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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

Back in the mid 90's as the Internet was starting to become more accessible to the general public, I remember reading an article that made the following point:

The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news. That was bad b/c it lowered the options people had for consuming news and dramatically reduced the diversity of ideas and opinions. The Internet was going to do the same to the point that we all read the same big websites and therefore had the same thoughts, opinions etc. <end of the point>

I remember reading this and thinking "that kind of makes sense". Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. It's not surprising that we've become so divided when you can "build" your own reality by choosing the information streams that you want to consume.

PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.

View on HN

The "customized feed for you" is not as unique as you'd expect. It basically is the algorithm fitting you into some number of buckets and then serving you that content.

And speaking of shared experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w has been watched 11 billion times.

However, I suspect 10 billion of those may be my kids ...

While billions might watch a video on YouTube, it's not truly a shared experience unless it happens at the same time. And at least for me, even with live chat scrolling in the speed of light to the side, it still doesn't feel the same as "Live TV" did. But as I commented elsewhere in the discussion, I still prefer the current experience.

I assure you, I can start whistling baby shark and get more people to recognize it than I could if I started whistling the MASH theme.

Baby shark is most definitely a shared experience.

I've never heard of Baby shark, and watching the video can't recall ever hearing the tune. You may be living in a bubble, or we all are.

Yeah, bubble called having children. There is not a single child in my daughter class that do not know this song by heart. And I'm sure that it's not like they learned it by randomly surfing web on their own - their parents introduced it to them. It's really bad song but still its good that it provides some shared context for each and every one of them.

I think my kids learned the song from other kids; I'm doubtful they've even seen the video(s). I know I haven't.

I don't even have kids and I know the song because I know people with kids.

The YouTube algorithm won’t take long to serve it up if a viewer spends any amount of time watching programming for small children. It takes some time training the account that you don’t want anything related to baby shark to ever be suggested.

Parent bubble I assume :D

Uncle bubble ;)

We all are; mine is clearly bigger than yours.

That's one of the most outrageous comments I've seen. Surely you must be trolling.

But did Baby Shark examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced? MASH was one of the first prime time TV shows that made people think about the cost of war and its ramification to society.

As someone who has no kids, I haven't seen Baby Shark, so maybe it does that too.

The cultural worth of mash is immaterial to whether or not it has comparable reach to baby shark (i.e. whether or not baby shark is a “shared experience”).

It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.

Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online - it would be disingenuous to write off the entirety of modern popular culture as "shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos." What we lack isn't depth, information and meaning but the power of a unified pop-cultural zeitgeist created by having cultural expression gatekept and controlled by a few broadcasters and media conglomerates.

If you want to know examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced, you have options beyond the blind, scheduled consumption of a single sitcom, however well written.

> Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online

this is true, but none of those are getting tens of billions of views. What spreads the farthest and the fastest are memes and quick hits of dopamine and rage. Those are what comprise our most shared experiences today. I think we'd agree that it's better to not be limited to only those things that have been curated for us by broadcasters and media conglomerates, but between our natural tendency to seek and spread low effort content and the curation of algorithmic gatekeepers optimizing to exploit that tendency our most seen and shared media typically ends up being far more shallow than it used to be.

A few generations ago the most 'viewed video' was mankind's first steps on the moon, an incredible feat of science and engineering that ignited their imaginations. Today ours is Baby Shark.

Comparing numbers between television in the 1960s and modern internet multimedia and then extrapolating that to a comparison of relative cultural impact is disingenuous. Baby Shark is only as viewed as it is because it's an easy way for people to distract their kids.

I don't agree that shared media experiences typically carried more depth and meaning pre-internet than today. You're picking out exceptions to the norm, but the mainstream is always mediocre. Most people weren't watching intellectually stimulating, complex, thought provoking works of art or listening to symphonies - people who watched television were literally referred to as "couch potatoes."

And if there were an event comparable to the Moon landing in cultural import (the closest I can think of in modern memory is COVID) it would of course be all over the internet, rather than localized on a single platform, to be compared to viewing on a single television channel.

>a unified pop-cultural zeitgeist created by having cultural expression gatekept and controlled by a few broadcasters and media conglomerates

What makes you think this has changed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

I do have to wonder how much of that is due to fake accounts.

I was looking over Wikipedia's lists of most watched youtube videos and wondered the same thing there. Lots of them are music videos and I'm sure recording companies are inflating the views to some extent, especially early in.

Fake accounts or no, its hard to find opinions among even smaller bloggers who don't at least tacitly kowtow whatever is debated among the major players in media at the time. You see it even on HN too, with certain regular 'major' storylines finding their way into the frontpage time and time again. We are only ever exposed to a limited set of opinions that fall within a range considered acceptable, given the incentive structures of media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

> It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.

I don't really think they are comparable in any meaningful way. To bring any comparison we would try to make a little more towards apples-to-apples, let's just consider the subject of war. On one side, let's take the entirety of the MASH run, 250-odd episodes, and on take a handful of 2 minute compilations from the war in Ukraine. IMO more depth, info and meaning about war is more easily accessible from the meme-videos; It's impossible not to be viscerally affected when you watch a grenade drop a couple hundred feet onto some poor bastard below. MASH have may moments like "Keep that damn chicken quiet!" but it just isn't the same, nor as true.

Out of curiosity, when you wonder about "comparability" in this context, what metrics of qualities are you thinking about including in the comparison?

Arguably maybe not war, but Baby Shark does talk to what a family is seen as, somewhat.

Doo dooo dodo dodo

Your comment made me laugh, but seriously, Baby Shark succeeded because of the platform it was on, and how little kids today are virtually glued to that platform. I wouldn't really compare the two, let alone Baby Shark has almost nothing to do with a live shared experience, but also it's just a different product altogether. It's like comparing MASH to Coca Cola, sure more people will be able to recall Coca Cola over MASH, but that doesn't really say anything I suppose.

It is shared if it the people reached it through the same memes, and took a similar conclusion. Time isn't relevant.

I understand where you are coming from but something about it doesn't seem quite right. I remember watching footage of 9/11 on the news while the event was happening. A Gen Z-er watching the same footage on YouTube could be said to have shared the same experience under your stance, but I feel like most people would disagree. I picked a significant world event as my example, but I could also see this applied to culturally relevant memes from the past.

I think live news events aren't a great example for this sort of thing. The experience of watching 9/11 live was that we didn't know what the hell was going on or what the aftermath would look like (a big terrorist in America was sort of unthinkable, after all). Knowing what the outcomes would be totally changes the experience.

For a more cultural example, I don't think today's teenagers would captivated by watching the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show in the same way as those who did back when it aired. Not just because they have already heard the songs, but because what it means to listen to music as an adolescent has changed so much. Watching people perform rock music on television isn't special, and songs about wanting to kiss and hold hands aren't considered risqué.

Not to offend, but there are plenty of these sorts of live cultural experiences for Gen Z that maybe you aren’t aware of and captivate millions of young audiences. Kissing and holding hands in the 60s seems like an artifact of a decade of undoing centuries of Christian religious repression in the west. You’re right that rock and roll is not novel anymore. Things change.

Twitch live streamers share experiences with tens or hundreds of thousands of folks. For example, I can guarantee any millions of young kids who played Fortnite learned about the musician Travis Scott through that.

Perhaps the era of mass media where 10-50+ million all tuned in at once is over, but there’s plenty of music and media that captivates many millions for live events.

Certainly, I wasn't trying to imply that kids these days don't or can't have such experiences.

A big terrorist attack wasn't particularly unthinkable. The WTC had been attacked before. We had the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people. There were the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa and Clinton's 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan because of Al Qaida ties (and lots of comparisons to "Wag the Dog" due to the Lewinsky scandal, it was all over the news).

The fact that the WTC just wasn't there any more and someone had ran a plane into the Pentagon was the actual definition of shocking (as opposed to the Millennial definition of shocking which gets used for everything down to stubbing your toe on the coffee table). It wasn't all that surprising that we'd been attacked though and it was pretty obvious who did it, in real time. It was also obvious that we'd dive into bloodthirsty wars in the Middle East, and plenty of us protested the 2003 Iraq War on the streets, to no effect. The country wasn't really all that "unified". A bunch of people in the middle who didn't pay any attention to events did suddenly have one rammed into their face and they all jumped in the same direction and mindlessly rallied behind the flag in a way that led to disastrous wars in the Middle East. That isn't something to look back on with fond remembrance. We were predictably fucking idiots and ignored the people who bothered to point out the hazards of our actions. Stop being nostalgic about that.

Not only had the WTC previously been bombed, it was the same group who did it! Their goal to destroy that particular symbol of American commerce wasn't exactly secret.

The success of the plan is what's shocking. The visual symbol had a jarring effect that allowed the narrative of unity to prevail temporarily. The parallels to Pearl Harbor are deep.

Not knowing what is going to happen is exactly the thing. When people watched the moon landing, or a shuttle launch, they shared the anticipation, tension and hope. Anything could go wrong at any time, and sometimes it did. Watching something that is happening right now feels like it has more weight to it.

Watching something like this after the fact you most likely already know what's going to happen and it will not have the same emotional impact. Plus, whatever the outcome is, it's in the past.

Someone brought 9/11 as an example and that's definitely a good one. You can watch the videos online and feel grief, anger, sorrow. But you already know it happened. You will never watch this footage thinking this can't be real, this isn't happening. You will never have that sobering experience after the fact since you now live in a reality where it already occurred.

I had never seen that video before.

Knowing that perhaps our best example of "unifying culture", something that has been watched an incredible 11 billion times, is a cartoon song where 80+ percent of the words are "doo" repeated over and over...

Maybe Armageddon isn't such a bad thing.

I had actually expected the "most viewed YouTube video" to be Despacito but I checked and was surprised.

I was expecting Gangnam Style.

This. It's east to be fooled by the illusion of choice and customization.

Just see what happens to other markets in maturity, e.g. food: https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/10-companies-own-...

I still see the spirit of what the OP is saying, though. At least the AI will know if I like my Kraft Mac-n-cheese extra-creamy or dry.

In fact, the "customized feed for you" does one thing really well. It treats you exactly like it learned to treat someone "like you" from the past. So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.

Im a broken record with how often I cite this article, but any chance I get where it is relevant it is worth exposing people to. And this thread is that moment. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...

The other thing algorithmic feeds, and even some sites like buzzfeed do, is generate strings of nonsense. This isnt quite a new phenomenon, but started in the 80s with MTV. "Whereas variety shows and televised concerts in the 1960s and 70s provided context and structure to the music they presented, MTV instead gave viewers a rapid succession of wildly different sounds and visual accompaniments to those sounds, without any logic connecting one video to another." https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used... Compare America's funniest home videos, with a host, callbacks, and even a basic narrative structure to tiktok. At least Tiktok accomplishes SOME of the culture missing from prior products on the market in the last decade by inviting people to remix videos with the same audio.

Great article! Thanks

> So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.

The part about keeping society frozen in time is contradictory to the rest of the text.

It's leading people on to the extreme end, so a conspiracy theorist will become even more of one etc. A frozen society would be unchanging... But it does change as extreme ideas spread like never before.

Right, the brain seems to have a heuristic that if it hears/sees/etc the same thing, it makes it believe it more. Like if you’ve heard two different people spout the same wrong thing, you’re quite likely to start believing it. So if you’re fed the same thing over and over due to your YouTube persona bucket, you probably become a more devout believer, for better or worse. Receiving a smattering of different opinions probably keeps you in a better place in terms of remaining critical. Maybe staying in a skeptical frame of mind helps inoculate against this somewhat, because you go through the exercise of trying to find counter evidence at the same time, so that you’re essentially feeding your own brain conflicting messages. But that takes effort unless you’re already in the habit.

Something to keep in mind, regardless of how correct you think your habitual info channels are. If dissent is stamped out, like it is on many subreddits and Twitter, that’s a pretty bad sign.

That's a good point - we have to be confronted with opinions we don't agree with such that we maintain our mental muscles for reasoning about why some ideas are wrong/bad. Otherwise if we're only fed a stream of things we agree with, that can be used to smuggle in bad/wrong ideas without our knowing it or having much ability to confront it. Not to mention that every once in a while you're confronted with some challenging ideas that compel a change in worldview in a positive way!

That would be true if the catalog of material to watch/listen/read remained static. But it does not. Nobody 10 years ago who was into music theory/practice would have seen Rick Beato's videos, or 12 Tone's. And things are different because those channels exist (and will presumably be different in another N years because of a different set of people producing new material).

The article is about more than youtube. The algorithms that balance the stock market, everyones 401ks, that predict repeat offenders in the criminal system. Stability, the kind that these systems attempt to create, is an equilibrium of unchanging nothingness. Change by definition is unstable.

And those buckets can very much already be found IRL.

It's still more unique than anything before as long as the number of buckets is larger than the number of available TV channels was a few decades ago or the number of available newspapers was a century ago.

Also, one point is that those algorithms operate on global scale. Even if there are a million other people who are in the same bucket as you are, they mostly don't live in your close proximity and you might never meet any of them in person. It's no wonder we feel isolated and lonely.

I call them propaganda streams, I share a similar bucket with my friend and it's interesting discussion the subtle tangents it takes us on - some days it will try get you mad about some world event, then some it will decide action sports is the go. I wonder how many other people are in the same streams watching the same suggested content thinking the same thoughts given to us, unlikely to ever go outside long enough to meet.

This is grossly misleading. That is one kind of recommender system, but there are many others.

Are there "11 billion" views just like there are "about n million results" on the Google search page? I wonder how real that number is.

Anyway, that is a sidetrack; I agree with the rest of your point. Seeing the garbage that recommendation algorithms serve me is proof enough that they are not successfully crafting a unique experience just for me but instead putting me in some heap based on what they mistakenly think they know about me.

This is the argument Postman makes in "Amusing Ourselves to Death":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Before the telegram news was predominantly local news and only major news from abroad since it took so long to travel. The telegram made all news globally, instantly available and we were suddenly inundated with information that for the most part we couldn't really act on and had a strong incentive to be as sensational and attention grabbing as possible.

Newer media like the radio, television and the internet only accelerated this trend.

We do all go to the same ~10 websites. There are some geographic differences, different sites dominate in different parts of the world. America has an outsized influence that may slowly be slipping.

What you couldn’t predict 20 years ago is that those 10 websites are going to have ~personalized feeds for everyone. That was a little surprising … although we’ve been talking about the problem of filter bubbles since at least the mid 2000’s. I remember telling my boss in high school that I’m going to quit so I can go build a Google that doesn’t suffer from the filter bubble problem. Ah youth …

Despite all this personalization, a collective conscience remains. Largely influenced by bot armies and professional memers. Look how effectively the news spreads when an american politician does anything. Especially around election season. The whole world knows and can’t get away.

And we all know that GOT had a bad ending even if we stopped watching the show after 1 season, for example.

>Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted.

Is that the opposite? If the customized feeds are selected from the same group of sources, we could still see a decrease in total number of sources even though people are more customized.

Here is a simplified example. Take the 50 US states. In the past, let's assume each state had 10 news sources. Generally people would only consume 10 news sources so the overlap of source consumption in each state was pretty similar. A person in a single state consumed the same 10 news sources as anyone else in that state. Total sources of news is 500.

Then we enter a globalization time. Everyone gets 10 news sources, but they are custom picked for each person. But there is now 1 source per state they are picked form. This gives us (50!/(40!10!) ~ 10 billion, assuming I remember my math correctly) combinations for 10 news sources, plenty enough that each person gets a custom selection of news sources. But the total sources of news is only 50, 1/10th of the previous example. So while each selection is more unique, the total number of captured thoughts and opinions is now 1/10th of what previously existed.

The situation is more complex than that, I think. It's possible for some domains to diversity while others homogenize (and I think you are overestimating the diversity of views actually in play). American politics is highly polarized rather than diverse. The mass media are owned by a few large corporations while the internet offers the possibility for greater diversity of views. But possibility does not necessarily translate into actuality. Dethroning a king doesn't automatically mean more liberty. Indeed, the removal of an authority creates a vacuum in which powerful players can now even more successfully dominate than before. Information travels very quickly today, but it must happen over a medium and "signal strength" still matters. Indeed, this speed of transmission can be a force multiplier, inviting less reflection and criticism and more thoughtless reaction.

We must view things systemically. The world today isn't the world of 2001 plus some new stuff, like Lego bricks tacked onto an existing edifice that otherwise remains the same. New things shape the world they enter into. Once the internet, social media, etc. entered the picture, they also affected everybody and thus the system as a whole, adapting and changing in response. It is true that the establishment can no longer exercise control over popular thought and sentiment using the exactly same traditional 20th century methods of broadcasting propaganda thought restricted channels, but new methods exist. And it's important to understand that today as well as decades ago, the less powerful often ape the more powerful. Chomsky talks about this in "Manufacturing Consent". There's your trickle down theory of propaganda.

So I'm of the opinion that things are changing, the pot is being stirred and bubbling, but there's a great deal that remains the same under new guises.

I used to think that it would be hard to imagine a time where 120 million people watched the same thing at the same time. And then I realized that's an outdated thinking. Here's my example:

There are certain ads that get played on campaigns. It's a longer time scale - not everyone is tuning in at the same time. But I've been able to communicated shared suffering over Forward ads to other people that I've met. If I like a similar topic to someone else and we both watch Youtube, then I guarantee they've seen (and hate) the "Toxic Poop Guy".

Instantaneous watching was the past. Experiencing the campaign is the now, in my opinion.

Sure, maybe not 120 Million people at the same time for a TV show. But it's definitely still out there.

> PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.

The Super Bowl numbers will blow your mind then ;)

The super bowl that year had ~82 million viewers.

Soccer had 5 billion viewers across the world.

For a single match? This feels like comparing apple to oranges.

Yes.

Wait until OP hears about FIFA World Cup viewership.

And Eurovision, with 200 million+ a year even more ;)

I should have clarified that I meant SCRIPTED mass media events.

This was based off the idea in the article that reality is a constructed game.

It's also funny that you mention this b/c when I usually mention the MASH story in person, I also share that the other events of that magnitude are usually Super Bowl/World Cup etc. Guess it slipped my mind this time.

4 billion people watched QEII's funeral worldwide

For it’s time (meaning relative to the US population at that point) MASH is larger than basically every superbowl ever, except for maybe the last couple. I’m not hip on the current viewership numbers, but literally over half of America watched the series finale of MASH

> The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news

Can you confirm there's a typo in here? Do you mean "moved FROM LOCAL newspapers to"?

His meaning is clear with contextual clues.

The telegraph killed local papers that only printed local news.

Having a show become a massive TV event (like MASH) is nice for solidarity but it comes at a price of having a centralized channel(s) of opinions, messages and agenda. It's a double edged sword but eventually, in my opinion, having a variety of messages available is better than traditional centralized TV. And massive TV events can still happen for something like the next moon landing or sports.

The problem isn't with selecting your content, but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly. Today it's far too easy to avoid doing this while staying on feeds that reinforce whatever it is you believe in, never challenging you, and becoming radicalized.

> but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly.

This sounds good but I actually don’t buy it anymore. I consider myself to be a pretty empathetic person, but over time I’ve realized empathy doesn’t solve any problems unless you’re forced to put your money where your mouth is. Would I work together with a far right conservative on a project towards a shared mission. Of course! Do I understand why conservatives feel the way they do? For the most part yes. But being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy, even if I understand the underlying emotion. Even if I empathize with the underlying pain, sometimes empathy makes those feelings worse.

We don’t just disagree on the substance of opinions( pro choice vs pro life) we disagree on the deeper ways of expression, emotion, thought processes and how we assess truth. I understand why someone is pro life but watching the thought processes behind those rants? Helps no one.

Sure I love reading a good relatively moderate economist from either side arguing whatever but /r/conservative comment section and caustic twitter threads?

> being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy

> watching the thought processes behind those rants

I think, perhaps, the problem stems from only paying attention to people who are making emotional arguments based on ideology or repeated talking points that they don't truly understand but simply feel align with whatever group they see themselves as belonging to. This is the partisanship or tribalism that seems to be poisoning a lot of public discourse. I specifically say discourse here because I don't believe it is actually disrupting society at the interpersonal level as much as popular opinion seems to think it is.

With either side, if you examine the well reasoned arguments that underly a lot of the talking points you find that they are often quite different and more nuanced than the things firebrands are turning them into. This is troubling because it means even the people who supposedly believe in these ideas actually don't understand them at all. I think this is responsible for the phenomenon of people turning out to be over all much more centrist and agreeing with each other when they make an effort to sit down and discuss these things in a rational manner.

My advice is to shun reddit, YouTube and twitter and instead find some old books that discuss the topics in a rational way from a variety of perspectives, read them and then draw your own conclusions.

Yeah You’re totally not wrong, I just had a reaction to the oft mentioned on the media pop psychology version of “get out of your bubbles” that is too abstract for most people to act on.

I would argue that him not liking far right people is a good outcome rather then bad one. Him becoming far right too would be the worst outcome possible.

Because then far right would become bigger and that is catastrophic for their targets. Far right has victims, a lot of them.

Becoming friendly with far right by moving closer and closer to them while ignoring victims is wrong strategy.

There's really very little difference between far left and far right. They're both radical extremes that allow no diversity of thought and that demand unquestioning allegiance to the tribe. Contrary to popular sentiment (or media narratives) they will both resort to verbal and physical violence in support of their views. The only real difference is their opinion of government. Leftist want a total nanny state, far right-wingers want anarchy -- until one of them actually takes power. Then they both take the form of a dictatorship in some form.

Unfortunately, in today's atmosphere (and the sentiment in your comment seems to betray this), people on the left view anyone who's actually a moderate or even slightly right-of-center as "far right".

>his sounds good but I actually don’t buy it anymore. I consider myself to be a pretty empathetic person, but over time I’ve realized empathy doesn’t solve any problems unless you’re forced to put your money where your mouth is

Exactly. Modern society suffers from a dearth of people being forced to practice what they preach because everyone is happy to look the other way when someone in their tribe is a hypocrite.

I don't think "both sides are the same" is accurate, so allow me to push back. One party ousted a leading politician because he violated their ethical code. [1] The other party stands by its leading politician even as said person violates national security. [2] In the former case it's very unlikely the policitian will ever become a presidential candidate. In the later case it's very likely he will. Both sides are not reacting to violations of their values in the same way.

I'm sure there are cases of hypocracy on both sides, but one side at least attempts to condemn gross violations.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/andrew-cuomo-resigns-17161f546bb8...

[2]: I trust no citation needed.

With the advent of the internet, one can pick and choose copious examples to cast either political party as hypocrites. This is because political parties are formed of lots of people, and most of their leaders will not live by their claimed prinicples (because lying and signalling is a much easier path to winning elections than living by principles).

I cannot emphasize enough how much both parties are corrupted by this. Both parties are beholden to corporate funding, and to the groupthink of their elite friends whose problems and concerns are not representative of Americans.

And the Republican leadership will have secret affairs and secret abortions, while the Democratic leadership will send their children to private schools (or the public schools of exculsive enclaves), while the former preach about the sanctity of life and marriage, and the later preach about the importance of diversity and public education.

In response to "Don't do the 'both sides' thing", with a clear and humongous example of the difference between the sides, you... do the "both sides" thing.

The problem with your example is that 1] actually happened. 2] is a media/political fabrication being proven in a court of law at this very moment.

And to the point of this article, and many comments here, the news is much more homogenized than people think, because I'm quite sure you've heard no factual coverage of the latter from ANY pundit who sits in front of a TV camera.

Well in one way it did work with the original point, the internet has created a centralized pipe for X. There exists not _many youtubes_ there is _one youtube_ and everyone uses that for video.

In the beginning of the internet there were _many_ options, but overtime all of these options get cannabalized by a central _service_ for that thing.

So yes and yes, which is arguably the closest thing to a matrix, simulacrum view of reality. On top of that we rely ever increasingly on models and statistics as physical laws. Oh woe to the future, for the difference between fact or fiction is irrelevant and blurred.

A teenager in my family says that all the kids in her high school have suspiciously similar senses of humor, as though that part of all of them was raised in the same environment; TikTok

> Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted.

Reality is even worse than that, what you actually get is an unholy marriage of both. A highly customised feed built out of content plucked from a small number of highly homogenised sources.

And it's larger than that. A lot of sentiment floating around is about how things should fit 'me' perfectly. There's an inversion of the "force" of society because we can all try to fulfill our apparent needs without anybody.

And in many cases YOU don’t actually choose - these ‘smart’ (read: stupid) algorithms infer what you want to see. I hate that.

I think we will look back on this period in dunbfoundedness at what we allowed big tech to do.

media has also become asynchronous, and streaming has made a metric like live audience lose some of its meaning and should be replaced with launch week or month views?

Maybe it is not the "building your own reality" which is the problem but the idea of nation states in which you have to be in a particular reality without a say. It is probably better for humans to live in smaller structures over which they have more control.

Concerning the division between liberals and concervatives in the States I think it is interesting to mention that Theodore Kaczynsky has written that the opposing evolution of these two systems(with the money a power they have) may lead to a larger conflict than other systems like Islam. He calls them self-propagating systems which are somewhat organisms on a higher level controlling more or less nodes, which are human brains(and machines nowadays).

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