It's helpful to keep in mind where LinkedIn gets its money: selling recruiters access to you. I don't remember what industry you're in, but if it's not the kind of industry where recruiters are falling over themselves to poach workers, or if it's the kind of industry where the candidates simply aren't on LinkedIn/computers, you probably aren't going to get a lot of interest there. Companies aren't going to waste their money paying LinkedIn to host their job ads or connect them to candidates if their own hiring portal is working just fine. They call it a professional social network, but really their money comes from software industry poaching.

I need to be less online. It's toxic for my brain.

Anything you can do online is worth doing if you'd still want to do it even if you weren't manipulated into spending time with it.

As it is the net is a big slot machine (look in the section headed "hijack #2").

The real problem isn't that corporations are directly manipulating you, though (they are, but so has the advertising industry since its inception). Instead, the problem is that most online content only comes to you indirectly, through other people. The real problem is the inherent uncertainty of just who, when, and on what site you are going to benefit of online content being spread by other people.

See, the problem is, that the answer to that question is that you just don't know. And can't ever know for sure. People are opaque, non-deterministic processes. The only way to cope with this inherent uncertainty about who, when, and where you are going to run into somebody who provides something useful to you is by building up representations of the media as presented to you.

On some level, people want to be constantly distracted, and will even pay money for it. But at the same time, if the web hadn't been co-opted for corporate profit, computers and networks could easily have simply been all about doing research and representing information, and this fundamental non-determinism that that exists in people could be mitigated if we were all using our personal computing to build up representations that manage it and hone in our attention on what we care about (rather than some external entity optimizing what you see in order to simply maximizes your online activity).

Corporations seek to do the opposite of this, though. We have a giant slot machine, because it's actually by increasing the amount of uncertainty that we are forced to sift through more media, which builds up networks of online media circulation from the bottom up from people with the smallest attention spans determining the criteria for what you should be seeing, no matter how sophisticated the topic.

So it's not that you need to spend less time online. It's that corporations shouldn't have hidden the information you wanted all along under a mountain of distractions. It's the other people that are the problem, that lazy chunk of the population who don't see anything wrong with entertainment substituting thought, that corporations are harnessing in order to deliberately mix together distraction with quality content.

It's the same reason publishers often make the table of contents hard to find, or omit page numbers. You are deliberately being made to sift through a bunch of things you didn't care about. You are paying for the content you consume by sacrificing your own psychological health, because you do a better job of helping grow the network if you respond positively to distraction, i.e., are psychologically damaged.

So yeah, I guess I came full circle and admitted that it is toxic for your brain. In this best of all possible worlds.

I know I'm getting hung up on a point here, but I wouldn't say social media is an inherently right-wing medium, so much as it's an inherently populist medium. I agree that it levels hierarchies based on knowledge and expertise that ought to exist, and gives people's voices equal weight, no matter how little or how much they are deserving of it. But that's not an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. Rather, it's an anti-elitist phenomenon, and anti-elitism is at the very core of populism, in both its left-wing and right-wing variants.

You can see plenty of populist tendencies on the left, as on the right. To go with the Tom Nichols article (he's so cranky!), even mainstream liberal outlets that on other issues are technocratic and elitist will grumble about the foreign policy establishment. Chomsky is often cited as emblematic of this way of thinking, when he says the "national interest" we talk about when when talk about foreign policy is really the narrow, parochial interests of a small, dominant economic class in the United States -- that is, of elites. The implication is that the real national interest takes into account the common good of the whole country and its people.

Yeah. That's the ****ty reason why I'm stuck using Twitter: that's where the people I want to hear from are already sharing their ideas.

The answer may be that I need to do a better job curating who I follow. Someone said Twitter only works if you immediately stop following people who regularly irritate you. It's probably true. Regularly being irritating is different from regularly saying things you disagree with.

Still better than the rest of the internet, though.

Why would they do that? I don't see a reason for it.

I think the idea is: you open up a magazine, you try to find the contents, and in searching for it, you unwittingly glance over a bunch of ads. If you knew exactly where what you were looking for is, you would be able to skip over the ads.

Ohh, in the context of magazines that makes sense.

Sure.

There's also the anti-Bush populism that took hold of the internet in the 2000's.

But then, why are the right wing populists still winning the propaganda war now in the age of Trump? Is it only because Bush himself wasn't a populist, that people didn't feel the need to spam pro-Bush content? Or perhaps that memes, comments sections, and imageboards didn't exist yet?

I think to say the two flavors of populism, right or left, are really the same, we'd have to have left wing populists meming anti-Romney memes if he won in 2020 all over Reddit and Twitter, or pro-Sanders memes if he won in 2020. Which I guess I can totally see happening.

I suppose the only thing I can say in defense of my simplification of the media climate created by these so-called social media companies is that they profit from spammy populist users being hooked on their sites, BUT also simply the fact that right wing ideology has nothing to say about increasing levels of literacy as a democratic principle, or about how media companies ought to be regulated. When left wingers complain about populism run amok in the public discourse, they lament the waning efficacy of public education and the failure to regulate media companies. Right wingers, on the other hand, don't think that society has a collective responsibility to do either of these things, and focuses either on the idea of free speech and individual vilification: either those crazy left wing professors are just practicing free speech, and the first amendment means that we don't have to listen to them, and don't need to because we control AM radio and can shout louder, or... said left wing professors represent an existential threat to society itself and need to be purged or exiled before their dangerous ideas catch on too much.

Right wing populism is winning because progressives and liberals have jobs.

Plot twist: some progressives and liberals have jobs that are helping right wing populism win!

absolutely

Why do you think this is true? To me it's not obvious that Trump has the upper hand... aside from the fact that, he's, you know, president. But aside from that!



I have no idea whether this is accurate or not, but I was under the impression that nobody is more responsible for associating transgressive political memes with the right than Hillary Clinton. When she went out and gave that speech about 4chan and the alt-right during the 2016 election, it effectively introduced into the national discussion a label that was used to describe a phenomenon that had existed for a long time and until that point had ambiguous political affiliations. Before that speech, it seemed like it was possible to use edgy memes make fun of "PC" stuff because there was plenty to laugh at about it, and you could joke about it without also affiliating yourself with... well, white supremacists and Trump. After the speech, friends of mine who had been deep into memes started to get more cautious about what they put out, I expect because they realized that by spreading around memes they were identifying themselves with a right-wing extremist social movement.

I remember reading somewhere that many on the left were slow to criticize "alt-right", because they saw the alt-right as motivated by the slogan that the student protesters in France in May '68 that "it's forbidden to forbid". I kind of like that idea, that it would be a response to certain tendencies on the left to moderate and sanitize speech. I do see the alt-right aesthetic as a tactic that's surprisingly flexible, and apparently is politically neutral. For example: https://twitter.com/r_neoliberal?lang=en. But I wouldn't go so far as to say left-wing and right-wing populism mirror each other, or that they're two flavors of the same thing.

I don't think I "get" @r_neoliberal. They understand it approximately means pro-business, and that every Republican other than Trump is one too, right?

Eversor: I was tracking alt. right online activity very closely at the time of the speech. I don't think it had much of an impact; everything that 4chan and theDonald did after that speech was already in the works. Are you saying she egged them on? Because I don't think they needed egging on, and had already been building up steam on their own.

Actually, I think this was a low point in the alt. right, because Trump was lagging in the polls.

kids these days literally agitating for labor market arbitrage by S&P 500 companies and calling it leftism, smh

You've convinced me, Eversor. The only hope is to purify ourselves with cleansing nuclear fire.

I wasn't saying they mirror each other. I was trying to disprove to myself your mythical left wing counterpart to the recent rise of right wing social media populism. If anything my original post didn't at all see them as two flavors of populism, but I admitted that you could point to left wing populists meming anti-Bush stuff in the 2000's. It seemed less anti-intellectual to me, though. Edit: and a lot less spammy, but not a controlled experiment, since comment sections, imageboards, and memes didn't exist.

So you'd say the alt-right actually had a lot of coherence as a movement before the speech? I find the term difficult to use, because it's used by so many people to mean different things. It doesn't seem to me like the people who call themselves alt-right really own the term anymore. It seems as if the people who use it as a derogatory term have more control over how it's used than the people who identify with it. Some people seem to use it as term of derision that means where it's basically a synonym for white supremacy. Others with more refined views seem to think it's a distinct aesthetic that's emerged to make radical right views socially acceptable to millennials. I guess Richard Spencer and Paul Gottfried actually tried to associate the term with some kind of substantive ideology. But it doesn't seem like when people talk about the term they generally have any of their ideas in mind.

I don't see what naming something has to do with it existing.

And yes the alt right definitely existed before Clinton labeled it in certain conventional public circles, and also, the alt. right most definitely exists independently from the likes of Richard Spencer. In fact, a lot of people on 4chan treat him as an opportunist or some kind of plant designed to discredit them.

The alt. right existed the moment that racist people without employment prospects discovered that they could spend all day posting memes on 4chan and Reddit, and that a surprising number of kids would go along with it. Actually the movement had its roots in Gamergate.

I think by neoliberalism they mean technocratic liberalism. Technocratic liberalism, that's sexier and more scandalous... they're only embracing the term because leftists attack them with it.

Just because a lot of people who were on the fringes of it, who didn't think of themselves as alt-right or as part of an ideological movement, but merely thought they were innocently making fun of social liberals who took themselves too seriously, suddenly found themselves associated with a deplorable racist movement. The label entering the mainstream, I'm hypothesizing (and again, I have no confidence that this is correct) polarized it, and drove away people who before didn't yet acknowledge it as what it was.

OK, but I don't think the people who are scared away by being associated with racists are part of the core alt. right. They are racist. Edginess and political incorrectness was always effectively merely a recruiting tool.

Trump supporters aren't impressed with people who call them racist. They have their own definitions for these words that liberals are completely ignorant of, because understanding them would require spending some time living in a worldview that is anathema to them. I've even spoken to alt. right people IRL who have redefined the N-word to only encompass people exhibiting the negative stereotypical traits the slur connotes, in order to make it the fault of the politically correct left for marginalizing them just for using a "word".

See, it's the left that thinks they've made a big impact by calling somebody racist. No, all they've done is preach to other liberals that you agree that the people you don't like are racist. But even if it's true, they're only deluding themselves if they think they've marginalized their opponents and not simply made themselves look more mainstream and thus worthy of ridicule.

I think the important thing to understand is, that just as conservatives would say that if you do drugs you are SUPPORTING AL-QAEDA, in this neck of the woods we'll say that by tweeting you are fueling NAZI corporations.

Maybe that's because they actually did always have that connotation, you just didn't realize that it was a Trojan horse for right-wing populism before then.

In 2016, we saw massive discontent with the current established order. Some of that you can attribute to say, Russian influence, but I would say much (really, most/pretty much all) is organic, home-grown tensions from decades of economic suppression of the middle and lower classes (let's not forget that poor people have become poorer too, and not just speak to the middle class).

The difference between left and right is, while whackadoodle ideas are present on both sides, the ideal left-wing approach is a detached analysis of the structure of these systems to identify the causes of power and injustice. The right-wing approach is a "deatched analysis" of the world via conspiracy theories. Anti-establishment right and conspiracy theory go together like butter goes on bread. Which isn't to say there's nothing conspiracy-esque on the left, but rather the only decent anti-establishment arguments I've ever seen come from the left.

Actually honestly only anarchists seem to say anything I approve of anymore.



The "left-wingers compaining about populism run amok" are liberals at WaPo trying to prevent too much social disorder from Democratic-leaning people. Bezos social control. Has absolutely no principle to it at all, it's just trying to establish that media figure as more authoritative.

Which WaPo is a decent publication, but they do also serve ideology.

Gamergate has its roots in deeper phenomenon. 4chan always had that group of woman-hating, neo-Nazi cultural defender types, and their growth and voice grew pretty clearly up until GamerGate. The only difference was GamerGate was paid attention to.

I'll do drugs with Al-Qaeda. Where do I sign up?

Playing the devil's advocate against my own position here (since you seem to largely agree with me here), let's go back to latter Bush 43 years: on the left, you have 9/11 conspiracy theories (which were in large part the responsibility of Michael Moore in his film Fahrenheit 9/11, where he insinuated that Bush's relationship with the Saudi's was reason to suspect his motives) run amok. On the right, you have the dramatic rise of anarcho-capitalist ideology, culminating in the emergence of Ron Paul as a rock star politician. In fact, you also see a confluence of both left and right leaning libertarian (anti-government) populism, especially with the Iraq war, and various conspiracy theories about what the Pentagon is up to. There were plenty of lefties who were ready to believe that Bush did 9/11, and that would even go so far as to support Ron Paul if it meant putting an end to American imperialism. And even Alex Jones in those days catered to this crowd.

Of course, I don't know if you want to let this group of people be labeled as part left wing thought proper. They are more like anti-war and anti-establishment, left-leaning libertarians. Now, the hardcore, decentralist ones probably supported Jill Stein, and the more educated ones probably went to support Bernie Sanders after the GFC and the increased credibility of socialist ideas after the rise of OWS. Of course a big chunk of libertarians were right-leaning all along, either for the single issue of second amendment rights, or simply because they couldn't let go of anarcho-capitalist ideology. These guys might have been sucked into the alt. right, depending on their tolerance (or embrace) of racism.

I'm not blaming Gamergate for 4chan being terrible. But I would be suspicious of anybody who tried to argue that it didn't bring a lot of kids into the alt. right who wouldn't have otherwise (although to some extent it might have been something else, since it in part represented a backlash against the purity of the politically correct left that was bound to happen at some point).

For example, I don't see your typical South Park watching kid going all in for Hillary Clinton

You don't have to do it with them. You just have to buy something made from poppy seeds.

I suppose there's a non-negligible amount of those sorts of people. I don't really know any personally, and probably wouldn't want to get to know them too well if I did.

I think the point I was making, isn't that there aren't examples of it on the left, but rather that it doesn't define the left like it does the right. You can't be alt-right without believing in some conspiracy theories.

Eversor this is the second time you've made this thread!

Oh yeah, no heroin. Instead I prefer to get my narcotics from American suppliers, so I'll take oxycodone.

To be honest, I don't think those people were so strongly affiliated with the left, so much as they were against the government, which happened to be controlled by conservatives at the time. So they could have been strongly against Bush, without knowing much at all about socialist thought. They are mostly just anti-establishment, and their reasons now for supporting (say) Jill Stein have much less to do with economic reasoning than opposition to all systems of control. Perhaps a more accurate lineage to trace them back to would be the anti-war flower children of the `60s.

The funny thing is, I believe that when the United States invaded Afghanistan and unseated the Taliban, poppy farmers began to flourish once again. Though the money might not have gone to the Taliban (and this is just from memory), it actually increased the total production of heroin.

I mean seriously, go read /r/the_donald. It's a pretty mainstream vein of online Trump supporters. And the **** they push there is really off kilter.

You have: different cameras and different lighting aren't real, lies about an ex-KKK member and devoted anti-racist, Hillary Clinton conspiracy stuff, and pre-planning to interpret the media through the eyes of conspiracy.

Yeah, for as bad as they were, the Taliban was something stable and actually operated on some degree of religious principle, unlike ISIS which, as far as I can tell, is completely unaligned with any serious morals.