I’m in somewhat of a grumpy mood so I’m going to complain here. Feel free to bail if you don’t like that type of stuff. If you are hanging around you have been warned.
So. The internet. I’ve been online for a long, long, while. I was online before webpages were really a thing and most of the interesting content was sitting in newsgroups and BBB’s forums. During that time there was little that really tied your activity online to your actual physical identity and that anonymity could let you express opinions freely without a lot of worry about backlash.
Obviously there are things that a lot of people do that wind up linking you back to your original identity. Even here I’m sure that someone could figure out who the hell I was with little issue since I’m not really hiding who I am here. However for some reason people still seem to think that just being online shields them from consequences.
And social media has not helped the situation any.
Now generally I’m really a live and let live type of person. However there were a few things that do get under my skin. And recently I’m seeing more and more people doing things that just cross a line into an area where I’m not comfortable with the whole live and let live approach.
Yes. Vauge bullshit. I know, but I’ll be right fucked if I’m going to draw attention to the crap I’ve been seeing.
My biggest gripe is the crap that’s flooding discussion about political matters. The ability to hide your identity on the internet and Generative AI’s ability to fake almost anything means that suddenly I’m getting flooded with political posts that are designed to enrage me and push me towards a specific outcome. The saving grace on a lot of those posts is that I tend to pay attention to what’s going on and many of the people using these tools don’t realize how similar all the generated content seems when you look at it.
So now I’m sorting through posts that are obviously AI gene I can tell that the information is being heavily manipulated, if not just misrepresented. However many people don’t pay attention to things, see the posts, and then get enraged about what’s going on and suddenly you can’t actually discuss anything about whatever the topic is without people painting you as some type of jackass who’s trying to do horrible things.
And it’s not like there’s specific bastions of truth that you can trust any more, if there ever were.
Even if it’s not something state run media there’s generally still some bias involved. In some cases it’s obvious what the bait is because the folks involved scream it from the top of their lungs like it’s a badge of honour. In other cases it’s not really apparent until something kind of pulls back the mask a bit and you start digging and realize what’s going on. Suddenly you realize that the news source that you were looking at is something that’s bene trying to manipulate you from day one.
Is it tempting to crawl under a rock, assume everything is bullshit, and try to hide.
Yes.
Hells. Yes.
However I still prefer having easy access to cat videos and the ability to get a warm pizza delivered to my hose within 15min.