6 upbears. "Oh please, spare me the doom and gloom. The internet has always been a tool of the ruling class, but that doesn't mean we can't use it to our advantage. As long as we're aware of the ways they're using it to control us, we can still use it to spread revolutionary ideas and organize against the powers that be. And let's not forget, the internet is also a source of endless memes, cat videos, and communist banter. So even if the search engines and ad revenue systems are controlled by the capitalists, we'll still be able to use the internet for some good old fashioned proletarian fun. As for the whole "machine learning is going to elect the next president" thing, I highly doubt it. Even the ruling class can't control technology that much. Plus, a robot president would probably be an improvement. Can you imagine a president that doesn't need to eat or sleep? Sign me up! So let's not give up on the internet just yet, comrades. We've got memes to meme and revolutions to start. Edit: to be clear this post was created by ChatGPT using OPs post as an input and telling it to respond like "a communist forum user""
I've wondered for a long time what portion of internet discussions come from "normal" individual users
I mean, it was nearly trivial for interested parties to astroturf small communities before machine learning even got involved. Marketing companies even sold that kind of service openly. Scripts can be run to swap out synonyms for evading spam detection, as well as to crawl the page for keywords to auto-reply to
From the other end, we're all accustomed to seeing weird shit online. Mostly when something doesn't make sense, we move on - maybe they misspoke, maybe they replied to the wrong comment, maybe a typo, who cares?
Companies routinely astroturf hobbyist forums manually to sell widgets, but if you suggest that the world's intelligence agencies wouldn't have ignored that kind of tool for all these years then you're fringe
I don't know. My guess is that it's not as well suited to educating people as it is to interfering with them.
It seems particularly suited to influencing what people think others believe, so it could be excellent at radicalizing people. Unfortunately I don't think it would help as much with building a coherent worldview that could be directed toward a bigger project
Maybe. I hope any tool can be used to help revolution, but I'm having trouble imagining leftist use cases outside of heightening enthusiasm for unions and other orgs
The trouble as I see it is that it's easy to sockpuppet some model plane enthusiasts to plug your brand, or some trans people to make a soft common enemy for your target audience. It's harder to do that to the bourgeoisie because they're public and powerful, and the fascists could hardly be made to look any worse than they openly profess to be. Meanwhile any subgroup of the left is as easy to believably impersonate as anyone else, except that those efforts only really need to reaffirm our rich imperial tradition of ahistorically smearing leftism
I've wondered for a long time what portion of internet discussions come from "normal" individual users
I mean, it was nearly trivial for interested parties to astroturf small communities before machine learning even got involved. Marketing companies even sold that kind of service openly. Scripts can be run to swap out synonyms for evading spam detection, as well as to crawl the page for keywords to auto-reply to
From the other end, we're all accustomed to seeing weird shit online. Mostly when something doesn't make sense, we move on - maybe they misspoke, maybe they replied to the wrong comment, maybe a typo, who cares?
Companies routinely astroturf hobbyist forums manually to sell widgets, but if you suggest that the world's intelligence agencies wouldn't have ignored that kind of tool for all these years then you're fringe
This comment was 100% with l written by a bot
Bots wish they could ramble like me
So why aren't we doing it?
I don't know. My guess is that it's not as well suited to educating people as it is to interfering with them.
It seems particularly suited to influencing what people think others believe, so it could be excellent at radicalizing people. Unfortunately I don't think it would help as much with building a coherent worldview that could be directed toward a bigger project
So it's only one part of a greater movement. Same as it always was.
Maybe. I hope any tool can be used to help revolution, but I'm having trouble imagining leftist use cases outside of heightening enthusiasm for unions and other orgs
The trouble as I see it is that it's easy to sockpuppet some model plane enthusiasts to plug your brand, or some trans people to make a soft common enemy for your target audience. It's harder to do that to the bourgeoisie because they're public and powerful, and the fascists could hardly be made to look any worse than they openly profess to be. Meanwhile any subgroup of the left is as easy to believably impersonate as anyone else, except that those efforts only really need to reaffirm our rich imperial tradition of ahistorically smearing leftism
As always, an uphill battle.