This is a fact. The government doesn’t actually oppress anyone. I have a hilarious bit about this that I would love to tweet about but I’m saving it for the special. I’m learning to not spill the beans. pic.twitter.com/HEvsgIWPY0
— Owen Benjamin 🐻 (@OwenBenjamin) August 21, 2024
1/3 of all internet traffic is fake.
Have you ever heard the phrase, "anticipatory obedience"? It's a phenomenon where people comply with authority more than what is actually being asked of them, essentially following rules that don't actually exist in anticipation of what authority, or even just social conformity seems to want from them. Very often this is about not wanting to draw negative attention to yourself, right, fitting in rather than sticking out. And very often it's about naturally authoritarian people using the authority of the collective to police other people and make themselves feel a little more powerful. That's what a Karen is, right, somebody sticking their nose in other people's business unnecessarily being a nuisance but still feeling justified because they believe the authority or social conformity is on their side.
In 1978, the former Chech Republic President, Vaclav Haval wrote a parable about a greengrocer living in a communist dictatorship. In the story, after the rise of an authoritarian government, the greengrocer started seeing more and more people putting pro-government propaganda posters in their windows. Now, eventually, the greengrocer who is not a fan of the authoritarian government ends up putting a sign in his own shop window, not because he feels idealistically compelled to but simply because he sees the rise in popularity of this narrative and he wants to be left alone. The idea is if you perform some sort of symbolic gesture to demonstrate your compliance with the authority, then you'll be left alone to live your life. So from his perspective, he's kind of just waving a white flag. The problem is from everybody else's perspective, they're seeing what he saw, lots and lots of windows with scary amounts of propaganda in them, essentially inflating everybody's impression of just how popular this ideology is and just how much power it actually has. Now imagine being a powerful financial interest today who wants to shift the narrative on a certain subject. You essentially have the technology to put 100 million signs in 100 million shop windows overnight. Now, if you also happen to have control of large segments of the corporate media, all you really have to do is sprinkle in a handful of popular bought and paid-for social media influencers. In a few hours, you will have thousands and thousands of people organically making their own videos, and posting their own comments supporting your narrative. Some in an attempt to fit in, eager to signal their moral virtue to the rest of us by how quickly they conform to the new narrative. Others simply relishing the opportunity to kick down by attacking, bullying, shaming, and guilt-tripping those who remain who have not yet conformed. Now in the video, I Stitch, the guy says one 1/3 of the traffic, which as far as I know is an arbitrary number and he's talking about Chinese phone farms. But considering how powerful a tool controlling the narrative actually is, if you really believe that this is the most sophisticated version of this technology that currently exists, well, then I don't know, you and me live in different versions of reality.
The Power of the Powerless https://t.co/DOnIoT1QUU via @amazon
— St. Michael, the Archangel (@aveng_angel) August 21, 2024
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