As a teenager in Neustrelitz (East Germany), I painted small stones purple and left them all over town.
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As a teenager in Neustrelitz (East Germany), I painted small stones purple and left them all over town. Did it for years. It drove the police and Stasi nuts. It meant nothing. It just felt good to do something they couldn't control or understand.
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@fesshole this is actually a sincere and serious method for toppling authoritarians and dictators https://canvasopedia.org/2017/06/21/new-york-times-topple-dictator-peacefully/
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@f00fc7c8 @fesshole thanks! I'd be remiss to not include another biggie for undoing radicalization and prejudice: https://www.vox.com/2020/1/29/21065620/broockman-kalla-deep-canvassing (TLDR: firsthand face to face experience trumps propaganda and prejudice almost always. So if you can get a person having a positive human connection with, say, a trans person, any weird ideas they had about trans people will start to melt. This is one way that acceptance of gay marriage did a 180° in just a few years.)
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@wilbr @fesshole i think part of the reason the internet has a callout culture is because we’ve been trained to treat everyone like a propagandist… often by real experience of propagandists trying to seem well-meaning
we’re also trained to act like propagandists ourselves - never accept new information, never admit your intellectual limits, always talk down to people who disagree with you
talking to strangers, in an open-minded and collaborative way, is a pretty cool thing to do in my opinion
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@f00fc7c8 @fesshole absolutely. I'm not sure if it's propagandists per se, at least I don't think it started that way. I think it started with snarky 140char internet sarcasm: you can't fit much nuance in that short space and wry "internet humor" dominated Twitter especially. Add in Gamergate, feminism, and the outrage machine and you've got a belief that you need a "three minutes hate" of fighting enemies online for the cause.
Arab Spring and "influencers" came later, and solidified it all
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@fesshole So that's why you can order painted rocks from Temu!
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@fesshole Years later, Russia's spooks found a scary rock in Moscow, and promptly arrested it.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/wireless_dead_d.html
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@wilbr @f00fc7c8 @fesshole Don't forget the algorithms of corporate "social" media itself; it's subtle, however it strongly reinforces alarmism and any kind of agitating lie over the more complex, boring truth.
Add to that everything mentioned before and stuff like chatbots (generative AI is about to bring the dead internet theory to fruition) and you got a perfect storm for societal degradation.