From a regime that has a long history of lies, misdirection, and attempts to repress our basic freedoms as a nation and a people. This is why I write my Congress critters at least a month complaining. I know one letter only pushes the needle a tiny bit, but after a lot we'll eventually get them to realize that Congress is the real power and not the dime store dictator in the White House.
I would be pushing local/state officials as well to ensure independent auditing of voting machines, considering the administration's hostility towards the CVE program, and the recent news of Musk's alleged scraping and aggregating records into a "master database".
Please, some reasonable Trump voter explain how this is acceptable. How can the sitting president still be openly claiming that a previous election was fraudulent after all this time?
I mean, this is very obviously retribution. But nobody's going to reply to you saying "yes, I want those who have wronged my beloved president to be annihilated." So I'm not sure what you're expecting here. There's no good faith explanation for these events save for whatever vague spin Fox News can come up with.
Not a trump voter or supporter by any means, but you can reflect on what made this action possible from the pr perspective (even considering the above quoted unnecessary own goal - they could have done the same thing with even more plausible deniability)
There was indeed a campaign to fight "misinformation", with active cooperation between the previous administration and social media companies. There was an official effort to establish a disinformation fighting team within the government. Some of the stories like Hunter biden's laptop and COVID origin stuff blew up as what looks like potential partisan censorship cases. And frankly while I'd attribute the latter, and most of these efforts, to stupidity, the former looks like malice even to me. So now one sides idiotic authoritarian self own can be used by the other side to justify even more idiotic even more authoritarian "corrective" action.
It's hardly surprising as it's almost the defining feature of Trump - pettiness and revenge minded.
(though strangely, he hasn't publicly insulted his Pennsylvania would-be-assassin, but luckily his ear has healed remarkably well and so maybe he feels no need to do so)
When someone demonstrates actual power, he backs down and cowers. It's why he always ends up doing awkward submissive gestures when interacting with foreign autocrats. No real confidence, all bluster.
My experience is that everyone who's not close to any of these impacts is apathetic or treating events like they're reality TV, and even light attempts at convincing that there's more going on and that we might be in a historic and bad situation is met with hostility as if you just told someone's small kid that Santa isn't real.
At best they care about the financial parts of the news.
I see that as a broad trend. Very very few people have guiding principles these days.
The "problem" with principles is that living by them sometimes means going against something we want right now. People don't want to concede anything, even for their own ideals.
It makes sense for our industry, a bad economy means vast layoffs and a terrible job market in tech.
A tech worker who graduated and entered the market in 2012 could easily retire in their 40s with millions. One who graduated in 2022 is going to struggle to stay afloat and employed, and you are surprised people care about that?
Politics and media has for the last two decades been operated on generating engagement through outrage, and it seems that we have arrived at the peak of what that model was able to do, with a very sharp decline into apathy. More outrage will not convince people to care. Even the financial parts had very limited impact towards political engagement.
A related change on the people's part has been decreased understanding of how to leverage their own political power.
Congress-critters are concerned about losing reelection. (And of being primaried even in safe districts)
Yet the minification of attention spans has confused the average American voter that they're impotent, when really they're just lazy, ignorant, and unwilling to muster real-world action.
When's the last time you saw someone pepper a House district with self-made signs?
There are things every single person can do, but just doesn't. And because of this, media has been able to turn political engagement into profitable passive consumption.
"The Constitution explicitly forbids Congress from issuing bills of attainder—laws that single out individuals for punishment without trial. While that restriction technically applies to the Legislative branch, the spirit of it clearly applies here. A president cannot simply declare someone an enemy of the state for contradicting a political narrative. That’s not national security—it’s authoritarianism, dressed up in executive language."
So the Constitution does not forbid it. All executive orders, it could be argued, are authoritarian, not just the ones that you happen to dislike.
The moral? Be damned careful to whom you give this authority.
Well the way it should work is that executive orders are not laws and should not be treated as such. They’re supposed to be memos about how executive agencies should interpret the law. Somehow though, as congress has languished they’ve been accruing more and more power
Congress largely relinquished that power by creating bills that establish rule-making executive agencies rather than writing the rules themselves. That leaves congresspeople free to do things like trade stocks and raise money for their respective parties. They claim they would be too busy to read all the rules they would have to pass, but (1) that's the point and (2) they pass massive bills they don't read anyway. This version of America is fundamentally broken, but it seems to be the nash equilibrium of the system given greedy congrespeople and a greedy executive.
When a law is passed that says "Do what the executive agency says.", then it makes executive orders that control that executive agency on the level of laws. Even with some limits in the original law, the executive order becomes like a law at least within those limits. But it isn't a law, meaning that some protections based on laws aren't offered. So now we run into an issue where we have things that aren't laws that effectively work as a law as far as the common man cares. The only simple fix I see for this is to require that all laws must clearly define what is and isn't illegal without any regard to another system's interpretation of the matter (but as with any simple fix, it is never that simple).
They don't even pass a budget anymore.. which they're explicitly required to do. They learned there are political consequences to their action so they handed their job to agencies in the Executive Branch to write their own rules which acted like laws.
When SCOTUS struck down Chevron Doctrine last year, it boiled down to "No, Congress writes the laws."
The executive branch has the authority execute citizens that pose a threat, unilaterally. Deeming someone as a public enemy clearly shows a measure of restraint from that power. Thus it must be legal. Otherwise the executive branch would find themselves in a position where they cannot point out when something has been done to harm the US, but could in fact just kill that person without comment.
We need to pass a law that makes it obvious that ANY executive order that clashes with a law that has been passed disagree, that the law wins. I know that's already the case, but it looks like it needs to be made a law so that it can go in front of SCOTUS. If a president has an issue with a law, he can always use his influence to see that a new law is passed or that it gets challenged in court; he can't simply issue an Executive order to override it.
I've also been imploring my friends to go vote, make sure their ID is in order because the current regime is going to do everything in their power to make sure than anyone under 65 has a tough time voting
Under the current administration, what the constitution does and doesn't say may be entirely immaterial. They are perfectly happy running ripshod over the due process provisions of the fifth amendment so may choose to ignore, or at least try to ignore, any other part too.
It could be writen on single-ply toilet paper, and the paper hold more value.
Of course a lot of this is up in the air and could be resolved before the end of this term, as there are numerous legal challenges on-going, but perhaps not and with people openly taking about a 3rd term by various tricks (not blatantly declaring that it is happening, but I'd not put it past them!) such as him running as vice to someone else's election campaign then the president elect stepping down, this sort of ignorance of current law could continue for two terms or more.
You see this in other areas too like academia being afraid they will get the ire of the administration and lose money. For a lot of firms they don't want to suddenly get their government contracts dropped by speaking out. This is how things slowly become more authoritarian, and freedom of speech dies. This is also why the gradual expansion of executive power was not good.
If the threat of financial loss stops people from criticizing actions, imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries.
> imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries
Some other countries? The US is renditioning people without due (any!) process ostensibly based on their tattoos. I'm not saying this to be pithy but to sound (or at least amplify) the alarm.
My feeds have been screaming about DOGE for months, until at some point it just turned into depressing cynicism. Nobody cared about the warnings from experts, and nobody cares now that their predictions are coming true. What's the point of speaking out now? Nobody will listen, anyway.
I suppose it makes sense: for most of the Americans who voted, this is what they voted for.
If people genuinely support what is happening then the only two possible conclusions are that they have no idea what is happening or they are extraordinarily stupid.
Because I am generous, I always assume it's the first. And, I can't fault them. They are under constant bombardment of propaganda and lies around what DOGE is doing. I mean, DOGE can't be honest to save their lives. So, of course constituents are misled.
The idea of DOGE, of course! But over and over anecdotal conversations about the huge difference between mental model of what one thinks DOGE would be doing vs all of the reporting about what is actually happening- Elon Musk's "approval" is bottoming out for a reason, the town halls are angry and nearing violence for a reason. Nobody wants what is actually happening.
We are not "silent", we're just not being heard. Those are not the
same things. You'll find plenty of critique and analysis,
anticipating and commenting on the unfolding cybsersecurity calamity
[0,1,2] ...
Another one [0] SpyCast - DOGE Layoffs and the Counterintelligence Threats They Pose
Also on their podcast RSS, but it seems they haven't added a webpage to link to for that individual show
> Yet in recent years, elitist leaders in Government have unlawfully censored speech and weaponized their undeserved influence to silence perceived political opponents and advance their preferred, and often erroneous, narrative about significant matters of public debate
Isn't the executive a branch of government? Physician, heal thyself.
It seems to be a feature of this type of brain dead odious politics to revel in the hypocrisy. Reminded also of the Harvard EO that simultaneously decried their DEI efforts and hiring/admissions not based on merit and then demanding that every department install a bunch of conservatives..
Please stop calling them "conservatives". The term is a dishonest cover that they shouldn't have been able to continue hiding behind after they openly put themselves at odds with our society's institutions during the first Trump term. As a libertarian who didn't particularly love the status quo, I held my nose and voted actually conservative in 2024 - that was Harris/Walz. The new radical Republican party is free to come up with a new label that accurately describes the goals of their movement. Until then I propose we just use maggots, fascists, or destructionists, which capture the only consistent values I've been able to discern.
Silence from companies in terms of press releases and official statements, maybe. But almost everyone I know in the industry is somewhere between concerned and outraged over this.
Another shining example in the first few months of this administration of how we should not defer leadership to private industry, because they will always be motivated by preserving their bottom line.
I've had the same experience about people in the industry being concerned. But private company heads are well aware of what's happening to the folks that have crossed Trump before or recently. Such as Harvard, state of Maine, the law firms strong armed to doing pro-bono.
Anyone surprised that the greedy executives at the top don't care if anything were to happen to Chris Krebs, Brian Krebs, Bruce Schneier, etc. under this admin is naive to this new dynamic. Nonetheless, it's disgusting to see.
It seems that the idea that someone could be motivated simply by having integrity, valuing honesty and pride in simply "doing their job" correctly is so alien to the current US administration that they see political motives everywhere and in everyone's actions.
The fact that people with such a cynical and amoral worldview wield so much power not only in US but globally and are willing to wield that power in capricious and petty ways is deeply upsetting.
But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
I love the US, have friends and family there, have a first cousin in the marines, grandfather born there, etc., and have visited many many times and just find it difficult to reconcile my positive experiences with the place and people with the idea that more than 4 out of 10 US adults could approve of the cruel and vindictive actions of this administration. I'm not being over dramatic by stating that it has genuinely shaken my world-view and belief in the innate goodness of humanity.
A lot of people in the US, especially the Christian Trump supporters are nice but not kind. They will say hi, they will smile, they ask if you need anything, then they will happily defend the deportation of innocent people to secret prisons in foreign countries without any sort of due process. They will offer to bring you soup while your sick but will fight tooth and nail to make sure you don't have affordable health care. The list goes on and on...
I think they are just nice and ignorant, honestly.
So many I interact with are just simply unaware and vote based on their discomfort with urban liberal culture. That's it. The blue hair and the pronouns made them feel weird, so they voted the other way.
If they have that kind of attitude, then they are not "Christian" as Jesus very explicitly welcomed strangers and notably made a point of healing people without asking for payment.
Bear in mind that a lot of people took pains to not look at their candidate too closely, to the point where a (slim) voting majority wasn't showing up to rallies etc. during the campaign. One might see this as signs of their being fake, but it could also be suggestive that they didn't want to come out and see where their guy was really at. They voted for the IDEA of him and what they figured he represented, and were indulged in those beliefs as hard as possible.
So this 'approval' is sort of phantom approval. It's approval of a fantasy man who doesn't track too closely with the reality of what's actually happening.
The point where people pay heavily for their erroneous beliefs, for instance by losing their retirements and savings, is a point where people re-evaluate.
Everyone who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were getting or should have known. He was in office for four years. 40% of the people know what he is doing and approve of it.
Now, someone has to act to deal with reality. This is pretty much the job of every adult in america.
I suspect this is why Vance has been so over the top as well. I think he expects Trump to get impeached, and take over the party faithful. This is an idle musings though.
It's too early to see visible results of what has happened in less than 100 days. I am confident the approval will rise and fall as swiftly as the price of new iphones.
Approval ratings might fall, but they've installed a system of nearly unchecked power, and have shown a blatant disregard for law. It's probably too late for even the base to affect change without bloodshed.
Something interesting to watch about the current executive is he never talks about the future concretely.
Keep an eye on his rhetoric. He'll talk in broad strokes, bright-shining-future abstracts... But he never talks about anything specific. Never about how any specific policy will create a specific good outcome. No concrete ideation.
An idea that has been floated on this topic is that he's not actually capable of imagining such a future because he won't be in it (one way or the other; dude's 78).
It makes him dangerous. He can accidentally destroy something he can't even conceive of existing.
He'll likely live another 15 years or so. I'm pretty sure he's imagining a future for himself. He's talking about a third term, which means at least eight years of "future". He also has children whose continued success he probably cares about. That said, I agree that he doesn't seem interested in building anything but his personal kingdom (including walls to protect it).
> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any change.
You should then be dissatisfied with both at the same time. When people wish 'any change' they actually wish a change into better, otherwise it's plain stupid.
It is disheartening to me to observe that the thing that broke the once proud USA, the final straw, the thing that disenfranchised hundreds of millions of people and made them rabid and reactionary (on both sides of the rage algorithm) was a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.
It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.
We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.
We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.
In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.
Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.
We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.
We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.
I think it's clear that the approval ratings Trump gets are more about disapproval of the rest of politics. When you have every politician getting rich somehow while your life gets worse and worse, a lot of people will want all politicians punished. Trump is that punishment, and many people are excited to see the political and professional classes suffer. That is the approval rating.
To a certain extent this is a result of living in a media ecosystem where most of the population doesn’t actually see an unbiased reporting of facts but whatever is shown to them by certain right wing news networks. But I do agree at some point people need to take responsibility for their information diet.
Fwiw media manipulation of American opinion isn’t new, its been a huge part of how America works since at least the Spanish American war of 1896.
Monopoly and capture is what happened to the right. Theres a reason republicans march and Dems debate.
The republican strategists build this advantage over decades, it’s not the work of a single term. It’s a captured market of ideas, tariffs if you will. No competition from actual debates.
That’s why you can sell contradictory ideas within hours of each other, and never be called out for it. It’s why you can sell debates on Tan suits or prop up bogeymen, and never deal with debate.
This is news media. Eventually Fox wasn’t the sole juggernaut, and the techniques got adopted for online debates.
It’s been so wildly successful in building a reliable political voting bloc, that every political party in the world took notes.
There is no such thing as unbiased reporting of facts. People not understanding that, and the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with bias, is a big part of the problem.
> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls
I feel this is largely a consequence of decades of overwrought hyperventilating about all things politics and a lot of crying wolf. Every republican candidate has been the next Hitler, every democratic candidate has been the next anti-christ. Every 4 years we go through this song and dance predicting the end of the world and untold human suffering and every 4 years life went on with barely a change. Why would people expect this time to actually be different? Why would they expect that this time the stories of corruption and abuse of power are actually true and being reported without ridiculous embellishment? Why would anyone who voted for Trump in the first place think that reports of abuse of power from the side of American politics that coined “chimpler” as a nickname for W. Bush would be sincere about Trump?
I agree with you that I think more people should be more concerned than they are. I just don’t think it’s all that surprising either. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” is that when the wolf finally comes, no one will believe you. Of course the other lesson is that eventually the wolf does come. It didn’t work out so well for the village, and it might not work out so well for us either.
The thing is, there has been a wolf. It's now eating us, and the time to stop it is gone. But sure, it's the fault of the people who correctly told you there was a wolf, and that it's been coming closer and looking hungrier and hungrier since the '70s.
Readit News
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
>Krebs ... falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen
This quote coming from "whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets" is pretty wild. This seems to be retribution, plain and simple.
There was indeed a campaign to fight "misinformation", with active cooperation between the previous administration and social media companies. There was an official effort to establish a disinformation fighting team within the government. Some of the stories like Hunter biden's laptop and COVID origin stuff blew up as what looks like potential partisan censorship cases. And frankly while I'd attribute the latter, and most of these efforts, to stupidity, the former looks like malice even to me. So now one sides idiotic authoritarian self own can be used by the other side to justify even more idiotic even more authoritarian "corrective" action.
...
Dead Comment
It's hardly surprising as it's almost the defining feature of Trump - pettiness and revenge minded.
(though strangely, he hasn't publicly insulted his Pennsylvania would-be-assassin, but luckily his ear has healed remarkably well and so maybe he feels no need to do so)
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At best they care about the financial parts of the news.
The "problem" with principles is that living by them sometimes means going against something we want right now. People don't want to concede anything, even for their own ideals.
The safety net in America is tattered and torn, with the current administration working to remove it.
A tech worker who graduated and entered the market in 2012 could easily retire in their 40s with millions. One who graduated in 2022 is going to struggle to stay afloat and employed, and you are surprised people care about that?
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"Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me"
There is still time to react, in a year from now it will be like something like McCarthy, only worse.
Congress-critters are concerned about losing reelection. (And of being primaried even in safe districts)
Yet the minification of attention spans has confused the average American voter that they're impotent, when really they're just lazy, ignorant, and unwilling to muster real-world action.
When's the last time you saw someone pepper a House district with self-made signs?
There are things every single person can do, but just doesn't. And because of this, media has been able to turn political engagement into profitable passive consumption.
So the Constitution does not forbid it. All executive orders, it could be argued, are authoritarian, not just the ones that you happen to dislike. The moral? Be damned careful to whom you give this authority.
Congress is broken - intentionally.
They don't even pass a budget anymore.. which they're explicitly required to do. They learned there are political consequences to their action so they handed their job to agencies in the Executive Branch to write their own rules which acted like laws.
When SCOTUS struck down Chevron Doctrine last year, it boiled down to "No, Congress writes the laws."
The fix is Congress doing their job.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...
I've also been imploring my friends to go vote, make sure their ID is in order because the current regime is going to do everything in their power to make sure than anyone under 65 has a tough time voting
It could be writen on single-ply toilet paper, and the paper hold more value.
Of course a lot of this is up in the air and could be resolved before the end of this term, as there are numerous legal challenges on-going, but perhaps not and with people openly taking about a 3rd term by various tricks (not blatantly declaring that it is happening, but I'd not put it past them!) such as him running as vice to someone else's election campaign then the president elect stepping down, this sort of ignorance of current law could continue for two terms or more.
If the threat of financial loss stops people from criticizing actions, imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries.
Some other countries? The US is renditioning people without due (any!) process ostensibly based on their tattoos. I'm not saying this to be pithy but to sound (or at least amplify) the alarm.
Dead Comment
I thought the same.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1913023007263543565.html
I suppose it makes sense: for most of the Americans who voted, this is what they voted for.
Because I am generous, I always assume it's the first. And, I can't fault them. They are under constant bombardment of propaganda and lies around what DOGE is doing. I mean, DOGE can't be honest to save their lives. So, of course constituents are misled.
[0] https://www.schneier.com/
[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/
[2]https://www.dataandpolitics.net/trump-is-a-critical-vulnerab...
When those who own and control the means of discourse are donors to, and so in collusion with the problem, don't expect to hear opposition.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foLsTVQwBIg
Is CVE-47 taken?
> Yet in recent years, elitist leaders in Government have unlawfully censored speech and weaponized their undeserved influence to silence perceived political opponents and advance their preferred, and often erroneous, narrative about significant matters of public debate
Isn't the executive a branch of government? Physician, heal thyself.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/15/agencies-demand...
Another shining example in the first few months of this administration of how we should not defer leadership to private industry, because they will always be motivated by preserving their bottom line.
Anyone surprised that the greedy executives at the top don't care if anything were to happen to Chris Krebs, Brian Krebs, Bruce Schneier, etc. under this admin is naive to this new dynamic. Nonetheless, it's disgusting to see.
The fact that people with such a cynical and amoral worldview wield so much power not only in US but globally and are willing to wield that power in capricious and petty ways is deeply upsetting.
But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
I love the US, have friends and family there, have a first cousin in the marines, grandfather born there, etc., and have visited many many times and just find it difficult to reconcile my positive experiences with the place and people with the idea that more than 4 out of 10 US adults could approve of the cruel and vindictive actions of this administration. I'm not being over dramatic by stating that it has genuinely shaken my world-view and belief in the innate goodness of humanity.
So many I interact with are just simply unaware and vote based on their discomfort with urban liberal culture. That's it. The blue hair and the pronouns made them feel weird, so they voted the other way.
So this 'approval' is sort of phantom approval. It's approval of a fantasy man who doesn't track too closely with the reality of what's actually happening.
The point where people pay heavily for their erroneous beliefs, for instance by losing their retirements and savings, is a point where people re-evaluate.
Now, someone has to act to deal with reality. This is pretty much the job of every adult in america.
I suspect this is why Vance has been so over the top as well. I think he expects Trump to get impeached, and take over the party faithful. This is an idle musings though.
Keep an eye on his rhetoric. He'll talk in broad strokes, bright-shining-future abstracts... But he never talks about anything specific. Never about how any specific policy will create a specific good outcome. No concrete ideation.
An idea that has been floated on this topic is that he's not actually capable of imagining such a future because he won't be in it (one way or the other; dude's 78).
It makes him dangerous. He can accidentally destroy something he can't even conceive of existing.
It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any change.
It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.
We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.
We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.
In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.
Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.
We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.
We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.
Fwiw media manipulation of American opinion isn’t new, its been a huge part of how America works since at least the Spanish American war of 1896.
Monopoly and capture is what happened to the right. Theres a reason republicans march and Dems debate.
The republican strategists build this advantage over decades, it’s not the work of a single term. It’s a captured market of ideas, tariffs if you will. No competition from actual debates.
That’s why you can sell contradictory ideas within hours of each other, and never be called out for it. It’s why you can sell debates on Tan suits or prop up bogeymen, and never deal with debate.
This is news media. Eventually Fox wasn’t the sole juggernaut, and the techniques got adopted for online debates.
It’s been so wildly successful in building a reliable political voting bloc, that every political party in the world took notes.
Dead Comment
I feel this is largely a consequence of decades of overwrought hyperventilating about all things politics and a lot of crying wolf. Every republican candidate has been the next Hitler, every democratic candidate has been the next anti-christ. Every 4 years we go through this song and dance predicting the end of the world and untold human suffering and every 4 years life went on with barely a change. Why would people expect this time to actually be different? Why would they expect that this time the stories of corruption and abuse of power are actually true and being reported without ridiculous embellishment? Why would anyone who voted for Trump in the first place think that reports of abuse of power from the side of American politics that coined “chimpler” as a nickname for W. Bush would be sincere about Trump?
I agree with you that I think more people should be more concerned than they are. I just don’t think it’s all that surprising either. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” is that when the wolf finally comes, no one will believe you. Of course the other lesson is that eventually the wolf does come. It didn’t work out so well for the village, and it might not work out so well for us either.