The whole internet used to be woke, it was full of counterculture people, freaks and geeks looking for communities, the same people who were on BBSes the years before, it was a diverse group of weirdos on the fringes at the time.
Not sure the whole internet was woke, the nazis and pedophiles have been here for quite a while too. But they were on the fringe and shunned by the larger internet culture until relatively recently. Trump started courting the votes of the worst side of the internet. Then the pandemic brought a bunch of “normies” online whose brains weren’t ready for the culture shock, and rather than accepting the freaks and geeks, they decided the nazis were the normal ones.
This has been well before the pandemic and even before Trumps presidential bid. But also before corporate social media being dominant i remember being exposed to self identifying nazis in video games around the time when facebook was mostly farmville invitations.
Once the Nazis realized the power of corporate social media and its algorithms and the corporations realized the money they can make with peddling hate-speech, it became more present, but it always was there and certainly not shunned away to the fringes.
In the early days the Internet was mainly people in STEM Universities and Science Institutes (plus a handful of Military geeks), and those kinds of people in my experience tend to be more liberal (in the traditional sense of “live and let live”, rather than the US politics sense) minded than average.
The whole internet used to be woke, it was full of counterculture people, freaks and geeks looking for communities, the same people who were on BBSes the years before, it was a diverse group of weirdos on the fringes at the time.
I miss it still.
Not sure the whole internet was woke, the nazis and pedophiles have been here for quite a while too. But they were on the fringe and shunned by the larger internet culture until relatively recently. Trump started courting the votes of the worst side of the internet. Then the pandemic brought a bunch of “normies” online whose brains weren’t ready for the culture shock, and rather than accepting the freaks and geeks, they decided the nazis were the normal ones.
I think they always have been there and certainly not on the fringes.
Take this question about “stormfront” for instance from reddit nine years ago.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEurope/comments/45krzb/why_do_many_of_the_european_subreddits_seem_like/
This has been well before the pandemic and even before Trumps presidential bid. But also before corporate social media being dominant i remember being exposed to self identifying nazis in video games around the time when facebook was mostly farmville invitations.
Once the Nazis realized the power of corporate social media and its algorithms and the corporations realized the money they can make with peddling hate-speech, it became more present, but it always was there and certainly not shunned away to the fringes.
I miss the wild west days of the internet. Now it’s just instagram and facebook, with a lot of google sprinkled in there.
Dolphinsex.org: never forget.
In the early days the Internet was mainly people in STEM Universities and Science Institutes (plus a handful of Military geeks), and those kinds of people in my experience tend to be more liberal (in the traditional sense of “live and let live”, rather than the US politics sense) minded than average.