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Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.

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There's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought about change would make the analysts less relevant.

It's a hard problem because it reduces to the fact that narcissists and sociopaths are a significant proportion of the population, and they're strongly attracted to money, power, attention, and status.

So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image.

Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.

Frankly, who are these people? Because this is just another "they" idle conspiracy theory.

"They" are against me.

Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other drugs as they age out - because being a trim fitness inflencer is easy in your 20s, keeping it going into your mid-30s is a lot more difficult.

I was thinking specifically of political pundits who are doing a roaring trade (in opinion columns, TV hits, book promotions etc) talking about authoritarianism and its many causal factors. They're curiously mute when it comes to discussing solutions, with very generic advice like 'go to a protest' or 'vote for the opposition' despite the abundant evidence from authoritarian regimes around the world of these tactics not being very effective. You never hear them talk about things like general strikes or mass civil disobedience campaigns for some reason.

reminds me of the college scene in the movie Tomorrowland where all the teachers going on and on about about the things that would end us and when she asked "Can we fix it?" and teacher is like "What?" "I get things are bad but what can we do?"

learned helplessness is really a problem, but personally all I have gotten is scorn and hatred for trying to make a difference/improve things that I managed/had control of. All people care about is precious number go up/ignoring the future while everyone around me is looking at me like I have two heads for not blindly following the insanity

what do we honestly do?

Find others likeminded locally and cooperate where opportunities present themselves.

What would you do? The system is very good at transmuting critiques of it into its own propagation.

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

You might like Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

A learned helplessness as a diagnosis implies that there are things that can be done. But I can't see any. It may be because of a learned helplessness of course, so my inability to see what can be done can be a fact about myself, not about the world around me, but still... It is a catch 22, isn't it? Maybe not, but it is a self-reinforcing uncertainty loop. I'm not buying it.

Unfortunately the political movements most interested in the relationship between society and technology were wrapped up with Nazis and so the line of thinking is underdeveloped, as it has had to start again.

Ok. How do you propose one fights back? Do you really viscerally understand what it is you are fighting against?

fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork the internet.

I mean, I've had pipe dreams of a parallel networking stack built on IPv6 with a killer app offering real peer-to-peer networking again. But who will deploy and maintain all the new IPv6 networking gear, infrastructure, undersea cables? This is not something within the purview of the average (or even above average) hacker any more; the encumbents are too firmly entrenched.

Collectives, cooperatives and other organizations. It's been done before, giant WiFi networks spanning countries. Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh are a few of them, the two first are real and alive alternative networks built on independent hardware infrastructure.

Not sure about the details with Freifunk, but Guifi has collaborating companies who basically operate like ISPs but connect you to Guifi + you get a internet connection via the Guifi peering the installer helps you with.

Personally, I am guessing it is the other way around. Not first killer app, but first a parallel networking stack, etc.

The idea that anyone is too firmly entrenched is always true. Until it is not. We are not still using horses, nor casting bronze tools. Nor do most ships sail. We (mostly) don't burn coal anymore. It would have been utterly insane to imagine replacing any of those entrenched technologies. That is the "follower" syndrome.

The context for a new kind of internet is very different now, than when the internet started. That changed context provides an opening for new ways to do things.

A crucial and hard piece is that it has to be paid for. As much as you need a parallel networking stack you need a parallel business model. Yes, the current one is too firmly entrenched, etc.

I think Heidegger provides a framing for why these are just musings in, as you put it, a firm entrenchment and the whole ordeal is looking quite bleak. I honestly can't imagine a way out of the technological frame and I am simply not seeing my generation in common spaces. Even my ability to meaningfully connect with my peers through conversation is deteriorating by product of the sheer scale of potential engagements one has at any moment. It is quite overwhelming and I am afraid there is no technological answer here.

The application layer has way more gravity than the networking one right now. You'd need to fork that for anything to happen.

It's (mostly) not the networking layer where people pay to target us. It's the application layer that would most benefit from being forked.

Of course the problem is that what can be forked already has been. Federated social media. Distributed git hosting. However most "essential" uses are centralized and often also commercial in nature. If you fork Amazon you're ... still Amazon. That sort of thing.

Can't have network effects without lock in effects as well.

But like...why?

This is basically "just don't use things you don't enjoy" and the trouble of our time seems to be the number of people who can't or won't do that.

It's somewhat an age thing but also definitely a lot of people in all generations never learn it: you can just stop using things. Walk away and suddenly find you never want to look back, and if you do it's entirely unappealing.

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