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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

Take the temporal relationship between Occupy Wall Street and the culture war battles (as can be seen on Google trends).

It is physically possible for a media campaign to be launched to increase the amount of discussion of such topics, which gets the public fired up and arguing with each other, leaving them less attention to pay attention to things like the issues surrounding Occupy Wall Street. Whether this actually happened is an epistemological matter, but it is not polling, and it is not mere marketing, though one could frame it as a kind of marketing: "here are some things to fight over, plebs....are you interested in doing so?".

And this is just one instance. And, defending a claim of nonexistence is essentially impossible, especially when the matter is largely subjective.

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I don’t deny that conspire over pr campaigns happens. What I’m saying is that the same thing happens as a side effect of marketing and polling, in the open with no conspiracy involved. Groups are addressed and in doing so group identities are reinforced which eventually leads to conflict and competition between those groups. Social media, one currently hot area of the ad business, is a great example. To increase ad sales platforms like x (formerly Twitter) optimize engagement which on a technical level means making people angry, typically by culture war content. Gansta rap is another example where marketing just sort of organically lead to a genre of deleterious (for society) music that glorified and thereby exacerbated social problems like prostitution and drug sales. No conspiracy needed, just record companies marketing to white suburban teens who desired authentic sounding ghetto-music.

Why try to explain what is going on in a way that is unprovable and sounds slightly unhinged? There are structural reasons that can be proven to exist (e.g. engagement metrics) which explain the phenomenon. Occam’s razor.

> Why try to explain what is going on in a way that is unprovable and sounds slightly unhinged?

Why people do the things they do is a good question. For example: why do you speak as if you are omniscient, and perfectly rational, simultaneously? I appreciate that is the norm of the culture we grew up in, but then so was racism ~20 years ago.

Figure that one out and maybe you will be on your way to figuring out your question, and perhaps a large swath of the other outstanding mysteries of "reality".

Can I get some Meme Magic (or radio silence) now? ;)

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