pogfan1996 posted:I’m pretty sure posting goatse at political figures is the only proper way to wield social media
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Thanks for your inquiry,
The Minstry of Internets
neckwattle posted:there's actually a massive cultural need for like a walter benjamin of hte internet who can show us how to wield it properly as a weapon but everyone is too fucking stupid i think. or maybe its just that the only possible answer is that you can't, it's satan (uphold Dr. Malachi thought), and ive categorically ignored this message from wiser people
So this is one thing I'm semi-working on. I come from the dot com boom days of the early 2000s but quit those jobs after the company I worked for sold itself. I inadvertently got involved in an NGO in 2017 (a legitimate one, not a CIA one) and have been catching up to the times since then on the latest and greatest tech tools.
My knee jerk reaction to this point quoted above is that there are good open source tools out there to use the internet as a political weapon, people just don't know how to use them because open source has sold itself to corporate interests. There is, after all, a massive amount of code is just mulling around out there for free without many people using it outside of a business purpose. You can see this ignorance of the pre social media days when you look around at political discourse on social media. There is no collaborative tendency among people of the social media generation, because there is no collaborative tendency among the people they learned from. My example to point to in this is the timelines and trajectories of the Panama and Snowden archive(s). The Snowden archive's lasting purpose is to carve out a media executive/ownership career for Glenn Greenwald. The Panama papers archive while accessible in its entirety was only published after journalists had extracted the same value for themselves from it. The social media generation has therefore learned from its most prominent so-called anti-authority figures that the thing to do if you stumble into incriminating evidence that will harm a government or its corporate co-conspirators is to hoard the evidence for yourself to launch or further a media career.
All of this is a far cry from the early 2000s, in which such information was routinely given to the public at large, as was the custom created by Wikileaks.
That said, we're only 12 years removed from a kid getting into a presidential candidate's private email account by googling personal wikipedia-type information for password reset data. Boomers haven't gotten smarter in that time. IT security has gotten a lot smarter, but that's a double edged sword. The same tools that allow corporate IT security allow third party tools to exist which are secure from prying FBI/CIA/NSA eyes as well, if properly implemented. Similarly, tools which allow surveillance at a lower level than large federal agencies can be used to surveil the surveillance state too. An example of this is leftists in the Pacific Northwest using homemade "honeypot" cell phone relays to identify the cell phones of and thus identify neo-Nazis who have organized far-right events up there. The takeaway from all of that is that police are stupid, so if police have a thing it's surely available to unpaid amateurs as well.
The tools that NGOs need are not terribly different from the tools that political dissidents would use, it's just a matter of building them with NGO money. The corporate world has no interest in this because non-profit is in fact... non-profit, otherwise such things would already exist.
Edited by Over9000ft ()
kamelred posted:i don't think there's anyway to safely fret about the tremendous viral power of Bad Ideas spreading throughout the dumbshit population without eventually sounding like you're bitching about the jewish bolshevik conspiracy
please explain! that particular nazi narrative is one that has itself been rehabilitated and spread like wildfire accross previously disparate groups, through exposure to stupid nazi fucks on youtube etc.
put it this way: is lenin the "patient zero" of communism in russia? in nazi mythology, this is so. he and his sickness were sent like a horseman to what were thought to be catastrophic results. the question i think about a lot is, does history show that this plan has backfired, or is it merely non-nonsensical to begin with?
pogfan1996 posted:goatse is the synthesis
serafiym posted:still dont understand what this thread is about... can someone break it down to me in image format?
the difference between a poison and an antidote is the dosage 
Over9000ft posted:(a legitimate one, not a CIA one)
kamelred posted:i don't think there's anyway to safely fret about the tremendous viral power of Bad Ideas spreading throughout the dumbshit population without eventually sounding like you're bitching about the jewish bolshevik conspiracy
There’s always the option of mentioning why the spread of wrong ideas doesn’t need people to be dumb. Since the topic is part of ideology, I think that should probably be part of talking about this anyway, if just to keep from being wrong about it.
A big part of that is something that doesn’t require a lot of explanation and that most people relate to, which is the increased social pressure from the workplace, or from navigating everything from utility bills to doctor visits down to the language used, as though everyone’s part of a family or like you’re there to make friends. You don’t have to buckle under to get shit from it, because it still makes phone calls to service lines take forever regardless of how you react to it.
No one has to read labor theory to know that eats up a bunch of time that might be spent thinking harder about what you see and hear, or that it pushes you in social settings, online or otherwise, “free time” or otherwise, to just accept what you see and hear, not as a form of consensus or compromise, but as the requirement to begin a conversation. Everyone is sick of bowing and scraping to that shit, everyone hates it, even people whose job is to promote it, and hey that’s ideology right there.
serafiym posted:still dont understand what this thread is about... can someone break it down to me in image format?
and what the heck is Trotskyism!!!
