There’s a tendency in this heated political climate to simply reject people who are saying false things and to write off conspiracy theorists writ large.
But as the US approaches the third straight election in which misinformation — and the fight against it — is expected to play a role, it’s important to understand what’s driving people who don’t believe in US elections.
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I talked to O’Sullivan about the documentary, in which he has some frank and disarming talks with people about what has shaken their belief in the US. But he paints an alarming picture about the rise of fringe movements in the country.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below:
WOLF: What were you trying to accomplish with this project?
O’SULLIVAN: So much of mainstream American politics now is being infected and affected by what is happening on what was once considered the real fringes — fringe platforms, fringe personalities.
And I think really what we want to do in this show is illustrate how these personalities may be pushing falsehoods, but they’re no longer fringe. This is all happening right now. And it is having a big effect on our democracy.
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it sucks so bad that the internet initially looked like this thing that would enlighten the world and allow for us as a species to make incredible gains in sciences and culture and morality. instead it seemed to do the opposite.
Trash in, trash out
While true, the bigger problem is how many people would rather believe the trash because it gives them someone to be angry at instead of learning empathy for other people.
I was more referring to the unfortunately naive hope that came from the early Internet. I am reminded of this quote by Charles Babbage,
I was also hopeful, but I now realize how silly that was.
It was easy to be hopeful because in the beginning it was fucking magical and then just got better and better until capitalism got involved and sunk their teeth into the veins of love and hope and sucked it dry until its dead decaying husk and then zombified by AI.
Exactly, and early on it was being led by people with radical ideas. Things like Wikipedia shouldn’t exist, but crazy people who believed in humanity and the free exchange of information made stuff like that.
Eventually the internet replaced the commons, but capital sees the commons merely as unclaimed land so they outcompeted it then enshittified it.
The solution is unfortunately we have to make normie friendly options. A home server is that just works and is cheap and easy seems like exactly the sort of shit that could help. Federation may very well be the solution
those people also believed in freedom.
not social control.
more and more and more the internet is become about social control. especially in totalitarian states, but also in the west more and more.
I was about to say the same thing applies to AI. But AI is fucked right out of the gate. There’s not even a brief window of hope for it being used to better society. Anyone with any awareness on the topic knows these AIs are already corrupted and compromised because they’ve been using the Internet to train all their LLMs.
Well if you go back to the use of algorithms they did have this massive potential but they all to quickly got involved with advertising and social media and yeah. it was yuck already at that point. But like computer vision and such gave it so much promise.
algorithms could help people. they could, for example, help you find relaly cool obscure stuff on netflix/spotify that you might like. They worked like this for awhile and ti was great!
But that doesn’t make money. the algorithm that shoves netflix’s latest trash content does, so that is why it shows up in every suggestion an takes up so my screen space. the vast majority of my spotify ‘feed’ is podcast trash i have never or never ever will listen to, and i can no longer use it to find some obscure band playing weird music like I did 8 years ago.
Because the 1st wave of people on the internet were nerds and geeks. People driven by hope and optimist to make the world a better place and using the internet to do things they were already inclined to do… learn and share. You had to read, and write and things were generally long form interactions. Chat rooms required that you write sentences and paragraphs. It was also largely hosted by universities and other non-profit interests. The philosophy of Open Source and Freesoftware was rampant in the 2000s, and then declined as the big 5 took over the internet.
Now the internet is driven by corporate greed and the exploitation of the LCD’s lazy monkey-brain interactions. EVerything now is a blurb, a meme, a click, a reaction emoji. A 8 min youtube video is ‘too hard’ now for the average internet user.