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In the past few years my parents, one a tail-end boomer and the other an early Gen-X’er, have become increasingly more and more difficult to have conversations with. They spout this FoxNews rhetoric every chance they get and my step-mom foams at the mouth blaming literally anything and everything on Biden (open a pack of chips and the bag splits on the side and it’s “Biden is ruining this country.”)
They’re irrational and exhausting. If they ever talk to my children about politics or even life in general, I’m sure I’ll see this post shared in our family group chat along with the other fucking stupidity they share.
Idk what happened or when, they were normal. Now, they’re banging on the walls of the looney bin waiting for a bed to free up
I feel like in 30 years (if we're all still alive by then) we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines. This is an observable phenomenon. Certain age and wealth groups have taken to the whole internet reactionary ideology like catnip. I don't know how else to describe it. If you're 55+, white, a homeowner, and you regularly wear polo shirts with khakis for fun it's like your whole brain got scooped out and replaced with conservative dipshit madness spinkled with minion memes. It's so common it should be a statistically noticeable blip.
They've become so heightened, so hair-trigger, they really do froth at the mouth once any of their activation words are said. They're often deep into Qanon, they concoct elaborate conspiracy theories that get more confusing every year, and they can't tear themselves away from Facebook. Is the problem they weren't weaned onto the internet like younger people? Like when I was growing up the internet as it is now was being constructed, I watched it grow and learned how to parse information presented to me. Older folk slammed face first onto the internet in like 2015, without the decades of acclimating to it.
Stories like yours and mine are so common I'm surprised there isn't yet an industry of family counseling specifically about de-programming reactionary parents/grandparents (there probably is already and that makes me sad)
I feel like in 30 years (if we're all still alive by then) we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines. This is an observable phenomenon.
I sure hope so. It's exhausting pushing back against the "it's just entertainment; entertainment has no effect on me" mantras of those consuming it. No one is immune to propaganda, least of all those who believe that they are immune to it.
I don't even know what to call the conservative propaganda tools at this point. They're like dopamine buttons for the most susceptible people. The only thing I know to compare it to are the people I knew who got addicted to WoW in like 2008 and would play for 30 hours straight.
I've seen it offline and in person: they are hooked. Some Reddit-style pedantic may get upset if I use the term addicted but as an external observer it does look like actual addiction. Fox News (or OAN or the like) has to be on a big screen and it has to be blasting at high volume or they seem visibly uneasy and shaken and if someone so much as asks for the volume to go down they get actually genuinely enraged.
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE FACTS, SNOWFLAKE? ARE YOU TRIGGERED?" -said by a 50+ year old man.
Dr. Drew is a chud so fuck him, but a long time ago I used to listen to Love Line. I really liked how Drew would talk about addiction. Someone would ask if something was an addiction or not. He would ask “is it having negative consequences in your life?” If it’s not having negative consequences, then does it really matter if it’s an addiction or not? Likewise if someone isn’t traditionally considered an addiction but it’s having negative consequences, then that’s where the problem is.
Like for me, I know I’m addicted to coffee. But tbh it isn’t really causing any negative effects in my life - I really do enjoy a morning coffee, I feel like it centers me - so I don’t really sweat it. Meanwhile even if someone isn’t “addicted” to Facebook in a conventional sense, if it’s causing negative effects in their life it’s a serious problem.
Older folk slammed face first onto the internet in like 2015, without the decades of acclimating to it.
Facebook went public in 2012. There's always going to be a lag with this kind of thing. Immediately before, Facebook was strictly for young people, mainly students. It was an unspoken rule that if older people or non-students joined, you didn't friend them. That changed quite quickly, really.
Fast forward to 2015. FB shareholders are only in it if it makes bank. And the interested security services partners are only interested to control the narrative. So they've opened FB to everyone. As you say, it's the first time the older generation has used the internet for fun.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of orchestration to make sure those new users hit a curated wall of propaganda from the get go. Because it guarantees an audience, which can be sold to advertisers. And it guarantees that the audience isn't going to move away from terrestrial and cable TV to consume anything wholesome. It's slop or nothing. So not only were they not acclimated. They never got a chance to become acclimated to anything that looked like reasonable discourse.
They did the same with streaming. Until around 2013 if you wanted to stream music or videos you went on YouTube or heaved ho and hoisted the skull and crossbones. Then came Netflix, which made the risks of the high seas disproportionately risky. So the same generation that ran head first into the FB wall started treading water in media libraries curated by the secret services on behalf of the haute bourgeoisie. They didn't stand a chance.
I'd like to be around when the records of 2010–2020 are made public in the FALCSRs of, say 2035 (too optimistic?), so I can read the books that come out revealing exactly what we've been up against.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of orchestration to make sure those new users hit a curated wall of propaganda from the get go.
That’s likely true, but also true that people tend to seek out the propaganda that already reinforces their worldview.
I think part of it is that for white boomers, both the USA and Canada offered a reasonable quality of life. You could own a home, 2 cars, and raise a family on a single income and a 40 hour work week. Neoliberalism (and the fact that this was unsustainable due to its reliance on imperialism) made this impossible for gen X. But at the same time, gen X was raised on red scare, anti-communist propaganda. They're unable to reconcile with the fact that the problem is Capitalism. And so they turn to the reactionary propaganda, because they have to blame something or someone for this decline.
Facebook fucks with people's heads even when they're not super conservative. Facebook liberals are low key insane too, just less aggressive
we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines
1,000%. My dad is usually just sitting and watching Fox News/Fox Business half the day. But there are times where for one reason or another, he doesn’t watch it for weeks. There is a marked difference in his demeanor in the two situations. He’s happier, less angry, and more apathetic (in a good way) to politics when he’s not watching. There’s something to the addictive quality of those things.
It's the effects of leaded gasoline and paint.
In the past few years my parents, one a tail-end boomer and the other an early Gen-X’er, have become increasingly more and more difficult to have conversations with.
I'm pretty old, but people that I know that are slightly older than me (Xers) are almost universally indistinguishable from boomer stereotypes. Effectively, they are junior boomers, but instead of a root of post-war abundance-driven selfishness, they had a root of post-Soviet-collapse apathy-driven selfishness.
The I came out on the right side of the end of history, loser, printed on their T.