ameancow

I limited my internet time to just an hour or two a day and stopped caring about any of this worthless performative BS.

If there are causes you care about or actions you want to take to impact the world and make a difference, GOING THE FUCK OUTSIDE does so, so much more than this kind of roleplay teenage bullshit. Moving your worthless scrolling time from one website to another isn't going to bring the establishment to its knees. But going out and donating a box of socks and underwear to a community food bank will literally change someone's life.

edit: if these kinds of messages make you angry or feel called out, that's a sure, 100% accurate predictor that you're exactly who this message is directed at. For that matter, if you're reading the feelings and opinions of others (what social media is) then you're not living your own life and finding your own emotional states and this is why we're here. We're discarding our lives to live in both the rage and satisfaction of others. When was the last time you sought out other HUMANS to feel these things? How much have you worked to exercise whatever shriveled spark of free-will is left in there? Are you just surfing from stimulation to stimulation as your brain invents rationalizations for your lack of actual life and progress? GO OUT AND DO LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE, YOU SHOULDN'T BE SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR MONITOR ANGRY YOU DENSE, TRAPPED MOTHERFUCKER.

Yeah, this is a terminally online manifesto that I couldn't even get through. It's roleplay and storytelling, which is what our species is great at, but it doesn't connect with reality beyond that.

Look guys, if you want to engage in some kind of organized social action that will actually make a difference, turn off social media entirely. You moving from reddit to lemmy feels good in a micro-narrative, but nobody cares, it won't change anything for anyone. It's not bad, but it's not some heroic action either.

You can do so, so much more for the causes you care about by GOING THE FUCK OUTSIDE.

Where are you from that you think hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US is "wealth"?

Do you know that 500k in the US doesn't even get you a nice house? You need literally around 2 mil saved up JUST TO RETIRE BEFORE 70.

She is helping people in that she serves her constituency, she is a representative, nobody expects her to donate her money to anyone, but she does raise money in fundraisers all the time. She helps more people than most of her peers in congress. These fundraisers do NOT make you money, you may have some very backwards ideas about how money works in politics. Even the right respects AOC to an unusual degree, like they do Bernie Sanders. At least about policy and messaging. They care more about people than party.

Do you live in the USA? That's not even the price of an "okay" median house in a middle-class neighborhood. That's a nice chunk to have in the bank or have in investments, but if you ever want to retire at a decent age and not spend your later years eating canned beans in a mobile home, you need to save up more than a million unless you have some specific plans for your future.

A lot of people have a lot of huge misconceptions about the wealth in the US. We may be the richest nation but we spend the most also, and the costs are skyrocketing beyond even the highest normal wages. You simply cannot own a house on a single income. In many other countries $20 USD will get you a week's worth of hot meals, here you can accidentally spend $50 running out to the grocery store for several ingredients for dinner or a half dozen frozen meals.

While the US military is sworn to uphold the Constitution, the President is still technically their commander and boss and they are obligated to follow his orders unless it's some egregious offense against the constitution, but like with everything happening right now, we've never had this system tested, we've never faced a military having to make this choice on a large-scale level.

We also have a constitution that was written centuries ago and hasn't been updated or amended in a very long time, and this archaic abstractness is what has let so many people and courts stretch the interpretations or ignore it entirely. At this point I don't think the military will defy the administration for nearly any reason because nobody actually knows what they're doing or supposed to do. The rug has been yoinked out from under US government but it's been a slow, slow tug and we didn't realize we didn't have a rug under us until the system wasn't there to protect anyone anymore. Add to that, there are enough far-right generals and defense department officials who are completely on-board with this administration's warmongering and hate that I don't think any kind of "constitutional crisis" would last long in the ranks of the military. The fascist marinade has seeped into every nook and cranny here.

The whole world should be very, very worried.

This sounds fantastic, and will never work in the USA as long as there are classes of people who live above the rules and can influence society through policy and social media. If they smell any extra income, rights or services you receive, it's like blood in the water and they will come from miles to get a piece of anything you own, exactly as they do now.

American brains have been shaped into 2-lane highways.

A lot of the most pernicious and insidious effects of the social media algorithm have a lot to do with unchecked capitalism just turning everyone's attention span into currency that can be infinitely divided and pulled apart.

They can't tell the difference between us laughing at them and us becoming enraged by them, they're just like mistreated dogs who have learned they can get attention by pissing on the floor and any kind of attention will do.

Also, it's pretty wild that absolutely zero effort has been made "correcting" all the actual card-carrying nazis who celebrate every major action that Musk makes, from restoring their accounts on social media to boosting their memes and messages for years now. There's clips out there of people with swastika tattoos sieg-heiling recordings of Musk's "awkward gesture" and they look exactly the same.

Tell us again how we shouldn't trust our own eyes. I think there was a book somewhere that talked about this. I'd recommend looking into it.

this and other organizations concluded that he didn’t perform a nazi salute

If someone takes a shit in your mouth and tells you it was a birthday cake, will you trust them just because they're an "organization?" Jesus christ and you people call others "cucks" it drives me batty but you long since abandoned value to intellectual consistency when you started hoisting madmen and wealthy landlords as somehow better than other people.

It's amazing for a group that says all day long that they're "free thinkers" there sure are a lot of people with mouths full of shit smiling because they've been told it's birthday cake and they're such special, good boys.

In the months leading up to November of 2024, our society broadly was living in the most naive, delusional, self-imposed bubbles we've ever constructed for ourselves and we're not a lot better off now, we're just starting to see consequences.

Yes there have been people giving dire warnings, there have been plenty of groups trying to organize opposition to our plunge into fascist authoritarianism, mostly people who were students of history or have lived in other countries and have seen the warning signs before.

But largely, most Americans lived and still live in extreme echo-chambers. It may not seem like it because it's utterly common now to fire up the internet every day and scroll through your feed and think you're actually getting the news and objective interpretations of current events. But we long since have given ourselves over to customized algorithms and personal feeds, mostly without even realizing it, we just tend to aim towards whatever is comfortable and agrees with us. Covid accelerated this process to a massive degree because it normalized a completely shut-in life, or at least a completely shut-in and wired perspective of life.

The biggest warning sign we should have all paid attention to was the rise of extreme worldviews, like flat earthers. Seriously, not because they have anything to do with anything or have any impact on anyone, but as a barometer to measure how people or groups of people are being peeled away from the collective and reprogrammed by closed-off spheres of influence. This should have been our warning sign that the internet broadly is dangerous and it changes how people see the world. We NEED social conformity on some level to function as a society, but we gave the internet free-reign to just give anyone whatever society they want to conform to and live in, at least until it butts up against other people's micro-societies, or worst-case, when nefarious people of incredible means deliberately hijack these tools to create the micro-society they want people to conform to.

China is a monstrous nation that hurts a lot of people. But they were onto something with their extreme paranoia about the internet and fears of social disruption to the point they built The Great Firewall. I don't think we needed censorship per-say, but we did need some very serious scrutiny and monitoring a long, long time ago to prevent rich fucks from using our own freedom to split everything apart. I really don't know if America will ever be close to what it was as we knew it even a decade ago, and I don't know if we're going to have another free and fair election. And the worst part is that if the worst-case scenarios continue to unfold, most people are just going to give the situation passing glance and shrug as they live in their own worlds with their own narratives.

Edit: I don't want my thesis to read that far-right echo chambers are what got us here. It was those, yes, but it was also the echo chambers on the other side not providing us a clear path towards better outcomes, communities boosting the naive delusions of the opposition who celebrate every debate between youtube personalities and genuinely thought the progressive-left was somehow gaining ground. You're all seeing only what you want to see. You're living in a giant AI feedback loop.