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I genuinely believe that social media is now solely used as a tool for crowd control, and mass manipulation. The evidence for such is overwhelming. The way which data can be manipulated and the perception of reality shifted. Even now, on sites like this, i have no real way of knowing if people are real or not. I operate on the assumption that they are, whether or not they are feds, or some advertising intern trying to learn more about subcultures is another thing entirely. That's the real issue I see, that the surface level internet like social media, is consistently manipulated and fed ideas which are perpetuated by bots, troll farms, real people using fake accounts to spread misinfo or even just to shill their products. its not about right v left. that entire politicization of the internet is also intentional. memes that are created by mis-info agents to spread paranoia and distrust of anyone who doesn't agree with you wholeheartedly. it is pure insanity. I want to copy and paste this from wiki talking about the key ideas behind Baudrillard's simulacra and simulation. which i think echoes alot of the ideas people have about mistrusting social media, the internet and why the idea of "dead internet theory" seems very accurate. because simply put, it is simulated reality. there is plenty of evidence showing how much these companies put into generating fake content in order to make it seem like the internet is more full of life than it actually is. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages: The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth. The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental. Degrees: Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period: -First order, associated with the premodern period, where representation is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality. -Second order, associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as "real" as its prototype. -Third order, associated with the postmodernity of Late Capitalism, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.[9] Phenomena​: Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in several phenomena: -Contemporary media including television, film, print, and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring the line between products that are needed (in order to live a life) and products for which a need is created by commercial images. -Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money (literally denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness, and moreover usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms in order to assist exchange. -Multinational capitalism, which separates produced goods from the plants, minerals and other original materials and the processes (including the people and their cultural context) used to create them. -Urbanization, which separates humans from the nonhuman world, and re-centres culture around productive throughput systems so large they cause alienation. Language and ideology, in which language increasingly becomes caught up in the production of power relations between social groups, especially when powerful groups institute themselves at least partly in monetary terms. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I think that this general idea makes alot of sense when applied to internet especially. it is clear to us how there is an old internet, and a current internet. They are very different things. ~~Anonymous 2023-06-16(Fri)06:24:09 No.196