I think the clever people in this scenario are the ones that created this narrative that Hillary would have had a decisive victory but for foreign interference. Though even that could just be neoliberals reflexively defending the decline of their ideology as anyone in a similar position would do since it sucks to be completely wrong about how the world works.
ETA:
@cannibalpeas I bet it was PragerU. That org is a fucking plague upon YouTube that you see if you watch literally anything.
@Papasan Also conspiracies make class consciousness harder to build.
Right. And they ultimately prefer the anti-vax videos, so when the college freshmen are assigned to write a paper about about a controversial topic, and they do their research with Youtube…
All this is well and good, however: how can we fight back? I am sick of seeing my resistance merely reinforce these horrid tactics. Seriously. How do we fight back against this?
Yes. Along with the Mercers, he’s one of the most prominent American funding sources for projects run by alt-right and Neoreactionary figures. The common thread is Thiel’s semi-feudal ideal version of Libertarianism, which further ties into the cesspool of scientific racism and misogyny and antipathy toward liberal democracy with which he finds further affinity.
It’s not so much not to trust anything it’s more that the average person doesn’t really know how to interact online (this is probably a generational thing). Like my mom, she’s utterly clueless when it comes to online bad actors. She just assumes everything is true because it fits her narrative and anything that runs counter to it must be false. It’s very hard to break that line of reasoning when there’s emotional investment. So my view isn’t so much nihilistic as it is defeatist/pessimistic. I think the best thing is to forge communities online and stop the enclosure of the online commons but that takes effort which the average person may not have (time and/or money). And considering how soul sucking capitalism is it’s gonna be a hella of a time for anyone to do that.
I heard a clip of Mr. Prager the other day saying that racism is just another leftist hoax that was invented after America had a black President and it doesn’t exist, except for racism against whites, which is in full force.
Their conspiracies all have the same nonsensical narrative: they are the aggrieved, they are the victims. And people like Prager, who like all right-wingers is underwritten by some billionaires, are more than pleased to cook up some cockamamie conspiracy to use to misdirect the ire of the feeble minded towards people that have nothing to do with their problems or people that are actually trying to help them. The job/purpose of Prager & his lot is to make sure that the declining middle class and the burgeoning lower working class don’t figure out that it’s actually all the Republican candidates that they vote for who created this system of extreme economic inequality for the benefit of the billionaires that finance their campaigns and finance Prager. Instead it was Barack Obama and the Democrats and things like affordable healthcare that covered pre-existing conditions that have been ruining their lives.
Not to make a joke on the conspiracy theory thing, but you would seriously wonder if a majority of these people weren’t sprayed with Agent Orange at some point. How can people be such suckers?
I kind of do and don’t worry about this. Ignorance is very real, and there are definitely those who cultivate it as a political tool. But that has always happened, and it has always been subject to the same fundamental limit: there’s no such thing as a smart stampede.
The only thing a mob is good for is smashing stuff. Kleptocrats might find that temporarily useful to cover their looting, but it’s no basis for a long-term masterplan. It’s the kind of plan you resort to when you think your conspiracy is dead already.
What I don’t worry about, at all, is that the next potential Karl Marx or Martin Luther King is out there being turned into a vegetable by YouTube. They might be pissed off at how much bullshit they have to wade through, but they’re going to find the ideas and viewpoints they need, on YouTube or in a library or wherever they have to look.
I didn’t get the impression that the author was alleging an organized conspiracy, but rather that large numbers of anti-vaxxers all exhibiting the same patterns produce a natural systematic effect.
From my experience with YouTube, I’d say you’re right, it does work that way, and it does happen all the time. That’s sort of by design, it’s just how recommendation engines work. That’s a large part of what you’d want it to do, in fact.
Two patterns like this that I noticed: Watching videos specifically by or about Anita Sarkeesian produced recommendations for GamerGate videos, anti-Sarkeesian videos, and other things that could be accurately described as “White man rants for an hour.” Watching videos by Sarkeesian’s much-less-famous male colleagues, who discuss similar issues from a similar point of view, hasn’t produced a similar result, as far as I can see. (Sarkeesian doesn’t even allow comments on her stuff, so there is more than commenting at work in the algorithm. Her insane “critics” probably watch her videos over and over.)
The other was that videos about sharpening tools produced suggestions about sharpening knives and cleaning and shooting guns, and sure, you can see how those might go together for some people, but also how other people are not going to be happy about finding such a connection.
Over the last year or so, YouTube has announced a lot of changes and crackdowns and these particular links don’t seem obvious to me anymore.
