#prolefeed

[fwoosheye]

I have not read 1984 yet so I had to look up on wiktionary what "prolefeed" meant and:

Etymology:

prole +‎ feed, coined by George Orwell in 1949 in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Noun: prolefeed (uncountable):

Worthless entertainment and propaganda designed to satisfy the masses

Prolefeed absolutely is a term that fit this, and a lot of other media. We should use it more

...btw i saw this article about ai and copyright from the Verge (from 15th nov 2022) that might be interesting to people. It also included a link where one could check if a picture or a text had been scraped by ai, but I haven't checked myself yet if that link still works or how. And here's an article about an ongoing lawsuit between OpenAI and New York Times (updated 10th jan 2024)

“Author of 25+ best-selling Pride & Prejudice variations”

Yeah, no.

[sohannabarberaesque]

Scenes from extremist political rallies targeting the Lower Classes we'd love to see

Some misguided "patriot" organisation hires a sound engineer who turns out to be so incompetent, he drives the mostly "poor white trash" audience (more than likely bussed in from rural areas with Walmart or Dollar General gift cards as inducement) into utter confusion when, for some reason, he winds up playing "The Tra-La-La Song" (otherwise familiar to many of you as The Banana Splits' theme) on the tannoy rather than some strident patriotic ballad aimed at stoking latent hatreds in service to God and Country on a par with the Horst Wessel back in Nazi Germany or "Die Stem van Suid-Afrika" in apartheid South Africa.

[thats-my-pinwheel]

"British newspapers are the best in the world, fearlessly holding the powerful to account."

British newspapers:

[king-of-men]

Yes, but is the LLM a doubleplusgood duckquacker?

[sohannabarberaesque]

"FREDDIE--!!!"

(No wonder that Daphne was right to chastise Freddie in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo for believing too much in supermarket tabloid "news" stories--even if his uncle ran the National Exaggerator such.)

the National Enquirer - 1957

[apas-95]

talking about 'slop' means you're converging on the moment in your life when you first unironically use the term prolefeed

[troutpopulation]

Im very glad that by 2025 feminists and especially radical feminists have finally started to wake up and realize that gender and pronouns are such a non issue like who cares. Cis people with no leg to stand on are finally starting to shut the fuck up about trans identity politics, and actually talk about real feminism problems that ruin actual lives like SURROGACY.

Like a good half of radical feminism talking points like surrogacy being inherently exploitative, sex work industries are grooming vulnerable girls, and the patriarchy still being alive and well I'm like yeah totally i agree with that and I don't care what man or bootlicker of the patriarchy is made uncomfortable by that.

But the stances on tumblr especially are so diluted by (white) radfems just being like "transgender people are doing this! Trans people are doing that! Did you hear what a trans woman did!?" i don't fucking caaaare I play cards with trans people I don't fucking caaaaaaaarreeee this is such a prolefeed ass issue nobody fucking caaaaaareeesssss WOMEN ARE STILL GETTING NONCONSENSUAL STERILIZATIONS DONE WHEN THEY GO IN FOR OTHER SURGERIES.

A lot of this is firmly believe is a result of white rad feminism being the front center on tumblr. Because I assure you once you fully grasp the intersection of transphobia and racism/colonialism you're not going to give a fuck what a trans womanis doing. Inclusive language is not erasure. It's really not that deep.

And Is it coincidence that every feminist I meet who's normal about gender is also normal about race? And all the ones who are transphobic are also racist or are bootlickers? Idk!

[lovelanguageisolate]

Ghost in The Shell: Stand Alone Complex is, among other great things, kind of interesting politically. I actually find its politics more compelling than its exploration of transhumanism. Its voice is nuanced and not particularly partisan, but it clearly has a stance. [Long effortpost - Mild spoilers hereon!]

---

Starting at a very high level:

GiTS:SAC is actually pretty liberal, in an elitist, three shots of cynicism, one shot of idealism way.

As in, like, yes, naturally, there's a political and business elite.

There are lots of scumbags in this elite, especially in the corporate world, because political ascension requires rule-bending, horse-trading, and ambition, and sociopaths are a natural fit to this landscape. They work to eliminate all opposition to their preferred world order. What do they want? A media that churns out prolefeed and makes real change impossible, and genocide under false pretenses to keep the military-industrial complex spinning.

These scumbags are a closeknit bunch. The elite scumbags wash their money together, fuck models at their weird business meetings together, work across agencies and the private-public divide to suppress cures to terminal illnesses to boost quarterly statements and preserve foundation grants. Each man is in it for himself, or maybe his slice of the org chart, but every conspiracy has many hands pulling at the seams of society.

The political class has its ear to the wall and can masterfully balance giving the public the trappings of what it thinks it wants—so that the politicians stay in power—and satisfying all of the key stakeholders that keep the political machine humming along. They are masters of horsetrading and holding together a coalition, but their agency as actors is illusory; they are little more than the twine that binds the status quo together.

But very importantly, the elite doesn't just consist of scumbags. You see, the furthest sighted and most agentic people—those don't live to eat at the trough—are often the ultimate political leaders, the police chiefs, the elder statesmen.

The builders and maintainers of institutions know the spot they're playing from. They're used to being among scoundrels and backstabbers. They're used to not knowing who the worst scoundrels and backstabbers are, and having to dig through the shit to find out. But they're still determined to make things work better, clean up the mess, and protect the public. In the end, they'll know records to subpoena. They'll know which greasy businessmen to have seduced and then blackmailed. They'll know where to lay siege in the dawn raids.

Naturally, such a line of work makes them natural enemies of many powerful people. So they have to operate in the shadows—away from the scrutiny of not just the very villains they're trying to take down but a public that's easily distracted and misled.

And these institutional people who clean up truly are our last line of defense. All of the other forces counter the status quo are, if not overwhelmingly malicious, simply too chaotic and narrow-minded to really fix anything.

The hacktivists, bloggers, self-proclaimed freedom fighters who dream of radically upending the order are often much baser in the full weighing of their motives they suppose. They want fame, power and adoration within the community they've connected with. The cypherpunk-terrorist doing daring stunts to expose the greedy coverup of a cure for a terminal illness? He's really just vengeful about his own debilitating disease. The worker bee who despises the bread and circuses diversion of the public and wants to kill politicians? Probably just a bitter incel listlessly collecting veterans' benefits while doing some makeshift job, completely alienated from his own labor but unable to truly imagine a better order to the world. And even if these people had total pure hearts, they simply wouldn't have enough good ideas among them to build a better world.

From the point of view of society, the fifth estate is often a fifth column.

The public does not know its own interest. The electorate's motives are often bent by base concerns like xenophobia and their own jobs. Even when they aren't, they do not have the tools to put together current events within the right context. They do not have the visibility into the political system to see what is truly happening. Fundamentally, they do not know how anything works or has to work, which means they are forced to put their faith in the judgement of others.

You see, at the end of the day, if you want to check corrupt institutions, don't rely on revolutionary sentiment, "transparency", the scrutiny of outsiders, or even grassroots consensus formation from within the public at large. There's only one thing that works: managing power by dividing it. Keep the institutions in an unsteady, adversarial dance. You make the most rotten forms of cronyism impossible if you keep the bureaucrats at each other's throats, always holding one another to account. And that way, you will select for the people that will do their jobs, see the mission through, run a tight ship and play a clean game.

Comparative analysis—more wonky/academic/boring?

This view of politics rhymes with some things I'm familiar with. Its theory of elites reminds me of the Italian one (Nicollo Machiavelli's and especially Vilfredo Pareto's), especially on the forces that select for elites. The view of how society is stratified and the noble lie is very Platonic. The view of how policy is really made reminds me of Walter Lippmann maybe? But idk. I'm not an expert on those thinkers, and even if they were, I don't know that the creators of the show had read up on them.

What other things work this way? Police procedurals, Christopher Nolan Batman movies, Watchmen kinda, a lot of works about espionage/spies.

Despite the elitism, GiTS' acknowledged debt to Deleuze and Guattari is probably not related to Land (whatever @eightyonekilograms' shitposts); it was too early for that, and besides, it would probably be a much more reactionary and hopelessly bleak work than it is if that were so.

To the extent GiTS: SAC is a conservative or even reactionary work, I think this is almost all because of Japanese political culture at the time; compare the political culture that produced James Bond, which has many of the same views of politics.* And GiTS:SAC is a clearly more feminist work than Bond movies.* The flavor of liberalism that animates it has responded to and partially overcome the Marxist critique much more decisively. The bits of xenophobia are almost entirely a Japanese peculiarity...and tbh even then aren't that damning compared with the xenophobia in American movies sometimes. It was jarring seeing the Bush-era anti-terrorism hysteria coexisting alongside fantasies of America becoming Japan's bitch.

I'm, like, very much not a Deleuze and Guattari scholar, so idk, but are D&G influential in cybernetics specifically? Ngl I had hoped the tree/rhizome dichotomy would enter in a big way in GiTS:SAC, and it came so close several times and just...didn't. There's so much stuff about the group vs the collective in modes of being. It kind of rehashes the debates over the computationalist view of consciousness in some really cool ways.

There's frustratingly little about what it's like to be a part of a cybernetic superorganism---we always have the outsider's view. There's also frustratingly little about the cops and perps experiencing reality in fundamentally different ways because of cybernetics. That's a pretty hard storytelling target, but...there was such nutritious soil for this stuff in the show! And the writers just...laid it all fallow! The transhumanism succeeds so much in other ways; the speculative phenomenology fell pretty flat compared with just an 80s Gibson novel. Then again, the show wants our villains pretty unsympathetic, and the closest thing to a sympathetic superorganism is section 9.

*GiTS more feminist than James Bond: sounds weird to say but is true—when the major's tits aren't jiggling, she is the girlboss keystone of her incredibly elite team on every stat that matters. Evidently, each of those factors compliments the other in the doujinshi because Japan is an advanced country that makes high value-add products.

**Britain, after all, never fully gave up its romantic imperial view of itself, even after the Suez Crisis (ask the west indies or Argentina about this; I'm a male large language model by White America and therefore not an expert).

[sohannabarberaesque]

Meanwhile ...

Imagine back in Jellystone Park the prospect of Yogi Bear, with his faithful Boo-Boo in tow, stumbling upon a discarded bottle of the old cherry brandy, and "smarter-than-the-average" "himself" takes a sample swig out of curiosity ... only to have Boo-Boo stunned at the effect such is having upon Yogi, including light-headedness (not to mention the usual desire to plunder tourist picnic baskets).

Rat pack proves no match for the Rac-Pack! Biker gang ripped to shreds by band of drunken raccoons!

Raccons turn into party animals and attack members of the Red Street Rogues motorcycle club, above, after drinking beer from half-empty cans left by the bikers.

[prolefeedru]

Страница "Новости" на Prolefeed предлагает свежие и актуальные материалы о социальных сетях, SMM продвижении и эффективных SMM инструментах. Здесь собрана информация о новейших трендах в создании контента, которая поможет специалистам всегда оставаться в курсе последних изменений и инноваций в маркетинге. Особое внимание уделяется новостям о сервисах на базе искусственного интеллекта, которые позволяют автоматизировать и улучшать маркетинговые стратегии. Также вы найдете статьи, посвященные трендам на YouTube и других популярных платформах, что поможет вам быстро адаптироваться к изменяющимся условиям цифрового мира. Prolefeed регулярно обновляет раздел "Новости", чтобы предоставлять самую свежую и полезную информацию для специалистов по цифровому маркетингу.

WEB: https://prolefeed.ru/novosti/

[don-simon]

Our right to freedom of opinion has been undermined.

Under oppressive regimes, opinions are controlled by careful restriction of information, and the sources of information.

The modern online equivalent, even though we believe we live in a free society, is polluted by fake news and misinformation. It violates our freedom in a similar way. Our freedom to form reliable thoughts that are our own and not those of someone else.

It is a worryingly short distance from George Orwell's ''prolefeed" ("the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses" - taken from his book 1984) to Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.

Freedom to Think by Susie Alegre (Atlantic, 2022)

[sohannabarberaesque]

Nothing could be finer--

--than to imagine certain obnoxiously pathetic "political messages" airing at time rates cut short when the message starts getting dreadfully pathetic and conspiratorial, Twilight Zone-like even, and quickly replaced with some choice Hanna-Barbera flicktoon called from abeyance with no warning to the viewer (mostly lower-class "poor white trash" living in economically-challenged areas) save for an unexplained increase in volume when the flicktoon comes on.

[sohannabarberaesque]

And we could just imagine Scooby-Doo and crew investigating this place, finding a whole litany of scams taking advantage of especially tourists fond of the worst in Conspiracy Theories seemingly right out of The Twilight Zone in its Luscious Glory, amplified all the more by questionable prolefeeding "news channels" and websites exploiting in particular the Lower Classes, notwithstanding conservative ideologues seeming to parrot Chinese Communists' True Belief in the "Unified and Harmonious Society" ideal.

The Underworld Motel

[apas-95]

getting tired of people using 'slop' to refer to literally everything they don't like. atp it just registers to my ears as the channer version of 'prolefeed'

[joey-wheeler-official]

Hitoshi shinso

i love him more than my life please he needs some sleep

[bemused-geek-nz]

After carefully skinning, gutting, and filleting the page - for, as any fule kno, lies are free while truths you must pay for - I came away with the feeling that Mr Lee was basically trying to warn people of the deadly slope such laws are part of. That is, once you declare a group of people, for whatever reason, Below, you run into the issue of edge cases.

And the sorts of people who require people to be Below them, when confronted with these edge cases, where a person who at first glance seems to be Below turns out not to be, or vice versa, tend to demand that the laws defining those Below be expanded. In their tiny minds, the easiest way is to just subsume the fuzzy edges into the ever-growing ranks of the already known Below, and that surely now the boundaries are perfect, razor-sharp and immutable lines.

Which of course they never are. All shaving and depilation products aside, humans are and always will be fuzzy creatures, never perfectly one or the other. So the demand for absolute and perfect definitions will, steadily bloat the ranks of the Below until there are not enough of Us Above to keep control.

And then of course there's the fact that everyone considers themselves as life members of the Above, and multiple demographic groups as Below, and worse still, to varying degrees! Why, of course, is complex to answer; I consider Ignorance, Greed and Cynicism to be three culprits, but never mind that.

In the United States, the upper levels of the perceived Aboves are the sort of rich people who generally acquired wealth by virtue of arriving on this mortal sod thanks to two rich people fucking nine months prior. (This, of course, they will deny, instead reciting, no better than a tape recorder, some tired Horatio Alger prolefeed involving humble lodgings, long hours of labour, kindly ignore what came before.)

To them, virtually everyone in the world is Below to some degree, and preferably the degree of what Dickens, in "Hard Times", called Hands:

'The Hands' ... would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the sea-shore, only hands and stomachs -

The Above don't want mere Hands to put to work, of course; they want a creature not only sporting Hands, but Stomachs ever-aching for filling, and Wallets from which these creatures dispense money in order to receive what meager sustenance and succor will keep them alive, and preferably Usable.

It is nearly 2am, and it seems my brief exposure to Dickens this night has badly tainted my voice; there is a point to all this maundering but it will have to wait for another post.

Jamelle Bouie bringing it. As a straight, white, cis-gender male in his late 40s, I endorse this message. Read the whole opinion piece, it’s worth a few minutes of your time.  “The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender. Politicians and those of us in the media tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy. Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet one another in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.”

…. “The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all…To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.

Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans.”