Me reading philosopher A: ”yeah this makes total sense”
Me reading philosopher B absolutely ripping A to shreds: ”wow I can’t believe A is such an idiot”
Me reading A again: ”yeah this makes total sense”.
Modern information systems do not need to censor the truth when they can simply drown it in noise.
We are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed by force (that is the former communist societies, and modern-day China, Russia, North Korea).
We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World.
The truth is not hidden – it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait, and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated.
Why censor the truth when you can drown it?
A fact no longer has to be disproven – it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition, and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes, and 15-second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it looks like just another piece of content competing for our attention.
That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care.
Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation, and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it.
The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.
So rather than ask whether you know the truth, I would ask:
Are you indifferent?
Author: Marijn Markus
Last night Ukraine could not intercept a single Russian ballistic missile. The USA deliberately starving Ukraine of Patriot missiles is now clearly understood by the Russians as American support for their terror bombing. The USA is helping Putin kill Ukrainians.
It’s funny how the loudest defenders of capitalism never mention how dependent corporations are on government support. Tax incentives, grants, bailouts, trade protections, legal shields—it’s all acceptable. But helping everyday Americans? Suddenly that’s dangerous socialism.
Il libero mercato è talmente capace di regolarsi da solo che sta rendendo il pianeta incompatibile con la sopravvivenza della specie umana pur di mandare avanti il business as usual. Un sistema sempre più folle e irrazionale. Va fermato.
@msciab I kinda like the idea but LLMs can already speak Italian and many other languages as well. In my opinion creating a model that only speaks Italian is pointless. At least an understanding of English is needed.
Je déteste ce monde, je déteste son fonctionnement, je déteste cette civilisation. Cette planète aurait pu, aurait dû être un paradis. C'est possible de le faire mais l'humanité est si corrompue et égoïste qu'on préfère tout détruire pour avoir un peu plus que les autres.
Inject directly into my veins fact-missiles like this one that litter the comment sections of every Musk post, in this case his false claim that he didn’t negligently cause cuts in government programs that scientific studies—see, e.g., LANCET—confirm will kill 14 million by 2030