nefarious synthetic content risks increasing people’s scepticism towards digital information altogether
This is honestly my biggest concern with AI gen and information. I’m not so much concerned about “fake news” as I am about people who are already jaded becoming more cynical about information as a whole and effectively saying, “Let me just enjoy my Cheetos and iPhone 53 in my domicile and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist.”
It’s also not just about privacy. It’s also about safety (historically, ads can be a vector for viruses). And it’s about having garbage shoveled in front of you that makes the internet borderline unusable. Which comes back to capitalism and the nature of every space becoming an ad-infested hell because consume product is the god.
Dream chasing under capitalism is similar to buying lottery tickets hoping to win the jackpot. They’ll let a few win big here and there to legitimize the idea of upward mobility, but the reality is, you are not going to be that person. And the “but technically I could be” mentality is what drives people in gambling, just as it does in driving them to believe in the legitimacy of capitalism.
Forgot to mention, people with NPD are in the same vicinity as psychopathy, with not feeling empathy or shame. That’s an important part of why it isn’t just another mental health disorder to treat, and why it’s such a serious designation, as compared to describing a person as a little vain. People who can’t feel empathy may still be able to intellectualize it, so it’s not to say they’re guaranteed to be ‘evil’ or something. And people who do feel empathy can still do horrific things. But it’s a pretty serious characteristic of the disorder.
If you mean narcissistic as in self-absorbed, I don’t see millennials being that way more than any other generation. Individualism appears to encourage an “I got mine” mentality where people are overly focused on carving out their little fortress of safety and happiness with little regard for how others are doing or how their hiding within their fortress contributes to the overall state of things. But that’s more of a thing of tapping out of society, whereas, as a pathology, narcissism thrives on attention and admiration. I would think people who are going out of their way to broadcast their life choices, they’re either doing it as a vlogging thing as desperate for money, or they specifically are wanting to know how society feels about things and where they land within it. Which doesn’t necessarily have to do with pathology. I mean, remember we are social beings. And wanting approval from your peers and reassurance that you aren’t an aberration is not narcissistic on its own; I’d say it’s very normal.
In my experience with very few people who seemed distinctly pathological narcissism, it’s not just being bothered by criticism or wanting attention alone. I almost want to say it’s sort of like, if you imagine someone addicted to hard drugs, but instead they are addicted to attention and admiration. So everything in their life becomes about that, it impacts their relationships, the kind of choices they make, and they use people as sources of narcissistic supply, maneuvering them into positions where they can control them and extract from them like resources. It’s not just hurt feelings or defensiveness or posting selfies, it’s like a part of their identity and some of them become disturbingly effective at using people to feed their addiction. (Side note: Addiction may not be the best analogy, cause I’m not sure how much success attempts to heal narcissists has, but it’s the way I could think of atm to convey how deep a thing it is compared to someone who is a little egotistical or gets mad at criticism some of the time.)
If there is anyone who could become a billionaire and then, somehow, without any working class force to make it happen, through sheer incapability to do anything sensible, become an eX-billionaire, it would be Elon Musk.
As far as I can tell, base skepticism doesn’t accomplish much, if not grounded in a conscious understanding and embracing of one’s biases (such as a bias for the working class), as well as translating that to an understanding of the biases implicit in sources (not just whether they are “factual” or not). For example, an article could say, “A man at the supermarket today was wearing a pink shirt.” Okay, on its own, this may be factual, but why are they focusing on the color of one man’s shirt and specifically the color pink? Sometimes answering that is way more important than whether it’s strictly true or not that there was a man at the supermarket wearing a pink shirt.
But if people don’t even get to that stage because they’re too exhausted with the exercise of verifying whether what they’re being told is even true on a basic factual level, I’m concerned they’re just going to tap out in general. Do you see what I mean?