It pains me how automated #MassSurveillance and #proprietary corporate #malware being used for automated #InfluenceCampaigns is apparently too abstract for some of my family to understand or care about.
It doesn't even matter if I provide references & explanations on how it works, the "but we're not interesting" mental block seems insurmountable and short-circuits any actual thinking about the matter.
Why is this a problem?
Some of them also seem to believe in the myth of #CorporateBenevolence, which I'm really not sure how that ever caught on.
The notion of something that exists solely for profit being benevolent is stupid-enough on its face that I just don't get it.
> Why?
It's an interesting and important question.
I don't think it's that it's too abstract as you suggested, I think it's more about that what you are telling them, it they accepted it, would be such a huge change in their world view.
We humans have a very strong tendency to stick to our beliefs. When confronted with something that turns our world upside down we do almost anything to avoid our worldview collapsing. It's like being told you live in the matrix.
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The fact that what you are saying is very important makes it even more difficult to persuade them, because the consequences of you being right would be too heavy, too hard to take in.
They would need to accept that their way of life is stupid and that they need to fundamentally change. Nobody wants to change, it's so much easier to keep living as usual.
I'm not sure if I managed to explain this, but do you see roughly what I mean?
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@lispi314 it's frustrating but I think somehow this is the kind of thing that you cannot be told by someone else, instead you must discover it for yourself in some way.
I have tried to remember how it was for me personally, but I cannot pinpoint when I started understanding and caring about these things. But I'm pretty sure it was not that somebody told me, it was more like I started to think about things on my own.
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So I guess the answer would be that to persuade someone, instead of trying to tell them how things are, one should try to nudge them into a situation where they are likely to discover things for themselves.
Not sure exactly how, but something like that, I think.
It's like Morpheus says to Neo in the movie:
"Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself."
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@eliasr I do get what you mean yeah, though I am disappointed at this state of affairs.
It also does beg the following question: What can one do about it? To bypass that reflex.