Hi all,
this piece by the Economist is a timely reminder of what is happening online. It's not just politics like Q-ANON or Incels (Involuntary Celibates that blame women for their celibacy). Echo-chambers can result in self-harm, like the young man I know of that committed suicide after too much time in peak oil circles.
If you are in an echo-chamber - have you stopped to really listen to arguments from the other side? Have you created an alternative world in your social media viewing? Do you find family and friends disagreeing with you not just on political opinions about things, but FACTS? Do you believe the Moon Landing was faked, Microsoft are putting chips in vaccines, and Bill Gates is part of a worldwide cabal to reduce human population (or hurt children or whatever)?
Try hearing from the other side. In my sillier youth (decades ago) a friend lent me a climate sceptic book. I was hooked - mainly out of sheer ignorance of the science. But the narrative grabbed me! There's something about alternative-truth narratives that can make you feel like you are part of a special group. Only your group know the 'truth'. And once you're online and in an echo-chamber - this gets weaponised. It gets to the point where family and friends can barely recognise you any more. I didn't go that far down the climate-sceptic rabbit hole. As time passed I got married, moved cities, and left that social group. Life moved on. Eventually I started to look up the claims from that book. They were either clever half truths or outright lies. It's just so easy for a seductive story to overtake the facts if we don't know anything about those facts. So if you feel like you're in an alt-truth echo chamber - check the facts from the other side. EG: 9/11 troofers - the twin towers did not have C4 to help them come down - they were a unique steel framework where corner pins melted. If they had been concrete cores instead they would have survived those planes just as the Empire State Building survived a plane impact!
My rabbit hole was more personally destructive - at the opposite end of the environmental spectrum. Not only was climate change true but so were peak oil and peak nature and everything else I've documented on my summary page - and there was no hope! That last bit was the lethal bit that eventually killed the young man I mentioned above. We are still on track for the Limits to Growth scenarios that model society collapsing in 2040. We are still growing at an exponential rate. We are still on track for 3 degrees of warming. We are still addicted to oil. We are still killing the soil that feeds us. We are still over-taking nature and watching vital species die.
But I still maintain there is hope. That is what my technology pages are - a collection of various solutions to the specific problems we face. Abundant clean energy, new food tech, super-sized seaweed farms, nature conservation, more energy efficient and community focused city designs - all these things offer hope. If we seize the day. If we get involved. If we make these things happen.
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