OK, Boomer

Here's a great little treatise chock full of insight.

From the comments:

Self care is also not arguing with people who are committed to misunderstanding you.

There are big problems with this kind of thing, of course, and they grow out of an evolutionary feature in our firmware - Pattern Seeking.

A million years ago, we had to start with sorting the world into easily recognizable binary chunks: The stuff that helps us versus the stuff that hurts us.

But then we had to figure out the duality thing.

• Fire helps us by keeping us warm and making our food easier to digest, but it can kill us too
• We have to have water to drink and to grow the plants we need to eat, but we can drown in it, and that's where the crocodiles live
• A flint knife is an excellent tool for acquiring and processing food, as well as being a deadly weapon that avails us the means to murder each other.

We dearly love sorting things. Oh how we do love it so.

But just as with water and fire and tools, the need to sort, in and of itself, can be both helpful and harmful.

We sort people according to physical traits, and we get racism
We sort people according to spiritual belief, and we get religious wars and genocide
We sort people according to their wealth, and we get class struggles and bloody revolution

So none of this is particularly new, but I need to write it down - to reiterate it to myself before it slips away.

Fast rewind to the early 20th century, when Bernays taps into Freudian concepts in order to synthesize a new kind of marketing, which of course turns out to be both a good tool to get the word out to people about good things, and an excellent weapon to divide and conquer.

A short course:

A bit longer:

And with each advancement in Mass Media, we've seen an amplifying effect of both the positive and the negative aspects of communications vis-à-vis news, advertising and propaganda.

What's new for me is the thought that so-called Artificial Intelligence (an oxymoron if ever there was one) has grown up so quickly and become so pervasive that the bad guys can run their scams in stealth mode so that by the time most of us become aware of what's being done to us, we figure it's too late to do anything about it.

(the 2016 election comes to mind - duh)

Anyway, Blunty's video popped a couple things into my brain.

First is the marketing/propaganda stuff: the slicing and dicing of demographics info to the point where micro-targeting gets so fucking granular as to make it possible to generate very specific hot-button items at very specific, and ever smaller sectors of the populace.

Second - growing out of the first (as usual) - is that there is practically no such thing as "shared experience" on any large scale that isn't being manufactured and custom fit to the biases that have also been manufactured and custom fit to us.

Divide-n-Conquer works. 

The practitioners are very good at it, and getting better as we go along.

for good or ill

the world is 

what we make it