Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, it’s time to address this nonsense bit by bit.

Posting has never been political action.

Then why are you on lemmygrad? Even pre-internet revolutionary efforts had means of spreading information, such as newsletters and the like.

Reducing politics down to consumption of entertainment products is one of the worst features of American liberalism.

That has 0 to do with what I said. Like it’s so far off, I’m not even sure what you’re talking about.

Voting in bourgeois elections is nearly worthless in most cases, and all the #resistance tweets in the history of time combined are still worth less than a single vote.

Twitter political posting is a lot more than posts about voting. You could take my word for this since I know it for a fact over years, or you could continue to wallow in ignorance and talk down about something you don’t understand.

I’d wager that most botched corporate rebrands are a result of acquisitions by some rich dipshit who lays off staff and makes arbitrary changes driven by vanity.

So now you’re just wildly speculating to back up your argument?

Elon Musk didn’t do anything different than every other oligarch in the industry, he’s just less skilled or invested in the PR flattery that most companies employ when they’re actually trying to make a return on investment.

Based on wild speculation.

Twitter was never a user-owned global town square for democratizing communication. It was always a Skinner box designed to maximize ad revenue.

And yet it managed to (hopefully still does) have political action on it that made a discernible difference in how some people think, what they are aware of, etc. Want to guess where I got a lot of primary source information when the 2020 protests were happening? Undeniable clips that made police brutality evident? There was somebody with a megathread on there, updating and adding to it for a while. I don’t think they were even a communist, just someone who wanted to draw attention to what was going on. This on top of all the dissemination of reports from brave citizen journalists on the ground. Want to guess where I got a lot of primary source info on the ongoing genocide? Like whose side are you on here?

I will shed no tears for the poor consumers who are now getting their treats from the rude vampire that makes them feel embarrassed

Now you’re just making stuff up whole cloth. Embarrassment has nothing to do with it. The fact that the platform has more overt reactionary spew on there than I can ever remember being there is certainly a difference, however. And calling it treats implies you know virtually nothing about Twitter. It is common among people who do use it for political efforts to also hate dealing with it. It has long been a pain in the ass platform, but people use it anyway because it has effectiveness. Sometimes you have to use the tools that are available, even if they aren’t ideal. It isn’t a fucking game.

let them pretend that indulging their addiction to looking at ads on their phone was actually politics.

See everything else I’ve said. This is such a gross portrayal of the platform and its users I don’t even know where to begin. And again, why are you on lemmygrad if you are so viscerally bitter toward Twitter users? It isn’t vastly different in structure. It is also posting on the internet to other people on the internet without necessarily following it up with RL action.

I will similarly shed no tears for the writers at CNN, a company so evil that OP intentionally posted an archive link to avoid giving them ad views, or any other privately owned imperial media outlet.

No one asked you to? What a bizarre soapbox to get up on.

Posting has never been political action. Reducing politics down to consumption of entertainment products is one of the worst features of American liberalism. Voting in bourgeois elections is nearly worthless in most cases, and all the #resistance tweets in the history of time combined are still worth less than a single vote.

I’m going to stop at this part because if I go much beyond it I’m going to go off on you and I don’t want to do that. Suffice it to say, there’s a good chance I would not be anti-imperialist and communist without Twitter, there are countless bits of information I probably never would have come across, and insulting and downplaying the contribution of mass spreading of information and influence over narrative is counter-revolutionary nonsense.

Yeah, X.com is stupid, but so is its owner and so is anyone who still uses it.

This is just smug elitist dross, as is the general tone of the rest of your post. People have reasons to use it like activism and sharing live information that make sense to continuing trying to do because of the sheer size and popularity of the website, in spite of how annoying it has become to use (and it was already plenty annoying before he took over). Which is also why it makes sense to keep calling it Twitter, at least in part; it was one of the most famous (or infamous if you prefer) websites on the western internet prior to the rebrand and one that was commonly referenced outside of Twitter as Twitter, in meta discussions about what Twitter is and the culture of it and the impact it has and so on. People out of the loop would have no idea what they’re talking about calling it X.

It’s basic sensible communication for such a widely known thing that has had such a pervasive pre-existing reputation. Furthermore, it’s not comparable to most rebrands, as most rebrands don’t come as a result of a billionaire user on the platform buying it up, proceeding to fire most of its staff, complain about how much waste it has while showing no understanding of how any of it works, scare away its ad clientele and users alike, and do all of this in broad daylight, like it’s some kind of macabre stage play. If people want to continue to call it Twitter out of pettiness or other reasons, more power to em. I don’t understand how someone can look at this raw demonstration of the capitalist class treating people’s lives and the resources they have available like toy blocks to play with on a whim and have the takeaway that what needs ire is some online publication continuing to include its old name when referencing it.

I’m not sure what this is in response to exactly. Comments on the youtube video? I’m sure some women don’t want to go through pregnancy throughout all of human history and they should have the right not to, wherever possible. But plenty do want to have kids of their own now and historically (in spite of the fact pregnancy can be a difficult and at times dangerous thing to go through), and it’s not as though all of them need to for a society to keep going anyway. And when it comes to the point that knfrmity raised about “takes a village”, it’s probably better to have some people who aren’t raising children of their own, but are nevertheless helping raise other people’s children as “part of the village.”

The question here is what has changed compared to certain numbers in the past. If capitalism is not a factor, what is the factor? Or are you saying the difference is made up?

I’m also just a little weirded out by this wording:

spend their best years

I would define a person’s best years as the years they are the happiest about, not a range set from the outside. When you turn 30, or 40, or 50, you aren’t in decline now and it’s all downhill from there. That would be a nihilistic, overly biological, depressing view of life. And one that syncs up rather uncomfortably with an objectified view of women…

I was thinking about this comment and thread a bit earlier and I think while it def has a good point, some of it is even more straightforward than that; western capitalism/empire went to great lengths to isolate and individualize because that makes it harder for people to organize and see eye to eye, makes them easier to exploit, etc., including segmenting on gender. That means many of the connections that a person might make in a “normal” (cooperative) society just from knowing other people and working (or playing) with them closely in the day to day, are just… not there. Which of course is going to include romantic connections too. Online dating seems to have tried to answer this problem by giving you a wider search range to compensate for how splintered people are and it got captured by gamified profiteering, and on top of that, in a place like the US for example, the splintering seems to have gotten progressively worse over time, diminishing any gains from an expanded search range.

So there is the factor of whether people can afford to have kids, have the time to, have any desire to, but there’s also the step of them even getting into a lasting relationship where that convo might come up, in the first place. The capitalists want to have their cake and eat it too; they want a populace that is so splintered it poses no threat to them, yet also somehow falls in love with each other and makes babies for the factory heaving, but the one is contradictory to the other.

I feel like I heard of some method that is long enough to get through a REM cycle but also relatively short like 1:30-3:00 hour increments or something. But it’s been years, so I could be remembering wrong. I wonder how that would compare to this thing of 20-30 minute increments. On the face of it, it seems like the 2nd would be a disaster because of not giving sufficient time to get into REM sleep.

“And do not quote me.”

At this point, Brynjolfsson points out that, “You’re on camera,” to which Schmidt responds:

“Yeah, that’s right. But you see my point. In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done.”

I almost wanted to say the US is a clown car of a country, but that would be insulting to clowns.

Love this. Needed a cathartic thing like this to get my spirits up. Edit: And I mean that unironically, sometimes it helps to have these things acknowledged throughout all the denial surrounding it.

As far as I can tell, base skepticism doesn’t accomplish much, if not grounded in a conscious understanding and embracing of one’s biases (such as a bias for the working class), as well as translating that to an understanding of the biases implicit in sources (not just whether they are “factual” or not). For example, an article could say, “A man at the supermarket today was wearing a pink shirt.” Okay, on its own, this may be factual, but why are they focusing on the color of one man’s shirt and specifically the color pink? Sometimes answering that is way more important than whether it’s strictly true or not that there was a man at the supermarket wearing a pink shirt.

But if people don’t even get to that stage because they’re too exhausted with the exercise of verifying whether what they’re being told is even true on a basic factual level, I’m concerned they’re just going to tap out in general. Do you see what I mean?

nefarious synthetic content risks increasing people’s scepticism towards digital information altogether

This is honestly my biggest concern with AI gen and information. I’m not so much concerned about “fake news” as I am about people who are already jaded becoming more cynical about information as a whole and effectively saying, “Let me just enjoy my Cheetos and iPhone 53 in my domicile and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist.”

It’s also not just about privacy. It’s also about safety (historically, ads can be a vector for viruses). And it’s about having garbage shoveled in front of you that makes the internet borderline unusable. Which comes back to capitalism and the nature of every space becoming an ad-infested hell because consume product is the god.

Dream chasing under capitalism is similar to buying lottery tickets hoping to win the jackpot. They’ll let a few win big here and there to legitimize the idea of upward mobility, but the reality is, you are not going to be that person. And the “but technically I could be” mentality is what drives people in gambling, just as it does in driving them to believe in the legitimacy of capitalism.

Forgot to mention, people with NPD are in the same vicinity as psychopathy, with not feeling empathy or shame. That’s an important part of why it isn’t just another mental health disorder to treat, and why it’s such a serious designation, as compared to describing a person as a little vain. People who can’t feel empathy may still be able to intellectualize it, so it’s not to say they’re guaranteed to be ‘evil’ or something. And people who do feel empathy can still do horrific things. But it’s a pretty serious characteristic of the disorder.

If you mean narcissistic as in self-absorbed, I don’t see millennials being that way more than any other generation. Individualism appears to encourage an “I got mine” mentality where people are overly focused on carving out their little fortress of safety and happiness with little regard for how others are doing or how their hiding within their fortress contributes to the overall state of things. But that’s more of a thing of tapping out of society, whereas, as a pathology, narcissism thrives on attention and admiration. I would think people who are going out of their way to broadcast their life choices, they’re either doing it as a vlogging thing as desperate for money, or they specifically are wanting to know how society feels about things and where they land within it. Which doesn’t necessarily have to do with pathology. I mean, remember we are social beings. And wanting approval from your peers and reassurance that you aren’t an aberration is not narcissistic on its own; I’d say it’s very normal.

In my experience with very few people who seemed distinctly pathological narcissism, it’s not just being bothered by criticism or wanting attention alone. I almost want to say it’s sort of like, if you imagine someone addicted to hard drugs, but instead they are addicted to attention and admiration. So everything in their life becomes about that, it impacts their relationships, the kind of choices they make, and they use people as sources of narcissistic supply, maneuvering them into positions where they can control them and extract from them like resources. It’s not just hurt feelings or defensiveness or posting selfies, it’s like a part of their identity and some of them become disturbingly effective at using people to feed their addiction. (Side note: Addiction may not be the best analogy, cause I’m not sure how much success attempts to heal narcissists has, but it’s the way I could think of atm to convey how deep a thing it is compared to someone who is a little egotistical or gets mad at criticism some of the time.)

If there is anyone who could become a billionaire and then, somehow, without any working class force to make it happen, through sheer incapability to do anything sensible, become an eX-billionaire, it would be Elon Musk.