On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done.
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — From the balcony of BuzzFeed’s São Paulo office right now, you can hear screams of “Ele Não” echoing through the city’s winding avenues. It’s the same phrase I’ve seen graffitied all over the city this month. The same one I heard chanted from restaurants and bars all afternoon. It means “not him” — him being Bolsonaro. But his victory tonight isn’t a surprise. He’s just one more product of the strange new forces that dictate the very fabric of our lives.
It’s been a decade since I first felt like something was changing about the way we interact with the internet. In 2010, as a young news intern for a now-defunct website called the Awl, one of the first pieces I ever pitched was an explainer about why 4chan trolls were trying to take the also now-defunct website Gawker off the internet via a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. It was a world I knew. I was a 19-year-old who spent most of my time doing what we now recognize as “shitposting.” It was the beginning of an era where our old ideas about information, privacy, politics, and culture were beginning to warp.
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WNU Editor: The world was radicalized before the internet was born. I can even make an argument that it was radicalized before the development of TVs, radios, and the telephone. To put it bluntly .... even if the internet was to shut down today, the politics that drive the world today is not going to change, they will just use another medium to drive their message.
4 comments:
I think we’ve arrived at a blip in history, where for a few years, everyone thought everyone else cared about their thoughts and that their thoughts were going to change the world.
Facebook was responsible for a lot of that by mass democratisation of opinions.
But everyone has opinions
That is the flaw.
And no one wants to change their views.
Which means that we’ve reached the point where we’ve reached opinion fatigue.
Which is a bit like outrage fatigue.
With so many opinions it does seem we’re all radicalised.
And less willing to give ground.
Crusader. That's right.. and on top is the cultural war that's happening. One side screams at the top of their lungs "we -believe- xyz" and get into people's faces, while the other side is a bit more rationale, wants to uphold due process etc. Irrational people seem to be more dependent on the thoughts of the herd, clique dynamics etc. and literally aim to punish people / mark as evil for speaking out or voicing different opinions. And part of this seems to be strongly related to the group dynamic. You've seen this with someone's friends network. Don't like someone's ideas and thoughts? Easy to unfriend or form a mob. But much much harder to take a pause and truly think - who has time to think for a few minutes or even hours if it's so easy to "like" an outrage activist's comment? Plus you getthe immediate rush of righteousness. But to stand up and defend someone is hard work. Because the mob is ruthless.. no thinking, just herd acting... coming after your job and livelihood for voicing thoughts your clique or group disagrees with. It's scary, really.. as if many people are back to highschool age and the apps give them methods to organise and move against you quickly, and if they were wrong, no problem, just scroll down to the next outrage post or comment
https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382.html
and then there is this
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