'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

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'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Sep 22, 2020 11:29 am

.
Yes, I believe the scare quotes are necessary here. Launching off my experience as shared in another thread (quoted below), I'm also including a series of tweets that zero in on the core issue(s).

A similar conversation can be initiated on the other end of the spectrum, but we can start with this, depending on level of interest on this topic. Anecdotally, this doesn't apply, or isn't as prevalent, among the older folks (40s and up -- there are exceptions to this, however, particularly among the more affluent along the coasts); seems to be more of a Millennial/Gen Z thing.

Belligerent Savant » Sun Sep 20, 2020 7:44 am wrote:.

Humorous (or perhaps tragic, but predictable - a classic comedy) side-note. I shared a link and excerpt of Jack's latest Counterpunch article on a sports blog i visit on occasion (as a lowly Jets fan - one of numerous activities I undertake to distract my attention away from the criminality on display every day), since a number of the blog members consider themselves 'leftists' (and yet, largely subscribe to all the standard MSNBC tropes); I was curious to observe their take.

In short, they dismissed the article/author -- and the messenger -- as, among other gems, 'moronic' and 'stupid', and I was an 'idiot' for thinking such a piece was of merit. When I asked them to articulate their disagreement, they largely resorted to name-calling or otherwise standard establishment narratives.
(This was not a surprise - i've been met with these retorts a number of times whenever i drop in a comment that challenges establishment narratives).

I'd post samples of their output here but the comments platform (disqus) is unruly.

In any event, these members are quite proud and sure of their learned take on current events (some here would argue the same of me, funnily enough, though i question my positions on a weekly basis, despite whatever i may impress otherwise; it's not uncommon for me to preface my viewpoints with 'disclaimers', both in person and here).

The responses to Jack's article represent a trend line among many that consider themselves 'smarter' than the dumb, ignorant Trump voter, who (according to them) are all either racist or fully influenced by Russia bots. There is no other reason to have voted for Trump, in their (conditioned) view.

(Amateur, crude Anthropology is my side hobby: my primary subjects are modern day Americans i encounter out there in the wild, or increasingly, in the virtual space).

This mindset is part of the reason Trump -- despite everything we've observed and experienced, particularly in 2020 -- has a legit shot at another 4 years.


Image


our urban intellectual class is far too trusting of their own understanding of the world, and perhaps doesn't realize the extent to which that understanding is shaped by the interests of wealth and power through control of media.

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The Use of Shibboleths

Postby Harvey » Fri Sep 25, 2020 7:17 am

Many people I unhesitatingly call friends had in recent years become extremely hostile toward any of my views on anything. These friends find it increasingly difficult to understand or predict what is happening or about to happen, and not because they're stupid, far from it, some of them are objectively close to genius level smart. Over the long haul since 9/11 I've proved many times that I was right where they were wrong, and they know it. They're far more intelligent and knowledgeable than I, but it's all due to one small thing. I begin from a slightly different premise, derived from the the various communities I've been a part of as much as experience, such as RI, and because of that, I have a slightly better model than they do, one which is unacceptable to them in principle. But as I'm sure you'll all agree, I'm lazy, slap dash, arrogant, ignorant, offensive and occasionally downright stupid, so it must account for something...

In short, many of them have been trained to think in certain ways, by commerce, devices, software design, media, employability, the privatisation of 'public' space, community, finance, lack of exposure to competing narratives and so on. While their various methods of understanding might serve them well in a lab, the lab itself is owned and directed by forces well outside their control or interests, and inevitably the community which rewards them cannot tolerate dissenting views for very long. Just as negotiating the apparent stupidities of an operating system can actually condition and entrain one's habits and eventually one's responses, so having to navigate the human world successfully, through all it's inherent stupidities, can create mental fences which appear to be protecting verdant pastures tried and true, rather than the arrid wasteland of illusion.

I've often argued many of the main points in this piece but rarely with the clarity and synthesis of the following argument by Jonathan Cook. And while it isn't specifically about 'liberal'/'left' intolerance of ideas (those demarcated for them by identity driven 'divide and rule' as belonging to 'suspect' categories) it does point toward all the real wolves at the door, all at the same time.

Anyway:

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-25/netflix-social-dilemma/

Why is the world going to hell? Netflix’s The Social Dilemma tells only half the story
Jonathan Cook, 25 September, 2020

If you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on right now – the “Why is the world turning to shit?” thought – you may find Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma a good starting point for clarifying your thinking. I say “starting point” because, as we shall see, the film suffers from two major limitations: one in its analysis and the other in its conclusion. Nonetheless, the film is good at exploring the contours of the major social crises we currently face – epitomised both by our addiction to the mobile phone and by its ability to rewire our consciousness and our personalities.

The film makes a convincing case that this is not simply an example of old wine in new bottles. This isn’t the Generation Z equivalent of parents telling their children to stop watching so much TV and play outside. Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform for Edward Bernays-inspired advertising. It is a new kind of assault on who we are, not just what we think.

According to The Social Dilemma, we are fast reaching a kind of human “event horizon”, with our societies standing on the brink of collapse. We face what several interviewees term an “existential threat” from the way the internet, and particularly social media, are rapidly developing.

I don’t think they are being alarmist. Or rather I think they are right to be alarmist, even if their alarm is not entirely for the right reasons. We will get to the limitations in their thinking in a moment.

Like many documentaries of this kind, The Social Dilemma is deeply tied to the shared perspective of its many participants. In most cases, they are richly disillusioned, former executives and senior software engineers from Silicon Valley. They understand that their once-cherished creations – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat (WhatsApp seems strangely under-represented in the roll call) – have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein’s monsters.

That is typified in the plaintive story of the guy who helped invent the “Like” button for Facebook. He thought his creation would flood the world with the warm glow of brother and sisterhood, spreading love like a Coca Cola advert. In fact, it ended up inflaming our insecurities and need for social approval, and dramatically pushed up rates of suicide among teenage girls.

If the number of watches of the documentary is any measure, disillusion with social media is spreading far beyond its inventors.



Children as guinea pigs

Although not flagged as such, The Social Dilemma divides into three chapters.

The first, dealing with the argument we are already most familiar with, is that social media is a global experiment in altering our psychology and social interactions, and our children are the main guinea pigs. Millennials (those who came of age in the 2000s) are the first generation that spent their formative years with Facebook and MySpace as best friends. Their successors, Generation Z, barely know a world without social media at its forefront.

The film makes a relatively easy case forcefully: that our children are not only addicted to their shiny phones and what lies inside the packaging, but that their minds are being aggressively rewired to hold their attention and then make them pliable for corporations to sell things.

Each child is not just locked in a solitary battle to stay in control of his or her mind against the skills of hundreds of the world’s greatest software engineers. The fight to change their perspective and ours – the sense of who we are – is now in the hands of algorithms that are refined every second of every day by AI, artificial intelligence. As one interviewee observes, social media is not going to become less expert at manipulating our thinking and emotions, it’s going to keep getting much, much better at doing it.

Jaron Lanier, one of the computing pioneers of virtual reality, explains what Google and the rest of these digital corporations are really selling: “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception – that is the product.” That is also how these corporations make their money, by “changing what you do, what you think, who you are.”

They make profits, big profits, from the predictions business – predicting what you will think and how you will behave so that you are more easily persuaded to buy what their advertisers want to sell you. To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”.

And, though the film does not quite spell it out, there is another implication. The best formula for tech giants to maximise their predictions is this: as well as processing lots of data on us, they must gradually grind down our distinctiveness, our individuality, our eccentricities so that we become a series of archetypes. Then, our emotions – our fears, insecurities, desires, cravings – can be more easily gauged, exploited and plundered by advertisers.

These new corporations trade in human futures, just as other corporations have long traded in oil futures and pork-belly futures, notes Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard business school. Those markets “have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity”.

Flat Earthers and Pizzagate

The second chapter explains that, as we get herded into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathise and compromise is eroded. We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants.

Anyone who has spent any time on social media, especially a combative platform like Twitter, will sense that there is a truth to this claim. Social cohesion, empathy, fair play, morality are not in the algorithm. Our separate information universes mean we are increasingly prone to misunderstanding and confrontation.

And there is a further problem, as one interviewee states: “The truth is boring.” Simple or fanciful ideas are easier to grasp and more fun. People prefer to share what’s exciting, what’s novel, what’s unexpected, what’s shocking. “It’s a disinformation-for-profit model,” as another interviewee observes, stating that research shows false information is six times more likely to spread on social media platforms than true information.

And as governments and politicians work more closely with these tech companies – a well-documented fact the film entirely fails to explore – our rulers are better positioned than ever to manipulate our thinking and control what we do. They can dictate the political discourse more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than ever before.

This section of the film, however, is the least successful. True, our societies are riven by increasing polarisation and conflict, and feel more tribal. But the film implies that all forms of social tension – from the paranoid paedophile conspiracy theory of Pizzagate to the Black Lives Matter protests – are the result of social media’s harmful influence.

And though it is easy to know that Flat Earthers are spreading misinformation, it is far harder to be sure what is true and what is false in many others areas of life. Recent history suggests our yardsticks cannot be simply what governments say is true – or Mark Zuckerberg, or even “experts”. It may be a while since doctors were telling us that cigarettes were safe, but millions of Americans were told only a few years ago that opiates would help them – until an opiate addiction crisis erupted across the US.

This section falls into making a category error of the kind set out by one of the interviewees early in the film. Despite all the drawbacks, the internet and social media have an undoubted upside when used simply as a tool, argues Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and the soul of the film. He gives the example of being able to hail a cab almost instantly at the press of a phone button. That, of course, highlights something about the materialist priorities of most of Silicon Valley’s leading lights.

But the tool box nestled in our phones, full of apps, does not just satisfy our craving for material comfort and security. It has also fuelled a craving to understand the world and our place in it, and offered tools to help us do that.

Phones have made it possible for ordinary people to film and share scenes once witnessed by only a handful of disbelieved passers-by. We can all see for ourselves a white police officer dispassionately kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine minutes, while the victim cries out he cannot breathe, until he expires. And we can then judge the values and priorities of our leaders when they decide to do as little as possible to prevent such incidents occurring again.

The internet has created a platform from which not only disillusioned former Silicon Valley execs can blow the whistle on what the Mark Zuckerbergs are up to, but so can a US army private like Chelsea Manning, by exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so can a national security tech insider like Edward Snowden, by revealing the way we are being secretly surveilled by our own governments.

Technological digital breakthroughs allowed someone like Julian Assange to set up a site, Wikileaks, that offered us a window on the real political world – a window through we could see our leaders behaving more like psychopaths than humanitarians. A window those same leaders are now fighting tooth and nail to close by putting him on trial.

A small window on reality

The Social Dilemma ignores all of this to focus on the dangers of so-called “fake news”. It dramatises a scene suggesting that only those sucked into information blackholes and conspiracy sites end up taking to the street to protest – and when they do, the film hints, it will not end well for them.

Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our leaders are really doing – whether they are committing crimes against others or against us – is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is a vital one if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviours The Social Dilemma is concerned about, not least our destruction of the planet’s life systems (an issue that, except for one interviewee’s final comment, the film leaves untouched).

Use of social media does not mean one necessarily loses touch with the real world. For a minority, social media has deepened their understanding of reality. For those tired of having the real world mediated for them by a bunch of billionaires and traditional media corporations, the chaotic social media platforms have provided an opportunity to gain insights into a reality that was obscured before.

The paradox, of course, is that these new social media corporations are no less billionaire-owned, no less power-hungry, no less manipulative than the old media corporations. The AI algorithms they are rapidly refining are being used – under the rubric of “fake news” – to drive out this new marketplace in whistleblowing, in citizen journalism, in dissident ideas.

Social media corporations are quickly getting better at distinguishing the baby from the bathwater, so they can throw out the baby. After all, like their forebears, the new media platforms are in the business of business, not of waking us up to the fact that they are embedded in a corporate world that has plundered the planet for profit.

Much of our current social polarisation and conflict is not, as The Social Dilemma suggests, between those influenced by social media’s “fake news” and those influenced by corporate media’s “real news”. It is between, on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those trapped in the old media model or those who, unable to think critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media, have been easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.

Our mental black boxes

The third chapter gets to the nub of the problem without indicating exactly what that nub is. That is because The Social Dilemma cannot properly draw from its already faulty premises the necessary conclusion to indict a system in which the Netflix corporation that funded the documentary and is televising it is so deeply embedded itself.

For all its heart-on-its-sleeve anxieties about the “existential threat” we face as a species, The Social Dilemma is strangely quiet about what needs to change – aside from limiting our kids’ exposure to Youtube and Facebook. It is a deflating ending to the rollercoaster ride that preceded it.

Here I want to backtrack a little. The film’s first chapter makes it sound as though social media’s rewiring of our brains to sell us advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our society’s growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very obviously neither proposition is true.

Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways for at least a century. And social atomisation – individualism, selfishness and consumerism – have been a feature of western life for at least as long. These aren’t new phenomena. It’s just that these long-term, negative aspects of western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly unstoppable rate.

We’ve been heading towards dystopia for decades, as should be obvious to anyone who has been tracking the lack of political urgency to deal with climate change since the problem became obvious to scientists back in the 1970s.

The multiple ways in which we are damaging the planet – destroying forests and natural habitats, pushing species towards extinction, polluting the air and water, melting the ice-caps, generating a climate crisis – have been increasingly evident since our societies turned everything into a commodity that could be bought and sold in the marketplace. We began on the slippery slope towards the problems highlighted by The Social Dilemma the moment we collectively decided that nothing was sacred, that nothing was more sacrosanct than our desire to turn a quick buck.

It is true that social media is pushing us towards an event horizon. But then so is climate change, and so is our unsustainable global economy, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet. And, more importantly, these profound crises are all arising at the same time.

There is a conspiracy, but not of the Pizzagate variety. It is an ideological conspiracy, of at least two centuries’ duration, by a tiny and ever more fabulously wealth elite to further enrich themselves and to maintain their power, their dominance, at all costs.

There is a reason why, as Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff points out, social media corporations are the most fantastically wealthy in human history. And that reason is also why we are reaching the human “event horizon” these Silicon Valley luminaries all fear, one where our societies, our economies, the planet’s life-support systems are all on the brink of collapse together.

The cause of that full-spectrum, systemic crisis is not named, but it has a name. Its name is the ideology that has become a black box, a mental prison, in which we have become incapable of imagining any other way of organising our lives, any other future than the one we are destined for at the moment. That ideology’s name is capitalism.

Waking up from the matrix

Social media and the AI behind it are one of the multiple crises we can no longer ignore as capitalism reaches the end of a trajectory it has long been on. The seeds of neoliberalism’s current, all-too-obvious destructive nature were planted long ago, when the “civilised”, industrialised west decided its mission was to conquer and subdue the natural world, when it embraced an ideology that fetishised money and turned people into objects to be exploited.

A few of the participants in The Social Dilemma allude to this in the last moments of the final chapter. The difficulty they have in expressing the full significance of the conclusions they have drawn from two decades spent in the most predatory corporations the world has ever known could be because their minds are still black boxes, preventing them from standing outside the ideological system they, like us, were born into. Or it could be because coded language is the best one can manage if a corporate platform like Netflix is going to let a film like this one reach a mass audience.

Tristan Harris tries to articulate the difficulty by grasping for a movie allusion: “How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you’re in the matrix?” Later, he observes: “What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”

Although still framed in Harris’s mind as a specific critique of social media corporations, this point is very obviously true of all corporations, and of the ideological system – capitalism – that empowers all these corporations.

Another interviewee notes: “I don’t think these guys [the tech giants] set out to be evil, it’s just the business model.”

He is right. But “evilness” – the psychopathic pursuit of profit above all other values – is the business model for all corporations, not just the digital ones.

The one interviewee who manages, or is allowed, to connect the dots is Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer for Twitter and Google. He eloquently observes:

We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. A world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.

This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. As if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. … What’s frightening – and what hopefully is the last straw and will make us wake up as a civilisation as to how flawed this theory is in the first place – is to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.



Here is the problem condensed. That unnamed “flawed theory” is capitalism. The interviewees in the film arrived at their alarming conclusion – that we are on the brink of social collapse, facing an “existential threat” – because they have worked inside the bellies of the biggest corporate beasts on the planet, like Google and Facebook.

These experiences have provided most of these Silicon Valley experts with deep, but only partial, insight. While most of us view Facebook and Youtube as little more than places to exchange news with friends or share a video, these insiders understand much more. They have seen up close the most powerful, most predatory, most all-devouring corporations in human history.

Nonetheless, most of them have mistakenly assumed that their experiences of their own corporate sector apply only to their corporate sector. They understand the “existential threat” posed by Facebook and Google without extrapolating to the identical existential threats posed by Amazon, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and thousands more giant, soulless corporations.

The Social Dilemma offers us an opportunity to sense the ugly, psychopathic face shielding behind the mask of social media’s affability. But for those watching carefully the film offers more: a chance to grasp the pathology of the system itself that pushed these destructive social media giants into our lives.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Sep 25, 2020 9:18 am

.

I'm lazy, slap dash, arrogant, ignorant, offensive and occasionally downright stupid


We may have been separated at birth, because that sounds just like me (rather than an approximation of you).


I plan to read the article you linked when I've time to fully take it in, Harvey -- thanks for sharing it here.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Elvis » Sun Sep 27, 2020 4:42 am

Harvey wrote:I've often argued many of the main points in this piece but rarely with the clarity and synthesis of the following argument by Jonathan Cook. And while it isn't specifically about 'liberal'/'left' intolerance of ideas (those demarcated for them by identity driven 'divide and rule' as belonging to 'suspect' categories) it does point toward all the real wolves at the door, all at the same time.


That was worth sitting down to read. Sharing this with my friend who was impressed by the info in the recently leaked Syria files when I showed him (his current events reading is copious but stays on the reservation) — but he thought Grayzone's report was too "judgemental" and he'd like to see the story written up by reporters with "less bias."

I suggested that the "more objective" journalists he has in mind are probably among those who unquestioningly repeated the very state propaganda exposed by Grayzone—who all the while were doing the real work of journalism. I reminded him that Grayzone was attacked as "conspiracy theorists"—that happened on RI—while it was Grayzone reporting the real conspiracy
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Sep 27, 2020 7:16 am

Good stuff all around.

I am starting to think that the biggest problem with the USA's so-called democracy are all the "politically engaged" people who are still dim-witted enough to be stans of either party or any leader of either party because they root for their favored blue or red as if politics were a sporting event.

IMHO, we need to form a None of the Above party that seeks to recruit anyone and everyone enlightened enough to unplug from the Super Shit Bowl that is our current American Demopublican political system. Almost any regular person trying to help society would do a better job than our current completely corrupt billionaire bootlickers.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Sep 27, 2020 5:45 pm

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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby conniption » Sun Sep 27, 2020 11:17 pm

stickdog99 »
"IMHO, we need to form a None of the Above party"...
- Yes...and we can call it NOTA (like NATO, but not... heh)

stickdog99 wrote:https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09/27/why-liberals-hate-leftists/


Well, isn't that timely... I like Caitlin, even if she is Australian.. (jk)
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:25 am

stickdog99 » Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:16 am wrote:Good stuff all around.

I am starting to think that the biggest problem with the USA's so-called democracy are all the "politically engaged" people who are still dim-witted enough to be stans of either party or any leader of either party because they root for their favored blue or red as if politics were a sporting event.

IMHO, we need to form a None of the Above party that seeks to recruit anyone and everyone enlightened enough to unplug from the Super Shit Bowl that is our current American Demopublican political system. Almost any regular person trying to help society would do a better job than our current completely corrupt billionaire bootlickers.


A good deal of this is contingent upon age. Plenty of zoomer dems but they are the exception. Everyone has their backs to the wall in 2020 but we’re fairly close to a critical mass burning this all down in the next four years, which will certainly be led by the youth.

Nothing like graduating in a recession AND pandemic to radicalize you. That cohort born between 1997 and 1999 are going to be the new Marianne.
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Re: The Use of Shibboleths

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Oct 10, 2020 10:45 pm

Harvey » 25 Sep 2020 21:17 wrote:Many people I unhesitatingly call friends had in recent years become extremely hostile toward any of my views on anything. These friends find it increasingly difficult to understand or predict what is happening or about to happen, and not because they're stupid, far from it, some of them are objectively close to genius level smart. Over the long haul since 9/11 I've proved many times that I was right where they were wrong, and they know it. They're far more intelligent and knowledgeable than I, but it's all due to one small thing. I begin from a slightly different premise, derived from the the various communities I've been a part of as much as experience, such as RI, and because of that, I have a slightly better model than they do, one which is unacceptable to them in principle. But as I'm sure you'll all agree, I'm lazy, slap dash, arrogant, ignorant, offensive and occasionally downright stupid, so it must account for something...

In short, many of them have been trained to think in certain ways, by commerce, devices, software design, media, employability, the privatisation of 'public' space, community, finance, lack of exposure to competing narratives and so on. While their various methods of understanding might serve them well in a lab, the lab itself is owned and directed by forces well outside their control or interests, and inevitably the community which rewards them cannot tolerate dissenting views for very long. Just as negotiating the apparent stupidities of an operating system can actually condition and entrain one's habits and eventually one's responses, so having to navigate the human world successfully, through all it's inherent stupidities, can create mental fences which appear to be protecting verdant pastures tried and true, rather than the arrid wasteland of illusion.

I've often argued many of the main points in this piece but rarely with the clarity and synthesis of the following argument by Jonathan Cook. And while it isn't specifically about 'liberal'/'left' intolerance of ideas (those demarcated for them by identity driven 'divide and rule' as belonging to 'suspect' categories) it does point toward all the real wolves at the door, all at the same time.

Anyway:

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-25/netflix-social-dilemma/

Why is the world going to hell? Netflix’s The Social Dilemma tells only half the story
Jonathan Cook, 25 September, 2020

If you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on right now – the “Why is the world turning to shit?” thought – you may find Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma a good starting point for clarifying your thinking. I say “starting point” because, as we shall see, the film suffers from two major limitations: one in its analysis and the other in its conclusion. Nonetheless, the film is good at exploring the contours of the major social crises we currently face – epitomised both by our addiction to the mobile phone and by its ability to rewire our consciousness and our personalities.

The film makes a convincing case that this is not simply an example of old wine in new bottles. This isn’t the Generation Z equivalent of parents telling their children to stop watching so much TV and play outside. Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform for Edward Bernays-inspired advertising. It is a new kind of assault on who we are, not just what we think.

According to The Social Dilemma, we are fast reaching a kind of human “event horizon”, with our societies standing on the brink of collapse. We face what several interviewees term an “existential threat” from the way the internet, and particularly social media, are rapidly developing.

I don’t think they are being alarmist. Or rather I think they are right to be alarmist, even if their alarm is not entirely for the right reasons. We will get to the limitations in their thinking in a moment.

Like many documentaries of this kind, The Social Dilemma is deeply tied to the shared perspective of its many participants. In most cases, they are richly disillusioned, former executives and senior software engineers from Silicon Valley. They understand that their once-cherished creations – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat (WhatsApp seems strangely under-represented in the roll call) – have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein’s monsters.

That is typified in the plaintive story of the guy who helped invent the “Like” button for Facebook. He thought his creation would flood the world with the warm glow of brother and sisterhood, spreading love like a Coca Cola advert. In fact, it ended up inflaming our insecurities and need for social approval, and dramatically pushed up rates of suicide among teenage girls.

If the number of watches of the documentary is any measure, disillusion with social media is spreading far beyond its inventors.



Children as guinea pigs

Although not flagged as such, The Social Dilemma divides into three chapters.

The first, dealing with the argument we are already most familiar with, is that social media is a global experiment in altering our psychology and social interactions, and our children are the main guinea pigs. Millennials (those who came of age in the 2000s) are the first generation that spent their formative years with Facebook and MySpace as best friends. Their successors, Generation Z, barely know a world without social media at its forefront.

The film makes a relatively easy case forcefully: that our children are not only addicted to their shiny phones and what lies inside the packaging, but that their minds are being aggressively rewired to hold their attention and then make them pliable for corporations to sell things.

Each child is not just locked in a solitary battle to stay in control of his or her mind against the skills of hundreds of the world’s greatest software engineers. The fight to change their perspective and ours – the sense of who we are – is now in the hands of algorithms that are refined every second of every day by AI, artificial intelligence. As one interviewee observes, social media is not going to become less expert at manipulating our thinking and emotions, it’s going to keep getting much, much better at doing it.

Jaron Lanier, one of the computing pioneers of virtual reality, explains what Google and the rest of these digital corporations are really selling: “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception – that is the product.” That is also how these corporations make their money, by “changing what you do, what you think, who you are.”

They make profits, big profits, from the predictions business – predicting what you will think and how you will behave so that you are more easily persuaded to buy what their advertisers want to sell you. To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”.

And, though the film does not quite spell it out, there is another implication. The best formula for tech giants to maximise their predictions is this: as well as processing lots of data on us, they must gradually grind down our distinctiveness, our individuality, our eccentricities so that we become a series of archetypes. Then, our emotions – our fears, insecurities, desires, cravings – can be more easily gauged, exploited and plundered by advertisers.

These new corporations trade in human futures, just as other corporations have long traded in oil futures and pork-belly futures, notes Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard business school. Those markets “have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity”.

Flat Earthers and Pizzagate

The second chapter explains that, as we get herded into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathise and compromise is eroded. We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants.

Anyone who has spent any time on social media, especially a combative platform like Twitter, will sense that there is a truth to this claim. Social cohesion, empathy, fair play, morality are not in the algorithm. Our separate information universes mean we are increasingly prone to misunderstanding and confrontation.

And there is a further problem, as one interviewee states: “The truth is boring.” Simple or fanciful ideas are easier to grasp and more fun. People prefer to share what’s exciting, what’s novel, what’s unexpected, what’s shocking. “It’s a disinformation-for-profit model,” as another interviewee observes, stating that research shows false information is six times more likely to spread on social media platforms than true information.

And as governments and politicians work more closely with these tech companies – a well-documented fact the film entirely fails to explore – our rulers are better positioned than ever to manipulate our thinking and control what we do. They can dictate the political discourse more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than ever before.

This section of the film, however, is the least successful. True, our societies are riven by increasing polarisation and conflict, and feel more tribal. But the film implies that all forms of social tension – from the paranoid paedophile conspiracy theory of Pizzagate to the Black Lives Matter protests – are the result of social media’s harmful influence.

And though it is easy to know that Flat Earthers are spreading misinformation, it is far harder to be sure what is true and what is false in many others areas of life. Recent history suggests our yardsticks cannot be simply what governments say is true – or Mark Zuckerberg, or even “experts”. It may be a while since doctors were telling us that cigarettes were safe, but millions of Americans were told only a few years ago that opiates would help them – until an opiate addiction crisis erupted across the US.

This section falls into making a category error of the kind set out by one of the interviewees early in the film. Despite all the drawbacks, the internet and social media have an undoubted upside when used simply as a tool, argues Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and the soul of the film. He gives the example of being able to hail a cab almost instantly at the press of a phone button. That, of course, highlights something about the materialist priorities of most of Silicon Valley’s leading lights.

But the tool box nestled in our phones, full of apps, does not just satisfy our craving for material comfort and security. It has also fuelled a craving to understand the world and our place in it, and offered tools to help us do that.

Phones have made it possible for ordinary people to film and share scenes once witnessed by only a handful of disbelieved passers-by. We can all see for ourselves a white police officer dispassionately kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine minutes, while the victim cries out he cannot breathe, until he expires. And we can then judge the values and priorities of our leaders when they decide to do as little as possible to prevent such incidents occurring again.

The internet has created a platform from which not only disillusioned former Silicon Valley execs can blow the whistle on what the Mark Zuckerbergs are up to, but so can a US army private like Chelsea Manning, by exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so can a national security tech insider like Edward Snowden, by revealing the way we are being secretly surveilled by our own governments.

Technological digital breakthroughs allowed someone like Julian Assange to set up a site, Wikileaks, that offered us a window on the real political world – a window through we could see our leaders behaving more like psychopaths than humanitarians. A window those same leaders are now fighting tooth and nail to close by putting him on trial.

A small window on reality

The Social Dilemma ignores all of this to focus on the dangers of so-called “fake news”. It dramatises a scene suggesting that only those sucked into information blackholes and conspiracy sites end up taking to the street to protest – and when they do, the film hints, it will not end well for them.

Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our leaders are really doing – whether they are committing crimes against others or against us – is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is a vital one if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviours The Social Dilemma is concerned about, not least our destruction of the planet’s life systems (an issue that, except for one interviewee’s final comment, the film leaves untouched).

Use of social media does not mean one necessarily loses touch with the real world. For a minority, social media has deepened their understanding of reality. For those tired of having the real world mediated for them by a bunch of billionaires and traditional media corporations, the chaotic social media platforms have provided an opportunity to gain insights into a reality that was obscured before.

The paradox, of course, is that these new social media corporations are no less billionaire-owned, no less power-hungry, no less manipulative than the old media corporations. The AI algorithms they are rapidly refining are being used – under the rubric of “fake news” – to drive out this new marketplace in whistleblowing, in citizen journalism, in dissident ideas.

Social media corporations are quickly getting better at distinguishing the baby from the bathwater, so they can throw out the baby. After all, like their forebears, the new media platforms are in the business of business, not of waking us up to the fact that they are embedded in a corporate world that has plundered the planet for profit.

Much of our current social polarisation and conflict is not, as The Social Dilemma suggests, between those influenced by social media’s “fake news” and those influenced by corporate media’s “real news”. It is between, on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those trapped in the old media model or those who, unable to think critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media, have been easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.

Our mental black boxes

The third chapter gets to the nub of the problem without indicating exactly what that nub is. That is because The Social Dilemma cannot properly draw from its already faulty premises the necessary conclusion to indict a system in which the Netflix corporation that funded the documentary and is televising it is so deeply embedded itself.

For all its heart-on-its-sleeve anxieties about the “existential threat” we face as a species, The Social Dilemma is strangely quiet about what needs to change – aside from limiting our kids’ exposure to Youtube and Facebook. It is a deflating ending to the rollercoaster ride that preceded it.

Here I want to backtrack a little. The film’s first chapter makes it sound as though social media’s rewiring of our brains to sell us advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our society’s growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very obviously neither proposition is true.

Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways for at least a century. And social atomisation – individualism, selfishness and consumerism – have been a feature of western life for at least as long. These aren’t new phenomena. It’s just that these long-term, negative aspects of western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly unstoppable rate.

We’ve been heading towards dystopia for decades, as should be obvious to anyone who has been tracking the lack of political urgency to deal with climate change since the problem became obvious to scientists back in the 1970s.

The multiple ways in which we are damaging the planet – destroying forests and natural habitats, pushing species towards extinction, polluting the air and water, melting the ice-caps, generating a climate crisis – have been increasingly evident since our societies turned everything into a commodity that could be bought and sold in the marketplace. We began on the slippery slope towards the problems highlighted by The Social Dilemma the moment we collectively decided that nothing was sacred, that nothing was more sacrosanct than our desire to turn a quick buck.

It is true that social media is pushing us towards an event horizon. But then so is climate change, and so is our unsustainable global economy, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet. And, more importantly, these profound crises are all arising at the same time.

There is a conspiracy, but not of the Pizzagate variety. It is an ideological conspiracy, of at least two centuries’ duration, by a tiny and ever more fabulously wealth elite to further enrich themselves and to maintain their power, their dominance, at all costs.

There is a reason why, as Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff points out, social media corporations are the most fantastically wealthy in human history. And that reason is also why we are reaching the human “event horizon” these Silicon Valley luminaries all fear, one where our societies, our economies, the planet’s life-support systems are all on the brink of collapse together.

The cause of that full-spectrum, systemic crisis is not named, but it has a name. Its name is the ideology that has become a black box, a mental prison, in which we have become incapable of imagining any other way of organising our lives, any other future than the one we are destined for at the moment. That ideology’s name is capitalism.

Waking up from the matrix

Social media and the AI behind it are one of the multiple crises we can no longer ignore as capitalism reaches the end of a trajectory it has long been on. The seeds of neoliberalism’s current, all-too-obvious destructive nature were planted long ago, when the “civilised”, industrialised west decided its mission was to conquer and subdue the natural world, when it embraced an ideology that fetishised money and turned people into objects to be exploited.

A few of the participants in The Social Dilemma allude to this in the last moments of the final chapter. The difficulty they have in expressing the full significance of the conclusions they have drawn from two decades spent in the most predatory corporations the world has ever known could be because their minds are still black boxes, preventing them from standing outside the ideological system they, like us, were born into. Or it could be because coded language is the best one can manage if a corporate platform like Netflix is going to let a film like this one reach a mass audience.

Tristan Harris tries to articulate the difficulty by grasping for a movie allusion: “How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you’re in the matrix?” Later, he observes: “What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”

Although still framed in Harris’s mind as a specific critique of social media corporations, this point is very obviously true of all corporations, and of the ideological system – capitalism – that empowers all these corporations.

Another interviewee notes: “I don’t think these guys [the tech giants] set out to be evil, it’s just the business model.”

He is right. But “evilness” – the psychopathic pursuit of profit above all other values – is the business model for all corporations, not just the digital ones.

The one interviewee who manages, or is allowed, to connect the dots is Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer for Twitter and Google. He eloquently observes:

We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. A world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.

This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. As if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. … What’s frightening – and what hopefully is the last straw and will make us wake up as a civilisation as to how flawed this theory is in the first place – is to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.



Here is the problem condensed. That unnamed “flawed theory” is capitalism. The interviewees in the film arrived at their alarming conclusion – that we are on the brink of social collapse, facing an “existential threat” – because they have worked inside the bellies of the biggest corporate beasts on the planet, like Google and Facebook.

These experiences have provided most of these Silicon Valley experts with deep, but only partial, insight. While most of us view Facebook and Youtube as little more than places to exchange news with friends or share a video, these insiders understand much more. They have seen up close the most powerful, most predatory, most all-devouring corporations in human history.

Nonetheless, most of them have mistakenly assumed that their experiences of their own corporate sector apply only to their corporate sector. They understand the “existential threat” posed by Facebook and Google without extrapolating to the identical existential threats posed by Amazon, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and thousands more giant, soulless corporations.

The Social Dilemma offers us an opportunity to sense the ugly, psychopathic face shielding behind the mask of social media’s affability. But for those watching carefully the film offers more: a chance to grasp the pathology of the system itself that pushed these destructive social media giants into our lives.



Cheers Harvs, that was great.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Oct 10, 2020 11:04 pm

conniption » 28 Sep 2020 13:17 wrote:
stickdog99 »
"IMHO, we need to form a None of the Above party"...
- Yes...and we can call it NOTA (like NATO, but not... heh)

stickdog99 wrote:https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09/27/why-liberals-hate-leftists/


Well, isn't that timely... I like Caitlin, even if she is Australian.. (jk)


She has certainly filled a niche successfully. Like any good entrepreneur. Inner city wokesters like her always do alright for themselves....

FWIW. I agree with 90% of that article, tho the real cognitive dissonance is hearing an Australian use the term leftists, instead of lefty or lefties, which is what we say. But she is writing to her audience.

People in the US.

It's understandable in this globalised world. I doubt she leaves the bubble of her Thornbury/Northcote cafe set, (especially now they are in lockdown with a 3-5km non essential travel limit.). So she can read and mentally exist in the US via social media and then access her progressive inner city suburban amenities and probably live a life that is almost indistinguishable from someone doing the same thing in the Pacific NW.

Did you know the Liberals In Australia are a political party dry similar to the Republicans? Once upon a time they were true to their name - a classical liberal party and on the centre right of Australian politics while their left leaning opponents, the Australian Labor Party were a union driven workers party. The ALP may as well be the old Liberal Party these days and for 40 or more years weveviewedour Liberals as Tories. We use the term "small l liberal" these days to refer to traditionally liberal ideas.

And that makes reading that article even funnier.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Monk » Sun Oct 11, 2020 6:39 am

Liberals and leftists in the U.S. are generally neo-liberals, and conservatives and right-wingers generally neo-conservatives, and they work with each other to work for the rich.

The rich control the U.S. economy, mainstream media, and social media. They fund the government, both political parties, right- and left-wing agitators, the military, businesses, and citizens. In return, the government deregulates and gives them tax breaks. The military is used to destabilize other countries so that they'll be dependent on the U.S., which benefits the rich who have access to cheap resources and labor. Agitators from various ideologies are used to create conflict in the country. Businesses sell goods and services from which the rich get their returns. Citizens use credit to splurge on goods and services sold by businesses funded by the rich.

The problems mentioned in the Social Dilemma documentary were taking place long before social media networks emerged. These include marketing to people and turning them into consumers and products, especially through mainstream media, which is also owned by the rich.

Social media, software, etc., are used by companies to gather information about consumers which are sold to other companies. These companies are hired by other companies and individuals to manipulate citizens for various reasons.

Even the platform that peddled the documentary is part of the same system.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby SonicG » Sun Oct 11, 2020 8:17 am

Monk » Sun Oct 11, 2020 5:39 pm wrote:The problems mentioned in the Social Dilemma documentary were taking place long before social media networks emerged. These include marketing to people and turning them into consumers and products, especially through mainstream media, which is also owned by the rich.

Social media, software, etc., are used by companies to gather information about consumers which are sold to other companies. These companies are hired by other companies and individuals to manipulate citizens for various reasons.


I like the word atomization for the effects of Capitalism (Technosphere) having to endlessly pursue growth for its own sake, although it is equal to the obvious "nichification" and "sophistication" of marketing you see at the leading edges of capitalism, now greatly aided by the increased velocity given to the Technosphere's efforts by the rapid IT/AI advances we have seen over the last two decades. What happens when this atomization of the individual actually reaches the lowest visible percentage point? Are Consumers inspired to search for the one authentic voice they have only heard careless whispers of in countless commercials? There are undoubtedly fractures happening in traditional political ideologies but what'll happen when this now manic need for continued growth hits this upcoming Covid global economic depression? I reckon more fractures, in more ideologies...
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby SonicG » Mon Oct 12, 2020 11:13 am

just to add on
same old song n dance
'get a job'
be all we allow u2b

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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Monk » Sat Nov 07, 2020 12:25 pm

SonicG » Sun Oct 11, 2020 1:17 pm wrote:
I like the word atomization for the effects of Capitalism (Technosphere) having to endlessly pursue growth for its own sake, although it is equal to the obvious "nichification" and "sophistication" of marketing you see at the leading edges of capitalism, now greatly aided by the increased velocity given to the Technosphere's efforts by the rapid IT/AI advances we have seen over the last two decades. What happens when this atomization of the individual actually reaches the lowest visible percentage point? Are Consumers inspired to search for the one authentic voice they have only heard careless whispers of in countless commercials? There are undoubtedly fractures happening in traditional political ideologies but what'll happen when this now manic need for continued growth hits this upcoming Covid global economic depression? I reckon more fractures, in more ideologies...


Not just pandemics but limits to growth.
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Re: 'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

Postby Harvey » Sat Nov 07, 2020 1:32 pm

Just noticed your post Sonic. For what it's worth, this was my response at the time.

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And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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