Internet Culture and The The Never Ending Drive to The Lowering Mean

Something I have noticed and felt in my interactions is that the internet is being divvied up by certain leading cultures that subsume others whether the people of that group want to be or not. Between the continued attempts at boards being cannibalized by pole / p o l / but I can't type that because of the spam filter so pole will do And because many of these leading cultures have some of their more wordy and thoughtful people come here to discuss semi-civilly for now. It would be nice to at least discuss the future of what will be social interaction on the internet and the people that will generate as kids become exposed to the internet at every aspect of their life. What this synthesis of and sterilization of communication will do to the mass psychology of a people who may as well be sewn to screens will be manipulated. How certain maxims that once were true such as "Once its on the internet its there forever" are increasingly becoming less true, how this once perfect memory is tainted and rewritten. How the conversation of this thread could one day be screencapped and years later when Lainchan is gone become attributed to some redditors or a group on tumblr, who when someone reposts it or some scraper comes through looking for things to give them karma or upvotes uses the thoughts of those he has no connection to; to build a name for himself. The dynamic of online communication is changing, and we are vestigial remanants of something that once was. The days of piracy, raids, anonymity, imageboard humor and the adversarial nature of conversation are going to not only be replaced but possibly erased from the record of all but the memory of its participants. Snapchat, Instagram, and proprietary chat services have supplanted forums and as imageboards become engulfed in pointless noise we can count on death here as well.

I did not see a question as part of your post, but I do agree with what you are saying. The problem is that the originality of thought is greatly outsourced to the droning global groupthink that is the internet in far too many ways. As original thought becomes lost in the ease of information access of the internet, so does the civility that comes from introspection and seeing the world through others eyes. The /pole/ mentality that you speak of is a symptom, rather than a cause, as people search for meaning and unfortunately find the loudest voice and follow it. In all areas of life, people are increasingly bound to the net, but as slaves to a system as willing addicts seeking social recognition, rather than choosing to positively contribute to a community system for the sake of benefiting others. The physiological needs of man are being more easily met using technology. as men become more of highly connected beasts than technologically integrated ubermenschen. (I use that word with the implication that we could use technology to be the best and greatest humans to ever have lived in societies that are refuges for independent and productive thought while allowing for a fostering of the body and mind) Rather, the simplicity of online systems means that social norms of everything from aggression to courtship rituals become so detached, that we live in an on demand world. we are rapidly moving toward a future where on demand sex is a norm (aside from current psychological implications of pornography permeating society and the need for humans to desire sexual interaction as a programmed biological response) app based dating and relationship systems supersede all social norms and promise rapid and physiological gratification of reproductive instinct. Similarly, the love and belonging that humans would typically desire from society is increasingly being provided by the medium of social media. The "likes" "shares" and "karma upvotes" that you speak of are merely a symptom of engineered happiness that meets or exceeds the basic idea of what it means to be loved or having a place in this world. Those of us who grew up in the infancy of this culture, or rather grew up in the absence of this technical dependency will fade as ghosts, as the anonymous nature of image boards where people posted to post original thought, rather than posted for recognition will slowly disappear in the face of increasing "togetherness" of society. If I were to blame anything at this point, I would not be able to place a particular root cause of this phenomenon, but in short, it seems like technology, rather than liberating man from his earthly confines and providing a means to live eternally (relatively) in his musings and ideas, has been used to provide man with temporary fame and a means to become more animalistic in his behaviors >tl:dr the internet is turning humans into high tech animals trying to fulfill biological urges instead of technophilosophers who strive to better mankind

I see something like this sequence: >anon is one of the few people who do stuff online, and is on the edge when he calls OP a glorious winged flying baghette, goes to /pole/ to insider trade jokes and laugh at people who take them seriously, posts his 911 folder on the "happy 9/11" threads every year, joins the fun in the sniper thr, and joins raids looking all over to find personal info on people who mistreat cats. >later, normal person joins the internet like everyone else, doxes himself on purpose through social media, he's not laughing when he rages on facebook partisan politics arguments, unironically browses /pole/ or is exposed to it through the TV, actually thinks that flying fagets are actually glorious and winged and should have a gay character in every movie because diversity, is convinced that gore crap like sex reassig surgery is part of human nature, and his stuff now populates the internet. >anon looks around and sees this actual madness, nopes and heads out to lainchan, wizchan or maybe some alternet or something, where threads are as slow as in 4chan twenty years ago, even though there's many times the amount of people online now, but at least he can have a talk with anon. When there wasn't a lot of people online, internet culture was defined by the actions of the people online. Now that it's massive and the outpouring of content is centralized and away of the individual, internet culture is molded by a few outlets through psychosocial Ed Bernays crap. And people actually believe it uncritically, so internet culture becomes actual IRL culture. Now we learn, the hard way, that subculture has to be created, not consumed. And that applies to cyberpunk as well, lain. To hell with the new Scarlett gits movie, when there's Drugs and Wires and (I think) some other indie cool stuff. Don't be an unthinking consumer, be a wise creator of things and ideas, so we don't fade as ghosts, as lainon said above. I think that's the strife that's shaping internet culture, and its future, now.

I understand what you're saying, and I've noticed the same thing. As the Internet becomes more saturated with content, and becomes a home for ordinary people, the kinds of thoughtful discussions that were once a standard become overshadowed by whatever content can satisfy the most people with the best ratio of time to payoff. It's hard for me to remember the last time that I thoroughly invested time into reading a blog, not because they don't exist anymore, or that the content is not as good, but because of the sheer amount of other, more concentrated content available that can satiate me faster. It was only a matter of time before humans found a way to exploit their reward systems to this degree. The feelings of satisfaction that one would get from a relationship are becoming more and more overshadowed by the swiftness and potency of dating through services like Tinder. In that event, where do long-term goals such as those for one's interpersonal lives lay? As a note on the schisms between internet subcultures: is it possible that the Internet's popularity and the constant change of those sites' culture could be causing it? Maybe it's a stretch, but I feel it's harder to fit in with a subculture nowadays as it constantly undergoes changes, requiring more time to be devoted to understand the subculture's humor.

The general availability of community through social media and gaming platforms and the ease with which these communities can be accessed has created a shift in power. Back in the day, you only had one or two good mailing lists on a topic, not many forums, not many servers to play on. The content was in there with the small community, who still didn't spend all day on the internet as their 16 color monitors gave them headaches. Meanwhile you were out in the cold, and most likely needed the help and benevolence of the community to get the technical howto required for accessing the content, as there was no company selling it and no google/youtube to explain it step by step. This scarcity of the good stuff made you cooperative and ready to adapt. Now there is an abundance of stuff, and since there's thousands of times more people producing content and many of them have the entire day to do so, there is time and resources for soykaf content to be made and distributed, and many things are accessible regardless of your behavior. You can't lock people out from google, youtube, wikipedia, reddit or facebook for trolling your forum. Just as most public spaces became policed and now all citizens have equal rights and freedoms, you also can't really punish people for coming into your neighborhood, trashing it and then leaving. This feels incredibly powerful and so many do just that. Others often realize that while the original fun of serious discussion is lost realize that larping and casual chat can still net them some value, so they settle for that. This new, even more casual and policed situation allows for even lower level of social-casual trash to appear, and the bar keeps falling until someone realizes that what they are doing is basically social media, except that its technologically inferior to facebook for the purpose, and so they all move out. Thanks to the ease with which good content can be taken and reposted somewhere else, and the social status that some people get for keeping a low profile inside the community while they smuggle value out, it's technically impossible to effectively recreate the scarcity from before. I have doubts whether humanity has become more animal-like than before. Perhaps we just lack records, as the cultured enough people of their time found these things disgusting and of no value and refused to archive them. Most of the world has become less physically violent than before, thanks to policing, but the impulses remain and now find different outlets. Mandatory education, bureaucracy and social media introduces people to jargon they don't have the time, IQ or will to actually understand, but they use this jargon either way. This process results in orders of magnitude more bullsoykaf that, unlike what the old eccentric dude rambled about in the pub, remains neatly archived in the cloud. If anything, I'd say we're just gaining more insight into what humans were like all along, while the ideals built on the volatile and selective nature of human memory are falling apart in the clench of NAND.

>>8284 >Don't be an unthinking consumer, be a wise creator of things and ideas, so we don't fade as ghosts, as lainon said above. I think that's the strife that's shaping internet culture, and its future, now. Not a 100% certain but i think it was pascal blaise who said ideas are not original but impressions are. Culture is there ultimately to be consumed and sometimes recycled. All ideas and arts we take for granted had to go trough thousands of years of evolution to reach their current state. This relies on combination and refinement of ideas. Ultimately it takes both for things to thrive, you cant create anything without having a basis and if nobody will bother picking up on your work then what is the point. Our situation is dire indeed, but i am confident that we will prevail in the end if we persist and resist the mainstream.

I've been online virtually every day since early 1998. For the most part, the internet was better off back then (as well as most of the 00s) than it is now. Sure, there are more videos that are interesting on Youtube, but that is it for the most part. In the past, people were about as self-centered and as caustic as ever, but the internet was more or less a place to escape from real life and to vent about the things that one would otherwise not be able to talk about and to become something that one would otherwise not be able to become. Now, not only is the internet an extension of real life, it molds it. This would have seemed to be a utopian wet-dream to some naive technophile in the 90s and perhaps the 00s, but in reality we all know that it has become a nightmare in which identities are forced upon you ("Oh, you don't want brown people to come into your country in mass droves and rape your women in the name of Allah? Well, you're a Nazi!") and social norms are decided for you without any real understanding by not only those who blindly follow them, but even most of those who enforce them/make them! We are living in a time where the internet is a stable physical medium that was birthed by a stable society that has given rise and now upholds a set of anomalous, abstract ideals in the ether than have no congruency in real life and yet has still held together, only to have this patchwork of bad ideas and foolish decisions support a society that is slowly going to ruin, only to in turn bring the source of the problem down with it. It could have all been prevented with a little bit of humility and self-awareness, but the narcissism that is inherent in those who want the world to be their oyster simply couldn't have it that way. So, here we are.

>>8300 > Oh, you don't want brown people to come into your country in mass droves and rape your women in the name of Allah? Well, you're a Nazi! You're doing the exact fvcking thing you're bitching about.

>>8301 That doesn't invalidate what I've said. And I wouldn't have said it if it wasn't happening. You're committing a meta-fallacy.

>>8302 > I can have opinions, it's the people with OTHER opinions that ruined my apolitical safespace

>>8303 You're reading too much into it. And you're also providing an example of how aggressive people have become online, which is sort of what is being described here as a problem.

>>8304 If you call this aggressive you might not have fit in very well on the early internet.

>>8305 It was a bit different back then; people attacked others for their personal qualities or behaviors on a forum or obscure website, rather than what their beliefs were or some minor, innocuous thing that they said or shared on some major platform like Twitter or Instagram. Like I said in my original post, people were caustic from the beginning, but it was more human and understandable in that they still saw people as people and judged them for what they did as an individual person. You rarely see that anymore.

>>8308 Considering that many here prefer communities with majority anon or even forced anon, seeing other users as actual people beyond the last single post you've just read at a given time becomes difficult. Also the more of an individual person with an identity you become, the more at risk you are in this culture of doxing people.

>>8281 Too much hyperbole and colourful words. If you are worried that your sekrit klub is taken away by average people drowning it in meaninglessness than I can safely assure you that this is not the case. There could have been nothing better than FB, reddit, instagram and/or other online communities. What I more read into your post (e.g. speculation) is that your reality doesn't live up anymore to the nostalgia goggles you have on. Your other online friends or regulars have already moved on due to changes in their lives, hence you perceive the forums and imageboards dying out. Another theory of mine is that these people never were like you in the first place, since they went to faster and less deep discussions as you share in the aforementioned communities. Cognitive dissonance might keep you from fully realizing this right now, but think about what I said before rejecting it as BS.

>>8315 s/than/then

>>8304 Actually I brought up the adversarial nature of things online being lost as a bad thing. Its the inability to be adversarial but continuously moving forward in the discussion that is dying. Ad hominems which should be allowed for users to speak naturally, with a large enough amount of people deride into arguments that subsume threads. Its the lack of conflict because otherwise it feels as though I have a therapist droning on for me. >>8315 >too much hyperbole and colourful words fuarrrk you glitterboy if I want to write in prose I will Its not secret club anything its signal to noise ratio from places becoming flooded. I can't think of a decent conversation I ever had on 4chan, very few on 8chan. But I've partaken in many good discussions on small forums and smaller imageboards. If the secret club mentality was to be attributed to anything it comes from people wanting to prevent that flood not wanting to larp as Freemasons or the Knights of The Eastern Calculus. The symptoms of a group online getting overrun are what I've noted. >moving on I already know they have. I'm not stating that imageboards are dying, I'm stating their cannibalization is being standardized. This is far different than saying they're dying. Of course smaller ones are definitely going to die. >faster and less deep discussions In smaller imageboards I've noted that people do run out of things to talk about at a point. And then its just brewing soykaf to keep the board moving.

>>8318 > I can't think of a decent conversation I ever had on 4chan Never ever? In some of the less weeby boards it was more possible in the past. Some of the devoted nerds there had really astounding amounts of knowledge about certain things, especially trivia about stuff that was behind the media being discussed. Occasionally there was something anecdotal and since the average LARPer doesn't put any effort in, it was usually easy to tell what was BS or not. Also I have found now that I have nowhere at all to discuss certain things, especially of a sexual nature. In among all the perversion-as-shock-value material and cartoon squids raping boys in drag, every so often there was an honest discussion about sexuality. You just had to ignore the driveby trolls and people crying about degeneracy (you came to the wrong site mafukka) there was a space, in anonymity of course, to talk about sometimes very personal stuff. Everywhere I go online now, places where talk about sex is even welcome, there is simply no one interested or even anyone who grasps certain things. brb grasping a certain thing atm amirite

>>8318 >can't think of a decent conversation I ever had on 4chan, very few on 8chan I've had quite a few good ones, some leading to me actually adding some of these weirdbros on steam where I still talk to them. Depends on the boards you frequent though. >But I've partaken in many good discussions on small forums and smaller imageboards Some forums are nice, but I had some bad experiences in the past where the lack of anonymity killed it for me. Some individuals try to hard on some primitive biological directive to signal how special they are. Especially rating systems ruin online communities. Hence imageboards without these mechanisms remain superior, no matter how hard youtube, reddit and facebook may try. >If the secret club mentality was to be attributed to anything it comes from people wanting to prevent that flood not wanting to larp as Freemasons or the Knights of The Eastern Calculus. The symptoms of a group online getting overrun are what I've noted. I can relate to this, a famous imageboard I know was killed when they removed IRC only registration to access the posting function on it. You can guess how fast it was invaded when that technology skill-check was dumped. So this is where I come from with the "sekrit klub" notion. >their cannibalization is being standardized. This is far different than saying they're dying. Of course smaller ones are definitely going to die. Only the admin team must not succumb by lowering their standards to the denominator of other online communities. Can you give an example about a common way they are cannibalized? I'm not sure I understand fully. >people do run out of things to talk about at a point. And then its just brewing soykaf Well yeah, happens in real life as well. Even though some people and boards can make up stuff on the go. Programming or creative topics can thrive pretty long. I just want you to not see things darker as they are, maybe you just have a depressive episode. And yeah I'm reflecting since I often feel down for no reasons and it allows me to see a layer of society I'd rather not. Maybe I'm wrong, would have to ask a shrink. Pic unrelated, I wish Wendy's existed here.

>>8320 Imageboards are superior as long as there is something to continually engage the userbase. A board that has a constant of 1000+ IPs and pph of 60-100 goes too fast for me and doesn't let you ruminate on what was said. So an ideal imageboard has about 20 ips on average per board and maybe 100-200 for the site. It depends on the topics covered. I go back and forth on forums because they have a purpose and they have higher thresholds for signal to noise than imageboards do. They just devolve into mod crap at a certain point because of time investment the mods have to put in. They're not bad, just their lifespans of high quality are shorter and less frequent. For certain purposes I would consider them a must. Such as setting up a vidya group or conducting meetups for trades; but facebook has overtaken that sadly. Vidya trades however they are still superior as you can check reputation. >Only the admin team must not succumb by lowering their standards to the denominator of other online communities. Can you give an example about a common way they are cannibalized? I'm not sure I understand fully. I can two examples one failed one ongoing. The failed comes from Uboachan where seisatsu had his break accelerated by some polak coming in and brewing soykaf.I lurk on uboa once or twice a month but not enough to know all of their ins and outs But Uboa seems to have had discord drama so it wasn't just a lone nonfat-soykaf drinker. The other is 8/tech/ where leftypole and pole constantly derail threads and has probably led to the uptick in posters on this site as well. Both of these are cases where the administration was either absent, unsure, or incompetent. >I just want you to not see things darker as they are, maybe you just have a depressive episode. I'm actually not depressed. I've come to terms with the fact that the mediums I enjoy are going to die or be sterilized. I get angry over it on occasion, but I never got to the point of depression. Its more a matter of shoring things up for the future. I've thought of becoming a computer science teacher at a middle or high school and showing kids how to get into irc or using cli programs just so that they aren't bound by using app stores and installers. Teaching them basic opsec as well. But I want some actual experience in the world under my belt before I go into dealing with kids. The goal being that one of them would probably have the desire to break off from being literal niggercattle.

>>8319 Not the OP but try me, discuss something seriously with me and I will be as open minded as I can. What you wrote about no one replying was experienced by myself as well. I've received praise for some arduino or raspberry projects, even got stars on them, but no one ever replied back like: "Hey I rebuilt that thing and it's good, but can we add this feature together?" or just a pull request. And I promoted my code hard on imageboards, people were just friendly and moved on. Either it was too specialized for them to care or I miss some hint. It was nothing too weird like "that guy who knows every spec about trains".

>>8322 >fast boards Okay, slowly getting what you mean. Could compartmentalization define this? People who could have good discussions self-isolate in too many topics and force themself to skim-read only as the tl;dr virus infects them? now I'm hiding behind pretentious words >forums because they have a purpose and they have higher thresholds for signal to noise than imageboards do Because moderation is insanely powerful there, people know you by alias and some guys are just on a egotrip. I do agree though that the lack of anonymity helps when conducting business. For me it was often an issue, since I would get myself in trouble by telling some forum mods they are way out of their jurisdiction. On imageboards rules are more comfy, i get along here. >some polak coming in and brewing soykaf Had something like this on /vg/tesg and /vg/fog with a guy from the commonwealth of independent states, but the mods cracked down on it by looking at what ISP he posted from, but as soon as they were asleep threads suffered heavily from poor quality replies, just the way you described it to me. Sorry to hear these alt-chans were (temporarily) ruined by it. As for discord: Once got dragged into one and some regular killed it for me and a friend by getting jealous over how the admin preferred us suddenly. We just left because the drama was too much. Hence I love the most being an anon. >thought of becoming a computer science teacher [cut] showing kids how to get into irc or using cli programs [cut] basic opsec as well Really feel you right now, I had this desire once myself but for the natural sciences .Had to let go because of issues with myself since I process problems not quite useful for teaching. I'm one of those nutjobs who plays TIS-100 at uni by pulling out a sheet of paper and writing down his pseudo-assembler code, feeding the parser at home the solution and laugh like a maniac when it worked. Don't feel special about it myself, often have weird point-of-views what activities are fun. Anyway I pictured you like my politics teacher, he was a true oldschool *NIX friend and made me aware by 2006 already of the NSA spying, never looked down on him as a tinfoiler. Guess he had the impact that you would like to have later on, and I guarantee you that you will, if working with school kids is possible for you. Didactic methods are not my strongsuit, it is either understand my scatterbrain or be lost. I'm not proud of it, often it was an impediment. >that one of them would probably have the desire to break off from being literal niggercattle Nearly too late for that, look at these psychopaths from google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoBAIQjWoUQ (narrated by the verge) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hxs__6US5U (original video from google)

>>8326 >Could compartmentalization define this? That is a temporary fix but it just diverts attention from the main board. Its just a matter of size and handling it. Too many users and too many replies means participation in the conversation requires less thinking and quicker responses. >Sorry to hear these alt-chans were (temporarily) ruined by it. I've actually not had all the ones I browser ever really ruined by pole just I've noticed ones that I lurk get into conflict with them. I have no conflict with pole, I'm using them as my example for their aggression and because reddit is often blamedrightfully so in many cases and to make this conversation less typical I thought I would use pole as my example. They aren't the only one doing this and they've actually been burned plenty for what they've done with it. From r_td taking over 4chan's ub and 8pole having more problems than can be listed with reddit, moderation, and most recently boomers. They have plenty of problems of their own and their serious userbase who valued not soykafting things up have gone into bunkers or split off into things like /polk/. Who again are in bunkers because of how bad organ like to have later on, and I guarantee you that you will, if working with school kids is possible for you. Didactic methods are not my strongsuit, it is eitheization on 8chan is. They surface once in a while but their serious discussions are deep in bunkers because of how bad the noise on main sites is. >if working with school kids is possible for you Its not the main plan but if things go a certain way I would do it. Its one of those things where you can plant the knowledge in someone and they won't be at a loss when they can start using it or when they need it. >psychopaths from google I have seen those. And with schools integrating Google into the curriculum making emails for the kids, monitoring social media, routing things for the kids through Google and locking them into that os with no explanation of opsec its a privacy concern that is going to be a hellscape no one can imagine right now. Google who wants those kids to do what kids do with school machines and mess up getting into trouble looking at porn, gore, or social media will have had them reveal more personal information. And the teachers are just incompetent as they come and would wave it on as their job becomes more managerial and less instructional. Sincerely a note I hand out to anyone who may be able to use this but if you have kids don't let the school give them courses that put them through AVID or let the school make something for them with Google. It'll make your kid the Christian dweeb who was taken out of Sex Ed but if you're teaching your kid good /cyb/ rules you're doing them a favor. But bringing it back to the point its that you have people who were serious and genuine about topics unable to communicate and that people who enjoy low effort conversation are taking over as the norm. Which as it does people who want high effort conversation on the internet at large have to find places where its possible. With the internet centralizing into small services and many of them moderated heavily it becomes a hunt for places to talk without being drowned in noise or derezzed by mods with an ego.

Are there even old-fashioned forums any more? I've been looking for one to host a play-by-post RPG, but EZboard and Yuku have died, and I have an old grudge against Proboards for deleting a forum with years of original work and correspondence with old friends with no warning because of frivolous complaints from a rival board... All the old forums I used to frequent died, mostly forums attached to specific webcomics, or oddities like Barbelith. Disqus doesn't lend itself to PBP, with its strange shuffling of posts and making them appear and disappear, and imageboards are unsuitable because of anonymity issues.

>>8329 phpBB on a rented vps?

>>8327 >too many users and too many replies means participation in the conversation requires less thinking and quicker responses A workaround could only be to implement a logic into imageboards that detects the posts per minute in highly active threads. Let's say a new game is released, you'll have a lot of one liners that have zero posting quality. So you'd fire up a cooldown timer on these topics, at least 180 seconds per follow-up post or higher if needed. Some people will engage in richer conversations as they must somehow pass time till they can spam again, ideally they read other peoples posts during that delay. Some will continue to spam, the worst of all posters might actually back off to go to other threads without the cooldown. People surely will complain. >Its one of those things where you can plant the knowledge in someone and they won't be at a loss when they can start using it or when they need it. Provided they want to listen to it, there are a lot of hackerspaces that teach kids how to use a 3d printer or push some code on a microcontroller. Your audience is essentially those kids above the influence of social media, I don't want to say the others are already lost souls, but quite the amount will already be indoctrinated by early on conditioning as seen in those videos above. It is mindbreaking and brainwashing when those who don't subjugate to their Google AI assistant will be the Christian dweebs you described. Some also will outright avoid the nerd image of technology and have a strong bias against it in the first place. Expect to find a lot of people rejecting your ideas as tinfoiler babble. You'll get whataboutism, surrenderism and have-nothing-to-hide replies pretty fast. Just an example my whole setup is that of a turbo-autist, partially due to my politics and economics teacher redpilling me about the NSA in 2006 as mentioned above: dnscrypt, fallback recursive dns resolver with qname minimization, umatrix + ublock, cookie cleaner, custom userscripts and a strict firewall with CIDR notation rulesets. How to ship this to any average joe, they think you should be in the looney bin? Average people would be fine with a proper cookie scrubber + history cleaner + ublock I guess. Google having this level of power to penetrate the educational system is bad enough. I wonder how many people ever clicked and held down the mouse on a google link so it doesn't open yet, watching the URL change, showing that the request would actually be redirected through google's metric analyzer first as nifty JS changes the link as you click, bonus for adding UTM fields added for later tracking with google-analytics. Without a google-link-fix-usercript you're already fuarrrked and have the kids/adults whole search history. And some person will will say "b-but I have nothing to hide" and your whole argument is killed by a thought-terminating cliché. They will already assume you have dark secrets whilst you just are a peaceful idealist and anti-corporatist >>8329 I often see forums revolving around warez or phone ROMs with good off topic boards. Some privately computer game dedicated forums often have good banter. LARP and RP communities have been mentioned. Maybe some DnD and Magic: The Gathering?

>>8313 >Also the more of an individual person with an identity you become, the more at risk you are in this culture of doxing people. Sorry but I back the notion of this poster here: >>8284 Just read this https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25120783 (Cyber self-harm: Why do people troll themselves online?) Sounds like as described by 8284 >later, normal person joins the internet like everyone else, doxes himself People love so much to be offended, to be the victim and have their personal army. Another reason why non-anonymous communities with a pseudonym are terrible. I'm thinking of tumblr and twitter right now.

>>8332 > I don't want to say the others are already lost souls, but quite the amount will already be indoctrinated by early on conditioning as seen in those videos above. I have hope, its not pissing into the wind yet, but getting kids beyond that basic microcontroller closed garden environment is something I'd be interested in. I'd love it if they were skids running hacks on soykafty wifi networks and screwing with people that is much better than the Raspberry PI Arduino land we live in now. I already have met people with no concept of how software or programming works talk about how great everything is open source now. So hammering in the points of just how fuarrrked they are doesn't seem to work anymore. I've caught my best argument with people as to how to get it through to them with data mining being bad is that hacks and tech trickles down to the consumer market. The hacks a skid has available were probably available to the government five to ten years ago. A corporation three to six, and with leakers, whistleblowers and bad actors the average college student now. Bringing up that its not just the government but a company doing it and turning you into a commodity or some pedo working at the data center taking pictures of your kid without them knowing. Things like that tend to get their attention a bit more. >Expect to find a lot of people rejecting your ideas as tinfoiler babble. You'll get whataboutism, surrenderism and have-nothing-to-hide replies pretty fast. That one would, but I can't do anything for those people, what I can do is give an out to those who can use the knowledge of getting out botnet or being datamined. I'm not going to go RMS and tell them the difference between a hacker and a cracker but teaching people good habits like never hand your real name out on the internet or take photos of yourself should still apply and still be taught. Instead of schools encouraging kids to make social media accounts and link the school into them. Quite simply getting into a normal users head about how they're screwing themselves when they use the internet you have to use an emotional argument based on fear rather than logic. Logically we came to the conclusion to fear some things and have taken steps to avoid it. Our fears stem from understanding of the technology. To get someone who isn't familiar with this to have that fear, you have to hammer into them what this technology can now do and enables. And drop an easy out, not a big step forward like install gentoo, but dropping something like use tor or install linux mint on a junky old machine. A similar psychology to the eco-friendly movement but actually having a powerful effect compared to them. The more people off of windows10 the better. The more people not using Google Chrome the better.

>>8336 >getting kids beyond that basic microcontroller closed garden environment This saddens me a bit as a fan of the esp8266, which is probably one of the coolest MCUs you can get for $4 a piece. I mean the device has wifi and runs compiled C/C++ code pretty good whilst offering SPI, i2c, GPIO, etc. "Arduino" or ATMEL (Microchip by now) are probably walled due to their lack of IoT capabilities. Espressif offers safe IoT (when you don't use their firmware or the lu crap they offer by default) also if you make use of WPA2 and common sense when coding. What is bad about Raspberry Pi at all? It is a portable *NIX box with Debian >I'd love it if they were skids running hacks on soykafty wifi networks and screwing with people You can just do that with wifi packet freedom on the esp8266 (deauth or capture WPS pins) or a good Atheros and a RPi (capture handshakes for later brute forcing with ocl), but why suddenly so destructive? Messing with wifi is not nice, part of the reason why the "free radio" (open wifi for everyone) movement in my country has troubles. >people with no concept of how software or programming works talk about how great everything is open source now They are just insecure and don't know that open source itself is just BS, it needs to be Free (libre) && open source to be good. Help them to not blame themselves by showing off their ignorance. Belittling them won't make them change. >teaching people good habits like never hand your real name out on the internet or take photos of yourself should still apply and still be taught Yeah I try to explain this to my dad all the time, but he doesn't grasp it. He is so naive it makes me depressed. >dad: "But it is free and a respectable website so I can give them my real e-mail / name" I have to put up with stuff like that, from someone who once thought me to protect my data. Really gets me how social media made him a sheep. At least I convinced my parents to close their FB accounts. Told them that it is just a hate and jealousy machine, psychologist have good data how FB usage makes people more depressed. >tor / gentoo Just a good Debian installation would do, given how people use their PCs as facebook machines by now they still would get themself trapped again in the big data collection scheme. So why again turn them to skids?

>>8337 >At least I convinced my parents to close their FB accounts. Told them that it is just a hate and jealousy machine, psychologist have good data how FB usage makes people more depressed. That's great you were able to convince them to stop using mass survailance and mind control platforms, but how do you think we could get people to switch to actually secured and non-backdoored systems like RetroShare or ToX? Prefer non-centralized systems like NextCloud over Google Drive?

>>8338 I totally believe we could. I have good memories of using Antox on my mobile and it was surprisingly easy to setup. Sadly most of my friends stopped using it since it was inconvenient, mostly the lack of offline messages made it bad. Good old email + GPG is still the gold standard of secure communication. Sadly that is harder to explain than runnin Tox/Antox etc. If you can make security easy without making it less secure, that would be good. Many mobile messengers failed at this, like you don't even have control over your private keys. Also kudos to the guy who designed the genius tier logo.

>>8332 I tried RPol, but their mod team rub me up the wrong way. My mod style, when I do mod, is laissez-faire, they're nearly as obtrusive as appleman.

>>8337 >What is bad about Raspberry Pi at all? The company itself. And ignoring their opinions they've made public. Its that they put themselves in such a position as the fact there are other people besides them and Arduino doing the same thing, for less and doing it better. But with kids using these, its kiddies first linux distro normally and people are very prone to baby duck syndrome. Meaning that more worthwhile projects with better development and design are ignored just because one has a name and enough money to be in your face constantly. >why suddenly so destructive? Its a bit of me that wants a little chaos. The fact that if people were being screwed with more actively for constantly being online it would tone down a lot of this cloud bs. Instead I'm meeting people who remind me of grandparents who would put ie in the recycle bin and say they deleted the internet. Not everyone needs to be a techie but this is like letting people who've never been in a car drive. >Belittling them won't make them change. Never do, just ask them where they heard it and try to have a discussion about it. Pointing out that Open Source has turned into corporations sharing code with each other publicly and that everything important is hidden is a hard point to get a cross. But FUD hasn't settled in that far yet and I can still get through to anyone who has slight interest. >Just a good Debian installation would do, given how people use their PCs as facebook machines by now they still would get themself trapped again in the big data collection scheme. That is actually one of the things that doesn't bother me as much as when someone is doing it on windows. I've thought about moving all the old peoples computers in my family to linux and just installing a win7 or win10 theme in the DE. Because I've had requests to recover data from when the forced updates force things to soykaf for them. But as for turning kids to skids, its that I want there to be at least some people outside of cyber sec world that know how fragile some of the things they're using are. If they just learn some basic micro-controller flash an led 5 times and get your points, which for middle-high school kids is a cool thing. But making them focus on that is only going to out of those who continue make people who buy in certain markets. I've already had a problem with some specialized arduino shields lacking compatibility with some boards because of something proprietary, its consumer creation with public approval. So some years in the future when the market saturates and starts to cut fat to what it needs, I imagine everyone who's been working with those will be locked by company because of the company locking the board to their shields. I'd rather the kids who want to play with tech be well rounded rather than specialized.

>>8347 >But with kids using these, its kiddies first linux distro normally and people are very prone to baby duck syndrome. Nah I haven't seen any kids using a headless debian server. You're just full of anger spewing the soykaf at people enjoying a device that can be used for home automation. I know better stuff as the Odroid-XU4 exists, I know that the Odroid-N2 with DDR4 will be amazing, but I'm just so tired of uncreative soykafters who only use them to build "muh NAS" and never even hook-up something to the GPIO pins, yet I don't go around and lecture them or give them my BS. I like my weather station with wind speeds, UV index, temperature, humidity and air pressure. So if you give the raspberry BS you haven't even looked at the garbage tier support for other single board computers. Either they come with complete crap distros like Ubuntu or there is barely any support because their Rockchip CPUs have some terrible proprietary components that are hard to integrate. Raspberry is good because of the huge community you seem to hate so much. If you haven't figured out already why they won't ditch the BCM283X series SOCs like the other clones have. >Its a bit of me that wants a little chaos. The fact that if people were being screwed with more actively for constantly being online it would tone down a lot of this cloud bs. Nah sheeple will never change, but they will actively avoid you once you tell them how naive they are. Snowden, fappening leaks, Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and Wannacry were not enough to make them become more security and privacy aware. I was at a point like you one time, but all this fatalist soykaf gets you nowhere. You're not a 60 year old jaded geezer yet and neither am I. >already had a problem with some specialized arduino shields lacking compatibility with some boards because of something proprietary It is all in hardware, and usually you use SPI, i²c or regular GPIO to interface with a shield. Tell me how they could even lock you out? Like just look at the specs of the chip on your shield and come up with your own library to drive it. >imagine everyone who's been working with those will be locked by company because of the company locking the board to their shields Literally how? They would need disk access to my machine to edit the libraries. Cannot lock me out of something that was libre at one point.

>>8348 >You're just full of anger spewing the soykaf at people enjoying a device that can be used for home automation. Not anger at the people, anger at the company. Why shouldn't I be angry that they're putting themselves in a position that will guarantee them a share of the sbc market that will give us a mediocre standard for years. If people want to use them thats fine, but Raspberry Pi3 being the gold standard of ARM boards is retarded. The people who use it have hobbyist projects they want to use it for. The problem is I'm sensing an unfair market share and misplaced loyalty. I'm not going to go out of my way to rectify them at every point. >they will actively avoid you once you tell them how naive they are. I don't tell them how naive they are. Telling them they're being screwed doesn't work but for people like us, promising them some wizard powers for just doing a few basic steps in the right direction does. Its actually been the best argument I've ever had to get some people off of windows/osx: just tell them that whatever task they're doing can be done on linux and that their laptop will run faster with it. This works on the crowd that is somewhat competent with computers, but just telling them that their macbook from 08 can run just fine with loonix on it gets a lot of them off proprietary land. Thats why I probably brought up skids. Some people react in response to a massively bad thing happening and work on avoiding it and hunkering down. Others tolerate it, to get some of those who tolerate it off of it offer them something that gives them some power and they'll be tempted to leave it or keep that door open. Showing someone what you can do with wireshark or tcpdump actually got one of my friends to carry around a kali usb for his laptop. And if all else fails I tell them to just take a junk laptop and use linux on it. Laptops from 03-07 are going between 15-50 easy on CL and Ebay. Not to mention thrift stores and used electronics shops. >Tell me how they could even lock you out? Crap documentation, and the library was incompatible with the microcontroller. The company sold a shield compatible with the microcontroller for what I needed but it wasn't compatible with the one I bought chinksoykaf shot myself in the foot really. >Cannot lock me out of something that was libre at one point. Should have made that more clear, they'll just get a large enough market share and coordinate to turn things proprietary in the hardware and over time just remove things that were libre from the market. For instance say it occurs by 2030, Adafruit could get a deal to start producing its own proprietary microcontroller, by 2036 they make all Adafruit shields and peripherals locked into that device and by 2040 nothing from their preivious lines is produced. You'll have to buy your shields and components from a list of approved vendors, based on whats compatible with your microcontroller; they'll age out that which was open source and at a certain point you'd be hard pressed to find it.. That is what I meant, the market just needs to develop a large enough base of hobbyists with at least half of an Apple consumer's tolerance for bullsoykaf. And once that happens they'll pull all the soykaf they can, I'm not really in that scene, but it has to be coming, there's too many things going right for it to not happen.

>>8349 You ignored my point that support for other SBCs can outright suck at times and you avoid to name alternatives, which makes this discussion how bad RPi is rather single sided. SO tell me where do I get a good clone with regular firmware, distro and package updates which will not go EOL after a few years? Name the best alternative please. >I don't tell them how naive they are What else is it, if you want them to "be[ing] screwed with more actively for constantly being online it would tone down a lot of this cloud bs"? I don't find joy watching them run into the meatgrinder that is social media and the cloud. It's good though that you help some to avoid windows by teaching them about *NIX. >the library was incompatible with the microcontroller You cannot expect code from one architecture to work on another. Endianess already will screw you over if you move from desktop to an esp8266. So you just didn't want to check the functions / classes / whatever step by step and fix it yourself? >Ad*fruit could get a deal to start producing its own proprietary microcontroller Ad*fruit was always soykaf, they charge $20-30 for a GPS controller I can get of Aliexpress with just a months wait and $3.5, also the owner looks like a feminazi. But their github has some nice libraries. Some are outright forked from other repos. So there goes the illusion they actually wrote them on their own Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA! How is an ideal real microcontroller proprietary, except for the blueprints? I mean it should just execute machinecode, not use DRM on you. And tell me about my Rpi alternatives with top level support please. If you cannot link an up-to-date debian image for it I still will believe RPi is superior for just support already.

>>8350 >I don't find joy watching them run into the meatgrinder that is social media and the cloud. I don't either but when people keep their foot in the door they at least have an out. Getting people off of cloud services is just as simple as showing them that when you're locked out of Google or Microsoft for whatever reason your cloud goes with it Thats an experience that normally has to happen for it to sink in. When you tell people that most of their problems and needs for cloud can be handled by putting a 64GB usb on their keychain and they notice thats all they needed, they won't use the cloud service as much. Its here to stay sadly but its something that they have to get burned by for it to click for them. Its keeping the alternatives relevant that keeps it from being an absolute nightmare. I'm not a nag on these issues. Its a case by case thing, when I see one of my buddies who wants to be a tinfoil hat type, I tell him to go full FOSS and where he can do that. If its someone who is tired of Windows Updates I give them an easy in with Linux and say "At some point you'll probably want to move on from Ubuntu but this will do for now." When its someone who doesn't want to throw out a machine I offer to put linux on it and that its safe to browse the net with it. >Endianess already will screw you over if you move from desktop to an esp8266. So you just didn't want to check the functions / classes / whatever step by step and fix it yourself? It was a variant Arduino board by a company called SparkfunFriend had dozens of these and handed me one, apparently the same damn thing as what Arduino sold and it was some cheap sound shield from a Chinese company, that gave me the manual to something from the German product it was based on. Said German product had poor documentation and the library was poorly maintained and documented. After 6 days of fighting with it I gave up because at best it could power on and rejected any attempt at handling wav files. I learned my lesson and it's something I'm wary of. The library for the shield was from some German company I can't even remember the name of, and the documentation was bad even in German. My friend who had the same board just bought Sparkfun's shield and it worked fine, even though I tried their code on the Chinese shield it still failed. >How is an ideal real microcontroller proprietary, except for the blueprints? I mean it should just execute machinecode, not use DRM on you. My point is that they will once the market consolidates enough. It will be a slow process but in the end of it you'll have proprietary microcontrollers with DRM locking out competitor's components. Its not a stretch to think that Sparkfun would lock their board's that they've based off of Arduino's to Sparkfun's components. Or that some Chinese company selling the base components will be selling them as legacy 20 years from now when anything new for consumer's is proprietary. >Name the best alternative please. Beagleboard or even the knockoff Banana Pi, the problem with Raspberry is that the company is aggressive enough to kill the market and ensure mediocrity. Their board is fine, its the lack of competition that will ensure mediocrity when people snub their nose at things that are better.

>>8354 >When you tell people that most of their problems and needs for cloud can be handled by putting a 64GB usb on their keychain and they notice thats all they needed, they won't use the cloud service as much. Why not help them upload an encrypted container to the cloud? It might be a good place to backup stuff from a house fire. USB devices are notoriously lost, so you would have to encrypt that too. Then the only benefit of the USB device is that it needs no internet, but is not available all around the world. >and it was some cheap sound shield from a Chinese company >gave up because at best it could power on and rejected any attempt at handling wav files https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai2RrCrgZ1c You know I'm obsessed with the esp8266? You don't need wifi to play wav, but this MCU is simply OP. >the market consolidates enough. It will be a slow process but in the end of it you'll have proprietary microcontrollers with DRM locking out competitor's components FTDI tried this by putting code in their driver to fry chinese clones, literally destroying hardware. the soykafstorm was so huge they gave up. Only schools will fall for proprietary soykaf. Even youtubers moved completely to cheaper chink suppliers. >Beagleboard I'm not going to pay 58€ just to "hurt" Raspberry, smh Even though support seems just fine https://beagleboard.org/latest-images >the knockoff Banana Pi Allwinner.. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Allwinner-Stripped-Symbols Companies using their SOCs are on my soykaflist. Unless you want to encode / process full HD content when do you really need more power than a Raspberry? But I accept one of your alternatives. Maybe let's agree that Odroid and Beaglebone are quite good.

>>8355 >Why not help them upload an encrypted container to the cloud? I think I'll do that. Right now I'm a free tech support for my friends and in exchange I'm paid in beer or computers or computer parts. Like when someone just wants to chuck Grandpa's compaq from 94 they can't use. I recommended the usb off the top of my head, you can use whatever; but I think of how many lose their keys for more than a momentary inconvenience. If you lose your phone you might as well be locked out of the cloud service because of the authentication method. >Only schools will fall for proprietary soykaf. Even youtubers moved completely to cheaper chink suppliers. Thats all they really need to get people locked into their system. There's a reason Microsoft will if need be bleed money and strongarm to keep people on their platform. If everyone who gets introduced to it gets a free Proprietary Arduino board, at school or has to pay 15$ for it because of a class. Then goes deeper in the hole for some components it will be similar to what you have now with OS's where it just becomes too much of an investment or timesink to switch. https://archive.fo/H6PDA Archive of the below so you don't have to enable js https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/04/munich_linux_costs_ownership/ When you can get people on your platform and dependent, the ability to switch becomes more and more difficult as time goes on. People who have all of their computer needs handled and run through Google have very little need to even own a computer, when Google runs everything for them. >I'm not going to pay 58€ just to "hurt" Raspberry, They're my example but I can understand not wanting to pay more. For me they're in the acceptable range of what I'm willing to pay if I disagree with something from another. $10-$15 in price. Although I'd recommend the pine64 over the Raspberry Pi in personal use. Even though the rockchip is a pain in the ass to work with distro wise. >Companies using their SOCs are on my soykaflist. Even EOMA? ARM really is an imperfect world with a long list of compromises. https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

>>8356 >but I think of how many lose their keys for more than a momentary inconvenience Can print them out as QR code and hide it somewhere. I mean they are not hiding crime evidence with these passwords, aight? Sensible chuckle there. >a free Proprietary Arduino board But you must know that Arduino is merely a brand name for a company soldering cheap Atmel (a company now called Microchip) MCUs on development boards. The Attiny Atmega chips will never try to lock their fans out. >Limux Heard the people working with it accepted it, but MS bribed the city of Munich. Also there is a new MS HQ in Munich now, what a coincidence! >For me they're in the acceptable range of what I'm willing to pay if I disagree with something from another. $10-$15 in price. The Orange Pi fits that range well, costing 8-12 bucks in china depending on how much RAM you want. But Allwinner again.. This is why we can't have nice things. >Even EOMA? Not too familiar with them yet.

>>8357 posting my 2nd image, take note of the kernel version this is quality support

>>8356 >ARM really is an imperfect world with a long list of compromises. Why do you give ARM bullsoykaf and then link an ARM Cortex A7 based Allwinner A20 CPU?

>>8360 Because its FOSS and is one of the least foul smelling turds in a sea of crap. I can give Intel soykaf for being insecure and corner cutting or AMD for being proprietary and energy inefficient they've gotten a little better about that though without saying "Don't use anything! Its all botnet, its all hard to use!"

>>8361 Something that uses SOCs by Allwinner can never achieve FOSS for as long as they keep violating the (L)GPL. Pretty much all SBC require you to run at least some form of bootcode binary by the vendor before you can execute the first ELF. So I assume that firmware blob is non-free / proprietary in pretty much all ARM cases?

>>8362 shameless self reply, I think open RISC-V architecture could overcome this, if it ever moves to mass produced cheapo SBCs it's open but is it free? https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive1/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hardware/open-source-risc-v-ready-take-intel-amd-and-arm-data-center

Freedom U540 processor specs include: 4+1 Multi-Core Coherent Configuration, up to 1.5 GHz 4x U54 RV64GC Application Cores with Sv39 Virtual Memory Support 1x E51 RV64IMAC Management Core Coherent 2MB L2 Cache 64-bit DDR4 with ECC 1x Gigabit Ethernet Built in 28nm process technology The HiFive Unleased development board specs include: SiFive Freedom U540 SoC 8GB DDR4 with ECC for serious application development Gigabit Ethernet Port 32MB Quad SPI Flash MicroSD Card for removable storage FMC Connector for future expansion with add-in cards I think the small one in >>8363 only has 320+MHz, so the big brother is the real alternative to ARM

>>8363 >it's open but is it free? When the hardware is open source you may not be able to manufacture it, but the code you run on it can be 100% free as anyone is allowed to write their own drivers for personal use.

>piracy, raids, anonymity, imageboard humor and the adversarial nature of conversation are just migrating to their proper place - darknet Let clearnet be the mall it was always destined to be. I don't want it. Darknets will be the first ones to peer and mesh successfully and be the driver of technological (and potentially social) revolution. Clearnet was dead from the start (ARPANET). Also I don't appreciate your tone, OP.

I don't know where to go to look for for new friends to talk with about specific things, in particular "deep" and "real" conversations. People on IRCs are often not very bright and primarily interested in brewing soykaf or smalltalk related to some hobby. The IRC channel for an imageboard is usually much worse than the imageboard. Where are all the "technophilosophers" from this thread in the IRC? Discord servers are horrible most of the time for obvious reasons, twitter I usually can't find anyone either. I don't really use either of those but sometimes I would look in places like that out of desperation. You can't just always ask people in a thread like this for their email or anything like that either, due to the anonymity "making friends" isn't really something that happens a lot on an imageboard. But you would think the internet would be the perfect tool to find people you are looking for, even if these kinds of people are a low percentage of the population.

>>10054 >Where are all the "technophilosophers" from this thread in the IRC? Avoiding it, for the reasons you mentioned.

>>10058 Well if you, or anyone in this thread is interested in having conversations like that, email is kurukuru@airmail.cc. I also have XMPP (kurukuru@creep.im) but I don't use it a lot, I'm in my rocketchat server most of the time but I'd rather get to know the person before inviting them to that. I look around the internet a lot and people like in this thread are hard to find.

>>8281 You must not get out much we already have on demand sex I go out find a submissive chick demand sex and then get it on.

>>8320 >Some individuals try to hard on some primitive biological directive to signal how special they are. I think this "special snowflake" mentality is getting out of hand and people are taking it too far, to the degree it just looks to me like cynicism. They dismiss people who have a self esteem and can recognize how they are different as just trying really hard to impress people. I'm not saying that you are doing this, but I know many people on imageboards think this way. Obviously there are many pretentious or narcissistic people who feel they are more unique than they really are and feel the need to flaunt it. I know that this has gotten out of hand too, with millenials often being seen as the special snowflake generation. This doesn't mean that actual eccentric people don't exist though. I even run into people who think that because everyone is unique, that means everyone is equally unique and no one is really special, since everyone is special. This is so stupid I can't even believe so many people unironically believe it. Think of it like this: you have a golden labrador, a brown labrador, and then entirely different breeds of dogs all together. Similarly, the variations between humans vary in extremity, even though we are all different. Some people's brains are born wired much differently, due to genetic mutations, resulting often in mental disorders, cognitive abilities, or eccentricities. One thing this has resulted in is the constant usage of words like "pretentious". People constantly attack other people if they claim to be smart or use big words, saying it's "/iamverysmart/" or some crap. The problem with this is a lot of people tend to dismiss people who are genuinely smarter than them as just being pretentious because they don't understand them. There was this recent episode of It's Always Sunny (which has gotten a bit worse I think) where Dee says some common sense thing and everyone thinks about it and then gets mad at her and says she sounds so pretentious. I really appreciated this because I am so sick of people abusing the word pretentious. Another problem is that being smart doesn't automatically mean you are humble. In fact many smart people were bullied in school, and feel the need to flaunt their intelligence to compensate, to show their worth. On top of this a lot of smart people are socially inept. Then you have posts like >>8315 that get on to people for using big or "colourful" words as if the only reason someone would do this is to hide their average intelligence under big words. Maybe it just sounds good to word things this way, paints a more colourful picture in the readers mind, or is mentally stimulating? People in the past seemed to write like this much more, and I think it's bad that so many people look down on it. Of course, you once again have the problem that there are indeed many people who do try to word things overly verbose in a pretentious way to look smart even though they're not that smart, and many people can't differentiate this person from the genuine person. Then you have of course dunning kruger effect. The thing about that is, while a dumb person would be more likely to not realize they are dumb, or even think they are smart, I think a smart person will at least suspect they are smarter in one way or another, they will just be more likely to question it. But they would typically see the signs that they are indeed smart. People form an identity around their positive aspects. A superb sports athlete would latch onto and focus on this ability and make it a integral part of his personality. A smart person would do the same. I guess one issue is something like athletic ability is easier to measure than a cognitive ability like creativity or intelligence. Nonetheless someone with cognitive abilities usually thinks different, and would be out of step with their peers and want to find other people like them, and start looking for other people like them. They would present themselves as being weird or smart due to this.

>>10089 >The problem with this is a lot of people tend to dismiss people who are genuinely smarter than them as just being pretentious because they don't understand them. There was this recent episode of It's Always Sunny (which has gotten a bit worse I think) where Dee says some common sense thing and everyone thinks about it and then gets mad at her and says she sounds so pretentious. I really appreciated this because I am so sick of people abusing the word pretentious. The problem with this is that there are a lot of people who really are pretentious idiots, and many of them can be found in academia and other supposedly intellectual fields. Academia is full of liberal feminist retards who throw out buzzwords and censor science for the sake of their ideology while they pretend to be the leading lights of scholarship. Deal with them and maybe people will start to respect intelligence again.

>>10091 >The problem with this is that there are a lot of people who really are pretentious idiots Yea I said multiple times that this is indeed a problem. The fact that being pretentious is a real thing, makes it even worse that people are misusing and abusing the word, making it lose all meaning. >and many of them can be found in academia and other supposedly intellectual fields. When I think of academic types I think of how there are different ways you can be smart. I don't really know any of the SJW feminist types though. I think for example that people in academia tend to often have a type of intelligence that makes them good at only academic things but not a lot of other things. Also they are often soykaf at thinking for themselves, kind of lacking some sort of creative intelligence maybe. You also have academics who are the opposite of this, great at theory but lacking any kind of structure practicality or discipline, but I am going to focus on the former in this post. It's interesting if you consider this in the context of genetics and evolution. There are two variants of the same plant, one with sharp edges and the other soft. The soft one will get eaten more and the sharp one will survive more. I'll get back to that in a minute, but I need to talk about something else first to make my point. Todays society is very bureaucratic (especially here in Germany), and emphasizes things like routine, learning the proper way to do things, and undergoing training in school to fit into society and get a job. The people who fit into this system will have a higher chance of surviving. A lot of people who think for themselves, have divergent thinking capabilities, or are creative have a harder time fitting into this system I think. This is seriously scary to me. There's this video from Jordan Peterson (who you don't have to like or always agree with, I don't always agree with him) where he talks about how being creative is "high risk high return strategy." That creative people fail most of the time, that it's like winning the lottery to succeed as a creative person. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocDli45faiw) For example many creative people have bursts of "creative flow". I think it ties into the manic episodes of bipolar disorder, but it's a much more mild and controlled form of it for a successful creative person usually. This is when the person is most creatively productive. You'll see many artists, musicians etc talk about this. Because the person has these bursts, it makes it hard for them to fit into a conventional routine. They might have suddenly creative inspiration at 2am when they should be sleeping, for instance. There are many more examples I could cite of how it would be difficult for a creative person to fit into todays society. On the other hand, someone who is smart in a purely academic way, follows routines, follows orders well, is calm under stress, thinks linearly, non aggressive, need to follow rules, no problems with authority, etc, this person will have much better chances of success in todays society. What this says to me, which returns us back to the sharp plant and the soft plant, that there will be a potential decline in intelligent creative people who think for themselves and a rise in intelligent obedient worker bees who think linearly and can solve problems using traditional methods and step by step processes without any significant creativity. Now of course I realize there are still jobs where you need creative problem solving, but I would view this as a very limited and restrained form of creativity, not the same as for instance how bizarre you have to think to think truly novel. Think of it like this: logical thinking is the ability to solve a puzzle. To solve this puzzle you need to find all the pieces first. To solve a mystery you need to find all the clues. To find the clues you need to think outside the box and let your mind wander into possibilities. Imagine in this picture the left is straight step by step thinking without diverging from the familiar and safe path, the dots are the clues or puzzle pieces, and the right is divergent thinking. The line going straight is going to miss many of the clues. If you think linearly, if you don't try to think in new ways, to change your perception, you will miss many possibilities and clues. Seemingly unconnected things often end up being connected in real life. But in many jobs, on things like tests, things are less often "seemingly unconnected" and you can use the knowledge taught to you in school and learned step by step processes, to solve a problem. You don't need to think into things like this, because the path to solving the problem is already laid out for you. I think that if you think linearly and are also a very logical intelligent person, then your brain is useful for solving step by step problems where "all the clues are already given to you" so to speak. You need the creative, divergent thinking capabilities to understand the actual world. What is disturbing about this is it implies there is a possibility that this is being done intentionally. Because how convenient would it be if people in power had a population of intelligent workers who can work complex machines but don't question things or figure out how life works and rely on the system? Some of this is just speculation. If creative intelligence is really going to become more and more rare, and if it's being done intentionally is uncertain. But it seems like a very real possibility to me, everything considered.