Help With Getting Out of the Echo Chamber
While the goal of this site is to help you understand whats happening, this is not for anyone feeling that they are in a mental health crisis, if you are, please reach out to a friend, loved one or call 988 to reach out to the national support system, it is confidential, free and there 24/7 for support or intervention. Asking for help is not a weakness, it is one of the bravest things you can do.
What is happening today is real, it was not planned out, it wasn't some conspiracy, but the echo chamber is real, the constant bombardment by things like "rage bait", leaders who act like nutbagz and the constant negative reinforcement from news and social media sites is having a drastic impact on not just us meatbags, but our country, and our species across the globe. We have legitimized snake oil salesmen as legitimate science and at the same time, we have erased culture and spritituality with science with that smug sense of elite self-righteousness.
At the same time, we turned capitalism into both a monopoloy and oligarchy. We have been pitted against each other, and if you speak up about this monopoly you are attacked as a socialist, if you speak out against a broken meritocacy in elite schooling, you are dismissed as some kind of uneducated fascist. Our newest generations are facing a broken american dream, massive student debt and an authoritarian system slowly replacing democracy as we knew it, it is not hidden, just look around and in schools, mass surveilance and the expectation of no privacy is the new standard, this is not a left or right issue, somewhere along the line we forgot we are americans and what that meant. We stopped even trying to find a middle ground, and groups like "No Labels" who offer a compromise are getting drowned out by a broken two party system.
All you have to do is go to news sites like Allsides.org or Ground.News to see it play out in real-time, and I encourage you to do that, but with caution. While these sites show the divide, they can also very easily exasperate it if you are not careful. If you are a boomer, you probably only watch one or two of the big four cable news stations and are spoon fed one side of the equation only, and its a narritive which is founded at times on complete lies. Unfortunately, those same people are also getting bombarded by social media bots who are disguised as news sources, much like most other people are. Ask yourself, how do you disseminate fact from fiction? Is it just only through the lens of your self-referential behavior, and if so, who has been shaping that over the years?
When I woke up from my digital detox, I opened my eyes to a country that turned into a monopoloy, was filled with psuedo-science, was masquerading opinion as legitimate news and two bad narratives that I refuse to buy into on either side. Personally, I never really cared about politics, that was until the Great Divide and people leveraging the tech I love and helped build to reshape us. To be clear, I don't care about the advertising stuff, that is just us being us, but feeding us false narritives is not who we are.
While they have us fighting each other through organized astroturfing campaigns, the real mess is playing out in real time, just search one thing to get a glympse, search on the phrase in order to beat china, we have to become china. They keep saying the quiet out part out loud, and we have become so polarized against our fellow americans that it is just white noise now. Once again, this is not right vs left, that is mearly the distraction, you have more in common with your neighbors who vote differently or fly a different flag then those in charge, we just got distracted, but its time to come home, we are in this together.
Comparing News Coverage
Lets explore how news has really just become opinion.
Wolf of Sheep
Visualize the Bias
An interesting site introduced to me by one of the cooler AI platforms (you know who you are lol). You can download the chart for free BTW. ad fontes media
Fact Checking Sites
Fact Checking is not one of those F-words, technology has made us a bit lazy, and the echo chamber has siloed us into their narratives. Own your thoughts and beliefs. FactCheck.org, PolitFact
From Misleading to Lying, Explore the Change of the Years
Annonimity and no accountability, the toxic mix, from the BBS days to mainstream news. A Toxic Mess
Collective Dillusion
Confirmation bias and humanities greatest weakness, tribal belonging over truth, regardless of the cost.
From Advertising to Pure Division
The tactics used today to divide us are not new, they have been around over 100 years, explore with me.Puppet Masters
Tips to See it in Real-Time
Learn to see it, research it, and understand it. This is an iterative process, but we were conditioned to accept what we were told.Own Your World
Keep Going
I truly hope you are still there, it means you already have some inkling inside that something is off. You may not know what, but you know this is not who we were, you are not wrong, you are not alone either. More and more of us are waking up every day and saying enough is enough, I do not accept these Terms of Service anymore, I do accept that what you are feeding my psyche, my soul, is remotely healthy or in my best interest anymore. Advertising was one thing, target advertising, whatever, using these same tactics to attack my mind to change the world view, nope, it will not work on me anymore, and don't let it work on you anymore, stop.
Lets explore this together because I promise you that you are not alone, and if you feel like the echo chamber around you was curated for you, and not by you anymore, you are right. But here is the thing, the more of us that know and get it, the more control we take back, and when enough of us decide to stop being the "product", the faster we can begin to heal that divide. Your neighbor is not your enemy, the person down the road with a different flag in their yard, they are not your enemy, we are just being conditioned to think that. The real problem, or perhaps the real question, is why, what is this distraction for?
Call it a grift, sleight of hand, look over there while I pick your pocket, its just a distraction, and its nothing new, we have just gotten really good at it and built the technology to amplify it. Its primordial, and you have to conciously choose to stop playing, you have to stop wanting to believe it, more than you want to find the truth.
