this is a :a-guy: post
So my grandma couldn't live alone anymore and she moved into my parents house about a year ago. Her new bedroom doesn't have cable. Her media diet used to be like 90% TV and 10% internet. Now it's reversed.
She's 90 years old and just a conventional methodist.
What probably happened is she searched youtube for gospel music to do crosswords by. 100,000 iterations of the algorithm later she believes in ancient aliens, crises actors, millenarianism, all of it.
Same thing probably happened in rural communities who got the full internet all at once. They didn't get it by degrees, dial-up alta vista, to learn years of bullshit filtering heuristics.
It happened the second smartphones became widely available. I watched it happen. My relatives had only heard of the internet as some hypothetical thing and never did much other than email people at work. Then they got iphones in like 2008 and 09. It was like a speedrun of the last 50 years of conspiracy theories directly into their brains like Neo downloading kungfu. Now they're all deeply into Qanon
I guess the question is if the internet is inherently poison to someone who hasn't built up resistance or if the American brain is already primed for gibberish conspiracies. I guess both.
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Yeah as much as I'm grateful that the internet got me into leftism, but damn if I didn't have to go through some weird fucking ideologies to get there. Would have been much healthier to just have met a DSA or SAlt member IRL
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