The callousing of our callow youth

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell delivered a ray of hope.

Losing an argument to a 12 year old is sort of on-brand for Mike, given his non-consensual relationship with reality and enthusiastic disregard for personal credibility.

Mike mainlines social media election misinformation like Neo learns kungfu and he was caught on camera aggressively shouting a transcript of his twitter feed into the face of a child.

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That social media actively floods our modern attention, discourse and culture with the most antagonistic, inflammatory and misleading content is, of course, widely known.

As Stephen Fry recent put it, Facebook and Twitter … “are the worst polluters in human history.  Worse than any chemical plant ever.  You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world”

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It was while channelling this cultural grey water that the living drainpipe of Mike Lindell was deftly corked by the diminutive Knowa De Brasco. Drowning in a stream of shouty dross, the young Knowa delivered a Mike (Lindell)-dropping moment:

So your source is ‘trust me bro’?  You’re full of crap.

And here we see, in its verdant spring, the bounty which will be reaped from the malignant crop which Muskerberg hath sown: a generation born jaded.

The omni-torrent of social media bullshit is so prolific now that it is having a culturally epigenetic effect.  Our children are developing the new survival instinct of live fact-checking every. single. fucking. thing. they hear.

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Some may mourn the loss of innocence.  Surely our children shouldn't have to scrutinise everything they hear, shouldn't have to doubt everything they read? Why are they having these lies delivered to them? Can't we just force the authors to pay a higher social price for their mendacity?

Thus, a wistful fancy for a more trustworthy society may turn the heads of the hopeful momentarily, before the star-spangled F-150 of evil tech t-bones their shattered corpses into the GoFundMe-sponsored wheelchair cairn of America’s terminally bankrupt.

No, I say.  This innocence, like others, must pass - just faster and with more ad impressions.

Gish-galloping, gaslighting, grooming, all share the quality of overwhelming the victim with misinformation and altering their perception of reality.  All are on the rise.  

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The opposable thumb of skepticism, the enlarged cranium of critical thinking, the bipedal gait of the dialectic; if selected for by the information evolution, will be an everlasting boon, accidentally gifted to our progeny by the bane of social media.