caryoscelus:~#

i wanted to play my part putting this war to end or preventing another one from happening . i thought — and i still think that ever more clearly, — this war was made possible by enormous unprecedented informational campaign , mass mind manipulation that rare dystopian sci-fi author could have predicted . however , one thing has changed since then : i’m no longer under delusion that simply making truth accessible is enough

that was my idea — building easy to access platform uncontrolled (impossible to control by design) by any malicious government or non-government actors that would allow everyone to access truthful information and using their brain power they would be able to pick truth amongst obvious fakes and lies . but while i still believe humanity needs uncensorable free for all platform , now more than ever — my further experience shows that it’s not going to be enough . what we face is a new kind of post-orwellian propaganda that at its core undermines the very idea of critical thinking , whilst at the same time claims “critical thinking” to themselves — somehow managing to do that effectively . we can’t solve that purely on technical level .

centralized attempts at that — marking , censoring and otherwise dis-recommending fakes — not only are ineffective in re-convincing already indoctrinated people , but actually famously effective at creating and fortifying “bubbles” . even the harshest righteous censorship is only ever going to make resistance to it dumber , but not extinct — especially not when there’s a whole rogue state with its own censorship . famously multiple states/state agglomerates competing for world domination — ever so slowly or ever so fast — each step on a slippery slope to totalitarian Machiavellianism . so that doesn’t work .

truly decentralized attempts are not as popular yet to cast final decision , but uncontrolled semi-decentralized solutions (like unmoderated social networks/group messengers) are already effectively used at spreading the aforementioned propaganda , which really isn’t as much of a classical propaganda as it is self-propelling meme (in original , barely remembered sense of the word) , a virus . would creating an environment that allows unlimited spread of this virus really solve the problem ?

unlikely

and yet we must make the environment because no benevolent censorship can stay benevolent forever . but we must also find the way to fight the virus inside this environment — this particular virus amongst many others , less directly harmful ones . and since we’re using this biology metaphor anyway , lets take it lessons from biology on how to fight viruses . two effectively translatable strategies come to mind : gaining immunity by inoculation ; and creating competing , more aggressively propagating , but less dangerous strain of virus .

translating back to reality of (mis)information spread and manipulation : we either have to educate people to detect manipulation before they are first exposed to it ; or we have to manipulate people into liking and reposting cute cat pictures instead of liking and reposting war . these two approaches seem to contradict each other , but if we set the contradiction aside , we can see that that’s how things are already happening in society world wide . “elite” in some loose sense of the word gets education , masses get to like kittens .

but then again , what went wrong in the system to allow this atrocious war to happen and continue happening as i write this ? maybe it is that contradiction , that narrow crack in the system where people get bored with doge emoticons and animated rewards , where they think they are smarter than that , but never got to be picked up by any educational institution (in a broad sense) to actually be smarter than that ?

our lives are inevitably duller than fiction . there are no film cuts , no cadence , not that much of strong emotions — most strong emotions are being erased from mainstream by either ban (of violent ones) or endless looped repetition (play a song a hundred times because you can and it doesn’t evoke the same feelings any longer) . all of this leads unhappy people to get that margin dose of extreme — be it harmless achievement of most likes on cringy video stream or pure violence . in the pre-war era that violence was mostly being manifested in real world by occasional “unexplainable” “crazy” “maniac” killers or rapists or otherwise singular violent people .

and i’m not writing this to pardon institutionalized violence of police and various armed bands colloquially known as armies around the world — it was and is a part of the puzzle . genocide of kurds and armenians was happening just a five minutes ago — even if on a lesser scale than a century before , and was done by a well-known “reputable” nato member state . oppression and genocide of uyghurs by a less reputable but still recognized prc was by and large ignored as well . but however historians , i’m sure , will put that under “world war iii” umbrella , we in the relative comforts of “western” civilization could blissfully ignore the world growing mad .

but back to the main topic — people want ever stronger emotions or the comfort of knowing better life is impossible . the war (un)declared by putin and supported by hard to count but sizeable amount of russian population gives people a choice of either . people in russia who’ve been successfully indoctrinated by the aforementioned virus , have a choice of either experiencing strong violent righteous emotions of going to war (physically or — as cowardly majority chooses it — in spirit), or at least comfort of “knowing” that life is shit everywhere because famously “everybody lies” and no heaven on earth is ever to be made .

does this still sound crazy and unbelievable to you ? i’ll tell you : it still shocks me when i’m actually witnessing it . but i get the solace in knowing where all this is coming from .

human nature

human weakness

human condition

call it as you like , you carry a part of it too and chances are you’ll never notice if you ever cross that threshold of becoming a monster