I was talking to my normie parents (Harvard educated, Clinton supporters) about the presidential debate. My parents think I support Trump, but when politics is brought up, I say "both are bad" and divert the conversation.

But with this presidential debate I had a little fun poking at the mental model my mother has - she was clearly in lockstep with what CNN was saying: "Biden is too old to run."

I mentioned this before to her, but I was labeled as a "misinformation spreader." - but now that that she agrees with me, I surfaced the question to her - "isn't it weird that CNN was saying before that those videos that showed Biden as being senile were deepfakes?" -- "isn't it weird that when CNN turned on Biden after the debate, they acted as if the *just* realized he's clearly a vegetable? As if they didn't gaslight people before who were saying that?"

I could see the CNN-firmware which her brain runs on crash.

She immediately went on the defensive and memory-holed my question.

I think this is because in her mind, she thinks that if she disagrees with the CNN narrative, she inevitably has to agree with the Fox News narrative.

There's still a need for mass-media firmware distribution for normies, so that they run on *our* software. Most people think they only have to options on what to believe.

Maybe X.com is helpful to change this, but the need for more media that is not *alternative*, but legitimate, is dire.

I wonder if you guys have any ideas on institution-building. What is needed? Are there formulas from the past that can be emulated? or the trick is that we need to come up with new formulas for institution-formation?

Yeah good observations but unfortunately I think some people are just locked in to trusting whatever is official. If it's got contradictions, they don't pursue them or fret about them. They are not philosophers. When they do pursue them, they end up in "alternative" la la land. There is a whole ecosystem of boomerslop for those who won't accept CNN.

So the problem reduces to how to produce official legitimate media. This is a definite imperative. Various projects like Palladium have experimented with trying to provide a serious perspective that can be taken seriously by conventional-minded people, but palladium is also too committed to philosophy to fully pull that off. It is also too elitist.

If someone did a mass market official media project for a better perspective, I wonder what barriers they would hit. I think the two major ones are funding and access. To a first approximation, all non-NYT media properties lose money. They are funded by patrons, not customers. So lacking elite patronage, you can't really operate at that level. The other one is access. The "sources" won't give you access if you don't stay on-message. Adversarial journalism against the wishes of "the sources" is a big lift.

But still, I think a smart project could go way further in this direction than anyone has so far.

> To a first approximation, all non-NYT media properties lose money.

One of the important features of NYT is that it promotes a very particular bourgeois lifestyle. Suppose there was a mass market official media project that promoted a philosophical lifestyle. Could it turn a profit from bourgeois tastes for quality food, the latest in ergonomic fashions, what other media to consume, and so on? Normies need to keep up with the Joneses. What if they were just keeping up with us?

>>2032
They keep up with whoever is perceived as being legitimate and official and powerful. It reduces to the same problem. The model isn't the problem. It's easy to sell something that's official. The problem is how to be official.

>>2028

My family is made up of normies, but are essentially upwardly mobile blue-collar types and do not seem to have the mental walls that you are describing in this thread (they have different ones). There is no social benefit to following mainstream narratives, in fact the bias is probably that all politicians are liars and assholes and ditto the mainstream media. This is why the populist approach under the Bannon brigade was effective. Non-welfare-dependent poors and climbing middle classers feel underserved by recent governments, the narrative does them no good.

I have lived around "your family" (Harvard educated, Clinton supporters). You must remember that in their house, they believe that science is real, love is love, and so on. Their social life is predicated on Being Good and Being With It, and if they are not retired, this includes their careers. Violating the good guy/bad guy narrative is disorienting, and it doesn't really empower most people. In some cases, it actively makes their lives worse, as they now have to drag around a bunch of dissent that they are hesitant to share with most of their friends and family.

Ultimately, they need a clear and present *material* danger to make them question the validity of their existing model. Then you can just be there to lend them an ear, or expose them to some place where they can find peers who also question the validity of their own existing model.

Empirically invalidate part of the existing narrative and then abate the risk of ostracism. That's really the only way that normies move (social defectives, like all of us who post here, are a little different, and actively seek out this sort of information, but we still all have our own little mental walls).

As an example, think of Bay Area political narratives over the last decade. They have lagged the online social defectives. The counter-narrative provided by the online right did not change the tune. Rampant crime and social dysfunction, "some dude broke into my fucking car again," & "I do not like the smell of People's Park" changed the tune. That opened up techoids to the the counter-narrative provided by the online right, which gave them validation, community, mental-scaffolding, and vocabulary for thinking about things.

As an example of an institution that is attempting to generate a semblance of autocthonic legitimacy from relatively non-elitist material, see https://www.mcucoop.com/