I was watching some old Ghost in the Shell anime stuff, and it brought back memories of what it was like to live in the 90s and early 2000s.
You kids don't know this, but there used to be a time when you had to walk to your friend's house if you wanted to see them. You had to call them on the phone line, and there was only 1 phone line per house (unless you were rich and had 2, but even then the 2nd line was for faxes.)
We had to read books to learn things, and if we didn't remember them, we wouldn't know them. There was no Google. There were card catalogs in libraries that you could use to search a limited number of topics. Research meant reading a book, finding the books it referenced, reading those books, and finding those books that were referenced. Etc, and so on and so forth. Eventually you might find a living person and you could go talk with them about the topic, see what they know about it.
The 90s and 2000s brought in the "Information Age", when information was at our fingertips.
There were are a lot of questions people had about what would happen if people integrated with technology. In other words, what would a society where everyone had the full power of the internet at their fingertips all the time look like? Well, you are living in it, and some of you young ones were born into it. You cannot imagine what life used to be like before the internet and smartphones.
One of the things we learned fairly quickly was that there was something called the Wisdom of the Crowds. Ask a million people a question, and there is a HIGH chance they will get it right. No, not everyone, but generally, the consensus leans towards the correct answer. Lots of people tried to harness this, to various degrees of success. Probably the most successful was Wikipedia, which almost encoded all the information in the world in a neat little website. (Wikipedia today is NOTHING like it was back when it started. Today it is all edited to reflect a left-leaning ideology.)
The other thing we learned is how powerful internet marketing could be -- if done right! If you could get your message to go "viral" you could potentially reach millions of people with hardly any effort.
As people began to interact with each other, politics shifted. By a lot. In the mid 2000s, it had become clear that the average internet user was deeply conservative, if not a full-blown nazi. It became clear that all of our social problems could not be hidden, swept under the rug, explained away with trite phrases. It didn't take long for people to start shouting from the rooftops about all the things you are not supposed to shout from the rooftops. (A classic example is the 13-50 statistic.)
And thanks to the viral nature of the internet, conservatism was spreading faster and faster and nothing could stop it.
Today's internet is a dumbed down version of what it used to be. You are no longer free to say what you think. You are no longer free to engage the wisdom of the masses. You are not allowed to create viral content. Everything you say and do is carefully monitored and filtered. Why? Because the internet was out of control, and threatened to destroy the power of the elites and replace it with actual freedom.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc... All these things exist for ONE purpose and ONE purpose alone: To CONTROL you. They NEED to control your thoughts and your actions. They NEED you to stop connecting with other humans on the internet and stop forming opinions based on your observations. They made these things so they can banish you and force you to disconnect.
We used to imagine that to be banned from the internet was the equivalent of a death sentence. Imagine living as a cyborg, and then someone pulling the plug on your data processing centers. You would die. That's how important we imagined the internet would be, and how important it was that everyone be free to access it and do with it what they felt was best.
Nowadays no one thinks twice about banning someone from the internet. This is how low they value individualism and the human spirit.
My 2 cents: Get off the internet. Disconnect. Read books. Learn how we used to do things before Google and Wikipedia existed. The things we used to do, the way we used to do them, didn't stop becoming relevant because of a small technological revolution in how computers connect. Their replacements are definitely not better! The "real" internet is coming, and you can help create it, but you have to free yourself from the prison of the current internet to do so.
I am going to have a long reply to this. My personal opinion is that internet was in fact a thing to further the enslavement and initially was thought to be a tool not for freedom of expression, as a digital wild west, but as a tool to promote the transhumanism agenda, right from the start. Internet inception was inside the military, ARPAnet, my speculation is that it was supposed initially to be a brainwashing tool to spread flow of information in controlled fashion, and here we are witnessing not the decay of the free internet, but actually its evolution into its original and final form - a tool to track, enslave and brainwash.
But the net grew too fast and unchecked, so it sort of backfired on "them". Exactly same what happened with Trump - they did not think he'd ever win. The same with internet - they did not think it would spread that fast and that wide. I still remember modem access and that I had to buy an internet card for dialup. And, the most interesting fact that at least in my university, connectivity was provided by open society foundation. The same Soros. So, it actually fits the agenda that it was supposed to be a curated tool. Then, as soon local home-networking enthusiasts appeared, the growth was EXPLOSIVE. Nobody foresaw that.
Now here are some ideas why internet concept was originally a pro-cabal thing. Most people practicing occult or magic tend to agree that belief and human will shapes the reality. This also resonates with idea that humanity was created in the image of God, because, well, the most defining trait of a Godly being would be ability to shape and mold the reality - to create something from nothing with Word and Will. A world where the whole earth human population mindset would be controlled and can be directed to specific goal is an occultist wet dream. This would be the biggest spell you could create ever, anything is possible with this. And that requires thinking in unison and a superior grade of global interconnectivity. And that's what originally internet was for. The official narrative that it was to preserve information flow in case of nuclear event, but I tend to believe that most of the highest profile projects were actually seeded "from above" with purposes that may be hidden. It is not just enough to be have a breakthrough idea to create a breakthrough product, you have to have budget and approval from the whole chain, especially in the military.
Did you just equate deep conservatism to Naziism? 😆😆😆
No, I did not.
Sorry misunderstood
I should probably explain.
Before the internet, there were neo-nazis and probably a few nazis, but hardly any of them really understood what it is all about. It was mostly a joke.
After the internet, not only did conservatives become very much more conservatives, but there was a rise in real naziism. Like, they had access to each other and to the source materials and started really advocating for the same policies that Hitler implemented.
Were these two communities compatible? Not even a little.
But the two camps, conservatism and naziism, were clearly gaining ground, rapidly, and leftists couldn't keep up at all.
Don't forget how much harder it was to tell what was organic back then. What was injected ? We will likely never know the scale
It's even harder today. "Organic" is a marketing slogan, just like "organic" politics.
Astroturf all the way.
I'd agree about reading books, but all the book stores near me shut down, the library is filled with drag time story hour books, and if I wanted to buy a book anywhere else I'd have to go to a 2nd hand shop (which I do) or order off Amazon anyway.
They got us by the balls on the information battle front.
I did score a Webster's 1949 deluxe dictionary from the 2nd hand shop, for 17 dollars no less!
It has a HUGE encyclopedia section on WW1 and WW2, but I'm still trying to grapple with the fact it mentions nothing about the holocaust in it... It mentions poor treatment of Jews in the rise of the 3rd Reich, but ends with absolutely no mention of concentration camps.
You'd think it would have been in there by 1949...