Comment by a2decrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a2decrow | Hacker News Reader

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> What if most jobs are automated and people everywhere turn to violence to keep themselves occupied?

This will be a slow, step-by-step process where the media will be working against the general population.

Truckers are going to be among the first ones to be replaced with self-driving vehicles. Quoted from The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches (Marshall Brain)

In addition, the mainstream media outlets will not cover the protests of truckers, or the force used against them, to any great extent. To the general, TV-watching public, any attempt at a trucker riot will be largely invisible, or will be marginalized as a nuisance. And any truck drivers who do appear in the media will tend to be selected to be the loudest, most extreme people possible. Therefore, when the general public looks at these extremists, teamsters will appear to be crazy. All truck drivers will be stereotyped with this “crazy” label, and the truckers will lose public support.

This is going to repeat itself until there are almost no human jobs left, if any. The rich will get richer and the poor will be stowed away, out of sight.

I see where you're coming from, but the current media situation says that any attempt to do this would be a terrible idea and backfire horribly on them.

I mean, we're already in a world where a large percentage do not trust anything the media is saying. Where 'CNN is fake news' is basically a meme and 'alternative' news publications have taken a large bite out of the older ones' markets.

If they try and paint the trucker actions as all negative or crazy, it could go about as well as painting Trump crazy did prior to the 2016 election. Or pleading for Britain to stay in the EU pre Brexit.

And something similar also led to GamerGate becoming such a catastrophe.

If the media try anything like this against the general population, they'll soon notice that:

1. Trust in them will decline even further 2. Alternative news sites and YouTube influencers will take full advantage of the situation and cover the other side extensively. 3. They'll turn social media sites into even more of a war zone than they already are.

So unless they want Breitbart (or the next Breitbart equivalent) to gain a few thousand times more traffic from people who feel like 'the media' is lying to them, I doubt they'll continue this sort of path.

I think you're wildly overestimating the intelligence and awareness of the general population.

The media is and has been doing this for decades. If they do it in a totally obvious and outright manner, then yeah, everyone's going to notice, but if they do it in a more subtle way and push their agenda over a longer timeframe, most people won't notice that, or they'll only notice it when it's too late. It's not about brainwashing everyone. All you need is a critical mass and once you're there, you've basically won.

Most people lack critical thinking abilities and they're rather contend with having other people think for them. You don't notice this here on HN because the readers and commenters here are far smarter than the average person is.

I guess, but I think you're forgetting just how bad the trust situation is with some groups. I mean, just 43% of people surveyed worldwide trust it:

https://www.ft.com/content/fa332f58-d9bf-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6a...

With the figures getting as bad as 24% trust in the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/16/britons-tru...

And it apparently goes as low as 5% among Republicans:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-trust_us_58...

Does that mean the average person has good critical thinking skills? No, not really. A lot of people's distrust comes as much down to feeling like their views/tribe are under personal attack rather than an actual analysis of how the media covers them.

But if they distrust mainstream media sources about stuff like Trump and his policies, then the likelyhood they'll trust them about how others in their own situation are 'crazy' could be even lower.

I mean, they're already used to seeing themselves painted as 'deplorables' here.

It's also likely people outside the larger outlets will write and heavily promote articles that counter any 'narrative' they detect in more mainstream sources.

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