their own hearts. I understand, and lament, the line of things that led to us getting to where we are now. My focus is into the microcosm of our lovely, diverse, fediverse, and our local offline communities of people of color and queer folks and people who want good for everyone, because there's still lots and lots and lots of those. Our local bubbles and those who adjoin it. We, and those before us, built spaces like these with the objective of creating inclusive and safe spaces, and I'm watching so many just throw those conventions away and forget "why" because they've determined the world is shitty enough that it's not worth extending that kindness anymore, even to people in the same boat as us, and I very much want to rebel against that sentiment. It's an "it's up to us to be the good we want to see in the world" kind of thing. Our own pockets of it. This is how we persist.

Open ##2382704