@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@fba@nyanide@sysrq It turns out that they were just trying to double their efficiency: instead of putting people through deradicalization programs after extended exposure to The Four Chan, they made them all post on NAFO instances.
"If we were wrong, these programs wouldn't be necessary" I guess every single cult ever is entirely correct. After all, if the cults were wrong, their members wouldn't need deprogramming to escape them, right?
> "If we were wrong, these programs wouldn't be necessary"
I don't think it proves them right, I just think that it is hilarious.
I do think, though, that there is an inherent fragility to any organization that relies on repetitive propaganda and censorship for its continued existence; cults or governments or all those wignats that start repeating their slogans at you if you use one of the words.
I noticed something about, I forget, I think it was chess, but it was definitely not about race or politics, and I said on fedi that I had noticed it, and some wignat pops in and says "Noticing things makes you anti-semitic" and this was about the eighth time I'd heard that but this was so completely out of left field that I got pissed off at the guy, like they refuse to allow you to use some really common English-words without injecting their horseshit thought-stopping cliches. spectrumofallies2.jpe spectrumofallies-left.jpe
@Alex@p@nyanide@sysrq@fba@Leyonhjelm So true, may I interest you in learning about the evil which plagues our universe - the horrific creator Yaldabaoth - and how we can break free of this prison planet by striving towards Sophia's grace? :AYAYA:
@shadowferret@rdr@fba@sysrq@Alex@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@Leyonhjelm@nyanide Most of them are unloaded; browser crashes, I start it back up, those tabs are just URLs¹ until I click on them. Seamonkey is only at 1.6GB resident. (Firefox goes higher if I use it, but I almost never actually use it.)
¹ Technically, they are also GUI elements, they have favicons, and the stupid "places" data structure in Firefox/Seamonkey is more than a URL, it's a clusterfuck.
@rdr@Alex@Leyonhjelm@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@fba@nyanide@shadowferret@sysrq It's not any worse than having a bunch of papers on your desk or having a bunch of books you'll never read on your shelf. The vast majority of the tabs are things that I was looking for, found on the last tab, and then didn't close the other five.
There were two really great extensions that no longer work: "Close-n-Forget" (which closed all tabs from a domain and optionally removed them from history or cleared the cookies they set; really useful for clearing all of the open Wikipedia or DDG tabs) and "Close Duplicate Tabs". The Mozibbas decided to make it a pain in the ass to type some JS that just traverses the open tabs and optionally closes them; I'd really like to be able to write a script.
Anyway, since I refuse to do anything that I could make a machine do, the tabs now grow without bound until I finally go "All right, time to figure out how to do this by eating their thousand stupid sqlite3 databases or by traversing the thing in memory." The more likely case is that eventually I just stop using Mozibba products.
@nigger@Alex@Leyonhjelm@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@nyanide@rdr@shadowferret@sysrq I don't know if it has changed, but at some point I tried OneTab and they had hard-coded Google in for the favicons so I tried to find the repo to get rid of the favicons but the source was unavailable and I didn't want to edit minified JS. If the source is available, I could probably just read the hooks they're using and bash something out, but if the source is unavailable, I am back where I started.
@p@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@nyanide@sysrq@fba@Leyonhjelm Quick question, more out of genuine curiosity than anything else: how do we know that 4chan post is real? Like how do we know the buy actually had any insider information, and wasn't just making shit up? Or the less likely possibility, that he was saying the opposite of reality to lull people into a sense of security?
Didn't the semi-recent hack reveal that the mods were controlled, and something something Israeli IPs? In that kind of an environment, what exactly is it that make people trust this particular post?
> Quick question, more out of genuine curiosity than anything else: how do we know that 4chan post is real?
Everything I have ever observed from working at an office makes it completely plausible that a bunch of middle-aged suits would have no idea how to make a meme. (Recall that I am myself middle-aged.) Look at Peter Daou's entire career: Huffington Post, ShareBlue, Verrit. The type of skill that makes your career in politics is, as far as I can tell, mutually exclusive with things like "sense of humor" or "lateral thinking". You also have things like Kamala Harris saying at a campaign event that it's really dangerous to allow Musk to "speak to millions of people with no oversight": if they could steer it, they wouldn't be so panicked about no longer being able to censor it. Or look at the PowerPoints from the NSF report from ReclaimTheNet ( https://screamshitter.club/rvl/full/835374c1bfa10895663d4d1c94500049823ea928fb7e9c47b01a6b7f8f07c091 ).
Fundamentally, though, there is no way to really verify the story. Just everything in it looks completely plausible.
> Didn't the semi-recent hack reveal that the mods were controlled, and something something Israeli IPs?
The Israeli IP thing (which I posted a lot of) turned out to be a doctored screenshot posted as a joke. The bit about the mods being controlled, that was real.
> In that kind of an environment, what exactly is it that make people trust this particular post?
> But plausible things don't always end up being true.
Sure; this is the reason we have two words.
> I am cautious to completely believing it, or repeating it as factual,
The internal "de-radicalization" programs are actually documented; that's the only part I "repeated as factual"; it's about as factual as anything is unless you've seen it yourself. A guy tells a story on 4chan: that's a story on 4chan.
> Thanks for clarifying the Israeli IP thing,
I replied to myself everywhere I posted it, but the retraction never gets as much interest as the thing itself.
> It reads as absolutely plausible and possible, but we don't actually know.
By the time we have any complete certainty about anything, it will have already changed. The only thing you can do is take what's plausible and then you get a handful of complete pictures to keep in mind. Trying to collapse the wave function prematurely makes the interference pattern disappear. SSA-11-white-crusade-how-to-prevent-right-wing-extremists-from-exploiting-the-internet.pdf
@p@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@nyanide@sysrq@fba@Leyonhjelm Oh, I absolutely agree that it is completely plausible. Which is why I do find the post highly interesting, and I keep reading it every time I encounter it. But plausible things don't always end up being true. So to me, it's one of those things I am cautious to completely believing it, or repeating it as factual, because it kinda feels too good to be true.
Thanks for clarifying the Israeli IP thing, and thanks for your response. I guess we're ultimately in agreement. It reads as absolutely plausible and possible, but we don't actually know.
The mods, including moot, were controlled since at least GG. During Hill's campaign you'd often see posts supporting her that'd feel like paid posts. But they were never able to have a meaningful effect. I think the first time they were able to use memes successfully was NAFO.
It may may be impossible to to prove the post is real but it is is plausible under the circumstances at the time.
> I think the first time they were able to use memes successfully was NAFO.
...Well, debatable. Depends on what counts as a meme. They've done an exceptional job with outrage-farming and "emotional contagion" (as the Facebook researcher called it). If you mean the effective use of humor and satire, then NAFO still didn't pull it off.
Establishment careerists cannot pull off subversive humor: the type of person that makes jokes like that is the type of person that reads wrong in those workplaces. I don't think I still have this paper, but some humorless researchers decided to try to analyze humor, so they split it into different axes, they determined that children enjoy jokes based on absurdity more than adults do, and adults like jokes where you have to resolve an apparent contradiction. The Simpsons character replacing the "2" in "2 more weeks" with another sign reading "2", right, that's a situation where there's an apparent contradiction and then to understand it you have to reason that the previous message was "2 more weeks" and the current message is "2 more weeks" and this is a joke about the lockdowns. You have to kind of be swimming in that context to understand the joke and if you are the person selling "2 more weeks" and you are trying to stop people from questioning it, then you can't come up with that joke. Writing that joke requires you to be fluent in opposing opinions rather than just familiar with them, which you cannot do if you are a partisan on the other side. kony2012psyop.jpeg nafo_operation.jpg
@p@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@nyanide@sysrq@fba It was utterly pointless as well, the only point of NAFO was shitting up replies on pro-Russian (or not pro-Ukrainian enough) tweets. Making your own instances because of Elon, and then siloing them in typical mastodonger fashion... congratulations, you played yourselves.
> Making your own instances because of Elon, and then siloing them in typical mastodonger fashion... congratulations, you played yourselves.
I don't think people ran those instances because they hated Elon. I think it was feds; that's kind of my point. It was the Five Eyes version of the Russian troll farm or the 0.50RMB Army or the YCL, it was glowies. nafo.jpg
>If you mean the effective use of humor and satire, then NAFO still didn't pull it off. It didn't around these parts. It was very successful at organizing an online movement with inside jokes, internal symbols, an identity, an active community, irl events and so on. It turned supporting Ukraine into an enjoyable and fun activity, with constant gore and dehumanization on the side. Their humor and satire seems retarded to us but it is effective towards the people they were targeting.
I agree with both pics you posted. It wasn't only Kony2012, but it is this type of online organization that they've been trying to replicate. Regarding the second picture, being able to attract young people is a strength rather than a weakness. For the people participating in it, it was fun. Now compare it with Hillary2016 which was a total embarrassment. Meanwhile, Hill's campaign managers were rightfully accused of being old geezers completely disconnected with young people.
> It was very successful at organizing an online movement with inside jokes, internal symbols, an identity, an active community, irl events and so on.
It died when the funding dried up; I think it just managed to attract some random participants, it didn't really turn into a community. It's one thing to get people to show up and drink their beer while they watch the band, it's another for them to join bands and organize shows. Compare NAFO to something like Occupy Wall Street or GamerGate; astroturf doesn't set down roots. NAFO was not as long-lived as skibidi toilet.
> Regarding the second picture, being able to attract young people is a strength rather than a weakness.
Sure; not exactly the point, though. Ignore the Twitter person's commentary about the NAFO post.
> The #bringbackourgirls campaign of 2014 led to military intervention against the Islamist Boko Haram insurgent group in West Africa. Incredibly, a great power adversary seeking to understand US critical national interests during a time of crisis cannot entirely discount the success of memes as a leading indicator for the direction of US foreign policy.
I think this is "wet streets cause rain" at best and in the likely case is the author pretending that astroturfing isn't astroturfing: "Look at all of this grassroots activism! We have to follow the will of the people!"
> Virtue-signaling online communities can make bellicose threats and maximalist demands that policymakers cannot without risking credibility. Whether through deliberate government synchronization with meme generators and social media bomb throwers or not, trolls then essentially become bad cops to the policymaker good cops. The angry online mob calls for nuclear escalation within their ideological echo chambers while prudent national leaders claim to be exercising responsible restraint.
:threeletteragentglowsobright:
This last paragraph is essentally an acknowledgement that the government was running a glow-op.
>It died when the funding dried up; it didn't really turn into a community. Yeah, it was a marketing operation but a successful one at that, even if the war wasn't.
>astroturf doesn't set down roots. It doesn't, that is why it is necessary for them to subvert existing communities. They managed to get /k/ though, which is now an asset to them and will always be utilized during relevant events, like Palestine and Iraq.
>Ignore the Twitter person's commentary about the NAFO post. Article 5ing on twitter was fun for the people doing the beatdown, that was the whole point of it. Make it enjoyable for the participants to censor the opponents. What they describe as "mooks" from that very interesting article you linked in your other reply:
>mobs of interchangeable serf-like “mooks” mobilized by recreational outrage and snark to spar with ideological opponents of similar status. Mooks hope to signal their virtuous worth as rhetorical combatants to ultimately be elevated in the hierarchy to the level of knight.
> Article 5ing on twitter was fun for the people doing the beatdown, that was the whole point of it.
Well, that was a tactic (a tactic out of Alinsky), not really a meme. I mean, pulling it back around to the actual question, right, NAFO was not "the government has learned to meme", it was "the government can fund propaganda operations on the internet".
>Well, that was a tactic (a tactic out of Alinsky), not really a meme. Yeah, 100%, it was the successful application of said tactics online from their side (because /we/ have been applying these same tactics during GG, donglegate and similar).
>NAFO was not "the government has learned to meme", it was "the government can fund propaganda operations on the internet". Given your earlier definition of meme encompassing humor and satire (and truth), the government is never gonna learn how to meme. But what they need is to subvert online spaces and organize successful online operations.
> the government is never gonna learn how to meme. But what they need is to subvert online spaces and organize successful online operations.
Completely agreed; they do know how to subvert them but there's the hard way (send an obstructionist to pretend to not be a cop) and the easy way (White House calls up the Twitter Trust and Safety desk and tells them to censor something). (And other ways they use less often, like what they did to Gab.) The easy way was really convenient if you have a central management system (Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, etc.); fedi must look like 20,000 militias cropping up in the woods. I'm kind of surprised there haven't been *more* WaPo hitpieces. honeypot_militia.jpg
Yeah, but I don't think it's one or the other. The point is to subvert those places that in combination with mass marketing, will be able to positioned as the hubs through which normies will be funneled. It's not about taking us to their side, we can always be sidestepped. It's about controlling normies.
> The point is to subvert those places that in combination with mass marketing, will be able to positioned as the hubs through which normies will be funneled.
Well, yeah; if people stop getting funneled (i.e., they move to a decentralized network) then that's a problem.
Not if the biggest instances they are directed to are freeFEDextremist, fediFEDS and similar, while non subverted instances are fediblocked. Normal people can differentiate between mastodon[dot]social and poa.st. But they cannot differentiate between poa.st and nicecrew. They will go where they are told and where they get their cummies. As such, they only need to take control of some of the spaces, and then make sure that those are the "places to be". My expertise would be leftist spaces pre-Occupy but a similar process happened to hacker spaces.
Only connection with Washington post I can remember.
Its about the most worthless newspaper. It's good for local weather, I'll give them that but everything else is just cia marching orders to the MSNBC anchors.
@Whitewall_Blasphemy@laurel@alyx@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@nyanide@sysrq@fba@Leyonhjelm Many such cases. Nobody wants to be anti-whoever if they're running something neutral like a hackerspace, they want everyone to be able to take advantage, and then they get pushed into the enforced inclusivity and suddenly a recreational hacking zone has a totalitarian HR department, everyone's been conscripted into the social justice shit, the backbone of the place gets demoralized because it's a room they go into and apologize instead of a place where they go do creative shit they can't do at their dayjobs or teach other people how to pick locks.
@p@laurel@alyx@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@nyanide@sysrq@fba@Leyonhjelm Yeah, that makes a shitload of sense. They can't have people with minds getting an outlet or a movement. The media basically cheered the OWS being shut down but never really elaborate about how it fizzed out. Thanks.
@p@Whitewall_Blasphemy@Leyonhjelm@alyx@ceo_of_monoeye_dating@fba@laurel@nyanide@sysrq You posting about his made me search on those happenings the other day. Because I mostly knew about it from the memes. Thinking, that I won’t find anything interesting on Wikipedia, I went to Academic, expecting to find some articles, that would, perhaps, be too small and not covering it all, but written by independent researches. But there was a copy of the Wikipedia page, as it was on the 67th day, when OWS was still ongoing. It was quite interesting. Zizek’s quote seems to be found quite in time, heh.
The article on Wikipedia in its current state is heavily cut, it threw off several sections, including that one about activists (from where this quote is taken), they also removed the photo of the Jewish detective (my radar beeps) who was overseeing the happening. Žižek.png