Just in case you needed more proof that the internet is dead and has been for a while …
I’m old enough to remember the initial push to get everyone online. The tech gurus promised us that once the web connected everybody, every idea would get a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas, and public discourse would be forever free of censorship.
Instead, the public square has devolved into a lockstep collective swamped with ritual litanies led by trillion-dollar corporations. And everyone constantly spies on everyone at the behest of those same megacorps and increasingly deranged governments.
The anarcho-fascist hive mind is here, which is why it’s more vital than ever that members of Generations X and Y hand on memories of the pre-internet age.
And it’s equally crucial that others learn to unplug from the Pop Cult matrix.
And TV was supposed to be the educational boon that would draw families closer together. Radio and telegraph were supposed to be the media to connect the world and bring greater understanding. Newspapers were supposed to be the vehicle by which the common man could become informed about the wider world.
Even if these were the intended purposes, look at the actual fruit they have borne. Internet, you have failed utterly.
Looking at you and that press, Gutenberg!
For a time, small towns and rural areas brushed off a lot of what the newspapers said, since they were typically weeklies. Radio stations that delivered weather and farm reports and filled the gaps with music were more popular than news stations. TVs were mini-movie theaters vice 24/7 news dumps.
All of that changed and became worse over time. Why would anyone think that the Internet would be immune, just because there was some small amount of “talking back”?
Classic case of ignorance backed with stupidity, right down here. I laughed out loud when I read this fresh off the electronic press. From Davos, Switzerland in … 1996.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
The smart set keep banging their heads against the wall due to the unexamined assumptions that everyone is equal, and education can fix everything.
Look at the blockchain, crypto, and NFT guys. You could Ctrl+F Replace “Bitcoin” with “cyberspace” in any of their utopian fanfics, and they’d sound just like starry-eyed information superhighway tracts from the 90s.
The perpetual confusion of “solution” with “tool”.
If you ever check out Toby Fox’s Deltarune—which is not a game that you should ever, ever popularize or show to children, under the penalty of grave sin—you’ll encounter a midwit gamer character named Berdly, whose façade of intelligence is the depth of his personality.
All of the fanbase hates him, because he reminds them too much of themselves. You can probably watch the Berdly cutscenes on YouTube.
The dissident right is brimming with INTJ engineer types who are hyper-resistant to Lefty rhetoric but have the aesthetic sense of Soviet-era factory managers. They’ve correctly identified the problem as cultural degeneration and demoralization but lack the skill and temperament to fix it.
The Critical Drinker’s most recent video is a perfect example of the gen y pop cult blind side.
So the Drinker knows Marvel’s producers hate him. He knows they’re morally bankrupt, and he knows that nearly everything they make now is full of hate for straight white males and preaches what he refers to as “The Message”.
In response to all of this, he…
Gives them money and recommends people pay to see their latest movie.
You can’t win the culture war if you don’t acknowledge you’re fighting one.
Try recommending ‘Brand Zero’ in a generic right-leaning Gen-Y/MIL space and you get treated like the guy with a third eye. ‘Build your own works’ gets some verbal support, but it’s also clear that it likely won’t translate into action by the listeners.
But, they are typically quick to bash the people making the degenerate works, as though just jawing about it will fix the problem.
The ‘sloth’ issue needs to be flagged more as a central problem.
The Drinker is a working author, so I don’t thibk that criticism really works with him.
No, this was directed at a couple comic forums I’m on. Plenty of anger; no desire to do anything about it.
It’s more Gen Y impotence. Shriveling up in the face of conflict. They’ll grumble about it, but when it comes to supporting anything, it’ll have to be on the level of that Matt Walsh scam in order to stick it to the people they don’t like.
It never occurs to them to actually do what they did as kids and do other things instead. They would rather have those same worn out aesthetics instead of better art. They just can’t accept those days are gone.
Something that Gen Y shares with boomers is that we fundamentally desire being seen as clever, righteous, or “doing something” above actually making a change. You can see this in the response to Matt Walsh style grifterism.
A perfect example of this is Michael Knowles’s “Reasons to Vote Democrat.” For those not in the know, it’s a gag book that insists entirely of blank pages. Nothing more. There’s no reason to own the book other than as a cheap gag or as a virtue signal; it doesn’t provide any value outside of those things. You could make the exact same joke without spending money on a book and taking part of grift. Obviously this sort of thing does nothing to build up conservative culture, nor will it do anything to convince leftists or even moderates to change their minds.
But the books defenders always respond to criticism as though those who do not like the book do not like it merely because they do not “get the joke.” Buying the book is ultimately meant to show how much funnier and cleverer the right is than the left, even though the joke is about as dead simple and bottom of the barrel as you can get.
The right’s “culture war” went about as well as Pickett’s Charge.
Fighting on ground of the enemy’s choosing is always a mistake.
A war involves both sides winning some battles. The West has suffered a culture rout.
Seeing “stimulus check” overtake the nation reminds me of how CBS puts out a story on there being another stimulus check every two weeks or so. When there was a third stimulus check, the only significant change to the story was changing “will there be a third stimulus check” to “will there be a fourth stimulus check?” I see them through the Twin Cities outlet, but of course the stories are the same across the country. This search will give you a very small subset of what they put out:
https://cbslocal.com/search/?q=stimulus+check
The animation also makes me glad that I still don’t know who Travis Scott is.
If you want to be really sad, go search for headlines of the form “[Place] is Warming Twice as Fast as the Rest of the World.” There are dozens of such articles, some about specific regions, some about countries, some about continents. They all paint this as a unique tragedy of the sun monster targeting either the reader’s home country someplace the reader cares about, but it becomes ridiculous as soon as you see the other articles labeling, among others, Canada, the U.S., individual states, individual European countries, and the entire continent of Europe as warming ‘twice as fast as the rest of the world.’
Once you see this, about five minutes of research will remind you that the majority of the planet is covered in water, which has a very high specific heat. This means that ALL LAND is heating ‘twice as fast as the rest of the planet,’ on average. The problem is that 99%-ish of the general population will only ever see one or two articles targeting their specific region instead of seeing enough to put together that it’s a scam.
Figures don’t lie—but liars make figures.
The speed with which “Gabbi Pieto” sweeps the nation around 13 Sept, quickly clearing our collective minds of previous search “Afghanistan”, as if on queue, is a miniature comedy in itself.
The Gen X and older dissidents who predicted that Afghanistan would prompt Biden’s resignation or impeachment failed to reckon with the regime’s ability to reprogram the NPCs via the net.
Teddy says, “The cracks are finally appearing in the narrative.” So all of his readers sit back and wait for somebody else to take action—because look at this cool new comic on Arkhaven!
Incidentally, I recommend Charles Lindbergh’s Autobiography for meditations on this and other things.
One of the things he notes is that when he was growing up culture could be wildly different even going over a county or two in Minnesota. He reflects on the fact that his aunt, who grew up without electricity or farming technology more advanced than a plow, spent her last days watching the same late night talk shows as everyone else in America.
But beyond that, he is a unique position to comment on the rise of globohomo as it started. When he first started flying around the world, barely anyone else was in a position to do so and no one else who could fly also had the prestige to be welcomed into nearly any nation. So Lindbergh got an opportunity to see a tremendous variety of cultures from all parts of the world. But then as airline travel became widespread he quickly started seeing travel hubs around the world become more and more homogenized. (This is one of the big uneasy parts of his autobiography; in his youth he crusaded for connecting the world through flight, but in his old age he questioned whether it was worth losing what we lost for it.)
(Important note: I do not endorse everything he said. In particular, he was full in on the “maybe if science was good enough we wouldn’t need God” idea. But he does have a perspective few others do.)