Technology

I'll give you a hint, the company behind the bots rhymes with Gracker Ferrel.

It's almost as if someone figured out that conservatives, in an effort to feel the need to play the victim, will react negatively and thus be more engaged when presented with non-conforming news.

A sort of dissonance.....that happens cognitively.

Yea a lot of people didn't like the new bland logo, but conservatives were going on about how it's an attack on their culture and heritage. To go that far about a truck stop restaurant was not an organic happening. This is why it doesn't matter that Charlie Kirk was shot. If it wasn't that, the outrage machine would have turned to something else.

Nah pretty much everyone was in agreement that the new logo was worse, what do you me-

Right? I'm definitely not right wing in any way shape or form, but I enjoy Cracker Barrel and the atmosphere once in a while. The logo doesn't need to be updated to the bland bullshit modern marketers want to force just so they can make millions in bullshit consulting fees. There is no way in hell the new logo was better than the old one to represent the company, but someone got paid a ton of money to convince them that it was a good decision clearly without any market research to back it up. A blind idiot could tell that logo was a worse choice objectively without any politics involved.

Were there bots? Oh, for sure. But they weren't the reason for the backlash, the shit decision was the reason it was a thing at all.

Exactly.

I only go to Cracker Barrel on road trips and when they happen to be near where I plan to stop anyway. I don't go out of my way to go there, but I do prefer them over fast food joints.

Their new logo is stupid, mostly because it reminds me of Denny's. It doesn't change whether I'll go there, it only makes me think their logo is stupid when I do.

For all we know CB may have been behind the outrage

They were also inconveniently experiencing significant negative feedback to their business decision to sell warmed up day old food as a standard operating procedure just before new of the logo drama erupted. If you thought cracker barrel was extremely mid before, it's apparently gone full Applebee's microwave kitchen bad lately.

I mean they took the barrel off too. What is cracker barrel without a cracker and a barrel?

Stir shit up, get people to declare sides. Or maybe for the lulz.

Making non-political things political means people aren't looking at other stuff that actually matters. People have a limited attention span, and a limited amount of time to look at things outside work and family. Fill that with bullshit that doesn't matter and they can't stay educated on actual current events.

To distract us from the other bots.

The culture war outrage keeps people from thinking about real problems. Instead, they're perpetually angry about shit that has literally zero impact on their lives.

They choose… profit.

There's a difference between thinking the change is dumb, which is something that happens in an individual's own mind as a passing thought, and thinking you suddenly need to tell everyone about it, and have arguments about it, and seek validations of your passing thought about it in large communities of other people and turn it into a national discussion. Bots are why everyone started talking about it, and that made people feel like they needed to tell everyone else what they thought about it too.

People were simply not losing any sleep over this (and never would have) until bots made it go viral. Some people might have legitimately formed such a thought without any significant outside influence, but it would have been an empty, meaningless, inconsequential thought, like thousands of others that likely go through everyone's brain in any given day to be summarily dismissed and promptly forgotten.

The point the article is raising is that the attention economy has now weaponized such insignificant thoughts, and can exploit them into controlling people's behavior, and thus, create actual real world consequences, the same way a hacker exploits access into a home computer to turn it into a botnet that they can orchestrate to perform actual attacks. It may not do any particular harm to the individual who has been motivated in this way, but it can do catastrophic damage to the targets of their collective wrath, scorn, and ridicule. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words might destroy civilization.