Reading comments under a post today that I thought would be fun and light hearted stuff.
It was a question thing, If someone went to sleep in 1971 and woke up today what would they be most surprised by?
A friend of mine had commented so it showed in my feed. I thought the comments would be interesting and fun, the sort of advancements we just take for granted now that would have been unbelievable in 1971. Like our smartphones. The internet. Electric cars. Watching movies on giant screen TVs. Giant screen flat TVs. Those sorts of things.
Instead it was all political venom. Just nasty shit. With the usual misspellings and bad grammar you have come to expect.
So then I had to wonder, are these real people? Which is always the question now right? How many of these are really people who live here and will vote here and actually believe this and how many of them are troll farm paid bad actors or bots programmed to post certain phrases? How many of them are people who just want to shit stir and know if they post something nasty other people will bite and the comments will take off?
How much of it is real?
And how much of it will become real?
Like, I fully believe a lot of what divides the country right now started as shit stirring and foreign interference posting. But those Russian (and now Chinese as well) troll farms only work because they understand how easily manipulated the American people are. Because they've watched us tear each other apart over ridiculous shit for...well ever. Things that shouldn't be political are. Things that should just be common sense aren't. Things that shouldn't form the core of your personality suddenly are your whole identity.
Like sunglasses in truck guy. You know him. You know his opinions, his bumper stickers, the flag he has flying from his tailgate. And you also know it started as a stock photo image from a troll farm and then escaped into the wild when actual sunglasses in truck guys were like Hey! That's me! I don't love anything as much as I hate liberals!
And I get really tired of arguing about both siderisms. Like Oh well both sides are just as bad. One, they aren't. They just objectively aren't. But two, who the fuck cares? Like if Hunter Biden did bad shit he should go to jail. AND ALSO we should be looking into that Saudi money that Jared Kushner took. It's a yes and, not a because both.
I used to say that we wouldn't accept that excuse from our kids. Well Johnny did it. I don't care. I'm not Johnny's mother. You don't get to do that thing. Someone else did something shitty is not an excuse to do something shitty.
But the whole when they go low we go high things rankles me too. I've talked about that before. It's aspirational. I can appreciate the sentiment and how you believe it's the best way to live your life, but...you cannot good behavior someone else into better behavior. Does that make sense? Continuing to ignore when they are dismantling the right to vote doesn't work. It needs to be called out. When they cannot win without gerrymandering and trying to impeach a justice who can over turn those gerrymandered districts calling that out as cheating isn't going low. It's standing up for what you believe.
When they say that kids can't get medical care that their parents and doctors think they should get or that Drag Queen story hours are evil and you point out that they are being bigoted and transphobic you aren't being intolerant, that's being honest. Stop thinking you have to sit back and be polite to people who are being awful.
But because we've got all that going all the time now, and as the parent of a trans woman, I can't ignore the constant chipping away of her humanity, it's hard to see what is real and what isn't. And then to wonder does it matter? Does it matter if even 90% of the online commentary is fake if 100% of the legislation is real?
Even if they know they aren't actually responding to the majority, that the comments are plants and fakes, they are still legislating based on that same principle. That what they want is all that matters. Like is Ted Cruz really that dumb that he keeps falling for fake stories and fake polls or is he smart enough to know that it doesn't matter if it's fake if you get it out in front of people enough times they start to believe it.
Look at what they did with Hillary Clinton and the emails and Benghazi. There are still people out there who will swear up and down that she personally poured clorox on her servers and that she was asleep while the compound was attacked, even though it was the middle of the day here. Because time zones. But people were told that so often that they will tell you with a straight face that those things are true.
Trump and the pee tapes. There is no evidence that those are real. He also did not pay a porn star for sex. He had sex with a porn star and then later tried to pay her for her silence about it. It's different. But trying to break through the things that people KNOW is almost impossible.
So I read through the comments, for a short amount of time, just long enough to realize my imagined fun read was not going to happen, and thought, does it matter if this is coming from real people or not?
Real people are reading it.
Some real people are wondering if they are being manipulated, but even if they are wondering it's still happening. There is still a part of them soaking in that information. And then what? Are they believing it? Are they fighting against it? Are they logging off and ignoring it?
The courts are saying more and more that there is no moderation that can be done. That blocking even blatant misinformation is a violation of free speech. So it will get worse. And it's already bad.
Maybe that's what would be the biggest shock for someone waking up from 1971. That we took all of these really amazing tools, like interconnected world communication, and we used them to spread lies about each other. To spread misinformation about something as important as a worldwide pandemic. To obfuscate actual treason by making up pretend treason (Pelosi tore up that speech, remember!).
Or maybe since 1971 was the year the Pentagon Papers were released they wouldn't be surprised at all. Maybe they would have seen it all coming. That technology might have progressed but people are still the same.
See? Not at all a fun little post with answers like "Your oven can send you a message telling you when it's preheated!"
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