So, same old, basically. When I was a kid it was the same thing, kids spending all evening watching sitcoms and otherwise-trash TV. I was online on my computer learning programming, audio production, trying different operating systems, playing every game I could get my hands on, as well as chatting with people all over the world & making friends who I'm still friends with today, ingesting media from all over the world as well, completely free of corp/govt propaganda. Kids can still do so, if they choose to skip past the pop culture garbage that is shoved in everyone's faces, just as I did 20-30 years ago.

Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>

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estearum 4 days ago | parent [-]

"Someone said something else was bad and it wasn't, so therefore anything else that someone says is bad is also not bad" is an obviously incoherent argument once you strip it down to its basics.

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amatecha 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah no I get what you mean, but my argument is like, you should try to be resilient against the arbitrary whims of the powers that be regardless of what their flavour of the week is. Asymmetric power/influence is a dynamic that will always exist in society, especially exacerbated by the scale and reach we see today.

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estearum 4 days ago | parent [-]

Absolutely! But one of the tools we created to make this possible is government. There are forces (like multinational corporations) that exceed the power of an individual or many individuals to mitigate.

Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.

	▲	amatecha 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah totally, I exclaim frequently that there should be government-backed open source and decentralized software[0], putting power of technology into the hands of everyone (rather than letting this power get consolidated into monopolistic corporations) ... but then, what we seem to have currently is a huge correlation of motives between state and industry, and neither seem to have the incentive to put power in the hands of individuals. And individuals often don't even want it either. Either way though, yeah, regulation is long overdue for SO MUCH of this stuff. [0] luckily EU seems to be doing a lot more in that direction, e.g. https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive...