If you read articles from previous decades about the previous decades before them, I think you will find yourself a Crawford after Crawford. Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris nailed this. Statements like "People used to talk to each other", "People used to meet up and enjoy company", "People used to know real skills and critical thinking", are all false. This generation might stare and screens all day, but communication is easier than ever and people are communicating. People may not know how to be motorcycle mechanics, but they know how to develop programs, build electric drives etc... I strongly believe we have a capable and driven society, and the people are not "drunk on there screens".
This decade brings something new, communication is mostly done through devices, this wasn't possible before and this type of communication has a very narrow channel and a lot of information like body gestures, eye contact etc are lost.
I think the difference is, when you called someone in the 90s to ask to say borrow a cup of sugar:
Call neighbor. 1 minute of small talk
Ask the question
Get answer
more small talk.
Say goodbye.
Today it would be (via txt):
A: can i borrow a c of sugar?
B: y. come over
A: k
A lot of communication happens through text messages which dramatically reduces the number of words you say to another human being.
I think what is more damaging is that most people can solve their own problems without ever having to rely on neighbors or even family. Cell phones, uber, and other services remove the need to ask for help. You don't really ask people for directions, ask the time, find out how to do something.
Yes. people still talk to neighbors, family, friends, etc. But it happens much less and in much different contexts. For instance the vast majority of people would not call their neighbor to check on their kids because they are stuck in a storm.
The text vs. call is an example of technology removing obstacles and inefficiencies. In your example, both of the conversations lead to people meeting face-to-face, but only one of them could be done while on a bus, or in between work meetings. Text-based communication enabled us to talk in situations when it wasn't possible before. I fondly remember late-night IM talks with my friends when I was in high-school. This is not something we could do on the phone, both because of stupidly high costs and because other people in our houses were sleeping.
RE most people solving their own problems, I think that's a) good, and b) not what actually happens. Good, because it means less time wasted for everyone in aggregate; not what really happens, because the world is getting more complicated and people delegate more and more understanding to third parties. Also, that we can solve some problems on our own doesn't mean there aren't other, more complicated problems - for help with which we end up calling the family or friends after all.
Why wouldn't you smalltalk when you actually get over there to get the sugar?
Also, if you're arguing these devices reduce smalltalk, I'm not so sure of that. If anything, I'm more likely to idly chat to someone on IM due to increased opportunity to do so. Plus I can even put my daily life in tweets and post that reach an even greater audience than just whoever I happen to bump into.
Oh, you are a manager whose existence depends on micromanaging and enslaving people who are more in touch with physical reality (but not in touch with exploiting human psychological bugs like insecurity and status anxiety that let people like you lord over them). No wonder you want to pretend everything is all right; it is for you. but there will be less of you in the future, and you might find yourself enslaved to someone who is better at the game than you are!
While I agree with what you're saying, I think the point of the article is lost on you. I don't think the author was implying technology has us "drunk on our screens.", but rather, the ability of technology to act as a buffer between us, to create a world where we can have images, messages, opinions, from all walks of life constantly pouring into our minds through our hand-held devices.
I can only speak for myself here, but I noticed how after I started a professional career as a programmer and a tech-geek, I became more and more isolated; preferring alone time, and being in my head. It's just easier, to take in all the information and opinions you prefer, and ignore what you don't want. To engage in activities you want to do yourself, rather than compromising with others.
Perhaps this new society that emerges will not be WORSE than any previous one, but it will be different. I think it is important to understand those differences. I can already feel the growing pains caused by old institutions struggling to keep up with the pace of technology. We should keep an eye on those millennia old social institutions as well (like politics, community building, and voting).
We can easily say the same for the knee jerk reactions to these articles that everything is fine.
What if people complain about this decade after decade because it is getting worse and worse? Of course, people in the conventional wisdom like you would never think of that.
I firmly believe that increased technology makes smaller and smaller cogs of us all, making us worse and worse, concentrating real experiences and all that creative stuff onto fewer and fewer people who can actually afford it.
Ease of communication means it's more difficult to separate your thoughts from others. You become ever closer to a mere regurgitator of pre packaged thoughts.
Luckily, if you regurgitate the thoughts of people who have better and healthier ideas (like how I'm regurgitating Baudrillard right now) the system is self defeating.
But it knows that as well, so there will always be zombies like you produced to promote the conventional wisdom!
> I firmly believe that increased technology makes smaller and smaller cogs of us all, making us worse and worse, concentrating real experiences and all that creative stuff onto fewer and fewer people who can actually afford it.
This is just demonstrably false, by a whole host of measurable metrics. For example:
Average people fly long distances dramatically more today than ever before. (And I'm not talking about just in rich countries -- regional airlines are booming in Africa and Asia too.) It's pretty hard to argue that visiting a faraway place is not a "real experience" that is more accessible than ever.
The fraction of children in the world who go to school instead of doing menial labor is the highest in history and continuing to rise.
And you can't have any "real experiences" if you're dead, so historically low global child mortality is generating an awful lot more real experiences.
> You become ever closer to a mere regurgitator of pre packaged thoughts.
It's rather rich to claim the past was better along this dimension, when most of history was dominated by orthodox religions backed by political elites, and only a tiny elite could even read. Unless you think literacy implies more regurgitation, in which case you've watered down the term enough that it loses it opprobrium.
The tourist industry and mentality is precisely what makes travel to another country less of a real experience. That's actually exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about, but that is lost on people like you who base all their thinking on metrics, which are always collected to justify an agenda, and this particular metric is about the global, totalizing economy, which brings me to my second point:
More kids are in school? For what? To be a white collar slave? To be a white collar slavemaster (entrepreneur)? Death in menial labor, while undesirable, at least prevents one from fattening the elites' wallets with their brains.
Where are the African and Asian artists? Scientists that arent just the tools of whoever is in charge? Philosophers with real, valuable ideas? I'll tell you, theyre the same as the ones in the rest of the world: few and far between, virtually unheard of.
Similarly, low child mortality just currently means the commodification of children and childhood.
I'd also say literacy could have resulted in more healthy attitudes and less regurgitation of what doesn't work, but few read for the sake of reading, and what they do read is trivial crap designed to keep them down.
Your reply is exactly another example of what I'm talking about where all the improvements in technology and education yield only people who think everything is great and there cannot possibly be any systemic problems with the way we live, after all these numbers say everything is fine and if it cannot be quantified or if the numbers arent big enough, it is not worth pursuing or it doesnt exist!
Man you are a good troll. Cheers to you. I lol'd at the "Death in menial labor, while undesirable, at least prevents one from fattening the elites' wallets with their brains".
Thanks for making the utter bankruptcy of Baudrillard's ethics so plain for all to see. Usually it's hiding under much more jargon.
> More kids are in school? For what? To be a white collar slave? To be a white collar slavemaster (entrepreneur)? Death in menial labor, while undesirable, at least prevents one from fattening the elites' wallets with their brains.
I'm a strong critic of schooling as its typically done, because it is indeed a conformity machine. But here's the thing: it's still better than sending all the kids to a salt mine, because that's a precondition for us to even be having this discussion. The kids who got sent to salt mines don't get to read Baudrillard and comment on HN.
> Where are the African and Asian artists?
On those continents, respectively. Racist much?
> scientists... philosophers... virtually unheard of
This has always been the human condition. I guarantee you the fraction of people who appreciated Aristotle during his life was a vanishingly small fraction of the human race.
> Similarly, low child mortality just currently means the commodification of children and childhood.
This is pretty hilarious, because high-mortality societies are the ones that have large families specifically because children are valued as sources of labor. Some societies didn't even name their infants until they got old enough to be out of the highest morality risk -- they were treated as fungible commodities before then.
> I'd also say literacy could have resulted in more healthy attitudes
It could have resulted in spontaneous world peace, too. But that kind of navel gazing is not relevant to the question of whether literacy is still better than nothing. It's clearly a precondition if you want those great scientists and philosophers to ever have a shot.
> people who think everything is great and there cannot possibly be any systemic problems
This is a giant straw man. Please find me a single person who thinks the world has no systemic problems. The presence of problems is a necessary precondition for someone like me to argue that things are getting better. "No problems" implies stasis, not improvement.
Hmm I think I am agreeing with you on the preconditions; I did say that the system, through literacy has sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
But it seems like we're on a path that makes this less and less likely, whereas the introduction of technology and so forth should have done the opposite, were we not "ethically bankrupt" as a species.
Baudrillard can be said to have identified the problems. and that more than makes up for his defeatism.
The rest of your reply is basically, now that we dont have salt mines worked by kids, everything is awesome and you cant complain.
If you really do recognize that we have the systemic problems I was talking about, perhaps we actually agree and I'm only saying things arent getting better fast enough.
Which is a real danger. There's only so much resources one can devote to not being a complete tool, and these are running down, quickly.
The evidence suggesting that society is deteriorating and we have less thinking and more following going on just isn't there. Its completely the opposite. More people are developing technologies in small groups, thanks to the democratization of resources like powerful hardware. No more is creativity to create and progress limited to Universities and Government. We have more time to spend with each other than salving away in repetitive and soul sucking jobs and religious dogma is manipulating less and less people. Explain to me how things are getting worse and worse please?
> thanks to the democratization of resources like powerful hardware
(Em mine.) I have a problem, my rig's not very powerful. Where can I vote to get a better rig? Or does my rig do the voting weighted by its power? (http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/)
By democratization of powerful hardware I meant the democratization of technology which refers to the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people(definition from Wikipedia).
Developing tech in small groups, making multiple versions of the same social media apps / manual labor explotation apps lol, while all thinking they will make it big, while sucking up to VC's. You could not have picked a worse example.
I'd say universities and government are actually the only institutiona left where one can really do the work you are talking about, and even that is with significant capitulation to the economy in order to continue existing.
We have a new religioua dogma now: capitalism, make more money than the next guy, everything is exchangeable, what you cannot pay for doesnt exist.
Ease of communication means it's more difficult to separate your thoughts from others. You become ever closer to a mere regurgitator of pre packaged thoughts.
This is going to sound snippier than the tone it's intended in:
What's your proposed alternative? So very much human suffering is directly caused by a failure to communicate well - seems like increasing ease of communication would be the best way forward based on that alone, regardless of the growing pains and the bad actors. Manipulation has been a thing since communication has been a thing - you're simply not thinking straight if you think retarding the latter will impact the former.
What the hell is a "pre packaged thought" anyways? A synonym for unoriginal? We're products of our shared environment, the likelihood that your thoughts are entirely unique is just about nil.
Aside:
there will always be zombies like you
Could you not? Doing this, your entire opinion becomes worthless, and even uglier than it already was considering the cynicism it's practically dripping in. Snide remarks aren't necessary here. Thanks.
You may find the pattern of complaints repeated decade after decade, but as the other commenter mentioned that is just as easily explained if it is in fact getting worse and worse. If you believe that, and believe that pretty much everything people point out as better that even our ancestors before the 20th century would agree with is better (less homicides for instance) is simply due to technological (incl. medical and scientific) improvement, then you're basically a neoreactionary. Give the authors in that field (or just writers from before the 20th century) a serious read sometime if you want a very different perspective on the world you live in.
I'd love to believe this, and I agree things weren't that better in the past (some form of nostalgic bias)[1], but when I hear people from the 60s, 70s talk, they have finer way to express themselves in more straightforward style. Especially politics (at least in my country), it's disarmingly sad to hear debates of that era, people seemed like far subtler and sophisticated compared to those in place now (they can't even hold a simple argument without resorting to low fallacious tactics).
I'm fairly convinced that when society is too comfortable (while being messier at the same time) then you see diminishing returns in people's existence.
[1] how society repeats itself, new tech bad for work, old good ways are dying; these are recurrent generational waves.
Personally, I ascribe differences in political talk to things being new. Democracy has a natural tendency to vote all competence out of the office, but it takes decades. Politicians of the past may have seemed smarter just because there weren't that many players specializing in persuasion tactics yet, and the "media experience" wasn't so streamlined.
Arguably, people today have more sophisticated politics. Resorting to fallacious tactics isn't a failing if it works. Maybe the problem is a moral one?
That's what I don't want to see. I care more about how it's done than how it 'succeed'. I'm realist, politics are a mess, and will never be all white.
I don't think the people who leverage these 'tricks' today do this because of superior intellectual skills or understanding. They just use it for blind results.
I'm always a little sceptical of these arguments too, because I wonder if the difference is this:
Now, when people are bored with what you're saying, instead, of their eyes glazing over, they might start to become increasingly attentive to their phones; In other words, they now have a physical bore-shield.
I think people meet and talk as much as they did - They just don't necessarily prioritise the pleb in front of them - and for some people, who like to monopolise their audiences, this is a problem.
31 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] threadAnd communication through phones for hours a day was normal for most people in the 90s too. Even in the 50s.
I think what is more damaging is that most people can solve their own problems without ever having to rely on neighbors or even family. Cell phones, uber, and other services remove the need to ask for help. You don't really ask people for directions, ask the time, find out how to do something.
Yes. people still talk to neighbors, family, friends, etc. But it happens much less and in much different contexts. For instance the vast majority of people would not call their neighbor to check on their kids because they are stuck in a storm.
The text vs. call is an example of technology removing obstacles and inefficiencies. In your example, both of the conversations lead to people meeting face-to-face, but only one of them could be done while on a bus, or in between work meetings. Text-based communication enabled us to talk in situations when it wasn't possible before. I fondly remember late-night IM talks with my friends when I was in high-school. This is not something we could do on the phone, both because of stupidly high costs and because other people in our houses were sleeping.
RE most people solving their own problems, I think that's a) good, and b) not what actually happens. Good, because it means less time wasted for everyone in aggregate; not what really happens, because the world is getting more complicated and people delegate more and more understanding to third parties. Also, that we can solve some problems on our own doesn't mean there aren't other, more complicated problems - for help with which we end up calling the family or friends after all.
The world is fine, at least in this aspect.
Also, if you're arguing these devices reduce smalltalk, I'm not so sure of that. If anything, I'm more likely to idly chat to someone on IM due to increased opportunity to do so. Plus I can even put my daily life in tweets and post that reach an even greater audience than just whoever I happen to bump into.
I can only speak for myself here, but I noticed how after I started a professional career as a programmer and a tech-geek, I became more and more isolated; preferring alone time, and being in my head. It's just easier, to take in all the information and opinions you prefer, and ignore what you don't want. To engage in activities you want to do yourself, rather than compromising with others.
Perhaps this new society that emerges will not be WORSE than any previous one, but it will be different. I think it is important to understand those differences. I can already feel the growing pains caused by old institutions struggling to keep up with the pace of technology. We should keep an eye on those millennia old social institutions as well (like politics, community building, and voting).
What if people complain about this decade after decade because it is getting worse and worse? Of course, people in the conventional wisdom like you would never think of that.
I firmly believe that increased technology makes smaller and smaller cogs of us all, making us worse and worse, concentrating real experiences and all that creative stuff onto fewer and fewer people who can actually afford it.
Ease of communication means it's more difficult to separate your thoughts from others. You become ever closer to a mere regurgitator of pre packaged thoughts.
Luckily, if you regurgitate the thoughts of people who have better and healthier ideas (like how I'm regurgitating Baudrillard right now) the system is self defeating.
But it knows that as well, so there will always be zombies like you produced to promote the conventional wisdom!
This is just demonstrably false, by a whole host of measurable metrics. For example:
Average people fly long distances dramatically more today than ever before. (And I'm not talking about just in rich countries -- regional airlines are booming in Africa and Asia too.) It's pretty hard to argue that visiting a faraway place is not a "real experience" that is more accessible than ever.
The fraction of children in the world who go to school instead of doing menial labor is the highest in history and continuing to rise.
And you can't have any "real experiences" if you're dead, so historically low global child mortality is generating an awful lot more real experiences.
> You become ever closer to a mere regurgitator of pre packaged thoughts.
It's rather rich to claim the past was better along this dimension, when most of history was dominated by orthodox religions backed by political elites, and only a tiny elite could even read. Unless you think literacy implies more regurgitation, in which case you've watered down the term enough that it loses it opprobrium.
More kids are in school? For what? To be a white collar slave? To be a white collar slavemaster (entrepreneur)? Death in menial labor, while undesirable, at least prevents one from fattening the elites' wallets with their brains.
Where are the African and Asian artists? Scientists that arent just the tools of whoever is in charge? Philosophers with real, valuable ideas? I'll tell you, theyre the same as the ones in the rest of the world: few and far between, virtually unheard of.
Similarly, low child mortality just currently means the commodification of children and childhood.
I'd also say literacy could have resulted in more healthy attitudes and less regurgitation of what doesn't work, but few read for the sake of reading, and what they do read is trivial crap designed to keep them down.
Your reply is exactly another example of what I'm talking about where all the improvements in technology and education yield only people who think everything is great and there cannot possibly be any systemic problems with the way we live, after all these numbers say everything is fine and if it cannot be quantified or if the numbers arent big enough, it is not worth pursuing or it doesnt exist!
> More kids are in school? For what? To be a white collar slave? To be a white collar slavemaster (entrepreneur)? Death in menial labor, while undesirable, at least prevents one from fattening the elites' wallets with their brains.
I'm a strong critic of schooling as its typically done, because it is indeed a conformity machine. But here's the thing: it's still better than sending all the kids to a salt mine, because that's a precondition for us to even be having this discussion. The kids who got sent to salt mines don't get to read Baudrillard and comment on HN.
> Where are the African and Asian artists?
On those continents, respectively. Racist much?
> scientists... philosophers... virtually unheard of
This has always been the human condition. I guarantee you the fraction of people who appreciated Aristotle during his life was a vanishingly small fraction of the human race.
> Similarly, low child mortality just currently means the commodification of children and childhood.
This is pretty hilarious, because high-mortality societies are the ones that have large families specifically because children are valued as sources of labor. Some societies didn't even name their infants until they got old enough to be out of the highest morality risk -- they were treated as fungible commodities before then.
> I'd also say literacy could have resulted in more healthy attitudes
It could have resulted in spontaneous world peace, too. But that kind of navel gazing is not relevant to the question of whether literacy is still better than nothing. It's clearly a precondition if you want those great scientists and philosophers to ever have a shot.
> people who think everything is great and there cannot possibly be any systemic problems
This is a giant straw man. Please find me a single person who thinks the world has no systemic problems. The presence of problems is a necessary precondition for someone like me to argue that things are getting better. "No problems" implies stasis, not improvement.
But it seems like we're on a path that makes this less and less likely, whereas the introduction of technology and so forth should have done the opposite, were we not "ethically bankrupt" as a species.
Baudrillard can be said to have identified the problems. and that more than makes up for his defeatism.
The rest of your reply is basically, now that we dont have salt mines worked by kids, everything is awesome and you cant complain.
If you really do recognize that we have the systemic problems I was talking about, perhaps we actually agree and I'm only saying things arent getting better fast enough.
Which is a real danger. There's only so much resources one can devote to not being a complete tool, and these are running down, quickly.
(Em mine.) I have a problem, my rig's not very powerful. Where can I vote to get a better rig? Or does my rig do the voting weighted by its power? (http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/)
I'd say universities and government are actually the only institutiona left where one can really do the work you are talking about, and even that is with significant capitulation to the economy in order to continue existing.
We have a new religioua dogma now: capitalism, make more money than the next guy, everything is exchangeable, what you cannot pay for doesnt exist.
This is going to sound snippier than the tone it's intended in:
What's your proposed alternative? So very much human suffering is directly caused by a failure to communicate well - seems like increasing ease of communication would be the best way forward based on that alone, regardless of the growing pains and the bad actors. Manipulation has been a thing since communication has been a thing - you're simply not thinking straight if you think retarding the latter will impact the former.
What the hell is a "pre packaged thought" anyways? A synonym for unoriginal? We're products of our shared environment, the likelihood that your thoughts are entirely unique is just about nil.
Aside:
there will always be zombies like you
Could you not? Doing this, your entire opinion becomes worthless, and even uglier than it already was considering the cynicism it's practically dripping in. Snide remarks aren't necessary here. Thanks.
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I'm fairly convinced that when society is too comfortable (while being messier at the same time) then you see diminishing returns in people's existence.
[1] how society repeats itself, new tech bad for work, old good ways are dying; these are recurrent generational waves.
I don't think the people who leverage these 'tricks' today do this because of superior intellectual skills or understanding. They just use it for blind results.
Now, when people are bored with what you're saying, instead, of their eyes glazing over, they might start to become increasingly attentive to their phones; In other words, they now have a physical bore-shield.
I think people meet and talk as much as they did - They just don't necessarily prioritise the pleb in front of them - and for some people, who like to monopolise their audiences, this is a problem.