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We went from a physical/social world to "digital as complimentary" to "digital native" in just a few years time. If you look at the old world, one would spent

We went from a physical/social world to "digital as complimentary" to "digital native" in just a few years time. If you look at the old world, one would spent a considerable amount of the day in the physical world with real people just to function. Work, do groceries, go to the movies, go to church (like it or not, powerful community builder), go to bars, the like. Only now do we start to understand how this "limited and inflexible" world had benefits we took for granted. Now many people can work from home, use food delivery, watch Netflix, then doom-scroll. In the rare cases that they are in public, they are rushed or buried in their phone, so unavailable. In the form of AI (hyper-personalization) and VR, more is on the horizon to complete our project of making the ultimate hyper-individualistic anti-social convenience consumer. We sold our humanity for convenience, short term urges capitalized by a handful of mega companies. Yes I'm dramatizing, but not that much, the trajectory is clear: loneliness might become the default.

dahwolf 3y ago
Small addendum: I'm middle-aged myself but got some hope from my gen-z nephews/nieces: they seem to understand what's happening. An example is vinyl. They collect it, and it's not just a hipster thing. This rationally makes no sense if you consider that Spotify will have any song at your fingertips wherever you go. Yet it totally makes sense. Digital music is dead, it has no soul, it's not real. If I tell you that I listened to a song on Spotify (out of 50 million of them) this is supremely meaningless. Yet if you visit my home (which is a vast improvement over a chat message) and I show you a real object with cover art and we both share the experience of listening to it, it's much more real. It's physical, and a shared experience. Likewise, if I'd share my Spotify playlist with somebody, that doesn't do much. Nobody's going to analyze a digital list of music forwarded by somebody else, especially without any background or curation. Yet if you look at a person's physical collection and they excitedly tell you about it, it's much more inviting to browse and explore. It's like a little piece of you, whilst digital belongs to nobody. Many of them also seem to play board games, whilst they could have played a million digital games. Anyway small sample size, but we need more of this.

dahwolf 3y ago

Small addendum: I'm middle-aged myself but got some hope from my gen-z nephews/nieces: they seem to understand what's happening. An example is vinyl. They collect it, and it's not just a hipster thing. This rationally makes no sense if you consider that Spotify will have any song at your fingertips wherever you go. Yet it totally makes sense. Digital music is dead, it has no soul, it's not real. If I tell you that I listened to a song on Spotify (out of 50 million of them) this is supremely meaningless. Yet if you visit my home (which is a vast improvement over a chat message) and I show you a real object with cover art and we both share the experience of listening to it, it's much more real. It's physical, and a shared experience. Likewise, if I'd share my Spotify playlist with somebody, that doesn't do much. Nobody's going to analyze a digital list of music forwarded by somebody else, especially without any background or curation. Yet if you look at a person's physical collection and they excitedly tell you about it, it's much more inviting to browse and explore. It's like a little piece of you, whilst digital belongs to nobody. Many of them also seem to play board games, whilst they could have played a million digital games. Anyway small sample size, but we need more of this.