The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.

I… remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can’t really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.

… And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.

Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.

Algos will always naturally ‘conclude’ that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.

Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.

We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I’ve read predicted or warned against.

My response so far has been ‘the only winning move is not to play’, I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.

They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.

… call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.

If they only still made them like Bowie…

I agree with everything that you’ve said, it’s sad and pathetic, but we’ve invited the monster inside. The calls are coming from inside the house now.

Black Mirror?

Oh, you mean the phone you hold in front of your face all the time, everyday, right?

When the screen’s not on… literally black, glossy, relflective…

Please tell me I am not the only person who immediately made that association when that show came out.

You definitely aren’t.

I really do feel terribly for Gen Z and A.

I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.

The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.

When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can’t afford it any more due to economic depression…

A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.

Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!

Untill that service is no longer available in your area.

The paper used pretty cool network science in their methodology. Since you’re clearly smarter, do you have any recommendations for the authors?

Cheers! Will need to schedule this for my evening reading session.

Thank you for the support!

I suggest moderation. One question; does the forum in any way affect the games themselves ?

Nobody is forcing you to read them.

Let me guess, though. People are saying things you don’t like, therefore you feel the need to censor it for everyone else?

Fuck you and all the children that agree with you.

You know who controls the you know what.

No, and most people upset about this are never exposed to it.

They want to censor things for everyone else.

I’m old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad’s truck. Didn’t have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.

I don’t think there’s any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I’d like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn’t make it.

“We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far…”

I wanna poke fun at you for actually having an 8 track, but at this point, culture is auto-cannibalizing, so I think we should just mostly celebrate, and maybe personally archive, what was once good.

Humble bundle had bundles for Sniper Elite, and Wolfenstein/Doom games. The Nazis don’t seem friendly in those games. Are you telling me they are not the bad guys?

I don’t think it’s new info that there is a substantial percentage of fascists in communities that are predominantly cishet men.

Haven’t played Sniper Elite in a while but I seem to remember being struck by how much they went out of their way to humanize Nazi soldiers.

Doom has Nazis?

Idk about Wolfenstein, but I have spent plenty of time in online gaming spaces.

8-tracks and 45s. I even remember early day modems where you actually had to pick up a landline, dial the number and then place the receiver in a specially built cradle that used analogue noise to communicate. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 that used cassette tapes to save data.

Best days of life if you ask me. Well actually maybe the mid to later 90s, when the Internet first started coming home for everyone. Watching live concerts and Napster and all of that. Instant messaging people, and being able to download every Nintendo game in existence, on demand. When computer games went from here to THERE, like Carmaggedon and games like that. Those were the magic days. When I discovered Napster I think we legit skipped school for almost the entire week.

Thanks for a trip through the memories!

Hey any time man!

Yeah I am a bit younger, but I dove head first into all things computer at a young age, so I completely agree with you that the mid to late 90s were… yeah, magic, just… incredible leaps and bounds being made by tech, there was a real optimism back then.

I was losing games of Starcraft in 98/99 because mom or dad picks up the phone, 56k modem now earrapes them and i get connection lost lol.

Trying to play Half Life 2, a few years later, on the same shitty eMachine… the computer could not handle the scene with Alyx being teleported in the intro / first level.

The uh, screen negative effect, plus the streaking emmisive particle blurs, every time it would crash so hard I would have to repair windows/defrag the drive.

What worked, was to stare at the floor that whole scene. That way you only get the screen negative flash effect, without the particles on top.

But yeah like, the leap from HL1 and like, Goldeneye style graphics, to HL2… fucking mind blowing.

Nowadays its all unoptimized UE5 garbage that actually looks worse in many instances than better optimized and more cleverly rendered games from 5 to 10 years ago.

Well the games for sure haven’t for the most part gotten any better. Maybe with the exception of the Rockstar games, like I totally get all the hate, but their games are also always next level.

And the dial up days lol. My dad wisely and thankfully got a second phone line.

Also I remember those underpowered computer days too lol. We got a 200 Pentium MMX the spring of 97, and that thing was cutting edge at first, but it quickly got pretty dated, like even around 2000 it was starting to struggle with some of the newer stuff. The old man insisted on riding it into the mid aughts. I was long and away at school and afterwards, with my own computers by then, but he rode that thing into the ground, and oh boy was it crawling at the end. We’d come home from school, where we had like wide open broadband, and have to suffer through Christmas break at dial up speeds lol.

Rockstar is so obviously just money grubbing for the last 5+ years that it is pathetic.

Yes, they do put out groundbreaking shit, truly S tier in many ways… but I won’t be playing GTA6.

Oh boy, two idiot criminals have shennanigans happen to them in Florida while they look cool and hot and do crime and appear to be basically morons with no personalities.

Meanwhile the GTA6 youtubers spend months, fucking months, inventing new gameplay mechanics by noticing random details and doing pattern matching like a schizophrenic.

Remember when GTA4 had like… a really serious and biting commentary on US society?

And then GTA5 was basically ‘nihlism, but expensive, and also infuriating!’

And now GTA6 seems to me to just be ‘lol thug life, life fast die hard, respawn, do it again.’

… Sorry, I could apparently write a fucking novel on how disappointed I am with Rockstar, they realized GTA online was a Steam like money spigot and then just never looked back, ruined everything in the name capitalistic profit they once artfully, and sullenly, exposed.