So why did we do stop the steal? Why did anyone go to January 6th? Why is anyone sitting in jail? Why did anything bad happen to anybody? Why did everyone get censored? Why is everything bad that has happened to the people that are involved? Why did that need to happen? If you’re just going to walk it all back and say, “oh, I lost.”
Well, that would have been good to know that before 1600 people got charged! It would have been good to know that before I had all my money frozen, put out a no fly list, banned from everything, lost all banking and payment processing!
Would have been good to know that. Before I, you know, in 2017, dedicated my life to this as an 18 year old in college. Just feels like a big rip off!
(Full transcript and video on the linked site.)
If it makes you feel any better, when I was young, I thought the Internet would bring the world together since you could sit and have a conversation with people all over the world with different perspectives, and befriending those from different walks of life would help break us out of small-town small-mindedness where everyone “not like us” is scary…
Yeah, I might have been a bit too optimistic with that one.
Honestly I still think that to some extent; at least I think it would be like that if we didn’t have corporate social media showing us things only very selectively, but had something structured like old web forums where there was not even a way to sort by popularity.
I think it could serve that purpose (and honestly has to some degree), but the big thing that I didn’t consider when I was young was that a lot of people just want to hate (or to convince others to be focused on hate), and will find spaces to spread and amplify that hate. I underestimated the capacity and drive of those that would spread fear and anger.
I think the problem is most people can tolerate anything except the outgroup.