Older folk slammed face first onto the internet in like 2015, without the decades of acclimating to it.
Facebook went public in 2012. There’s always going to be a lag with this kind of thing. Immediately before, Facebook was strictly for young people, mainly students. It was an unspoken rule that if older people or non-students joined, you didn’t friend them. That changed quite quickly, really.
Fast forward to 2015. FB shareholders are only in it if it makes bank. And the interested security services partners are only interested to control the narrative. So they’ve opened FB to everyone. As you say, it’s the first time the older generation has used the internet for fun.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some level of orchestration to make sure those new users hit a curated wall of propaganda from the get go. Because it guarantees an audience, which can be sold to advertisers. And it guarantees that the audience isn’t going to move away from terrestrial and cable TV to consume anything wholesome. It’s slop or nothing. So not only were they not acclimated. They never got a chance to become acclimated to anything that looked like reasonable discourse.
They did the same with streaming. Until around 2013 if you wanted to stream music or videos you went on YouTube or heaved ho and hoisted the skull and crossbones. Then came Netflix, which made the risks of the high seas disproportionately risky. So the same generation that ran head first into the FB wall started treading water in media libraries curated by the secret services on behalf of the haute bourgeoisie. They didn’t stand a chance.
I’d like to be around when the records of 2010–2020 are made public in the FALCSRs of, say 2035 (too optimistic?), so I can read the books that come out revealing exactly what we’ve been up against.
Facebook went public in 2012. There’s always going to be a lag with this kind of thing. Immediately before, Facebook was strictly for young people, mainly students. It was an unspoken rule that if older people or non-students joined, you didn’t friend them. That changed quite quickly, really.
Fast forward to 2015. FB shareholders are only in it if it makes bank. And the interested security services partners are only interested to control the narrative. So they’ve opened FB to everyone. As you say, it’s the first time the older generation has used the internet for fun.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some level of orchestration to make sure those new users hit a curated wall of propaganda from the get go. Because it guarantees an audience, which can be sold to advertisers. And it guarantees that the audience isn’t going to move away from terrestrial and cable TV to consume anything wholesome. It’s slop or nothing. So not only were they not acclimated. They never got a chance to become acclimated to anything that looked like reasonable discourse.
They did the same with streaming. Until around 2013 if you wanted to stream music or videos you went on YouTube or heaved ho and hoisted the skull and crossbones. Then came Netflix, which made the risks of the high seas disproportionately risky. So the same generation that ran head first into the FB wall started treading water in media libraries curated by the secret services on behalf of the haute bourgeoisie. They didn’t stand a chance.
I’d like to be around when the records of 2010–2020 are made public in the FALCSRs of, say 2035 (too optimistic?), so I can read the books that come out revealing exactly what we’ve been up against.
That’s likely true, but also true that people tend to seek out the propaganda that already reinforces their worldview.