I look at some of these things that are popular on YouTube, and TikTok, and Instagram, and a lot of it seems really extreme and strange and unbeleivable.
When I reflect on it a bit it seems like none of it is actually real.
By which I mean it's so far out there that even the smallest bit of research would determine that somebody is taking a few words wildly out of context and then turning them into something completely unbelievable. And yet very popular.
The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that we see this soup of extremely weird stuff because the only way to get anybody to pay attention in an intensely competitive "Attention Economy" is by being over the top outlandish in what you claim and say. I suppose you could say it's clickbait taken to a whole new level.
Are we really that easily bored?
Moreover, are we really so ready and willing to abandon reality in favor of some wild fantasy?
If you purely consider how many subscribers some of these channels have, I guess the answer to that would be "yes." But we should not deceive ourselves that we're actually looking at news, what we're looking at is the form of escapism.
What I find strange — and even a little bit disturbing — is how many people who are living in this particular lunatic fringe actually started out as mainstream news reporters. Or, at least, has somewhat colorful commentators on mainstream news networks.
Maybe I'm just getting old and paranoid, but it feels like these distractions are actually there precisely to distract us from what is actually going on. Perhaps it's not a conscious decision, but based on the fact that if somebody is going to make some sort of living as a result of their channels being monetized they have to take an extreme angle rather than a factual one.
But if that is the case, how is that influencing society? If we're normalizing crazy conspiracy theories while pushing the actual facts of what happened into the background, how does that play out for all of us over a longer period of time?
It seems rather like the old claims that "violent video games don't cause people to become violent in real life." But while that may be true, the constant exposure to this violence also means that when similar violence happens in real life (for other reasons), people are a bit numb and perhaps conditioned to not respond with the level of outrage befitting the situation. And so, that kind of violence is gradually normalized, even if it wasn't the actual video game that was the root cause of it.
Except in this context it is "smake oil" that has become the norm, while facts are forgotten. And the fact that you can fake virtually anything with the latest generations of AI is not helping.
Maybe it all goes in cycles. Our middle son who is now in the second-half of his 30s and while still an avid gamer, he's slowly phasing out of a lot of his first person shooter games and instead getting involved in more and more adventure type games and world building games where the violence/killing aspect is a highly secondary or tertiary part of the scenario.
But I digress.
I do believe that the process of "normalizing the outlandish" is in full swing... possibly to the point where we won't actually recognize and push back against the more "normal" but potentially quite dangerous that might be happening to us; in the world.
Just something to think about...
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Created at 2025.10.15 23:25 PST
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My oldest is 17 and my youngest is 13. I just can't follow how they deal with social media with clips not lasting 6 secs. Really does decrease their attention span in general.
Luckily games are mostly sports related, which strangely is more violent in real life then in games.