51 ms·

Is everything falling apart?

• jmyeet 4y ago
  In my experience the young tend to exaggerate highs and lows because they tend to have lived through one and not the other. This is particularly true because many people today have no memory of actual recession. Far fewer have any memory of war (in the West in general and the US in particular). The last few years have really exposed just how profoundly irrational and profoundly selfish a significant percentage of the population is. So take climate change. Yes, it's a big issue but my view is now fatalistic. Humanity won't even minorly inconvenience itself to do anything about it. So we'd better hope there is an economic solution, specifically an eenrgy source without greenhouse gas emissions that's cheaper, because nothing else will change behaviour. And I actually expect that will happen. Many people will be displaced and die in the meantime, which is obviously awful, but people collectively are completely fun with letting other people die and that's just the truth. So for many things I just don't think it's as dire as many think. But one area where I think we're in real trouble is the the resurgence of literal Nazism. This isn't a perjorative. We've come so far that the former Prime Minister of israel engages in Holocaust revisionism to blame it on Palestinians [1]: > Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech to the Zionist Congress on Tuesday night that “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.” The prime minister said that the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had protested to Hitler that “they’ll all come here,” referring to Palestine. > “ ‘So what should I do with them?’ ” Mr. Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking Mr. Husseini. “He said, ‘Burn them.’ ” We have the highest-ratest host on the #1 cable "news" network openly pushing Nazi propaganda [2]. Republicans are in love with autocrats and the examples are legion (eg Trump's praise of Jinping, Kim John-Un and Putin, GOP praise of Victor Orbon of Hungary). As much as age has given me perspective to realize most alarm is overstated, I can't help but think this is going to end very, very badly. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/world/middleeast/netanyahu-saying-palestinian-mufti-inspired-holocaust-draws-broad-criticism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/world/middleeast/netanyah... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGb748VOcYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGb748VOcYU
• incomingpain 4y ago
  Yesterday I made the comment "everything is collapsing underneath" though there's context etc. I think the better way to say it. "Is everything falling apart for the USA?" Yes indeed. Most other countries have problems. Sure Sri Lanka has the same problems. Sure the middle east just went through the same problems and some states are still enduring civil war. Though from what I can tell it's mostly the USA in this 'falling apart' situation. Canada is certainly not far behind. >“The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Damn that's a good analogy! Elon tweeted this yesterday: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144 The political polarization starting pre-existed social media. This started late 90s or for sure early 2000s with GWBush. Bush knew something from his father's reign. He could play identity as a victim. So he would pretend to be a yokel and when the elites would make fun... it told every yokel that Bush was the only option. Obviously he never passed laws or tried to 'fix' something for yokels. It was shallow identity politics but identity politics breeds more identity politics. The democrats then needed identity politics of obama. It's an inevitable scenario, 'first black president' will eventually happen in history and inevitably it would be toxic with identity politics. The rest is history, Trump is a symptom. Biden is a symptom. >By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In Nonzero I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press. Blaming social media is not legitimate in my opinion; social media will be what fixes this. The fix to the USA falling apart is free and open discussions between the camps. This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter. He's a billionaire and will be the world's first trillionaire, ONLY if the USA doesn't fall apart. He has a vested incentive/interest to help make this not happen. >One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland. Which is for sure true. The reality is that they are still the same team. You can enjoy F1 over Nascar. You have to still realize you're on the same team. When the left-wing attacks the right-wing. You can't take actions that harms your own team. Eventually that team breaks and here we are.
• recursivedoubts 4y ago
  Daily reminder: the comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.
• lbj 4y ago
  • hef19898 4y ago
    Idiocracy was, I feel, a prediction. An optimistic one, we wont need 500 years.
    • lbj 4y ago
      That's my feeling as well. Go Woke Go Mentally Broke.
      • hef19898 4y ago
        I think we come from different directions...
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    > For millennia every human has known what a woman and a man is, now even supreme court justices in American don't know. What does this mean? Are you talking about gender or sex?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • Izkata 4y ago
      It's one specific justice: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWtGzJxiONU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWtGzJxiONU
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • throwawayN0W 4y ago
    Could you tell me, what gender a person with male physique and female brain structure has? What actually happend is the break up of over archaic role models and scientific progress. Some people today, have a decent answer to that question.
• jaqalopes 4y ago
  I think some things are falling apart but not everything. If you had the foresight/luck/guidance to get into a stable white collar career, find a partner, and buy a house before 2022 I think you're on "the train". This train is currently pulling away from a burning station containing everyone else who hasn't done those things yet. It's still possible to escape the station by running down the tracks but at this point the train is picking up speed so your odds aren't too good. Obviously this is a young single person's perspective but I think we're by far feeling the shifts in society and the economy the most right now. Alternative, darker analogy: everyone is on the Titanic. It's currently breaking in half and about to sink, but people like the author of this blog post are on the upper half looking down.
  • tamaharbor 4y ago
    Or you can just wait for the next stop and get on there.
    • the_other 4y ago
      How do you get to the next stop?
      • jimbob45 4y ago
        You wait for the market to cycle again - crash, boom, then crash, etc. Parent poster might have been in their 20s/30s though and implying that waiting for the next cycle would waste prime years of their life.
        • tejohnso 4y ago
          > waste prime years of their life. I'm not sure that life is wasted, but I'd suggest financial opportunity is wasted. You just can't reach the level of financial security that the previous generation could if that previous generation had a drastically lower cost of living relative to income for the first X years of their adult life. Especially as X approaches the length of your entire career.
        • 4y ago
• taylodl 4y ago
  The constant theme since the dawn of civilization threaded through all of history is that everything is falling apart. Change is continual. History is more like the seasons. Nations rise. Nations fall. Sometimes there's revolt. Sometimes there's peace. There's a continual game of King of the Mountain being played at all levels. So what can we say? Situation Normal - all effed up! Enjoy this phenomenon called life. You only get one.
  • leereeves 4y ago
    > Nations rise. ... Sometimes there's peace. In short: sometimes things aren't falling apart. For a few decades we enjoyed one of the great periods of peace and prosperity. That was surely doomed to end eventually, but I wish it could last a while longer.
    • techdragon 4y ago
      Unless you lived in the parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity… it’s important to remember peace and prosperity are regional phenomena that are not shared around the globe equally.
      • leereeves 4y ago
        Certainly there have been some parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity, but it was widespread. Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes. Most of the "developing world" developed. Marginalized groups gained new civil rights. China and India rose to become great powers even as their former colonial masters, though declining, still enjoyed peace and prosperity. Recognizing that there is still a lot of injustice and inequality in the world doesn't require denying all the progress that has been made.
        • 4ggr0 4y ago
          > Recognizing that there is still a lot of injustice and inequality in the world doesn't require denying all the progress that has been made And recognizing that we've made process shouldn't make us believe that we've done enough. Recognize what we've (or they've) achieved, be proud about it but never loose focus on making "it" even better. (I'm just adding to your comment, not disagreeing)
• xwowsersx 4y ago
  > The framing begins with appreciating how closely intertwined the divisive and unifying effects of information technology can be. The author speaks as if "unifying", as opposed to dividing, is the redemptive quality of information technology. I don't see it as an unmitigated good and, somewhat ironically, the story of the tower of Babel is about how their single-purposedness (?) was the source of the problem altogether. Genesis 11:6: "And the Lord said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do?"
  • rob74 4y ago
    If you ask me, humanity could really use some unifying influence right about now, for example to help tackle the issue of climate change...
    • fristechill 4y ago
      The issue of climate change, among other issues, is being used to promote unity and one world government. But it doesn't follow that this approach is best to climate change or anything else. We need variation in policies and technologies in order to select the best approach (and not get locked in to a sub-optimal approach). One world government is bad because it will attract evil elements who use it to place all peoples under their control/taxation/exploitation, with no recourse or escape. All in the name of helping people and fighting for <insert your favourite political cause>. By analogy, it might seem more efficient if families were to live in communal dormitories instead of their separate houses. In reality it would create stultification and at worst mass suffering when individuals took control over all aspects of other families' lives.
      • rob74 4y ago
        Currently, on climate change this variation is some countries doing nothing, others doing worse than nothing (e.g. encouraging mass deforestation, as in Brazil), and some countries doing a little more than nothing, but saying they are doing enough when compared to those who are doing nothing or worse, and that they can't afford to do more because it would put them at a disadvantage to the others. So this is less about "selecting the best approach" and more a race to the bottom of how little one can do while still pretending to care (or alternatively keep denying that the problem even exists and do nothing).
• baal80spam 4y ago
  Technically speaking, yes [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
  • whatda 4y ago
    is it not the opposite, because as entropy decreases everything becomes stable and ordered?(as far as I know)
    • photochemsyn 4y ago
      Well... dead planets (that harbor no life) are lower entropy than living planets as their surfaces change much less over time. Fewer possible microstates = low entropy. Hence, if you take a complex biochemical system and reduce it to <100 piles of atoms of specific elements, this is a lower entropy state. Mass extinctions, collapse of civilizations, that does lead to a 'more stable and ordered' state. Disorder is desirable. Let chaos reign!
• aldarion 4y ago
  Nothing lasts forever, and we have been on the downturn of the civilization for the last hundred years or so. This is merely the time when we started running out of the reserves that our ancestors had secured us, and thus problems started becoming apparent.
  • Arainach 4y ago
    The last hundred years? So electrifying rural areas, civil rights, vaccines, space exploration, Medicare (US), public medicine (first world countries), and more are all the downturn?
    • throwawayN0W 4y ago
      I thnik he just wanted to throw "ancestros" somewhere in there without specifying what that former glory exectly is.
  • taylodl 4y ago
    I think we're at a transition point. People talk about our entering a post-scarcity economy but what you don't hear so much about is exactly how would that happen? Human nature being what it is those at the top who are accustomed to consuming the most civilization has to offer are still playing by that same old playbook - but in a post-scarcity economy that consumption is obscene and it's becoming clearer to more and more people that the old playbook needs to be thrown out. But that "old playbook" has been around for 6,000 years (actually more)! I remember the old Police song having the line "there is no political solution for our troubled evolution." They say we live in the Anthropocene epoch, an epoch dominated by man. The problem is that's not the world we evolved in and for humans evolution isn't just a matter of physical adaptation but social adaptation as well. Our social structures we've built over the millennia no longer work the same in this new world we've built. We have to evolve, but social evolution typically involves violence and upheaval and would appear that everything is falling apart.
  • goatlover 4y ago
    Nothing lasts forever, but some things last a really long time. Like life on this planet (several billion years). Or possibly advanced alien civilizations out there. Question would be why can't humans find a way to last a really long time?
• fullshark 4y ago
  "Everything is falling apart" if you are someone who contributes information to the public sector in the form of analysis, scientific studies, news reporting, etc and your audience was built solely on your credentials, or the organization you belong to being respected. Those credentials and institutions are collapsing and they need to rebuild public trust by providing legitimate value instead of spending the next 10 years whining about how the commoners just don't get how valuable they are.
• mk81 4y ago
• m0llusk 4y ago
  This is a bit of an oversimplification of the argument. Technology is argued to be a wedge, but this is in the context of well documented social division. In recent memory we were significantly less divided and the most consumed media sources served as moderators. Brushing this off as just another prognostication and everything is always messed up is missing the seriousness of this. It is perhaps fortunate that the Ukraine situation is demonstrating once again that just about the only time America can function in a coordinated manner is when there is an agreed upon external threat. Perhaps the next external threat will be carbon climate cancer? Or will our internal divisions prevent us from effectively dealing with that. It is going to be a rough ride one way or the other. The current war will be our first experience with global famines since the so called green revolution.
  • goodoldneon 4y ago
    > Perhaps the next external threat will be carbon climate cancer? Americans rarely unite against something that's partially and/or possibly our fault.
    • rtkwe 4y ago
      Also that will prove costly to the existing economic order, companies will resist every change that threatens their bottom line unless and until they find a way to benefit themselves. Look at oil now "energy" companies like Shell that knew climate change was a looming cliff but were so heavily invested in oil they buried the issue in confusion and flak until they figured out how to make money off of green energy.
  • SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    There's a lot more political polarization, no doubt, but I'm actually not sure it's true that there's more social division. A few decades ago, basic questions like "is it OK for different races to get married" and "should women participate fully in society" remained unresolved, with a ton of people wielding substantial power sitting on the "no" side. (The Handmaid's Tale wasn't meant to be some crazy impossible premise; Margaret Atwood genuinely believed that she was describing a real trend that might happen if we're not careful.)
• rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  I remember watching the universal disdain Americans shared for high finance after 2008 and even movements like Occupy Wall Street resonated with a lot more people than one would have predicted. Then, all of the sudden, a whole new field of social engineering algorithms are unleashed on the populace, convincing everyone that their neighbor is the true enemy.
  • rcpt 4y ago
    Why do you think that OWS was killed by new "social engineering algorithms"? The US has had a strong anti-protest culture for decades. March in the street, for anything, and the response is near universal cynicism and derision of the "hippies". With OWS this was apparent with traditional news coverage that constantly focused on the most ridiculous looking protestors
    • rgrieselhuber 4y ago
      OWS isn't the main point of my comment.
  • lampshades 4y ago
    And now we're even teaching children which "group" they belong in, from the time they're in kindergarten, to further divide the populace so that we can be at war with each other instead of them.
  • MichaelMoser123 4y ago
    things became quite, i think the main reason was that they fixed the economy, for a while. However you have a point, media is very potent factor; You see that in Russia, where the state has a monopoly on the press, and old TV managed to persuade a majority in necessity of this senseless war, which is going on right now. The new media thing is creating a kind of monopoly on information for your own tribe, because it trains everyone to discard any info that comes from the other side of the fence. So there is a strong element of social control here. (don't know if Mr. Musk will manage to change that, but he seems to be trying...)
• trey-jones 4y ago
  I feel generally that everything is falling apart. I also have an article still pulled up from earlier this week titled Why Pessimism Sounds Smart. It seems pessimists are sometimes wrong! But sometimes they are right too - especially in the last couple of years I have observed incompetence seemingly everywhere I go. But is this the changing world, or my changing perspective? It's really difficult to pin down. At the same time, I read books that were published before I was born that allude to many of the same problems that seem so prominent in our society today, reinforcing the idea that We Didn't Start the Fire. Still, the decline in quality of goods and services seems to be backed up by data as well as anecdote. I go to schools, churches, businesses. I see lightbulbs out. Things that are broken that could be repaired if only someone would put in 10 minutes of effort. My opinion: Everything is maybe falling apart in America specifically. I hope I'm wrong, for my childrens' sake.
  • nikanj 4y ago
    Unfortunately said someone has been made redundant, and the parts wouldn’t be available anyway because all of the planets microchip factories are building bitcoin rigs
  • 4ggr0 4y ago
    I think the question shouldn't necessarily be who started the fire, but if it is a good idea to just let the fire burn, even though you weren't the one igniting it.
    • trey-jones 4y ago
      Yes, that is how I think about it. Billy Joel's generation didn't start the fire, but they also sure as hell didn't put it out. Don't get me wrong. Some people are carrying buckets of water towards the fire, but there are other people poking holes in the buckets, or shoving them so that they spill the water, or whatever other metaphor you would like to use here. And also some people standing around and telling the people carrying the water that it's not the correct way to put out fires.
      • 4y ago
• ilaksh 4y ago
  My take is that people and technology are part of the same system and the details of technology and how it is deployed really do matter. Also I strongly recommend another Haidt book called "The Righteous Mind".
• Shaddox 4y ago
  I hope I am not being too inflammatory by saying this but it's ... quite amusing how sheltered Americans are in thinking that a little political tension is a danger to their own country. Bosnia was about to be destroyed and more recently, attempted to be divided by neighbors and they're still fine. Look at anywhere that's not Americas or Western Europe.
  • watwut 4y ago
    Contrapoint: it is actually good for Americans to worry about whether democracy will be destroyed in their country. Complacency and ignoring issues with "there are other countries that got it worst" may sounds smart or "worldwide-inclusive", but does not help neither Bosnians nor Americans. Possibly the most politically apathetic nation is Russia .. and where it got them. Political apathy is what you get in autocracies and dictatorships - and what simultaneously empowers them. It is debatable whether Bosnia is fine or will be fine. It is in danger of new rounds of violence. For that matter, even if Ukraine wins, which I hope, it wont be fine. Wars do actually damage places where it all happens and price is paid for many years after.
    • myth_drannon 4y ago
      Well look at Israel, it had so many wars(some it almost lost). I would argue it made it stronger, more cohesive. I hope the same happens to Ukraine, despite the price it is paying.
      • danamit 4y ago
        Israel is a nuclear power supported by the West, there is no almost losing.
      • watwut 4y ago
        They have own hard liners with genocidal rhetoric's and pretty violent practice. No, all the threats and violence did not made Israel better. It made them increasingly violent place.
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
• 21723 4y ago
  Answer: Maybe. What we are experiencing is acceleration. Left-wing accelerationists want to bring on capitalism's end-stage calamities in order to foster a revolution that will overthrow the bourgeoisie. Right-wing accelerationists think that worsening economic conditions will trigger some sort of white-nationalist boogaloo garbage. I'm not an accelerationist, for my part, but it's pretty clear to me that acceleration is happening. Capitalism has been in objective decline for decades, but now the decline is happening faster than most of us ever imagined. There's an inevitable sequence to this sort of thing. Capitalism becomes corporate capitalism ("Stage 2") due to business consolidation. This requires the proliferation of middle management positions, both to curtail inefficiency and to prop up a middle class (preventing overthrow) while small businesses die, so what you get is an evolution into managerial capitalism. ("Stage 3") At this point, bureaucratic diversions make it hard to know what is happening, and few people--least of all the overpaid boneheads on top, who can't tell when they're being lied to--know if their managers (or consultants) are any good, so this leads to reputation capitalism ("Stage 4") in which there is no such thing as truth--there is only what people say, and power resides in the ability to control what others say. (In other words, might makes right.) This leads to widespread, deliberate misinformation that proliferates; the system begins to shake, but the nature of post-truth capitalism ("Stage 5") allows it to preserve its own stability, for a little while longer, if it can convince a large number of people that they're either already winning (bourgeois false consciousness) or destined to win (fascist fuckery). This isn't hard at all, in a world where nothing means anything, and in which the convincing telling of lies is the surest path to prestigious jobs and high incomes. We now live in a world where having a national reputation is necessary just to get an average job--hence the pathological obsession of the young with fame and "influencers"-- and in which admission to the most prestigious universities is as competitive as it has ever been but the product is the worst it's ever been. We have the right wing using fascism to win; we have the left wing diverted into callout-culture identity politics and virtue signaling instead of actual change. The dysfunction of capitalism can no longer be contained. We have stagflation now and will see worldwide food riots in a year or two. Read up on the Russian 1990s if you want to know what the capitalistic world (which is now the entire world) is in for. Is everything falling apart? It's hard to say. It'll get a lot worse in the short term, but humans and human civilization are resilient.
• goodpoint 4y ago
  I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up - a more up to date version of Idiocracy.
• Taikonerd 4y ago
  I think if the debate is "everything is pretty bad" vs "everything is kinda bad, but..." then it's not going to go anywhere. I wish that Wright had focused more on Haidt's concrete suggestions in his article. For example, towards the end of his article, Haidt writes, "Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one." And that's an idea that may have pros and cons! But it focuses the debate on specific proposals to improve the situation, rather than just a general referendum on "How Bad Are Things?"
• qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
  • 4ggr0 4y ago
    So for you Trans-People are a sign that the end is near? If that's your biggest worry I'd really like to be in your situation.
    • pelasaco 4y ago
      I know nothing about this topic, and I never looked into this topic, but for some specialists, yes https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mjz54/does_a_cultural_shift_towards_androgyny_mark_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mjz54/does_... Note: No, reddit isn't a good source, but It was the first one that i found. Searching for Camille Paglia and transgender you will find more information about it..
    • cato_the_elder 4y ago
      No, gender dysphoria has existed since like forever. But it's certainly not a good sign when our institutions try to indoctrinate us with gender ideology. [1] The day it really becomes "the science" is the day I will lose hope in the rest of the apparatus. Lysenkoism [2] be damned. [1]: And by that I mean believing that we should behave as if there are no differences between biological females and MTF, or that it's all just a "social construct", or that we have a moral duty to "deconstruct" all social constructs which interfere with some ideology. [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
      • mikkergp 4y ago
        What’s it like to have such strong feelings about gender? I don’t have that, the idea that it’s all just a social construct is so embedded in the way I see the world, I just don’t see how anything about sexuality or biology are immutably connected to gender identity. To me the two are completely divorced from each other.
• outside1234 4y ago
  Everything is falling apart but we are falling slowly upwards in terms of things getting better. I recommend this book for data that supports this if folks haven't read it already: https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/ https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/
• pjmorris 4y ago
  I appreciate the sentiment that 'it's always been like this.' That said, I am of the view that the mindset of optimizing for efficiency and the tools we've acquired over the last 50-100 years for doing so may, in addition to the benefits, have unintended consequences on a large scale. A couple of examples; in yesterday's discussion of nurses want to leave the profession, it was observed that the buyers of EMRs are optimizing for different things than the nurses that use them, to the detriment of nurses and patients. And, Boeing's products may be less safe now that it is optimized for capital rather than engineering. To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.
  • tablespoon 4y ago
    > To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on. That may be a problem that can be addressed though. Neglecting resilience to over-optimize for efficiency seems like it's symptom of stability. People, as a whole, seem to lack the wisdom to not fool themselves that they can ignore long term risks while the short term is good, especially when we're talking about spans greater than generation. However, a lot of that stability is getting disrupted right now: the pandemic, a big land war in Europe, supply chains are fucked, etc. The war especially has blown up a lot of naive assumptions that had been taken for granted until a couple months ago. I think here's a decent chance that for the next few decades, Western civilization will value resilience far more than it has over the last few.
• namelessoracle 4y ago
  The elephant in the room is that the Industrial world wanted alot of people, and the post Industrial world does not. Not only in terms of production, but in terms of having a livable environment for everyone. So what happens to what are now "excess" people? The answer to that question is gonna define pretty much everything.
  • infamouscow 4y ago
    I believe the term you're looking for is "useless eaters".
  • rank0 4y ago
    We can’t sustain our current levels of spending without a growing population. The lions share of American spending goes to social services: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. If you’re referencing to automation taking over…I fully agree with your point. It seems like half the people around me have made up jobs.
    • namelessoracle 4y ago
      The elites that control everything dont really care about social security, medicare, medicaid. Automation can make all the things they would want. Why do they need you around again? Especially when having you around creates pollution that makes things worse for them....
      • rank0 4y ago
        Because if shit gets bad enough for the general population, they go after the elites in full force. This is why we have constant revolution throughout human history.
        • namelessoracle 4y ago
          Whats scary to me is that before the elites needed other non elites to be bodyguards/administrators/army/muscle for them to help avoid that, and they at least had to trickle down to their henchmen to keep in power. What happens when they have automation for that?
• thaway2839 4y ago
  I find all the comparisons to previous technological changes lacking for one very simple reason. Previous technological changes never had granular data on individuals the way today's technological revolution does. Since most such pieces are written by journalists, or written by people who think about these things but are also writers, they tend to focus on the idea distribution medium aspect of today's technology. So that would be the internet, or social media platforms, or chat platforms, etc. That's the most easily comparable part to past information technologies such as the printing press. But the novel danger with what we're facing today is not the fact that everyone is on social media, or that stuff can go viral. Even though these are turbocharged versions of past technologies, they are still versions of past technologies (being turbocharged can still make it meaningfully different, but for now I'll ignore that). The novel danger is personalized data collection. It's the fact that major companies can built extremely accurate and granular profiles of every single person on their platforms. This is completely unprecedented. Throw in even rudimentary AI, and I can target my message to match every individual's unique psychological profile. This was never possible in the past. The most you could do is target something based on a few broad aspect of someone's personality. Where they lived, what religion they followed, what language they spoke, etc. But there were thousands if not millions of people who filled that mold, and there were vast variations within those people, which still allowed for non conformity. Today, however, you can target every individual and even the same individual differently depending on whether it's the morning, or evening, or if they are working or relaxing. It's this that's truly novel and truly dangerous. You don't even need Social media to be involved for this to be a problem. The Chinese government, for example, famously has a highly intrusive citizenry score for its citizens based on a variety of such micro targeted factors. And pretty much every government across the world is also doing the same. Corporations have gone even further because they have all the data.
• scythe 4y ago
  My impression is that optimism peaked in the '50s -- some time before I was alive -- and has been in decline ever since. That's not to say that there haven't been major achievements since then -- I wouldn't have a career without them -- but increasingly, we have seen experts throwing up their hands and saying "I don't know how this will ever be solved". The most optimism right now comes from people who think major societal problems will be solved by machines that can solve more problems than people. That of course does not contradict the idea that humans are having more and more trouble solving our problems, even as we continue to move forward in the near term. We have never had a unified cultural perspective on this phenomenon -- it is either an artifact of regressive politics, a warning sign of the limits to growth, a reflection of deep failings in the basic structure of society, a punishment from Heaven for our disregard for tradition, or [choose as many as you like]. But as it continues to become more visible, the possible conclusions clash more and more. So while social media appears to create divisions in society, I don't think it's the only cause, and I don't think the only causes are things for which we can so easily allocate blame.
• Zigurd 4y ago
  There is a specific danger that will form the context for evaluating the destructive power of social media: The invasion of Ukraine will have costs. Innocent people will die. Obviously in Ukraine, but people who ate the grain produced in Ukraine and Russia may die of starvation because Ukraine's ability to plant an harvest large areas has been destroyed. Prices for the available grain in the world will go up. Starvation and price rises will provide new opportunities to fearmonger and divide. Social media is ill equipped to stop Russia and others from using it to manipulate fearful people.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  The printing press story always seems to focus on the Protestant-vs-Catholic conflict, but let's also recall it fostered an explosion of scientific and mathematical knowledge across the continent. For example, the print runs of Isaac Newton's Principia: https://www.livescience.com/200-more-copies-newton-principia.html https://www.livescience.com/200-more-copies-newton-principia... I'm not sure if social media has contributed in any similar way to the spread of useful scientific and technical information... there's an argument that it has of course, but this is a very small fraction of the total content. The Internet overall has (long live sci-hub!), however.
  • jimkleiber 4y ago
    Along these lines, I'm curious what impact science/academia Twitter has had on scientific advancements and discoveries. Anyone with more knowledge on this?
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    I think in this analogy, the Internet is the printing press. Social media is maybe the gutter press. But note that the gutter press is only possible where enough people are literate, which is definitely a good thing.
• juanani 4y ago
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  We were getting close to a fairly positive future. There are three basic constraints to material and non-material goods: - capital - labour - energy There are other raw materials, but they aren't limiting factors. For example, processed Lithium is in short supply right now, but it's not raw Lithium that's the constraint. We don't have enough Lithium mines and processing facilities. capital/labour/energy, in other words. We had a glorious period in the post-WW2 era where the price of energy & capital was dropping dramatically so the world was labour constrained. Wages skyrocketed, and the middle class emerged and prospered. Then the 70s halted cheap energy and the 80s halted cheap capital and the world has stagnated since. In 2019, things were looking up again. Capital was cheap, and green energy prices were dropping in their own version of Moore's law so it became crystal clear that energy would be very cheap soon. But we can't have the proles regain the power they had in the 60's. Low unemployment, cheap energy and cheap capital means that power will shift from the rich to the middle class. So a crisis was invented. Let's pretend that the inflation caused by a supply crisis and a war in Ukraine is actually caused by cheap capital. That way we can get rid of cheap capital and throw a ton of people out of work so the rich and powerful can maintain control. While we're at it, we'll use the war as an excuse to stay on the petro-economy. Luckily, it's not too late. I expect inflation to quickly turn negative as bottlenecks free up and high interest rates throw the economy into a recession forcing the fed to reverse the interest rate hikes.
  • aisengard 4y ago
    > So a crisis was invented. Are you saying that the millions upon millions who died (not to mention the untold millions who are suffering long-term health problems), didn't actually die? Or that what they died from (a highly contagious and infectious novel virus) was engineered?
    • jimmygrapes 4y ago
      A piddling price to pay to regain control of the proles.
    • bryanlarsen 4y ago
      The crisis that was invented is the perception that it was government stimulus that caused the inflation. The pretension that millions of deaths didn't cause the economic problems, it was the stimulus that caused the economic problems.
• ravenstine 4y ago
  Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart. In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to public sentiment. People who I would consider "normies" even don't trust law enforcement and the FBI anymore (not that they ever should have). Even the education system from K12 to college is increasingly being seen as a joke and an outright racket. We also went from the President being a more respected position to one deserving of relentless tabloid gossip. Even if one's "guy" is in office, I don't think we feel the same about it the way we did even as recent as Obama, and his administration was when we really began to see the social cracks forming. Civilization ebbs and flows, but I think the current sentiment is unprecedented in my lifetime. This is not a high point by any stretch of the imagination, and while I see "everything is collapsing" to be hyperbolic, it seems inevitable that many things we thought were rock solid are in a transition period where either they will reform or one day be replaced with force of some kind.
  • jahewson 4y ago
    > but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to public sentiment. No it’s because it caters to the employees and owners of traditional journalism who have been dethroned by Silicon Valley.
  • mrits 4y ago
    I have a much different experience. I have a dozen family members that were part of the auto industry in Michigan. They were on top of the world for decades. It ended with most of them thinking society has collapsed in the 80s and doubting they'd actually get their pension. My grandfather spent the last 30 years of his life in retirement collecting a pay check that he thought might be his last.
    • RivieraKid 4y ago
      Why did he think the paychecks would stop coming?
• lazyier 4y ago
  The tower of Babel is a story of how man tried to create their own salvation through technology and was punished by God. The punishment was the fracturing of language. The fracturing isn't the subject or metaphor. The metaphor is people attempting to create their own salvation in a very ignorant and shallow way and being punished for it.
• mbg721 4y ago
  It's easy to lament polarization, but the reason it's not going away is that there are important differences in how people view the world, and calls for unity are really closer to "It would be so peaceful if we could eliminate the opposing viewpoint once and for all".
  • macintux 4y ago
    I’d just be happy if we could agree on basic facts. I don’t expect everyone to agree on the right way to solve a problem, but it seems increasingly difficult to even come to a common understanding of what’s true and what’s not.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      Do you have an example of that? I haven't seen a lot of debate about the data (facts), but usually it's about the information (how it was formed from the data). Of course there are a small group of leaders (and/or crackpots) on either side spreading blatantly false info, but I feel that's rather small and receives outsized coverage.
      • _gabe_ 4y ago
        I think one of the most basic facts that we can't agree on is what constitutes a man or a woman. It's a very simple problem that a 5 year old can point out, yet we somehow lost sight of this very basic fact.
        • giantg2 4y ago
          I suppose that's a perfect example of what I was talking about. The only reason it's controversial is due to the ways we apply them. The man-made contexts can convolute the meaning of man or woman. For example, are we talking about sex, gender, or something else? In the context of reproduction, sports, or something else? Most people agree that the various labels exist. It all depends on how we want to define them. It can get even more complicated because we have this artificial tautology of man or woman, but in fact there are naturally occuring intersex individuals who fall in between and are mostly forced to choose. So in closing, I feel the facts are not at issue here (xx vs xy vs intersex). It's how we are utilizing them and applying them to our social constructs which do not necessarily follow nature. If we are are talking about gender, then we take it a step farther into artificial labels and buckets built purely on one's preference (no way to factually check claims). The facts of the subject are simple and agreeable, yet the way we apply them make for controversy around our policies.
• titzer 4y ago
  It's not that things are falling apart, it's that things are not being put back together. Complex societies have systems and mechanisms in them that require people to do a.) do their job and b.) hold others accountable. We're a uniquely distracted and lethargic generation obsessed with titillation, fantasy, and procrastination. Yet a lot of things require sober, deliberate work, and enforcing the rules. With the level of corruption in the US government--the level of open shirking of duties and outright lies, coupled with the seeming inability of elected officials to accomplish overwhelmingly popular policy changes, coupled with prolonged strategic malinvestment and a obvious debt bubble, we're in some serious hot water.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    "coupled with the seeming inability of elected officials to accomplish overwhelmingly popular policy changes," I feel like this is always a hot button. What are the overwhelming popular policy changes, and just how popular are they? I'm wondering if there's a list somewhere that will show the top ones with the percent of support.
    • codefreeordie 4y ago
      There are tons of them, so long as you poll for them carefully such that each person surveyed can imagine that it's the version of the proposal that they support.
• david927 4y ago
  I think there are two intersecting issues. The first is the dwindling of easy resources. The second half of the 20th century was so easy it was wasteful, and we don't want to give that up -- that abundance of resources, readily available and on the cheap. But the bigger issue right now is the end of the US/NATO empire. It matches with the end of other empires like Rome: the spending, the inflation, the corruption and the splintering/partisanship, where groups hate other groups because they blame them for what's going on. They say, "if it wasn't for this group, or if only they would agree with our side, we'd be fine again," but in the end nothing was going to stop it. What goes up must come down.
  • RivieraKid 4y ago
    This is not what the article is about at all.
    • david927 4y ago
      The article seems to be blaming the division of society on the Like button. I'm saying it was going to happen with or without that for the reasons I listed.
      • NoGravitas 4y ago
        Yes... the article that this article was responding to is the kind of thing you get when you rule out an analysis of material conditions and focus exclusively on the ideological superstructure.
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    >if only they would agree with our side, we'd be fine again I'd argue a lot of problems today would be solved if people stopped buying into the massive intra-class war propaganda pushed onto the working class and had a little more empathy for one another.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      I sort of agree. A lot of the normal people, like neighbors, tend to be more empathetic and are accepting of people who are more or less affluent than themselves. But the normal people aren't the ones that run the country.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  "The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.".. it could be Germany from 2015 and beyond..
• ajross 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • ianbutler 4y ago
    I'd like to see numbers backing it up either way. I'm center left leaning and I largely distrust journalism these days. I don't consistently read any news source and assume appropriately relevant and significant information will filter it's way to me from my network. It's worked well so far and I've managed to keep my biases moderate. It also let's me more easily filter out bs since I'm not consistently immersed in it.
    • xhkkffbf 4y ago
      Absolutely. I'm very center, perhaps slightly left. But aside from Rachel Maddow, I don't trust what I hear.
      • lukeholder 4y ago
        >But aside from Rachel Maddow Ha, is that a joke? One person?
      • drugstorecowboy 4y ago
        "Slightly Left" but the only journalist you trust is Rachel Maddow? That is a very interesting take, I have never heard Maddow described as anything remotely resembling slightly left, only as a caricature of the extreme left.
        • jen20 4y ago
          Every time I read one of these threads I’m reminded that the American “far” Left is broadly equivalent to the European centre-right.
        • AlexandrB 4y ago
          That's pretty funny. On many topics, the whole spectrum of acceptable political thought has been compressed in the US (and much of the west) so that you're either a little bit pro-business ("extreme left") or very pro business ("extreme right"); a little bit pro military ("extreme left") or very pro military ("extreme right"). Radical ideas are allowed to exist only as long as they don't stop the flow of money. Hence the current focus on culture war over anything else.
• cleandreams 4y ago
  He speaks of "the magnitude of the attendant change in social structure: a movement from national toward international social organization." This can't work because it is not associated with growing prosperity in developed world but rampant inequality, the decline of good jobs for the non college educated, and growing resentment about this. Particularly in America, labor has been crushed. The substitution of "international" for "national" elites has worsened the problem and made the resentment worse not better. Because there is a material basis for the discontent it is indeed likely that we will fall apart.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  The disconnect is so large. What the author calls mere tribalism is freighted and begs the question in regard to his example of US coastal and european elites having more in common with each other than their fellow "working stiff" citizens. What I think he misses is that these elites aren't elite, and the popular/ist reaction to them is to being made subjects of technocrats who always seem to be working for the good of someone else far away but mostly self-dealing to their own benefit. The reason these elites are not in fact elite is their (our?) advantage is mediated by technology, and so it doesn't matter whether it's social media or muskets, without legitimacy, there is no elite, just a crumbling power vaccum sustained by the control of tech. The hatred we expereince is from the impostor syndrome that comes from the precariousness of this percieved elite status. People who percieve themselves as having been elevated from ignorance and poverty have unlimited cruelty for others who "held them back," and who they "left behind," and I would argue that's the crux, as there's almost no way to convince them they have been seduced and decieved as a means to unleash and harness that very cruelty for political ends. If you feel justified in being cruel to the ignorant and that they are deserving of humiliation, I am sorry to have to be the one to say, you are the mark. The author chalks up the social tension Haidt identifies as the effect of neutral and inevitable change, but to me that belief is a kind of affectation. The attitude of, "this is change, learn to cope or be left behind," is the newly bourgois version of "let them eat cake," and Haidt I think identifies that the consequences are looking similar. In general we can bet that all people will align to whatever they percieve to be power. The notion of change is presented as inevitable, and so aligning to it seems like aligning to the power of the universe and the prevailing forces of history. The notion of history as progress iterates the logic of that idea. But what undermines the legitimacy of the people who percieve each other as an elite, installed and annointed by the inevitable forces of historical progress, is that they exist over a substrate of stability, built for them, and provided to them by people who have invested themselves and their identities in it. There is an appealing argument to be made that the working stiffs whose parents invested lives to build homes, communities, and institutions so that their children could thrive, have a more persuasively legitimate claim to the fruits of that culture and society than those who identify as a new elite and use tech to deconstruct and redistribute them to the arbitrary and placeless coalitions they assemble to support themselves. The counter to this is that there is only one humanity, which even seems compassionate, until it clicks that a single humanity and shared interdependent planet reduces to a zero-sum power struggle to prevail in the flow of progressive history, with no truth or rules, and in whose pursuit all things are justified. The explanation for why things are so irreconcilable is not that one side is basically stupid, but this author seems to have fallen for that.
• niviksha 4y ago
  This is an interesting response to the original article. My TL;DR for this is something like 'Yes, information tech has always resulted in social upheaval, so notwithstanding the scale and speed of the current iteration, this isn't new. Also, it can result in international social cohesion (aka Nazis of the world unite). The thing is, it feels like the author is telling us not to worry because all of this has happened before (with horrific consequences to those caught in the churn, to borrow my favorite phrase from The Expanse). That is a weak rationalization at best - 'same shit, different day, (albeit global scale, speed of light) so don't worry' isn't as reassuring as it should sound
  • kipchak 4y ago
    I think it's worth considering the scale of change is different as well. Things like the printing press and the translation of the bible into English definitely did result in upheaval and information being more widely available, the scale is our new information systems is much larger, so the potential stress on people and systems likely will be as well. I think practically the best strategy is to reduce your exposure to the churn as much as reasonably possible if it's something you're worried about.
• hsnewman 4y ago
  I don't understand why people who clearly are traitors to the USA are able to get by with it. In the 1950's they would have been immediately arrested and tried for supporting facist countries. Now they are beloved.
  • Minor49er 4y ago
    This isn't limited to the USA. With the rise of globalism, the sovereignty of nations has been eroding in favor of a one-world government, whether those nations go with it willingly or have it imposed on them. Warfare is now primarily conducted from within, beneath the surface.
• lisper 4y ago
  Things are not falling apart any more than they have in the past. What we are witnessing is a shift in power structure brought about by new communications technology. Humanity has been through this many times before. The invention of writing in the first place empowered the scribes. The printing press disempowered the scribes and empowered publishers . Radio disempowered publishers and empowered broadcasters. The internet has disempowered broadcasters and empowered the unwashed masses. Every time this has happened there has been accompanying social upheaval. We will probably figure this out. But until we do (and it could take a while) things will be a little chaotic.
  • Barrin92 4y ago
  • notpachet 4y ago
    > Things are not falling apart any more than they have in the past. Depends on which window you're looking through, I suppose. Environmentalists would disagree.
    • lisper 4y ago
      Oh yes, absolutely. Climate change is a whole 'nuther kettle o' fish, and it is very, very serious. Nuclear war is also a very real danger. But that's not what TFA was talking about.
• axutio 4y ago
  The argument that things will work out in the end is not particularly reassuring when it still rests on the idea that I will have to spend most of my adult life in turbulent times. Just as I wouldn't have liked to live through the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion, I'd much rather have spent my adult life in the peace and prosperity of the late 1900s than on the trajectory people agree the world is headed for now.
• TimPC 4y ago
  I'd argue that the greater risk of things falling apart is economic rather than political. We've built our society on two near-ponzi schemes that are in danger of falling apart. The first is pension funds which are paid into by current workers to pay out for past workers. Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. They rely on the fact that more people pay into them then take out from them at any one time. This literally meets the definition of a ponzi scheme and it will be heartbreaking when it comes due. The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. To continue growing at this pace they'd have to reach 128x average income by 2072. Those prices are absurd enough that it's clear there will be a slowdown in real estate prices before then. But much of our society is built on real estate growth and we aggressively encourage people to own real estate assets worth more than the entirety of their net worth. When these assets stop going up, or even worse start going down there will be major complications for society. I'm not talking about the adverse effects of a temporary market correction, I'm talking about a new normal in which real estate is flat or downward trending. When real estate is no longer an incredible investment opportunity it will have significant adverse effects on society. For instance, homes are currently a large part of people's retirement plans and selling a home is often used to pay for an extended stay in a nursing home (which is quite expensive). For many people the home represents over 60% of a retirement plan. In my parents lifetime, their home value increased to roughly 10x what it was worth. If my home increases 4x instead this is a substantial adverse impact. If my child's home increases 0x this is disastrous. The things we fundamentally depend on to provide things as important in society as retirement are breaking badly. Meanwhile we're so obsessed with political differences that we barely talk about or work towards solving the slow economic crisis we are facing.
  • blauditore 4y ago
    > They rely on the fact that more people pay into them then take out from them at any one time. This doesn't need to be a ponzi scheme though. Even if population size is stable, if people on average work longer than they are retired, they have to pay less than they receive, all things equal. A problem here has been that people get increasingly older, so they spend a larger percentage of their life being retired, making the ratio of payers vs. receivers worse. The most obvious solution to this is raising the age of retirement, but that's always politically difficult and somehow seen as cruel.
• pphysch 4y ago
  Modern America is thoroughly a product of capitalism -- the belief that economic growth is a) the solution to all problems and b) easy to achieve (just deregulate and let the market figure things out!) Neither of those are true anymore. So yeah, things are falling apart because their foundation is rotten.
• lucasyvas 4y ago
  I've had some thoughts lately that these issues are closely linked with physical borders. In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations. In today's world, it is trivial to find people who share similar values - but they might be on the opposite side of the world. We are doing nation building in a virtual space, but we are unable to realize them because we reside within physical borders that we did not draw, cannot change, with mismatched governance. The values of everyone around us have changed - and we are stuck in some type of twisted hell of a prison where we can't escape those we don't share values with. Your neighbours are now on the Internet. Some of those people might be your physical neighbour, but many aren't.
  • quesera 4y ago
    > In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations. I can't think of any nation in history which was formed by such a rational and reasonable process, but I'd love to be informed otherwise. In my estimation, nations were formed by force, usually by individuals with a functional balance of ruthlessness and charisma. Sometimes by confederations of people with the same qualities.
    • maccolgan 4y ago
      Funnily enough, the first few colonies of the US.
• jspaetzel 4y ago
  If you only look at your lifetime things might not look great at this exact moment. But this too shall pass. Expand your lense to include a few hundred or thousand years and you'll realize we're doing fine. Things have never been better. However the perception of what could be has shifted because memory is short.
• boh 4y ago
  Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality. Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War ethics and regulation collectively reworked its incentives. The education system has always been in a position of scrutiny since universal education become the norm. Presidents have been the stuff of tabloid gossip since the founding fathers with the media mercilessly opting to promote scandal and controversy over respectability. Our conception of President as moral arbiter is a function of the reworking of journalism mentioned above. The difference in peoples attitudes reflects an increased diet of emotion inducing media that accelerates fears and expectations, rather than some great pivot in volatility. Yes there are things to worry about but there always are (let's remember the twentieth century had two world wars, the Great Depression, and an even worse pandemic).
  • b112 4y ago
    Yes, the 60s was far, far, far more disillusioned than this.
    • bsenftner 4y ago
      And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge, and their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider. They are the institutions and they do not trust themselves, as is clear via the leadership stalemate and both parties destroying their best hopes in favor of the crumbling and ever more distant wealthy status quo.
      • Clubber 4y ago
        >And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge, and their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider. Why do people think of an entire generation of people as a single minded entity? Might as well say, "women," or "men," or "humans." Did you know the majority of baby boomers weren't hippies? Looking at documentaries of the era, you'd think they were. Many boomers hated hippies. So which boomers are creating these divisions? The hippies or the non-hippies? >their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider. This would be much more targeted (and accurate) if you said the current generation of politicians. Last time I checked, I've mostly only had two bad choices for president since I've been voting. The third choice was, "throwing away my vote." Guess who came up with that one? The politicians. When you blame a generation of people, you don't blame the people who actually have the power to make the decisions affecting our lives.
• TheGigaChad 4y ago
• diogenescynic 4y ago
  It's not falling apart if you make a good income, but I would say it's getting harder and harder to get by as a middle/working class person in America. It's become much more of winner take all economy and I think that's destructive to a society in the long term.
• naravara 4y ago
  It seems a little odd to try and reassure me that everything isn't falling apart by referencing the Protestant Reformation as the "we've been through this before and come out of it" example. The Protestant Reformation was something of a disaster. Everything DID fall apart. It got rebuilt again into something better but the transition period was an era of war and strife and bloodshed. It is not at all reassuring to lean on that as the example. (Ditto broadcast media (radio, TV, film) and its associations with the rise of fascism and bolshevism in the early 20th century.)
• beepbooptheory 4y ago
  It is very interesting to see this come up so much here. I, personally, don't feel epistemically equipped to have an opinion on this, but it seems a lot of people do. My main takeaway from this piece and the fellow comments (but not Haidt's piece, which is just Substack doomerism), is that you could probably roughly approximate salaries based on someone's stance on this, whether they are right or wrong. So many comments, especially, make this clear, if still under the surface. And that makes sense! If you have a business, a mortgage, or whatever critical long-term investments, you have to be at least somewhat inclined to, 1., think positively about the way things generally work right now, and 2., to feel confident that history is skewing towards progress and good things, however qualified. This also kind of explains how it seems generational too. Kids and millennials are without a lot of wealth, have little investments, and are most likely just in terminal debt and paying rent month-by-month. There isn't really the sense of a tomorrow for many, much less accumulates ROIs.
• arrosenberg 4y ago
  America is at the end of the neoliberal political/economic cycle, so (somewhat obviously) neoliberal institutions are failing and being reformed by groups with power who want their preferred system to prevail for the next 40-50 years. Radicals want socialism, reactionaries want fascism, and the wealthy on both sides want to consolidate their oligarchy, Its less “falling apart” and more that those interested parties are all happy to pick away at the carcass of the current system in the meantime.
• 2ion 4y ago
  Well, the view that history may be in fact (perhaps not objectively, but to any observer cultured enough to entertain himself with observing it) not a time line into the future but cyclical, with civilizations rising and falling, is not new [1]. Perhaps this time what's different is that due to our information age and accelerated rates of change, cultural history's process of change has been pushed from being viewed closer to evolution (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and chance", that is, stretched out over long periods of time and caused by factors not directly being under human influence) to being much closer to immediate, accountable, man-made history (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and choice", that is, actors making active choices causing outcomes) [2]. And so, because most humans, even humans of influence making the choices altering the life outcomes of populuations not over generations but even within single, half or quarter lifetimes, are terribly selfish and stupid and unwise, the outcomes of bad choices just never seem to stop coming. I'm no expert, but topics like shifting balances between global powers which are interested in different kinds of change (from hegemonic US in a post-WWII word to a very multi-polar world order to xyz) causing metrics like HDI to even out between global population groups have been "hot" since when? the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? So sure, things might keep falling apart for one population group but still improving for the other group(s). Another interesting take on "falling apart narrative" interpretations of current history might be a take on how looming juggernauts like climate change, migration waves and so on play into it. This kind of change may be good for something, but surely not perceived stability in the factors that make up human societies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West [2] "Environment and change", "environment and choice" --- words borrowed out of recently read "Red Mars" by Kim Robinson.
• captainbland 4y ago
  Well if Malthusian scientists are to be believed then we only really have another couple of decades at best before the global population level causes society to collapse. So you could interpret recent events to be the first warning signs of that. Personally I remain unconvinced of that, though. Or at least, it seems to me that humans have the unique benefit of being able to problem solve their way out of the issues related to population growth, at least for a while. We don't have to be gazelles grazing themselves to death or to act merely on selfish instinct.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Somehow we are simultaneously doomed because of both too little and too much population growth
    • cosmic_shame 4y ago
      Nobody said that threading the needle was easy.
    • captainbland 4y ago
      I think that's actually less contradictory than it sounds. In one case you're doomed in the way where too big a population uses too many resources leading to a crash. In the other case what you're actually doomed by is a historical population boom that requires a large younger population under it to sustain it, and in the absence of new young people, maybe that older generation cannot be sustained, potentially leading to catastrophe. In fact I'm pretty sure there's a potential middle ground with large enough historical population boom where both of these issues could hypothetically be realised simultaneously... But, you know I think we should really focus on just making agriculture and energy production more efficient/cleaner, reducing waste and making care work a decent living or something.
• FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  Nimrod built the Tower of Babel to challenge God. It was hubris. It sounds like we have many Nimrod's running around lately (Bezos, Musk, Buffet). Where do you get your happiness? Amazon or your tribe? You know that this partisanship we are experiences, sounds like people are talking another language sometimes, yes? For completeness: --- Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to reach. And that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers. Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion ...
  • zackmorris 4y ago
    Thank you, out of all of the comments, I think yours is the best model for what is happening. The anti-woke sentiment coming from the rich is about keeping the members of the working class from discovering their own divinity. Specifically, that the miracle of creation and their own consciousness dwarfs any material value. That misalignment in perception is what lets people be ok with profiting from another's labor, or hurting people for material gain, or having more wealth than a thousand/million/billion people. Pure free will, intelligence without wisdom or empathy for oneself on another timeline, is the stuff of nightmares. The relevance of this is that we're doomed to keep reliving these timelines over and over, stuff like JKF's assassination, 9/11, pandemic, etc, until we wake up and realize that feeding our ego feeds these systems of control. Which separate us further from the divinity of the universe/creation/aliens/god or whatever name we want to assign to the source of meaning (love).
• dwighttk 4y ago
  Yes
• dwighttk 4y ago
  No
• jiveturkey42 4y ago
  Comments TLDR: "Yes, and it's the other side's fault"
• testbjjl 4y ago
  It’s becoming increasingly inconvenient for the minority to control the majority in this country. This shift has been discussed for decades. I would expect more “dumb” to come. Immigrants bring Covid so we need to control the border, but Covid is a conspiracy. My candidates won on a ballot where my candidate that lost on the same ballot was cheated. The democratic presidents showed weakness to Putin, but somehow the insurrection does not. Most Americans are unprepared to compete against others who view life objectively and earned advanced degrees and practice introspection. The math books are threatening. Teachers shouldn’t teach grade schoolers subjects taken from graduate courses (CRT). There is no way this doesn’t backfire. Too many contradictions to enumerate.
• victorclf 4y ago
  That daily "the end is near" post. It would be interesting if we could find a way to curb the negative news bias at least here.
• slackfan 4y ago
  In start contrast to the general law of headlines - the answer is yes. On a cosmic scale. Ain't entropy grand?
• dukeofdoom 4y ago
  If the democracy is actually working and elections not fortified, why do so many US politicians predate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Things seem like they are falling apart because these people have been holding on to power for generations.
• dukeofdoom 4y ago
  • shigawire 4y ago
    Alex Jones spits on people and tells them it's raining.
    • dukeofdoom 4y ago
      • flappyeagle 4y ago
        He's been wrong 100x more than he's been correct. He spends the entire day spouting random garbage, and you can cherry-pick the 10 pieces of garbage that happened to be true.
        • redmen 4y ago
          Yes. Seems like people remember when he's right because he's like their prophet or something.
        • dukeofdoom 4y ago
          You made up statistic to criticize someone on accuracy? Clearly lots of people find value in listening to him.
      • redmen 4y ago
        LOL you realize Alex Jones just says obvious shit and takes credit right? When has he ever said anything profound that turned out to be correct?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • Bud 4y ago
    Predicting it while himself being one of the main causes of it, you mean.
• tyingq 4y ago
  I have noticed a pretty strong trend of "falling apart" in specific niche. It seems related to the combination of inflation and people being fed up with low wages. It's hard to get workers for low paying jobs, and the things those places are selling have gotten more expensive. So we're paying quite a lot more for services and goods, but the quality of those things are declining at the same time. Declining quality both due to the providers buying lower quality supplies and due to the workers willing to take the lousy jobs not giving a shit. I see it pretty strongly in areas like restaurants and retail.
  • kbelder 4y ago
    {I'll be savaged for this comment} but I think that'll be fixed by the free market, if we let it. The trouble is that it doesn't happen instantly; there'll be a lot of reluctance to raise wages, a lot of reluctance to value unpleasant jobs more, it'll take a while for the wage gain/inflation feedback loop to settle down... and in the mean time, there's a lot of suffering. To make things worse, attempts to shortcut the process, or temporarily alleviate the suffering, can have detrimental unintended consequences.
    • imtringued 4y ago
      That sounds like a non-solution. Especially the reference to "the" free market, such a thing does not exist. You can't just take whatever market we have, with all its imperfections and then slap the label "free market" on it, it doesn't work that way. If something is unfair, you shouldn't call it fair because of ideology. For example, my primary objection to the idea that we have a free market is that we are mortal and are born with basic needs that must partially be acquired from the last generation. If people need land to live on, and land is owned by old people, then the young must appeal to the old to be allowed to exist on this planet. At that point, any attempt to call the market we have "free" becomes completely absurd because the term "free" now refers to the freedom of letting someone else take your freedom away. In fact, most "free market" attempts are entirely about sweeping the problem under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist, which only makes it worse due to negligence. Just drop the damn "free", in Germany people just talk about the "market" in general. They just say "market economy". In fact one of the most common sarcastic phrases is "Der Markt regelt das", "the market is going to fix that" when talking about market failures. In theory I agree that a free(=freedom) market would be good for everyone, but the amount of people that want a free(=freedom) market is incredibly small. Capitalists don't want a free(=freedom) market for example, because that would be the end of capitalism. They want a free(=without cost to capitalists) market, which is inherently against the idea of maximizing freedom and self determination. Take Say's Law for example. If we postulate that Say's Law is correct and involuntary unemployment is impossible, then for our market to be "free(=freedom)", we should make it impossible to let the economy reach states that make involuntary unemployment possible. That means the ability to indefinitely defer spending shouldn't exist beyond the point that people agree to let someone defer spending. That would immediately break the idea of endless capital accumulation. Capital accumulation would have to stop at some point and that means the end of capitalism. Who here is ready for the end of capitalism? Does anyone want to live in a market economy that isn't capitalism? Just a regular market? I doubt anyone is.
• rotexo 4y ago
  Hits close to home. Several years ago, people from one end of the political spectrum mistook me for another person on the opposite end of the political spectrum and doxxed me. I haven’t been able to correct the record to any real extent, and I basically live in fear that the whole situation will flare up again, and all it will take is for one crazy person with a lethal weapon to find me and make me pay, and that’ll be it. Which is just to say that I experience these self-reinforcing divisions at a visceral and existential level, which I suppose is the case for everyone. It only leads me to want to withdraw. I would like to try to explain who I actually am to people who think I’m the devil, but i think that would just backfire. So the solution at an individual level is to pull back my online presence and, I don’t know, buy a gun. Which clearly doesn’t help at the macro level. Edit: typo Further edit: I guess the second paragraph there illustrates how the prisoner’s dilemma comes into play to reinforce the mass psychology of tribalism. I long for the days of my youth, when I could still talk with my ideologically-different family about issues, but extending that to others on the internet feels fraught with danger, leaving me more exposed. It feels like the best strategy is to stay in my bubble and armor it up—safety in numbers, and all that. Which must be the same on the other side. The better solution is cooperation, but given the unknowns, everyone has to act suspicious and fortify instead.
  • YATA1 4y ago
    And some people laugh at the notion of staying anonymous online.
    • rotexo 4y ago
      Bingo. Like many in my generation, I used to not worry about it at all. Now I am a bit obsessive—constantly checking my name, number, and address on people finder sites and sending takedown requests when they pop back up, and currently trying to transition all my online accounts to use e-mail addresses provided by Hide My E-mail on iCloud (which is quite the project). Seems like changing my e-mail on different accounts could be useful, since people would be less likely to connect those different accounts. I keep reporting the links to the doxxed info on pastebin, Twitter, and google (pro-tip: you can ask google to remove doxxed information from their search results). I know I will never be able to ask the actual extremists to take down my name when I am mid-identified as that other person, which sucks. And it still feels like there might be some other exposure that’s just waiting to blow up in my face. Open to suggestions on the subject if anyone has any.
• andrewla 4y ago
  I think there's a bit of the Copernican fallacy at play here; the assumption that things are getting worse is pretty dramatic but it's not clear that it's supported in any real way. We point to the riots last summer, and while there are debates about how severe they are, we willfully ignore that there have been riots in the past, even much more pervasive and deadly ones, even with a significantly lower population and population density than we have now. There's political divisiveness, but students aren't getting shot at Kent State, and the Weather Underground isn't blowing up bombs in Manhattan, and there are no open wars being fought between private armies, militias, and government forces in West Virginia. Maybe once upon a time people were as passionate about George McGovern as people are now about Hillary Clinton, but passions fade and people forget. There will be implications for the direction of history based on social networks and open information exchange, but likely we won't recognize them until far in the future. I'm sure there were dozens of upstart anti-Catholic movements that preceded Martin Luther and had the advantage of the printing press but fizzled out into nothing are are forgotten to history before the circumstances led to his success, but we can't see the invisible failures, only the visible successes, so we try to take lessons there.
• Gravityloss 4y ago
  Hacker News is a positive counterexample. The people, the community, the platform. Let's apply the methods that have made this work so well also elsewhere. A few ideas. Professional moderation. Crowd moderation with downvoting and flagging. Guidelines. Culture of restraint.
• tehchromic 4y ago
  what is collapsing is the planetary ecosystem, thanks to industrial practice. Especially in North America suburban sprawl and industrial agriculture and waste have eaten into and degraded what was very recent a deep well of ecological wealth. I would call this a major impact on the American culture which built it's identity around that seemingly boundless wilderness, and as well our basic human psyche and culture for which (many argue) proximity to deep ecological process is a fundamental need. The consumer culture and consequent wealth of things, especially images and meditated simulcra, really only echo the naive American soul in a wasteland of it's own making. All cultural realities are fundamentally ecological. We fill our lives with artificial realities so liberally because we are born into a culture that took massive wealth of natural resources and the experiences they provide for granted. As they vanish, we fill the gap with artificial things and experiences. It's a dangerous game with potentially grave and unexpected consequences, and we have played it before many times on a much smaller scale: hunting food sources to extinction, turning rich farmland into desert, etc. It seems that the collective human psyche it's unable to reflect accurately on the consequences of it's own actions with respect to our fundamental biogenic foundation. Take for example the flooding of our nights with artificial blue spectrum light pollution. In evolutionary terms, this is a new event. For billions of years nights have been uniformly mostly dark with a regularly variating moon glow. Suddenly we change all that and dark nights are a thing of the past. Nevermind the massive affect on a whole ecosystems, nevermind studies that show a severe affect on the human psychological health, status quo says lighting up the night is normal, good, and safe. And there are shootings at schools and terrible crime and massive loss of insect life and songbirds dying off and these quite extraordinary changes to the continuity of our bio systems and our lifestyles, and yet we don't see the connection. We blame the media or Donald Trump or the 1%. We don't see the problem as something we have direct control over. We blame our institutions or leaders or gods or what have you, anything but ourselves, and anything to avoid changing our lifestyles and behaviors. So imo things really are falling apart, just not the things we think.
• mrwnmonm 4y ago
  You lost me at "we have been there before..."
• FredPret 4y ago
  The answer to a headline is usually “No”. Some things are falling apart, as always, but civilization marches ahead exponentially through war and famine and plague, again as always
• temporallobe 4y ago
  No, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to obtain our status as a nearly Type I civilization (we are currently 0.73 on the Kardashev scale). But we do have a lot of what some describe as sludge. For example, in the USA, with the awful state of healthcare, where even with a good job and "good" benefits and being in the so-called 1%, it can be a struggle to obtain certain kinds of medication, and insurance companies will absolutely fuck with you to avoid paying, giving patients the runaround and making them waste hours and days in endless phone call black holes until you give up. Doctor's offices and hospitals will and do double- and even triple-bill you, then bully you into paying by sending you to collections. God forbid you should get a catastrophic illness. There are so many similar and related examples that we could have entire threads about. There was a book recently written about this but I cannot find it right now...will update when I do. There certainly is the sense that we are losing a lot in terms of core values, especially as technology evolves (we seem to be resembling the movie Idiocracy more and more), but this has also been the case with other, now fallen civilizations. The ancient Greeks thought that books/the written word would bring about the destruction of their society because people would lose their ability to use their memories.
• zitterbewegung 4y ago
  Doesn’t this get brought up every few years and the answer is neither yes or no but instead everything is changing. When companies disrupt others they put them out of business but it doesn’t mean they do a complete replacement . When Google and Facebook disrupted text advertisement local reporting disappeared. The Internet made companies that can have services anywhere but the people who make them work moved to the coastal cities which unemployed many people. Just in time manufacturing shifted it to other places and the rise of computers made manufacturing in the US much less than it was before.
• juskrey 4y ago
  Why no one says it is transparency which is increasing, not things falling apart
• steve76 4y ago
• lesgobrandon 4y ago
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Who cares what people feel like is happening? Just look at the data you care about. For example, I think it’s interesting that many major cultures are dying because they have below replacement rate demographics. The trend looks like a slow-moving Black Plague, except at the end of the rollercoaster you are left with old people instead of a bunch of young people (that survived the sickness). This is certainly a new experiment by humanity that hasn’t happened before quite like this, so we are in for interesting times :)
• stjohnswarts 4y ago
  America hasn't always been the 1950s. We'll survive a bit longer. There is polarization but it's not as much as the far left and far right would like you to think (that basically the world is burning down). Although Putin may burn it all down for us if he has a terminal illness like some people are proposing. That's the only significant threat I see to American and civilization itself. I mean it's a strange game. We can't cave to him but if we don't he may be the suicidal dictator with nukes that we were always worried about.
• lvass 4y ago
  How devoid of intelligence it is to consider this manufactured divide as the reason things may fall apart. The group of mass media big-shots is extremely cohesive, as per this author's own perception of integration. Yet they fuel both sides without a single care about whether this may cause things to fall apart, and they're not wrong, which becomes clear if you actually look at the world and try to understand it instead of just absorbing mass media without practicing intellectual self-defense. Our eyes are being averted from the actual problem, because it's believed that the more we look at it, the worse it becomes. I reject this anti-intellectualism, therefore present you why everything is actually falling apart. The more humanity advances, the more we lack eros (loosely love for things we do not have) and the eros we have becomes weirder or outright bizarre. As this happens, we lose hope, that's the fatal hit. For example, access to porn has demonstrably been extremely detrimental to sex. For every passion we lose, we lose hope or replace it with a fetish. When we lose a healthy passion for clothes, we stop caring about what we wear or (more common in the west) become fetishized with bizarrely priced brands. When we lose passion for work, we stop caring about the future entirely (common in the third world) or become parasitical bureaucrats. It all adds up and often materializes into drug abuse. For an extreme example, look up the catalytic converter gangs in Kinshasa [0]. This loss of hope is monotonically increasing globally, and the manufactured divide has nothing to do with it. In fact our elites believe a little infighting and polarization may be good, as extremists are generally hopeful when they see things going their way, and more traditional solutions like education don't seem to be working these days. I don't think this theory has a name yet. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210927195719/https://nypost.com/2021/09/27/car-exhaust-drug-craze-alarms-congos-capital/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210927195719/https://nypost.co...
• specialist 4y ago
  > By that I don’t just mean that I see social media, and the internet broadly, sustaining a trend we’ve seen at earlier technological thresholds, such as the print revolution—a trend toward more tribes, often narrower tribes, and sometimes more intensely combative tribes. I keep expecting some kind of system of phyles. Like "pick your own adventure", but for real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles Instead, bad people weaponized k-means clustering to lock-in us-vs-them. > The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now. Yes and: Decreasing costs seems to accelerate winner-takes-all outcomes. We technoptimists thought that improved production, distribution, discovery, and consumption would lead to a better signal-to-noise. We were wrong. Sure, we got a lot more content. But now anti-information dominates. Why? Some scattered notions: I guess we didn't anticipate the attention economy, how an over abundance in content (opinions) would create a scarcity of attention (deliberation). I definitely didn not anticipate automating the hate machine with recommenders. (Parisi's filter bubble thesis was a near miss.) And I was totally ignorant about rent seeking, financialization, and usury. How our economy's transition from manufacturing to services would accelerate inequity. The resulting anxiety is a huge part of our current hysteria. h/t Clay Shirky's obervation about power laws, Chomsky's theory of the 5 filters, Brandolini's law, Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media.
• phoehne 4y ago
  With 500+ comments I doubt anyone will read this - and please don't - but "it happened before and we survived, so it's going to be okay" doesn't really resonate with me. We survived perhaps the bloodiest period of European history, where people set about to exterminate each other based on religion. Catholics in England weren't really given their full rights back until after the 1920s. And the schism in Christianity was like the Tower of Babel. So I'm not any more sanguine about the future after a the author brings up what became about 300 to 400 years of very bloody and repressive sectarian violence as a ... as a way to say it's going to be okay? Holy shit! If it's anything like the protestant-catholic sectarian fighting in Europe, it's going to be hell.
• freebuju 4y ago
  I concur with everything the author says here. If you want to visualize this for yourself, just take yourself back to the whole science/anti-vaxx debate we've had the past 2 years. That was a pretty accurate picture of the biblical tower of babel. Social media as a tool keeps sowing more division than ever because that's the growth incentive and we are too afraid to kill the golden goose. Once the metaverse becomes a thing, we will have better bricks to build the tower even higher. China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony. This disruption will have devastating effects. The accelerated move to the 4th Industrial Revolution will be even more disruptive, unlike anything we as humans have ever known. We keep on ignoring the global warming threat because we think our survival will be under threat if we go cold turkey on fossil energy and the creature comforts necessary to forestall the climate disaster. The covid pandemic gave us all a unique opportunity to recalibrate our collective lives. Today, we go about our daily lives as if the past 3 years was just a bad dream. I very much doubt we can make it through another global pandemic on a scale as or bigger than covid was in the near future.
  • unethical_ban 4y ago
    >China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony. I don't think this is guaranteed. I think the world should be prepared for it, be resilient against it, and (ideally) undermine it if possible. Six months ago, I don't think many would have guessed that all of Europe, including Germany, would unite in ending their relationship with Russian fuel. Perhaps at some point, the free world will unite in diversifying or ending their relationship with Chinese manufacturing. The rest of your analysis I agree with - the automation/"AI" process marches on. Ownership of production and capital continues to concentrate, and population grows while employment needs will shrink for non- and semi-skilled workers. Oh, and climate.
    • freebuju 4y ago
      > >China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony. >I don't think this is guaranteed This is very much assured. Only a matter of when. It may take 2-3 decades to realize but it's gonna happen if China's growth rate [0] continues as US GDP [1] steadily declines. Though with the current geopolitics around the Russia/Ukraine war, maybe China may threaten to invade Taiwan and speed up this process of dethroning US as the top super power. [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/263616/gross-domestic-product-gdp-growth-rate-in-china/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263616/gross-domestic-pr... [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/188165/annual-gdp-growth-of-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/188165/annual-gdp-growth...
• unethical_ban 4y ago
  I think this is a great article, which doesn't say "everything is fine" but analyzes underlying root cause, and that the problems are older than we think. But also, wars have been fought due to the kinds of changes we are experiencing. I am truly concerned for the fate of Democracy in America. This has a similar to e to Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America" which looks back through times of great division and bitterness brought about by rapid societal changes. It is well worth a read if you like US history and think this was a good article.
• nostromo 4y ago
  We need to return to federalism and bring an end to activist politicians. (Good luck with that, I know...) The reason the American Experiment has worked so well for a few centuries is because we knew how to leave each other alone. If I'm in New York City, it's really none of my business what's happening in Albany, let alone Albuquerque New Mexico, so long as some basic standards of universal liberty are upheld. Today that's all out the window. Activists for every issue want every issue solved at the federal level. Well, the problem with that is the US is a big country and the federal government should do the bare minimum, not the maximum. Both parties have completely forgotten this and it's really heightened tensions.
  • LeafItAlone 4y ago
    If you are a resident of NYC, what is happening in Albany (the capital of the state) certainly affects you. If you are a resident of New York, some of your Federal tax dollars[1] are going to New Mexico. Why would what they are doing with your money not be your business? [1] https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/ https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal...
    • gedy 4y ago
      Maybe that's their point - do more at state level vs so much tax money & power at the federal.
      • LeafItAlone 4y ago
        > do more at state level One of the two levels mentioned was at the state level and the question remains unanswered.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• gambler 4y ago
  I think this kind of framing of the question is very close to being a sly form of gaslighting. What people want to know is not whether the current state of things is "normal". After all, death, sickness, war, hunger, disease and crime are all perfectly normal. Everyone gets that at some level. What most people want to know is what the fuck happened with the metanarrative that we were fed for the last several decades. Is it defunct and debunked? If it is, that has obvious implications in terms of who we should trust and who we should empower.
• artificialLimbs 4y ago
  America is having a Pluto return. Traditionally this is a period of time when nations are dissolved or at minimum completely transformed in their nature. It's currently turning retrograde and will scrape back across the US natal Pluto on July 12th, and will be conjunct again December 28th for the beginning of its next 246 year cycle. If it matters by that point.
  • schroeding 4y ago
    Are those english idioms? Or do you mean the actual planet, it's position in orbit, in a astrological way?
    • hedgedoops2 4y ago
      It's astrology.
      • schroeding 4y ago
        Ah, okay, thank you! :)
• Animats 4y ago
  Those aren't the big problems. These are the big problems the US faces: * Putin wants to conquer Eastern Europe. It's been over 75 years since a major nation in Europe had comparable territorial ambitions, and that didn't end well. Nuclear war at some scale is a very real possibility, especially if Russia starts losing in a big way. * Coronavirus. It's not over. 988,690 US deaths to date. Case rates are headed up again. * Global warming. It's just getting started. * Supply insecurity. Between troubles with Russia and China, and coronavirus, there are far more shortages.
• qiskit 4y ago
  > "... We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Since when did we ever "speak the same language or recognize the same truth". We've always been cut off from one another. Racially, regionally, econonically, etc. The civil war being the obvious one. America is a country of many nations. America, the empire, is an empire of many countries. > It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families… This is just silliness from the media. This snapshot that the media portrays doesn't really exist in the real world. People just live their lives. Go outside and see for yourself. And even if it did, it doesn't matter. The red/blue, left/right, etc doesn't matter. Things fall apart when the elites are divided. And the two dominant forces in american life (political, media, economic, cultural, geopolitical, etc ) are imperialism and zionism. I don't see any division amongst the elites on that. Left/right, red/blue, up/down, flat earther/round earther, etc. So I don't think anything is falling apart as there are no signs of fracture.
• antisinguIarity 4y ago
  Possibly. History may remember our response to Covid as the last great and destructive folly of a dying civilisation.
• jdkee 4y ago
  “ As I emphasized in Nonzero, the digital revolution—even before the internet age dawned, and certainly after that—did what the printing press did: It made promulgating information cheaper and easier.” The author clearly underestimates how many orders of magnitude greater the Internet’s impact is over printed words. EDIT: for clarity.
• subsubzero 4y ago
  During the course of history every period post pandemic has brought drastic change, what makes this one so different[1]? Institutions that have not fared well are the media, colleges(dropping attendance due to high paying jobs everywhere). Urban cities have also seen record numbers of residents leaving, SF lost 6.7% of its population in a year and a half. For some that are connected to those places/institutions things are really falling apart. For everyone else things are slowly getting back to normal. 1 - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/04/29/what-history-tells-you-about-post-pandemic-booms https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/04/29/w...
• christkv 4y ago
  We are seeing the slow collapse of the globalized economy and it will be painful and last for a couple of years as things relocalize. The constant chasing after larger margins lead to centralization of key industries in a few countries. We are starting to see that unwinding as some of those countries can no longer be trusted to be partners. Not sure what it means long term politically but it’s easy to imagine big block politics rearing it’s head again. I am however unsure if the west had the will to stand on principles anymore.
• kkfx 4y ago
  Our society is in a big change phase so anything need to fall apart while the new emerge. So far we see the decline, still too early to see the new. Beware a thing: while things changes, an old model disappear a new one is gestating human needs do not change that much in fundamental terms. Our eating, sleeping and sexual needs are still the same. So not "all" fall apart but something at a time, something will remain, something grow, something change, something disappear etc. We have electrical lights since "much" time, but we still have stearic candles on sale. In the past they was a big industry, now is marginal, but it's still there. Civil construction techniques have changed much, but we still have the concept of construction companies. Dress have changed much, but not that much. We still have pants, skirts, jackets, hats in new shapes, different tissues but essentially the same since hundreds of years. What's really falling apart is the present paradigm, the economy-centric society of neoliberal capitalism that it's about to overthought itself to remain in power.
• chemmail 4y ago
  It is still my hope Elon will just dismantle Twitter and that is his first step in killing social media.
• sazz 4y ago
  Humans just tends to repeat themselves every 50 to 100 years. But the good thing is - with each iteration we are learning. It's just a bit but maybe in a thousand years we will come out of our puberty. And no - the world won't go down due to climate change. It won't go down because of some silly war either. It's not a simple graph showing where we are heading to. Especially not an exponential graph. And we are still repeating history because we haven't learned the simple lesson which Leo Tolstoi already knew: Everybody wants to change the world but nobody themselves. But this is where the real change starts. And do not believe all those angst people out there. Life is way too complex and beautiful that we will ever understand it's secrets and twists it's capable of.
  • acuozzo 4y ago
    > the world won't go down due to climate change. It won't go down because of some silly war either. When most collapse-aware persons write about "the end of the world" they mean "the end of complex human civilization", not the total destruction of the planet or even the end of humanity. > It's just a bit but maybe in a thousand years we will come out of our puberty. You're asserting that we'll solve the phosphorus problem (among others) in the next 50-100 years, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus
    • sazz 4y ago
      If you look back 150 years or so the "complex human civilization" which existed back then don't exist anymore. Maybe only in a museum or some buildings here or there. We can now label that replacement by being "evolved" or "transformed" - but the way people thought back then, were dressed, behaved in a social environment, worked or lived is now totally different. Some of those aspects are better now, some aspects got worse. What I want to say is that we can already say good bye to the current way of life because it won't exist in 150 years anymore. Maybe we have found a way that people are not triggered anymore by advertisement to consume things because they are bored with their life. And yes - a lot of things will hit us hard. Maybe we are going to solve it, maybe we will being forced to adapt. A lot of people will die, a lot of people will be born. If we can reach space, then the possibility of 10+ billion people is rather good. But even if we shrink to 500 million it won't be the end of complex human civilization. And to be honest - are you proud of the current form of "complex human civilization" and would it be such a bad thing if it would being replace with something else?
• JamesAdir 4y ago
  The media want you to show that the world is falling apart for all kind of reasons. The social media shows you posts about the world falling apart for same kind of reasons - it generate views and sells ads. The world hasn't been falling apart for the last decade as far as I can tell. Not in the US and not in many other parts of the world.
• al_hag 4y ago
  Supposedly it was Goethe who once observed, “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective.” Like an entropic principle of social information exchange, with the potential for reorganization under a new paradigm.
• Sloppy 4y ago
  Something unique has happened and I don't think anyone sees it for what it is. A new type of agent has taken control of human behavior--or at least has taken a major stake in influencing human thought. Call it the algorithm, call it AI, call it a simple recommender. It doesn't have morals, doesn't want to benefit we biological beings. It is mindless except in a very narrow sense. The greatest of idiot-savants. It doesn't care about human values in any way as it has shown over and over. It doesn't even come with common sense. Beware its influence. But it does generate money and so it is given free reign to bait us into psychopathic behavior if needs be. It is encouraged to inject whatever it needs to into our communications in order to keep generating wealth without any recognizable constraint. I hope a counter or limiting factor evolves before we start killing each other as its thralls.
• cannabis_sam 4y ago
  Turn it on its head: “what lasts forever?” Cleary it’s a matter of degrees and timespan considered.
• Blackstrat 4y ago
  Those of us who have been around for awhile haven't respected the Presidency for far longer than Obama, nor trusted the institutions of government to work on behalf of the American citizen. Further, what is now called the "deep state" has been an issue for many decades, previously referred to as the administrative state. I worked for a company shortly before I retired that employed full time lobbyists. They would arrange meetings with various members of Congress to discuss pending legislation. Not once, in ten years, did the actual member of Congress attend the teleconference, always staff and agency personnel. Big Tech has become a tool for elitists to control the narrative. It's not necessarily a conspiracy. It's an artifact of a laughable public education system and political malice. One need only look at the hyperbolic reaction of liberals to Elon Musk buying Twitter and promising to allow "free speech", something Twitter certainly doesn't allow today. Or the "ministry of truth" established by Mayorkas. Or more broadly, the so-called "social credit" systems. The United States has been moving in a fascist direction for decades, interrupted only briefly by outsiders such as Trump. Many of the positions of today's Republican Party more closely resemble the Democrats of the 60s when I was growing up. The views of today's "progressive" Democrat Party more closely align with Marx and other communists. It's been trending for decades and I see little reason for optimism.