A Boring Dystopia

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Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

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Are you using Lemmy / other networks to create noise in your life and to replace talking to people irl? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I grew up pre-internet and only embraced it at uni, early www time. I grew up not having a mobile phone because they didn't exist, went to the local (crappy) library if I wanted a map of the world or to do any form of research. Things most people today can do it seconds involved having to get up, go out, and interact with people one way or another.

I rushed out one day and forgot my phone and headphones. I got about 40m away before realising and thought 'meh'. Didn't make any difference to my day.

I look at what I do today, and even typing this wouldn't really have been possible some 25-30 years ago, unless it was in an email to someone I probably personally knew. I only had read-only access to usenet.

Now, everyone (and any bot) can write text on to another computer that others can be influenced by.

Posts that are clearly attempting to manipulate me are everywhere - propaganda thrived in the newspapers, on the radio, the television, and now internet. He who wins, gets to write history.

Having so much information at my fingertips (both biased and factual) mean I actually need to interact with the world less because any inquisition can be solved within seconds.

So now, I'm actively stepping away from the online and want you encourage you to do it too! I've started to read a physical book, ask more people questions forget my phone more often, and take a better look at the world around me, and things are so much more quieter!

"Muh anxieties" have no excuse because I need to forget about them to do stuff.

We're actually becoming a world of isolated people falling into particular funnels that shape us. Break free now and do something afk that scares you. Put your phone down, leave it at home when you go out, ask a stranger for directions.

You owe no online community anything, especially not your short-lived time.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago

Thank you for typing all this out - I concur on a lot of things, especially the politics. Once you mute the political communities, lemmy is nothing but gaming, linux, trans, and German and Danish communities about politics! All the noise across networks I suspect is from a lot of bots. For many years (even before LLMs), it's always been fairly easy to automatically create text posts to persuade and manipulate. Now, with the advent of LLMs, they can adapt to relevant communities and your specific post history to create hard-hitting "OMG someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them" noise, either to keep you engaged (a la facebook) or to manipulate you or others vicariously.

Just think, all that time and effort you put into typing your response (even if you can type > 100 wpm), you could have spent looking for a real-life community to join - board game clubs, a local coffee / tea cafe and you'll soon be talking to the regulars, a pub, even for a coffee (especially during the day time) and so on

Start with easy openly friendly people and work your way up. Or just jump in to speed dating and be stupid with it!