If you had read Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarian regimes (Origins of Totalitarianism) - focusing specifically on Nazi Germany and the USSR under Stalin - you would never think this. As she says, and I am paraphrasing here, the consequence of people always lying to you isn’t that you stop believing everything but rather that you end up capable of believing anything.
And I’m pretty sure that effect is on full display already.
Nah, they keep engaging… even harder…
A certain neighbouring country of Finland is doing this already, but for other reasons.
Latvia?
I think they meant Russia’s disinformation machine.
Or it plunges us back into the dark ages, where people believe things based on anecdotes and superstitions, and sources of factual information are rare and typically locked inside some walled garden or other.
This is just another form of control being asserted by the wealthy and powerful - knowledge is power. Removing effective access to knowledge keeps people in the dark, making them easier to manipulate.
Hold on to your public institutions. Fight for them tooth and nail. Collect books (unredactable, uneditable, un-paywall-able sources of information). Donate to libraries. Don’t patronize LLM systems. Prefer local storage and applications over cloud services.
And don’t romanticize ignorance.
I’m really considering to build up a small library of books on fundamentals in history, sociology and natural sciences. I see a future where everything is digital, books and all information can be altered in real time and then fascists come into power and use this infrastructure. They won’t need to burn books they can just rewrite everything.
Go find an eBay collection of the great books. Keep paper around, it will last longer after the emp’s destroy our technology.
I mean, if ever there was a good reason for blockchain (aka immutable things that can’t be changed after being created), it’s this.
Digital everything is the future, like it or not, for long term preservation it’s better to focus on digital solutions.
I don’t see how it would work. People tend to believe things without proof just because every little separate fact doesn’t seem to be important enouth to bother with proofs. But all those little “facts” combined might create a rather crazy overall picture. Some people detect the craziness of the conclusions but many are not. Anyway I see no reason to “unplug”.
I see it as a wall of noise and of course there would be decipherable channels but if they didn’t have the media literacy we could always point to the fact they fell off.
Social media has been a toilet for a decade, but people keep drinking the shitwater. Making it more turd flavored will do nothing.
Generated science facts on YT are getting worse and more every month.
If you couldn’t trust anything, that would work.
But you’ll still trust whatever truth you discover on your own. And when a source repeats something you know to be true, you’ll believe them when they say something else that you can’t verify. So long as that source is internally consistent, they are going to become the verification of what is “true” for you.
For your system to work, the individual must not be able to trust their own truths.
Exactly, that’s another thing that I’ve learned recently - don’t lose your shit when things seem to be falling apart - one, it’s a system much bigger than your individual control, but two, and more importantly, those things tend to self correct for the better, like action-reaction, like a wave, or ying-yang and duality of life. It’s quite liberating to see this way at the bigger picture.
I don’t think you need AI for that but it certainly helps. It’s good ol’ flooding the zone. The strategy is old. To me, it’s a lesson of the Soviet Union. If you continuously barrage people with a manicured version of the truth, one that includes Orwellian changes, you get them to unplug. It’s getting to be too much work to stay on top of important stuff. So people become pliable subjects for their leadership. One could argue that Putin is running Russia on this basis. Running for a party he’s not a member of. Cozying up to the left, then to the right, to the church, and back to the start. He’s everything and nothing to all sides. It’s a strategy that 47 wished he could run the US with.
