There’s a tendency in this heated political climate to simply reject people who are saying false things and to write off conspiracy theorists writ large.
But as the US approaches the third straight election in which misinformation — and the fight against it — is expected to play a role, it’s important to understand what’s driving people who don’t believe in US elections.
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I talked to O’Sullivan about the documentary, in which he has some frank and disarming talks with people about what has shaken their belief in the US. But he paints an alarming picture about the rise of fringe movements in the country.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below:
WOLF: What were you trying to accomplish with this project?
O’SULLIVAN: So much of mainstream American politics now is being infected and affected by what is happening on what was once considered the real fringes — fringe platforms, fringe personalities.
And I think really what we want to do in this show is illustrate how these personalities may be pushing falsehoods, but they’re no longer fringe. This is all happening right now. And it is having a big effect on our democracy.
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I feel like the Internet has gone through three distinct phases. The first phase was primarily driven by individuals and a small handful of businesses. Content was highly limited, but generally positive. Lots of niche communities formed and most things had a very amateur feel to them, but everything was new and interesting.
The second phase was the rise of big corporations and the almighty ad. This was the first arms race between ad tech and ad blockers and gave us such evils as the pop up and pop under. A lot of the early charm of the internet was lost here. Everything started to become much more polished and commercialized, but we also saw a rapid expansion of content and functionality. This phase was heavily driven by corporations, and most of the early individual content was killed at this time.
The last and current phase is the social media phase. It’s kind of a hybrid of the previous two. We have individuals generating most content again, but it’s controlled, filtered, channeled, and exploited for commercial gain by the corporations. This has somehow lead to things being worse as corporations discovered that catering to people’s worst impulses is the most profitable decision.
You’re forgetting the pre-Web internet: 99% students & academics. It was largely awesome. When you did get trolled, it was by someone who could spell and form a cohesive argument.
Yup I was there at the edge of that (about a year before Mosaic released on a Mac).
Aol added usenet in 93 and we got on a lot of college servers, also with FTP, gopher and a little later, Hotline. So much warez and shareware games! I was in 8th grade then, had a 14.4 modem and life was pretty great.
Commander Keen nostalgia intensifies
Many neo-nazis used the BBS system to find each other. The funding model of direct email and such, that is used today, could probably be traced back to the early 1990s BBS forums. Scummy people have a way of finding each other.
The current phase is equivalent to reality tv. Made with people you don’t have to pay much, if all, and run by faceless corporations.
honestly im talking a bit further back pre www when it was basically education institutions.
Gopher!
True story: I made a Gopher implementation that sits on top of Apache. When I first met my wife, this happened to come up in conversation, and they mentioned that being from Minnesota, they used Gopher a lot in school. I thus married the first woman who came along who knew what Gopher was.
I honestly never got the hang of gopher. usually looked for an appropriate alt newsgroup.
Usenet and FTP were how we did it. Then we found Hotline in highschool (we had a Mac and a modem back then), and found some pretty sick servers to grab 3D software and games.
I’m not quite old enough to remember that first phase you are talking about, but I’m well old enough to remember the other two, and frankly, during them I don’t think the independent niche communities really ever went anywhere. But they are really dying or dead now, and it was discord that killed them.