Jun 21
Ben Hoerman talks about the rise of Internet cruelty in the form of prank content, "a-logging," and "lolcowing" and reactionary ideologies.
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Ben Hoerman talks about the rise of Internet cruelty in the form of prank content, "a-logging," and "lolcowing" and reactionary ideologies.
my politics are such that I get called far-left irl but on the internet I might as well be John McCain
Pizzagate Revisited: The 2016 Hoax, the Real-World Gun Attack, and the 2026 “Pizza Ring” Rebrand
By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS NewsBaybay City, Leyte, Philippines — February 13, 2026 A familiar claim is circulating online again: that a child exploitation ring is being operated out of “a pizza place.” Promoters insist this time is “not QAnon” and “not Pizzagate.” It is, functionally, the same story. The details get swapped (a different restaurant, a different city, a…
What's fascinating about a lot of the responses I got to that post that blew up a while ago where I shared tiktok comments by people talking about how their parents fell into conservatism & science denialism is that seems to be this belief that yes, propaganda exists and affects how people think but also if you aren't able to resist it, that's your fault and you must've always been a fundamentally shitty person so it's actually not a loss at all when it happens to someone. Falling for misinformation and fear-mongering is seen as a personal flaw, not a systemic issue, and viewing someone as a victim of propaganda is interpreted as making excuses for shitty people.
No wonder nobody has so far been able to properly address online radicalization pipelines. If you decide every bear that walked into a trap was just a shitty bear with poor survival instincts, you don't need to think about reducing the amount of bear traps people are setting in the woods. You can just point at the bears in a surrounding forest that has fewer poachers setting traps and go "see? these bears didn't step into the traps, the ones that did had no excuse".
Techbros think of you as simpletons who foolishly don't want what's best for you. Funny how "what's good for you" somehow always happens to align with their initiatives and profits.
Overstatement? The record is longer than many of you have been alive.
It started with Digital Rights Management getting into tech so that you could only play their content in ways they approved of (yet it didn't stop piracy)
Amazon becoming a nearly inescapable middleman in first books, then everything, while maximizing profits by deliberately mistreating its workers
Then ads became central to the online experience, and now Google and Meta are ad companies with tech services attached, radicalizing people because outrage drives clicks
It went on to paying forever for subscriptions vs owning anything so they could endlessly raise prices
Introducing crypto/bitcoin to solve a problem only bad people had, enabling buying guns and illegal drugs online, money laundering and stealing people's savings
Spotify and record labels stealing from artists and keeping all the profits, leaving artists with touring as their only real revenue
The Netflix-ization of Hollywood, leading to successful shows being canceled solely to avoid paying creators what they're owed
Generative AI nobody really needs or wants, expanding the water and energy guzzling of crypto into a full environmental catastrophe
And now Adobe, Google etc. want to steal your personal content to feed the AI beast (and incidentally scan it to "protect the children"—which always turns out to be code for "turning over your data to any random law enforcement chud who wants it")
Many people have grown up in this ever-more-toxic stew and don't remember what came before—which, while in many cases was extremely imperfect, it didn't concentrate so much of the money in so few hands and lead to so many bad outcomes.
The goal is turning us all—consumers AND creators—into digital serfs, who have no rights not granted you by the techbros.
SO: Turn AI off when you can. Don't use generative AI. Think about where your money is going and consider some alternatives to the techbro crap, where they exist.
This year, President-elect Trump made gains across almost every demographic since the 2020 election. But one of the most notable was among
'Radicalised' 16-year-old shot dead by Australian police after stabbing - Times of India
NEW DELHI: Australian police fatally shot a 16-year-old boy after he stabbed a man in Perth, Western Australia. Authorities indicated that the assailant bore characteristics of terrorism. The boy wielded a kitchen knife and exhibited indications of online radicalization, as suggested by state officials. Concerned members of the local Muslim community had alerted authorities prior to the late…
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