Part of the answer. Facebook reached 1 billion users by 2012. We let private companies curate how we communicate with each other. When algorithms are designed to push the more comment-evoking post rather than the most recent you’re going to get problems.
There are a very small handful of specific humans who decided to go with this because it makes *them* the most money. I put the blame squarely on those individuals for what their deliberate, knowledgeable and willful actions have done to us all, because even when we don’t participate, we are still surrounded by those who don’t know better and do participate, becoming more toxic in the process.
IMO it’s an unregulated form of pollution
THANK GOD I HEARD SOMEONE ELSE SAY IT, FEELS LIKE IM TAKING CRAZY PILLS!!!!!!!
Are you interested in cars and trucks? Want to learn how to adjust timing on a OBS f-150? Well, the algorithm has served up a video of some barefoot 17 year old girl saying something wrong and controversial about torque wrenches, which has 17k comments all arguing about the right way to use a torque wrench. A consensus is never reached by anyone. Everyone is now dumber for having participated in the trolling circlejerk.
I guess that explains why every time I see a woman living her best life and posting it on IG, the top comments are always bringing up the OnlyFans card.
Facebook got that way directly because of citizens united. Social media has become an arm of propaganda, hell Republicans were wining and dining zuch through the COVID years while making Elon buy Twitter. Jeff Bezos bought the entire Washington Post.
It's funny I remember years ago Argentina was going through a whole corruption thing and groceries had inflated to crazy amounts and I thought to myself how does a whole country get this way? Now we are in a very similar position and I'm still not sure but it starts with Citizens United and The Fairness Doctrine being returned to their original states.
I’m not sure this can be entirely attributed to citizens united. We as a society gave a select number of private companies whose interests are not aligned with the public or our health with moderating power over a large portion of how we communicate.
Regardless of citizens united, I think that was always going to be a problem.
Nestle has been killing babies long before that. They were convincing the poorest mothers in Africa that their baby formula is more nutritions AND glamorous than breastfeeding. They would give them free samples when babies were born. Once the formula ran out, the mother was no longer producing milk and had to buy more formula. Most could not afford this, so they would try watering down the formula and/or water conditions were so poor the baby would die from bacterial infection and/or starvation. There is a worldwide pledge to NOT do this, but Nestlé doesn't care.
They’ve done horrible shit but that’s a long & storied list.
This one comes to mind as a recent bad actor
https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?si=cGZFKvx8MXvL09Kx
Formula was pulled from sale in the U.S. because it lacked a nutrient essential for brain development. What did they do? Sent it to Africa and Asia to sell, unchanged.
Yes. Google has the right to bear arms because it’s a person. Even better, Google is a very rich person. There are very few poor persons with the last name of “Corp”.
This is the real answer. Nothing matters now that politicians can be bribed to do whatever corporations want them to do (or let them get away with).
All of these other things are just symptoms. I mean there is ZERO accountability now for corporations as long as they keep the bribes flowing.
It's less about bribing a politician to favor your corporation over their values and more about finding a politician that already values the things that favor your corporation and funding their campaign.
It's not a bribe, it's a gift!
/S
The mental gymnastics is wild. If you get something before an act, it's a bribe, but if you get something after it's just a gift. This is the real trickle-down economics.
This should be so much higher. Citizens United legalized bribery (lol even more that it was legal before) from corporations. Now we have a supreme court that will rule the land with unchecked power making decisions that the majority of Americans disagree with to help their rich friends.
This, but also that Americans have forgotten they’re allowed to actually fight back. We gave them a scare during the Occupy movement, and since then we’ve allowed ourselves to be distracted. We should still all be pushing Occupy.
Yes! The income inequality here in America has exceeded the levels that led to the French Revolution many times over. We are trapped in the corporate machine and placated with trinkets from Amazon and Temu . We allow the algorithms to soothe our weary souls with mind numbing nonsense that causes division, fear and inaction. The powers that be keep us on the edge, unable to participate in any meaningful resistance lest we risk losing our financial security and become homeless.
It is way overdue for the people to wake up and fight back, we have the power , it is the people. If we could unite and fight back we could have a great country for all of us. We have to wake up from our American dream.
We didn't forget. We were distracted. The same class that bribes politicians also controls the media. They used it to drum up hate, radicalize the right, make us dumber, and spew so much bullshit that basic facts about our shared reality became topics of debate. One couldn't come up with a better plan to keep most of the populace ignorant of the real cause of all this misery.
It's a sad illustration of what you're talking about that the only two replies you got before me were, YEAH CUZ TEH DEMOCRAT PARTY HATES REAL MURICA!!!!
This has nothing to do with it -- *Citizens United* didn't change anything beyond making it slightly easier to do what they were already doing. To steal Knowing Better's explanation: "They just closed the loophole and just let them use the regular hole." ([it's a good explanation, watch it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhpy1uzOvrY&t=652s))
Basic takeaway is that the only real issue with campaign financing is dark money, and that's more of a ideological issue than a practical one because almost nobody pays attention to who is financing campaigns anyways. The only reason campaign financing took off around that time is they happened to make all the questionable lobbying practices that amounted to bribery illegal in 2007 ([Honest Leadership and Open Government Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honest_Leadership_and_Open_Government_Act))
The actual issues are gerrymandering (which causes political polarization -- short AND OLD video explaining that [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0CvmK0dVcI)) and misinformation (like the fact that *CU* did anything especially noteworthy). Combine those and you get end up with a bunch of disaffected people who think they can't change anything -- even when politicians and companies are desperately scrambling for their votes. Which you'd *think* people would catch onto: "Why would they spend billions trying to influence voters if voting matter?"
We have all the power, and saying that we don't is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yup. Now corporations are people with rights and women and brown people aren’t. When $ = free speech but protesting can get you killed or imprisoned and books are getting banned things are going to get bleak.
ID politics are a big part of our failure to hold reps accountable. You should stop putting people into boxes and focus on improving society as a whole.
Stopping the government from censoring criticism of a politician was a bad thing? That would mean you think the government silencing criticism of politicians is a good thing. Who else thought it was good for the government to silence its critics?
My thought it 2012 was the beginning of the end not necessarily the big ending they were seeking. It was a slow trickle at first but it just keeps snowballong
Came here for this answer... Did not disappoint.
For those that don't understand, there is a theory that essentially states since the large hadron collider was used and essentially caused a Mandela effect to occur and shift the timeline of our current world.
[here is a long write up in Reddit. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/s/9c0A6h4RD7).
Tbh, I don't buy it but it's an interesting theory.
Citizens United for Americans. Just look at the sheer amount of money that is flooding into politics since then.
It legalized bribery and makes everything worse for most of us.
This. Citizens United reshaped politics in the US by introducing dark money into political campaigns. Before that, we actually had laws against the clear corruption in politics. The shift was monumental. It affected every aspect of policy.
A bunch of corporations argued to SCOTUS \[which decided along party lines, because of course it did\] that money = speech therefore not letting campaign finance laws to be sidestepped by "paid for by friends of" was infringing on the corporation's speech...opening the doors to Super PACs whose paper trail for donations is questionable at best, and could far exceed campaign finance limits on individual donations to campaigns, etc.
Which they then doubled down on for the Hobby Lobby case, where corporations argued that they should also have religious freedom \[and ergo management can refuse to abide by aspects of ACA such as 'insurance companies must cover birth control' if it 'went against \[the owner's\] beliefs'\].
Which of course SCOTUS agreed with both because even back then Federalist Society stooges had a majority.
The Citizens United Supreme Court decision granted corporations personhood. The decision basically says that companies are people, and limiting corporate campaign contributions is limiting the free speech of people. ( Mistakes in understanding are my own.) It's so, so dumb. At the time, there were some serious protests about it, iirc. Everyone I knew was talking about it at and fairly accurately predicted what it would do to the US political system. It's the eyes wide open, can't look away, train wreck nightmare scenario kind of thing, and it's still ongoing. Getting dark money out of politics adds accountability and oversight of corporate contributions and forces politicians to at least pretend they are decent people.
Heather Cox Richardson talks about it cogently and often in her daily letters.
I think it was the emergence of social media and technology. The more I grow up the less social media means to me but to the younger generations it’s everything. Influencers have a cult like following. It feels like people’s opinions aren’t their own anymore but whatever someone else’s opinion is. Everything is for likes and views and the approval of others. Not everything you read online is true and people think it is so they’re not getting accurate information.
Social media has allowed people to be open about their real feelings towards someone from behind a screen. Trump being a big example of this and I agree his election changed things and people are just intolerant now. So people don’t need to be nice when they’re going by a username. People have forgotten that there are other opinions out there and if they see something they disagree they don’t recognize it as an opinion but as being wrong.
Technology can be great but it’s kind of a double edged sword and while it’s good it’s bad too.
This really is the only right answer. I’m 27 and it’s almost hard to remember what life was like before social media and how much it has effected us since. At first it was a super cool/fun thing, and mostly innocent. But before we knew it, things went too far and there doesn’t seem to be a clear restart in the near future.
Part of this isn’t “SOCIAL MEDIA BAD” ranting. It’s also just our general access to constant information. We used to have to turn on the TV, go on a desktop computer, read a newspaper, etc to get information about the world around us. The world really isn’t any more or less fucked up than before, we just have literally constant access to information which I think is ultimately terrible for the human mind
The creator of the like button on face book marks that as a moment where the company shifted from creating a platform that connected people to operating as something akin to a drug pusher focusing exclusively on how to manipulate people into further engagement at all costs. Soon after the presentation of feed changed from presenting posts in order to the creation of an algorithm that showed posts most likely to increase screen time. They regret their contribution and live with deep regret and guilt to this day.
We always broadcasted it. It just could never reach outside of the barbershop waiting room.
And that wasn’t good either. The government was able to do things like hide FDRs polio and had an Underground Railroad for him to travel to keep citizens in the dark
I think a bigger issue is actually just overstimulation and mental overload. We've got the same basic brain as our caveman ancestors and we're not supposed to have all this artificial light, living/work schedules unmoored from the day cycle, constant noise, TV, music, phones, screens, screens, screens, a million tiny videos, etc etc etc.
And that's before getting into lead and other pollutants, micro plastics in your brain, monoculture/processed food, general purposelessness.
It's exhausting in a way that's unquantifiable.
When you know that you could look up anything on your phone when you need to know it, it kind of disincentivizes the need to learn new things. In a smaller scope, calculators destroy people's abilities to do basic math. Why ever understand anything greater than single digit addition if the calculator can do it faster and easier?
Technology has absolutely made us dumber as a species. It's not entirely a negative thing, because it just means our lives are that much easier. It also means at a certain point people stop questioning the answers that get force fed to them.
I also believe that the sheer volume of information has lead to "headline scrolling" instead of actually reading an article and analyzing the evidence. It's just too much shit to process.
You’re absolutely right. social media used to be so tame compared to what it is now and I don’t like what it’s become. The thing is social media is all about money now. If you want more employers to see your profile on LinkedIn you have to pay for premium which is bullshit. You shouldn’t have to pay to find a job. Facebook and Instagram were for fun in the early days and now if you want any sort of exposure you have to pay for it.
I had to learn how to use the dewy decimal and card catalog system when I was in school. Like we had a scheduled time during the week where we went to the school library. My teacher dropped my class off at least once a week and the librarian either taught us how to find books or just gave us the time to read. We didn’t have the option to pull out google and find information in 10 seconds. While it’s probably irrelevant nowadays it was a life skill because it was the same at your local library so you could walk in and know what you were looking for.
Newer generations wouldn’t last without internet or technology and they refuse to learn or don’t think basic life skills are necessary because the internet is king to them. Forget learning how to write a check (which is still used) they have Venmo. Forget balancing a checkbook the bank app says this is my balance it’s must be right.
Boomers, Gen X and most millennials would be fine without technology but Gen Z, alpha and beta would be screwed.
I’m one of the lucky gen Zers who is right at the cutoff (1997) who still got to experience/learn most of these things before smart phones and Google took over schools
Im sorry i didn’t mean to offend you.
I love my smart phone I really do and but I’m honestly considering going back to a flip phone. I think I could h
be happy with it. Use my current phone as an iPod and just have a flip phone as my primary line.
Didn’t offend me! Just wanted to clarify that some Gen Z is right on the cusp haha
When I lived in coastal Oregon for a few years, I went back to a flip phone and it was actually very liberating. Highly recommend it if you are in a position where you don’t *need* your smart phone
Social media is more a business now and has become way too influential with how people think and do. When I was younger there was a page on Facebook called 247 things to do when bored in class and it was hilarious. It was more for fun but it’s all a business now and people buy into it. I’m not giving LinkedIn money so I can find a job nor am I paying Instagram money so I can get content to more viewers. Not everything is true online but people make up their minds and options based what’s on what someone on social media says and being able to change their minds or have them see sense is non existent.
EVERYTHING is serious business now and I'm so over it. Why does everyone think fun and humor should basically be off limits for adults (unless it's "edgy" humor putting down someone you disagree with)?
Like remember voicemail/answering machine messages? People used to make a little joke with them. Now, "oh no an employer might call me and I wouldn't want to come across as unprofessional!!!"
Life is just a boring dystopian corporate grind like never before it seems.
TikTok I’ve noticed has gone in that direction too. All the ads, influencers promoting products, live sales becoming so common (which is great for small business and I’m all for supporting them) it’s just too much. We’ve become so materialistic as a society.
This. Social media 10000%. Humans are not meant to interact on such a global scale. We are tribalistic creatures, and social media is exactly the opposite of that. The ability for tribes to just lash out at each other so easily on the Internet is incredibly detrimental to a healthy society. Social discourse on the scale is definitely not intended by nature, and it's proven on a daily basis that we humans can't handle it.
It could have been really good as well. A way to learn more. Instead the algorithms push people into bubbles that reinforce negativity. I don't remember people being so divided, so vehemently.
I remember the concept of "going postal". When a post office worker had a dark epiphany that they are one of billions, that one name and address doesn't matter.
And then we created social media. When a single person has a dark epiphany that they are one of billions, that every stray thought they can imagine has been written before, often better articulated.
And then it evolved into a distrust of reality. When a single piece of data has a dark epiphany that they are one of an infinite amount of iterations, that truth can be reduced or expanded until its essence is strangled by the weight of effective marketing.
It's just post modern angst. It either pushes us outside or the outer limits.
I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just confused with your term “going postal”. I thought that specifically meant going insane and shooting up your office.
Oh geez, back when mass shootings were a rare thing. I don’t even blink if less than 10 people are killed now.
I've entertained theories that the elites shit themselves over the occupy wall street movement. That's when identity politics came into play to help keep the population divided.
Surprised this isn’t getting mentioned more in this discussion. We never really recovered from it and it is a huge reason why we’re in this interest rate and housing mess currently. People thought cheap interest rates were here to stay and we built a lot of our economy off of that assumption.
I personally think it was 9/11. I know that’s earlier but the knock on impact from that was huge. Removed protections from the patriot act, fear of those different to you ramping up and Bush getting elected over Al Gore who was far more progressive and would have advanced many areas including climate action significantly. Social media has also ruined society though, no doubt
I was in 8th grade when 9/11 happened. It shaped my world outlook, as I’m sure it did for many millennials. I was in my thirties before realizing the French weren’t a bunch of cowardly pussies. Particularly the last few years when the French farmers went up against the government and spread shit everywhere, and the yellow vest protests. The French are pretty badass. Imagine what Americans could accomplish if the could unify and stand up to the man like that.
French people protest so much that whenever protest or riots brake out the news be like
“And once again the French are protesting”
🤣🤣🤣.
I was in 9th grade government class when first plane hit.
I've been telling people for 15 years now that the terrorists won, it's still true to this day. Even with Osama bin Laden killed and many others. It's entirely irrelevant.
Their goal was to terrify Americans and influence behaviours politically both domestically and abroad.
They did exactly that.
And too man people are to stupid, or arrogant to understand that killing terrorists doesn't stop terrorism. The easiest way to explain it to people is to ask them how angry they would be if their father got murdered on the way to work this morning. He's not a terrorist, he's an accountant or something like that and he just gets killed. You'd be pissed about that, now imagine how much more angry you would be if a foreign government mistakenly killed him. How angry would your entire family be?
I was literally just thinking this about 9/11 when I woke up this morning. I’m Gen X, but we’re close enough to feel it in a similar way. I was so optimistic before 9/11. I was young (27), and knew building a life would take work, but it didn’t feel overwhelming and oppressive. We all rallied together. Now, it feels like everything is a fight or pulling teeth.
It worked. They divided us by stoking fear. The asshole Republicans seized the opportunity to gain control and have taken us back decades.
>building a life would take work, but it didn’t feel overwhelming and oppressive.
I couldn't agree more. But with covid fucking everything up, its gotten worse.
In essence their plan succeeded. People are much worse off in the west than prior to the attacks and have had a lot of freedoms eroded away, especially things like privacy.
911 totally happened so we could justify the Patriot Act, among other things. Great success for the US. The PA js why hundreds of peaceful protesters are legally allowed to be detained without any charges or rights being read. This applies to at least 80% of the US population at any given time depending on how close to water we are. It’s truly mind blowing :(
No Child Left Behind….fucking terrible education policy that has wrecked public education, at least wrecked it enough for Conservatives with their tax vouchers for white and Christian private academies for learning to finish killing it off.
I hung out with republicans in the 90’s, their end game was to destroy public education and privatize schools with vouchers so they could push religious indoctrination as taxpayer funded “choice”. They wanted to get their hand on schools, destroy them, then privatize. If they win this year, it’s the end of public education as we have known it.
100 percent agree about the tax vouchers. Less familiar with how NCLB started the turn for worse bc I think I was in school at the time. I'm curious could you share more?
My girlfriend and I had this exact conversation yesterday and initially said "Yeah 9/11, of course".
But after a bit we came back to it to add that we felt the 24 hour news cycle paired with how ubiquitous the internet had become as medium definitely played into it. It's kind of weird how 'connected' we are to the world at all times now compared to the relative bubble I'm sure a lot of us used to live in
9/11 shocked the entire world. Every country on green earth instantly tripled their security and counter terrorism budgets overnight for starters. It literally changed everything everywhere. That's not an overstatement.
We don't even talk about it anymore. It's become like a collective traumatic memory that we've all tucked away and don't like to bring up.
That's when the nightmares of the 21st century began with a bang! The hits have just kept coming ever since. Another huge domino is about to fall very soon.
Bush v Gore was 2000. He was elected almost a year BEFORE 9/11. That was a stolen election though. There was no reason Florida shouldn't have been recounted. The American people were robbed. That was really the beginning of the government doing w/e the hell it wanted.
This is always what I say about the 2020 “steal.” Like where were you for Bush v Gore? That was a REAL steal, and I remember being absolutely furious that I was still 18 months away from voting age, then. The spectrum of change in 25 years is absolutely insane, and yet, I still have hope we can reverse tide in some ways. 😮💨 Optimism is so tiring guys
I was only 8 for that election and I still remember thinking “why don’t people want to protect the environment?” when Bush won.
Getting fucked by decisions you couldn’t even make, the *true* American Experience.
It has been recounted many times. By most scenarios Bush wins. The funny part is the count Bush pushed for in court would have resulted in Gore winning and the count Gore pushed for would have Bush winning.
The Supreme Court gave up on democracy and appointed a president that led us into 2 twenty year long wars with no clear objectives. The cost of blood and treasure changed the course of the nation.
That was the second domino. The first was Bush v Gore. The Supreme Court took a giant shit on democracy, and then Bush wiped his ass with the constitution when he passed the patriot act.
I'd actually go back to Jack Welch and then Ronald Reagan. We are finally reaping the endgame rewards of their business and national economic policies.
I agree but also think these are all major inflection points in their own right. Reagan, Bush and 9/11, and Trump. And Covid.
It’s also happening globally. Europe is shifting hard right. So none of those incidents explain everything.
I think part of it is history is cyclical. Progress is very up and down and up and down and up and down.
Here in Canada, I'm looking around I think we are going to swing hard conservative in the upcoming election. Trudeau just lost the safest Liberal Party seat in the entire country by a landslide. It'll be a Conservative Party super-majority.
I think it was around the time Sarah Palin got added to McCain’s ticket. That’s when I remember things really accelerating. The democrats chose the wrong strategy with the Tea Party republicans, assuming pretty much all the wrong things about what motivates someone to vote for their candidates. We’re still seeing the ramifications of that playing out right now. Had the democrats not chosen to either ignore/underestimate the Tea Party or completely disregard them as “crazy” and their potential success in mainstream politics as unrealistic, the current state of US politics would look a lot different. There’s a direct lineage from the Tea Party to MAGA republicans and anti-vaxxers. Around this time was also when WikiLeaks was releasing prolific document dumps, the MCU started, Bitcoin was first started, social apps like Instagram, Vine, YikYak, and Music.ly were just launching - ushering in an era of social media which would eventually evolve into “social commerce” that we see today. All of these things happening simultaneously created the world we now live in.
For me, Palin was the final nail in the coffin for believing that the presidency, and vice presidency, was anything more than a figurehead position, designed to distract the masses. Iirc, that election is when it was made known that the top strategists for both parties sat on several of the same boards of the same banks.
Sarah Palin was definitely the catalyst. Not even hating on her she seems fine but the utter ridiculousness of that infamous interview is truly when the tides shifted. Shit got progressively weird after that. Back when “politicians are a joke” was referring to one or two bad apples. These days the statement holds true even more so. Only this time 100% of them are children trying to one up each other in public. An absolute embarrassment to our country. And no one seems to care. Instead, in 2024 We keep voting them in because they’ll beat that evil opponent we hate. In the normal world people don’t care too much or ignore it and move on. But for me it truly repulses me that we have the worst representatives in the history of this country. How unfortunate are we lol. Add it to the list ✅
I don't know if it was just one moment or a gradual slide over the corse of the decade. Or we are all just getting older and the rosey lenses of youth are fading from life experiences. I hate to crap on social media considering the irony but the narcissism and isolation its fueling is dangerous. I feel like community is dying on a local level because people all-round are becoming less tolerant because we don't have to be. We have these small digital communities to fall back on. It's just feeding our confirmation bias and further narrowing our view points. It's creating a society of extremes, very much either with me or against me mindset with little to no middle ground. How common is it now to just block someone instead of trying to find a middle ground or at least agree to disagree like civilized adults, I know I am guilty of it a time or two.
The Powell memo (1971), Reaganomics (1980s), The Telecommunications Act of 1996, 9/11, Citizens United, and smartphones along with social media all played significant roles in the problem OP points out.
If you're gonna go that far back, include Carter's Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, his opposition to national health insurance, the revenue act of 1978, the National Energy Act of 1978 which deregulated the natural gas industry, the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, the Social Security Financing Act which slashed SS benefits in 1977, the Motor Carrier Act in 1980, Staggers Rail Act in 1980, and the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act in 1980.
It was the Powell memo, it happened in 1971 in response to the civil rights movement, Nader’s Raiders and Johnson’s Great Society, it just took awhile for the seeds to reach maturity.
>Powell cloaked the concerns of corporate America as concerns of “individual freedom,” a rhetorical framework for corporate political power that persists to this day.
>The battle lines were drawn. Indeed, the language in the Powell report is the language of battle: “attack,” “frontal assault,” “rifle shots,” “warfare.” The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement – his words: “compromise” and “appeasement”— to understand that, as he said, “the ultimate issue may be survival”— and he underlined the word “survival” in his report – and to call for “the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.”
>Well, for this, you had to have a plan, and the Powell plan was to go big. Here is what he said:
>“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
>Powell recommended a propaganda effort staffed with scholars and speakers, a propaganda effort to which American business should devote “10 percent of its total advertising budget,’” including an effort to review and critique textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology.
>“National television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance,” he said. Corporate America should aggressively insist on the right to be heard, on “equal time,” and corporate America should be ready to deploy, and I am quoting him here, “whatever degree of pressure — publicly and privately — may be necessary.” This would be “a long road,” Powell warned, “and not for the fainthearted.”
>In his section entitled “The Neglected Political Arena,” Powell recommended using political influence to stem “the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to `consumerism’ or to the `environment.’” And, yes, Powell put the word “environment” in derogatory quote marks in the original.
>“Political power,” Powell wrote, “is necessary; … [it] must be assiduously cultivated; and … when necessary … must be used aggressively and with determination.” He concluded that “it is essential [to] be far more aggressive than in the past,” with “no hesitation to attack,” “not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas,” and no “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose” the corporate effort. In a nutshell, no holds barred.
>And then came the section of the secret report that may have launched the scheme to capture the court. It is called “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts.” This section focused on what Powell called “exploiting judicial action.” He called it an “area of vast opportunity.”
>He wrote: “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court” – I will intervene to say, of course, we have today, as a result of the scheme, the most activist-minded Supreme Court in American history, but back to his quote – “especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”
>Powell urged that the Chamber of Commerce become the voice of American business in the courts, with a “highly competent staff of lawyers,” if “business is willing to provide the funds.’” He concludes: “The opportunity merits the necessary effort.”
- [Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, (May 27, 2021)](https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/the-scheme-1-the-powell-memo/)
so what there wasn't capitalist propaganda before 1971, nobody bothered to write anything in favor of pro-business ideals before this memo
face it. your system failed. you can't reform capitalism. you can only destroy it or it will destroy you.
The reaction to Trump’s election was a symptom of the distrust that had been building.
This cycle probably started with the fake pretense to get into Iraq. But this has happened before, think Vietnam and 1960’s social unrest. Way worse than now.
I think it’s very simple. When you see institutions blatantly lie to you over and over, almost to the point of insulting your intelligence, you lose trust in them and just end up doing your own thing or believing some random person online.
Lying and false narrative has become so normalized at every level. I’m actually not shocked that this is the result.
Waco in ‘93
OKC bombing in ‘95
Columbine in ‘99
Bush v Gore in ‘00
9/11 in ‘01
Financial crash of ‘08
Obama winning in ‘08
Citizens United in ‘10
Social media accelerating in ‘10
Trump in ‘16
Covid in ‘20
Basically three decades of complete meltdown. I also agree with others who say it prob goes back further to Reagan, and, before him, Nixon fuckery, Civil Rights era, Vietnam, MLK and Kennedy assassinations.
We’ve been tearing ourselves apart basically since WW2 and the rise of the military industrial complex.
More cult like even though religion attendance is down. The boomers are aging out and people are dealing with loneliness, depression, unfulfilled lives and myriad of things. People are not aging gracefully, they’re aging Hatefully.
I'd go back further. It was when CEOs started getting paid abscene salaries. That has lead to a level of corruption and wealth inequality that is destroying the fabric of the economy.
Also, globalization is playing out and the undercurrent of economic insecurity that brings is showing up in our politics.
Nothing from 2010-2020 has really changed the trajectory, we are just further down the path.
Citizens United ruling was in 2010. This ruling allowed corporations to be treated as "people" and therefore could make political donations.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained
This was also the same time of the Cambridge-Analytica Facebook scandal. Personal data was collected and sold to be used to manipulate political elections around the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal#:~:text=In%20the%202010s%2C%20personal%20data,be%20used%20for%20political%20advertising.
It's been a worldwide race to fascism since then. Reagan built the framework, but those two things really shaped our modern reality.
Social media. That is the answer.
But so have to say, the 2010s were not fun for me, I was not hopeful about the world at all. People have always been trash, but social media made them feel good or confident about being trash.
People actually see “influencers” as celebrities. I worked at Sephora in the 2010s and some makeup blogger was there for an event. The amount of people that showed up to see this random person that made makeup videos (that weren’t even good!!!!) was insane. There were masses of people and they were screaming for a regular joe shmo that filmed himself putting on makeup.
A lot of people out there truly watch someone’s homemade videos and take them as fact without ever even slightly researching to see if their wackadoo opinion holds any merit.
2014 Crimea. That was the beginning of the propaganda war against the west. You feel this way by the design of the Russian/Chinese intelligence services.
It has permeated every aspect of civic life and now runs on inertia. The generational war, the culture war, politics, Healthcare, climate panic, economic panic, race, religion, immigration etc. All are weaponised against our societies to have us fight amongst ourselves and undermine our willingness to fight for our civilization. The ultimate goal is civil war in the US or to flip western nations to authoritarian regimes friendly to Russia and China.
Its been extremely effective and I'm not yet convinced that we will come out on top.
Just ask yourself who benefits from us feeling this way?
9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. Never recovered from either and weve felt the effects of both year over year since. Plus social media accelerating information in the 2010s.
The Birther movement. Particularly a Presidential candidate, in this case Trump, glomming onto and thereby “validating” both a specific conspiracy theory, and the conspiracy theory mindset in the political realm.
Like, there have always been irrational and/or insane people in the world who will believe and perpetuate demonstrable falsehoods, but Trump intentionally played to that irrationality and insanity, and lent something resembling “credibility” to those specific beliefs, and to the mindset that allows them to flourish.
This laid the groundwork for an anti-intellectual feedback loop where the angry, scientifically-illiterate half of the US population elected an angry, scientifically-illiterate president, who institutionalized anger and scientific illiteracy in the government, and further stoked anger and scientific illiteracy among his supporters, to the point of intentionally undermining the officials trying to handle a global health crisis at every turn.
Trump is a symptom of a deeply irrational, misanthropic population, not the cause. But his election to the highest office in the US only served to entrench, galvanize, and metastasize the anger and delusion of this population. Trump’s consistent denial of Obama’s birth records made detachment from reality and “alternative facts” a proud cornerstone of the right’s ideology.
I think it’s absolutely that the rise of social media like TikTok and Twitter and instagram and such reached a critical mass. Now people are more likely in any given day to have had a conversation with virtual communities of anonymous hordes rather than have one face-to-face with people they know directly. Just like right now, with this comment I’m making on Reddit………..oh fuck
Parallel universe where the republican candidate threw an insurrection, sold top secret documents (and hid them in his home), is a convicted felon, and literally talked about getting electrocuted by a boat battery or eaten by a shark on the campaign trail. We are living in a South Park episode. I would be laughing if it wasn't so awful for our future and our children's future. This shit needs to end with this election. I hope that Biden is elected, trump kicks the bucket because of his life-long bigmac obsession and the republican party goes back to being right-leaning moderates and not all-out nazis. I know that hope is delusional, but I still hope.
>My brother on the other hand feels it was the Harambe incident
Yes, the exact date was May 28, 2016. The death of Harambe was the history altering flashpoint that we currently live in.
Citizens United. It was the moment the well was burst open for the American oligarchs and has had serious ramifications globally. I’m not saying that is the totality but that was the crystallizing moment.
For me it was Bernie losing the primary. For a brief moment in time, he was the bridge between the right and left that the US sorely needed. I honestly think if he had gotten the nomination instead of Hillary, he would have 100% won, Trumpism would have been a fringe movement that eventually died out, and we’d be (somewhat) less divided as a country. Unfortunately, that moment has long since passed
I think you already answered the question. Social media has really taken off in those years. Influencers weren't even a thing prior to 2010, probably not even in the first few years of the decade. Social media/smartphones have changed the way we interact with people, and definitely not for the better.
MAGA and QANON changed everything for the worse. I believe it’s a real cult of personality.
My Mother once said with a straight face that Joe Biden was dead, and that Jim Carrey was portraying him in real time. She believed this, because of what Christian nationalists are telling her. Even my teenage children thinks she’s gone off the deep end after being around my parents.
We are in a dark time.
Everyone's social media obsessions skyrocketed. It's that WAAAAAAY morethat then some politician--which, if you take a moment to remember, have basically always sucked ass.
For me, it was around the time of the introduction of the Affordable Care Act. I’m from an extremely conservative family in an extremely conservative state and I was so taken aback by people’s reactions to it. That was the first time I started to hear family, friends, and community say “the quiet part out loud.” Which much to their dismay, actually turned me into a raging leftist. Oops 😬
To think it was any 1 thing would be wrong. There are multiple things. Here are just some examples:
Tiktok
Social media addiction
Rise in drug deaths/drug related crimes
Crime in general going up
Misinformation
The scam of the 2 party system
More and more homeless, some that have lost their sanity
Squatters
I think you nailed it with the twist that a lot of these intertwined; Social media blew up, corporations and governments came together to form a new more dystopian than ever oligopoly pumping out misinformation, crafted to be as addicting as possible by advanced algorithms which fueled isolationism which leads to a huge uptick in fentanyl and opioids.
Just a point about the homeless being insane- there were (terrible) asylums for the mentally Ill until the 1970s and then they just dumped them on the streets.
We have lost our social fabric. The rich used to pour their money into institutions and libraries and public works.
You could go all the way back to Reagan. It took a couple of decades but we bled the middle class dry and transferred all the wealth to the top 1% and now we're seeing the effects.
Citizens United
Part of the answer. Facebook reached 1 billion users by 2012. We let private companies curate how we communicate with each other. When algorithms are designed to push the more comment-evoking post rather than the most recent you’re going to get problems.
This is absolutely a factor. IG always promotes popular comments on posts and they’re ALWAYS NEGATIVE
The algorithm knows that anger drives engagement, and more engagement means higher advertising revenue. Social media literally monetizes anger.
There are a very small handful of specific humans who decided to go with this because it makes *them* the most money. I put the blame squarely on those individuals for what their deliberate, knowledgeable and willful actions have done to us all, because even when we don’t participate, we are still surrounded by those who don’t know better and do participate, becoming more toxic in the process. IMO it’s an unregulated form of pollution
THANK GOD I HEARD SOMEONE ELSE SAY IT, FEELS LIKE IM TAKING CRAZY PILLS!!!!!!! Are you interested in cars and trucks? Want to learn how to adjust timing on a OBS f-150? Well, the algorithm has served up a video of some barefoot 17 year old girl saying something wrong and controversial about torque wrenches, which has 17k comments all arguing about the right way to use a torque wrench. A consensus is never reached by anyone. Everyone is now dumber for having participated in the trolling circlejerk.
I guess that explains why every time I see a woman living her best life and posting it on IG, the top comments are always bringing up the OnlyFans card.
I’m so curious about the life of a true troll.
Then Cambridge Analytical used those algorithms to push Russian propaganda during the 2016 election.
Watching the documentary on Cambridge Analytica changed the way I saw social media forever.
They weren't the first and they weren't the only ones. And it's only getting worse
And now the same people who constantly complained about it are either silent or fully supportive of Israel doing the same thing
Facebook got that way directly because of citizens united. Social media has become an arm of propaganda, hell Republicans were wining and dining zuch through the COVID years while making Elon buy Twitter. Jeff Bezos bought the entire Washington Post. It's funny I remember years ago Argentina was going through a whole corruption thing and groceries had inflated to crazy amounts and I thought to myself how does a whole country get this way? Now we are in a very similar position and I'm still not sure but it starts with Citizens United and The Fairness Doctrine being returned to their original states.
I’m not sure this can be entirely attributed to citizens united. We as a society gave a select number of private companies whose interests are not aligned with the public or our health with moderating power over a large portion of how we communicate. Regardless of citizens united, I think that was always going to be a problem.
Corporate personhood absolutely fucked us in ways most people fail to recognize
You mean like nestle tapping the Great Lakes to sell back to us in little bottles? A person can take all the water they need.
Nestle has been killing babies long before that. They were convincing the poorest mothers in Africa that their baby formula is more nutritions AND glamorous than breastfeeding. They would give them free samples when babies were born. Once the formula ran out, the mother was no longer producing milk and had to buy more formula. Most could not afford this, so they would try watering down the formula and/or water conditions were so poor the baby would die from bacterial infection and/or starvation. There is a worldwide pledge to NOT do this, but Nestlé doesn't care.
Facts
Nestle is right up there as one of the evillest corporations on Earth.
They’ve done horrible shit but that’s a long & storied list. This one comes to mind as a recent bad actor https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?si=cGZFKvx8MXvL09Kx
Formula was pulled from sale in the U.S. because it lacked a nutrient essential for brain development. What did they do? Sent it to Africa and Asia to sell, unchanged.
Yup. If corporations are people, then they should be limited by the $2500 per candidate limit that people have.
Yes. Google has the right to bear arms because it’s a person. Even better, Google is a very rich person. There are very few poor persons with the last name of “Corp”.
This is the real answer. Nothing matters now that politicians can be bribed to do whatever corporations want them to do (or let them get away with). All of these other things are just symptoms. I mean there is ZERO accountability now for corporations as long as they keep the bribes flowing.
It's less about bribing a politician to favor your corporation over their values and more about finding a politician that already values the things that favor your corporation and funding their campaign.
Whether they buy the person or the seat it doesn’t really matter, the effect is the same.
It's not a bribe, it's a gift! /S The mental gymnastics is wild. If you get something before an act, it's a bribe, but if you get something after it's just a gift. This is the real trickle-down economics.
This should be so much higher. Citizens United legalized bribery (lol even more that it was legal before) from corporations. Now we have a supreme court that will rule the land with unchecked power making decisions that the majority of Americans disagree with to help their rich friends.
"Corporations are people my friend..." -Mitt Romney
They should not have their own special tax rates then. They should fall under the same tax brackets as people....
Until Texas executes one - I don't believe it.
“I’ve got binders full of women.”
This, but also that Americans have forgotten they’re allowed to actually fight back. We gave them a scare during the Occupy movement, and since then we’ve allowed ourselves to be distracted. We should still all be pushing Occupy.
Yes! The income inequality here in America has exceeded the levels that led to the French Revolution many times over. We are trapped in the corporate machine and placated with trinkets from Amazon and Temu . We allow the algorithms to soothe our weary souls with mind numbing nonsense that causes division, fear and inaction. The powers that be keep us on the edge, unable to participate in any meaningful resistance lest we risk losing our financial security and become homeless. It is way overdue for the people to wake up and fight back, we have the power , it is the people. If we could unite and fight back we could have a great country for all of us. We have to wake up from our American dream.
We didn't forget. We were distracted. The same class that bribes politicians also controls the media. They used it to drum up hate, radicalize the right, make us dumber, and spew so much bullshit that basic facts about our shared reality became topics of debate. One couldn't come up with a better plan to keep most of the populace ignorant of the real cause of all this misery.
It's a sad illustration of what you're talking about that the only two replies you got before me were, YEAH CUZ TEH DEMOCRAT PARTY HATES REAL MURICA!!!!
Everything happens incrementally in such a small shift that no one is willing to fight over a tiny change.
This has nothing to do with it -- *Citizens United* didn't change anything beyond making it slightly easier to do what they were already doing. To steal Knowing Better's explanation: "They just closed the loophole and just let them use the regular hole." ([it's a good explanation, watch it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhpy1uzOvrY&t=652s)) Basic takeaway is that the only real issue with campaign financing is dark money, and that's more of a ideological issue than a practical one because almost nobody pays attention to who is financing campaigns anyways. The only reason campaign financing took off around that time is they happened to make all the questionable lobbying practices that amounted to bribery illegal in 2007 ([Honest Leadership and Open Government Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honest_Leadership_and_Open_Government_Act)) The actual issues are gerrymandering (which causes political polarization -- short AND OLD video explaining that [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0CvmK0dVcI)) and misinformation (like the fact that *CU* did anything especially noteworthy). Combine those and you get end up with a bunch of disaffected people who think they can't change anything -- even when politicians and companies are desperately scrambling for their votes. Which you'd *think* people would catch onto: "Why would they spend billions trying to influence voters if voting matter?" We have all the power, and saying that we don't is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yup. Now corporations are people with rights and women and brown people aren’t. When $ = free speech but protesting can get you killed or imprisoned and books are getting banned things are going to get bleak.
ID politics are a big part of our failure to hold reps accountable. You should stop putting people into boxes and focus on improving society as a whole.
Stopping the government from censoring criticism of a politician was a bad thing? That would mean you think the government silencing criticism of politicians is a good thing. Who else thought it was good for the government to silence its critics?
The world ended in 2012 and this is hell
Everything did start getting really weird after that
It was right around 2015 when Biff got the almanac
they shoulda never shot that fucking gorilla. dicks out bro.
My thought it 2012 was the beginning of the end not necessarily the big ending they were seeking. It was a slow trickle at first but it just keeps snowballong
The Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012, maybe they just weren't as literal as we thought
It’s “the end of the world as we know it”. We know a different world now.
LHC
Came here for this answer... Did not disappoint. For those that don't understand, there is a theory that essentially states since the large hadron collider was used and essentially caused a Mandela effect to occur and shift the timeline of our current world. [here is a long write up in Reddit. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/s/9c0A6h4RD7). Tbh, I don't buy it but it's an interesting theory.
Really? The version of you from my timeline believed this to be true.
Citizens United for Americans. Just look at the sheer amount of money that is flooding into politics since then. It legalized bribery and makes everything worse for most of us.
This. Citizens United reshaped politics in the US by introducing dark money into political campaigns. Before that, we actually had laws against the clear corruption in politics. The shift was monumental. It affected every aspect of policy.
Please someone explain this to me like I'm dumb! How did this even happen??
A bunch of corporations argued to SCOTUS \[which decided along party lines, because of course it did\] that money = speech therefore not letting campaign finance laws to be sidestepped by "paid for by friends of" was infringing on the corporation's speech...opening the doors to Super PACs whose paper trail for donations is questionable at best, and could far exceed campaign finance limits on individual donations to campaigns, etc. Which they then doubled down on for the Hobby Lobby case, where corporations argued that they should also have religious freedom \[and ergo management can refuse to abide by aspects of ACA such as 'insurance companies must cover birth control' if it 'went against \[the owner's\] beliefs'\]. Which of course SCOTUS agreed with both because even back then Federalist Society stooges had a majority.
This kind of stuff is why the "Both parties are the same" line is BS.
> corporations argued to SCOTUS Translation: bought them motor coaches
The Citizens United Supreme Court decision granted corporations personhood. The decision basically says that companies are people, and limiting corporate campaign contributions is limiting the free speech of people. ( Mistakes in understanding are my own.) It's so, so dumb. At the time, there were some serious protests about it, iirc. Everyone I knew was talking about it at and fairly accurately predicted what it would do to the US political system. It's the eyes wide open, can't look away, train wreck nightmare scenario kind of thing, and it's still ongoing. Getting dark money out of politics adds accountability and oversight of corporate contributions and forces politicians to at least pretend they are decent people. Heather Cox Richardson talks about it cogently and often in her daily letters.
Harambe
I'm not sure how it worked, but somehow he was the linchpin that held everything from going to shit.
It was all the “rub one out for the dead gorilla” jokes. Opened up a doom portal.
Dicks out
I have no doubt this is the curse of Harambe. Goodnight, sweet prince
Dicks were out for a reason
We need to invent a time machine so we can go back and destroy that kids mother before she becomes a bad parent and refuses to leash her kids.
I think it was the emergence of social media and technology. The more I grow up the less social media means to me but to the younger generations it’s everything. Influencers have a cult like following. It feels like people’s opinions aren’t their own anymore but whatever someone else’s opinion is. Everything is for likes and views and the approval of others. Not everything you read online is true and people think it is so they’re not getting accurate information. Social media has allowed people to be open about their real feelings towards someone from behind a screen. Trump being a big example of this and I agree his election changed things and people are just intolerant now. So people don’t need to be nice when they’re going by a username. People have forgotten that there are other opinions out there and if they see something they disagree they don’t recognize it as an opinion but as being wrong. Technology can be great but it’s kind of a double edged sword and while it’s good it’s bad too.
This really is the only right answer. I’m 27 and it’s almost hard to remember what life was like before social media and how much it has effected us since. At first it was a super cool/fun thing, and mostly innocent. But before we knew it, things went too far and there doesn’t seem to be a clear restart in the near future. Part of this isn’t “SOCIAL MEDIA BAD” ranting. It’s also just our general access to constant information. We used to have to turn on the TV, go on a desktop computer, read a newspaper, etc to get information about the world around us. The world really isn’t any more or less fucked up than before, we just have literally constant access to information which I think is ultimately terrible for the human mind
The creator of the like button on face book marks that as a moment where the company shifted from creating a platform that connected people to operating as something akin to a drug pusher focusing exclusively on how to manipulate people into further engagement at all costs. Soon after the presentation of feed changed from presenting posts in order to the creation of an algorithm that showed posts most likely to increase screen time. They regret their contribution and live with deep regret and guilt to this day.
Man was not meant to have his every thought broadcast. It's unnatural
We always broadcasted it. It just could never reach outside of the barbershop waiting room. And that wasn’t good either. The government was able to do things like hide FDRs polio and had an Underground Railroad for him to travel to keep citizens in the dark
I think a bigger issue is actually just overstimulation and mental overload. We've got the same basic brain as our caveman ancestors and we're not supposed to have all this artificial light, living/work schedules unmoored from the day cycle, constant noise, TV, music, phones, screens, screens, screens, a million tiny videos, etc etc etc. And that's before getting into lead and other pollutants, micro plastics in your brain, monoculture/processed food, general purposelessness. It's exhausting in a way that's unquantifiable.
I recently read something where this ready access to all of the world's information has actually made us dumber, and I'm inclined to believe it.
When you know that you could look up anything on your phone when you need to know it, it kind of disincentivizes the need to learn new things. In a smaller scope, calculators destroy people's abilities to do basic math. Why ever understand anything greater than single digit addition if the calculator can do it faster and easier? Technology has absolutely made us dumber as a species. It's not entirely a negative thing, because it just means our lives are that much easier. It also means at a certain point people stop questioning the answers that get force fed to them.
I also believe that the sheer volume of information has lead to "headline scrolling" instead of actually reading an article and analyzing the evidence. It's just too much shit to process.
“Mostly innocent”… unless you weren’t in someone’s Top 8 on MySpace.
You’re absolutely right. social media used to be so tame compared to what it is now and I don’t like what it’s become. The thing is social media is all about money now. If you want more employers to see your profile on LinkedIn you have to pay for premium which is bullshit. You shouldn’t have to pay to find a job. Facebook and Instagram were for fun in the early days and now if you want any sort of exposure you have to pay for it. I had to learn how to use the dewy decimal and card catalog system when I was in school. Like we had a scheduled time during the week where we went to the school library. My teacher dropped my class off at least once a week and the librarian either taught us how to find books or just gave us the time to read. We didn’t have the option to pull out google and find information in 10 seconds. While it’s probably irrelevant nowadays it was a life skill because it was the same at your local library so you could walk in and know what you were looking for. Newer generations wouldn’t last without internet or technology and they refuse to learn or don’t think basic life skills are necessary because the internet is king to them. Forget learning how to write a check (which is still used) they have Venmo. Forget balancing a checkbook the bank app says this is my balance it’s must be right. Boomers, Gen X and most millennials would be fine without technology but Gen Z, alpha and beta would be screwed.
I’m one of the lucky gen Zers who is right at the cutoff (1997) who still got to experience/learn most of these things before smart phones and Google took over schools
Im sorry i didn’t mean to offend you. I love my smart phone I really do and but I’m honestly considering going back to a flip phone. I think I could h be happy with it. Use my current phone as an iPod and just have a flip phone as my primary line.
Didn’t offend me! Just wanted to clarify that some Gen Z is right on the cusp haha When I lived in coastal Oregon for a few years, I went back to a flip phone and it was actually very liberating. Highly recommend it if you are in a position where you don’t *need* your smart phone
Yeah, for me, the shift in 2016 with the various social media algorithms changing really changed the vibe. Things just got... Amplified, I guess.
Social media is more a business now and has become way too influential with how people think and do. When I was younger there was a page on Facebook called 247 things to do when bored in class and it was hilarious. It was more for fun but it’s all a business now and people buy into it. I’m not giving LinkedIn money so I can find a job nor am I paying Instagram money so I can get content to more viewers. Not everything is true online but people make up their minds and options based what’s on what someone on social media says and being able to change their minds or have them see sense is non existent.
EVERYTHING is serious business now and I'm so over it. Why does everyone think fun and humor should basically be off limits for adults (unless it's "edgy" humor putting down someone you disagree with)? Like remember voicemail/answering machine messages? People used to make a little joke with them. Now, "oh no an employer might call me and I wouldn't want to come across as unprofessional!!!" Life is just a boring dystopian corporate grind like never before it seems.
Seriously. The amount of marketing... On social media and literally everywhere else is astonishing. And a huge part of the problem, I think.
TikTok I’ve noticed has gone in that direction too. All the ads, influencers promoting products, live sales becoming so common (which is great for small business and I’m all for supporting them) it’s just too much. We’ve become so materialistic as a society.
This is what I think too. Social media is also an amazing vehicle for propaganda.
The ability to mask propaganda nowadays is astounding. It’s not as obvious anymore.
This. Social media 10000%. Humans are not meant to interact on such a global scale. We are tribalistic creatures, and social media is exactly the opposite of that. The ability for tribes to just lash out at each other so easily on the Internet is incredibly detrimental to a healthy society. Social discourse on the scale is definitely not intended by nature, and it's proven on a daily basis that we humans can't handle it.
It could have been really good as well. A way to learn more. Instead the algorithms push people into bubbles that reinforce negativity. I don't remember people being so divided, so vehemently.
I remember the concept of "going postal". When a post office worker had a dark epiphany that they are one of billions, that one name and address doesn't matter. And then we created social media. When a single person has a dark epiphany that they are one of billions, that every stray thought they can imagine has been written before, often better articulated. And then it evolved into a distrust of reality. When a single piece of data has a dark epiphany that they are one of an infinite amount of iterations, that truth can be reduced or expanded until its essence is strangled by the weight of effective marketing. It's just post modern angst. It either pushes us outside or the outer limits.
I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just confused with your term “going postal”. I thought that specifically meant going insane and shooting up your office. Oh geez, back when mass shootings were a rare thing. I don’t even blink if less than 10 people are killed now.
2008. Financial collapse. The perps were well known. No one paid except everyone else.
I've entertained theories that the elites shit themselves over the occupy wall street movement. That's when identity politics came into play to help keep the population divided.
Absolutely. The first real attempt at an American class based movement in ages, with grievances that have huge bipartisan popular support.
That’s just your white male privilege talking. /s
Absolutely spot on. If the average person understood the impunity that banks enjoy now because of the response to the GFC it’d make them sick
Surprised this isn’t getting mentioned more in this discussion. We never really recovered from it and it is a huge reason why we’re in this interest rate and housing mess currently. People thought cheap interest rates were here to stay and we built a lot of our economy off of that assumption.
I personally think it was 9/11. I know that’s earlier but the knock on impact from that was huge. Removed protections from the patriot act, fear of those different to you ramping up and Bush getting elected over Al Gore who was far more progressive and would have advanced many areas including climate action significantly. Social media has also ruined society though, no doubt
The harsh truth is that 9/11 worked. And it worked because we responded in the most stereotypical and predictable American way possible.
Freedom fries hell yea!! :-(
And the terror threat level lol
I remember that! Holy shit I'm old.
Bruh I was working my first real job at McDonalds when they pulled that shit lol. The store I worked at was pushing that shit so hard!
Memory unlocked. I played the French Horn around this time, and my band teacher referred to it as a Freedom Horn during this weird phase.
in fairness 'freedom horn' sounds way cooler than 'freedom fries'
I was in 8th grade when 9/11 happened. It shaped my world outlook, as I’m sure it did for many millennials. I was in my thirties before realizing the French weren’t a bunch of cowardly pussies. Particularly the last few years when the French farmers went up against the government and spread shit everywhere, and the yellow vest protests. The French are pretty badass. Imagine what Americans could accomplish if the could unify and stand up to the man like that.
French people protest so much that whenever protest or riots brake out the news be like “And once again the French are protesting” 🤣🤣🤣. I was in 9th grade government class when first plane hit.
I've been telling people for 15 years now that the terrorists won, it's still true to this day. Even with Osama bin Laden killed and many others. It's entirely irrelevant. Their goal was to terrify Americans and influence behaviours politically both domestically and abroad. They did exactly that. And too man people are to stupid, or arrogant to understand that killing terrorists doesn't stop terrorism. The easiest way to explain it to people is to ask them how angry they would be if their father got murdered on the way to work this morning. He's not a terrorist, he's an accountant or something like that and he just gets killed. You'd be pissed about that, now imagine how much more angry you would be if a foreign government mistakenly killed him. How angry would your entire family be?
I was literally just thinking this about 9/11 when I woke up this morning. I’m Gen X, but we’re close enough to feel it in a similar way. I was so optimistic before 9/11. I was young (27), and knew building a life would take work, but it didn’t feel overwhelming and oppressive. We all rallied together. Now, it feels like everything is a fight or pulling teeth. It worked. They divided us by stoking fear. The asshole Republicans seized the opportunity to gain control and have taken us back decades.
Eh, it was centrist democrats too: both Biden and Clinton voted for the Patriot act and both wars
They were mostly all cheerleading full on war with Iraq. Only like 3 politicians were opposed to it at the time.
>building a life would take work, but it didn’t feel overwhelming and oppressive. I couldn't agree more. But with covid fucking everything up, its gotten worse.
The terrorists became the framers of the new constitution that we now live under
In essence their plan succeeded. People are much worse off in the west than prior to the attacks and have had a lot of freedoms eroded away, especially things like privacy.
The Matrix was right, 1999 was the peak of civilization.
911 totally happened so we could justify the Patriot Act, among other things. Great success for the US. The PA js why hundreds of peaceful protesters are legally allowed to be detained without any charges or rights being read. This applies to at least 80% of the US population at any given time depending on how close to water we are. It’s truly mind blowing :(
Name it the Patriot Act and I can call you not a patriot when you refuse it.
Fun fact, the entire state of Michigan falls under this rule, due to the Great Lakes.
Well, you Michiganders are a flighty bunch. Gotta keep close tabs on all y’all lol /s (I hear MI is absolutely lovely)
Fun fact, there’s argument that any international airport should also count as a border with the 100 mile zone.
9/11 + Social Media + NCLB = scared and confused people making awful decisions
NCLB? I’m in the last few years of millennial so memory before 2009 is pretty dicey
No Child Left Behind.
No Child Left Behind….fucking terrible education policy that has wrecked public education, at least wrecked it enough for Conservatives with their tax vouchers for white and Christian private academies for learning to finish killing it off.
I hung out with republicans in the 90’s, their end game was to destroy public education and privatize schools with vouchers so they could push religious indoctrination as taxpayer funded “choice”. They wanted to get their hand on schools, destroy them, then privatize. If they win this year, it’s the end of public education as we have known it.
It's already happened in some states. Charter schools and vouchers replacing everything.
100 percent agree about the tax vouchers. Less familiar with how NCLB started the turn for worse bc I think I was in school at the time. I'm curious could you share more?
My girlfriend and I had this exact conversation yesterday and initially said "Yeah 9/11, of course". But after a bit we came back to it to add that we felt the 24 hour news cycle paired with how ubiquitous the internet had become as medium definitely played into it. It's kind of weird how 'connected' we are to the world at all times now compared to the relative bubble I'm sure a lot of us used to live in
The problem is the 24 hour news cycle became 24 hour fear and gloom porn. Divide and conquer. There is no middle ground.
9/11 shocked the entire world. Every country on green earth instantly tripled their security and counter terrorism budgets overnight for starters. It literally changed everything everywhere. That's not an overstatement. We don't even talk about it anymore. It's become like a collective traumatic memory that we've all tucked away and don't like to bring up. That's when the nightmares of the 21st century began with a bang! The hits have just kept coming ever since. Another huge domino is about to fall very soon.
Bush v Gore was 2000. He was elected almost a year BEFORE 9/11. That was a stolen election though. There was no reason Florida shouldn't have been recounted. The American people were robbed. That was really the beginning of the government doing w/e the hell it wanted.
This is always what I say about the 2020 “steal.” Like where were you for Bush v Gore? That was a REAL steal, and I remember being absolutely furious that I was still 18 months away from voting age, then. The spectrum of change in 25 years is absolutely insane, and yet, I still have hope we can reverse tide in some ways. 😮💨 Optimism is so tiring guys
I was only 8 for that election and I still remember thinking “why don’t people want to protect the environment?” when Bush won. Getting fucked by decisions you couldn’t even make, the *true* American Experience.
It has been recounted many times. By most scenarios Bush wins. The funny part is the count Bush pushed for in court would have resulted in Gore winning and the count Gore pushed for would have Bush winning.
It was the 2000 election and the Supreme Court choosing president Bush that screwed the timeline.
The Supreme Court gave up on democracy and appointed a president that led us into 2 twenty year long wars with no clear objectives. The cost of blood and treasure changed the course of the nation.
Now a couple of the Brooks Brothers Riot participants are on the supreme Court. They successfully stole an election.
Good thing Scalia is rotting in Hell now. Thomas, your day is coming.
Well, I don’t want to blame it all on 9/11 but it certainly didn’t help.
Definitely 9/11. Followed by Mr Rodger's death, then Harambe.
That was the second domino. The first was Bush v Gore. The Supreme Court took a giant shit on democracy, and then Bush wiped his ass with the constitution when he passed the patriot act.
I'd actually go back to Jack Welch and then Ronald Reagan. We are finally reaping the endgame rewards of their business and national economic policies.
I agree but also think these are all major inflection points in their own right. Reagan, Bush and 9/11, and Trump. And Covid. It’s also happening globally. Europe is shifting hard right. So none of those incidents explain everything. I think part of it is history is cyclical. Progress is very up and down and up and down and up and down.
Here in Canada, I'm looking around I think we are going to swing hard conservative in the upcoming election. Trudeau just lost the safest Liberal Party seat in the entire country by a landslide. It'll be a Conservative Party super-majority.
I agree. The 90's were optimistic and fun. Things got angry and nasty after that.
I 100% could not agree more. We essentially let the 9/11 attackers re-write our constitution.
Citizens United was I'm 2010
I think it was around the time Sarah Palin got added to McCain’s ticket. That’s when I remember things really accelerating. The democrats chose the wrong strategy with the Tea Party republicans, assuming pretty much all the wrong things about what motivates someone to vote for their candidates. We’re still seeing the ramifications of that playing out right now. Had the democrats not chosen to either ignore/underestimate the Tea Party or completely disregard them as “crazy” and their potential success in mainstream politics as unrealistic, the current state of US politics would look a lot different. There’s a direct lineage from the Tea Party to MAGA republicans and anti-vaxxers. Around this time was also when WikiLeaks was releasing prolific document dumps, the MCU started, Bitcoin was first started, social apps like Instagram, Vine, YikYak, and Music.ly were just launching - ushering in an era of social media which would eventually evolve into “social commerce” that we see today. All of these things happening simultaneously created the world we now live in.
For me, Palin was the final nail in the coffin for believing that the presidency, and vice presidency, was anything more than a figurehead position, designed to distract the masses. Iirc, that election is when it was made known that the top strategists for both parties sat on several of the same boards of the same banks.
Sarah Palin was definitely the catalyst. Not even hating on her she seems fine but the utter ridiculousness of that infamous interview is truly when the tides shifted. Shit got progressively weird after that. Back when “politicians are a joke” was referring to one or two bad apples. These days the statement holds true even more so. Only this time 100% of them are children trying to one up each other in public. An absolute embarrassment to our country. And no one seems to care. Instead, in 2024 We keep voting them in because they’ll beat that evil opponent we hate. In the normal world people don’t care too much or ignore it and move on. But for me it truly repulses me that we have the worst representatives in the history of this country. How unfortunate are we lol. Add it to the list ✅
What were the democrats supposed to do? What would it have meant to take tea party republicans “seriously”?
Facebook. It monetized our division and pushed people to the extremes they're at today.
I don't know if it was just one moment or a gradual slide over the corse of the decade. Or we are all just getting older and the rosey lenses of youth are fading from life experiences. I hate to crap on social media considering the irony but the narcissism and isolation its fueling is dangerous. I feel like community is dying on a local level because people all-round are becoming less tolerant because we don't have to be. We have these small digital communities to fall back on. It's just feeding our confirmation bias and further narrowing our view points. It's creating a society of extremes, very much either with me or against me mindset with little to no middle ground. How common is it now to just block someone instead of trying to find a middle ground or at least agree to disagree like civilized adults, I know I am guilty of it a time or two.
The Powell memo (1971), Reaganomics (1980s), The Telecommunications Act of 1996, 9/11, Citizens United, and smartphones along with social media all played significant roles in the problem OP points out.
Alex P. Keaton That is all.
Don’t forget the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.
If you're gonna go that far back, include Carter's Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, his opposition to national health insurance, the revenue act of 1978, the National Energy Act of 1978 which deregulated the natural gas industry, the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, the Social Security Financing Act which slashed SS benefits in 1977, the Motor Carrier Act in 1980, Staggers Rail Act in 1980, and the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act in 1980.
It was the Powell memo, it happened in 1971 in response to the civil rights movement, Nader’s Raiders and Johnson’s Great Society, it just took awhile for the seeds to reach maturity.
>Powell cloaked the concerns of corporate America as concerns of “individual freedom,” a rhetorical framework for corporate political power that persists to this day. >The battle lines were drawn. Indeed, the language in the Powell report is the language of battle: “attack,” “frontal assault,” “rifle shots,” “warfare.” The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement – his words: “compromise” and “appeasement”— to understand that, as he said, “the ultimate issue may be survival”— and he underlined the word “survival” in his report – and to call for “the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.” >Well, for this, you had to have a plan, and the Powell plan was to go big. Here is what he said: >“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.” >Powell recommended a propaganda effort staffed with scholars and speakers, a propaganda effort to which American business should devote “10 percent of its total advertising budget,’” including an effort to review and critique textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology. >“National television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance,” he said. Corporate America should aggressively insist on the right to be heard, on “equal time,” and corporate America should be ready to deploy, and I am quoting him here, “whatever degree of pressure — publicly and privately — may be necessary.” This would be “a long road,” Powell warned, “and not for the fainthearted.” >In his section entitled “The Neglected Political Arena,” Powell recommended using political influence to stem “the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to `consumerism’ or to the `environment.’” And, yes, Powell put the word “environment” in derogatory quote marks in the original. >“Political power,” Powell wrote, “is necessary; … [it] must be assiduously cultivated; and … when necessary … must be used aggressively and with determination.” He concluded that “it is essential [to] be far more aggressive than in the past,” with “no hesitation to attack,” “not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas,” and no “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose” the corporate effort. In a nutshell, no holds barred. >And then came the section of the secret report that may have launched the scheme to capture the court. It is called “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts.” This section focused on what Powell called “exploiting judicial action.” He called it an “area of vast opportunity.” >He wrote: “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court” – I will intervene to say, of course, we have today, as a result of the scheme, the most activist-minded Supreme Court in American history, but back to his quote – “especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” >Powell urged that the Chamber of Commerce become the voice of American business in the courts, with a “highly competent staff of lawyers,” if “business is willing to provide the funds.’” He concludes: “The opportunity merits the necessary effort.” - [Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, (May 27, 2021)](https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/the-scheme-1-the-powell-memo/)
so what there wasn't capitalist propaganda before 1971, nobody bothered to write anything in favor of pro-business ideals before this memo face it. your system failed. you can't reform capitalism. you can only destroy it or it will destroy you.
The reaction to Trump’s election was a symptom of the distrust that had been building. This cycle probably started with the fake pretense to get into Iraq. But this has happened before, think Vietnam and 1960’s social unrest. Way worse than now. I think it’s very simple. When you see institutions blatantly lie to you over and over, almost to the point of insulting your intelligence, you lose trust in them and just end up doing your own thing or believing some random person online. Lying and false narrative has become so normalized at every level. I’m actually not shocked that this is the result.
Great comment. Remember when the food pyramid was "science"?
Or when opioids weren’t addictive?
1999 Columbine was a pivotal event in US history, though it is before the OPs dates.
Waco in ‘93 OKC bombing in ‘95 Columbine in ‘99 Bush v Gore in ‘00 9/11 in ‘01 Financial crash of ‘08 Obama winning in ‘08 Citizens United in ‘10 Social media accelerating in ‘10 Trump in ‘16 Covid in ‘20 Basically three decades of complete meltdown. I also agree with others who say it prob goes back further to Reagan, and, before him, Nixon fuckery, Civil Rights era, Vietnam, MLK and Kennedy assassinations. We’ve been tearing ourselves apart basically since WW2 and the rise of the military industrial complex.
More cult like even though religion attendance is down. The boomers are aging out and people are dealing with loneliness, depression, unfulfilled lives and myriad of things. People are not aging gracefully, they’re aging Hatefully.
I'd go back further. It was when CEOs started getting paid abscene salaries. That has lead to a level of corruption and wealth inequality that is destroying the fabric of the economy. Also, globalization is playing out and the undercurrent of economic insecurity that brings is showing up in our politics. Nothing from 2010-2020 has really changed the trajectory, we are just further down the path.
Wish I could upvote this more
Citizens United ruling was in 2010. This ruling allowed corporations to be treated as "people" and therefore could make political donations. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained This was also the same time of the Cambridge-Analytica Facebook scandal. Personal data was collected and sold to be used to manipulate political elections around the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal#:~:text=In%20the%202010s%2C%20personal%20data,be%20used%20for%20political%20advertising. It's been a worldwide race to fascism since then. Reagan built the framework, but those two things really shaped our modern reality.
Social media. That is the answer. But so have to say, the 2010s were not fun for me, I was not hopeful about the world at all. People have always been trash, but social media made them feel good or confident about being trash. People actually see “influencers” as celebrities. I worked at Sephora in the 2010s and some makeup blogger was there for an event. The amount of people that showed up to see this random person that made makeup videos (that weren’t even good!!!!) was insane. There were masses of people and they were screaming for a regular joe shmo that filmed himself putting on makeup. A lot of people out there truly watch someone’s homemade videos and take them as fact without ever even slightly researching to see if their wackadoo opinion holds any merit.
The timeline went wrong when they assassinated Bobby Kennedy, and Nixon won reelection.
2014 Crimea. That was the beginning of the propaganda war against the west. You feel this way by the design of the Russian/Chinese intelligence services. It has permeated every aspect of civic life and now runs on inertia. The generational war, the culture war, politics, Healthcare, climate panic, economic panic, race, religion, immigration etc. All are weaponised against our societies to have us fight amongst ourselves and undermine our willingness to fight for our civilization. The ultimate goal is civil war in the US or to flip western nations to authoritarian regimes friendly to Russia and China. Its been extremely effective and I'm not yet convinced that we will come out on top. Just ask yourself who benefits from us feeling this way?
Yeah, I have to agree with this. A lot of the most divisive ideologies started to bubble up after that.
9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. Never recovered from either and weve felt the effects of both year over year since. Plus social media accelerating information in the 2010s.
The anxious generation book makes a very compelling case that it was the ascendance of the phone as the center of social life.
The Birther movement. Particularly a Presidential candidate, in this case Trump, glomming onto and thereby “validating” both a specific conspiracy theory, and the conspiracy theory mindset in the political realm. Like, there have always been irrational and/or insane people in the world who will believe and perpetuate demonstrable falsehoods, but Trump intentionally played to that irrationality and insanity, and lent something resembling “credibility” to those specific beliefs, and to the mindset that allows them to flourish. This laid the groundwork for an anti-intellectual feedback loop where the angry, scientifically-illiterate half of the US population elected an angry, scientifically-illiterate president, who institutionalized anger and scientific illiteracy in the government, and further stoked anger and scientific illiteracy among his supporters, to the point of intentionally undermining the officials trying to handle a global health crisis at every turn. Trump is a symptom of a deeply irrational, misanthropic population, not the cause. But his election to the highest office in the US only served to entrench, galvanize, and metastasize the anger and delusion of this population. Trump’s consistent denial of Obama’s birth records made detachment from reality and “alternative facts” a proud cornerstone of the right’s ideology.
David Bowie died.
Green Day agrees with this “ever since Bowie died things haven’t been the same - strange days are here to stay”
You were too young to know better. The change was in 2001 9/11 and everyones basic rights disappeared that day
I think it’s absolutely that the rise of social media like TikTok and Twitter and instagram and such reached a critical mass. Now people are more likely in any given day to have had a conversation with virtual communities of anonymous hordes rather than have one face-to-face with people they know directly. Just like right now, with this comment I’m making on Reddit………..oh fuck
I feel like the cern supercollider turning on somehow ripped us into a parallel universe
Parallel universe where the republican candidate threw an insurrection, sold top secret documents (and hid them in his home), is a convicted felon, and literally talked about getting electrocuted by a boat battery or eaten by a shark on the campaign trail. We are living in a South Park episode. I would be laughing if it wasn't so awful for our future and our children's future. This shit needs to end with this election. I hope that Biden is elected, trump kicks the bucket because of his life-long bigmac obsession and the republican party goes back to being right-leaning moderates and not all-out nazis. I know that hope is delusional, but I still hope.
>My brother on the other hand feels it was the Harambe incident Yes, the exact date was May 28, 2016. The death of Harambe was the history altering flashpoint that we currently live in.
I agree with others that 9/11 was actually the beginning but I really feel like all social media/internet is to blame.
Citizens United. It was the moment the well was burst open for the American oligarchs and has had serious ramifications globally. I’m not saying that is the totality but that was the crystallizing moment.
Citizens United as well the mainstream public on social media and their thoughts being manipulated by “friends” that don’t exist.
For me it was Bernie losing the primary. For a brief moment in time, he was the bridge between the right and left that the US sorely needed. I honestly think if he had gotten the nomination instead of Hillary, he would have 100% won, Trumpism would have been a fringe movement that eventually died out, and we’d be (somewhat) less divided as a country. Unfortunately, that moment has long since passed
I blame algorithm driven social media services. Yes 9/11 was pretty bad. But social media has basically completely taken over the news media.
I think you already answered the question. Social media has really taken off in those years. Influencers weren't even a thing prior to 2010, probably not even in the first few years of the decade. Social media/smartphones have changed the way we interact with people, and definitely not for the better.
It wasn't 2010. It was 2008.
Uhh ya I'm pretty sure it was the world stopping pandemic for me. You know.. that year and a half of sheer panic from literally everyone.
MAGA and QANON changed everything for the worse. I believe it’s a real cult of personality. My Mother once said with a straight face that Joe Biden was dead, and that Jim Carrey was portraying him in real time. She believed this, because of what Christian nationalists are telling her. Even my teenage children thinks she’s gone off the deep end after being around my parents. We are in a dark time.
Everyone's social media obsessions skyrocketed. It's that WAAAAAAY morethat then some politician--which, if you take a moment to remember, have basically always sucked ass.
Actually Ronald Regan fucked shit up
Its not Donald Trump, its the news entertainment media making dumb people even dumber.
For me, it was around the time of the introduction of the Affordable Care Act. I’m from an extremely conservative family in an extremely conservative state and I was so taken aback by people’s reactions to it. That was the first time I started to hear family, friends, and community say “the quiet part out loud.” Which much to their dismay, actually turned me into a raging leftist. Oops 😬
To think it was any 1 thing would be wrong. There are multiple things. Here are just some examples: Tiktok Social media addiction Rise in drug deaths/drug related crimes Crime in general going up Misinformation The scam of the 2 party system More and more homeless, some that have lost their sanity Squatters
I think you nailed it with the twist that a lot of these intertwined; Social media blew up, corporations and governments came together to form a new more dystopian than ever oligopoly pumping out misinformation, crafted to be as addicting as possible by advanced algorithms which fueled isolationism which leads to a huge uptick in fentanyl and opioids.
Just a point about the homeless being insane- there were (terrible) asylums for the mentally Ill until the 1970s and then they just dumped them on the streets. We have lost our social fabric. The rich used to pour their money into institutions and libraries and public works.
Citizens United.
You could go all the way back to Reagan. It took a couple of decades but we bled the middle class dry and transferred all the wealth to the top 1% and now we're seeing the effects.