By corporate culture I mean like what you see with Google~YouTube/Meta~Facebook/etc. to accommodate advertisers and influence people to engage and acknowledge adverts. In turn, by adapt/adjust I mean how some people bleep curses out like fuck/shit/etc., say unalive instead of commit suicide/kill oneself, and make notorious video thumbnails that supposedly work to drive up views.
The amount of people who just mindlessly accepted that certain words were forbidden has ruined any faith I had of us making it out of “this.” I’m not talking about hate speech, but seeing literal baby-speak like “corn” in place of porn, “rake” for rape, or “unalive” for suicide is ridiculous. How anyone can type those out in an otherwise serious context is beyond me
I cant find the video but there was a very serious accident in Australia at a theme park and several people died. The ambulance crews who attended reported that “The patients suffered injuries incompatible with life” and the media had a fucking field day about how paramedics shouldnt be making jokes and how cold and insensitive it was and blah blah blah.
The Ambulance service had a press conference the following day which was one of the absolute best public ass chewings Ive ever seen. The guy tore into the media like a wolverine. Heavily paraphrased but - “Our paramedics are not doctors, legally speaking they cannot pronounce someone dead. They do however know that a man who has been literally torn to pieces by heavy machinery cant be helped. They have to stand there, look at that scene and make a realistic professional assessment that the patient has suffered injuries that nobody could survive and report that. Then they have to look at the next person… and report that professionally too… and then the next one… And without doing any investigation into our procedures and the why of them you decide to report on OUR professionalism!?!”
This is pretty damn epic. Good on that ambulance service.
Was it the Dream World incident?
Yeah, its easy to find the video of the initial statement. Cant find the followup though.
It was the most amazingly professional “go fuck yourselves” Ive ever heard.
I like Aussies. Always have. Never met a single one that didn’t tell me what he thought about me or anything else.
There was a science fiction novel a ways back where the government would “devive” its opponents, as a euphemism for “kill”.
George Carlin said it best with his Soft Language skit.
Agreed. It actually terrifies me, because the implications are huge on a cultural level with regards to feelings of autonomy, ability to ascertain when rules or social conditionings are inherently detrimental and should be ignored (or outright fought against), not to mention the erosion of critical thinking, the rampant dopamine regulation issues that’ll follow the youngest members of society potentially for life, etc.
I am EXTREMELY worried for the young gen Z/gen Alpha cohort, as this kind of thing already seems so deeply-ingrained in their attitudes and acceptance of, quite frankly, bullshit corporate-driven cleanspeak, that I’m certain future governments are just rubbing their hands together waiting for an era where passing oppressive speech restrictions and destructive online privacy policies will be a certainty, assuming that by voting age, the youngest among us don’t realize what they’re unknowingly being influenced by and push back against it.
I know this post comes off as alarmist, but people have to realize that massive cultural shifts take place after, what at the time seem to be unimportant social attitudes or opinions, begin to take hold of a generation… and I’m personally very, very worried.
Sounds like the problem is the platforms and their algorithms, who are bending over for their advertiser overlords, who demand censorship. But nah, let’s get mad at kids just trying to make their bits. /s
Some of that is just getting around dumb auto moderators.
Meta will become the champion of Open Source and near completely become as known for it as Google was in the mid to late 00’s. They will dominate AI to such an extent Facebook will be the inbred backwater project that no one thinks about when the name Meta pops up. I know it’s hard to swallow and believe right now, but the Zuck isn’t the driver that matters here. Yann LeCun is the person behind Meta AI and he is Bell Labs alumni beating the war drum of open source for market leadership, not monopoly, just leadership. The majority of the digital age exists on those credentials; a Bell Labs alumni pushing Open Source. That is worth betting big on IMO.
It may take a couple hundred years, but AGI lead government is coming, once conservative stupidity fades. A politician with infinite persistence and fractal attention is far better than anything finite corruptible humans with tiny attention spans can offer the public.
It may take a couple hundred years,
once conservative stupidity fades.
Ah, an optimist
A couple hundred years? Why, Del Complex is already there! /s
History Youtube gets pretty whack about this because Google’s adsense algorithm freaks out when words like “Nazi” and “Stalin” appear. To name a few examples:
- “The Famine” in place of “Holodomor”
- Jo. [CENSORED] in place of “Stalin”, “The Patsies” in place of “The Nazis”
The second example is particularly amusing, being a video about how Shostakovich circumvented soviet censorship while self-censoring all instances of “Stalin” within the script.
Pew pew oil
