I dunno dude. Sometimes building a home or on the woods, way out where no one could hear me play my instruments and get mad because I suck, that sounds kinda nice.
Capitalism Detox
Poison the torment nexus. Burn it’s creators. Abuse it’s maintainers.
I disagree about digital detox, if you have an addictive personality the Internet is a drug.
The rest yeah fuck that shit coeperations raped the internet and left if to bleed out while they sell it’s remaining body parts.
Mfs will post this then get into a 3 hour debate on mastodon about the ethics of projecting yaio shipping culture on a race swapped hetero pair of platonic friends from an anime with 12 episodes.
Hey, don’t gatekeep, drop the link to the thread 😏
I lol’ed. Danke.
Do you accept all cookies?
For decades websites didn’t need this ridiculous disclaimer and then all the sudden it’s become absolute necessity.
Because they put them on your device silently, and then the EU stopped them from doing that?
Lemmy isn’t using an algorithm to serve me anger inducing content or users, yet that’s usually the most active content. People are the problem and detoxing is little more than a band aid.
The human brain is susceptible to engagement bait. There are different flavors of bait, but some of the ones that are most effective need to simultaneously avoid triggering moderation (whether automated or human) while jumping out of the containment of only people who subscribe to the person or place where it was created.
So a post that is sexy might encounter too much resistance to sharing from people’s NSFW filters (and reluctance to share nsfw content with people they actually know in real life).
A post that is interesting or funny or fun might get spread around, but is hard to replicate and takes a lot of effort to get right.
That leaves posts that trigger people’s responses, whether they feel compelled to correct a grammatical error or angrily correct a factual error, or vociferously defend an idea that isn’t being treated fairly. The comments themselves breed engagement as the commenters then interact with each other, and the commenters keep coming back to the same post to see whether new comments have been posted. Anger and pedantry are the types of bait that work best on most platforms.
None of this is inherently corporate or profit-motivated, so it would be naive to assume that only for-profit corporate platforms would have that stuff.
Don’t sort by active, only use custom feed, block communities which only contain “anger inducing” content, block people who post “anger inducing” content.
Yep, actively moderating your own content, curating your own feed… that’s the solution.
It worked on reddit for a long time, untill the powermods went totally nuts and the massive waves of paid trolls and bots invaded.
It still works with RSS feeds, which I guess is just technology we are all supposed to forget exists, because its built for a paradigm of many people having many personal websites, as opposed to many people all being on maybe 4 big websites.
If corpos weren’t evil, they’d expose their recommendation algorithms and just allow you to tweak its parameters, for yourself, so you could do your own advanced curation.
But that would make them about as much money as a dating app with no supscription nor signup fees, so, its a non starter.
So… <gestures around broadly> everyone?
What the fuck did you just say about me, you little shit-lemming, I graduated top of my class in The Art of Fediverse Debates and I have over 300 confirmed [removed by mod].
I can win a debate in over 9000 ways, and that’s only considering text, not only do I have access to the dankest arsenal of Leftist Memes, but I also have control of a massive army of bot accounts¹ ready to brigade you and downvote you into lemm-blivion.
¹/joke I do not have any of such thing
Maybe delete your account.
If all people around you are always angry, maybe it’s you?
That’s kind of cliché, honestly. It’s a common assumption that in reality doesn’t necessarily always hold true. It may even be an appeal ad populum.
The easiest counterexample is to say that it’s entirely possible to be surrounded by assholes, while being one of a few people who isn’t a jerk (perhaps being loosely defined as someone who makes an effort to be respectful and considerate of others, an increasingly rare characteristic).
If we reject that claim, then it makes it virtually impossible to make a valid social critique, as it gives a free pass to anything that’s a collective responsibility or widespread issue. If the norm is to be a jerk, then the culpability would rest on anyone who resists conformity, according to that logic.
It also normalizes abusive behavior. Often an abuser will push their victim past the breaking point, then use the result to smear the victim in the public eye, making the victim look like the bad one. Or on a larger scale, in an oppressive society, it would make the only ones willing to stand up look like the bad guys, making it a convenient tool of oppression.
It’s not all people, just most. Despite the name I’m not angry most of the time.
I sort by Hot and barely block anything tho I actively ignore the tankie triade (or the two that are confederated with my instance, grad isn’t)
Lol top tier comment.
Seize the memes of production.
We need both.
Technology is awesome and I have a tech job and a house full of computers and all that. But it’s important that we don’t fall into the trap of “if we just got rid of the capitalists, then we could be on our screens all day in peace and health.”
If you cooperate with the primitive parts of your brain that evolved to take cues from the natural world, it can often improve things across the board.
I mean, the torment nexus is the torment nexus because the corpos did an unbelievable amount of data analytics to figure out how to precisely manipulate human emotions and brain chemistry.
Yes, we need to wrest control away from the digital drug dealers, but also, they are digital drug dealers, so you can actually do a good deal of that by detoxing, by quitting, going clean, destroying their market base, rewriting the cultural norms so that such activity is not celebrated, but viewed as shameful.
Detoxing from corpo social networks (or phrased differently: boycotting them) is at least an actionable thing that a person can do, and it will actually benefit them directly.
Of course, switching to non corpo social networks is also very important, but its probably still a good idea to have that detox period, to just, you know, renormalize, establish a new baseline, touch grass for a while.
I’ve logged into my Facebook account out of sheer curiosity, and my god it’s a wasteland. Ads, AI slop, hot takes from nobodies, the works. It is obviously designed to be as infuriating as possible, and qutting that digital landfill is the easiest thing ever.
I was one of the earliest adopters of Facebook, and also seemingly one of the earliest to bail out.
When the Cambridge Analytical scandal broke?
Nuked my entire account, at least, according to Facebook, who I’m totally sure doesn’t just still have their own archive of me, because how the fuck would I know?
Basically everyone I knew thought I was literally insane for doing that at that time… I connected the dots and realized the true extent of what they could be, and we now know they were and are doing … because I worked with databases and data analytics.
But nope, everyone thought I was nuts, and slept walked into the social apocalypse.
All you need to know about Facebook:
Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuck: just ask
Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuck: people just submitted it
Zuck: i don’t know why
Zuck: they “trust me”
Zuck: dumb fucks
I only used it to check a local thing (they don’t have a website, just a fb) and my account was banned “for lurking and inactivity” and when I found out it was 180 days since automated ban, so I can’t request my account back. 180 days since they did it because they shut down for renovation for a little bit and then it was summer so they were inactive then too. They didn’t get banned, so I think they may have proven that they do indeed exist and that they are indeed important to facebook. I’m not able to go as often due to account removal.
i think oop wants to challange the underlying assumption that “digital” automatically means corporate social media and such.
There are large parts of the digital world that I would not describe as toxic that actually work for the people not against them.
Touching Grass is important but large parts of “real-life” are just as toxic. You can find a break from those in the good parts of digital life as well as by touching grass.
theres good and bad in both, and most of online sites are not toxic, but most of these nontoxic sites remain untouched and will for a while, and they are quite small. I’ve joined blips.club and spacehey and they are so refreshing and feel so nice. digital detoxxes can be good or bad, so can social media and it depends a lot on circumstance
Sure… but unless you’re talking like, I2P decentralized alternative internet… or torrents…
… (almost) everything runs pretty much entirely on servers that are owned by a handful of megacorps.
Almost every physical part of the internet fundamentally is literally controlled by corpos, and they also govern almost all the software that is run on that physical stuff.
Yeah, it didn’t used to be that way, so extensively and thoroughly, yeah, it doesn’t have to be in the future… but like, how, what’s the plan?
See how that compares to ‘detox from toxic corpo social media’ as… an actually actionable plan that produces results?
I dunno, I don’t generally care for self expression for self expression’s sake, in the form of saying things to a small audience that said small audience will just generally agree with, as compared to a potentially actionable plan to actually cause the change that is being prescribed by that statement.
There’s expressing feelings, and there’s “here’s something you could maybe do to remedy the situation causing those feelings, to achieve the effect I desire”.
countering almost all stuff online is corpo (except piracy)
internet archive? the millions of servers making up the fediverse? foss maintainers and organizations, wikipedia, etc. if you have a computer, you can make a webpage. yes, that old mac you played oregan trail on instead of doing your research could host a server. the internet is always 1 foss maintainer from collapsing and most servers are old laptops hosting a personal site nobody has visited before, and along with that, decentralized media and archives for said media. most web domains are not known because theres quite a few random kids (like me) who learn javascript, html, css, et cetera and make a personal site and host it hoping someone will visit, hoping someone will care, and most of them have 0 visits from anyone other than the creator. example.org is a real domain by the way.
your computer sometimes acts as a router, if someone near you is looking for a site, and their device and/or router can’t find it, they’ll look to nearby devices to see if they know where it is, so sometimes your device does that. if you have folding@home installed on any of your devices, your device will temporarily become a server as long as you have it running.
many small buisnesses and some schools have their own sites. those (usually) aren’t owned by megacorp
sorry for the rant and have a great day (also sorry for bad grammar/spelling too tired to fix a the moment)
Ah yes, because no-one got unhealthily addicted to IRC or BBS or SMS or whatever. Digital detox is more about taking time to be purposefully disconnected from current affairs and people you might be better off not interacting with.
…to bolster your sarcasm, LPMUDs had a reputation for destroying academic careers thirty-five years ago…
Although not the careers MUDs’ creators - I dated the daughter of one of them once upon a time, and his academic career was founded on his contribution to the creation of MUD!
people can, but they weren’t built for the purpose of engagement bait like stuff is now. texting is sending words from one device to another without moderation or an algorithim, so you only see what people are saying
on most socials it pushes engagement bait and whatnot, and they’re both solutions and they can be solutions to the same problem or to slightly different problems that look the same. it is the fault of both the customer and the company.
not sure if its sarcasm, but anyway
Yeah it was sarcasm. Because people wanted digital detoxes before all that.
*looks at Fox News
Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) tweeted:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.
8 Nov 2021, 2:49 PM
For today’s lucky 10,000.
i never expected that there was a wikipedia page about this concept that just explains it in such a dry way
this feels like knowyourmeme but less … sarcastic? idk. it feels weird
i am one of the 10 000, thank you for this info! have a great day! :D
Here’s an idea: email your friends more often. It’s not a silver bullet but seriously, it’s so much more pleasant to fire up Thunderbird than it is to deal with the FOMO of keeping up with Discord servers and group chats and Facebook and Insta and Snapchat and
… and risk accidentally sending a wrong attachment file that i should not have sent? and i can’t delete images after i’ve sent them? no thanks.
If that is a significant concern for you then no, you probably shouldn’t use email. The other platforms are lying to you when they say that they can delete your photos off other people’s computers though. Most of them are probably lying when they claim to delete files off their own servers.
And we can achieve that by… boycotting?
No, there are PLENTY of people who need to touch grass and go hang out in a social setting from time to time.
Yea, but which social setting wants them?
the last 20 years were successful in removing any and all 3rd spaces
