I realize that a lot these days. People are not inherently so bad but greed is a nasty drug that has the potential to ruin the best.
When you have nothing to offer but kindness and compassion, it is very simple to see the humanity side of things in this world and it can feel really amazing.
They get to write the narrative.
We can analyze just one small tool in the belt of narrative control: censoring. If you've been warned or banned on Reddit, you can imagine how this works. If you've said something against the mold of what they allow, you will get censored. With so many people commenting, some subset of people will always say what you want to see. You censor or derank opinions you don't want, and boost opinions you want. This is a defensible form of writing a narrative without actually having to artificially write anything.
Of course with AI, you can now just write anything and seed ideas.
Give such sick people the reigns, and you get a false reality has little connection to what's really happening.
Aside from that, I'm not saying you're wrong or right about that theory, I'm just wondering how it falls down around that idea.
On this topic of interenet behavior, maybe I'm not really sure or maybe I am, but my view is it's less about some sort of diempowering imposition of external/elite evil upon a innocent and good mass population, but rather about the medium itself enabling latent negativities in the populus to surface. Which doesn't mean the population is itself not good and innocent - it is also multifaceted. Thus, such dynamics might operate in a "Stanford Prison Experiment" kind of "cover and permission" way.
My view of many of these dynamics are its more about emergent self-regulating properties of a system than it is about top-down control. In a sense, that's a lot more liberating and empowering for people, because then they are not cast as victims of some evil from on high, they are the architects of their experience, for good or bad.
The view you espouse, while seeming to empower the downtrodden by taking aim at hidden sources of evil power, I feel in fact disempowers by playing up the fake victim narratives that disempower and confuse people. In other words, your idea, while seemingly edgy and incisive, may in fact be what any such extant "evil elites" would want you to think, if they hope to have control! Haha :)
Anyway, I'm not trying to cut down your idea here in this topic - personally I believe people are very much in charge of their experiences, that's what I've found in my life - but in this kind of mass topic, who knows? Anywa, thanks for responding. Just some food for thought and maybe discussion. Have a good one :)
That reminds me, I'm making a text-based terminal browser. It might achieve that! Haha :)
For many years the prevailing notion was that anonymity turns people into dickheads. But they did studies on this, and it turns out it's just that the real-life dickheads just dominate the discussion and the reasonable people post way less
The societies we humans build always allow such persons to rise to the top - it doesn't matter if market democracy or brutal communism, fascism etc. The last type that didn't work well was some sort of feudal kingdom style where power was shared among elite across generations, inherited and rarely claimed by more competent, ambitious and vicious folks from lower ranks. But this is also how we got most of the progress in past 150 years, so its a double-edged sword. I wish I had a solution, maybe some Deus Ex-style of neutral AGI, but who would build such an AGI when everybody competent wants more power and manipulate others to their favor.
Heck, we often celebrate them by looking at their achievements, conveniently ignoring what utter piece of shit they are as humans (Ford is a prime example - a great inspiration for Hitler among others, and musk doesn't go far and look how uncritically he was celebrated also here for a long time and often still is... but the list is very long, basically almost all billionaires and high power folks).
With great power comes great impact even if they don't try, and who doesn't like some ego boost. People imitate them, follow them, subconsciously accept their values more easily. They literally imprint their values on rest of the world and we allow it due to our laziness, convenience and inherent sheepish mentality of masses which we are part of whether we like it or not - just look at how most folks need some form of a role model.
All this tho -- can the mother have no impact? I don't think so. Children are raised by their mothers. Why put the blame on dads, if solely? Seems not fair. A bifurcation in blame in society that can only cause a fracture that leads to greater wrongs later.
Also, while such questions are intriguing -- much of this talk of what's wrong with the internet, points the blame at a few rich people. This seems misguided, and misses the point that the internet is largely "us" - all of us. If we are doing something "wrong" but deflect, we're never going to get better. Even if some bad people are trying to push buttons, we're the ones that have to take responsibility for how we act and to do good.
When I'm chatting online, I'm sure as hell not talking with Bezos - he can't text that much, least of all in the hot-tub. I'm talking with some random. And we each have to take resopnsibility for our behavior. If the rando I'm talking with says, "Why am I bad? Because Jeff Bezos made me this way." It sounds totally ridiculous. And it is, of course. I think the hijacking of a question about "why is the internet negative sometimes" into a 2-minutes-hate on rich-elite is the wrong approach to solutions and understanding.
1: https://academic.oup.com/joc/article-abstract/71/6/922/63636...
2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rJ20sca3fg6epXwVbGj7HdNfCH4...
If the social permissions change like Rwanda in 1994 then your nice neighbors would sooner chop you to pieces.