Why do people persist in posting articles and comments on social media when they generally have no real-world impact at all? It’s a mystery worthy of an article…
Newspapers used to include a "letters" page. I am sure the editors received more contributions than they could possibly publish. The editors were also able to curate the content to suit their supposed readership. Shifting the Overton window is akin to adapting editorial policy to changing mores. Receiving comment was (and still is) a useful marketing tool for the publisher. The information age has changed all of that. We now have access to a vast public square in which each one of us has the ability to rant, vent and contribute. John Naisbitt said it all in his "Megatrends". (1982).
Sharing your ideas in the hope that they will attract people or effect some change is a fool's errand. Share without hope. Someone like you has a contributed much to SA libertarian thought, but this country may never use any of your ideas until it collapses in on itself and all of us are eventually forgotten, that South Africa even had one libertarian may become forgotten in time. This is fine, we will still try to disseminate our ideas not in hope, but as a way to avoid the nagging of our conscience.
I feel guilty when I don't say what I think I know to be true, especially in a country like this with so much human-caused misery. I feel I have to shout into the probable void because I can say I put it out there for people to find and reason it out for themselves. And if all of us keep doing that, who knows, one day people may get attracted to these ideas, maybe by accident, and it will resonate with them.
This cannot happen if we pay too much attention to the probably meaningless, definitely thankless task of sharing these ideas. We owe it to that 0.000001% chance to share them as widely as we can.
I would list examples of this but I know you know them all already.
I post to elicit comments like this and others that may change MY mind, that may convince me of errors in MY thinking.
For example, I am an individualist who believes that the single most important rule to follow is "No harm without consent". By implication this means that a free individual has the right to move and reside wherever they choose in the absence of some prior contract freely consented to. It means I believe in free movement (within and between countries), freedom to live where I choose (by mutual consent with the property owner), freedom to trade without interference with whomever I choose, freedom to control my own body (suicide, abortion, masochism, drug taking). In the US context, this makes me more Democrat than Republican.
In the current climate, yes, that makes you more Democrat than Republican. But then again, the closer people are to power, the more they dislike freedom. And vice versa.
Trevor, I think that without most of the posting masses knowing it, they are actually making a contribution. Their posts and reactions are harvested by the tech companies, as we know. Agentic AI then constantly adapt the algorithms pumping the harvested insights towards the masses to influence their everything. What they read, what they buy, what they...you can add. Even how they vote these days; all thanks to MANY bots also pumping millions of carefully thoughtout messages into cyberspace, shaped by the harvested and processed opinions and by the agendas of the tech companies and/or their clients. This is surely not pushing humanity to higher hights of intellectualism, but rather to the level of the common denominator, with emphasis on the "common" in most cases. unfortunately...
I didn't even think to mention that the vast majority of posts these days may be bot-generated. Their motivation is simple - agenda pushing or revenue generating. As a regular article contributor, I stopped to wonder why I bothered. My article is my answer.
I miss the old days when getting a letter published in the "readers views" section of the local newspaper was a cause for celebration, and the piece was invariably cut out and pasted (not posted) in a scrapbook somewhere.
Like with so many other areas, I am really not sure if we are advancing, treading water, or actively regressing.
Newspapers used to include a "letters" page. I am sure the editors received more contributions than they could possibly publish. The editors were also able to curate the content to suit their supposed readership. Shifting the Overton window is akin to adapting editorial policy to changing mores. Receiving comment was (and still is) a useful marketing tool for the publisher. The information age has changed all of that. We now have access to a vast public square in which each one of us has the ability to rant, vent and contribute. John Naisbitt said it all in his "Megatrends". (1982).
Sharing your ideas in the hope that they will attract people or effect some change is a fool's errand. Share without hope. Someone like you has a contributed much to SA libertarian thought, but this country may never use any of your ideas until it collapses in on itself and all of us are eventually forgotten, that South Africa even had one libertarian may become forgotten in time. This is fine, we will still try to disseminate our ideas not in hope, but as a way to avoid the nagging of our conscience.
I feel guilty when I don't say what I think I know to be true, especially in a country like this with so much human-caused misery. I feel I have to shout into the probable void because I can say I put it out there for people to find and reason it out for themselves. And if all of us keep doing that, who knows, one day people may get attracted to these ideas, maybe by accident, and it will resonate with them.
This cannot happen if we pay too much attention to the probably meaningless, definitely thankless task of sharing these ideas. We owe it to that 0.000001% chance to share them as widely as we can.
I would list examples of this but I know you know them all already.
I post to elicit comments like this and others that may change MY mind, that may convince me of errors in MY thinking.
For example, I am an individualist who believes that the single most important rule to follow is "No harm without consent". By implication this means that a free individual has the right to move and reside wherever they choose in the absence of some prior contract freely consented to. It means I believe in free movement (within and between countries), freedom to live where I choose (by mutual consent with the property owner), freedom to trade without interference with whomever I choose, freedom to control my own body (suicide, abortion, masochism, drug taking). In the US context, this makes me more Democrat than Republican.
Prove me wrong.
In the current climate, yes, that makes you more Democrat than Republican. But then again, the closer people are to power, the more they dislike freedom. And vice versa.
Trevor, I think that without most of the posting masses knowing it, they are actually making a contribution. Their posts and reactions are harvested by the tech companies, as we know. Agentic AI then constantly adapt the algorithms pumping the harvested insights towards the masses to influence their everything. What they read, what they buy, what they...you can add. Even how they vote these days; all thanks to MANY bots also pumping millions of carefully thoughtout messages into cyberspace, shaped by the harvested and processed opinions and by the agendas of the tech companies and/or their clients. This is surely not pushing humanity to higher hights of intellectualism, but rather to the level of the common denominator, with emphasis on the "common" in most cases. unfortunately...
I didn't even think to mention that the vast majority of posts these days may be bot-generated. Their motivation is simple - agenda pushing or revenue generating. As a regular article contributor, I stopped to wonder why I bothered. My article is my answer.
I miss the old days when getting a letter published in the "readers views" section of the local newspaper was a cause for celebration, and the piece was invariably cut out and pasted (not posted) in a scrapbook somewhere.
Like with so many other areas, I am really not sure if we are advancing, treading water, or actively regressing.