Can you explain where you hope to take this conversation? I don't seem to understand the point you're trying to make regarding books.
1,031 karma · joined March 20, 2013
Your point being? Over-stimulation in the short term can be numbing in the long term by building up tolerance. And that's assuming that stimulation is somehow a one-dimensional thing and it can only ever be one or the other. The brain is complex, stimulation can go many ways, and simplifying too much is not constructive.
> I can only think of "entertainment value" which is often sacrificed to make more profit and which books are clearly lacking when compared to other more entertaining things.
In the previous reply it was only informational value. Putting that aside, this also reduces something to a single dimension when there is really no reason or benefit in doing so. There is no such thing as The Entertainment just as stimulation does not happen along a single axis.
While there is no doubt plenty of content out there that I am sure is actually stimulating the brain in a healthy way, I wouldn't consider it the norm for either of the media mentioned.
[1] https://jacobin.com/2025/01/trump-executive-orders-project-2...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/trump-project...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-executive-orders-list-...
In conspiracy and qanon circles leaders of the left and basically anyone voicing dissenting views have been labelled as pedophiles for years (while Trump's presence on Epstein's flight logs, pictures of Trump/Musk with Epstein and Maxwell continue to be ignored and explained away) and this I fear creates enough ambiguity to not only cause a lot of harm to those affected, but to abuse these policies and go after political enemies for supporting/enabling these now outlawed things.
As someone from Germany, the whole Project 2025 document reads like a nightmare come true again, but this bit in particular mirrors the past in the most dreadful ways.
Among the first acts on his first day as president he shuts down an app that helped people immigrate legally.
The first swath of Biden era executive orders rescinded[1] includes migration related ones to now loosen and reduce oversight and enable more heavy handed treatment of the matter, creating the foundation to conduct the type of raids that started happening the second he was certified[2].
Then at his inauguration this unfortunate little mishap occurs. Twice, mind you. By a man who continually promotes and enables alt-right ideology.
If you squint really, really hard, it's a dog whistle. That's the best case scenario. For everyone else, Elon Musk unambiguously performed a Nazi salute.
The absence of this moment from alt-right safe spaces like r/conservative and the X/Twitter feeds of prominent influencers despite the fact that their user base seems to have loved it is, in itself, a story worth telling.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/init...
[2] https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigrati...
As for my own situation, I have been watching for a while. I didn't know I was, until the pandemic hit and all the alt-right and conspiracy talking points all of a sudden got brought up by my peers in real life. I had seen the same troll posts on 4chan and propaganda Telegram channels months prior. They don't know what these things are, and they were repeating the same things, convinced they came to their own conclusions.
I watched Occupy rise and fall on 4chan over a decade ago, then in the run up to the 2016 elections I saw the whole Trump thing unfold in real time, not thinking any of it. I'm not from the US so the connection to my personal life was never there. In 2019, during the height of the climate protests, a Telegram group I was in got raided by right wing trolls posting nazi imagery, antisemitic memes and then some. The obvious response was to try and get to the bottom of that and join as many right wing channels as I could, which I did, to the point that I joined their social media platforms for the sake of interacting with people who had fallen into the hole. To push and prop, and to see what falls when I shake the tree a little. Nothing about it is scientific, of course. I was just sating my own curiosity.
What I ended up seeing was a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering, a lot of projection, hate, and non-solutions. As well as a lot of people that are more emotionally than rationally inclined in their decision making, their judgement of what they see, and their response. This also seems to be something studies are showing. [1][2]
What I describe in the GP is my attempt to come to a conclusion in my endeavors. Why people end up in the hole. What I had hoped to find an answer for is how to get them out, but I came up empty-handed. I have since lost multiple peers to this behavior and ideology, and alt-right populists have gained a lot of ground politically, here and everywhere else. What I had also hoped to learn is who is helping dig the hole, and why. The answer to that seems to be that there is simply an alignment of interest among many parties, that all benefit from some aspect of it. To what degree they may or may not collude, I don't know. Those are the things where someone smarter and/or more dedicated would have to take over to find good answers.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3867439/
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12706
My take is that this is a symptom of something else. Populism has existed for a long time, but it feels to me that the environment we created also created the perfect target audience for it on a scale that never existed before. Observing the alt-right and conspiracy bubbles collapse into one over the last five years, it feels like it's the result of a sort of mental defense mechanism for a group of people that is growing every day. As I see it, we have built a world around us that is very complex and abstract, and hostile to the mind in a way that enables this sort of ideology immensely.
In it, it is very hard to feel a sort of purpose, and it is very easy to be overwhelmed. On average, the work people do has little to no effect on themselves or their direct peers. All day, every day is spent shuffling around numbers on a spreadsheet, or doing work to aid someone who shuffles around numbers on a spreadsheet. Then you clock out having a net zero benefit on your life, or that of people that matter. Other than, of course, a number that goes up in a different spreadsheet. And while you do your shuffling about to scrape by another month, you get bombarded with a flood of information about this war or that catastrophe or those disasters.
It leaves people numb, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, helpless, purposeless, etc.
Keep that up long enough, and what happens is something like a narcissistic collapse, except that it's not narcissists it happens to, but normal, healthy but vulnerable minds whose mental health can no longer be reconciled with a toxic reality.
In comes an ideology that does three things: It simplifies. It gives purpose. It provides an outlet.
Once you subscribe to it, everything returns from countless shades of gray to black and white. If you're not one of the good guys, you're one of the bad guys. If a bad guy says a thing, it's a bad thing. If you say a bad thing, you're a bad guy. The simple prescriptive labels of what counts as good and bad are delivered to you, on the house. Takes away all the nuance, all the complexity and all the mental burden that came with it.
Then, it gives purpose. If you fall into this hole, you end up seeing yourself as two things: A victim, and a savior. You see what others don't, and you suffer for it. "They" - the bad guys - are out to get you, to destroy everything. Every confrontation is thus someone attacking you, the victim, or defying you, the savior. It provides a narrative in a chaotic world where bad things happen for no reason and without explanation.
Last, it creates a target for all your bottled up frustration and anger. The bad guys are responsible for all the bad things, and it is made clear how very okay it is to channel all your negative emotions into hate towards some group. Be it Jewish people, immigrants, scientists, democrats or some imaginary lizard people. Hate is fine.
The end result is a full abdication of responsibility, and a return of control at the low, low price of a divorce from reality. To the mind that slips into this rabbit hole it is not so much a choice as it is a lifeline. That is why it is so incredibly hard to get people out of it, as well.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
I don't doubt that there's a lot more out there (10x yes, 100x possibly, 1000x unlikely imo), but I think tens-of-thousands is enough to capture almost all of the significant ones that get any traffic and will be around for longer than one or two domain renewal periods.
I exclusively follow technical people. Devs of the software and tools I work with, PG, indie hackers, that sort of thing.
Personalized ads are a scam. They are not personalized to you. They are personalized to the imaginary profile advertisers want to see their ads. You're just the sorry victim that nobody cares about. Some of them are outright dangerous (see the first one in the album), and your interests always come last.
That doesn't even include the primary concern: The rampant abuse of privacy and collected data.
[1] - https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM (one or two are mildly NSFW)
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/1...
Peaceful protestors, as is tradition, were largely ignored. Acts of civil disobedience were ignored. Acts of obstruction are being frowned upon and the people involved are turned into villains by the media. There are people out there who went through all these efforts, faced rejection or deafening silence at each step of the way and are now out there further radicalizing themselves. Policymakers are still largely sleeping on the issue. This summer broke records and hit concerning extremes all over the globe. It feels like it's just a matter of time before something boils over.
Billionaires are uniquely positioned to be, because they tend to get away repeatedly with things that would be career- or life-ending for others.
Now the parts of the world who got us here in the first place are burning through the remaining CO2 budget, with no regard for these regions, while pointing fingers at third world nations.
It's a sad joke, and nobody's laughing.