Seeing the Democratic establishment react (or not react) to Trump so far this year has made me feel like this sort of disruptive spiral into fascism was going to happen no matter what. It just would’ve been some other likely Republican positioned as a populist strongman.
I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 does have construction workers being contractually obligated to receive strength-augmenting implants that are low quality and frequently malfunction and/or drive the wearer to homicidal insanity.
Seems to be a common thing with Chinese tech, honestly. It’s kinda frustrating.
The problem is that people read a few things on the internet, think they’re now suddenly domain experts, and do it anyway.
I’ll admit I don’t spend enough time on here to have a well-formed opinion, but aside from the occasional obvious spam post, I don’t see a lot of obvious bot activity… Depending on the instance/community, you’re going to get a lot of very strong and, uh… controversial opinions.
Keep in mind that the (still relatively) niche nature of Lemmy/Piefed (and the fediverse writ large) means that a higher proportion of people around here are going to be far from the center of the political gradient… and the western world is very much experiencing a cultural/political paradigm shift which is driving people to the fringes.
I also think that a lot more people are using the platform than a year or two ago and that has knock-on effects on moderation that we still need to figure out how to deal with.