Nova (59:06)
It's also, like, the sort of reality that will sort of sink in for various people about the things that you see on your computer screen do actually happen in real life and the way in which things happen on your screen, you can't predict them, you can't control them. You can't control the response to it. Also the way in which we react to violence online and on our phones and stuff. I think Gaza. I think, as you mentioned, Greg, Gaza really has changed so much. And I think one of the biggest sort of. I don't know whether this necessarily call it radicalizing. But one of the things I think has really changed many people who did not necessarily have an opinion on what had been happening in the Middle east for a long time or were very comfortable to go if, oh, it's complicated. This is the first time where they've really had to experience the feeling of, oh, every time I go on my phone, I just see dead bodies or I see the most horrific things I can imagine, and there's no way to get around that. And this is the other thing, too. All these attempts to control social media have largely failed, right? Because there are ways to sort of circumvent that. And, like, the sort of trajectory of, like, online content is not particularly easy to control. And I think I keep going, like, the thing that you mentioned about, like, okay, you may, like, these people have desired, like, a certain kind of violence for a long time, and in many ways they're getting what they want. And there are, like, some people who are really happy about it. Like, you can sort of see, like, you know, they kind of, like, you know, they froth at the mouth, like, seeing, like, these ICE agents kind of kidnap children or, like, you know, brutalizing protesters on the floor and, like, you know, spraying pepper spray in their faces and everything. But, like, I do wonder whether, and I don't want to say for sure what's going to happen, because I do. I also think that, like, one of the effects of sort of the ubiquity of violence online has kind of meant that, like, there is kind of a higher degree of tolerance. I don't necessarily have. Tolerance is the right word, but, like, it can just end up becoming, like, background at a certain point. And I do wonder whether there's sort of a strategy in play to be like, oh, okay, well, if we just sort of make this type of. Of violence normal, then the political consequences of that will not be that significant. And in many ways, I can kind of see that strategy working in the sense that every day of 2026 has been a school shooting, and no one's really talked about it or just a local shooting where people have died. In 2025, the same thing, I think it was basically every week there were at least two or three shootings by young people in which there were at least one or two fatalities. And it's kind of become so kind of commonplace. But, like, no one has really even, like, in sort of political discussions, like, it's kind of like no one really talks about that anymore. And so I do wonder then whether it's like, okay, well, you can't predict the reactions to violence that people will have when they see like extreme acts kind of all the time circulating on their, like the production of images. But I do wonder whether the strategy among kind of the right is to sort of like be like, okay, you know, they talked about like flooding the zone with like, you know, slop and shit content and that like, you know, we would just sort of be fine sort of accepting that the information environment that we had would just be like contaminated forever. And like, lo and behold, you know, we've just sort of let that happen. And, you know, this idea that you could go online and basically like most of the stuff that you read and most of the people you interact with are not real. I wonder whether the same will happen. Like, the long term strategy for these guys is to just like make this continual background noise until like everyone is numbed by it.
