Just depressing to realize how much people depend on these services and when they switch off, left helpless.
...for the sake of sanity, you all should just

You bring up a good point with this because even someone like me who has very extreme opinions. (I've said multiple times that if we lost social media, it would ultimately be a net positive due to all the disgusting brainrot it spreads worldwide.) Has to admit that I rely on social media for business reasons more than I like to admit.Business owners that operate mostly on social media, users of social media - all are hostages of big companies.
I believe it would be a big gamble for governments to create isolated internet. People like to be brainwashed into consuming foreign items, governments are fine with that as long as these companies paying taxes to them. It's kinda an abusive relationship, when you see how bad modern internet and social media are, but can't get away with that. Also, since a lot of consumers have a short attention span thanks to social media, they can easily create context for every shit that's going on. Social medias are just too convenient. Not only money circulation is going thanks to them, but it's also makes people dumb and easy to control. If anything, for government it's just stupid to do anything with all that shit until something really strange happens. Isolationist internet isn't a solution either. It may be harder for foreign companies to get into there, but as long as they abide the rules, it's ok to try to monopolize this closed area. I don't think that isolated internet would be the solution. It's easy to use VPN in China and they do it. The reason they don't give a shit about global internet is their disinterest in English (I'm talking from the perspective of an idiot who tried to find my way in China using English and getting stupid looks, and also chatting online with one Chinese guy who uses online translator to understand English). In case of Europe, where English isn't perceived as a foreign body and is used commonly, nothing would stop them from using VPN and getting into this ocean again.Xed51 wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 1:48 pm You bring up a good point with this because even someone like me who has very extreme opinions. (I've said multiple times that if we lost social media, it would ultimately be a net positive due to all the disgusting brainrot it spreads worldwide.) Has to admit that I rely on social media for business reasons more than I like to admit.
I would personally be able to survive without it theoretically due to most of my contacts communicating via email, phone & IRL, (although I would definitely take a hit due to the loss of social media adverts), however I would be ignoring the larger economic issue which is that my clients are mostly fully reliant on such a type of advertisement. To the point where it's more viable for me to just hire a 4.0 marketer with a monthly stipend than it is to pay for their services when redacting business plans.
It really is a hostage situation with Silicon Valley. Which in turn forces corporations to agree with every single political talking point which is arbitrarily pushed by those platforms. I guess what the Chinese did with their isolationist internet is the only viable solution, like a social media deterrence theory lol. Too bad most countries just lack the infrastructure or budget to build something like that. I know Russia has a facebook equivalent. Italy used to have a Myspace clone until facebook came along, so it was abandoned & became a meeting space for pedophiles so it got shut down LOL!
For it to happen nation states would need to admit there is a problem in the first place, with foreign corporatists having direct ownership over every advertisement platform. Which is of course never going to happen since globalization has shifted its meaning from "fascism" to "universal justice for all" sometime during 2008 or 9. It would be funny to try and scam money from the Italian government to build a proprietary social media platform though.
Oh yeah, I understand the issue with discord. Especially when these people don't even care to pin the messages for easy navigation and you supposed to figure it out through their shitposts. But actually it's kinda comforting, knowing that digital data does rot, like in real world. That it's prone to be destructed by its creator with no way of restoring, like in real world. Or it's actually unsettling, since it does resemble a real world. This is one of the reasons why I stopped purchasing games on Steam (although I'm faulty of repeating that mistake more than 1000 times), since in reality I own fucking nothing. I've encountered that issue while hunting for some rare japanese indie games and came back empty-handed. Even if there was some information about them online, there would be no way to download them, since the link are dead. The same shit happened when I found some homebrews for DS/3DS and after banhammer from Nintnedo I couldn't find them no more. It's depressing, but it only shows how fragile this digital world really is. Backing-up may be a good thing, but the more I experience this total lose of access to some information, the less I care about preserving the past.Iwazaru wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 3:05 pm Same thoughts i also have regarding recent fashion of using discord instead of a separate message board or chat room for communities nowodays. People now treat them as forums and often put important information that may not exist anywhere else (e.g. there was a circle of programmers who kept documentation of how to make custom mods for a certain game only in private discord and when admin had nervous breakdown and nuked the server, it basically killed the whole modding community as nobody even backed docs and posts), and also not indexed by search engines etc. etc.
If one "board hosted on company's site" goes offline, its just it. If the whole discord or reddit has 404, it's thousands of communities that loose access.
That's essentially what I'm doing with the Suda51 stuff. With help from BMJ when it comes to digitization.Iwazaru wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 3:05 pm
I don't even want to think about tons, and tons, and tons of content that exists only within Facebook or Instagram or Discord, be that very useful informational posts or photos/images.
The only way to keep things save is always do new copies and back-ups both in offline and online. But it could be very demanding and tiring to to that constantly. And sometimes it is not a thing that can be done if e.g. it's company official channel and they don't allow content to be anywhere else. Etc.
It was always bullshit. Most people don't seem to realize the wayback machine must be triggered manually. As in you need to archive the specific link yourself, it doesn't just save whole websites automatically.And yes, that myth about "once it got to web, then its immortal" is just a wishful thinking. I already lived through trouble of realizing how some obscure stuff is literally lost forever (webarchiveorg didn't save it, people who had it do not anymore after hdd change etc. etc.). That catchphrase only works when talked about VERY popular stuff, and that's it.
I would argue most of the content on Discords isn't worth preserving in the first place. I do see your point though. I went on a Discord for the game YIIK (YES yes I play Yiik. Such is my life.) and the devs actually posted a bunch of interesting stuff about their cancelled projects, including concept art, 3d models, explanations of game systems and what not. Granted noone gives a fuck but that stuff might as well be lost because I'm not gonna go through an endless chatroom to find it again, so it might as well be lost already.Same thoughts i also have regarding recent fashion of using discord instead of a separate message board or chat room for communities nowodays. People now treat them as forums and often put important information that may not exist anywhere else (e.g. there was a circle of programmers who kept documentation of how to make custom mods for a certain game only in private discord and when admin had nervous breakdown and nuked the server, it basically killed the whole modding community as nobody even backed docs and posts), and also not indexed by search engines etc. etc.
If one "board hosted on company's site" goes offline, its just it. If the whole discord or reddit has 404, it's thousands of communities that loose access.
I agree with everything you said, I was just using China as an example of a country that is rich enough to insulate itself which involved building a separate internet infrastructure. Obviously both are bad. Globalized internet just brainwashes you into poisoning yourself for the sake of corporate interests. The Chinese internet brainwashes you into worshiping the state and the social credit score lol.I believe it would be a big gamble for governments to create isolated internet. People like to be brainwashed into consuming foreign items, governments are fine with that as long as these companies paying taxes to them. It's kinda an abusive relationship, when you see how bad modern internet and social media are, but can't get away with that. Also, since a lot of consumers have a short attention span thanks to social media, they can easily create context for every shit that's going on. Social medias are just too convenient. Not only money circulation is going thanks to them, but it's also makes people dumb and easy to control. If anything, for government it's just stupid to do anything with all that shit until something really strange happens.
People who are able to operate a VPN are a tiny minority, way smaller than you expect. Most people don't know how to operate the internet at all, they just click on apps and absorb content passively.Isolationist internet isn't a solution either. It may be harder for foreign companies to get into there, but as long as they abide the rules, it's ok to try to monopolize this closed area. I don't think that isolated internet would be the solution. It's easy to use VPN in China and they do it. The reason they don't give a shit about global internet is their disinterest in English (I'm talking from the perspective of an idiot who tried to find my way in China using English and getting stupid looks, and also chatting online with one Chinese guy who uses online translator to understand English). In case of Europe, where English isn't perceived as a foreign body and is used commonly, nothing would stop them from using VPN and getting into this ocean again.
The point I'm trying to make is that cultural context is always enforced from the top down, because a greatest majority of people are soulless drones who will shape it around you. That is to say that the same westerner who screams off the top of his lungs that Putin is threatening transgender children with the infinity gauntlet, would just be praising Xi Jiping if he were born in China.All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
My personal solution is to just live in a cave. I've been working towards making my entire business function at a distance, without me having to ever meet a client directly so I can just live wherever, buy a farm and hug sheep or something. I'm tired of people and their retarded shit. You can see that reflected in how I run my website, where it's basically stuck in the 90s and is only preoccupied with existing as a thing lol. My latest update made it even harder for it to be read on phones which is fine by me.All in all, I believe the conclusion could be only pessimistic. The roots of social media degeneracy are consuming every person that lives in a society. Considering how children are getting into this consumerism mindset by using gadgets since they're one year old or so, the war for sanity is over. But who cares, if I would be getting money from abusing these retards, I would roll with it.
It's pretty much a small-scaled version of globalized internet. I wanted to discuss some shit with my Chinese friend how they see internment camps, but I guess it would be a tricky theme to tackle. Nonetheless, it's still a better way to talk with real people about this shit than relying on Western or official Chinese position (even if the latter would be the same, at least I'd know it from experience). But the Internet isn't a real issue here in how people perceive the World. Since all propaganda is officially documented in Chinese constitution, it all came from there. I presume that the same shit happens in American world with all this tranny/lgbt agenda, even though it's labelled as fearmongering. Although I do agree with statements that at least in the US it's more or less a passing thing (time will tell for sure), it's the same mechanism that is used in China, where you're taught from childhood how communism and China are great (which, I presume, is happening now in American world with all sex ed. lessons and shit like that) and mass media encourage that. It all comes down to "The Internet is a tool, a tool made by people". The real world is the main point of focus here, the Internet comes as a supportive platform to strengthen the views in ideology. In retrospective, I guess that mainstream globalized internet is akin to Chinese closed, since people who're profiting from trannies and such just create the right context for them and resemble the same politically correct version of Chinese internet. One may argue that at least globalized internet allows people to create small-scaled alternatively thinking communities such as this, but it's only a way of deterrence of people who were able to see internet as a free space. If that shit with creating the right context started at the dawn of the Internet, globalized internet would resemble Chinese, but with popular American trends.Xed51 wrote: ↑Wed May 04, 2022 12:07 pm I agree with everything you said, I was just using China as an example of a country that is rich enough to insulate itself which involved building a separate internet infrastructure. Obviously both are bad. Globalized internet just brainwashes you into poisoning yourself for the sake of corporate interests. The Chinese internet brainwashes you into worshiping the state and the social credit score lol.
Both systems inundate you with a constant wave of bullshit. The chinese portray their concentration camps as "highschools" lol.
I'm just saying that between these two systems, the Chinese one is obviously more successful because it manages to infiltrate the western internet infrastructure, while the west has to beg and grovel to even get movies released in China. Tiktok is just straight up harvesting data for the Chinese government while pushing divide and conquer propaganda onto the west, glamorizing underage girls mutilating or prostituting themselves and so much more.
That is how China manages to keep control, while western social media is so insane, everyone in the middle east & asia is just confused as per what the fuck we're going on about when we say that men are women, blacks are whites, war is peace (literally war is peace LOL), collapsing economies are actually good and white people colonizing foreigners is actually anti-racist.
It's the same deal with that generation in Russia, but what changes? There're no results. My younger siblings watch tiktok, shitty youtube videos made for kids, their parents are happy to allow them to do so since it's an easy way to get rid of them and get some peace after work, and the oldest ones can bitch about how stupid younger generation is, what they watch is some shit and they'd better do something else, but overall it's a state of mutual apathy. All words, no action.My dad's generation finally caught on to this insanity because that generation still watches TV, which is mostly ran by people their age (60-70yos), and it took them this long to catch up with what was going on online. Their reaction is of utter confusion because to them, suddenly there's an app on children phones telling them that girls need to cut off their tits and boys need to cut off their dicks, also that black people are oppressed in Italy and need to rise up against the government by burning down businesses and killing private citizens (?????) and that american imperialism is not bad at all, and in fact Biden is saving all of us by forcing us into NATO warmongering through WW2 sanctions.
The reaction from foreigners is not that different from what boomers are doing here. They just look at the facts and interpret it as "american insanity".
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This may be true. Although in recent events that happened in Russia (since 2014, to be precise), even my mother knew how to use VPN. Much of it is true about Chinese young generation, I suppose. (I guess I better ask from a person himself about this). But whatever, usage of VPN doesn't solve anything. If you aren't curious about something, VPN won't help, yeah.People who are able to operate a VPN are a tiny minority, way smaller than you expect. Most people don't know how to operate the internet at all, they just click on apps and absorb content passively.
Such a minority of people is not enough to shape culture around you. The reason why the internet suddenly transitioned into real life around the late 2000s and early 2010s is because platforms like twitter, youtube, instagram and so on were built or updated to be easily consumed on a smartphone, which in turn is much easier to use than a desktop PC or laptop because instead of typing out URLs, you just put your thumb on a colorful icon.
I think you're projecting your own intelligence onto other people. The ones who shape the culture around you are not smart people who know how to operate machinery & software, they are knuckle dragging neanderthals who just do as they're told.
The idea of modern western democracy was founded on the idea that the school system would raise citizens and not employees. That is to say that by giving everyone the same cultural baseline, supposedly they'd be able to make informed decisions when voting for representatives. It worked for a while I guess but there is no denying some people are just born retarded. (Alt right adjacent groups only attribute that to Race and IQ. I tend to think there's simply too many bodies and too few souls to inhabit them.) So as mass communication became more and more ubiquitous (Newspapers -> Radio -> Television -> URL based internet -> smartphone based internet) we shifted away from democracy because that majority of people is susceptible to ritualistic mind control.
Don't know about the West and their relationship with the Church. If we're talking about Russian communism regime, destroying church was more of a necessity to destroy everything that was dominant in peasant life, which was, primarily, institution of Church, which was under governmental control since Ivan the Terrible and more prominently since Romanov dynasty. Maybe it was different with Catholics (which I doubt), but I see how eliminating old beliefs would lead to less resistance to new ones. It's also funny when those "I fucking love science" types act high and mighty towards religious people, when they're having science as their religion and don't see it ironic. If not monopolizing the Church, then it should be science, since it's more progressive! wow! But I wonder would these NPCs be disappointed if they were to discover that big companies support a lot of science research for their benefits, or it would be fucking awesome, since even government fucking love science!In the past, organized churches could easily topple governments because they had the keywords & rituals necessary to control the masses. Which is why communist regimes had to outlaw churches and worship entirely (though funnily enough, Castro outlawed every organized religious group except for freemasonry lol).
The shift happened when Edward Bernays ratified those rituals in a psychological/scientific framework with his work on Group Psychology.
Which is essentially just the Talmud translated into science lol.
Nowadays, the ones holding the keys to mass psychological control are marketers, which is why the west exists under a corporatocracy where national governments are meaningless at best, and enforcing corporate order at worst. There's a reason why memes like "ORANGE MAN BAD" catch on so quickly, and are so close to reality. It's because the people who espouse such things unironically only have the attention span and intelligence to digest slogans, or prayers. The point of Trump in western society was to embody the devil figure in a secular religious narrative, where everyone espousing different values than the mainstream can now be safely labelled as a "satanist" (trumptard).
Hitler & Goebbels operated within the same framework.
It supports my point earlier. It's simply laughable how Tokio Morishima statement about the Internet hasn't stopped being true even for a tiny bit since the 1999. I see how simplifying everything down to Orange Man bad, Putin bad, Xi bad could lead to an easier life, but it's all like a big bad joke. People in small-talks may appear as intelligent or at least seem to have it, but when you say some shit they don't agree with, they turn into fucking NPCs for no reason. What's the harm in at least considering another position as valuable, especially when you proclaim yourself as a free-thinker, but the matrix is harsh. "Wall of texts" are considered as a scary shit, as if it's a big book, videos with length that, god forbid, is more than 5 minutes (with the tiktok infestation it's shortened to even like one minute?) is a chore to get through. Once again, I'm not blaming big companies for simplifying anything. It's not like people were forced to play by this rules, but they simply agreed (or just never showed anything but apathy) towards it.The point I'm trying to make is that cultural context is always enforced from the top down, because a greatest majority of people are soulless drones who will shape it around you. That is to say that the same westerner who screams off the top of his lungs that Putin is threatening transgender children with the infinity gauntlet, would just be praising Xi Jiping if he were born in China.
People who can operate basic things (such as using a VPN since that was my example) are already too intelligent to have any real cultural impact, because they'll ask at least one question after hearing a slogan, which makes the propaganda ineffective. (That's also why Twitter has a 140 character limit and its entire navigation is based on hashtags; The people calling you a nazi on twitter are actually using a platform modeled after Hitler's propaganda, which in turn was appropriated from Talmudic rituals from the jews, LOL!!!!!!)
I know one Ukrainian blogger who went through the route of living in a city to a small village without that much of a contact with people and he's doing fine. Which is something I'd like to do myself, because city gives nothing but a lot of unnecessary stress. Recently, when I started interacting with people a lot more I noticed how a lot of people are just unpleasant to talk (although I appear as an easy-going guy to them). It's really tiresome to have some meaningful conversation with people who are willingly become hostages of modern Internet. If anything, I despise modern site layouts to the ones like this forum has. At least interface is straight to the point without unnecessary shit I would never ever bother to click on. But I guess nowadays flashy icons and unnecessary shit is an essential. Also, who in the world is posting on forums through mobile phones? The site is fine for read-only for mobiles, or maybe it's just me not being retarded enough to comfortably using zoom functions, lol.My personal solution is to just live in a cave. I've been working towards making my entire business function at a distance, without me having to ever meet a client directly so I can just live wherever, buy a farm and hug sheep or something. I'm tired of people and their retarded shit. You can see that reflected in how I run my website, where it's basically stuck in the 90s and is only preoccupied with existing as a thing lol. My latest update made it even harder for it to be read on phones which is fine by me.
You can make money out of social media addicts, all you need to do is be a shill. I was talking in another thread how most youtubers are not hobbyists at all. They are literal actual shills who are paid to espouse a false consensus. In the USA, a lot of them are most likely paid off by DNC think tanks. I was talking about it in another thread fairly recently.
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That also exists in China funnily enough, they will hire goofy westerners to do song and dances about how great the chinese government is lol.
I don't engage with it simply because of where my career path has led me. I make money off of other things. But if I had to do that to make money, then sure. I'd praise Winnie the Pooh or Biden or whoever paid me.