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Comment by donkey_brains | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with what you are saying, but I have grown too cynical to believe it will ever happen. American capitalism has been very effective at ensuring 2 outcomes:

- The population is kept just comfortable enough to become complacent, with easy access to intoxicants, brainrot media and fast food. Now there are even robots that can do our thinking for us. A large percentage of people are brainwashed into thinking that all change is bad because it will cause them to lose the paltry, ersatz freedom they have rather than gaining real liberty.

- The labor pool is kept large enough that any of us could be replaced immediately with no significant loss to our employers. As the ISP mantra goes, “we have nothing to lose but our jobs”.

Yes, we know that they couldn’t replace _all_ of us at once, but combine points 1 and 2 and you will start to understand why there is no appreciable labor movement in the United States.

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What chills me the most, is the self-censorship Americans engage on social media today, everywhere online. It seems Americans today are afraid of talking clearly about general strikes, protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship and more "taboo" topics, and I'm guessing it's because the platforms kind of shadow-ban people quickly for it.

Growing up, I always heard Americans bragging about freedom of speech, and how important it is. I'll admit I swallowed that wholesale as a young impressionable person in another country, and I still believe in it, just not the American freedom of speech flavor I suppose. But it's so sad to see the state of affairs compared to just ten years ago, where discussions could be freely held, even on mainstream social media, and people weren't afraid of talking about things with clear words.

But the chilling effect is in full effect today, and I think it's having a large impact on how well (or not) the working class could actually mobilize. Because as soon as anyone mentions "general strike" on social media, they seem to disappear into a black hole and that stuff never shows up in people's feeds. Regardless of the size of the labor pool, if you can't organize people somehow, especially across a large country like the US, it's short of impossible to actually get any change in reality.

Americans don't talk about "general strikes" because they don't care about general strikes and never really have. That concept doesn't have a place in American culture. I know socialists keep trying to make it salient but that is like trying to impose democracy on Afghanistan.

You have to work with what you have, not what you wish you had.

> Americans today are afraid of talking clearly about general strikes, protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship

Americans are talking about protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship all the time ... and I mean literally all sides - liberals, conservatives, leftists, feminists, MAGA ...

Using what words specifically? Besides HN, even people commenting on reddit tends to self-censor words like "r@pe" just because they've realized they get penalized if they talk about things too clearly, on other platforms. Same with general strikes, censorship and more, even on platforms where you don't get downranked automatically just because you used specific terms, people have now started self-censor in those ways.

> "r@pe"

Whenever you see something like this, it's because the platform has some kind of automoderation policy that is liable to delete/shadowban content containing the word. Typing that, then, is not self-censorship; it's the exact opposite, the defiance of external censorshop.

I hear this argument, but can't believe the content filters are so crap they can't detect simple letter replacements like that.

>people commenting on reddit tends to self-censor words like "r@pe"

That's just because reddit is almost entirely children and bots/shills. Yes, a platform full of children is going to be childish.

I'm not talking specifically about reddit...

> I'm not talking specifically about reddit

Using the example of someone typing “r@pe” to get around auto moderation is a pretty specific complaint, and not really an example of self censorship since that person clearly still got to say whatever they wanted to say.

At least online, there is a decent argument to be made that a good cohort of people have significantly lost the ability to self moderate.

Average Reddit user is in their late 20s or early 30s.

The chilling effect on speech on social media platforms is because they are ad funded, nothing more. Advertisers have no desire to be associated with controversy.

If someone wants unfettered speech, it has to be someplace for which they are willing to pay the hosting and moderation bills. "Private businesses don't owe you a platform for your speech" as the American left liked to say.

Meanwhile, the Swedes seems able to run a forum entirely supported by ads, yet still enable unfettered freedom of speech, together with really strong moderation, which results in a place where you can actually discuss pretty much anything. Online since 95 although taken offline in various points of it's life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashback_Media_Group

Maybe it's just the American way of doing ad-funded social media that is the problem?

It's not "captialism." Sweden is capitalist. Norway is capitalist. It's about America going from a high-trust wealthy society, to a low-trust, mostly lower class society with increasing wealth inequality.

If you look around the world, this is effectively the natural state of affairs: India, South Africa, Nigeria, Russia... they all have the same pattern. The US and the West was the outlier in the '50-'90 because we had a lot of wealth redistribution AND free markets. Then the boomers were like, fuck that, we want to all be rich... and they mostly are, but everyone else is fucked.

Government is hard, you need people to give a shit. We decided we don't care somewhere along the way.

oh man, "we have nothing to lose but our jobs" really cracked me up in a sad way

1984 ended up being a playbook rather than a warning

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