Gen-Z pre-purchase AAA games and hang out on r/Marvel salivating at the daily question some Intern cooked up for that day just so executives can mark “engagement UP” on a monthly teams call. Get fucking real. It’s the most corporate owned generation to exist.

Just look at the state of the internet now. Look at how it is built. There can be no room for creation and new. It’s all mods trying to copy and paste last weeks questions to keep numbers up. Step outside that and BAM you’re banned. Must keep the trains running.

All of this is to capture people and sell their attention to marketing teams to sell that weeks pokemon or action movie. It is so inherent in the way the internet is now that Moderators don’t even know that’s what they’re doing, let alone the users. Forums are not suppose to be like this. The internet was never suppose to be like this. You’re suppose to see a butthole every now and then. That’s how you know you are in an area they dont’ control.

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Yes

I think they are. I think tech forums are essentially places to convince people to hate tech. Hate progress. Meanwhile other countries embrace these new technologies and develop, build and iterate.

Spamoflage

I’m starting to see that China may have a large presence on lemmy. It would make sense with the .ml groups. You can see a lot of pro China stuff here plus lemmy is a generator against things like AI which benefits China.

Is your argument that Chinese government is not using technology to restrict freedoms?

How is that being upvoted

I would say that decades of western Hollywood has primed the population to mistrust any new technology and only see potential dystopian ends in exchange for entertainment. Combined with China spreading propaganda to encourage those views in western nations. Sites like lemmy and Facebook are heavily used as generators to spread mistrust.

Right but so are people. This was all inevitable from the start. Much worse stuff is coming. People should have been embracing methods to avoid this stuff decades ago. I’m not just talking about using a fucking ad blocker. There needed to be measures to fuck with data collection. Become hostile to any site’s or content creators looking to sell viewers anything. Run applications that could feed junk data back to sites.

Had people started earlier they wouldn’t be facing the giant industry that grew out of a digital spaces that welcomed the things that eventually grew into this data collection beast we all knew were coming.

Yea it’s unfortunate the Republicans are in power. They would have done something about this.

Any new technology instantly gets turned into some new boogeyman instead of being embraced. Works out great for China when western people become luddite at a very critical window of opportunity from emerging technology. You’d almost think China has a strong ability to flood western sites with propaganda.

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You all deserve this and worse. No reason to complain about it. This is what everybody wanted.

What is an influencer?

Since you said I’m wrong, what is the inflection point that I’m describing?

Did I say he flashed his wealth?

I do expect people to be aware of their impact, directly and indirectly, especially on kids. The more people you can potentially impact, the greater the responsibility to be aware.

Is data collection, exploiting children to sell products, and the consequences of profit-seeking something that we weren’t aware of at the time PewDiePie became famous?

I agree PewDiePie didn’t sell things to children. He didn’t need to. He was the product. I’m against commercial pressure on the internet, which seems like a radical concept now. PewDiePie didn’t need to hawk products to kids i know he did a good job with that. But he was the product. He was the point at which kids saw they could become a gamer and help commercial sites collect people’s attention and sell it to advertisers. That model is what broke everything. It turned the internet into cable television 2.0.

We already had corporate-approved media that was just a way to sell our attention. The internet, for a brief moment, was something for us. It was as close to a gift economy as we could get. It was the difference between a lawn sprayed with glyphosate to kill anything that wasn’t good old American Texas bluegrass devoid of originality, beauty, or color but looking neat and a lawn allowed to grow wild, full of weeds but also flowers, plants, and life.

PewDiePie wouldn’t have been the only one to make money, but he was the first to hit that milestone, and everything changed after that.

He laid the groundwork for those shitty influencer. He had the attention of young people who looked up to him. The minute they saw he could make millions by becoming the walking embodiment of a Nascar fender he set the attitudes and aspirations of a generation.

Would YouTube continue without him? Yes of course.

Could he have pushed back and created helped influence a generation of kids to reject the selling out of themselves to this influencer culture? Absolutely.

There were a few influencers in those early days that could have changed things or at least maintained the zeitgeist that we had then. Nobody did. That money was too good. Everything after he made that first million would change how the internet worked.

He was the inflection point. He could have impacted everything going forward. He could have told kids that these companies were stealing their data. That they were soliciting gamers to use as Trojan horses for what would eventually make everything worse.

You think not having total control of an organization means he’s free of blame. Would you say that your MAGA uncle doesn’t control Trump so isn’t responsible for his actions.

Pewdiepie is literally called an influencer. He warped what many young people belief they can become today and that belief is what ushered in a world of influencers chasing the all mighty dollar. That has given all these corporations fuel to create content and that content is stealing our data, eliminating data scarcity and used to influence politics.

He’s not the cause of it but he was an inflection point and could have went in a different direction to push kids to reject this new paradigm. Instead he was the face of it.

He helped usher in this new enshittification. He was the Trojan horse. First one to reach a million

I always get the vibe it’s an astroturf. A way to c convince leftist to further isolate themselves like 1700 Japan. It just makes these people turn into Trump like archetypes where you only surround yourself with people you agree with.

I bet you’re all being used to manipulate stock prices.

And time is running out to do meaningful things on any platform. They’re quickly taking them over. It’s not just for fun

In my opinion that makes it a big failure. But also eye opening. There is so many here who say they will fight some nazis in the upcoming Civil War, yet can’t be pissed to do anything now.

Also I’m starting to see moderators may be big contributors to this failure on the left. The right grip and control over groups like it is some military unit is the box I’m talking about. It creates a space where everybody is in lock step or removed. But everybody that remains are all low energy, low effort people. No passion. No energy.

Stay with me for a minute. We know governments and just about any one wages warfare at all times. All except the left. Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk are out there working with Cambridge analytics. Proud boys joined with backyard militias and eventually becoming ICE. Peter Thiel funded Joe Rogan to become the mouth of MAGA. That is what we can see. When people we calling this stuff out, they were called crazy or to go touch grass. But they were right.

We have to assume that behind the scene there is equal or greater effort. You can see this in all our protests. All our efforts. All our ideals. Something is broken. There was 700 million people in the streets without any effect. That wasn’t the only time. Something is steering the left into these black holes of effort. There is an old guard that is protecting this.

We need new ideas and generators. Lemmy should be that. But instead we again get tight boxes and people yelling about car heads and issues that shouldn’t be the upfront focus.