ChunkMcHorkle

Good luck with that.

Even in the 70s, if you went to Catholic school in a very Catholic city, or had a number of friends that did, whether male or female, you knew. The only ones keeping quiet about it were the press and the church itself.

Meta today began removing ads from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media

. . . Thereby proving the absolute ease and facility with which content can be rapidly identified and removed when that content removal serves the corporation, and thereby actively helping to prove the plaintiffs’ cases for them.

Now that’s meta.

It’s a baby shower. Wanda’s meatstorm already came.

This is really good. Thank you for taking the time to write it.

Oh, yeah. Another one is Sad Eyes by Robert John, telling his his temp girl that his real girl is coming home today, she knew it was going to happen and he doesn’t want to see her cry. “I never used you,” lol.

There are quite a few of them. One that’s been in the news lately is Lola by The Kinks, which Moby called unenlightened and he’s right. One I always found creepy was Cat Stevens’ Wild World saying goodbye to his lady, because whatever he’s wishing her it’s not well. “I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.”

That’s not even starting with all the underage lyrics.

The 70s were amazing for music, but there sure are some clunkers in there.

It is a righteous text.

It’s hard to believe he’s been gone 35 years.

Thank you for writing this up, as someone not familiar with what’s going on over there I really appreciate you taking the time.

It’s all good. I think it has a lot more to do with accommodating one’s own brain, and how we individually categorize and enjoy our listening, than with specifics of music like genre/artist/album/track.

For myself, I almost always have some tune or another out of nowhere running through my head, so when I choose something to listen to, I am either picking with or against what’s already playing. So if I tune in to the music that’s already playing, I can see associated choices that are the same, similar, or completely unrelated on a superficial level, but my brain has linked them all somehow. Any of those choices, if I put them on, will satisfy because my brain is already playing one and mentally I’m already there.

I think the reasons algorithms never work for me is because no one could ever follow that, much less predict it. Even I can’t. Instead I’ve learned to simply accommodate it.

I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years.

Same here. I love that shit. My mood is the algorithm. I still occasionally get new stuff, but from other sources I happen to see or hear, like a Netflix show that has it in the background or a musician’s personal recommendation in an interview, and I go look it up manually. But even if I never got anything new, I already have more music than I could easily listen to in a lifetime that I already know I liked at least once.

I’ve tried streaming sources, but it never hits right. This way, where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right, always fresh, and I’m always listening to something I want to hear.

Yeah, it is bizarre. I’m on desktop so I opened the pic in a new tab, opened it to full height, and there are what look like a set of dark brown horizontal slat blinds compressed at the top as if raised (it’s flat-fronted so not a roll), then behind that another set of lighter brown horizontal slats down the right side as if lowered, and a square of glass in front of both.

Their AI decorator is . . . conflicted.

Lol, me and my poor memory started it. My apologies to you both.

I love dbzer0 and have an account there, it’s a really well-run and well-moderated instance with a LOT of thriving diversity, but they are also very pro-AI and I am very not, so I didn’t move completely. But I keep that account open just in case. It’s a great place.

Wow, thank you. When I wrote this, I was trying to explain something I have been thinking about and understanding innately for years but have never really put into words, and as a result it got long. But it has to do with how the act of consuming short-form content like social media (tweets and tik-tok videos, for example) has the effect of placing us in a semi-trance state, where the usual walls between ourselves and the outside world blur or even disappear, and our trust is the default even as we are certain it isn’t.

When we go in to consume that short-form stuff, because we think we actively chose it and believe our own chemistry has nothing to do with it, we’re walls down, thinking we’re in charge, but in fact our inner landscape has changed dramatically: mentally we’re in another world that we’ve created for ourselves. It’s made of the combination of what we brought and what we’re seeing, and how our imaginations combine that mix into something almost trustworthy at the moment of consumption when in reality it’s anything but that. Entirely Hitchcockian in a sense – “let the viewer create the fear” – but for the technological age where the mantra is “let the reader create the sense of trust” where trust could NOT be less deserved.

So later I was thinking about a TL;DR for all that, and honestly, if I could offer one, it would be that the more intentionally and forcefully we hold our own mental space, the freer and safer we are to read and skip whatever we want, because we are not feeling the same pressure to stay and get more. We can literally drop something mid-sentence and not feel a loss. The usual hooks of alternating dopamine and subtle fear just don’t hit the same when you really can just take it or leave it.

And because there’s no part of us feeling trapped and unable to let go, the need to hit back at something disagreeable also lessens. And that’s the part that lets the subtlety of diverse opinion in: it’s no longer a threat, because you’re not in the same kind of trance mode. You never stop maintaining that critical inner separation from its content. But that takes work and vigilance: I have to know what I’m up against to do it and actively continue working at keeping myself separate.

Yeah, not at a good TL;DR yet. Still needs work, clearly. Also, no denigration to food trucks! It’s not unusual to get better food from a truck than a sit-down restaurant, depending on where you’re located. And speaking of diversity, especially national, they can offer a lot more than the usual. To be clear I was thinking more the smaller, limited item ones – hot dogs and pretzels – they have at amusement parks than the real street trucks in NYC and LA, for example, and totally forgot about some of the amazing, unusual ones I’ve had the privilege of trying.

I genuinely hope no food trucks were harmed in the making of my comment, lol. But it’s a point well taken. Thank you for the correction!

Imagine it is two weeks before a major election in a closely contested state. A controversial ballot measure is on the line. Suddenly, a wave of posts floods X, Reddit, and Facebook, all pushing the same narrative, all amplifying each other, all generating the appearance of a massive grassroots movement. Except none of it is real. …Trust in the information people encounter on X, Facebook, and Reddit, already eroded, could fall even farther.

It’s much more difficult to be propagandized by any means, including autonomous AI, when you’re not freely offering up your own time and devices daily to have it fed to you, individualized just for you by means of your own data, which you are also donating to the cause of propagandizing you.

I get why people do, there are lots of good reasons, but at a certain point the good outweighs the bad. And there’s no time like the present to make a change.

So if you’re reading this and you are still interacting with these centralized corporate-owned propaganda sites regularly, maybe it’s time to rethink that strategy.

It was several years ago so in regard to dbzer0 signups I bet it’s my memory, lol. Thank you for the correction!

Lol. No. I’m what AI trained on.

Throughout history, there were people who read, and in reading, gained the ability to write. Look at my post history. (I looked at yours: it explains your stance perfectly.)

Let me know when you get something that idea-diverse out of a machine that isn’t actually a list or start out as one.

Thank you for saying so. Makes it worth writing.

Lol, no. Where else am I going to hear from the proudly atheist, anarchist, socialist, not-mainstream-and-not-interested folks? Even folks on the outer edges from my own position, like hexbear and lemmygrad, educate in their own way: not so much about what they think but about why they believe what they do. That doesn’t mean I want to go roll my brain around in that full time, but I am absolutely better for having encountered them.

I love these comments and opinions when I see them in the wild, and while I may completely disagree, when they are presented courteously they are fascinating and informative.

This next bit is long, but relevant: it’s about getting yourself to a point where you are able to see and enjoy the diversity that is already here. Just my opinion, skip it if you want.

You don’t have to agree with something to be able to read it. And you don’t have to possess, or even form, an opinion of your own just because others express theirs strongly. That need comes from innate human evolution, a deep quiet fear that if you stray too far from the pack or disagree too strongly you will be ostracized and not survive, but in the here and now in online spaces it’s just a fear. You can, within your own tolerances, choose to set that aside and just read whatever you want.

Or to see it from the opposite direction, ALL people, including you, including me, derive comfort and security from being in agreement with the herd. But these days, in online spaces, and in every open space where public discourse occurs, that is no longer natural discourse, but a mindfuck: something manipulated beyond recognition by hooking into our primal human fears and using that subtly activated fear as a leash to drag people into thinking, and then doing, what they would otherwise not be inclined to think or do on their own.

That’s what fucks it up for the rest of us. Propaganda, bad actors, and endless marketing. Remember how it was when the internet was young? That’s the difference between then and now: those three things weren’t there then, and the internet was a space as great as we could all make it. But they sure are there now. And if you’re human, you too are susceptible to it. I know I am.

So you carefully choose your spaces, you make the effort to know and respect your own tolerances, you take the time to look up sources on your own, and you curate your own feed like your sanity depends on it, because it does.

Some young person told me off many moons ago about how “all people [his] age are overwhelmed” and how he could not be held accountable for his own shitty behavior online because of his resultant “anxiety,” while at the same time absolutely refusing to curate his own intake. To me, he was drowning in a flood of negative, low-value content he refused to turn off or even slow.

I feel bad for him because while it is absolutely true that everything, coming at all of us all the time, is a tsunami of mental and emotional overwhelm that never stops, he CAN easily take control of what he chooses to see, and choose to cut it off when it’s too much. No one’s going to do that for him. But I can choose to do that for myself, and I do.

And that’s how I can easily read differing opinions without being threatened by them: they are just that. Opinions. Not even necessarily factual. When you get to that place, the world is your oyster, but it takes constant vigilance. Get lazy and you’re back to just doomscrolling the propagandized mainstream mental and emotional manipulations again.

But hit that sweet spot in your own feed and viewing tolerances, and that’s when you can see and appreciate the diversity that is already thriving here. Instead of a glance and a discard in a world of one-line comments – what doomscrolling and social media are made of and count on – you can actually read, really read and not just skim, and recognize when something is worth more than five seconds or not. The more you actually read and don’t just skim, the better and faster you’ll become while still enjoying the pleasures that deep reads will bestow.

People are still making ten course meals of real content, but most readers are still hanging out at the food trucks. Only you can find what you’re really looking for, but chances are excellent it’s already here and you’ve either trained yourself to look past it, or actively cut it off by blocking it because it was too much trouble to deal with (high noise to signal, bad actors or behaviors, poor moderation, spam, etc). Look again.

I especially tip my hat to dbzer0 forcing new users to write a brief essay on anarchism just to sign up. I don’t know if they still do that, but their requirement made me think about something I already knew from the distant past that I had not thought about in years – Sacco and Vanzetti came to mind, though they are perhaps not the best example of real anarchism, lol – and given recent world events it has been a VAST personal relief to know that there is a huge, thriving set of alternative philosophies that are NOT just designed to move masses of people through orphan-crushing and value-extraction machines until we all die. (And that’s before you get to the scam that is politics in the US.)

So yeah, I’ve learned more about grassroots populist movements and beliefs just browsing Lemmy in three years than I ever learned in the space of many decades prior, and I can honestly say that while my values have remained the same, my entire worldview has been transformed by quietly hearing and listening to others talk about their own, even when I did not agree.

TL;DR: If you’re not seeing diversity, that’s a sign to carefully broaden your own scope and tweak your own viewing boundaries.

The counting/tabulation is where the fuckery occurs, but you’re lucky to have a paper receipt anyway. I have voted in several states and gotten nothing but a sticker.