Today, it's less the "Boomers" or whatever pejorative you'd like to use, and more the younger generations that are online (including HN which comes out of the box with lovely vote and flag functionality - yours for 500 credits). Take a minute and ponder the implications of that one as you stack it next to other tidbits of information like the political alignments of certain demographics.
The greater issue we are facing is people unable to cope with "dissenting" (read: different) opinions because for whatever reason they think it's a personal affront on their identity for someone to disagree with something they've said online, under an anonymous (not for long!) moniker.
Facebook Isn't Other People. There is no 'democratization'. These platforms did not create anything. Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Parler, Win, Reddit, HN, Wikifarms, are fairly holistic in their representation of what people are actually like from the very beginning. You just don't want to admit you're as much of an asshole as the next poster, if you could get away with it.
> because for whatever reason they think it’s a personal affront on their identity
Because most people seem to believe in a single objective Reality™. It leads people to not just disagree, but to consider “the other” as having a totally broken thought process. Makes it a lot easier for people to dehumanize the other :/
Disagreeing over opinion is one thing, but most curious is when there isn't even real opinion involved. I don't know how many times I've posted something matter of fact like "Today is the first day of winter." to get a response akin to "How can you love winter? I hate the cold and there must be something wrong with you if you don't see summer as the one true season."
A response of "Actually, it is the first day fall" I can understand, but how does observing that a given day is the first day of winter, to stick with the above, equate to having some kind of emotional bond with winter? I have never been able figure out the logical leap made. The only conclusion I have been able to come to is that the mere existence of certain keywords is enough to challenge their reality, and making it about the person helps them cope. But perhaps that is just me projecting the idea of a broken thought process on them.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming every account on the Internet is an actual human. I obviously have no way to prove such a thing, but it would be strange if there weren’t a massive amount of bots-posing-as-human online trying to influence opinions and behavior.
I am sure that in some cases it is completely intentional (be it a bot or a human) with an intent to be disruptive in some way, but in other cases I think it can be reasonably been seen as being genuine. Sometimes the respondent will eventually admit that they took it the wrong way. Often it comes from usernames who have enough of a reputation that you can have good reason to believe it is a real person with no specific motive.
The author claims that unhappy, unsuccessful people fill social media with misplaced anger because they have too much time on their hands. These are the ‘other people’, while we, the knowledge workers are Happy and naturally repulsed by social media.
This is a really condescending take, and I don’t think that unhappiness and mental illness magically avoid knowledge workers - perhaps even the opposite. I do think that earning a software engineer’s salary makes you view the world in a different way than most people, and it’s true that I don’t see too many software engineers (angry or otherwise) on Facebook, but perhaps that’s because we’re all hiding here. :-)
The argument made in the article is that bitter, ostracised people who want to lash out have existed forever. The biggest change in the last 10 years is that the internet has become more accessible to this group and allowed their voice to be heard.
Not saying the author is right, but it's an interesting perspective and definitely worth considering.
More disturbingly that his perception of old media is one of a careful, curated gate keeping process to ensure those producing information knew where the bounds should be.
I find this somewhat disquieting. I certainly thought it was somewhat true up to the early 1990s.
The implication is that it was always known that people are easily manipulated. They needed protecting from themselves and the manipulators need to come from a certain class.
I object to that notion, but I am appalled at the base insanity that Facebook creates so I find myself conceding the point.
It appears to me that we haven't really switched the model, but looking at the analysis of the tiny number of influencers it takes to generate 90% of anti vax or whatever propaganda on facebook it seems clear this isn't democratization.
We have simply been handed a different set of carefully curated sources of information.
It's worth bearing in mind that the mainstream media are far from unbiased when taking about the benefits and harms of their gatekept information vs sources like Facebook which they don't control. For example, I remember the BBC pushing an article about Facebook anti-vaxers putting the UK in danger of a serious measles outbreak that was a sterling example of deceiving with true facts. The percentage of eligible kids receiving their vaccinations had dropped, but it was a mere fraction of a percent below the UK's all-time record high a year earlier. The UK was indeed failing to meet the UN goal of 95% of kids double-jabbed, but it had never acheived that in the first place. And after digging up some NHS publications, it turned out that the UK was in danger of a measles outbreak, but the big problem was all the people who didn't get vaccinated in the 90s due to anti-vaccination misinformation spread by the BBC and other mainstream media before most people even had internet access. Basically, the BBC was spreading misinformation to blame Facebook for a problem that they themselves were actually responsible for.
It pisses me off to no end when someone says something like, "Given how much google/fb/amazon has been in the news, theres no question that they're now evil"
Anyone can confirm the challenge of poverty even in the 1st world, with minimum curiosity, exactly the way RFK did in 1967[1] and John Edwards did in the aughts [2]. We live in a world of plenty but surrounded by vast communities of need.
Yet all of his examples are of conservatives, even though liberals do the same (often worse). The whole article itself was a very politely written “lashing out” at people who vote differently than he does.
Yes that’s fair - and I’m not necessarily saying he’s wrong. But I think his framing reinforces an us vs then perspective, and if we practice seeing another group of people as deeply broken and misguided then we reinforce a divide. And in a way, that justifies other people’s anger at us. So even if this distinction exists, I’m not sure we should practice noticing it.
Conversely, the "Great Awokening" is a direct result of the legitimate "democratization" that the article discusses.
It seems to me that the knee-jerk opposition to "wokeness" always comes from people who would rather sweep problems that don't affect them under the rug than acknowledge that they need to be fixed. They are the aloof, socially normative people in this article, utterly confused by and thus dismissive of the struggles of those outside of society's standard ingroup.
"We weren't like this 10 years ago" because, as the article describes, those concerns were previously ignored by the mainstream because they didn't fit the experiences or interests of those who had influence over the mainstream. Now that those institutions have lost that filtering power, we're hearing from more real people with more real problems. Healthcare access, structural racism, mental health resources, poverty, etc. They are taking their little hammers to our Twitter feeds. The solution isn't to shame and ignore the people complaining about them - it is to fix those societal issues that cause the pain to begin with.
On the contrary, "structural racism" seems to me an almost religious, simple explanation (akin to "sin", "wickedness" or "the Devil") that papers over a much more complicated and nuanced situation.
There is a massive hodgepodge of ethnic communities in the U.S., of all possible colors, and their societal and economic outcomes do not conform or correlate to the idea that people of darker skin are more oppressed by the society and are worse off.
10 years isn't that long ago. All those sites were around then, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News...
Even the topics changed only a little bit. GamerGate was 7 years ago. 4chan and 8chan were reviled before that. The major political debates are as old as time. The division between American and European morality is about as old as those world-views.
I also didn't like that the deranged person is a Trump supporter. There are deranged democrats in not small proportions. The point of the article was good but it too was polarizing.
The author trying to elicit sympathy for "the deep state" as a group of despised people seemed like an extremely contrived example. I agree that the article was polarizing, and caricature-like.
Unfortunately you fall in the same kind of trap. I would argue that it matters not for the argument. Whoever Your Guy is. The trap is the diatribe (my position is superior to yours) and it’s solution is better politics of inclusion. At least that’s how I read it.
"The Other" strikes me as a distinctly anglophone construction. I think you may be reading too much into French's use of adjectives as nouns, meaning people to whom those adjectives apply.
In English, we are okay with "the young" and "the old" but shy away from doing the same with other terms, especially in the plural. "The poors," "the gays," "the olds" are all considered derogatory trolling.
Not so in French. The best translation of "les autres" really is "other people."
Yes this is a normal phrase meaning simply other people and nothing to do with ‘the other’ which has a different meaning in English.
Another example of this is the film ‘Au revoir les enfants’ which a literal translation would render as ‘Goodbye the children’ but is really just ‘Goodbye children’.
> Millions of Americans are miserable. The internet has “gotten worse” because Americans are not ok. Near-universal internet access means that there are immiserated, lonely people spending many hours a day online. The breakdown in the social fabric, climbing "prime-age" unemployment and high rates of addiction and mental illness manifest themselves in our mutually-constructed online spaces. There is a misery that wants to make itself known--to inflict itself on the world--that social media enables. We are reaping what we've sown; the interconnectedness enabled by the internet and the gains from open communication/cooperation cannot succeed while so many are left behind.
There's an awesome idea for a sci-fi/cyberpunk/horror story in here somewhere.
If we're talking dystopic anime, we already have celebrity avatars like in Psycho Pass, and surveillance that rivals Sybil's at times. I wonder how long do we have until things like China's social score directly lead to preemptive arrests.
At least Sybil strives to be fair as it's prime directive and the thought of it being self-serving is radical.
I could have worded my comment more sensitively, I apologize.
However, the impulse to create art that aims to better inform the populace of various sufferings is age-old. Victor Hugo wasn't Valjean, but Valjean was based on an incident he witnessed, and Les Misérables was born from that, to use one example.
Thank you for this reply. This is both a much better take and a welcome way of engaging. In that spirit, I apologize for not giving you more benefit of the doubt that it’s possible this is what you meant.
> Millions of Americans are miserable. The internet has “gotten worse” because Americans are not ok.
I remember when this kind of stuff used to make me feel better because I felt like it "wasn't just me". Now it makes me feel worse, because I realize that no-one will "come and save us".
I dunno, maybe the people running our economy could lay off the induced-scarcity a little? It’s not like our money’s value is tied to any tangible real-world thing, after all. They seem to think it builds character: https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/documents/education/pubs/w... (PDF warning)
On the other hand, humanity appears to have an endless capacity for hierarchy. In the absence of natural scarcity, humans create the artificial.
Also, who are the people running the economy? I think it’s an emergent phenomenon of humans natural behavior, amplified by our current scale and low friction interconnectedness.
I don’t know. I assume there has to be at least some intended direction for them to be able to write comics about it, but I am just a peon in this system :)
The emergent phenomenons arise from an environment defined by certain rules and external factors.
Many of those rules are defined by a small group of people (laws), and a very important external factor (money) is directly influenced by central banks. These people decide pretty directly how much and into what types of investments money should go.
While our money may not be tied to any tangible real-world thing, our ability to actually buy tangible real-world things with it absolutely and obviously is. I can't imagine most people would feel better off if they had twice the money on paper but couldn't afford anything more than they can now. Also, one really alarming thing about modern society is just how much social media, the press and populist politicians have been feeding miserable people conspiracy theories about how all their problems are created by a plot of a shadowy group of individuals to oppress them and could trivially be ended if those people were overthrown.
That seems utopian. Norway is among the happiest nations in the world, yet a guy once decided it’s a good idea to go to an island fully armed and kill a bunch of teenagers
... A guy who consumed too much far-right wank, much of it from other countries. Especially America.
And that was about the definition of an isolated incident, or the exception that proves the rule.
So, I'm left wondering what your point is? You think utopia isn't something to strive for? We must accept our fate because of an isolated incident in a country that while much much better at taking care of its people than America is still far from actually a utopia?
I find it a weird response to deny technology's role in making the problems we do have worse but simply saying "why don't we just fix all the previously unfixable problems in our society?"
It makes me feel better, because there's more to fix :)
Life was really bad for me about 13 years ago, and that means it's easier to relate to other peoples' suffering now. People have practical needs - food, shelter, a little money - but need community even more.
Thanks to ambivalents pointing it out, I read the article, including Chekov's story of the little hammer. I also remembered UncleBob talking about code: "clean as you go" [1]. We can make the world a better place, but the solution isn't to pay someone else to do it professionally - we have to all take responsibility and fix our little parts of the world as we go along. We can also make it better by not only filing bug reports, but suggesting what to do instead. Then we'll all be saying "thank you" all the time!
Treating others in the way that we want to be treated (not how they treat us), dying to ourselves, and giving thanks - that's a message from someone who did "come and save us", our Savior. I'm not very good at following his instructions though >_<
> We can also make it better by not only filing bug reports, but suggesting what to do instead. Then we'll all be saying "thank you" all the time!
I have a fairly long list of bug reports regarding reality, including suggestions of how things could be improved. Is there somewhere that I can file these such that they might get addressed, or at least considered?
There's 2 hard things in life: naming things (knowing who to tell) and cache invalidation (forgetting to tell them).
When it's totally outside our control, we can always let the great Debugger know how things are going, and if there's a problem, ask to stop time and hack some solution in. We have to live with the consequences of that being answered though, so be careful what you pray for!
Well, being omnipresent, it's not hard to make sure that your message is heard. And being omniscient, language shouldn't be a problem. We just want to make sure our messages go to the right entity. And that requires naming things. In whose name do you pray?
There is a neat end-of-file marker that works in most human languages though: "Amen."
When the Debugger stepped into human life, now that was something special, Immanuel. His name seems like the most logical name to talk to, because we can know Him personally.
When you think about it, it's kind of funny in the year 2021 in an increasingly secular "democratic" country, your recommendation is probably similarly effective to most any other option out there.
> Now it makes me feel worse, because I realize that no-one will "come and save us".
I'm curious: why do you believe this? Of course it's not a particularly uncommon belief, but I am interested in where it comes from.
Or, if it was intended more of a casual comment than an accurate prediction of the future, then I will simply ask for that: do you believe it is most likely that ~"no one will come and save us", and if so is a component of that belief based on a belief that ~it is not possible to save us?
What I mean is that I had this "feeling", not even a belief, that if things go bad for everyone, then whomever is in charge will finally realize that shit's going sideways, and pull the plug on it. I'm saying feeling rather than belief cause I don't think I ever really believed that ; instead it's probably more of a remnant from childhood when there was always someone to save us in the end.
> the final thousand feet was horrifying—steep sugar snow that collapsed beneath our feet as we battled upward, unable to down-climb, and unable to find protection or anchors. On the summit, with the immaculate expanse of the range unfolding in every direction, Scott turned to me and said, in complete seriousness, “I want my mom so bad right now.”
> it's probably more of a remnant from childhood when there was always someone to save us in the end
I have this very same feeling now and then. I wonder if you and I are the only ones. Or, is this particular way (how we are feeling it) the only manner in which this......whatever it is manifests in reality? Or might this be some component, one among perhaps thousands of others (or even more, or maybe much less) that keeps humanity at this local maxima trajectory that seems (so they say) headed for some sort of major calamity, on more than one front.
Interesting piece but these substacks throw me off - just assume a 'newsletter' is recent. Like you received this in your inbox recently and thought it was worth sharing.
I liked this piece but I'm more blown away by Chekhov's insight into the human condition. I hadn't heard of the 'little hammer' concept before. In a way I think Covid (and social media, like the author argues) has brought the hammer to each of our doors.
> For so many people in my class — blessedly “successful” knowledge workers safely sequestered in pleasant suburbs, college towns or gentrified urban neighborhoods — the horrors we encounter only on social media are a more or less accurate reflection of the lives of millions of Americans.
Misery might have a nicer veneer when it's not floating in poverty, but to believe that blessedly “successful” knowledge workers only encounter miserable Americans on social media is a stretch.
I think the author overestimates just how good his class has it. Behind closed doors, places like Silicon Valley are just as unhappy if not more unhappy than many other places where people are less educated and less financially secure. Drug and alcohol abuse are common. Many marriages are unhealthy and unhappy. Lots of people are concerned about money even though they have more of it than most people would accumulate in lifetimes. People struggle with their interpersonal relationships and many are lonely.
In reality, the suburbs, college towns and gentrified urban neighborhoods can be very unpleasant places. As an example, about a month before I left Silicon Valley, I had a terrible encounter in an upscale coffee shop. A man physically threatened me after he literally stole my table (where my food and belongings were) while I was using the restroom. This was not a mentally ill homeless person as one might guess, but rather a well-dressed young man who might very well have worked at one of the big tech companies surrounding the coffee shop.
Instead of author's "other people" approach, I'm going with "misery loves company". Facebook isn't other people. It's you.
FB groups is relied on by rescue groups routinely with huge altruistic benefits. An example I personally know:
animal shelter workers routinely find homes for abandoned animals, rather than euthanasia...at least in the United States.
What I imagined is this is a very significant part of how FB is used and I don’t think the person who uses it this way misrepresented it. Also based on my personal and lived experience but, I don’t think it’s an outlier. Rescues and pet loving communities use FB very effectively.
The app/product is terrible but this is one of the places where thats not the case
the recent research conducted by Facebook reported on by the WSJ that brought to light that even Facebook's own researchers attribute significant negative effects to the usage of the company's products on misinformation and the mental health of teenagers, for example.
I agree with the overall message. I would like to note that the author doesn’t stop himself from dehumanising people though. To him, there are ‘red state’ people, ‘blue state’ people, ‘conservatives’ or ‘losers’. These people also share ‘evil’ knowledge and support ‘evil’ politicians. That is one issue with people/Americans: everything is good or evil. This is the polarisation you supposedly speak against! Why are you committing it? My disclaimer: I don’t support any political idea/party, and I don’t like any politics.
To be frank, "I don't like politics" is a privileged position that can only be held by people who are already so well-served by the current shape of the world that they have no strong desire - or rather, need - to change it. Political parties seem equivilant because they don't disagree about things that affect your needs. (That doesn't mean your life is necessarily easy, but it does mean that the most controversial issues in society don't impact you, which is an uncommon advantage.)
That need is where the moralizing comes from. As the piece describes, there are swaths of people who are left behind by difficult gaps our societal culture - but there are also people who are either ignored or explicitly oppressed by our political system too.
The "evil" in the oppression part is easier to explain (though more divisive) - in modern US politics, Republicans are almost universally hostile towards and opposed to expansions of rights for marginalized groups. LGBT+ rights are an obvious example, which they have almost universally opposed. Yes, Democrats have also opposed things at times and acted slowly, but over time the party has changed to accept them, and Republicans have not. Whenever positive change is made, it is almost universally by Democrats against Republican opposition.
The ignorance part is trickier. As a conservative party, the core Republican demographic has always been the idealized social norm. Almost by definition, maintaining existing social norms is what a conservative party does. In pre-modern US politics (say, pre-1970s), that would be the middle class, straight, white, Christian, male. Because that is the base, that is the group whose interests the party serves. Thus, a blind spot is formed that excludes everyone else in society who does not fit that mold. Generally speaking, their needs are ignored - even fought against, if it would cause disruption to the social norms their base represents and values.
Ignorance itself is not evil. But sweeping known problems under the rug is. Over the last few decades especially, we have learned a lot about the problems of our fellow Americans that have been ignored by society. Minority discrimination, marginalization, extreme wealth inequality, lack of healthcare access, mental health problems, etc... And again, Republicans are almost universally against any change that would alleviate that suffering, usually with the excuse that they are too expensive (e.g. healthcare) or are not real problems (e.g. BLM). The real reason, though, is that any such change might cause discomfort to their base - rich white people who don't want to pay taxes (and the people like the kid in the novel who are manipulated by them).
As society learns more about the people who it has left behind - exactly as this article details - it becomes a moral imperative to fix those problems. Republicans have been purposefully obstructing progress for decades - Gingrich and McConnell have literally bragged about it.
As social media connects us more, the stories of the oppressed and marginalized become louder and more apparent. As this realization becomes more clear (as some would say, "becoming woke"), the urge to fix it becomes greater. At this point, there is no longer a reasonable justification for inaction. Combined with the growing influence of the racist alt-right and clear escalation of anti-democratic practices, it is difficult to characterize them as anything other than "evil", particularly if you are (or are allied to) any of the groups that they harass or dismiss.
I think there is a lot of truth to what you say here, and it is certainly reasonable.
However, I believe that it describes a relative conceptualization of the world (Group <X> "is" <Y> relative to Group <Z>).
Hopefully the idea that I am trying to communicate lands as intended within your mind. Assuming it did to a sufficient degree: if you were to rerun this same evaluation process from an absolute perspective, do you think it would come out to at least some significantly different conclusions, paint a different picture, etc?
"I don't want to be political."
<posts pro-gun, pro-police, pro-military stuff>
"Why do you keep making things political?"
<posts editorial about Afghanistan>
"Stop bringing politics into everything!"
<posts meme making fun of masks>
I think some of these people sincerely don't recognize how political their own views are. They think they're just being patriotic, as though definitions of patriotism aren't political. They think they're just expressing religious beliefs, as though their own religion hasn't had an intensely political role since the day it was founded. To them, "politics" is only about deviating from what they know is Right And True. As long as you agree with them on every political topic, they don't think of it as politics.
A really great piece of writing. These problems have been growing, festering, for twenty years and we're only just waking up to it.
One thing I take issue with:
> This electoral democracy still excludes the poorest and least capable in our society, who cannot keep up to date with politics and make it to the polling station to actually cast a ballot.
We have to stop doing this. If we want to create some kind of common set of values that binds us together regardless of class, wealth, etc we also need to accept some things that we can collectively agree as positive or negative traits or values.
Too often, middle class people infantilise the working class, refuse to accept that they have agency, and ascribe their lives and behaviour to externalities and societal injustice. This doesn't help anyone, it just reinforces the division of society and stops us seeing our neighbour (regardless of class, wealth, etc) as essentially the same as us.
The poorest in our society can keep up-to-date with politics, and a lot of them do. All they need is a TV or radio, and the poorest in western society can get hold of one of these. If they don't, that's fine, I don't accept there's a moral imperative to do so if it's not your bag, but let's stop with this nonsense. Just go to hustings or the local meet of any political party and you'll meet people from all wealth brackets. Probably more of them poor than wealthy. So where does this idea that poor people can't keep up-to-date with politics come from? Any that want to can, and most do.
Similar sentiments like: poor people can't be expected to read books, or eat vegetables, or go for walks, or tell their kids to do their homework, or help their kids to read, etc, etc. None of these things require money. Oh, but what about the institutional injustices, and the ways in which our society is configured such that poor people do not benefit from having those values instilled? And the fact that money stresses preclude other less critical concerns finding a time or place? Sorry, that's middle-class well-meaning crap, and it's helping to destroy any kind of cohesive set of shared values we once had.
> Too often, middle class people infantilise the working class, refuse to accept that they have agency, and ascribe their lives and behaviour to externalities and societal injustice. This doesn't help anyone, it just reinforces the division of society and stops us seeing our neighbour (regardless of class, wealth, etc) as essentially the same as us.
I disagree, at least to some degree.
My counterpoint is to merely point to the “fundamental attribution bias” as being the usual direction of human cognitive biases.
The general idea is to “enable” people to have more agency and to give them the tools and support they need to make informed, self-interested decisions. The idea is not to blame externalities directly.
> poor people can't be expected to read books, or eat vegetables, or go for walks, or tell their kids to do their homework, or help their kids to read, etc, etc. None of these things require money.
Those things still require free time. Having these as values and being able to regularly practice them are two different things. I don't see how that fact is "well meaning crap".
1. they often have multiple jobs since many jobs on the lower end don't pay a living wage.
2. they have longer commutes so they live in less expensive communities where their wages can go further. But those communities tend to have less available jobs overall.
So, on average, yeah. Less free time for the working poor.
This is where having hard data would help. Do the poor actually work multiple jobs? Do they actually have longer commutes? On average. And to be more specific, we can compare people who make 50k in bay area (poor) to people who make 200k (e.g. Silicon Volley SWEs frequently seen on HN).
The decrease in television watching is actually among the more technically literate, not illiterate; according to Nielsen, younger people are watching streaming services instead of television.
Watching television is not free time that can be switched out for other activities. Much of the television watching happens after the kids have gone to sleep as a wind down activity. Also popular is tv before work in the background on a morning show or tv in the background while cooking or cleaning.
Trying to teach your kids how to read or reading them a story cannot happen when much of the tv is consumed.
4 hours/day of TV watching is crazy and I think this is a very generous portrayal of that time. It is certainly /possible/ for parents to adjust their schedules to spend an hour reading to kids at night (top priority imo). Treating TV as an essential activity is a new one I find quite depressing.
Parents using TV as a crutch to entertain kids is really common, and I'm eternally grateful I grew up in a home without TV. However, that was pre-modern streaming, ipads for kids, etc.
I agree generally with the diagnosis here. Although I disagree with the notion that a more equitable society is a silver bullet for reducing human misery.
Firstly, in terms of social media I doubt that misery would ever stop commanding people's attention. I've heard that in psychology studies people tend to latch more readily onto negative ideas than positive ones in a group setting. For what it's worth, my anecdotal experiences have cohered with this too.
Secondly, I think the politics of pushing equity over mere equality of opportunity is more complicated than proponents would suggest. Humans have an instinctive normative sense of fairness that would need to be subsumed somehow by a more intellectual altruism. I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.
> I disagree with the notion that a more equitable society is a silver bullet for reducing human misery.
Surely it would not solve every source of human misery, but I don't see how it wouldn't be a substantial improvement.
> I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.
There is a whole branch of political philosophy dedicated to exactly that, which capitalists around the world (valuing utmost the ability to accrue and hoarde capital) have spent over a century turning into a dirty word.
Nowadays in the US, even the suggestion of public healthcare is an untouchable evil, because helping your fellow man is seen as being taken advantage of, and the idea that someone might get something for free is abhorrent. This, despite that fact that public healthcare is normal, successful, and more efficient in almost all other western democracies (because the cost of services isn't padded by executive bonuses and investor returns)
Besides, if you have insurance, you already believe in that general concept. It is a pooling of resources with the knowledge that some may give and take in unequal measures, but that on average less people will need to take than will give, and that you have a safety net in the case of an extreme unlucky event. Same idea, just applied on a societal scale.
Capitalists have successfully ejected murderous regimes from their timeline, by saying that capitalism isn’t really real unless it’s got a free democracy associated with it. Thus imperial Japan, Belgium’s atrocious behaviour in the Congo, the behaviour of the British Empire is completely left out of “capitalist history”.
If you did the same trick for socialism you could just count Denmark, Sweden and other successful mixed-but-really-socialist democracies and you could say that socialist guided economies are actually fantastic. Ie if I define socialism as only real socialism when there is a free market democracy but large well funded social programs that keep the society from excessive inequality, I suddenly have the recipe for some of the happiest countries on earth.
And some people, you know reasonable people who actually understand Marx’s critique of capitalism - not as a recipe but as a pretty accurate descriptor of the end result of the natural forces of capitalism - they might say that Denmark style socialism is actually what they would like.
But of course Denmark = Soviet Union in some peoples mind so that’s impossible.
Let’s forget of course that past Stalin’s death, the USSR’s criminal activity was relatively limited. They didn’t invade a country until Afghanistan and that was still without imperialist purpose - they just believed Afghanistan to be in their sphere of influence. In comparison with American military, the Soviet military essentially was used to put down revolts in part so the world the USSR believed has been left to their influence after Yalta. When Portugal was turning red in 1974, the Soviets refused to have anything to do with it.
Vis à vis the crimes of the Soviet Union or Red China past their murderous genocidal creators - Mao and Stalin - were relatively limited. In the same vein you could argue that the US was also founded on genocide, just of Native Americans.
It is important to remember Denmark socialism works in Denmark but couldn't be imported around the world.
"To implement the Nordic model, you have to have a society which is a high trust society, i.e. the government is trustworthy and not corrupt, you identify to your state and not to your tribe, you can trust your fellow nationals, and you can also trust to outsiders. This all stems from Lutheranism.
Calvinist societies are highly individualist and they distrust any central government, and they also tend to distrust outsiders. This is why US, Switzerland and the Netherlands have not adopted the Scandinavian model, while Germany has. Likewise, Catholic countries tend to be more corrupt than Protestant, and Orthodox countries even more corrupt than Catholic. This is why the Nordic model won’t succeed in those countries."
Im not sure I agree with you. Yes Germany isn’t Denmark, the distance from US —- German government policy is vast. Even the difference between UK and Germany is vast. What do we call that difference ? Some people might call it socialism, others just more govt intervention. Still the societal dynamics are so different yet “capitalists” and free market folk want to take it all under their wing, while ascribing only genocidal dictatorships to socialist policy.
> Nowadays in the US, even the suggestion of public healthcare is an untouchable evil, because helping your fellow man is seen as being taken advantage of, and the idea that someone might get something for free is abhorrent.
Private healthcare is also a restricted public (or "group") healthcare. You pay your premium along with the rest of your group (the section of the market that can afford and wants the same provider); the fund's management organise the healthcare and any parallel investment. The "socialist" view is that everyone within the political boundary (state/country/etc) pays into one pot, nominally run by elected officials. The "private" version is that subsets of the political boundary each have their own and the market decides the sets. The _healthcare_ part is the same (quality differentiators aside).
Anyone complaining that social healthcare is wrong/immoral/offensive is lying to themselves.
>Humans have an instinctive normative sense of fairness
We have and that's why I never have grasped the fairness of "equal opportunity" while at the same time being allowed to inherit your parent's success (or failures). :thinking face:
I don't think he's saying that we should make it illegal to give better opportunities to your children. He's just pointing out the fact that some children are born into poverty and there's no simple justification ("they don't work as hard as the rich kids", "they made poor financial decisions", etc.)
The alternative is to intervene and prevent you from gifting your success to those you love and your future generations.
One (of the many) problems with that approach is that it takes away a meaningful incentive for an individual to sacrifice their time and energy. Without that there is only your own individual life to enjoy.
> Without that there is only your own individual life to enjoy
As well as “work for my children” and “work for myself”, there is a secret third option: “work for the good of my community / society / humanity as a whole”
Doesn't that only really work if you like the current society and it's direction? If you don't, why would you support it with effort you don't need to expend?
Counterpoint, the entire biological reason for life is reproduction. You would not be here without the long chain of individuals who sired you. Sexual reproduction favors the advantaged, and wanting to give your genetic line every possible leg up over other genetic lines seems entirely reasonable and natural.
The idea that genes have a will and that there is anything reasonable, or generally positive about reproduction seems flawed. Its biological machinery which happens to optimize for replication. I am not thankful to my forebears for reproducing. Their choice to reproduce is of neutral merit. I believe that (somewhat conditionally) sentient beings deserve to prosper and shouldn't bow to genetics and tradition in the quest to do so. This idea that the purpose of existence is to fuck and have babies is straight out of the religion/pickup artistry playbook... I prefer a less bleak purpose than that. If anyone really internalizes/believes that they're just here to spread their "seed"... like, I just feel sorry for you.
Well, it's kind of a problem then that, as a human, all that you value as "good" has been determined by what has been advantageous to persistence of your genetic lineage.
You may find joy and fulfillment in pursuing the proxies such as love or even truth, but you're fooling yourself if you think it's not because you are at the core biological.
We forego bowing to genetics and tradition at our peril. How would we convince a sentient super AI to "not be evil" or even describe to it what that means?
Ok I’ll bite. I’ll assume for a moment that, as you postulate, morality is purely a function of genetic fitness. Even if that was true, genetic adaptation occurs at evolutionary time scales. In a rapidly changing environment, genetics will always be out of phase with what is optimal. In other words, any sense of what is “good” or “evil” will always be outdated by hundreds of thousands of years at the least.
I guess I'd say that our genetically encoded behavior has a good track record over many millions of years of latching onto what "the right thing" is. That's quite a few chunks of 100k years that it was "outdated" yet still did ok given the conditions.
I agree our slow-to-respond genetically encoded behavior/values might not be fully optimal for survival in the modern world. And that there are now threats ("evils" maybe) that our emotions fail to correctly respond to.
The selfish gene model often works to explain behaviour, but it doesn't follow that it should be used to justify or guide it. Society and cultures do many things to keep our biological instincts in check and to rise above our instincts.
(Also there are lots of preconditions, aka reasons, for human and other life on earth...)
The term “selfish gene”, as coined by Dawkins, actually is orthogonal to individual, familial, species or “line” fitness referred to by the parent post.
Under the selfish gene hypothesis, genes seek to increase their own reproductive success, and it’s not a rule that this is aligned with an organism or species fitness. (Of course, genes don’t actually “seek” anything in the personified sense)
It’s interesting that the idea of working hard to provide your children better lives is universally regarded as good, but inheriting a lot of wealth is more often that not seen as bad.
> I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.
I agree, but I expect that's due to scarcity (which forces zero-sum thinking) and we're eventually going to get to Buckminster Fuller's idea of a "post-scarcity economy" where the automation generates enough for everyone.
I think the author's broader point is well-taken, though:
The way we operate as a society today may be generating a bunch of pollution (environmental, psychological, existential, etc...) and we may realize we're going to have to do something to reform that when the negative consequences emerge.
The example in the article is poignant, but part of a broad class.
Good article, but given the title, it's surprising that Facebook is only mentioned in the very last sentence:
> We all hate Facebook, and Facebook (the corporation) is, admittedly, terrible. But to a large extent, we hate Facebook because Facebook is other people.
That said, I think there is something to this, and some parts of this article put some ideas into words that I think I'd previously subconsciously noticed, but had never quite fully grasped and crystallised into concrete thoughts.
The description of his older relative who is just starting to get online was particularly poignant. It's easy to forget how hard this must be for so many people who didn't have the luxury of growing up with this technology like I and many others here did.
This bit particularly hit home:
> If he gets online, he is at serious financial risk; never very financially savvy, he will be defenseless against the legions of outright scammers, identity thieves and ransomware extortionists.
And this rings true too:
> And his presence as a consumer of online news will have negative consequences, both for himself and for the wider information environment. He is an embittered, lonely man, the perfect target for information fraudsters who will claim to explain that the source of his pain is some despised group (immigrants, the deep state).
Reading the article I was suddenly reminded of this comment I once saved : whip up outrage -> increase alienation and segregation -> build up resentment that leads to violence -> violence used as a whip.
Those who are in power know they can use the disenfranchised as their whip.
The article correctly identifies imo that it’s paramount we need to start thinking inclusive when it comes to setting up society.
Or like that quote, a society is measured how they treat their poorest.
The problem is all-encompassing selfishness. I remember (being gen X), that they said that about my generation, but I've never seen anything like what I see now.
Pretending to act on someone's behalf while belittling them (a recent case being changing Lantio/Latina to latinX because virtue signalling), all the lies everywhere (look at this perfect sponsored life I live).
My city now sports nothing but black flags and stickers, or thin blue line flags. BLM were bullied from showing support publicly.
People would rather complain than help the homeless.
Home owners will screw over the rest of society to protect their 'investment'.
Businesses treat their employees worse than ever while paying them the lowest ever.
The rich oay nothing in taxes.
The list goes on and on.
The Internet isn't making people crazy.
People have been fucking crazy this just lets them have the aforementioned megaphone.
Every one of our institutions is rotten to the core, none of it can be fixed as they all have evolved to protect themselves. Budgets are maxed to ensure more funding, education is terrible.
Truly, I'm down to get together with some people, buy an island, and start from scratch.
Putting bandaids on squirting arteries does nothing.
> Twice now you came at me with ad hominem and nothing substantive, but I'm the edgelord.
Yes, you are the edgelord. You literally refer to yourself as a jaded asshole in your profile, so don't be upset when people choose to see you as the persona you present. You get what you give.
>Refute a point or move along.
"Every one of our institutions is rotten to the core, none of it can be fixed as they all have evolved to protect themselves" is low-effort juvenile cynicism and hyperbole that deserves no more than the snarky dismissal I gave it. You're not making substantive, intelligent arguments in this thread, nor are you making thoughtful replies to anyone else. The only refutation I can offer is that you mature emotionally and stop seeing the world in such narrow-minded and reductionist terms. Assuming you're not just shitposting, I mean.
I can appreciate how daunting the challenge seems to get from what we see around us to the ideal we have in mind, but if its any consolation - this is the kindest the planet has ever been (which admittedly might not be saying much).
More people have access to transformative resources than has ever been the case.
All the ills around you were even worse in the past and its only the incremental efforts of the decent that have gotten us to these heights.
We haven't fallen from grace - we're rising out of the muck.
I am pretty sure this is not the case. We have less wars than we ever had, and people aren’t dying by the millions anymore in the industrial Revolution of the 19th century.
So please elucidate where you think we are killing eachother at record rates, because I don’t think that is the case.
Less wars!= less killing. We have mass shootings, military coups, genocides, we fight over resources already. Murder rates in the use rose what 20% in 2020?
Need I go on? I'd ask instead what good do you think we humans are doing, and further if you believe it outweighs the bad?
You always hear about the bad. You never hear about all the good. In any case, it is never futile to make your slice of the world better. Volunteer, help, donate, all help to turn the ship around.
A friend of mine started small with a organisation and now helps tens of people a year with domestic issues. All people who might have been worse off, and perhaps start doing bad things.
I think the record's fairly clear that things are (generally) trending up over the last couple hundred years on such diverse topics such as:
1) Access to education
2) Labor norms
3) Lifespan and infant mortality
4) Social justice
5) Depth and breadth of our understanding of subjects from physics to mathematics to philosophy to justice (setting aside that there's also plenty of navel gazing in these efforts)
These have made a dent, and there's plenty more to do.
The worst part is the outrage part is downright addictive. Trying to get people who are plugged into this loop to take a step back and consider others' perspective is like taking their favorite toy away
Yup, the author is guilty of some of the polarization he writes about, smugly describing caricatures of other people with dripping condensation. Political examples aside (already got downvoted for mentioning them), he even manages to take a swipe at 'blessedly successful' tech workers.
I'll be a bit more charitable to this than I normally am. We're all polarized to the point where this sort of talk is normalised enough that he might not even instinctively think of it as condescending.
> But what kind of content moderation system is robust to millions of broken, embittered peopled willing to spend thousands of hours inflicting pain on a society that let them slip through the cracks?
Another point for China style thought police? Reminds me of the chat bots trained on the Chinese vs. U.S. internet.
> So while Tay, after only one day online, became a Nazi sympathizer, Xiaolce offers free therapy to Chinese users.
How is it ironic? It's just one more outgroup, and people harboring this particular combination of grievances exist IRL in great numbers. The author seems well aware of how his own demographic fits into this narrative.
Some people argue that an even more optimal approach is to develop/harvest the cognitive and social capabilities to conceptualize (cognitive) and discuss (cognitive+social) such people in terms other than "idiot", and that in doing so it may become apparent (fleetingly at first, more constant with practice) that all people are ~idiots on an absolute scale.
The village is full of "idiots", but they're people who suffered serious head injuries, people who have been mercilessly exploited from birth, people who have trauma and no possible outlet other than the internet.
And a lot of the rest of the village is full of people who are "alright Jack", people who think the "idiots" deserve their fate, people who need someone with a hammer to remind them of empathy. Wink.
Reads like: "These people are too stupid to use my internet."
Your faith that your poor old relative can come to no good end if he's allowed access to public forums is not an argument I can respect. You could be wrong, and where's your right to keep him from going to hell in his own way? Find him better forums that can help, if you so fear the people he may meet.
"On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" is still one of the greatest reasons to have an Internet. People with differences can more easily ignore those and collaborate ont heir shared interests, and thats a good thing. Whether we approve of those interests or not is a separate issue.
How do you identify this class of people who aren't fit to be heard? Who gets to decide?
I can understand that takeaway, but I think he's pointing out something more interesting:
There are side effects of the way that we conduct society today that can become huge problems when mixed with social media.
Solutions span the range from "prevent the mixing", "adjust society's side effects", to "eliminate social media" (with a reasonable or pragmatic option likely somewhere in-between).
I'm pretty openly in support of gatekeeping. I'd have set the bar a bit earlier, but most people are going to set it in a way to include themselves anyway.
However, I think gatekeeping is overly maligned right now. A fully open community is exceedingly unlikely survive going viral. Influx of new users at that scale is likely to outnumber existing users at a much larger scale, resulting in replacement, or at least dilution of the source community.
True. It is telling that he identifies his old relative as someone who would be prone to problematic beliefs about an outgroup. It is lost on him that he is adopting similar beliefs about the outgroup his relative represents. It's a stunning lack of self-awareness.
As far back as 1995, I was on USENET lamenting that all these new, stupid people were showing up everywhere with their newbie questions --- the ETERNAL SEPTEMBER of the Internet.
And someone no less than Craig Good of PIXAR corrected me at that time, to scold me in public. "Just because you got here first, doesn't make you better than them. You had newbie questions once, too."
This piece strikes me as very similar to the concepts outlined in the book "Deaths of Despair" by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This was a fantastic read.
The callous indifference to society at large is kind of sickening in about half of these comments here. We do absolutely need to address the problems in society, and it takes very little effort to observe it outside of an ivory tower. There are those who are working to change it, and they are being attacked from all sides by nonsense and government sabotage (I'm not talking about protestors, I'm talking about actual social workers and the like being sabotaged by elected officials for decades).
Just go outside of your comfort zone in society once in awhile. It's extremely observable. I figured most IT workers would at least have minimal exposure to this, but maybe many of those here didn't start in tech support.
167 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadThe greater issue we are facing is people unable to cope with "dissenting" (read: different) opinions because for whatever reason they think it's a personal affront on their identity for someone to disagree with something they've said online, under an anonymous (not for long!) moniker.
Facebook Isn't Other People. There is no 'democratization'. These platforms did not create anything. Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Parler, Win, Reddit, HN, Wikifarms, are fairly holistic in their representation of what people are actually like from the very beginning. You just don't want to admit you're as much of an asshole as the next poster, if you could get away with it.
Because most people seem to believe in a single objective Reality™. It leads people to not just disagree, but to consider “the other” as having a totally broken thought process. Makes it a lot easier for people to dehumanize the other :/
A response of "Actually, it is the first day fall" I can understand, but how does observing that a given day is the first day of winter, to stick with the above, equate to having some kind of emotional bond with winter? I have never been able figure out the logical leap made. The only conclusion I have been able to come to is that the mere existence of certain keywords is enough to challenge their reality, and making it about the person helps them cope. But perhaps that is just me projecting the idea of a broken thought process on them.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming every account on the Internet is an actual human. I obviously have no way to prove such a thing, but it would be strange if there weren’t a massive amount of bots-posing-as-human online trying to influence opinions and behavior.
This is a really condescending take, and I don’t think that unhappiness and mental illness magically avoid knowledge workers - perhaps even the opposite. I do think that earning a software engineer’s salary makes you view the world in a different way than most people, and it’s true that I don’t see too many software engineers (angry or otherwise) on Facebook, but perhaps that’s because we’re all hiding here. :-)
This knee-jerk moralizing is a huge part of why “Internet is bad”.
We weren’t like this 10 years ago. The Great Awokening has made everyone more judgemental.
The argument made in the article is that bitter, ostracised people who want to lash out have existed forever. The biggest change in the last 10 years is that the internet has become more accessible to this group and allowed their voice to be heard.
Not saying the author is right, but it's an interesting perspective and definitely worth considering.
I find this somewhat disquieting. I certainly thought it was somewhat true up to the early 1990s.
The implication is that it was always known that people are easily manipulated. They needed protecting from themselves and the manipulators need to come from a certain class.
I object to that notion, but I am appalled at the base insanity that Facebook creates so I find myself conceding the point.
It appears to me that we haven't really switched the model, but looking at the analysis of the tiny number of influencers it takes to generate 90% of anti vax or whatever propaganda on facebook it seems clear this isn't democratization.
We have simply been handed a different set of carefully curated sources of information.
Von Braun said "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?".
Facebook says "As long as people keep reading the content, who cares what the content is?".
[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/01/...
[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=119247...
Yet all of his examples are of conservatives, even though liberals do the same (often worse). The whole article itself was a very politely written “lashing out” at people who vote differently than he does.
It seems to me that the knee-jerk opposition to "wokeness" always comes from people who would rather sweep problems that don't affect them under the rug than acknowledge that they need to be fixed. They are the aloof, socially normative people in this article, utterly confused by and thus dismissive of the struggles of those outside of society's standard ingroup.
"We weren't like this 10 years ago" because, as the article describes, those concerns were previously ignored by the mainstream because they didn't fit the experiences or interests of those who had influence over the mainstream. Now that those institutions have lost that filtering power, we're hearing from more real people with more real problems. Healthcare access, structural racism, mental health resources, poverty, etc. They are taking their little hammers to our Twitter feeds. The solution isn't to shame and ignore the people complaining about them - it is to fix those societal issues that cause the pain to begin with.
There is a massive hodgepodge of ethnic communities in the U.S., of all possible colors, and their societal and economic outcomes do not conform or correlate to the idea that people of darker skin are more oppressed by the society and are worse off.
10 years isn't that long ago. All those sites were around then, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News...
Even the topics changed only a little bit. GamerGate was 7 years ago. 4chan and 8chan were reviled before that. The major political debates are as old as time. The division between American and European morality is about as old as those world-views.
"The line “Hell is other people” in French reads “L'enfer, c'est les autres” or “Hell is [the] others.”
(The best known English translation of the play, by Paul Bowles, actually renders the line “Hell is just – other people.”)
We get a little more of the flavor of the line in English if we read it as “Hell is the Other"
https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing....
In English, we are okay with "the young" and "the old" but shy away from doing the same with other terms, especially in the plural. "The poors," "the gays," "the olds" are all considered derogatory trolling.
Not so in French. The best translation of "les autres" really is "other people."
Another example of this is the film ‘Au revoir les enfants’ which a literal translation would render as ‘Goodbye the children’ but is really just ‘Goodbye children’.
There's an awesome idea for a sci-fi/cyberpunk/horror story in here somewhere.
Reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain.
> There's an awesome idea for
Absolutely gross.
It's not their role to be safe spaces.
However, the impulse to create art that aims to better inform the populace of various sufferings is age-old. Victor Hugo wasn't Valjean, but Valjean was based on an incident he witnessed, and Les Misérables was born from that, to use one example.
I remember when this kind of stuff used to make me feel better because I felt like it "wasn't just me". Now it makes me feel worse, because I realize that no-one will "come and save us".
Also, who are the people running the economy? I think it’s an emergent phenomenon of humans natural behavior, amplified by our current scale and low friction interconnectedness.
I don’t know. I assume there has to be at least some intended direction for them to be able to write comics about it, but I am just a peon in this system :)
Many of those rules are defined by a small group of people (laws), and a very important external factor (money) is directly influenced by central banks. These people decide pretty directly how much and into what types of investments money should go.
And that was about the definition of an isolated incident, or the exception that proves the rule.
So, I'm left wondering what your point is? You think utopia isn't something to strive for? We must accept our fate because of an isolated incident in a country that while much much better at taking care of its people than America is still far from actually a utopia?
Is that really helpful to the discussion ?
Life was really bad for me about 13 years ago, and that means it's easier to relate to other peoples' suffering now. People have practical needs - food, shelter, a little money - but need community even more.
Thanks to ambivalents pointing it out, I read the article, including Chekov's story of the little hammer. I also remembered UncleBob talking about code: "clean as you go" [1]. We can make the world a better place, but the solution isn't to pay someone else to do it professionally - we have to all take responsibility and fix our little parts of the world as we go along. We can also make it better by not only filing bug reports, but suggesting what to do instead. Then we'll all be saying "thank you" all the time!
Treating others in the way that we want to be treated (not how they treat us), dying to ourselves, and giving thanks - that's a message from someone who did "come and save us", our Savior. I'm not very good at following his instructions though >_<
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSaAMQVq01E&t=2021s
I have a fairly long list of bug reports regarding reality, including suggestions of how things could be improved. Is there somewhere that I can file these such that they might get addressed, or at least considered?
When it's totally outside our control, we can always let the great Debugger know how things are going, and if there's a problem, ask to stop time and hack some solution in. We have to live with the consequences of that being answered though, so be careful what you pray for!
There is a neat end-of-file marker that works in most human languages though: "Amen."
When the Debugger stepped into human life, now that was something special, Immanuel. His name seems like the most logical name to talk to, because we can know Him personally.
I'm curious: why do you believe this? Of course it's not a particularly uncommon belief, but I am interested in where it comes from.
Or, if it was intended more of a casual comment than an accurate prediction of the future, then I will simply ask for that: do you believe it is most likely that ~"no one will come and save us", and if so is a component of that belief based on a belief that ~it is not possible to save us?
That story relates it better than I can: https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
> the final thousand feet was horrifying—steep sugar snow that collapsed beneath our feet as we battled upward, unable to down-climb, and unable to find protection or anchors. On the summit, with the immaculate expanse of the range unfolding in every direction, Scott turned to me and said, in complete seriousness, “I want my mom so bad right now.”
I have this very same feeling now and then. I wonder if you and I are the only ones. Or, is this particular way (how we are feeling it) the only manner in which this......whatever it is manifests in reality? Or might this be some component, one among perhaps thousands of others (or even more, or maybe much less) that keeps humanity at this local maxima trajectory that seems (so they say) headed for some sort of major calamity, on more than one front.
But nope it's from June. :/
nope, pretty much the same as June.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_No._6
Misery might have a nicer veneer when it's not floating in poverty, but to believe that blessedly “successful” knowledge workers only encounter miserable Americans on social media is a stretch.
I think the author overestimates just how good his class has it. Behind closed doors, places like Silicon Valley are just as unhappy if not more unhappy than many other places where people are less educated and less financially secure. Drug and alcohol abuse are common. Many marriages are unhealthy and unhappy. Lots of people are concerned about money even though they have more of it than most people would accumulate in lifetimes. People struggle with their interpersonal relationships and many are lonely.
In reality, the suburbs, college towns and gentrified urban neighborhoods can be very unpleasant places. As an example, about a month before I left Silicon Valley, I had a terrible encounter in an upscale coffee shop. A man physically threatened me after he literally stole my table (where my food and belongings were) while I was using the restroom. This was not a mentally ill homeless person as one might guess, but rather a well-dressed young man who might very well have worked at one of the big tech companies surrounding the coffee shop.
Instead of author's "other people" approach, I'm going with "misery loves company". Facebook isn't other people. It's you.
FB groups is relied on by rescue groups routinely with huge altruistic benefits. An example I personally know: animal shelter workers routinely find homes for abandoned animals, rather than euthanasia...at least in the United States.
The app/product is terrible but this is one of the places where thats not the case
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/18/facebo...
That need is where the moralizing comes from. As the piece describes, there are swaths of people who are left behind by difficult gaps our societal culture - but there are also people who are either ignored or explicitly oppressed by our political system too.
The "evil" in the oppression part is easier to explain (though more divisive) - in modern US politics, Republicans are almost universally hostile towards and opposed to expansions of rights for marginalized groups. LGBT+ rights are an obvious example, which they have almost universally opposed. Yes, Democrats have also opposed things at times and acted slowly, but over time the party has changed to accept them, and Republicans have not. Whenever positive change is made, it is almost universally by Democrats against Republican opposition.
The ignorance part is trickier. As a conservative party, the core Republican demographic has always been the idealized social norm. Almost by definition, maintaining existing social norms is what a conservative party does. In pre-modern US politics (say, pre-1970s), that would be the middle class, straight, white, Christian, male. Because that is the base, that is the group whose interests the party serves. Thus, a blind spot is formed that excludes everyone else in society who does not fit that mold. Generally speaking, their needs are ignored - even fought against, if it would cause disruption to the social norms their base represents and values.
Ignorance itself is not evil. But sweeping known problems under the rug is. Over the last few decades especially, we have learned a lot about the problems of our fellow Americans that have been ignored by society. Minority discrimination, marginalization, extreme wealth inequality, lack of healthcare access, mental health problems, etc... And again, Republicans are almost universally against any change that would alleviate that suffering, usually with the excuse that they are too expensive (e.g. healthcare) or are not real problems (e.g. BLM). The real reason, though, is that any such change might cause discomfort to their base - rich white people who don't want to pay taxes (and the people like the kid in the novel who are manipulated by them).
As society learns more about the people who it has left behind - exactly as this article details - it becomes a moral imperative to fix those problems. Republicans have been purposefully obstructing progress for decades - Gingrich and McConnell have literally bragged about it.
As social media connects us more, the stories of the oppressed and marginalized become louder and more apparent. As this realization becomes more clear (as some would say, "becoming woke"), the urge to fix it becomes greater. At this point, there is no longer a reasonable justification for inaction. Combined with the growing influence of the racist alt-right and clear escalation of anti-democratic practices, it is difficult to characterize them as anything other than "evil", particularly if you are (or are allied to) any of the groups that they harass or dismiss.
However, I believe that it describes a relative conceptualization of the world (Group <X> "is" <Y> relative to Group <Z>).
Hopefully the idea that I am trying to communicate lands as intended within your mind. Assuming it did to a sufficient degree: if you were to rerun this same evaluation process from an absolute perspective, do you think it would come out to at least some significantly different conclusions, paint a different picture, etc?
"I don't want to be political." <posts pro-gun, pro-police, pro-military stuff> "Why do you keep making things political?" <posts editorial about Afghanistan> "Stop bringing politics into everything!" <posts meme making fun of masks>
I think some of these people sincerely don't recognize how political their own views are. They think they're just being patriotic, as though definitions of patriotism aren't political. They think they're just expressing religious beliefs, as though their own religion hasn't had an intensely political role since the day it was founded. To them, "politics" is only about deviating from what they know is Right And True. As long as you agree with them on every political topic, they don't think of it as politics.
One thing I take issue with:
> This electoral democracy still excludes the poorest and least capable in our society, who cannot keep up to date with politics and make it to the polling station to actually cast a ballot.
We have to stop doing this. If we want to create some kind of common set of values that binds us together regardless of class, wealth, etc we also need to accept some things that we can collectively agree as positive or negative traits or values.
Too often, middle class people infantilise the working class, refuse to accept that they have agency, and ascribe their lives and behaviour to externalities and societal injustice. This doesn't help anyone, it just reinforces the division of society and stops us seeing our neighbour (regardless of class, wealth, etc) as essentially the same as us.
The poorest in our society can keep up-to-date with politics, and a lot of them do. All they need is a TV or radio, and the poorest in western society can get hold of one of these. If they don't, that's fine, I don't accept there's a moral imperative to do so if it's not your bag, but let's stop with this nonsense. Just go to hustings or the local meet of any political party and you'll meet people from all wealth brackets. Probably more of them poor than wealthy. So where does this idea that poor people can't keep up-to-date with politics come from? Any that want to can, and most do.
Similar sentiments like: poor people can't be expected to read books, or eat vegetables, or go for walks, or tell their kids to do their homework, or help their kids to read, etc, etc. None of these things require money. Oh, but what about the institutional injustices, and the ways in which our society is configured such that poor people do not benefit from having those values instilled? And the fact that money stresses preclude other less critical concerns finding a time or place? Sorry, that's middle-class well-meaning crap, and it's helping to destroy any kind of cohesive set of shared values we once had.
I disagree, at least to some degree.
My counterpoint is to merely point to the “fundamental attribution bias” as being the usual direction of human cognitive biases.
The general idea is to “enable” people to have more agency and to give them the tools and support they need to make informed, self-interested decisions. The idea is not to blame externalities directly.
Those things still require free time. Having these as values and being able to regularly practice them are two different things. I don't see how that fact is "well meaning crap".
https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...
The decrease in television watching is actually among the more technically literate, not illiterate; according to Nielsen, younger people are watching streaming services instead of television.
Trying to teach your kids how to read or reading them a story cannot happen when much of the tv is consumed.
Parents using TV as a crutch to entertain kids is really common, and I'm eternally grateful I grew up in a home without TV. However, that was pre-modern streaming, ipads for kids, etc.
Firstly, in terms of social media I doubt that misery would ever stop commanding people's attention. I've heard that in psychology studies people tend to latch more readily onto negative ideas than positive ones in a group setting. For what it's worth, my anecdotal experiences have cohered with this too.
Secondly, I think the politics of pushing equity over mere equality of opportunity is more complicated than proponents would suggest. Humans have an instinctive normative sense of fairness that would need to be subsumed somehow by a more intellectual altruism. I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.
Surely it would not solve every source of human misery, but I don't see how it wouldn't be a substantial improvement.
> I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.
There is a whole branch of political philosophy dedicated to exactly that, which capitalists around the world (valuing utmost the ability to accrue and hoarde capital) have spent over a century turning into a dirty word.
Nowadays in the US, even the suggestion of public healthcare is an untouchable evil, because helping your fellow man is seen as being taken advantage of, and the idea that someone might get something for free is abhorrent. This, despite that fact that public healthcare is normal, successful, and more efficient in almost all other western democracies (because the cost of services isn't padded by executive bonuses and investor returns)
Besides, if you have insurance, you already believe in that general concept. It is a pooling of resources with the knowledge that some may give and take in unequal measures, but that on average less people will need to take than will give, and that you have a safety net in the case of an extreme unlucky event. Same idea, just applied on a societal scale.
Capitalists have successfully ejected murderous regimes from their timeline, by saying that capitalism isn’t really real unless it’s got a free democracy associated with it. Thus imperial Japan, Belgium’s atrocious behaviour in the Congo, the behaviour of the British Empire is completely left out of “capitalist history”.
If you did the same trick for socialism you could just count Denmark, Sweden and other successful mixed-but-really-socialist democracies and you could say that socialist guided economies are actually fantastic. Ie if I define socialism as only real socialism when there is a free market democracy but large well funded social programs that keep the society from excessive inequality, I suddenly have the recipe for some of the happiest countries on earth.
And some people, you know reasonable people who actually understand Marx’s critique of capitalism - not as a recipe but as a pretty accurate descriptor of the end result of the natural forces of capitalism - they might say that Denmark style socialism is actually what they would like.
But of course Denmark = Soviet Union in some peoples mind so that’s impossible.
Let’s forget of course that past Stalin’s death, the USSR’s criminal activity was relatively limited. They didn’t invade a country until Afghanistan and that was still without imperialist purpose - they just believed Afghanistan to be in their sphere of influence. In comparison with American military, the Soviet military essentially was used to put down revolts in part so the world the USSR believed has been left to their influence after Yalta. When Portugal was turning red in 1974, the Soviets refused to have anything to do with it.
Vis à vis the crimes of the Soviet Union or Red China past their murderous genocidal creators - Mao and Stalin - were relatively limited. In the same vein you could argue that the US was also founded on genocide, just of Native Americans.
"To implement the Nordic model, you have to have a society which is a high trust society, i.e. the government is trustworthy and not corrupt, you identify to your state and not to your tribe, you can trust your fellow nationals, and you can also trust to outsiders. This all stems from Lutheranism.
Calvinist societies are highly individualist and they distrust any central government, and they also tend to distrust outsiders. This is why US, Switzerland and the Netherlands have not adopted the Scandinavian model, while Germany has. Likewise, Catholic countries tend to be more corrupt than Protestant, and Orthodox countries even more corrupt than Catholic. This is why the Nordic model won’t succeed in those countries."
Im not sure I agree with you. Yes Germany isn’t Denmark, the distance from US —- German government policy is vast. Even the difference between UK and Germany is vast. What do we call that difference ? Some people might call it socialism, others just more govt intervention. Still the societal dynamics are so different yet “capitalists” and free market folk want to take it all under their wing, while ascribing only genocidal dictatorships to socialist policy.
Private healthcare is also a restricted public (or "group") healthcare. You pay your premium along with the rest of your group (the section of the market that can afford and wants the same provider); the fund's management organise the healthcare and any parallel investment. The "socialist" view is that everyone within the political boundary (state/country/etc) pays into one pot, nominally run by elected officials. The "private" version is that subsets of the political boundary each have their own and the market decides the sets. The _healthcare_ part is the same (quality differentiators aside).
Anyone complaining that social healthcare is wrong/immoral/offensive is lying to themselves.
We have and that's why I never have grasped the fairness of "equal opportunity" while at the same time being allowed to inherit your parent's success (or failures). :thinking face:
I feel like that’s pretty deeply ingrained in the idea of fairness.
One (of the many) problems with that approach is that it takes away a meaningful incentive for an individual to sacrifice their time and energy. Without that there is only your own individual life to enjoy.
As well as “work for my children” and “work for myself”, there is a secret third option: “work for the good of my community / society / humanity as a whole”
You may find joy and fulfillment in pursuing the proxies such as love or even truth, but you're fooling yourself if you think it's not because you are at the core biological.
We forego bowing to genetics and tradition at our peril. How would we convince a sentient super AI to "not be evil" or even describe to it what that means?
I agree our slow-to-respond genetically encoded behavior/values might not be fully optimal for survival in the modern world. And that there are now threats ("evils" maybe) that our emotions fail to correctly respond to.
(Also there are lots of preconditions, aka reasons, for human and other life on earth...)
Under the selfish gene hypothesis, genes seek to increase their own reproductive success, and it’s not a rule that this is aligned with an organism or species fitness. (Of course, genes don’t actually “seek” anything in the personified sense)
I agree, but I expect that's due to scarcity (which forces zero-sum thinking) and we're eventually going to get to Buckminster Fuller's idea of a "post-scarcity economy" where the automation generates enough for everyone.
I think the author's broader point is well-taken, though:
The way we operate as a society today may be generating a bunch of pollution (environmental, psychological, existential, etc...) and we may realize we're going to have to do something to reform that when the negative consequences emerge.
The example in the article is poignant, but part of a broad class.
> We all hate Facebook, and Facebook (the corporation) is, admittedly, terrible. But to a large extent, we hate Facebook because Facebook is other people.
That said, I think there is something to this, and some parts of this article put some ideas into words that I think I'd previously subconsciously noticed, but had never quite fully grasped and crystallised into concrete thoughts.
The description of his older relative who is just starting to get online was particularly poignant. It's easy to forget how hard this must be for so many people who didn't have the luxury of growing up with this technology like I and many others here did.
This bit particularly hit home:
> If he gets online, he is at serious financial risk; never very financially savvy, he will be defenseless against the legions of outright scammers, identity thieves and ransomware extortionists.
And this rings true too:
> And his presence as a consumer of online news will have negative consequences, both for himself and for the wider information environment. He is an embittered, lonely man, the perfect target for information fraudsters who will claim to explain that the source of his pain is some despised group (immigrants, the deep state).
A lot of food for thought.
Those who are in power know they can use the disenfranchised as their whip.
The article correctly identifies imo that it’s paramount we need to start thinking inclusive when it comes to setting up society.
Or like that quote, a society is measured how they treat their poorest.
Pretending to act on someone's behalf while belittling them (a recent case being changing Lantio/Latina to latinX because virtue signalling), all the lies everywhere (look at this perfect sponsored life I live).
My city now sports nothing but black flags and stickers, or thin blue line flags. BLM were bullied from showing support publicly.
People would rather complain than help the homeless.
Home owners will screw over the rest of society to protect their 'investment'.
Businesses treat their employees worse than ever while paying them the lowest ever.
The rich oay nothing in taxes.
The list goes on and on.
The Internet isn't making people crazy.
People have been fucking crazy this just lets them have the aforementioned megaphone.
The solution at this point is starting over.
If you don't like what the mirror shows you, breaking the mirror or replacing it won't solve the problem.
Truly, I'm down to get together with some people, buy an island, and start from scratch.
Putting bandaids on squirting arteries does nothing.
Refute a point or move along.
Yes, you are the edgelord. You literally refer to yourself as a jaded asshole in your profile, so don't be upset when people choose to see you as the persona you present. You get what you give.
>Refute a point or move along.
"Every one of our institutions is rotten to the core, none of it can be fixed as they all have evolved to protect themselves" is low-effort juvenile cynicism and hyperbole that deserves no more than the snarky dismissal I gave it. You're not making substantive, intelligent arguments in this thread, nor are you making thoughtful replies to anyone else. The only refutation I can offer is that you mature emotionally and stop seeing the world in such narrow-minded and reductionist terms. Assuming you're not just shitposting, I mean.
And you don't get to tell me where to go.
Get over yourself.
You don't get to lecture me on hiw to treat people when you came at me unbidden and for no better reason than to talk shit.
More people have access to transformative resources than has ever been the case.
All the ills around you were even worse in the past and its only the incremental efforts of the decent that have gotten us to these heights.
We haven't fallen from grace - we're rising out of the muck.
We kill/harm each other at record rates.
We are sinking into the muck, using wet naps to clean our eyes to pretend we are making things better.
So please elucidate where you think we are killing eachother at record rates, because I don’t think that is the case.
Need I go on? I'd ask instead what good do you think we humans are doing, and further if you believe it outweighs the bad?
A friend of mine started small with a organisation and now helps tens of people a year with domestic issues. All people who might have been worse off, and perhaps start doing bad things.
1) Access to education 2) Labor norms 3) Lifespan and infant mortality 4) Social justice 5) Depth and breadth of our understanding of subjects from physics to mathematics to philosophy to justice (setting aside that there's also plenty of navel gazing in these efforts)
These have made a dent, and there's plenty more to do.
Another point for China style thought police? Reminds me of the chat bots trained on the Chinese vs. U.S. internet.
> So while Tay, after only one day online, became a Nazi sympathizer, Xiaolce offers free therapy to Chinese users.
https://www.inverse.com/article/13387-microsoft-chinese-chat...
Particularly ironic quote in an article that implies that the real source of his pain is privileged “successful” knowledge workers.
I like to use a phrase that sums up alot of this: social media has given the village idiot a megaphone.
As the author points out, we can no longer ignore this idiot.
The village is full of "idiots", but they're people who suffered serious head injuries, people who have been mercilessly exploited from birth, people who have trauma and no possible outlet other than the internet.
And a lot of the rest of the village is full of people who are "alright Jack", people who think the "idiots" deserve their fate, people who need someone with a hammer to remind them of empathy. Wink.
Your faith that your poor old relative can come to no good end if he's allowed access to public forums is not an argument I can respect. You could be wrong, and where's your right to keep him from going to hell in his own way? Find him better forums that can help, if you so fear the people he may meet.
"On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" is still one of the greatest reasons to have an Internet. People with differences can more easily ignore those and collaborate ont heir shared interests, and thats a good thing. Whether we approve of those interests or not is a separate issue.
How do you identify this class of people who aren't fit to be heard? Who gets to decide?
There are side effects of the way that we conduct society today that can become huge problems when mixed with social media.
Solutions span the range from "prevent the mixing", "adjust society's side effects", to "eliminate social media" (with a reasonable or pragmatic option likely somewhere in-between).
However, I think gatekeeping is overly maligned right now. A fully open community is exceedingly unlikely survive going viral. Influx of new users at that scale is likely to outnumber existing users at a much larger scale, resulting in replacement, or at least dilution of the source community.
And someone no less than Craig Good of PIXAR corrected me at that time, to scold me in public. "Just because you got here first, doesn't make you better than them. You had newbie questions once, too."
=== ==== ==== =======
Chekhov's LITTLE HAMMER is everywhere.
The callous indifference to society at large is kind of sickening in about half of these comments here. We do absolutely need to address the problems in society, and it takes very little effort to observe it outside of an ivory tower. There are those who are working to change it, and they are being attacked from all sides by nonsense and government sabotage (I'm not talking about protestors, I'm talking about actual social workers and the like being sabotaged by elected officials for decades).
Just go outside of your comfort zone in society once in awhile. It's extremely observable. I figured most IT workers would at least have minimal exposure to this, but maybe many of those here didn't start in tech support.