9 ms·

For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this man

by jl6 5y ago

For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a while, it seemed like the direction of travel was towards a global system of thought based on a widely distributed factual, rational approach. But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. Cryptoscams are the perfect (but not only) example of a self-sustaining shared consensual delusion. They don’t talk to the outside world. So much so that something like this happens. They are living inside a pre-rational info-bubble which has budded off from reality and floated away on its own wind. We are not just dealing with scams and fools here. There is an intense current of reality-defiance and cult behaviour. Some people get sucked into the crypto-attractor, but other hallucinations are available.

kybernetikos 5y ago
I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere. Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came along. And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio, or the BBC spaghetti harvest april fools was believed by so many.
- donkeyd 5y ago
  > Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs. Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're now also pulling in people who might have previously ignored the village idiot because everyone else did.
  - schnebbau 5y ago
    This is it. Whoever builds a study around this phenomenon will have it named after them.
  - tzs 5y ago
    I've heard the effect of internet compared to the effect of the printing press. For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest. We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it. Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us. For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press. It was like the discovery of fire. [1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.
    - jmercouris 5y ago
      Could you please expand upon how it was like the 'discovery of fire'? There are many ways to interpret this, and I'm not certain I know what you are saying.
      - tzs 5y ago
        Giving fire to a society that does not have it greatly increases their power and efficiency to a much greater extent than does giving the printing press to a society that not have it. So what I'm saying is that while the invention of the internet was a big change to everyone, for those on the other half of the curve from the village idiots it was a change that let them do things they were already doing but faster and more efficiently (an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, much like the Gutenberg's printing press was to 15th century Europe), but for those down in village idiot territory it allowed them to do things with information that they had not been able to do before such as large scale collaboration (a revolutionary change rather than an evolutionary change, much like the discovery of fire was for early humans.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  > War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid. I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness. On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time: "[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." - "Yes? Why is that?" "Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]" When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    I don't know enough biology to know if the metaphor is apt, but I think he's wrong. Small groups in isolation speciate faster, but that's not the same as evolving faster. I would expect that larger groups spanning many diverse ecological niches would feature greater diversity within the group and are able to explore more evolutionary avenues. Perhaps that's what we see intellectually as well.
- fortran77 5y ago
  > And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio But it didn't: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...
rossdavidh 5y ago
The "something" you refer to, is the problem of scale. Within a "small, local information bubble", you have enough experience with each source of information to be able to accurately evaluate its reliability. Some in your hunter/gatherer group were reliable, others were not, you knew who was which. With a large group, at some point you can no longer tell, because each source is a one-time source (or close to it). Plus, the potential profits from compromising that source become so large that, for example, newspapers get bought by corporations, to help mold popular opinion. People cannot tell who they can trust, but they know there's a lot of untrustworthy out there. So, they retreat back into a local bubble. Whoever is in this person's local bubble, is currently getting a valuable data point as to their trustworthiness. :)
gilbetron 5y ago
I've noticed the same phenomenon. I think it is, at least partly, driven by the collapse of local power structures that the local information bubbles (great phrase, btw!) enabled. Those power structures are built into our genes, and have roots that go back ages. They are fighting back, or at least our innate responses are fighting back. It's tough to run a church or a school or a family, when those under you can reveal your ignorance quickly on their phone. And so the power structures are attempting to exert their own reality. It's what Trump runs on, he pushes a reality that people want to exist, and are willing to let go of actual reality to get it. Not that the phenomenon isn't also seen in the Left, it just is less malignant (for now).
- mtsr 5y ago
  This seems a really important point because it explains why this happens. It’s about power. Additional one could hypothesize that conspiracies are so effective here because they are (almost by definition) unfalsifiable. Similar to how churches still stay powerful by running on dogma.
osobo 5y ago
In the last ten years there has been a significant change in mainstream content from information (what) to personalities (who). A major driver has been the adoption of social media by the mainstream: Uncle Bob pawing his cell phone while on the toilet. Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) have created a whole new, uncontrolled feeding ground to some old vices: Jaleousy and greed. Watching other people's lives and see them spending money and enjoying fineries in an (supposedly) unedited, reality-like format makes a lot of people feel that it must all be real and they should be living that live themselves. Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. This, coupled with the ease of packing in actionable links and buttons, creates a whole new dynamic where people get lured in by shiny things (crypto/NFS/MLM etc) only to get duped. It's a really old phenomenon, though.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the trend of "fast fashion", even extremely expensive cell phones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold series can be had with a contract for under 100€ a month. And if you're just looking for something to prop up your Instagram profile, everything you need sans cosmetic products can be rented for cheap - no need to actually buy all that stuff.
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    > what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
terabytest 5y ago
Are there any books written about this phenomenon?
- sho_hn 5y ago
  Probably many, but it seems like the WWW never got its seminal, "Amusing Ourselves to Death"-type status report, so far.
sgerenser 5y ago
Your description sounds very apt for most of the posters on r/wallstreetbets. Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams. There's an enormous amount of gambling going on on WSB and the average post quality is... well, there's a reason they're self-identifying as apes. But in any case, there is a key difference: WSB deals with legitimate, established companies only and have a zero-tolerance policy against pennystocks and crypto. The one exception where your comparison is retrospectively (!) on point are wish.com and Chinese stocks, but at least for the Chinese stocks one can say that the radicality of Xi Jinping's actions on the tech/finance sector could not have been reasonably expected - and even Wish.com has been around for over a decade, whereas most of the rug-pull crypto ops and NFTs isn't even two years old. (Disclosure: HODL'ing a couple hundred euros in Gamestop and AMC)
cyanotes 5y ago
It’s happening because people subconsciously have learned the global system is compromised
mftb 5y ago
I think a lot about the issues you have touched on here. What you refer to as, "reality-defiance", I call, "knowledge immunity". Long story short, by my estimation what has "arrested this direction of travel" and "reinstated local bubbles of thought" is fear, the mind killer, and where they've headed, is back into superstition, global superstition, where they substitute whatever comfortable story, for whatever uncomfortable reality.
the__alchemist 5y ago
Neal Stephenson explored this in this book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (And to a lesser extent, Termination Shock). In this depiction, parts of the world; especially red state USA, has succumbed to a post-truth society, made possible through the internet. The narrator implies that we had a limited window in human history where people took a fact-based approach to knowledge, starting with the scientific revolution, and ending with internet circa ~2010. Examining mainly the pre-truth half, Carl Sagan goes into this in Demon Haunted world, and focuses on remnants that have stuck around, eg UFOs, cults etc.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  This makes me think of Wilbur's writings on the pre-trans fallacy, the idea that 'post truth' and 'pre-truth' are identical. A lot of the 'facts based' approach did require trusted authorities, and there wasn't much thought paid as to who was a trusted authority. Now that some serious abuses of authority have happened we're suddenly aware of just how screwed we can be if we trust the wrong authorities, but the answer isn't to do away with all trust in authorities. The people most able to navigate complexity seem to update both their mental models of the world and their trust in given authorities gradually, neither over-nor-undercorrecting when new information is added to the whole. At least that's my belief after reading 'superforecasters', something I recommend to anyone wrestling with the implications of the post-truth era.
  - the__alchemist 5y ago
    Sounds very Baysian.
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      It is. The book is basically a primer on Bayesian thinking for everyday life.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  > especially red state USA This is funny because you can say exactly the same about blue state USA. They seem to live in a totally alien world.
ben_w 5y ago
> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. Been going on a lot longer than 10 years. I saw the same thing in the late 90s, and the only reason I didn’t see it earlier than that is that before then I wasn’t really looking.
thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. Personalized and targeted ads.
mindslight 5y ago
It's the continuing advancement of post-reality into more and more of people's existence. Back twenty years ago when we were all just dipping our toes into the Internet, the majority of our existence was still rooted in traditional society. You might dig around on the Web and find "conspiracy" discussions, but you knew that these topics wouldn't pass the bar for conversation with your family and friends, so you just compartmentalized them. Eventually you either found a way to process the grains of truth in such thoughts (eg the military industrial complex didn't "do" 9/11, but they greatly benefited from it), or you kept on compartmentalizing those thoughts until you forgot about them for whatever reason. Now most of our social interactions are online, and at the very least mediated by online communities. When you run across some outlandish theory, it's easy enough to share it, even if you editorialize a bit to soften the blow- "does anyone think this might be true", "sounds crazy but I'm just passing it on", etc. You don't have to leave the post-reality environment, so it never even occurs to you to temper it down a bit to avoid being the crazy person (coupled with people's lack of physical empathy when communicating through text. I suspect us early Internet citizens are more reflective here, because we learned to overcompensate with left-brained sympathy early on, before pictures supplied a substitute empathy signal). Additionally, most of this communication is done through third party intermediaries whose main metric is to maximize "engagement", and so they'll amplify the signal to those who are receptive, and hide it from those who would shun you because of it. Furthermore, I characterized our previous existence as "traditional society", but it really wasn't that either. Rather it was a different post-reality as mediated by broadcast media, progressed to be owned by a handful of corporations. This kept us all on the same page and working for common goals, even if the goals weren't necessarily in our own interests (eg widening wealth gap, elective wars). That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it because of the massive social proof from The Important People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either, and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless, looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it because of the massive social proof from The Important People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either, and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless, looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for. Very well said. I think that's what's so heartbreaking. We were right to reject that old status quo, but something even worse has replaced it.
carapace 5y ago
Cf. Robert Anton Wilson, specifically his writing regarding "reality tunnels". In brief, what you're describing is the default state of humanity. In colorful language, human civilization is "the war between gangs of hypnotists".
zemo 5y ago
> in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. ...you are using one right now
lbrito 5y ago
>But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. I've noticed this specifically with covid denial/conspiracy nuts. Sure, there have always been conspiracy nuts (and some conspiracy theories are later proven not theories at all), but covid-related conspiracies are a different beast altogether in terms of how widespread they got. There seems to be a personality type that is prone to believing in conspiracy theories of any kind, and the bar or threshold for that kind of personality seems to have lowered all of a sudden -- otherwise normal people that were not particularly conspiracy theory-leaning are way into the craziest covid stuff. The level of angst involved is also on a whole other level: while in other conspiracy theories the "Enemy" is usually a small evil cabal and the general "blue pill" public is just "misinformed sheep", now suddenly everyone _not a conspiracy nut_ is immediately evil.
gwern 5y ago
> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. I agree there is a troubling bubble here. I just don't agree that the bubble in question has anything to do with crypto, as opposed to those getting their jollies dunking on crypto bros. How many tweets do you have to read before you escape the bubble of OP and learn that the tweet is false...? (By my count, you have to go through 320 HN comments before you will find the first deeply-buried comment pointing out that OP is false and the buyers believed no such thing; this submission is at +501 points, BTW.) Here is a quote from an article published well over a month before OP tweeted: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dunedao-soby https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune... "Now that they have won the bid, Saqib and his associates must make good on their promise to bring the bible to the people and prove that their fundraising approach was not just a gimmick. As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. Jodorowsky is now 92 years old; Jean Giraud, or Moebius, the legendary French illustrator who did all the storyboards, died in 2012; H.R. Giger, who designed the creepy home planet of the House of Harkonnen, died two years later. “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public." They explicitly acknowledge they do not 'own the IP' and can't just scan it etc and it is positioning for negotiation for the actual IP.
h0nd 5y ago
Wow, what a great comment. You just explained how the whole 'mass formation psychosis' was/is possible.

by jl6 5y ago

kybernetikos 5y ago

I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere. Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came along. And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio, or the BBC spaghetti harvest april fools was believed by so many.

donkeyd 5y ago
> Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs. Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're now also pulling in people who might have previously ignored the village idiot because everyone else did.
- schnebbau 5y ago
  This is it. Whoever builds a study around this phenomenon will have it named after them.
- tzs 5y ago
  I've heard the effect of internet compared to the effect of the printing press. For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest. We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it. Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us. For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press. It was like the discovery of fire. [1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.
  - jmercouris 5y ago
    Could you please expand upon how it was like the 'discovery of fire'? There are many ways to interpret this, and I'm not certain I know what you are saying.
    - tzs 5y ago
      Giving fire to a society that does not have it greatly increases their power and efficiency to a much greater extent than does giving the printing press to a society that not have it. So what I'm saying is that while the invention of the internet was a big change to everyone, for those on the other half of the curve from the village idiots it was a change that let them do things they were already doing but faster and more efficiently (an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, much like the Gutenberg's printing press was to 15th century Europe), but for those down in village idiot territory it allowed them to do things with information that they had not been able to do before such as large scale collaboration (a revolutionary change rather than an evolutionary change, much like the discovery of fire was for early humans.
sho_hn 5y ago
> War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid. I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness. On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time: "[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." - "Yes? Why is that?" "Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]" When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  I don't know enough biology to know if the metaphor is apt, but I think he's wrong. Small groups in isolation speciate faster, but that's not the same as evolving faster. I would expect that larger groups spanning many diverse ecological niches would feature greater diversity within the group and are able to explore more evolutionary avenues. Perhaps that's what we see intellectually as well.
fortran77 5y ago
> And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio But it didn't: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...

rossdavidh 5y ago

The "something" you refer to, is the problem of scale. Within a "small, local information bubble", you have enough experience with each source of information to be able to accurately evaluate its reliability. Some in your hunter/gatherer group were reliable, others were not, you knew who was which. With a large group, at some point you can no longer tell, because each source is a one-time source (or close to it). Plus, the potential profits from compromising that source become so large that, for example, newspapers get bought by corporations, to help mold popular opinion. People cannot tell who they can trust, but they know there's a lot of untrustworthy out there. So, they retreat back into a local bubble. Whoever is in this person's local bubble, is currently getting a valuable data point as to their trustworthiness. :)

gilbetron 5y ago

I've noticed the same phenomenon. I think it is, at least partly, driven by the collapse of local power structures that the local information bubbles (great phrase, btw!) enabled. Those power structures are built into our genes, and have roots that go back ages. They are fighting back, or at least our innate responses are fighting back. It's tough to run a church or a school or a family, when those under you can reveal your ignorance quickly on their phone. And so the power structures are attempting to exert their own reality. It's what Trump runs on, he pushes a reality that people want to exist, and are willing to let go of actual reality to get it. Not that the phenomenon isn't also seen in the Left, it just is less malignant (for now).

mtsr 5y ago
This seems a really important point because it explains why this happens. It’s about power. Additional one could hypothesize that conspiracies are so effective here because they are (almost by definition) unfalsifiable. Similar to how churches still stay powerful by running on dogma.

osobo 5y ago

In the last ten years there has been a significant change in mainstream content from information (what) to personalities (who). A major driver has been the adoption of social media by the mainstream: Uncle Bob pawing his cell phone while on the toilet. Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) have created a whole new, uncontrolled feeding ground to some old vices: Jaleousy and greed. Watching other people's lives and see them spending money and enjoying fineries in an (supposedly) unedited, reality-like format makes a lot of people feel that it must all be real and they should be living that live themselves. Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. This, coupled with the ease of packing in actionable links and buttons, creates a whole new dynamic where people get lured in by shiny things (crypto/NFS/MLM etc) only to get duped. It's a really old phenomenon, though.

mschuster91 5y ago
> Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the trend of "fast fashion", even extremely expensive cell phones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold series can be had with a contract for under 100€ a month. And if you're just looking for something to prop up your Instagram profile, everything you need sans cosmetic products can be rented for cheap - no need to actually buy all that stuff.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  > what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago

terabytest 5y ago

Are there any books written about this phenomenon?

sho_hn 5y ago
Probably many, but it seems like the WWW never got its seminal, "Amusing Ourselves to Death"-type status report, so far.

sgerenser 5y ago

Your description sounds very apt for most of the posters on r/wallstreetbets. Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams.

mschuster91 5y ago
> Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams. There's an enormous amount of gambling going on on WSB and the average post quality is... well, there's a reason they're self-identifying as apes. But in any case, there is a key difference: WSB deals with legitimate, established companies only and have a zero-tolerance policy against pennystocks and crypto. The one exception where your comparison is retrospectively (!) on point are wish.com and Chinese stocks, but at least for the Chinese stocks one can say that the radicality of Xi Jinping's actions on the tech/finance sector could not have been reasonably expected - and even Wish.com has been around for over a decade, whereas most of the rug-pull crypto ops and NFTs isn't even two years old. (Disclosure: HODL'ing a couple hundred euros in Gamestop and AMC)

cyanotes 5y ago

It’s happening because people subconsciously have learned the global system is compromised

mftb 5y ago

I think a lot about the issues you have touched on here. What you refer to as, "reality-defiance", I call, "knowledge immunity". Long story short, by my estimation what has "arrested this direction of travel" and "reinstated local bubbles of thought" is fear, the mind killer, and where they've headed, is back into superstition, global superstition, where they substitute whatever comfortable story, for whatever uncomfortable reality.

the__alchemist 5y ago

Neal Stephenson explored this in this book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (And to a lesser extent, Termination Shock). In this depiction, parts of the world; especially red state USA, has succumbed to a post-truth society, made possible through the internet. The narrator implies that we had a limited window in human history where people took a fact-based approach to knowledge, starting with the scientific revolution, and ending with internet circa ~2010. Examining mainly the pre-truth half, Carl Sagan goes into this in Demon Haunted world, and focuses on remnants that have stuck around, eg UFOs, cults etc.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
This makes me think of Wilbur's writings on the pre-trans fallacy, the idea that 'post truth' and 'pre-truth' are identical. A lot of the 'facts based' approach did require trusted authorities, and there wasn't much thought paid as to who was a trusted authority. Now that some serious abuses of authority have happened we're suddenly aware of just how screwed we can be if we trust the wrong authorities, but the answer isn't to do away with all trust in authorities. The people most able to navigate complexity seem to update both their mental models of the world and their trust in given authorities gradually, neither over-nor-undercorrecting when new information is added to the whole. At least that's my belief after reading 'superforecasters', something I recommend to anyone wrestling with the implications of the post-truth era.
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  Sounds very Baysian.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    It is. The book is basically a primer on Bayesian thinking for everyday life.
Ostrogodsky 5y ago
> especially red state USA This is funny because you can say exactly the same about blue state USA. They seem to live in a totally alien world.

ben_w 5y ago

> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. Been going on a lot longer than 10 years. I saw the same thing in the late 90s, and the only reason I didn’t see it earlier than that is that before then I wasn’t really looking.

thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago

> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. Personalized and targeted ads.

mindslight 5y ago

It's the continuing advancement of post-reality into more and more of people's existence. Back twenty years ago when we were all just dipping our toes into the Internet, the majority of our existence was still rooted in traditional society. You might dig around on the Web and find "conspiracy" discussions, but you knew that these topics wouldn't pass the bar for conversation with your family and friends, so you just compartmentalized them. Eventually you either found a way to process the grains of truth in such thoughts (eg the military industrial complex didn't "do" 9/11, but they greatly benefited from it), or you kept on compartmentalizing those thoughts until you forgot about them for whatever reason. Now most of our social interactions are online, and at the very least mediated by online communities. When you run across some outlandish theory, it's easy enough to share it, even if you editorialize a bit to soften the blow- "does anyone think this might be true", "sounds crazy but I'm just passing it on", etc. You don't have to leave the post-reality environment, so it never even occurs to you to temper it down a bit to avoid being the crazy person (coupled with people's lack of physical empathy when communicating through text. I suspect us early Internet citizens are more reflective here, because we learned to overcompensate with left-brained sympathy early on, before pictures supplied a substitute empathy signal). Additionally, most of this communication is done through third party intermediaries whose main metric is to maximize "engagement", and so they'll amplify the signal to those who are receptive, and hide it from those who would shun you because of it. Furthermore, I characterized our previous existence as "traditional society", but it really wasn't that either. Rather it was a different post-reality as mediated by broadcast media, progressed to be owned by a handful of corporations. This kept us all on the same page and working for common goals, even if the goals weren't necessarily in our own interests (eg widening wealth gap, elective wars). That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it because of the massive social proof from The Important People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either, and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless, looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for.

JohnBooty 5y ago
That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it because of the massive social proof from The Important People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either, and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless, looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for. Very well said. I think that's what's so heartbreaking. We were right to reject that old status quo, but something even worse has replaced it.

carapace 5y ago

Cf. Robert Anton Wilson, specifically his writing regarding "reality tunnels". In brief, what you're describing is the default state of humanity. In colorful language, human civilization is "the war between gangs of hypnotists".

zemo 5y ago

> in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. ...you are using one right now

lbrito 5y ago

>But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. I've noticed this specifically with covid denial/conspiracy nuts. Sure, there have always been conspiracy nuts (and some conspiracy theories are later proven not theories at all), but covid-related conspiracies are a different beast altogether in terms of how widespread they got. There seems to be a personality type that is prone to believing in conspiracy theories of any kind, and the bar or threshold for that kind of personality seems to have lowered all of a sudden -- otherwise normal people that were not particularly conspiracy theory-leaning are way into the craziest covid stuff. The level of angst involved is also on a whole other level: while in other conspiracy theories the "Enemy" is usually a small evil cabal and the general "blue pill" public is just "misinformed sheep", now suddenly everyone _not a conspiracy nut_ is immediately evil.

gwern 5y ago

> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge. I agree there is a troubling bubble here. I just don't agree that the bubble in question has anything to do with crypto, as opposed to those getting their jollies dunking on crypto bros. How many tweets do you have to read before you escape the bubble of OP and learn that the tweet is false...? (By my count, you have to go through 320 HN comments before you will find the first deeply-buried comment pointing out that OP is false and the buyers believed no such thing; this submission is at +501 points, BTW.) Here is a quote from an article published well over a month before OP tweeted: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dunedao-soby https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune... "Now that they have won the bid, Saqib and his associates must make good on their promise to bring the bible to the people and prove that their fundraising approach was not just a gimmick. As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. Jodorowsky is now 92 years old; Jean Giraud, or Moebius, the legendary French illustrator who did all the storyboards, died in 2012; H.R. Giger, who designed the creepy home planet of the House of Harkonnen, died two years later. “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public." They explicitly acknowledge they do not 'own the IP' and can't just scan it etc and it is positioning for negotiation for the actual IP.

h0nd 5y ago

Wow, what a great comment. You just explained how the whole 'mass formation psychosis' was/is possible.