I think I remember seeing calls for pieces of this on the SomethingAwful forums back in the day, it was a collaborative art piece. There was a template with specific frames where the ball enters and leaves each square and it was up to forum members to fill in the rest and then it was all stitched together.
Blue Ball Machine
71–80 of 137 posts
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s more likely that it was just one of the places that movement coalesced. Others include Reddit before they ban hammered a lot of that stuff, Twitter, and Telegram. As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts: (Paraphrasing a bit) “People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or…
I mean from looking back as a non participant in either (way too young to even care), it seems like occupy Wallstreet and the alt right pretty much pretty much had a similar message, some people have used money and power to make the US far more unbalanced and it's grinding people down. So 2008 seems a good benchmark
The anger was palpable back then. The MSM swept it under the rug and replaced it with BLM.
Being anti globalism was THE left wing thing back then. Trump sounds more like Michael Moore / Noam Chomsky than anything approaching right wing. He’s classic 90s left wing, especially the taking the jobs thing, that’s Michael Moore to a T.
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you give too much agency to 4chan. It's just a imageboard - an internet forum - that happened to have some subforums related to alt-right. Maybe it had (has) a bad influence on people, but it's hundred times smaller than Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch.
FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox. I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social med…
As someone who was exposed to 4chan at far too young of an age, I don't buy this. There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Granted, I avoided that board like the plague, but cursory glances never showed me any novel ideas being formulated. Even if there is real conversation of various political ideologies, it's drowned out by a sea of kids who think it's cool to say the N word online.
4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale.
Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, and I think that's why so many folks jumped from Bernie to Trump during/after the primaries. They couldn't be given a fair chance for peaceful change so they went for the other change option.
I wish I’d gone around the Internet screen shotting comments from Reddit and Twitter from 2008 until 2016 so future historians could understand. A lot of this stuff got purged. Some others I remember (paraphrasing): “I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.” “I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.” “When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for…
The MLK quote is "a riot is the language of the unheard", and the full context is rich:
> And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
The last point in particular has proven quite prescient to our current moment.
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#75Part of me likes all the insanity with the internet back then, with mixed feelings. I probably got computer skills wasting time on YTMND for one reason or another. I 100% attribute 4chan's b for inspiring me to program. Their raids inspired me to learn programming when I was a teenager. But... I see that the alt-right came out of 4chan and the previously funny memes were no longer funny memes but serious accusations.…
I agree, actually most of my memories of that time are of pretty horrible sights online too. Shock gore sites, snuff films, etc. way more often than today
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean from looking back as a non participant in either (way too young to even care), it seems like occupy Wallstreet and the alt right pretty much pretty much had a similar message, some people have used money and power to make the US far more unbalanced and it's grinding people down. So 2008 seems a good benchmark
The anger was palpable back then. The MSM swept it under the rug and replaced it with BLM. Being anti globalism was THE left wing thing back then. Trump sounds more like Michael Moore / Noam Chomsky than anything approaching right wing. He’s classic 90s left wing, especially the taking the jobs thing, that’s Michael Moore to a T.
[deleted]
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you give too much agency to 4chan. It's just a imageboard - an internet forum - that happened to have some subforums related to alt-right. Maybe it had (has) a bad influence on people, but it's hundred times smaller than Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch.
FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox. I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social med…
> I wonder whether one could quantify/measure [where ideas originated and entered the mainstream] somehow.
You could probably use something like genetic tracing, if you could come up with a way of fingerprinting free text semi-reliably.
My expectation is there are probably "tell words" (i.e. not used elsewhere or for that purpose) in novel ideas, and you could likely observe these spreading over time, as the ideas carrying them did.
One of the first things groups tend to do is specialize and redefine language / create jargon.
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#78This is the visualization of my employer's Kubernetes deployment.
How did they got access to it? Concerning..
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#79https://timetraveler.ytmnd.com/
Does this ytmnd predate the movie 'safety not guaranteed'?
Re: Blue Ball Machine
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I’d gone around the Internet screen shotting comments from Reddit and Twitter from 2008 until 2016 so future historians could understand. A lot of this stuff got purged. Some others I remember (paraphrasing): “I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.” “I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.” “When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for…
> In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening. I recently heard that depressed people are unable to habituate to things. I think I might be very depressed because I was never able…
>I was never able to accept the increasing inequality, pointless wars...
>I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills.
Years ago, someone on HN made a comment to the effect of, "I feel less and less a part of this world. Like the world is just moving away from me."
I understood the sentiment perfectly. And, this was before the madness of the last 9 years or so.
Funny thing is it seems that a large number (perhaps the majority) of people feel this way, yet powerless to do anything about it. I think the things you mentioned represent a very short list of the total dysfunction to which people of conscience cannot (and probably should not) habituate. And, I wonder if it's really the sense of powerlessness in the face of these things that is actually the depressing bit.
Of course it seems that the sentiment has been weaponized, with a third to half of the U.S. (and some significant portion of other countries), now incited to destroy it all, including their fellow citizens whom they have been convinced are part of the problem.
While this superficially sates their disaffectedness by channeling it into a kind of frenzied bloodlust, their behavior further demoralizes those who consequently feel more powerless in a world that is now more hostile and even less sensible.