One thing I’ve really come to appreciate about xo is that many of the people here are self aware and honest and good naturedly self deprecating about our Online addiction and how it’s definitely a bad thing

It’s like an Alcoholics Anonymous group for internet abusers

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5879435&forum_id=2#49977171)

Like what the fuck lol these people are crazy man not even the actual schizophrenics who poast here are that deluded

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5879435&forum_id=2#49977179)

At least XO is a walled garden and no one is deluding themselves otherwise. (Maybe not no one.)

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5879435&forum_id=2#49977221)

the majority of the median, not mean, content on the early mass internet (90s--00s-early mid 10s) available through mainstream outlets was either educational or light entertainment. you could check IRC news aggregates and get a good blend of local and regional news reporting. legacy reporting was still held to a higher standard than they were today due to the lack of a partisan political death spiral and our "national outlets" were still reporting from a place and time and with an eye to a still-defined and set "national interest". what was available was high quality either through existing reporting systems or by virtue of its rawness (older user generated content before "massaging the algorithms" or financially incentivized programs existed)

it didn't become noticeably foul (though always greyer morally than, i don't know, some scarcely reachable or often indefensible agrarian or classical living situation) until it changed from a place where you had people speaking to people using machines as the medium to people speaking to machines for the benefit of other people

you could fix the whole malicious paradigm at present by sundering the digital megacontinent and rebuilding using localnets with actual people who actually exist in and for various communities gatekeeping access to systems and resources (all of this chatgen garbage is entirely for the benefit of the top down, for the systems of Empire, for globalized capital flows, for bloated conglomerates at the expense of actual communities, and would scarcely exist had the people the real right to choose and gatekeep fellow users and information flows) but we had a political situation where dems were too cowardly and decadent to go after the actual enemies of the public interest and cons are too complacent, short-sighted, and drunk on blood profits to realize how these things are killing the tax base spiritually but also increasingly in material terms so it's not likely that anything will change until you have a critical mass of people so dehumanized or exploited by tptb that they're willing to die to destroy the nodes of these exploitative and evil snares that extract tangible and intangible value into the global or national economies for no benefit to the actual set communities that produce goods, services, or information as either.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5879435&forum_id=2#49977201)

Cr. I made a poast recently along this same line

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5879435&forum_id=2#49977260)

LOL’d, ty

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5879435&forum_id=2#49977192)