Like a story can literally beat someone over the head with a theme or moral and people somehow come to the opposite conclusion?

It’s like “Tyler Durden is so manly and cool” except every bit of media feels like it’s misinterpreted like that now.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    75·
    8 days ago

    There’s a lot behind this and I don’t want to come off as if I’m pinning it all on a younger generation or [current fad] but it seems to have reached its peak to this point with the anti-intellectual tropes of “it ain’t that deep bro” and “sometimes the curtains are just blue.”

    This is the culmination of a ton of factors in the west, especially the US, where decades upon decades of underfunding of education has finally had a cumulative effect a lot like deindustrialization. I know that sounds ridiculous but hear me out. For a long time as the US outsourced manufacturing, there was a skeleton structure of holdover manufacturing and logistics that kept things ticking over. Not like in the previous eras but enough that the problems as a consequence of deindustrialization didn’t manifest until later. It’s only as the last vestiges really fell away that it became apparent with the covid outbreak and the block in the Panama canal and soon after, the block in the Suez canal to a lesser extent (for the US) that it was obvious how bad things got. (That’s when there was the knee jerk CHIPs act under Trump to try and reshore semiconductor fabrication, but that’s a story for another time.) Anyway, a similar thing has happened with education and media literacy - there’s a genuine literacy crisis in the US that forms the backdrop of the media literacy crisis but both of these have been coming down the pipeline for decades. As education outcomes dropped, older people could kinda keep things ticking over and they could impart a degree of literacy in all modes just by encouraging it and setting a higher standard, and workplace expectations also set the bar to a certain extent. This has gradually slipped away though. These days it’s getting so bad that online people are getting AI to summarize content or a comment, then getting AI to generate a response, copy-pasting that, and then the next person responds by using AI to interpret and respond. This is because for some people their literacy muscles (literacy literacy or media literacy) are so underdeveloped or so atrophied that they aren’t able to engage properly and they need a crutch to lean on. It’s not all AI though, that’s just a symptom of the literacy crisis.

    This is also where a lot of vibes-based analysis comes in too. People struggle to actually advance a thesis and, when they state a position, it often lacks anything to back it up and if the person gets pressed on it usually their argument crumbles like wet cardboard. You see this with people throwing out weird allusions where they just rely on a “thing bad” response. One example that comes to mind is that I criticized Mamdani for being a Zionist online. A person responded that he absolutely was not one. I explained that he openly supports the existence of modern-day Israel as a state given he advocates for a two-state solution and thus that makes him a Zionist categorically. The person rejected this argument reflexively but couldn’t actually offer anything more than “nuh-uh.” When I paraphrased Wikipedia and said that Zionism is advocating for the political project of an Israeli state and that Mamdani fits this definition to a tee, they couldn’t respond. But it didn’t feel right to them. They were wholly unable to engage with the discussion though and they couldn’t actually manage to talk definitions or principles and they were unwilling for me to dogwalk them to the point.

    There’s also a sort of siege mentality amongst progressive libs. The conservative libs have been very anti-intellectual for a long time, longer than I’ve been alive, and the old guard of erudite conservative libs is long dead. As a whole they aren’t able to engage with anything to significant depth. But in the Trump/Qanon era, the progressive libs have been rudderless and they’ve been unable to defend the gains in the culture war, let alone getting their shitty candidates elected, and amongst them I see this sort of Weimar Republic progressive flavor of latent terror at the awareness that they aren’t able to fight back, let alone win. So they seem to have shut down and closed themselves off in response to the rise of (more extreme) reactionary politics. This siege mentality makes progressive libs incapable of engaging with literacy on any serious level. (Idk I’m not really doing my point justice here but hopefully it suffices, I’m tired.)

    I also see a lot of people who can’t manage to engage in hypotheticals or, at the risk of coming off as a debate pervert, thought experiments. People genuinely seem to struggle with following through the logical extension of an argument. There’s a developmental milestone that comes to mind and I forget what it’s called but if you tell a younger child “Imagine gravity is reversed, so things fall upwards instead of downwards. If I drop an apple, what happens to it?” and a younger person who hasn’t reached that level of development can only use their experience as a reference and they can’t hold a frame where they consider the implications of a scenario where the imaginary rules have their own outcomes so they will respond that the apple will fall down to the ground, whereas the older child has reached the developmental milestone where they can respond with the counterintuitive answer of upwards. I’m not trying to pathologize this phenomenon by implying that people like this have developmental delays but if you don’t exercise engagement with these sorts of things, you lose your ability to deploy them. It’s a thing where it can hem in a person’s ability to engage in media literacy because if you argue that a character in media is basically a stand-in for Hitler, for example, people will respond with superficial rebuttals but when you defend your argument with “But there is no Germany in this story” they believe it vindicates their rejection of the argument instead of asking themselves what Hitler would look like in this fantasy setting where, instead of being a German in the 1930s, he is an elf in a high fantasy narrative - if you can’t hold the frame that there are different “rules” to the reality of a narrative, if you can’t engage in comparative analysis or symbolic analysis, if your whole engagement with the world is purely vibes-based then you’re gonna have very poor media literacy.

    So imo it’s largely due to the education system buckling under decades of defunding as well as a political context where people are encouraged to be incurious coupled with technological crutches that make it easier to avoid engagement, but the tech aspect is very downstream of the cultural and political aspects (political including education policy here.)

      • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        14·
        8 days ago

        I couldn’t figure out how supporting an Israeli state is Zionist. They have been back in Israel since like 1948. At this point, given the generations that have been born there, and given that people should be able to live on the planet they were born on, a two state solution is preferable so that both Palestinians and Israelis have a home. An Israeli state and a two state solution are not mutually exclusive conditions, therefore Mamdami’s support of an Israeli state is not Zionist necessarily, unless I just misunderstand the definition.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        24·
        8 days ago

        I have to remember to breathe.

        Online discourse is wild these days, and not in a good way. I can’t even use an analogy or propose the logical extension of an argument without people flipping out:

        Yes, I know that the analogy isn’t a 1:1 representation of the reality; that’s the nature of an analogy. If the analogy was perfectly accurate it would cease to function as an analogy. You can dispute my framing of the analogy or you can elaborate to defend your position but pointing out that the analogy is an analogy does not dispute the point being made.

        Yes, I know that when I said “By that logic, you can defend x or y using the same argument” I wasn’t representing your words. In fact, I was very explicitly not representing your words and, if I was, I would have just quoted you directly instead. I was literally telling you how I understand your position and inviting you to justify how you support one thing but oppose the other when your defence of one can be directly applied to the defence of the other.

        • MarxMadness [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          14·
          8 days ago

          I think your two examples are less about a lack of literacy and more about people defaulting to reddit-style pedantry because it’s easier than engaging the merits of whoever you’re talking to.

          I bet 90% of “your analogy doesn’t work”-style comments aren’t people misunderstanding what analogies are, and probably aren’t even bad faith, but are people attacking the analogy because doing so is an easy way to disagree.

          • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            13·
            8 days ago

            That’s a fair point but in my experience it’s not nearly as self-aware a form of deception because when I’ve gotten into the weeds with them, they actually can’t make the connection most of the time. I can usually detect the reddit-tier smuglords straight away because they almost always tip their hand by presuming they’re the smartest person in the room and they’ll use big words to try and impress their superior intellect and shit like that. And those ones are definitely capable of playing rhetorical tricks like you’ve described (I generally don’t bother with this group of people because they just want to “win”, they don’t actually care about anything beyond that and I’d prefer if they stay a lib because if it’s a choice between having them acting corrosively in the discourse as a radical or doing the same as a liberal, it’s worth more for my efforts if they stay right where they are and poison their own liberal political discourse. Not that it’s really worth the effort trying to rehabilitate someone who is deep in that mentality anyway.)

            With this other group it’s characterized by this underdeveloped position. If I can get them to engage long enough, then for example they will justify Israel’s actions and I’ll say that everything they’re saying can be used to justify the genocide of native Americans by the US and they’ll reject it. Then I’ll quote their arguments either word for word in “defence” of the genocide of native Americans or I’ll slightly adapt the wording. They respond by telling me why that’s wrong and it’s not okay. Then I will use their counterargument to say that what Israel is doing is also wrong and they’ll refute it, at which point I’ll take their refutation and use it to justify the genocide of native Americans. It can go round and round like that for quite a while. Sometimes they even get angry at me because they think I’m genuinely defending the genocide of native Americans rather than trying to highlight the contradictions in their own beliefs, even when I’ve been explicit about doing as much. And the thing is, at least in my experience, they just don’t get it. Like I can see them not connecting what I’m telling them because they aren’t able to engage with the meta level of the argument, they just argue from the place of their beliefs being right and not actually being able/willing to see where they are inconsistent.

            (Caveat to say that I don’t like doing this and I’d much rather argue principles or facts but if it gets down to it, I’ll do it if it’s necessary. I find it tedious as fuck and honestly I do anything to avoid it getting to that place if I can because I loathe it so much.)

        • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          9·
          8 days ago

          I had someone get in my DMs on another site and the way they interacted made me question what humans are. They refused to let me actually talk about the argument that they were making or paraphrase anything because I was “putting words in their mouth” to literally just describe their position. And I don’t mean that I called them a bourgeois chauvinist supporting white supremacy, I literally mean describing something on the most basic level of “The Earth is round” being a claim about astronomy, or “Evolution is impossible” being a biological claim. No, I was just putting words in their mouth and avoiding talking about the subject itself. I cannot stress enough that I made a claim of exactly that structure and somehow got that response, and then only got doubling-down after that.

          I know complaining about an internet argument is lame as fuck, but I seriously was baffled by it in a way that I can’t even begin to articulate, and that’s despite the fact that assessing arguments is probably one of the only things that I’m genuinely good at, and trying to understand motivated reasoning is one of my biggest interests. Like, their actual position was just dogwater chauvinism and not remotely interesting, but the way that they talked about it has put a fucking parasite in my brain.

          • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            8 days ago

            I think this is different, although I’m pretty partial to complaining about internet arguments so maybe I’m biased but I think it’s valuable to examine what’s going on in culture and to discuss the trends. If you’re going online to do victory laps or to lick your wounds over an internet argument then that’s pretty cringey but if it’s in service of making sense of culture and discourse or furnishing people with arguments then it takes on a very different quality.

            I’ve had the same experience you’ve described and I think it’s a manifestation of that siege mentality that I didn’t do a good job of describing above, and it’s happened more often than for it to be some random event.

            I can’t remember the exact discussions but as an example, someone makes a statement and I’ll ask them if they agree/disagree with an uncontroversial premise. Not like “So you think killing is wrong, that means you wish that Hitler never died. You’re a Nazi sympathizer.” kind of thing but like “So if there are colors that exist outside the visible spectrum, do you agree that humans aren’t able to accurately experience all of reality because the inherent limitations of our biology?” sort of thing.

            And I’ve had multiple people flip out and accuse me of putting words in their mouth. My guy, I’m literally asking you a question - that’s the opposite of putting words in your mouth. Usually I’m trying to assess whether it’s worthwhile continuing the discussion or I’m trying to establish a foundation of points we agree upon so we can understand each other better, I’m not trying to “trick” you into saying the “wrong” thing.

            I think it’s partly to do with how polarized the mainstream discourse and mainstream politics has become, partly to do with people being victims of debate pervertry (unironically), online culture being absolute garbage, and beneath it all I think it’s only capable of existing due to how hyper-alienated and atomized people are; if you have a community of people who value you and respect you then you’re gonna be pretty insulated from what some internet stranger thinks of you but if you’re really lacking in connection and community then you’re gonna be much more liable to amplify the importance of internet exchanges and you’re gonna feel like it’s life-or-death so you’re gonna respond that way. I’m not trying to be unsympathetic here and to tell people to just log off, although it would go a long way, but I see it as largely being a symptom of being socially disconnected and, to put it bluntly, a symptom of a fundamentally unwell society.

            • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              5·
              8 days ago

              I mostly agree, though for reasons that I mostly hadn’t given you I think in the case I was talking about, as I think about it more, I have a really strong feeling that this person in my story was themselves a (very bad) debate pervert rather than just a victim of one.

              This is highly speculative of me, but I struggle to make another coherent picture: I feel as though the issue is that they’re the sort of debate pervert who wasn’t actually in a debate club or who studied philosophy or even really studied anything at all, but literally are just a fan of Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk and want to act out the spectacle of being a debatelord without remotely understanding how people communicate even for the purpose of abusing good faith to harm people or something like that. One of the biggest problems with this is that these videos always model the debatelord having total control over the conversation all throughout, because times where they didn’t have total control were simply edited out. As you and I know, this is not how real arguments (let alone conversations) normally go, even when one side is plainly superior to the other, so it just sort of broke down over an incredibly mundane conversational element because they were unprepared to actually talk to someone, they were only prepared to perform in an “SJW owned” stage play that they decided to cast me in for some fucking reason. There is no other human with their own agency, just an NPC for you to perform combos and trickshots on.

              I was reminded so much of “The Look” from Sartre, where the voyeur enjoys viewing others in secret, but feels horribly self-conscious when they realize that they too were being watched, because now they must confront themselves as an object of someone else’s perception rather than an invisible subject for whom others are merely something to be unilaterally experienced. The difference here of course is that our new voyeur can fully make eye contact with people and still not see their humanity such that they are confronted with self-consciousness, it requires intervention on the part of others to break them from this blissful self-obliviousness and even then, they first resist it with a siege mentality like you describe before ever confronting such a thing. So it’s not just mere intervention, but effectively being overpowered, at least momentarily.

              Of course, this nonetheless produces your conclusion:

              I see it as largely being a symptom of being socially disconnected and, to put it bluntly, a symptom of a fundamentally unwell society.

              But again, this is extremely speculative and basically just my feelings on this after spending too long trying to make sense of it and failing to produce a good answer.

              • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
                4·
                8 days ago

                You’ve gotta trust your instincts on these things.

                There is no other human with their own agency, just an NPC for you to perform combos and trickshots on.

                This is such a good way of putting it.

                Ultimately you’re never gonna know exactly what was motivating that behavior in them and you’ll sooner go mad trying to make sense of it than you will arriving at a comprehensive and accurate understanding of it.

                There’s another aspect I didn’t really go into where online discourse has degraded to often being symbolic, both in the sense that you’ve described above and in the sense of “I depicted you as the soyjak…” So much of what I see being used as placeholders for arguments that are articulated is “This is x” but people aren’t able to provide their justification for it and it’s just devoid of substance. I think that’s partly due to people not being expected to write out a decent essay justifying their take on a novel or movie in school anymore, partly due to the internet culture becoming very siloed into echo chambers so people become accustomed to getting praise and validation because they can just say something like “Vaush Derangement Syndrome” and they collect dozens of upvotes for just invoking the same old tired trope (algorithms have a lot to answer for in this respect), and partly because they aren’t capable of doing more than vibes-based analysis. (I’m gonna sound curmudgeonly, and maybe I am, but it feels like the art of discussion is becoming endangered.)

                There was that video that dropped recently where some content creator on the progressive left claimed in a video essay that a few figures were “recruiting leftists to become Nazis by using dogwhistles.” Big if true. Now I’m loath to entertain peak breadtuber pseudointellectual content stretching where they read through a paraphrasing of the Wikipedia entry on dogwhistles and fascism but this creator made the accusation that The Kavernacle, amongst others, was a cryptofascist who was turning people into fascists. Their argument amounted to nothing besides “He has a colonizer accent, he speaks with a flat affect, and he interrupts his girlfriend on streams [with the implication that this is domestic abuse]”. There wasn’t any attempt to make criteria for the argument and to show how it was being met, it was basically just being asserted as self-evident fact.

                I’m not a huge fan of The Kavernacle - he’s fine, just a bit 101 for my tastes and kinda uninteresting to me. But at no point did the creator elaborate how he was using dogwhistles or how you can turn a leftist into a Nazi by using dogwhistles or how he was a Nazi himself. It was all just throwing out buzzwords and doing really loose association (which is a charitable way of putting it because there basically wasn’t any through line at all imo.) He did use the term “Nebula elite” to refer to people like Lindsey Ellis in one tweet, which honestly is a pretty fucking accurate assessment, and the closest thing to an argument was that this is a dogwhistle because using the word “elite” here is basically invoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish elite globalists control the world. If The Kavernacle actually did make positive or veiled references to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion or something then I’d be more sympathetic to the argument but instead the next thing they very heavily implied was that this is basically him wanting to put Jews on trains to Auschwitz. The connecting thread between this argument was so tenuous that it might have not existed but it was brain-melting to see people praising the analysis because they basically just did the verbal equivalent of pointing to a picture of The Kavernacle then to a picture of the cover of The Protocols then to a picture of Auschwitz then nodding emphatically.

                It’s pretty shocking to see people agree with things just because it feels truthy and salacious.

                My take on this is that if you’re capable of being converted into becoming a fascist just because someone used dogwhistles on you then you have zero political principles. Ironically, the people who were won over to the idea that this is a real and significant enough phenomenon on the left worthy of being discussed were the ones who were being convinced of a political position based on vapid symbolism and thus they’re probably the most likely candidates for having their own political position subverted through the strategic use of dogwhistles. But I don’t think any of them are ready to hear that take.

                • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  3·
                  7 days ago

                  I’m not a huge fan of The Kavernacle - he’s fine, just a bit 101 for my tastes and kinda uninteresting to me. But at no point did the creator elaborate how he was using dogwhistles or how you can turn a leftist into a Nazi by using dogwhistles or how he was a Nazi himself. It was all just throwing out buzzwords and doing really loose association (which is a charitable way of putting it because there basically wasn’t any through line at all imo.) He did use the term “Nebula elite” to refer to people like Lindsey Ellis in one tweet, which honestly is a pretty fucking accurate assessment, and the closest thing to an argument was that this is a dogwhistle because using the word “elite” here is basically invoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish elite globalists control the world. If The Kavernacle actually did make positive or veiled references to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion or something then I’d be more sympathetic to the argument but instead the next thing they very heavily implied was that this is basically him wanting to put Jews on trains to Auschwitz. The connecting thread between this argument was so tenuous that it might have not existed but it was brain-melting to see people praising the analysis because they basically just did the verbal equivalent of pointing to a picture of The Kavernacle then to a picture of the cover of The Protocols then to a picture of Auschwitz then nodding emphatically.

                  It’s pretty shocking to see people agree with things just because it feels truthy and salacious.

                  I think this sort of thing happens not because people actually “agree” with it, but because they don’t like a person, and the liberal worldview doesn’t allow for nuance. So if someone is “bad” they are all bad things at once, including a nazi. So this person making this video did not set out from a position of “I discovered an awful truth about this person and need to share it with others.” but “I don’t like this person and I want others to hate them, so I’ll look for something I can accuse them off that shuts down discussion.”

                  You see this a lot with online drama stuff, one party will accuse another of doing something beyond most people’s “moral event horizon” in order to shut down discussion, not facilitate it. The people who watch this video can then just insist that this Kavernackle guy is a “nazi” and “why would you support a Nazi?” since liberals (currently) think nazis are bad, they will just agree with the accusations to avoid looking like a nazi sympathiser. It’s something CHUDs have figured out about liberals for a while now, which is why they always accuse them of things like domestic abuse or animal abuse, because they know it is something that will just completely shut down a discussion about a person, because no one wants to defend an animal abuser. And they don’t “believe” it, but they know if they repeat it enough, people will internalise it and it will cause the damage to their target’s reputation that they want.

        • meler [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          8 days ago

          God. This is exactly the bullshit my dad pulled on me when he tried convincing me it was reasonable for him to not gender me correctly.

          transphobia, homophobia

          His argument was that ahem being trans is bad because if you’re trans you won’t be accepted by society, therefore you will seek validation. You will find validation from gay people, and they’re gonna turn you gay, which is a sin.

          Which honestly has to be my favorite transphobia of all time. It feels like it should win an award of some kind. I repeated this back to him basically verbatim and he said I strawmanned him lol. Like you can’t just claim strawman when you realize how fucking absurd your take is 😭

          • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            8 days ago

            And like, the obvious solution here is for your dad to just accept you ans then he doesn’t have to worry about all of that. (Aside from the solution where you are unbothered by someone’s sexuality since it really doesn’t matter who a person is into and the world is gonna keep on spinning even if your kid turns out gay.)

            Idk maybe I’m jaded or maybe I’m too autistic for this shit but I’d much rather if someone just tells me to my face that they don’t like queer people than trying to come up with tortured justifications like that. Obviously it’s different for people that you are close to but trying to navigate all those mental gymnastics is exhausting to me.

            Anyway, keep at it and good luck with it. Your dad obviously cares for you which is a really important basis to work from. He’s also willing to talk it through with you so that’s a good sign. I hope that he’s willing to put in the work to become the dad you deserve, one who cares for you and genuinely appreciates you for who you are. It sounds like there’s a long road ahead before you get to that point but I’m wishing you all the best with this.

    • Dessa [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      8 days ago

      Overthinking the dropped apple, I would be falling toward the sky along with the apple in my hand. If I released my grip on the apple, I’m not sure if the apple would “fall” toward the sky faster or slower than I. But it might nonetheless at least appear to go upward (toward the earth) from my POV if it falling toward the sky more slowly than I

    • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      61·
      8 days ago

      it seems to have reached its peak to this point with the anti-intellectual tropes of “it ain’t that deep bro” and “sometimes the curtains are just blue.”

      That’s a reaction to bad teaching methods that teach that there is a single critical read to any piece of media. Sometimes it’s a good read, sometimes it’s isn’t. No matter, grading young people on the content of their read, rather than how they got their is bound to make many of them resentful.

      “But there is no Germany in this story”

      This is actually a person engaging critically with a text (the media analysis). Maybe there is a lack of education, maybe they just enjoy being argumentative.

      Engaging critical with critical texts is not only important but also transferable to other texts.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        8 days ago

        I don’t entirely disagree with what you’re saying here and it might be that I didn’t do a good job of explaining myself in the example but there’s an attitude or approach to media analysis where, purely hypothetically, you can lay out a case for why the Hitler-insert elf seized power after the burning down of Dorianeth tower and started vilifying and persecuting the half-elves is literally a play-by-play recounting of Hitler’s rise to power and how it’s a commentary on elven ethnonationalism in fantasy and how the fantasy genre lends itself directly to aristocratic beliefs that ultimately end in fascism (or something. I think I’m getting carried away here lol.)

        But then a person will do a sort of poisoned, critical semi-engagement where they are responding but instead of genuine engagement with it they just seek to frustrate and shut down this analysis by saying something like “There’s no Germany in the story, wtf are you even talking about??” as a way of kind putting up a roadblock to the analysis rather than exploring where it goes, either by contributing to it or by critiquing it.

        Not to be a dick about it but saying that the curtains are just blue is technically also a critical engagement with a text but generally I’d expect something more than that, although that’s not to say that it’s wrong; sometimes the curtains really are just blue and if you can make a convincing case for that then I’m on board with it even if I ultimately disagree. But I’m not gonna hold someone’s hand through articulating this position because I’ve got better things to do, especially if it’s being done as an alternative way of saying “shut up”.

        I guess what I’m driving at is the anti-intellectual weaponizing of critical engagement to try and stymie deeper critical engagement here.

        • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          7 days ago

          I mostly agree. I just think it’s useful to engage with people a lot more often than is appearant.

          People oftentimes won’t tell you when you changed their mind even in small ways, because they have their pride.

          I don’t think that recognizing something like a Nazi allegory is that trivial, as antifascists, we are just very practiced at it.

          • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            7 days ago

            Yeah, I’m with you on that.

            I think the cumulative effect of a lot of small discussions like this amount to qualitative change in people’s values and you’re right in that you don’t often see it. I believe that the person themselves often doesn’t even notice it, especially when it’s small, but over time if there’s enough of these moments then it can often set them down a different path or it can even bring on an epiphany.

            I know for me, I was an anarchist for a very long time. I often say that finally reading Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? is what brought about the watershed moment for me but there’s a series of smaller events and experiences I had that led up to that point as well, and that’s only of the ones that I can definitely identify. I’m certain there are other ones that made an impact that I wouldn’t be able to recall that shifted my outlook in subtle ways too.

  • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    42·
    9 days ago

    It’s intentional

    It fucking sucks because every single time I play with random on Helldivers, I have to deal with people who just miss the joke entirely

    Literally had a guy with the username Paleocon88 join up my last game

    I shot him with a stun round from my shotgun, then burned him with a flamethrower before I kicked his ass

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      34·
      9 days ago

      Beat me to it. It’s not about media literacy but narrative spinning. In this day and age, the more intellectual, the more complicatated, the more nuanced your ideas? The worse. Complexity and nuance are liabilities in this new world.

      The good news is we can do it too. One of the best ways to disarm a fascist soyjak meme is just get dumber and say “soyjak right tho.”

      • mayakovsky [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        49·
        9 days ago

        In this day and age, the more intellectual, the more complicatated, the more nuanced your ideas? The worse. Complexity and nuance are liabilities in this new world.

        This gave me a flashback to the debates in 2020 when Biden(?) asked Bernie to explain his economic plan or whatever, Bernie said “Do you have an hour?”, and Biden(?) said “that’s the problem”. The crowd cheered. This was the one where the crowd also booed literacy.

      • Self_Sealing_Stem_Bolt [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        24·
        9 days ago

        I disagree. That might be what chuds and some libs do, but in my experience if you know what you’re talking about (more likely than them) you can just dance in fuckin circles around them cause they know NOTHING. Its hilarious in a black comedy kinda way. You can short circuit westerners pretty easy ime

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    34·
    9 days ago

    We literally have “Truth Social” where the president tweets out “truths” if that ain’t some ministry of truth shit idk what is. Oh my bad though, 1984 is when trans people exist, right right.

    • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      8 days ago

      1984

      On this matter, I occasionally break people’s brains when they argue that words like “unalived” are literally 1984 because it’s actually the polar opposite of Orwell’s (admittedly pretty shitty) thesis with Newspeak.

      Here’s the summary of the Newspeak position:

      The government controls language and removes words and, thus, removes the concept from our collective experience by making it impossible for us to engage with it or describe it.

      Here’s the summary of neologisms like “unalive”:

      The structure of social media prevents/discourages discussions of suicide and so, in response to censorship, people maintain their concept of it and they resort to inventing new words to communicate the same idea to subvert attempts at preventing discussion of these topics.

      You see what’s going on there, right?

      Newspeak is the erasure of concepts by eliminating words. Social media neologisms are the response to censorship and the effort to work around it while maintaining the shared understanding of the concept through making more words for the concept, which is the exact opposite of removing words for a concept until (allegedly, according to Orwell’s dubious position) the concept itself gets erased. So if you’re concerned about a 1984 reality where words are removed and concepts are erased then you should actually be celebrating social media neologisms rather than denouncing them.

      …but apparently nobody engages their literacy when it comes to reading 1984.

      • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        34·
        8 days ago

        Right at the beginning of the book, it says most of the surveillance state is pointed at government employees and that it doesn’t matter too much what the average workers say and think. But for some reason, nobody responds well when I remind them of that.

        • Kefla [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          35·
          8 days ago

          Yeah 1984’s assessment of the average worker is basically that they are meat robots who have no effect on the world and that it doesn’t matter what they do or think because nobody does or should give them or their affairs the slightest thought

          Orwell was a “socialist” though agony-shivering

        • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          16·
          8 days ago

          Oh that’s interesting. I’m gonna use that next time.

          I read 1984 when I was young so it’s been a long time and I never really got into it so it didn’t leave a big enough impression on me that I could recall more than the broad brush strokes so this is handy info to have at my disposal.

          At the risk of coming off as stuffy, I’m not a big fan of the internet neologisms because they’re kinda cringey and we already have so many good euphemisms that we could use instead. (I guess it says something about literacy when the discourse demands a single word replacement which is prosaic instead of using something that has a little bit of metaphorical flair to it.) It always baffles me that someone who is mildly opposed to those neologisms, who refuses to use them, and who also is a very vocal critic of Orwell that takes any opportunity to shit on him ends up being the #1 defender of Orwell’s work and of internet neologisms.

          I really don’t want to be in that position lol

          • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            10·
            8 days ago

            Honestly… I never finished it. Made it through the first coupla chapters for a high school class, and I bullshitted my way through the rest of the group discussion. From what I gathered, I had read more of it than most of the other students.

            • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              11·
              8 days ago

              I did finish it but it was a hell of a grind and there was nothing notable about the final act that it left any impression on me so I doubt you missed out on anything.

              1984 really felt like Orwell had a hot idea for a dystopia so he wrote the world and then… idk that was about it. The End.

              • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
                7·
                8 days ago

                1984 really felt like Orwell had a hot idea for a dystopia so he wrote the world and then… idk that was about it. The End.

                It’s worse, he really hated the Soviet Union and used any tiny excuse or premise he could invent as an opportunity to “criticize” it, including during WW2 (notably, he did not do this to the fascists of the time). You can tell because he truly tortures the plot and setting of 1984 to make sure you couldn’t possibly mistake the antagonists for fascists or any other ideology than his warped view of the USSR. If you haven’t read the Isaac Asimov review of 1984, it’s worth reading. He makes this point a lot better than I could.

                • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  7·
                  8 days ago

                  The review you mentioned, in case anyone wants to read it.

                  I know that everyone here is probably already aware of this but, on the odd chance that someone isn’t already, did you know that Orwell not only straight up plagiarised the concept for the story of Animal Farm but he also decided that, instead of the story being an anti-nazi, it would be better if it was an anti-Soviet parable instead?

                  Never ask:
                  a man his salary
                  a woman her age
                  an enby whether they’re a man or a woman
                  Eric Arthur Blair how he felt about Hitler

          • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            9·
            8 days ago

            I find it so weird how people don’t just use sayings, like “punched his own ticket” or “caught the bus” or something new, and instead make a coinage that is comically crass in its grasp on language (De-alived would be more appropriate, for example).

            • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              8·
              8 days ago

              I’m really partial to “clocking out early” but I’m totally with you on this.

              I haven’t looked into this but my hunch is that since it’s very online terminology that it’s probably an adaptation of unsubscribe, hence the un- prefix.

      • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        yeah you need to know what the elided terms are in order to use the new one. reminds me of findings that txt spk actually improves spelling because you have to be thinking about how the words are spelled all the time.

  • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    8 days ago

    There’s always been a problem with surface level vibes analysis of media, hence Reagan using “born in the USA” as a campaign song.

    I think the difference these days is that the internet has made more people aware of the idea of subtext, allegory, metaphor, etc in media in a way that prior generations mostly didn’t even consider. But, the awareness of the idea wasn’t coupled with a greater education on how to evaluate media for those things. So it’s less that it’s gotten worse overall, than it is that people who previously weren’t exposing how bad they are at it are doing so on the regular now.

    • Dort_Owl [they/them, any]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      23·
      8 days ago

      the internet has made more people aware of the idea of subtext, allegory, metaphor, etc in media in a way that prior generations mostly didn’t even consider.

      I always find it funny when the narrative is beating the audience over the head with a theme and meanwhile people are like “but what could the cup on the table mean?” theory crafting and its consequences.

      • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        8 days ago

        If Amazing Digital Circus is anything to go by, you might think people pay more attention to the background details than the dialog.

        • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          7 days ago

          If you look in the background in episode 3 at 8:37 minutes, for half a frame you can see the silhouette of Sans Undertale, thus proving that ADC and Undertale take place in the same universe!

      • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        Over-reading is the counterpart to nothing meaning anything. Then there’s also weirdos who try to say every noble sacrifice is a jesus figure but i don’t think they’re doing analysis per se.

    • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      8 days ago

      That’s an interesting point I’ve never seen brought up before. I guess we’ll never really know how much of the silent generation watched Twilight Zone and their only takeaway was “huh, weird show” and then never thought of it again.

      • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        7 days ago

        It could also be that the internet lets people stew on an opinion far more than they would’ve back in the day as well. Someone who didn’t like Twilight Zone and thought it was weird and offputting might have a brief chat with their coworkers on Monday about it, and that was it.

        These days though, you could find a hundred video essays/rants complaining about how Twilight Zone is the worst thing on TV and a travesty and uhh…whatever 1960s buzzword they would’ve used instead of “Woke”. It’s much easier for people to get caught in a spiral of confirming their own opinion and making it into something much bigger than it needs to be than it would’ve been back then.

  • built_on_hope [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    29·
    8 days ago

    To add to all the excellent points here, I’d also like to lay the blame on the faux intellectual “gritty” amoral media that was popular in the 2010s. Shows and movies that had no message other than “everyone is a piece of shit deep down and that’s just the way the world is, kiddo”. Looking at you, Game of Thrones

    I feel like these shows trained a whole generation of people to see “realism” as the only / highest standard of media, and neatly destroyed the need for media to have any coherent (let alone vaguely moral) underlying message or theme to be made. If meaningless slop is all you have access to, your ability to think critically about said slop is also diminished

  • ClassIsOver [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    8 days ago

    It feels as if the deluge of bullshit we’re subjected to has filled our orifices so much that as a society, we can’t tell what’s what anymore.

    During the 2024 US election cycle, the “left” (fucking Christ, that hurts to type) candidate had literally the same campaign platform that the candidate on the right (of the other candidate) had, and the difference they decided to capitalize on was that she’d do it better than he would. No difference in outcome, she just said he’d fuck it up somehow, and she was more capable.

    Now I have relatives that think they’re different for wanting her to run in 2028, and the only response I can think of is “Why, so you can watch her lose again?”

    It’s like they ignore every word that comes out of her mouth and then wonder why things never get better. I’m an asshole for voting for “throwing my vote away” on a socialist, because voting is what matters so goddamn much.

  • trompete [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    9 days ago

    I suck at media literacy, but I have gotten better. I can’t imagine learning any of it without the internet, and so over the course of my live, my personal media literacy has improved. I imagine there’s lots of people like me.

    On the other hand, I know a bunch of people who supposedly studied literary criticism at uni, and they’re mostly a bunch of liberal Zionist (including literal genocide apologia) and other such reactionary crap, and so I can only conclude that the main thing they are taught in these classes is propaganda and sophistry, and not how to actually critically read anything.

    A couple of decades ago, these educated morons would have had a near monopoly on literary opinions, while the unwashed masses had no say. So, no, I do not think, at all, that people have gotten worse overall in media literacy.

    • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      8 days ago

      On the other hand, I know a bunch of people who supposedly studied literary criticism at uni, and they’re mostly a bunch of liberal Zionist (including literal genocide apologia) and other such reactionary crap, and so I can only conclude that the main thing they are taught in these classes is propaganda and sophistry, and not how to actually critically read anything.

      Some people get a degree to learn, some people get a degree so they can insist that their interpretation of things is the “correct” one inherently because they are smarter than people who didn’t go to uni.

      • MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        19·
        8 days ago

        I think most people go to college these days for the higher wages / better jobs that supposedly comes with the degree. Whether you actually learn anything while there is secondary.

        • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          8 days ago

          If money weren’t a concern, I think I’d spend a decade just taking whatever classes interested me.

          But there’s no degree or accreditation I particularly want, so I ain’t about to pay for that shit.

      • Maeve@kbin.earth
        9·
        8 days ago

        When that’s what university is mostly pushing, that’s what people who don’t question learn.

    • godlessworm [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      16·
      8 days ago

      i stopped watching those forever ago. so many times where whoever wrote the script just didnt get shit and counted it as a ‘sin’. plus the dumb ass self aware meta references he would count as sins. whats even the point then if you’re just gonna add shit on to be funny? that makes it way less interesting

      • moss_icon [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        Yeah although they aren’t getting anywhere near as many views now by the looks of things. If Boogie2988 can lie about having cancer, bothsides abuse and the Holocaust, scam his fans out of money and still keep an audience then nothing is surprising to me.

  • daniyeg [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    18·
    8 days ago

    for a fascist, reality doesn’t shape their truth, it’s their “truth” that shapes reality. people are not becoming more obtuse, the fascist are willingly misinterpreting media because to not do so is seen as weak. if a piece of media passes the vibe check, then everything in it must confirm their worldview. do not engage them just call them stupid and shame them for their stupid views. these people will not learn because they are not willing to learn, the only thing that will distance them from being a dumbass is by shaming them.

  • RedSturgeon [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    8 days ago

    I haven’t come to any concrete conclusion, but there’s a lot of potential factors at play.

    Underfunded education, lack of need to pursue said education, then there’s racism and IQ tests telling people that they are who they are born and hierarchy is a “natural” part of life.

    There’s lack of trust in each other and the good old alienation. if someone is speaking positive of X that must be because of X paid them, nobody would be doing this for free. Like the slogan goes: “If you’re good don’t do it for free!”

    Information overload is another big one I think and how do we sort through this, what grants the speaker legitimacy? In the traditional media environment it’s stuff like which platform your speaking on, perhaps your diploma. In the new internet media age it’s the algorithm that grants you legitimacy.

    I might edit and develop this further when I have time.

    So the other important factor I wanted to add is how bad people have gotten at tolerating disagreements, which is a crucial skill for being able in a world with multiple interpretations. There’s a lot of dogmatism, science has become dogmatic too, failing is viewed as an act of shame, wrong interoperations get you shamed, people are eager to find the perfect solution to the universe, the one correct interoperation. Naturally literacy would go down because in such a world, you no longer need to think at all. If there’s only one correct solution, what’s the point?

    And there’s nothing I can do to critique such a mindset, because I would simply be brushed aside as a naysayer. I don’t even need to wirte the research again, because people have already done it. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, these people wrote science, it is absolutely meant to be taken literally, supposedly this is something that modernity values highly, yet they refuse to recon with the facts and in their tantrums burn the books, they end up resorting to dogma in order to make sense of it all. This is what the upper crust of society has been doing. If trickle down theory applies to anything it’d definitely be the ideology, not material wealth. This is why nothing makes sense anymore.

  • BanMeFromPosting [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    8 days ago

    I dunno. I remember years ago on my first account here I made an effort post that went against the mainstream hexbear line of thought and I had to argue with a shitton of people about something I didn’t even say. That was 4-5 years ago. I haven’t experienced things getting significantly worse in that time. In my general experience it’s mainly something I get when talking americans.

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    14·
    8 days ago

    i think the volume of media and its instant availability blunts or reduces the time for reflection and analysis.

    far more infrastructure exists for straight entertainment. you watch A, then you watch B. maybe you think about A beyond the story, trying to imagine what the message was, but more likely we don’t unless it ended in a way where its characters’ fates or their conclusions are uncertain.

    and legit, some people seem to be vicerally upset by that: a movie that leaves something open to interpretation.

    my point, i guess, is that the emphasis of media delivery systems these days is to deliver and promote the consumption of more media, not to facilitate digesting it.

    i think the general alienation from each other also limits our reflection and analysis. like i always get more out if books or movies when i have a curated group discussion afterward. like a reading group or a discussion class or whatever.

    • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
      12·
      8 days ago

      Not that people don’t have wrong takes on here (obviously they do), but if you’re going to call people’s takes “cringe” it would be good to give at least some vague examples of what you mean.

      • thefunkycomitatus [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        8 days ago

        Hexbears tend to have an added level of cringe because we start assuming our takes on media are politically meaningful, significant, and more astute. It’s the difference between saying The Godfather is boring vs The Godfather is capitalist striver propaganda that glorifies anticommunist mobsters who did counter-revolutions in Italy. You may look at the latter and say that it’s completely correct but it’s also a way to launder shallow criticism. If you don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about media (and you must post anyways because the internet demands you have a take), then just vaguely attach it to some political stuff that is agreeable.

        Then there is the urge to be obnoxiously maximalist on a take. “This media is garbage and I low key don’t respect anyone who engages with it” kind of stuff. Which goes beyond simple media criticism into drawing real lines between people and groups over media consumption. Online leftists have a long history of being overly concerned with media consumption. It does get to a point, at the most extreme, where people think you can’t be a good leftist if you consume a piece of media.

        • Euergetes [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          8 days ago

          If you don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about media

          there’s something insular around an assumption that characteristics identified by surface level political readings are not insightful. people on this site (and not everyone on this site) are familiar with lots of shit the general public are more ignorant of. it’s fine for folks to beat a dead horse now and then on here-the horse might be alive in irl social encounters

          • thefunkycomitatus [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            8 days ago

            They’re not insightful if used to avoid delving into the artistic content, or any other aspect of the specific content in question. What I’m saying is that surface-level political readings are used to elevate or hide otherwise bad or specious opinions. A motte & bailey, if you will. Retreat from a weak opinion on a piece of media into a safer political opinion that most would agree with. There are exceptions for works that are created with nothing but political content. Like low budget, terrible right-wing movies that exist just to complain bout a culture war issue. Those things technically have artistic content but it’s so unremarkable that you can only focus on the political content.

            I use two real examples. One is Pluribus. There was a sentiment shared several times over the past week that it’s more interesting to discuss the show than watch it, or there is more to discussing the show than watching it just to see people’s takes. I think this shows that discourse does overshadow content on this site. The other example is Avatar. While there are fewer discussions about it, I think it shows that people will defend questionable artistic content due to surface-level political readings being agreeable.

            Also this ties into media literacy. The point of commentary isn’t to accurately decipher intention or subtext, it’s to provide content for social media. It’s taking the conversation you and your friends would have after a movie 20 years ago and commodifying it. Mass producing it on an industrial scale. Stripping away the need for friends or going out to see the movie. You don’t even need to watch the movie so much as be hyper-aware of what other people think about it. That happened before Hexbear but it’s baked in to the idea of a content aggregator and curation platform. We do it but with our own Hexbearian character.

            The hyperawareness of what others think comes from the affordance of other takes being shoveled into your face for consumption by the same forces that mass-produce opinion. The takes have boundaries that somewhat reflect society at large, in-groups and out-groups, cohorts and demographics. Competing interests turn into competing takes and a game of meta-commentary forms. People purposefully provide exaggerated or aloof commentary for kicks or spite. Again, we do this too.

      • DogThatWentGorp [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        8 days ago

        I will not nitpick to justify my hatred of media I won’t consume: my time is limited and I will avoid something on the faintest whim so I can get back to playing the same couple of paradox games.

        I’m not going to be on my death bed wishing I did another Viccy 3 where I watched some mediocre looking show to “give it a chance” instead. What if doing that run as Hawaii where I reverse-invade the US by becoming a tributary of france was the last thing I needed to escape samsara?

        Seems more likely than trying to watch Stranger Things to me.

  • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    8 days ago

    I asked ChatGPT about this and it assured me everything was fine.

    People have thought Romeo and Juliet was a great love story since forever ago, so not sure, honestly shrug-outta-hecks I don’t think it helps that things like literary criticism and everything else adjacent to media analysis is de-emphasized because it doesn’t make money. You’re supposed to think the curtains were fucking blue and nothing more.