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Something went wrong in the US after 911. I don’t think it’s just the government. The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be, and th

Something went wrong in the US after 911. I don’t think it’s just the government. The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be, and that’s been one of the big marketing angles in the 2000s. Especially in media, but elsewhere like supplements and drugs too. But the society wide impact of that has been a much more fearful people, obviously making parents more protective too.

WalterBright 4y ago
> Something went wrong in the US after 911. Well before then. I got one of the last chemistry sets around 1970, when they were all emasculated. > The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be Oh come on. A huge driver of this problem is the legal system which encourages jackpot lawsuits, along with our culture of it's always someone else's fault (usually the party with money that becomes worthwhile to sue).
- civilized 4y ago
  What I see is mutually interlocking and supporting drivers: 1. Profiteering media based on a 24/7/365 fixation on fear and violence: "if it bleeds it leads", and encouraging our worst tendencies toward moral panic (e.g. the 80s satanic ritual abuse panic, which recapitulated in some ways the Salem witch trials) 2. A people who easily go along with the media-driven culture of fear, and learn e.g. that their kids can't go anywhere without falling into pedophile clutches 3. The hyper-punitive systems of US law and child protective services
  - tootie 4y ago
    Honestly I'm dubious it's any of those. I blame more cars on the road.
- voldacar 4y ago
  The book Where is my Flying Car traces a lot of different developments back to the late 60s/early 70s explosion in number of pages of federal regulations and lawyers per capita. The massive cultural obsession with danger and liability is relatively young and can essentially be blamed on Richard Nixon.
mbg721 4y ago
The seeds were planted long before 9/11. I was born in the 80s, and even I saw something wasn't right. The Nancy Reagan War on Drugs and Stranger Danger were there already.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Yeah, the culture around stranger danger and satanic panic really had a lot to do with it. Part of the freedom my generation had also came from the lack of tech to keep track of us, but the culture itself really changed. My parents occasionally decided we'd spent too much time indoors and kicked us out of the house until dark and had little idea where we were a lot of the time. I was a latchkey kid too and I'm pretty sure today leaving a kid unattended at home for hours would be considered illegal now (or at least risk a visit from CPS)
- prox 4y ago
  I see three comments saying it was there before 9/11, but really, the fear dial was amped to 11 then. It was a milestone in that sense. Furthermore, journalism changed dramatically. Instead of more open ended questions, especially TV interviews started treating guests like enemies for example “Why didn’t you do X?” to a guest, instead of saying “Can you tell us what you did?” Also more subtle changes in how media reports things in general. I haven’t seen a study on this, but it would be an interesting subject.
  - loa_in_ 4y ago
    > I see three comments saying it was there before 9/11, but really, the fear dial was amped to 11 then. If you look for security reasons, you'll find security reasons, for everything. It's like like applying a caricature of scientific method to gaslight someone.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    I'd place the journalism shark-jump more at the OJ trial than at 9/11.
    - 4y ago
drewcoo 4y ago
> Something went wrong in the US after 911 To be fair, the media landscape changed pretty drastically since the 80s or so. First, cable (and talk radio?) let us start forming bubbles. Then ubiquitous Internet made more bubbles and pushed people apart more. And what's great for forming bubbles and, coincidentally, marketing demographics? Nothing new: fear. The thing is . . . the media landscape hadn't been so mainstream, pine-scented, and vanilla-flavored until really recently: probably traceable to the rise of radio in the early 20th century. Before that, every big city had many newspapers, most of whom claiming some of the others were lying. "Yellow journalism" dates to the last century. Radio and broadcast television were highly regulated. The idea was that use of those things should be for the public good. And people who voted D and people who voted R both had reasons to want that enforced. And their politicians found something to agree about beyond scrabbling for donor money. In these days of corporate capture of politics, regulating anything for the public good is only going to happen if it profits the biggest gorilla in the room.
heavyset_go 4y ago
I think American history tinges its culture, as this has almost always been a state driven by fear of boogeymen, whether those boogeymen were witches, sin, foreigners, minorities, communists, satanists, terrorists, etc. I agree with your premise that it certainly was recognized and capitalized upon at that time again that fear, hysteria, crises, etc were good ways to get what you want out of people.

WalterBright 4y ago

> Something went wrong in the US after 911. Well before then. I got one of the last chemistry sets around 1970, when they were all emasculated. > The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be Oh come on. A huge driver of this problem is the legal system which encourages jackpot lawsuits, along with our culture of it's always someone else's fault (usually the party with money that becomes worthwhile to sue).

civilized 4y ago
What I see is mutually interlocking and supporting drivers: 1. Profiteering media based on a 24/7/365 fixation on fear and violence: "if it bleeds it leads", and encouraging our worst tendencies toward moral panic (e.g. the 80s satanic ritual abuse panic, which recapitulated in some ways the Salem witch trials) 2. A people who easily go along with the media-driven culture of fear, and learn e.g. that their kids can't go anywhere without falling into pedophile clutches 3. The hyper-punitive systems of US law and child protective services
- tootie 4y ago
  Honestly I'm dubious it's any of those. I blame more cars on the road.
voldacar 4y ago
The book Where is my Flying Car traces a lot of different developments back to the late 60s/early 70s explosion in number of pages of federal regulations and lawyers per capita. The massive cultural obsession with danger and liability is relatively young and can essentially be blamed on Richard Nixon.

mbg721 4y ago

The seeds were planted long before 9/11. I was born in the 80s, and even I saw something wasn't right. The Nancy Reagan War on Drugs and Stranger Danger were there already.

autoexec 4y ago
Yeah, the culture around stranger danger and satanic panic really had a lot to do with it. Part of the freedom my generation had also came from the lack of tech to keep track of us, but the culture itself really changed. My parents occasionally decided we'd spent too much time indoors and kicked us out of the house until dark and had little idea where we were a lot of the time. I was a latchkey kid too and I'm pretty sure today leaving a kid unattended at home for hours would be considered illegal now (or at least risk a visit from CPS)
prox 4y ago
I see three comments saying it was there before 9/11, but really, the fear dial was amped to 11 then. It was a milestone in that sense. Furthermore, journalism changed dramatically. Instead of more open ended questions, especially TV interviews started treating guests like enemies for example “Why didn’t you do X?” to a guest, instead of saying “Can you tell us what you did?” Also more subtle changes in how media reports things in general. I haven’t seen a study on this, but it would be an interesting subject.
- loa_in_ 4y ago
  > I see three comments saying it was there before 9/11, but really, the fear dial was amped to 11 then. If you look for security reasons, you'll find security reasons, for everything. It's like like applying a caricature of scientific method to gaslight someone.
- mbg721 4y ago
  I'd place the journalism shark-jump more at the OJ trial than at 9/11.
  - 4y ago

drewcoo 4y ago

> Something went wrong in the US after 911 To be fair, the media landscape changed pretty drastically since the 80s or so. First, cable (and talk radio?) let us start forming bubbles. Then ubiquitous Internet made more bubbles and pushed people apart more. And what's great for forming bubbles and, coincidentally, marketing demographics? Nothing new: fear. The thing is . . . the media landscape hadn't been so mainstream, pine-scented, and vanilla-flavored until really recently: probably traceable to the rise of radio in the early 20th century. Before that, every big city had many newspapers, most of whom claiming some of the others were lying. "Yellow journalism" dates to the last century. Radio and broadcast television were highly regulated. The idea was that use of those things should be for the public good. And people who voted D and people who voted R both had reasons to want that enforced. And their politicians found something to agree about beyond scrabbling for donor money. In these days of corporate capture of politics, regulating anything for the public good is only going to happen if it profits the biggest gorilla in the room.

heavyset_go 4y ago

I think American history tinges its culture, as this has almost always been a state driven by fear of boogeymen, whether those boogeymen were witches, sin, foreigners, minorities, communists, satanists, terrorists, etc. I agree with your premise that it certainly was recognized and capitalized upon at that time again that fear, hysteria, crises, etc were good ways to get what you want out of people.