Internet Opinions are Outdated

[#HBC | Acrostic]

Discussion of opinions on the internet has not aged well. I think that there was a solid block period roughly twenty years ago when forum boards were a relatively new concept with platforms like VBulletin being released in early 2000. The platform breaking out had novelty and people attempted to cater to nuances with it gradually reaching a downhill as the platform was increasingly taken for granted. There is a big question of what factors are contributing to polarization of opinions in America, however one of the least mentioned factors is the nature of how market factors have contributed. One such instance? Possibly how market incentives have shaped UI development on social media apps.

In advertising and marketing there are considerations for target demographic and the production of skews. A skew is a type of variant to a main product which is being produced because it has potential value to the company when it is produced. For instance, target demographics could be basketball fans, college students, or blacks when it comes to marketing for a product like a new brand of Air Jordans. In a similar manner, I think that UI development has followed similar market incentives with an increasing amount of social media platforms like Facebook and Discord enabling specific groups/channels to be created for people who want to be with friends, gamers, fashionistas, programmers, and the like.

Outside of Russian bots, there was always a natural trend for people to simply join ideological subgroups. Human beings best find personal satisfaction and meaning in their pointless existence by self-ascribing themselves to a tribe in which they develop true comrades in the fight against opposing ideological savages. Instead of framing social income inequality as being a natural market factor that applies to everyone e.g. employers will always try to find ways to compensate employees less while forcing them to work more hours we are now seeing intellectual insight into the intersectionality of a feminism viewpoint e.g. this is a woman's issue or from a power dynamic viewpoint e.g. this is a black issue of living in a white man's world. Sometimes there is such deep intellectual intersectionality that we get black feminism e.g. this is a black woman's issue of living in a white man's world.

When people are already ascribed by subscribing to the groups that they ideologically identify with then it leaves an empty hole for people who used to exist somewhere here and there in order to feel the opinions of other people who were also developing similar centrist positions. Because in truth, positional dynamics like left/right/center are really ludicrous instead of focusing on the truth. The Libor scandal, HSBC, and the subprime mortgage crisis were all issues that concerned monetary manipulation and were independent of political discourse. I think that increasingly people are being blinded by generalized sociological principles like "Power Dynamics in Donald Trump's America" which have clouded attention to possible other stories like Mylan's ridiculous overpricing of Epipens because they are aware if that consumers don't buy their product, they will die. Having the public polarized, tribalized, and angry makes it much easier to sneak money out from underneath them when they are divided and looking at each other suspiciously from over a figurative wall.

This is not to downplay racial disparity. People will still care less about a death due to gang violence in the black hood than a school shooting in the white burbs. But at the same time, it's disingenuous to think that any asian american applicant applying to Harvard is being placed on the same table as a black or hispanic high school graduate. I think that policies like affirmative action are insensitive towards blacks/hispanics because such policies essentially insinuate that such applicants couldn't have gotten in if they were a jew or an asian. I think though that when it comes to issues of injustice that the response has been too polarizing with asian americans having taken arms within the past year. Racial quotas have been utilized by the college/university education complex since the 1920s when hard caps were placed on how many Jews were allowed on college campuses. It has become a more systemic issue even within professional programs like law schools and medical schools with administrators viewing a black applicant with the name Mbaku as being a golden applicant because they just finished watching Black Panther and think it would be great to have a tribal leader become a fully licensed family physician. The white man must have a long reach if we are accounting for oppression from 4 years of undergard to 4 years of graduate school and even then still considering race as a crayola consideration factor when it comes to academic merit & scholarship.

Discussion of opinions on the internet has not aged well. But neither has social security. This is Acro and these are some uneducated opinions.

 

[Luigifan18]

This is a deep post and not really what I was expecting from the title.

 

[Sucumbio]

Those of us old enough to remember a world without Internet have a fascinating viewpoint. I personally hate most of what the Internet is now but some of it is amazing.

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

Luigifan18 Thanks brother.

Sucumbio Out of curiosity, do you want to elaborate? My short response is that the internet is a medium which makes it difficult for someone to attribute hatred to portions of it, without being specific about what it is they hate. This post touched upon how contemporary use of the internet through sites like Facebook or social media apps like Discord can encourage ideological echo chambers with pages/channels of people who want to only connect with other people that look like them, talk like them, or hold the exact same ideas as them.

I have been invited to Discord channels on divisive issues where the person who invited me to take part in their sub-group was soon banned from the channel because they typed/voiced a different opinion than what was agreed upon with moderators/the host of the channel on a "grey issue." The collective dog-piling that happened after that person was excommunicado'd made me feel awful as seemingly rational people collectively use it as an opportunity to virtue signal to their peers that they were in agreement with everyone else remarking that not just the divergent opinion disgusted them, but also attributed it to the human being being a disgusting human being. The fact that people were actively encouraging tribalism with an us v. them mentality made me realize that there was absolutely no reason to attempt a rational counter-opinions or to maintain membership when it was obvious that such an effort would be wasted as no one seemed interested in being open to alternative discourse.

However, if we are talking broadly about the internet then there are many other concerns that I have had as I have watched facets of the medium change and expectations along with it. To touch upon it briefly, these have to do with my alarm at seeing the increasing interconnectivity of sites into services. It used to be that the only Google service I used was Gmail. However, it seems like when you create a Gmail account these days you don't just create a Gmail account. It becomes a Hangouts account, a YouTube account, and a general multiservices account that can then integrate with other websites like Facebook which is also will then link to an Instagram account and then the list literally goes on and on. It didn't used to be that these bundles existed and at the time when services were being created there were many options that asked you whether you wanted it to be linked. However, a concern of mine is that it seems like it doesn't matter whether you attempt to non-link these services in an attempt to keep each individual account private. To this point, Gmail and Facebook are now offering linkage between different Gmail accounts and different Facebook accounts as if knowing that there is an interest for privacy, but ultimately it's a futile effort to attempt to hide it from them.

The reason for this is that with the rise of interconnectivity between websites and platforms has become a growth in analytics. One instance of this is how much market research goes into search engine optimization and figuring out people's marketability personality based on the things they look up, the events they want to go to, and their prior purchases. All of the Big 4 have substantial involvement in data analytics of their users to the point where they can print out reams and reams of information. I believe it was Max Schrems who requested that Facebook provide him with all the information they had collected on him and they were tracking everything from what he shared on Facebook, what he put on privately, and also constantly geolocated his IP address and the people he contacted on the website in order to establish a profile on who Max Shrems was to them. This mass of information was even used by a political consultant agency called Cambridge Analytica in order to design political advertisements that would resonate with free spirited and independent thinking Millennials. Analytics has also been exposed to be an issue on the part of operating systems like Windows 10 in which Microsoft informed users that they were running a "telemetry" read on users to observe functional data e.g. their time spent on specific apps. Microsoft on boot up now allows users to opt out of several metrics that they were collecting on for information like speech feedback to Cortana, tailored experiences with diagnostic data, relevant ads, and constant location tracking. In a more benign form of usage, popularity with analytics can be seen with market services like Amazon which track your spending and viewing patterns to curate better recommendations. Due to the continued growth and success of an industry like Amazon, there is a competition for improving research algorithms into gathering data conscious and subconscious into human behavior, there will very likely be a point where programs can infer journal like daily histories from users solely based on trends from IP oriented triangulations, credit card spending, and other forms of passive information to establish meta-data patterns.

Finally, we have witnessed the last frontier that my parents likely never imagined when they thought MS-DOS was the bees knees. Control. I own an HP OfficeJet Pro, it is one of the best pieces of commercial hardware that I have owned. But the ink prices are absolutely atrocious, basically they made a pretty sturdy/efficient home office printer so they could overcharge you on the ink. The solution that I have found as have many others is to use third party ink providers like 123inkjets which sell ink for 20-30% of the price. The only thing is that OfficeJet Pro was aware of this so they used an automatic firmware update in order to to have the printer recognize third party ink manufacturers and then refuse to run with them. As someone who buys in bulk, I literally had around $200 of ink that were potentially a wasted investment until the manufacturer caved in after several months and decided to give users the option to revert back the firmware update patch. I have not firmware updated my printer in the past 2 years.

This is not a one time instance. Apple has admitted that for years it has slowed down older iPhone models through firmware patch updates and specifically agreed that iOS 11.2 was designed to suddenly shut down older iPhone models if the program suspected that the battery was not up to Apple's standards with users reporting that their battery would have 30% to 40% battery life before the phone would just black out on them. Samsung faced similar accusations with respect to the Galaxy Note 4, however did not concede to any wrong doing. It is interesting to note how hardware failure is a one sided affair with manufacturers being able to dictate the terms of service on users even though they have recently introduced flawed and dangerous products into the pipeline. One such instance is the Galaxy Note 7 which was notorious for exploding due to faulty compatibility with Chinese batteries with one instance occurring shortly before a plane flight. When the manufacturer controls the consumer, there is less and less recourse for consumers as products become more in-house and there are less options to home brew, seek third party handymen, or to simply try to fix it yourself.

Connectivity, analytics, and control can all be used as effective tools to improve user experience. However, they have been used for alternative purposes such as assisting the FBI in catching elusive criminals like Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) the founder of Silk Road. Silk Road was an illicit website that had a marketplace where people offered and accepted bids on illegal drugs as well as services like obtaining fake passports and ordering assassinations on other people. The website was theoretically crack proof requiring the use of Tor network (onion routing) in order to access the site and only accepted Bitcoins as currency (before Bitcoins became a popular phenomenon). Correspondence between the FBI and private companies like Google resulted in cracking his identity as they were able to know which cafe he would use as a hotspot and his VPN provider which he would use as an initial mask before utilizing an onion routing program. This is an instance of how all the aforementioned factors could be used to achieve a net positive.

These tools which were used to catch DPR can be used to catch anyone... this is where you go, "Acro man. I read through 7 paragraphs of your Livejournal post. I am invested man. Don't do it man. Don't do an M. Night Shamlyman ending." The last issue that has come up within the past couple of years is ethos. In some bizarre twist, Silicon Valley is developing an ideology and running business practices according to what they think is right and wrong. Patreon, a service that enables creators to post projects and enable other people to fund them has specifically denied projects to people they deem to be inappropriate according to their ethos. Jack Conte described a very vague set of standards which the website operated on in which it believed that certain users/projects/goals were not in congruence with the ethos of the company. Twitter has posted that it will ban users who insist of misgendering or misnaming transgender people. It has other rules in place designed to represents its ethos.

We are back to the beginning. When it comes to tribal cultures there is often little to no time to consider who is the target when the trigger finger is already itchy to hunt down savages. When it comes to a tech company that knows nothing about you, the meta-data they have on who you are and the groups you are a part of and the places you go and the things you spend on represent a more truthful picture of yourself to them than anything you could say in court. And so, when corporations themselves begin to literally inject their own ideology into their own business practice there is an interesting question. Am I a target? Will Google Maps navigate me to roads of higher traffic rather than the most efficient pathway because it identifies me as an enemy? Will my phone blow up when I'm in the middle of a flight? Will my laptop shut down in the middle of a presentation to a company viewed as being ideologically evil to the Silicon Valley collective? With the existence of quasi-government partnerships, what information is there not to obtain with the NSA and Silicon Valley firms working collaboratively on projects to collect information on American citizens?

Technology has changed since MS-DOS or when I tried to write a paper when geocities/angelfire were the most reliable websites for third hand information. So to go full circle, what do you hate about the internet?

 

[Sucumbio]

Because so far everything has proceeded exactly as predicted by early writers, so-called predecessors of cyberpunk. Jacking in. Elon is going to put us in a true position to connect digitally and no one thinks twice about how they use the internet every day even if they're neo luddites like my parents. I don't see it any other way anymore which is why I still don't use anything outside here really. Sometimes I'll broadcast myself on whatever but honestly it's not my thing to constantly socialize.

The internet is like a city. Just like all those stories and strange graphical interpretations... The place has its seedy side, the high rise the burbs... But unlike say early days of Library computer catalog removing card catalog, and library culture/social setting.. The internet is 2 way. You can use it to get information but you can also deposit information for everyone else and THIS makes the Internet the largest Community ever. Being we're still human, that entails a cultural and sociological melting pot.

I think it should have been regulating back in 92... But oh well. See I unplugged in 99 and when I came back 2 years later I was like.... Wut. Hahaha billboards everywhere. WAHWAHWAHWIZZZARD... BUFFERING...
and today it's just a cesspool of the worst lines of thinking drowning out the best.

Oh well. I'm Goin To Mars.

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

Sucumbio That's cool. What did you gain from your insight of unplugging from the internet in 1999 and what caused you to come back two years later?

Also what are some examples of stuff that you would frame as being the "worst lines of thinking" because I have my own take, but I'm tired of shredding my keyboard and drowning you out from fleshing some of your thoughts in this thread because I feel like you have a unique perspective that a lot of other people would benefit from your sharing (if you feel open).

 

[Sucumbio]

Sucumbio That's cool. What did you gain from your insight of unplugging from the internet in 1999 and what caused you to come back two years later?

Also what are some examples of stuff that you would frame as being the "worst lines of thinking" because I have my own take, but I'm tired of shredding my keyboard and drowning you out from fleshing some of your thoughts in this thread because I feel like you have a unique perspective that a lot of other people would benefit from your sharing (if you feel open).

Lol yeah I've missed the text walls in this place. But there's an example. How often do you glance a wall of text, commit to reading it, and are none the wiser for your time?

When I unplugged it was because I used the internet to date and in 99 I was engaged. Two years later we broke up and I met my now wife. The first relationship was with someone who disliked technology except when pertinent to their needs which meant I had to barter for time just to play final Fantasy lol. Yeah didn't last (and for clarification she was met "IRL" +spit+).

Having learned that living with someone requires a certain frame of mind I went back to the Internet and found exactly what I was looking for though that in itself was a little like fishing.

While I was not using the Internet for anything except by proxy (as in second party) life was actually different because all social interaction were face to face or by telephone and this ridiculous distinction between real life and internet life has always annoyed me. But that's beside the point.

Going back in changed me to a degree. But that's also ironically timed with the insurgency. All these dot coms e-commerce bla bitty bla it started getting to the point where if you didn't have an email address that wasn't just for work you may miss on a genuine opportunity.

So I use it but I don't have to like it. Had the world wide web been parsed from get go into categories where some are read only and free, read only and not free, read write free read write not free I mean that's only 4 categories... Anyway hope that better illuminates my personal take.

 

[Holder of the Heel]

A problem is that the internet sphere is unnatural, and so is the connection to billions of people. Interaction with people that you do not see, do not hear, with no repercussions, no investment, no physical signals, no connotation, etc. There are advantages to speaking through text; you have the opportunity to look at what you are going to say and reflect on it, refine it, and judge whether it's worth posting. But most of the time that does not happen. I mean of course--after all, if we judged whether or not we should post something, there'd be very little on the internet in the first place. Speaking in person is much of the time inherently useful in some way, whereas online it serves little to no needed function, and any social bonds forged are innately going to be more shallow.

It doesn't help that, as animals, we can hardly comprehend the lives of others and our local society, but when we go online, much of the world pours in and, our brain, ever seeking to make judgement for the sake of our survival, is flooded with information that does not at all contribute to evolving in our immediate surroundings, but instead warps it to fit a shadowy perception of the world at large. Again, not everything about this can be bad. The internet as a tool is indispensable to our growth, and some times our immediate surroundings are very bad, so going online for interaction and help is a necessary and logical step to take.

There are probably, I'd wager, consequences due to the fact that the online world is made up of words, which may contribute to the ever ideological world we hear more and more of. Our brain naturally is going to be tribal and make sweeping conclusions, it is our wont to categorize each other and as you say, ourselves for protection. But an online arbitrary title does not provide this protection we are compelled to seek. It's congregation is not physical and not founded on the basic building blocks of an ecosystem in "real-life". Progressively we forget that words are tools to be used, sounds we make from our mouths to convey practical information, as opposed to actual things in reality. I believe there is a word for this: simulacrum. Words are used to map reality, but here online, words are the world, and this perception doesn't just end when we close our laptops or turn off our monitor. We carry our time spent, all the sensory data we pour in, everywhere we go with us, even when it doesn't fit where we are.

We're animals, not robots or angels, and I don't believe we take up ideologies for the sake of virtue but instead of some sort of self-defense mechanism, a kind of compensation or way of further our interests, and at times our opinions might even fail to do that, as misbegotten as they may be. Nor are we an avatar of our ideological tribes. If someone says they are of a religion or political party, we can make some judgement, but really how well do we know them just from that? So many people fit into terms such as Christian or liberal, and so on, but how incredibly different are the people who make such claims? What do they have? What do they do with their time? What do they give to others and what do they take? It isn't very effective to reduce people to opinions, but online it is quite a natural thing to do, because words rule here--it's all we have access to.

I'm under no delusion that I'm exempt from this. Hell, really I can't make this post without there being a bit of irony in many ways. All I can do is try and be self-aware and moderate my usage in quality and/or quantity.

 

[Sebas22]

I think opinions are cool.
Most of the time.
Ok, sometimes.

 

[---]

I think opinions are cool.
Most of the time.
Ok, sometimes.

Given this is the Serious Discussion/Debate Hall board, please elaborate your on thoughts more before posting as to better carry on the conversation.

Sucumbio

 

[Kansiwiz]

This is a good read. I learned a lot and I walked out feeling smarter. Thank you.

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

Holder of the Heel The "internet sphere" can't be "unnatural" because the internet in and of itself holds no qualitative or quantitative characteristics. The term "internet sphere" in and of itself is such an unnecessarily broad starting point that it fails to account for important intricacies between something as basic as outlining the differences between YouTube and Twitch. Although a layman could argue both are video streaming platforms, the content delivery and the formatting it provides are so fundamentally different that familiar users can probably discern which platform is being used based on cues from the live streaming content creator. It is important for me to start with a criticism and initiate with an example because it establishes a concrete starting point for an actual conversation to happen. I'm sure that if you caught me on a good day, I could humor you and agree with the concept that the "internet sphere" is a sphere where "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" exists in some vacuum like state. But when it comes to the applied notion that actual live streaming services that capture billions of views on a daily basis and is a format that is not accurately captured by the idea that anons are engaged in:

Interaction with people that you do not see, do not hear, with no repercussions, no investment, no physical signals, no connotation, etc.

Then I have to start out with, "I don't agree with your initial premise." Now let's make something clear, this is very much a trivial point. I think your starting point is flawed, but the rest of your post contains interesting content that I still want to branch off from and I don't want to mindlessly argue about the nature of the "internet sphere" of which I think is a completely useless starting point because it's literally such an abstract, broad, useless, and flawed concept to get caught up on that I had to knock it down as a device in order to explain to you how I like to have a conversation with other people.

The next concept that you presented is this idea that long-form text content offers self-censure through editing. However, you state that people don't really self-censure themselves despite the feature being available. You also insist that there would be less content on the internet if people actually considered whether or not they should be posting in the first place. // I think that there needs to be elaboration on what we're deciding is a content-delivery platform. If you're talking about Facebook messages on politics and I'm thinking about Verge technology reviews on laptops then there is a large gap. I have the feeling though that what you're referencing in terms of "speaking through text" is what I'd personally call crap. Crap is kind of that thing where there is too much of it, but if you squeezed your two neurons a little harder to close your sphincter shut there would be a lot less **** to wade through in life. I don't read crap and I don't think it being excised or exorcised is a bad thing. P.S. Dieter Bohn with the Verge has been one of the few product review journalists who I think actually cares about review accuracy and it takes a lot of effort in order to fool me into thinking a stranger actually values their work output.

The last concept in this paragraph is the idea that there is an inherent benefit to be gained from speaking in person whereas the same is not true when it comes to an online format with you then making the additive statement that social bonds (from the internet) are subsequently "more shallow." // I completely disagree with this on multiple levels and I know that at least on this issue that contemporary society agrees with me. First and foremost, if you have nothing important to share then you're wasting my time. When you're wasting my time, then you're also wasting your time talking about your new ketogenic diet or how your makeup had abestos in it. This is the same mistake that secondary education is attempting to correct with their professor on a pulpit model. Do you think if a professor had a million dollar idea, they would share it with an entire class of people? **** no.

In fact, the documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson pointed out Frederic Mishkin from the Colombia school of business was commissioned/given a bribe of $124,000 to write a report about Iceland's economy following deregulation of its banks. Mishkin coincidentally wrote a glowing report, Iceland's banking system collapsed less than a year following the 2006 report. Glenn Hubbard, the dean of the school regularly publishes academic articles that are referenced in the business world to justify laissez-faire economics while being a board member or two major financial groups (KKR & Blackrock). Both these men also held civil appointments within the United States and played a role in gradually shaping the economic policies that contributed to the subprime financial crisis. The net worth of both of these men is incalculable, but officially somewhere between high six figures to low seven figures.

A more benign example for people in the sciences is for people who are going hard in STEM. If you are someone who is taking those advanced classes involving rigorous research, then you know that you are honestly burning your time in class just wanting to know what the **** is going to be on the exam. 99% of the information is going to be material that you are going to grind on your own in order to make it yours. The professor talking about how much they love hazelnuts isn't teaching you how to retrieve FAST sequences from blast.ncbi to engineer a modified T-DNA strain to transfer drought resistance to a drought poor species of plants. However, when it comes up in your research or as a test question then you are fully expected to be competent in being able to approach the problem. That's on you, it's not on them.

STAT published an article in August of 2018 whose opening line puts it aptly, "The future doctors of America cut class. Not to gossip in the bathroom or flirt behind the bleachers. They skip to learn - at twice the speed." Nationally nearly 1/4 of second year medical students reported they almost never attended class during their first two years. How are they learning all the medical material they need in order to be physicians? Through online material, online lectures (not usually from the class), and an index card application called Anki. It's literally peer learning with the professors often times being useless sock puppets and going over their ketogenic diet and abestos makeup. Who did you think I was referencing with a statement like that?

A 2018 article from Inside Higher Ed discussed statistics from the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics which showed that from 2016 to 2017 there was a postsecondary enrollment drop of 90,000 students in the United States. However, the number of students who took at least one college class online grew by more than 350,000. Furthermore, another consideration is the growth in Coding Bootcamps that correlate with the demands for computer science, software engineering, coding developer, or what falls under the umbrella of coding jobs. There are plenty of narratives of graduates with non-CS degrees who are able to land jobs based on their ability to problem solve via white board and through whatever coding interview was given by FANG (Facebook, Amazon/Apple, Netflix, Google). These coding bootcamps are online with most involving independent learning and do not involve face to face learning. Skype/Discord are used if you find yourself stuck learning a concept or problem solving through a coding question.

Bestowing knowledge that gets people trained, helps people with career development, and gets them hired isn't shallow. The fact that most of these functions are being better met through an online medium where students are very grateful that their time isn't wasted by face-to-face semantics in an increasingly ridiculous SJW climate on college campuses indicates that there is something to lose from "speaking in person" that didn't use to exist a decade or so ago. Notably with events at the debacle in the Evergreen state college requesting that a historical Day of Absence involve no white people actually being on campus and academic representatives of Oberlin College accusing a local bakery shop of racial profiling after arresting three of its students for shop lifting, there is a charged atmosphere on some college campuses where having an opinion may land you a lifetime of harassment from not just ignorant peers but also from the entity of the University itself. This notion of saying the right thing and only the right thing is such a pervasive sentiment that the outlet for actual speech is probably not stated in person, but more so written anonymously on the internet.

--- --- --- ---​

It doesn't help that, as animals, we can hardly comprehend the lives of others and our local society, but when we go online, much of the world pours in and, our brain, ever seeking to make judgement for the sake of our survival, is flooded with information that does not at all contribute to evolving in our immediate surroundings, but instead warps it to fit a shadowy perception of the world at large. Again, not everything about this can be bad. The internet as a tool is indispensable to our growth, and some times our immediate surroundings are very bad, so going online for interaction and help is a necessary and logical step to take.

There is a lot to departmentalize here, again, as I disagree with a lot of basic concepts that you are using as building blocks. First and foremost, there is a difference between using the analogy that humans are animals v. pointing out that human nature is essentially tribal. Animals are actually more in tune with their fellow animals on an instinctual level with wolves having a high level of sophistication when it comes to pack behavior and hunting down targets. Honeybees operate on a complex superorganism level when it comes to decision making for the colony which popularized the colloquial term, "hive mind." When you state that humans are animals, it's difficult to ascertain whether you are using a type of slang like, "You're a filthy animal" or if you're actually trying to make a valid point of comparison. I'd like to also like to do a brief spillover into your next sentence when you use the term "evolving" in more of a sci-fi (X-Man-esque) type of way over preserving the actual term of evolution in and of itself. Evolution as a concept is the macroscopic application of natural selection over a gross period of time, however the way you are applying it here is that humans could theoretically self-induce a mutation in their own genes in order to conquer their immediate circumstances. Perhaps this was the case for fictional characters like Dr. Manhattan or X-Men Wolverine: Origins, but the idea that humans, animals, or what have you are evolving to immediate surroundings is a conceptual miss.

There is a human tendency to extrapolate general behavior off of personal trends. For instance, people who use the internet for pornography or videogames often don't see the shadowy perception of the world at large because their immediate surroundings are videogames and pornography. If I asked you Coursera, Udemy, or Lynda you probably wouldn't know what I'm asking about or if you did understand and then I asked you Bros, AnKing, or just Firecracker then the likelihood that you understand both lines of questioning is even slimmer as there are a select number of people who are interested in learning either programming or medicine. However, a dramatically even lower amount are interested in both those fields to the point of being curious enough to explore either options. In other words, you don't know what you don't know until you sincerely decide to start pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Perhaps I buy too much into the savior narrative that coding bootcamps and DIY learning trumps any form of institutional learning because people understand what works for them the best in the immediate moment. However, I know that there are people who are able to tap into the vast resources on the internet and escape poverty. Perhaps this difference in what the internet holds is generational, I grew up in a time where you needed capital to burn through product in a warehouse if you were interested in setting up a brick and motor store. However, with online business models available and platforms like Amazon, it's no longer required for you to have to deal with some retail market cartels that require an arm and a leg from you in order to push your home brew product inside their store front for a limited shelf space for a limited period of time. This is not to state that we should shame the idea of the internet being a very good platform for videogames and porn, it's just that it's completely up to the end user whether they want to confront their own shortcomings or whether they want to escape from them and go to Neverland.

There are probably, I'd wager, consequences due to the fact that the online world is made up of words, which may contribute to the ever ideological world we hear more and more of. Our brain naturally is going to be tribal and make sweeping conclusions, it is our wont to categorize each other and as you say, ourselves for protection. But an online arbitrary title does not provide this protection we are compelled to seek. It's congregation is not physical and not founded on the basic building blocks of an ecosystem in "real-life". Progressively we forget that words are tools to be used, sounds we make from our mouths to convey practical information, as opposed to actual things in reality. I believe there is a word for this: simulacrum. Words are used to map reality, but here online, words are the world, and this perception doesn't just end when we close our laptops or turn off our monitor. We carry our time spent, all the sensory data we pour in, everywhere we go with us, even when it doesn't fit where we are.

We're animals, not robots or angels, and I don't believe we take up ideologies for the sake of virtue but instead of some sort of self-defense mechanism, a kind of compensation or way of further our interests, and at times our opinions might even fail to do that, as misbegotten as they may be. Nor are we an avatar of our ideological tribes. If someone says they are of a religion or political party, we can make some judgement, but really how well do we know them just from that? So many people fit into terms such as Christian or liberal, and so on, but how incredibly different are the people who make such claims? What do they have? What do they do with their time? What do they give to others and what do they take? It isn't very effective to reduce people to opinions, but online it is quite a natural thing to do, because words rule here--it's all we have access to.

I'm under no delusion that I'm exempt from this. Hell, really I can't make this post without there being a bit of irony in many ways. All I can do is try and be self-aware and moderate my usage in quality and/or quantity.

It's not hard to adopt and accept the notion of nuance without masturbating into rhetorical questions about it. The issue is that a lot of people aren't aware that when it comes to social media platforming how they are being unconsciously placed into market interested skews. Part of this is by design from programmers to end-users e.g. creating Discord sub-groups for your fetish, interest, or hobby. Facebook pages for specific interest groups. However, the more concerning element is that another aspect of skews is that it's very friendly when it comes to analytics oriented market research e.g. your autofill completion preferences, your preferred purchases, channels that you would like to view based on prior viewing habits. These types of analytics to consumerism in conjunction with giving people echo chambers of ideology where they can have someone else reaffirm their thoughts on evolution means that these people essentially insulate themselves from being called out on their ****. These are the people who don't give a **** about the shadowy perception of the world at large because they are too busy giving each other hand jobs while they are chained to the walls of their own caves.

I think that utilizing a conceptual framework, abstract concepts, and some type of profound self-reflection has an effective place when it comes to making points. However, when all you type whittles down to abstract bull**** with no root, it's hard to initiate a serious conversation because the person who takes on a more conceptual approach is analogous to being the ultimate slacker. What the **** do I gain from this conversation when I feel like the only effort you are expending is some word salad of a figment of an idea that came to you while you were smoking a joint.