Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist.
This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.
The damage this causes across generations (even if the regime is short lived!) is so hard to grasp if you haven’t lived with it. It touches every aspect of life. It makes trust impossible, and without some level of trust and a belief in the possibility of justice, *nothing in society works.*
The first time I saw it I seriously considered making a similar game for moderation using actual content (ie not the more abstract way Moderator Mayhem went with) to provoke the same understanding of how corrosive a force it is, but the fact it legally couldn't include the worst stuff would blunt it
yeah if it doesn’t realistically depict looking at thousands of ads for acai powder with slightly different wording, punctuated by the occasional teenage Brazilian girl posting CSAM to get Justin Bieber to notice her for some reason what’s the fucking point
Exactly! Just the subconscious pressure valve of knowing the game could never throw CSAM at you when you hit "next report in queue" would change the experience too much to really make the point, I concluded
There are people who will volunteer moderate on Reddit even knowing that they have a nonzero chance of encountering an ISIL propaganda “music video”
No one but CSAM collectors would mod if they reasonably believed they’d encounter even one instance of CSAM.
Not to be dramatic but I feel like a lot of problems stem from people assuming, somehow, that stuff that isn't csam can somehow be the same as a record of actual harm to an actual child.
But also yeah, absolutely, that game has the problem of you know it's a simulation and you're safe