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Comment by champagnois | Hacker News Reader

Consider what this does to opinion and independent thinking.

Most attention grabbing platforms are designed to use a variety of reward mechanisns to reinforce the politics of the platform.

Some easily botted platforms (like reddit) will constantly bombard people with anti-civilizational content promoting "anti-work" or very toxic identity politics that further isolates the users, and, in turn, strengthens their addiction to reddit because they will have no friends or family.

I wonder if the platforms are complicit in this or if they are passively incompetent and this terribleness is just being exacerbated by foreign adversaries trying to poison western dialogues and minds.

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Absolutely agree. I see anecdotal evidence of this everywhere. Its most noticicble with people who spend a lot of time "online" browsing placing like twitter, reddit, and tiktok (or even older folks who watch too much "mainstream" cable tv news). They tend to hold derivative and thoughtless "stock" worldviews that are clearly directly borrowed from the feed they subscribe to and not a result of deciding for themselves how they think things based on their lived experiences or research. This is as much a "liberal" problem (e.g. Capitalism is bad) as it is a "conservative" one (e.g. Universal healthcare is communism).

A particularly striking example for me recently was when I happened to compare the content on my TikTok feed to the content on my 60 year old parents. There were completely different sets of propaganda being peddled to both of us that were essentially incompatible with each other.

We are all drowning in so much propaganda on these platforms its almost impossible to separate fact from fiction or to find a perspective that has the proper level of nuance. Its no wonder everyone is so divided.

The anti-work content on reddit should be analyzed by the feds a bit. It is promoting illegal sabotage of workplaces much of the time.

It is also very similar to an organic movement from China that got banned and censored just before it suddenly became a top three thread on reddit every day for all of this year.

I suspect movements and divisions that are studied and analyzed in (adversarial nation) are then exported, translated, and weaponized by their information warriors.

What I have noticed about anti-work is that the insane opinions are amplified and encouraged. They promote and advocate for digital sabotage of your own work places.

This all has numerous effects down stream that would slightly benefit an adversary.

Have you considered that there are just a lot of people whose work lives are so horrible (because they don't have cushy tech jobs for example) that they might completely and utterly despise the work-worshipping society we live in? Many Americans, let alone people in poorer places, are forced to work like dogs, often under inhumane conditions, for compensation that barely earns them a dignified standard of living. It's a far simpler explanation than believing there must be some coordinated effort to topple America via propaganda on a little subreddit. Sometimes the lack of empathy shown by commenters on hackernews with the living conditions of their fellow humans is really jarring to me.

The sentiment exists in every society because society and civilization is always hierarchical.

That is the root of a simple division that a coordinated state actor will exacerbate, amplify, meme-ify, and repeatedly upvote with bot armies.

Taking as fact that social media platforms program the brain of their users via dopamine rushes obtained through the upvotes, likes, and user engagement. Thus and therefore we can conclude that this is the easiest attack vector in the history of state versus state psychological warfare.

Adversaries use benign divisions as a tool to cause discord. This has always been the case, but social media is a tool that has been weaponized to tremendous effect and now you can see it being leveraged as a weapon by simply opening Reddit and seeing what divisive was botted to the top.

Maybe you refuse to believe this is happening and you assume this is all a paranoid fiction. That is fine. How then do you explain the legions of PHDs and psych researchers and language experts working at Chinese and Russian information warrior farms and leveraging machine learning empowered bot identity generators? Do you just assume Russia and China are pissing money away?

Where are similar antiwork movements in Scandinavia, Western Europe, and other regions with more favorable work-life balances?

The sentiment will be there, but they aren't the target of Russia's / China's focus with these social media troll bots.

Further, I would add, it seems pretty scarey that many of the platform leaderships trend toward thinking toxicity in the leftwing direction is somehow not bad or censorable due to some absurd logical fallacy of victimhood hierarchies and such that allow leftist groups to claim their toxicity isnt toxic because they are "victims".

>This is as much a "liberal" problem (e.g. Capitalism is bad) as it is a "conservative" one (e.g. Universal healthcare is communism).

Bingo.

>A particularly striking example for me recently was when I happened to compare the content on my TikTok feed to the content on my 60 year old parents. There were completely different sets of propaganda being peddled to both of us that were essentially incompatible with each other.

This is kinda scary and makes me glad I've never had a TikTok account. Also kinda makes me think that you and your parents shouldn't have one either. But hey, "to each their phone"...

>We are all drowning in so much propaganda on these platforms its almost impossible to separate fact from fiction or to find a perspective that has the proper level of nuance. Its no wonder everyone is so divided.

Isn't that the way ""they"" want it though? Divide and conquer? So busy fighting each other that we can't see the real enemy? Or is that just some crazy shit I picked up somewhere?

Do you have a Google, FB, Twitter, snap, YouTube, Reddit, any other social accounts? TikTok is exactly the same

Of the platforms you listed, I only have a Reddit account. And I don't consider it to be "the same" as a TikTok account, but I think I understand what you mean.

Yes, I understand that everyone is grabbing for my attention, it's just that some companies do let the users have a little bit more autonomy or agency. Eg; sure, Twitter can be a cesspool, but AFAIK they don't have 'streaks' where you get a dopamine hit for signing on every day or messaging with your friends every day. (That's an example of a thing I'm pretty sure exists on either TikTok or SnapChat. Like I said, I'm not a user of those platforms.)

Anyone who doesn't just have a kneejerk reaction based on the name realizes antiwork is actually more against the exploitation of workers and/or the planet than against work. Calling it "anti-civilizational" demonstrates that you either have no understanding of it, or worse that you're trying to discredit the movement through intentional lies and manipulation.

As for the possibility that the movement is being bolstered by some foreign nation for nefarious purposes, maybe. I have only checked it semi-regularly in the first half of 2021 and it wasn't that popular then, whereas I often see it on the frontpage nowadays. However, even if that was the case, it doesn't mean that the sentiments at the heart of it aren't genuine. Rebellion against capitalism's unsustainability has been a long time coming.

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