SchillMenaker [he/him]

  • 9 Posts
  • 183 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2020

help-circle













  • The amount of people who think that online is real life is scarily high. I've got kids under 10 who have watched various kids YouTube shows for a while. A couple years ago they got mad at us that we don't get to open presents all the time like the kids on the Whatever Dumb Bullshit This Is show. We explained that those people are opening all of those presents because the people who make those toys are giving them to the family for free to make other kids feel sad that they don't have them and want to buy those toys. It's an ad to make you want to buy things you don't need and spend money you don't have and always be chasing a kind of happiness that you'll never be able to catch.

    It took a little while for it to sink in but when it did they would get pissed off at those videos and shortly after lost interest in that channel. I feel like there is a massive population of young people who grew up and never had that context provided to them, so they buy into manipulative Internet trash as much now as when they were six.


  • I can't express with words how much I love this post.

    My younger brother is a lifelong conservative and I'm always trying to chip away at his ideology. I think that the most impactful thing I've ever said to him to get him to question capitalism's organization of labor and resources was something along the lines of "We have incredible modern technology that has almost unlimited capacity to change the way that people live and function in the world, and the people who are the most skilled and educated in developing that technology are spending 100% of their time trying to serve you slightly more relevant banner ads.