Ricardo

I was born and raised inside a cult (OKC for Ogyen Kunzang Choling) there is a one page explainer of how much things went wrong and the impact on countless children’s, teenagers, today adults like myself.

https://okcinfo.news

I have been thinking about this very subject since four years now and have sometime spoken publicly about the similarities that I lived, even if In a completely different context from OKC and the Trump cult, the gradual loss of discernment, the loyalty towards the cult even at the cost of one’s integrity, the damage it does towards families and friends, the need to cut ties and links with outsiders to cut the cognitive Dissonance alerts between what is experienced and how it should be correctly understood and what is being done, what is being made out of ordinary decent people.

I could go on for hours for each Trump speeches about how he uses gaslighting, manipulation, anger redirection, DARVO and other manipulation techniques to better dive, self harm and even collapse the entire fragile US democratic system.

There is a whole chapter that should be written about regarding algorithmic automated self radicalisation and the role YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Parler and others are being used to produce an entire generation of miseducated, bowing, serving idiots, abandoning the wheel of their own lives to a sociopath, literally throwing away discernment and critical thinking to advance a servile autocratic regime in the making before our very own eyes.

All of this is related and connected to the infodemic madness currently spreading and all of this is also connected to a deficient education system, illiteracy, lack of media literacy, ignorance about the very structure that power internet and the ad-tech Industry and of course shadow data profiles being used to target individuals at a micro level of precision, all these things won’t be solved by a tech startup or a new unicorn, this mess can only be solved through education, digital media literacy, understanding of the internet structure and what feeds the golem of our attention span.

Our Societies porosity to disinformation, fakenews, misinformation is only equal to the holes we allowed in the democratic structure, increasingly flawed, to the point of being permeable to foreign influence, to the point of self harming ourselves into a utopian nightmare under the sarcastic increasing influence of regimes that are well positioned to send our flawed democratic systems in the dustbin of history if we don’t urgently upgrade them and care about them, refounding them into what they should become to face the future and still serve future generations.

We’re loosing time.

Just a quick note but in short, I have a WordPress running, my intention with this site/landing page is to learn to put in place #Indieweb & #ActivityPub for a WordPress site but I had one constraint, I wanted to keep Elementor to design my pages, indeed I have become so much used to Elementor, it now takes me double time to work with core WordPress Gutemberg or doing page the old school approach.

After some discussion yesterday on #mastodon I realized I could use a WordPress theme indieweb ready, called Autonomie (edit this post to add some links) with on top Elementor, so this is what I did today, but I'm not convinced yet, because I have issue with Author h-card not being visible for indiewebify checker tool.

I'm still messing around and thinking about how I have to correctly put this in place and then test indieauth, Micropub, Microsub from my WordPress instance.

If Elementor adds too much mess I will default to Autonomie & back to a very simple/pure/core approach to my WordPress site.

I asked some recommendations on the #fediverse on how to start learning #python and got quite some interesting links to explore.