Social Media Vs Democracy

She says that social media has a limited amount of power to do real things. Recent events have, though, gone against her claims. Look at the recent news in Nepal, where social media led to a vastly better regime, or look at the Epstein files that were released. It has tanked Donald J. Trump's voting scores. What she is saying is a gross oversimplification.

I’ve come back to this video a few times now because of how effective it is as a method of communicating the issues at the core of the digital age, which is ultimately a question of how safe democratic discourse is when you have 5 people (men really) who own everything and can halt your democratic participation at will. We’ve seen this over and over again in relation to discussions about Israel in particular and it ultimately adds hard limits to the true extent of the discourse. When Abigail refers to “Code is Law”, she’s referring to a 1990s/early 2000s piece of work by Laurence Lessig, who talked about computer code being the only effective way of regulating online content, such that the law can only be reactive and attempt to remedy a harm that’s already been done to a person/s. Whilst Lessig would never go as far as to suggest that algorithms be brought into public ownership for direct regulation, there is a quietly growing case for it (but it obviously does raise questions about WHICH public owns it, is ownership assigned to each individual jurisdiction, how will these differing regulations of the code interact with each other in a globalised world), but whether or not full/partial public ownership would work it reflects the massive sentiment shift from the cyber-libertarianism of people like Yarvin and Thiel (which is to say, tech elites), to the more left-populist ideal of these tools working FOR the people and societies reaping the collective benefits of enhanced democratisation. There are plenty of Qs around how this could be weaponised by rogue states, but we can all agree that social media has already been so weaponised in its current form of private ownership and manipulation.

Hellnoa Bonham Carter

Abigail, the only woman I am truely scared of, but cant stop watching. Both out of sheer presence but also as an apparently consistent source of existial dread and societal nihilism.

In switzerland we're in part a direct democracy. no BS "protest on street, or whine on Socials, or call your elected" which has no legal weight and can be ignored. Any citizen can challenge any law approved by the parliament or, at any time, propose a modification of the federal Constitution. four times a year, policies, referendums (50'000 signatures) and popular initatives (100'000 signatures) are voted on YES and NO by the entire population. votes are handed in by mail, counted by hand, btw, so effort really isn't an excuse for other countries. oh, and for every vote, they write a little booklet explaining the changes, with both the opposition and government's position and recommendation.
This is information, tangible and actionable for politics to properly pivot and not get completely disconnected from the people. its a pressure release valve.

You are my favorite video essay maker… I really am rediscovering my ability for critical thinking.

given the framing /content im expecting a rug pull at some point in the video. and then we got to the point of abby straight up saying " this is gonna get rug pulled". is fun.

This has been the first ad read to actually make me think about subscribing to Nebula; thank you for being so honest with us

I‘M GONNA BUST 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

The thesis that no one was actually responsible at Boeing interests me. At one point—while I was still paying attention—Microsoft very clearly pursued institutional incompetence as a legal strategy, arguing in court that it couldn't be adopting illegal monopolistic practices by deliberately giving its own upper level software privileged access to system-level services because none of its engineers could reasonably be expected to have normal levels of professional competence in designing and documenting interfaces. It worked. Poorly written, long obsolete and deliberately misdocumented, MS-DOS, through its incestuous relationship with Word (later Windows and Office) , became utterly dominant in the marketplace, and remains so to this day (although the original systems code—legally canny, perhaps, but increasingly technically unworkable—was eventually almost entirely replaced with other work bought in from outside).

It seems unlikely to me that other large American businesses were unaware of this and did not make conscious decisions whether to go down such a path or choose another. Those decisions may be made at the dinner party level and, to put this delicately, fail to be documented, but that doesn't mean they were never made. Though word on the street is that it's the ghost of McDonnell Douglas, not the traditions of Boeing, that we have to examine for the explanation of that particular story….

Or?

What if any form of journalism was non profit.

The barbarians are running the country.

Bravo! True art 👏💐

Oh my God! It really is these damn phones!!! 😱

There are two things that define a system of governance. How good it is at making a strong country/empire and how good it is at regulating who's making the calls. The success of democracy isn't coming from how much information it gathers, it doesn't come from how much people agree to be part of it. The success comes from the facts that A) a democracy needs to make as many people in the country believe they have a chance at happiness by earning more money and that makes them productive which makes the country strong and B) when it fails to do that the people on top get replaced with a fresh batch of leaders that need to do that same thing better. Observing the people and manipulating them based on the information you gathered has been done for as long as humanity has existed and it bares no threat to democracy. As long as the people think they get the leaders they want, they'll be fine. Whether that comes from just talking to a lot of people or using tech do it makes no difference, except in how effective it is. But fundamentally it's the same thing. The threat to democracy today is the same it was a century ago: the people being convinced that they actually don't want democracy. There was no social media when Hitler turned Germany from a democracy into a dictatorship, blaming social media for Trump doing the same in America is pointless. People are just that stupid. But also dictatorships tend to self destruct because they don't meet the first two conditions, they don't make people productive and they can't regulate themselves.

i work for the chinese government

" I’ve recently started calling it the “3M Model” of false belief based on the following components:

>Mistrust. As I explained in a previous post, the rationale for our beliefs is often rooted in intuition, faith, personal experience, or trust. We depend on trust when we look to others—as we often must—when don’t have the answers ourselves. But with so many sources of information vying for our attention today, accessible in an instant through the peripheral brains that are our phones, it’s easy to end up placing our trust and mistrust in the wrong people. When we come to hold false beliefs, and cling to them despite counter-evidence, it’s often because we mistrust the people who are telling the truth and trust those who aren’t.

>Misinformation. When other people tell us things that aren’t true, they’re supplying us with misinformation. And when they deliberately feed us misinformation that they know is untrue—like when Big Tobacco told us that cigarette smoking doesn’t cause cancer or when Big Oil told us that global warming is a hoax—they’re spreading disinformation. Still, whether deliberate or not, false beliefs often take root in our brains because we encountered misinformation somewhere and decided that it was true. We all know that “fake news” exists, but we’re often not the best at distinguishing between it and the real thing, It doesn’t help that we’re often told that real news is fake and fake news is real.

>Motivated Reasoning. While “confirmation bias” means that we tend to gravitate toward information that supports what we already believe, or want to believe, while swiping past or rejecting information that contradicts it, the related concept of motivated reasoning is a bit more involved. While confirmation bias refers to what we do when we encounter information, motivated reasoning describes what we do after we’ve actually scrutinized something, rationalizing to ourselves whether it represents quality information or not depending on our ideological identities. If it supports and preserves that identity (like how Fox News supports conservative viewpoints, while MSNBC supports liberal views), we reason that it’s great information. When it doesn’t, we reason the opposite, telling ourselves—and our ideological opponents—that the information is bogus, biased, or otherwise unreliable." -Joe Pierre M.D.

Middleware filtering also sounds like censorship to me.

thats the best set ive ever seen

Thanks!

25:36 this video makes the cia people leaking stuff in bo3 mean 1000000% then knowing about it the 1st time when playing the campain.
and its 2040=—————>so everything she said is WWWWWAAAAAAAY more hi.tec./extreme.