Who cares if something is “condescending”, if it’s true?
This knee-jerk moralizing is a huge part of why “Internet is bad”.
We weren’t like this 10 years ago. The Great Awokening has made everyone more judgemental.
This knee-jerk moralizing is a huge part of why “Internet is bad”.
We weren’t like this 10 years ago. The Great Awokening has made everyone more judgemental.
The argument made in the article is that bitter, ostracised people who want to lash out have existed forever. The biggest change in the last 10 years is that the internet has become more accessible to this group and allowed their voice to be heard.
Not saying the author is right, but it's an interesting perspective and definitely worth considering.
I find this somewhat disquieting. I certainly thought it was somewhat true up to the early 1990s.
The implication is that it was always known that people are easily manipulated. They needed protecting from themselves and the manipulators need to come from a certain class.
I object to that notion, but I am appalled at the base insanity that Facebook creates so I find myself conceding the point.
It appears to me that we haven't really switched the model, but looking at the analysis of the tiny number of influencers it takes to generate 90% of anti vax or whatever propaganda on facebook it seems clear this isn't democratization.
We have simply been handed a different set of carefully curated sources of information.
Von Braun said "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?".
Facebook says "As long as people keep reading the content, who cares what the content is?".
[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/01/...
[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=119247...
Yet all of his examples are of conservatives, even though liberals do the same (often worse). The whole article itself was a very politely written “lashing out” at people who vote differently than he does.
10 years isn't that long ago. All those sites were around then, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News...
Even the topics changed only a little bit. GamerGate was 7 years ago. 4chan and 8chan were reviled before that. The major political debates are as old as time. The division between American and European morality is about as old as those world-views.
It seems to me that the knee-jerk opposition to "wokeness" always comes from people who would rather sweep problems that don't affect them under the rug than acknowledge that they need to be fixed. They are the aloof, socially normative people in this article, utterly confused by and thus dismissive of the struggles of those outside of society's standard ingroup.
"We weren't like this 10 years ago" because, as the article describes, those concerns were previously ignored by the mainstream because they didn't fit the experiences or interests of those who had influence over the mainstream. Now that those institutions have lost that filtering power, we're hearing from more real people with more real problems. Healthcare access, structural racism, mental health resources, poverty, etc. They are taking their little hammers to our Twitter feeds. The solution isn't to shame and ignore the people complaining about them - it is to fix those societal issues that cause the pain to begin with.
There is a massive hodgepodge of ethnic communities in the U.S., of all possible colors, and their societal and economic outcomes do not conform or correlate to the idea that people of darker skin are more oppressed by the society and are worse off.