SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety – The Mind of David Krider

Giving Up

For all of my adult life, I’ve been convinced that the right thing, the correct thing, the moral, ethical, or “good” thing would prevail on its own merits. I’ve been under the spell of the notion that the world was a just place, and if people could just be shown the right way to do things, they would accept them and want to do them in that way. I now realize this is a complete and utter delusion which has been foisted on me because of my personality and, if we’re being honest, a bit of neural atypicality.

I have often rued the days where I blundered through meetings at work, pointing out why certain decisions sucked, and how we could make things better, and in the process, making everyone mad. It took a couple of decades to even work out that I was, in effect, calling everyone stupid, and no matter how right I was, people got their backs up and worked against my ideas just out of spite over a wounded pride. I’ve seen it more times than I can count, and that’s not hyperbole.

What I’ve finally figured out is that the same thing has been happening in churches. Indeed, why should church have been any different? It’s filled with selfish, stupid people, just like everywhere else. Well, to be fair, we’re supposed to care more about “rightness” than the working world. But, no, when push comes to shove, people abandon correctness for feelings, and hide behind sentiment and platitude, because holding people to account is hard.

Maybe those other people already understand that holding out for the right thing is too much trouble, and therefore accept acquiescence more quickly and easily. Maybe they don’t want to get involved to save their sanity. Maybe. In Christian theology, there’s an infinite supply of forgiveness, so we must always be willing to forgive. There’s always an opportunity to take the high(er) road, because there’s always a higher road. Perhaps at the expense of sanity, but, sure, it’s always available. So at least in church circles, the fallback position not only saves time and sanity, it also makes you look “holier than thou.” Win-win!

Realizing that my own attitudes work against me in business, I’ve tried to reset and work WITH people in moving them towards more correct positions, but that hasn’t worked very well either, so I’m doubly screwed. Turns out most people aren’t even open to thinking that whatever it is they’re doing could be improved. After being in “leadership” of a church beset with spiritual abuse for 30 years, and suddenly being able to speak directly to a game-changing crisis, I skipped the pleasantries and went straight for the “correct” approach again when it mattered most, and lost again. And no one wants to hear it. No one cares. No one else is bothered. Everyone just wants to move on. Everyone just wanted to roll over. I guess they have that choice, but then they don’t get to complain to me when the barking dog they’ve turned their back on bites them in the rear again.

So I’m done. I’ve already removed myself from that situation, but now I’m also removing my concern about it. I can’t change anything. I never could. Turns out, I couldn’t even budge the needle. I’m sick of trying to point out ethics and morality to a bunch of people who shouldn’t need the lesson in the first place. I’m tired of trying to hold people accountable for things when no one else will. So they all get what they’ve accepted, and I don’t want to hear any more complaining about it. Ever. Congrats, everyone. You win. I’ll shut up now.

IQ Tests, All Day, Every Day

Certain topics have revealed themselves to be IQ tests on social media. It’s become clear that, as a society, we are being held back by people who can’t understand basic concepts like averages and standard deviations or compound interest. When I’m reading an online conversation these days, I’m starting to see the IQ test behind the point more often and more quickly; the logical pitfall which, if you don’t avoid, will cause you to conclude the wrong things, and land on the opposite side of the solution.

Failing these tests wouldn’t be harmful, except that the people failing them have full access to society through voting and being present when adults are talking, and they fight against rules, regulations, and policies which would help everyone in the long run due to their limitations. Our progress as a country is being thwarted because our politicians cater to their fears and misunderstanding in order to get their votes, and this absolutely happens on both sides. Society can be mapped onto a 2D graph with left/right political leanings on the horizontal axis, and IQ on the vertical, with 100 on the crossing.

The Graph we Need to Understand the World

This is our world. There’s about 25% of the population in each quadrant, and we’re all just trying to “figure it out.” Societally, the people below the line haven’t really had a lot of impact until the invention of the internet. In the early days, the internet felt egalitarian and promising because it took a certain amount of intelligence and resources (working as a proxy for intelligence) to get on and say something, and the results were quick, amazing, and impactful. Now “the internet” has been reduced to a dozen web sites, and everyone is on it. Now they have full access to whatever “news” they want to consume, and they have full access to the town square in various forms of social media. (And, no, for the purposes of this discussion, I’m not going anywhere near the debate about the First Amendment, or political or racial biases.)

So now the people above the line are trying to “figure it out” while the people below — who will never “figure it out” — make it more and more difficult for the rest, as they flail about in their own doomed efforts, confident in their Dunning-Krugerring that their input and understanding is equal to every else’s, and, after all, why shouldn’t they sit on city councils and school boards and be middle managers at large companies, and implement all the dumbest stuff imaginable?

A lot of the IQ tests are failed due to modern liberalism, by which I mean the tendency to ignore facts — or, especially, ignore certain facts in favor of others — while focusing on intents and feelings. You can’t save the Titanic by caring about the feelings of the iceberg, but that’s exactly what a large portion of our society would be concerned with these days. So there’s a concentration of society-sabatoging effort going on in the left half of the quadrant that mixes with the problems in the lower half. Hence the red line. (I really wanted to draw it going up asymptotically on the left side, showing that after a certain amount of liberalism, no amount of IQ can save you, but working Photoshop is not one of my skills, and, ironically, I’m apparently not smart enough to figure it out after 30 years.) It’s the people to the top and right who could help society the best over the longest terms, and they’re being clawed at by the people to the left and below, like crabs in bucket pulling down the ones smart enough climb up and over to escape.

Reddit is a Psyop

I can’t confirm one way or another that this actually happened, and I’m not going to even try. It is instructive that there is no doubt it could be true, and I’ll leave it at that.

This is yet another reminder that Reddit is a corporate-fronted deep-state psyop propaganda machine designed to manipulate a very, very specific demographic.

“Can Everyone See My Screen?”

“YES! EVERYONE CAN SEE YOUR SCREEN. THAT’S LITERALLY THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS STUPID SOFTWARE.”

If you can ask if your screen can be seen, and you reasonably expect to be able to hear someone respond to that query, you should know without a shadow of a doubt that everyone can see your screen, which inevitably is showing some stupid PowerPoint slide that we call could have done without anyway.

So it turns out that there are, in fact, stupid questions.

When I’m president, I will make it illegal to ask, “Can everyone see my screen?” in online meetings.

I expect to be swept into office on a “purple wave” with no other policy positions.

Societal Reprogramming

People are starting to wake up. This notice needs to be expanded to include all printed media, broadcast, movies, streaming, video gaming, and even tabletop role playing. The billionaires in question are at the top of companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard, which collectively own a controlling stake in almost every single company in the US. Larry Fink has become the poster child of this effort, because he literally said the quiet part out loud.

The next time you wonder why your favorite entertainment started being terrible all of a sudden, realize that these investment companies directed that to happen, and they’ve got more money than God to lose on spreading their messaging. It has become a complete top-down reprogramming of society. The only major platform/channel standing apart from this is Twitter, and that’s why they hate Elon Musk.

We Used to be a Civilization

There were a handful of websites I found way back in the 2000’s that I liked, and kept on a short list to check every few days. This one stuck in my head because of the domain name, which I thought was terribly clever. I dug it up in the Internet Archive. It’s been taken over by some film company? Or something? I’m not clear if it’s run by the same people or not.

Another one was called “The Bassment” (sic), made by a guy who worked at SGI. It was named that way because he played bass, too. I can’t find it in the archive. It was run out of an Indy he had at his house, which inspired me to run my own web and email servers out of my house for 15 years.

There were others, like “Ze Frank,” who has moved to TikTok and YouTube (and probably others).

Anyway, I just wanted to capture the kind of free design that used to be prevalent on the internet before everyone started using “engines” and “templates” and “front ends.” And, no, the irony is not lost on me, sitting here using WordPress with a stock theme. And, sure, I started to rewrite another custom web site for my personal use, but I was using Bootstrap anyway. I readily admit that I’m not creative, but I used to at least try.

Graphics by FrontPage 97 and Image Composer

The web used to be a wild frontier of programmers and artists and writers who were exploring the new medium. Now, it’s just YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et. al., etc. There are very few personal sites left. It all got so boring. And for all the “AI” that’s supposed to be in “the algorithms,” TikTok and YouTube offer me 20 pieces of crap for every 1 thing I might have been interested in.

You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

Source: You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don’t how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you — individually– angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks’ goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners — especially young ones — to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it’s much scarier than you think.

The best part? The very best part? Reddit is one of the biggest parts of the problem, and I don’t see anyone in the comments with either that realization, or the guts to say it. The site got used like a 3-dollar whore in the run-up to the 2016 election, in favor of Trump. Then they “fixed” that algorithm problem, and now the entire front page is almost always filled with posts about people being awful to one another, in various forms. It’s ALL hatred towards “others.” It’s ALL moral superiority over someone else. Just zoom out and look at it without being logged in. It’s kind of like junior high, but way, way worse.

Reddit Knows Programmers

I “use” Reddit to look at subs for ESO and Fallout 76. That’s it. When I’m bored, I sometimes click over to the “popular” tab, and just have a look. It’s more of an anthropological experiment than an interest in reading what’s there. Sometimes, I can’t get past the front page, because, most of the time, Reddit is just a living monument to people being awful to each other. Sometimes, I make it to the next page. Sometimes, I make it to a gem. Most of the time, I see Reddit’s twenty-something, white, middle-class, male, under-sexed, under-employed hive mind on full display, like this.

“He,” here, refers to Elon Musk.

This guy thinks “backend and fullstack” programmers “know shit about OSes and PC in general.” And, as of 13 hours of being posted, deep in the thread, has 84 upvotes. (On a post with 2200+ votes.)

I’ve been programming since I was 12, on a Vic-20. I’ve been doing it professionally my entire career, for about 30 years now. Even the people who I would consider “casual” programmers know how operating systems and PC’s work. I’ve met some posers, but they wash out. To blithely say “most” programmers “don’t understand computers” is utter nonsense, and, frankly, weapons-grade cope.

Welcome to Reddit, I guess. “Enjoy” your stay.

Reddit just made a deal to sell their “content” to Google, to train AI. Good luck with that. With what we’ve seen over the past few days with their AI product, using Reddit seems like a really good fit.

I weep for the future.

Me and My Impertinent Questions

That’s apparently what I get for calling him on conflating two very controversial, yet very different issues, and asking why he would do that. It’s too bad. I mean, I know we have different politics, but he’s a great writer with a lot to say, and he’s smack-dab on the money about the corporate “enshittification” of every online service, and, indeed, every business in America these days. On the other hand, he’s one of the charter members of the he-man Musk haters club, and says he’ll be “leaving” Twitter soon, so I guess I’ll have a chance to get blocked on Mastodon or something in the future.

Twitter, in a Nutshell

Some mid account, posting a summary, of a news article, which says specifically the opposite of what he’s saying in the tweet…. 21.2K likes. The truth? Doesn’t even register. But it’s red meat for his audience, so…

Where’s Elon’s vaunted community fact-checking service on this one?

There really isn’t a way to fix this on this platform. Maybe not on social media at all. But I’m going to start muting a lot more accounts in a last-ditch effort to make this platform useful to me.