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DangerousVariant's avatar

Some fifteen years back there was some "studies" emerging around the introduction of the smart phone into physical interactions. One that struck me at the time was how this particular technology appeared to be a massive sink hole on empathy. Such that one needn't be using the phone while having lunch with a friend to register a decline in empathy. Merely the visible presence on the table was enough.

Now, it's easy to doubt these studies, if for no other reason than !Science! is on house arrest indefinitely, except that anyone paying attention over the last decade can plainly see that not just empathy, but the full spectrum of dehumanizing and anti-socializing effects has been completely internalized at an astounding pace. Particularly the young.

What if we tracked the emergence and adoption of smart phone usage then specifically at new mothers. Would it map with a rise in "ADD/ADHD" and "spectrum" disorders in their children some years later? I'm just an artist, but having watched a lot of mothers in those early i-phone years fully ignore their babies in favor of their phones across all types of situations, I could easily paint that outcome.

And so the dynamic nature of human social development means that these sink-holes of things like empathy do not just leave a vacancy but instead result in malformations and distortions. Skyrocketing narcissism, for example. The ubiquitous and constant access to social media is a brilliant - happenstance or not, cognitive priming tool for a massive inversion of physical reality aka Truth aka Normal aka Natural Law.

The manipulation of what to think, is the other shoe. Most people are already trapped in the conditioning of how to think.

Now what happens when the entire culture looks to these devices and the various curated chambers, removed from physical reality, to provide not just venues in which analogs of human social interaction can be played out but literal marching orders for what to think? Was there a tipping point when those venues replaced real life? Is there a going back or is this all part of the great divide, the great reckoning for our very souls?

Having never been on the socials or into the devices much at all, affords one a particularly keen sense of these changes. And it can lead to very dark thoughts of our future. So indeed, the inversion - and indeed the war on Natural Law, for me is what the good book is all about: your soul.

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Rob (c137)'s avatar

A lot of times you see these accounts pushing the narrative only reaching the already hypnotized.

This system is actually quite inefficient because the people in the middle should be the target, but the creativity of the propaganda has declined considerably. The people in power have become lazy.

That's why you see the tweet storms of the same exact message (with slightly different wording) to push jabs or masks etc...

It's so obvious to everyone but the hard line believers.

This propaganda is failing, because like the mass media, it caters to the extremists who will always support the "current thing".

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