Ask Lemmy

I formed my filthy inclusive solidarity leftist agenda before the web was a thing.

Though I did use dial-up BBS and FidoNet and later Usenet and email and FTP and some federated remote file polling services I don't remember, mostly to get my hands on newsletters and FAQs and docs on studio electronics and hacking and philosophy and occultism and punk rock and industrial music. Regular nerdy computerized teen stuff of ~1990.

But I also frequented the library and hung around in political circles.

So, I guess?

More or less. My morals and where they come from predate the Internet. I'm not particularly old either.

I certainly wouldn't be voting for Trump since i have the rare human ability of noticing when someone has lied to my face thousands of times in the most absurd, lazy, and inconsistent manner possible.

My dad was a Republican and a military man who i respected immensely, so I could've seen myself going that route, but that route in my mind was "fiscally conservative" and not "socially conservative", but I haven't seen any fiscal responsibility from that party outside of implementing cuts to offset massive tax break handouts for billionaires, and there's instead an extremely unhealthy emphasis on the latter.

Come to think of it i don't think i even came across politics much during my childhood years with Internet, it was still web forums mainly and political web forums sounds as boring now as it did then. (though It's kinda weird that i feel that way and still spend most of my time on lemmy discussing politics rather than any other topics)

I can state pretty definitively mostly yes because a lot of my formative years were before the internet really existed as such. Www came about when I was about 15. I was already dialing into BBSes and Gopher and IRC before that, but DSL didn't come about until I was in my twenties and I must've been nearly thirty when broadband came about in my neck of the woods.

My swing from right to left was well under way by that point. The internet certainly didn't hurt that, and I might've hung onto some deep-seated bigotry longer without it, but my die was cast probably before 9/11 and certainly after it.

I'd say i'd have the same political/philosophical beliefs, cuz they make sense with who i was before i had access to the internet, and the social context i grew up in. I rejected religion since i can remember interacting with it. On the other hand, i might not have the same cultural knowledge (especially in music, which i discovered on youtube and forums).

I don't think so. It's provided me with a lot of different perspectives and information that doesn't show up in centralized media.

Vaguely, I think a lot of my outlook on life came from reading Terry Pratchett and Ian M Banks amongst others

I didn't really seek out political content on the internet when I was a teenager (this was before the powers that be really discovered the internet as a propaganda tool), but I was already pretty leftleaning just from reading/watching traditional news, reading books and talking to people in person.

I do wonder if my views would have changed if I was more financially successful. It's easy to believe that you deserve it when you have 'made it'.

I think so, yes - I first used the internet when I was about 18, it was the first real flush of it becoming a widely used consumer product.

As such, I had already formed most of my political/ethical stances, more or less, and they haven't really changed, other than to react to new factors in the world. I obviously still had some growing up to do but I think my basic life view hasn't really altered much.

if internet didn't exist, I'd probably be a religious person, who wouldn't read any religious books but would have followed the customs. But with internet, and by interacting with different people, I became atheist.

If the internet didn't exist I very likely wouldn't be alive today, so I guess not

Probably not. I build my philosophy bit by bit, by being exposed to a lot of different often contradictory ideas though the internet.

I would have never had patience for reading all the classic philosophers (they wrote a lot). Even less with modern ones (they are very niche these days). But having a summary of anything at my fingertips made me able to cross connect ideas and form something coherent on my own.