Gen is a Medium publication that runs long-form features on technology, culture, and society, including pieces on calculators and psychology studies.
HN links it for long features such as the Texas Instruments calculator story and a critique of the Stanford Prison Experiment, which commenters call fraud.
Yes misinformation is nothing new. The type of bullshit I see now being promoted now on social media is no different from the bullshit that used to appear in Weekly World News or Nexus Magazine in the 90s.
Hell in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" Mike Myers even does a bit about how his mother reads batshit crazy conspiracy theories and refers to them as "news". Fringe batshit crazy conspiracy theories have always been out there and have always been a space where the far left overlaps with the far right[1].
The problem is that now we have an entire class of politican, forming an increasingly powerful faction in global politics, whose pitch is based on misinformation and it's reinforced by a media network that is increasingly divorced from any sort of regulation or oversight, has the veneer of "news" and the trust that goes with it, but which is just a bunch of sociopaths in equal measures crazy, greedy and stupid, amplifying each other into authenticity.
Social media has enabled this, it would have been impossible to do otherwise.
Yes the writers of Nexus Magazine could publish something and sell it in the newsagent alongside Time Magazine and National Geographic, but what Social Media does is the equivalent of running Nexus Magazine articles inside Time Magazine, or worse it just lets a whole bunch of people who can imitate rational, educated thought create content that too many people fail to differentiate from actual scholarly or journalistic work.
The politicians lend…
That's the thing. The political "spectrum" isn't really real. Extremism comes in lots of fun flavors.
What the new-age hippie leftist types and the far-right evangelicals have in common, apart from a fairly casual relationship with objective truth and a deep distrust of the state, is that they favor a simplistic, absolutist Lord-of-the-rings-esque good-vs-evil style framing of the world. Fascism and vaguely occult symbolism have a long history of symbiosis. This renders New Age types with their laissez-faire attitude to new memes easy prey for propaganda merchants.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/22/leftwingers-far-right-conspiracy-theories-anti-vaxxers-power
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-55957298
https://www.mironline.ca/beyond-the-qanon-shaman-the-disturbing-relationship-between-new-age-and-far-right-movements/
https://www.kunskapskonsult.com/eng/_fascism.html
https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far-right-overlap-d1a6ddcd7be4
Interestingly the same writer wrote this recently:
"I’ve written before about the lack of resources for young men during critical times in their lives. What feminism does for women — providing girls with alternative media, cultural norms, and a language to understand sexism — is what we need for boys and young men.
I don’t believe young American men end up in racist and sexist online spaces — spaces that radicalize — because they are innately bigoted. They end up there because they are confused and seeking out community, and no one else is providing an alternative."
https://gen.medium.com/young-white-male-rage-is-the-biggest-threat-to-our-country-495917022630
The principle of charity leads me to take the view her heart is in the right place but she like many of us has published caustic words on the internet that don't really represent us correctly.
Reminds me of this harrowingly well written article about living through the Sri Lankan civil war
Some choice quotes
> People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner.
> I was looking through some old photos for this article and the mix is shocking to me now. Almost offensive. There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub. This is all within two weeks.
> [There] is not a uniform experience of chaos. For some people it destroys their bodies, others their hearts, but for most people it’s just a low-level hum at the back of their minds.
https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-there-ba1e4b54c5fc
> Movies like The Thing, Terminator, Alien, Aliens, etc. Don't really have a political message other than some vague politics as window dressing.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a34518538/john-carpenter-2020-interview-coronavirus-trump-they-live-the-thing/
https://gen.medium.com/the-scariest-thing-about-alien-is-how-real-it-s-become-fa2182d2207e
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2012/06/13/the-politics-of-ridley-scotts-blockbuster-film-prometheus/?sh=60c077293e6a
https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/terminator-james-cameron
> Give me the politics of Tetris, Pong, Super Mario, Donkey Kong
You got me. Let me rephrase it as any culture with a message.
I used to think that, too. Then I read this post[1]. JUUL has more nicotine than a cigarette and there’s less friction to using it: a 10 second hit instead of a 10 minute cigarette and there’s no need to find a lighter or go outside. It also doesn’t really smell so it’s easy to use discretely.
All of that adds up to people who think JUUL is safer or can help them quit but it actually gets them hooked even more.
It’s like trying to cure a coffee addiction by switching to a shot of espresso. It might look like cutting back but it’s really doubling up.
[1]https://gen.medium.com/confessions-of-a-juul-junkie-6b5ce4a8b92e