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Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of t

by roenxi 2y ago

Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly. It is a big win for the public discourse if people start applying cynicism where warranted. In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited. Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.

tomohelix 2y ago
A society where people can trust each other and each individual has enough integrity to not violate that trust is, in my opinion, the closest we can get to a thriving utopia. The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves. Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on. So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.
- codr7 2y ago
  I see what you see. But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster. Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.
- Hizonner 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Have you watched US presidential debates across the decades? (1992) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s They've objectively gotten meaner and dumber with each cycle.
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - plagiarist 2y ago
      You can also see that Congress has become this trash: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123507 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371... I think a large contribution to this behavior is the limited number of representatives. A terrible law and a huge disservice to the American people.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Also, you know, gerrymandering. The US needs a constitutional amendment that just picks one of the mathematically-based methods for evaluating voting districts and makes it mandatory.
    - myvoiceismypass 2y ago
      It definitely seemed to get very sides-like-sports-teams in the mid 90s just after this (when Newt was speaker) and just gotten progressively worse over time.
- taurknaut 2y ago
  Mostly I agree with you, but politicians should be insulted and ridiculed. I’ve had enough nauseating bipartisan back-slapping for one lifetime.
  - codr7 2y ago
    I would rather replace them with real humans.
- rfrey 2y ago
  The US might be much closer to an authoritarian lurch than 20 or 30 years ago, but don't romanticize the recent past. My understanding is that polls around the time of the Kent State massacre... Where unarmed students were shot in the back by the military for the crime if protesting the Vietnam war... had almost 50% of the population supporting the military and saying the kids had it coming. Nixon had tons of support right until he resigned. There was never any level of social cohesion, the divisions just hadn't metastasized yet
  - AbstractH24 2y ago
    It's a hard thing to accept that in the arch of history our current times aren't as unique as they seem. Even times like this occurring in a world that has the power to self-destruct isn't unique. What is unique is the speed at which information travels.
    - codr7 2y ago
      True, I don't believe the world has ever evolved this fast before.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    Like a documented Tiananmen Square massacre ...
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I think the problem is seeking social cohesion to begin with, and seeing the US government as the tool that controls it. I think historically people had a much greater sense of distinct social spheres and political spheres.
- fullshark 2y ago
  The trust was built on basking in the glory of WW2's victory and fear of nuclear annihilation. Maybe part of it too was the quality of life for 80+% of the generation was better than their parents in clear ways beyond "our TVs are better." The first two I'd like to avoid something analogous for a new order based on trust, but maybe the last one we can bring back if our leaders start to have a larger vision beyond focus on GDP, Stock Market returns, inflation, and unemployment rates.
  - waspleg 2y ago
    Top bracket taxed at 90%. Wealth disparity not at worse than 1920's levels as it is currently.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- gradientsrneat 2y ago
  "The good old days" is a worn trope, but there may be a point. Women's employment and/or compensation in the United States peaked approximately two decades ago, and has since declined. Xi Jingping wasn't China's dictator yet, so China was a bit more free. Crimea hadn't been annexed yet, and Russians had much more access to the internet. The alt-right was still in its infancy. Brexit hadn't happened yet. Hence, when a British think tank claims freedom is falling across the world, I'm inclined to believe it. And levels of authoritarianism are inversely correlated with trust. On the flipside, a whole generation of people across many of the poorest parts of the world have experienced increases of standards of living due to globalization.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I would say that you go back to the past two sets of prez debates and tell me that the "lie" ratio wasn't 10:1 or 20:1 between the two candidates. I would trust most HN people to revisit those and give a reasonable estimate. I think that's why I'm skeptical of "two-sides" most of the time.
- chneu 2y ago
  American society was only "refined" if you were part of the accepted classes. The US has whitewashed our history with rose tinted glasses. It's always been pretty bad, just the winners get to tell the story.
azinman2 2y ago
It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons. Trust institutions (arguably had been the right choice), and society can move in lockstep forward together.
- ARandomerDude 2y ago
  > lockstep forward Those words are the problem. Why even have a democratic system if everything is done in “lockstep”? Moreover, “forward” is a highly opinionated term. Perhaps we can all, in lockstep, take a Great Leap Forward. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    Coordination and shared purpose are often good things actually. I'm so tired of people decrying any pursuit of consensus and collective action as tyranny, it's intellectually lazy and just leads to further atomization.
    - ARandomerDude 2y ago
      Voluntary coordination and shared purpose are great things. Otherwise, all the “forward” and “shared purpose” euphemisms do not change the fact that you have a tyrannical system, nor do the “intellectually lazy” ad hominems.
      - ribadeo 2y ago
        Uninformed or misinformed people can make choices against their own interests, such is MAGA. Facts and physical primary reality matter more than ones opinion, but we paint the sun on the sky and order the tides to recede to please the king anyway. An informed populace can make informed decisions. Lying fake news not so much... Aka $50million for condoms in Gaza is a lie. Alternative facts will bite us all when the pedal hits the metal.
      - stevenAthompson 2y ago
apeescape 2y ago
I'm not sure I share your optimism. If kids don't trust institutions, who do they trust? The answer is friends and celebrities (=influencers). Maybe they don't trust Big Tech companies per se, but you still need them to facilitate the content of whichever parties they find trustworthy. Decaying trust in institutions is just more ground for a total fantasyland where everybody can justify whatever they believe in. If the NYTs and gov't agencies of the world aren't deemed more reputable than the Andrew Tates of the world, we're on a path to a worse society.
- watwut 2y ago
  Well, big tech companies are busy to push Andrew Tates of the world on kids accounts. If you open a new account for a young boy, algorithms will feed him Tate kind of philosophy in about a day.
  - Aunche 2y ago
    Characterizing Andre Tate as being pushed by big tech is like characterizing YouTube "pushing" people to use iPhones. When it came to people actually putting their thumbs on the scale, that went overwhelmingly against Andrew Tate. A lot of young men genuinely resonated with what Andrew Tate had to say, but admitting to that would be admitting that Andrew Tate was one of the few figures who was actually listening to young men, even if he was doing so soley for his own profit.
- Galatians4_16 2y ago
  Welcome to the shift show.
- Xen9 2y ago
  You can't trust anyone. No even yourself, since whether you are insane or not may not be solvable, though you can aim to remember that you couldn't know & stress less. It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on! Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow. Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes. Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it. On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast. Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim. Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule? Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition. The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation. To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.
heavyset_go 2y ago
> Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly. It is a big win for the public discourse if people start applying cynicism where warranted. Instead, people are outsourcing their thinking to people like Joe Rogan and political YouTubers who exploit that cynicism for sponsorships, ad revenue and their own product lines. Say what you will about corporate media, and I'm also a big critic of it and even PBS, but at least something like PBS isn't pure brain rot and can be informative. I highly doubt Mr. Rogers or the News Hour radicalized anyone. These days terrorists are literally putting internet memes in their manifestos, along with shout-outs to their favorite YouTubers and internet pundits. > In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited The "real change" was the Arab Spring era and powers all over the world quickly learned to not let that happen in their own backyards. We are currently experiencing a duality between domestic powers doing their best to stifle or direct change for their benefit, and external powers doing their best to generate unrest elsewhere to their benefit. The internet as it exists enables both to extents the world has never seen before. > Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them. Manufactured consent has modernized, it's happening right now all over the internet. Tech has become the modern Skinner box for owners to manipulate users, and social media has absolutely warped the minds of at least one generation in favor of their owners, too. I wish I had your optimism, and I did like ~20 years ago, but man, the internet is pure poison for the unprepared mind. And I think we're all varying levels of unprepared for the highly optimized digital manipulation on the internet.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Algorithmic feeds are pure poison for the mind. But what might be even worse is headline reading. Like you don't read articles like you use to. People read the headlines which are rage bait and click bait. Realtime rage on "developing stories" than nothing when the boring conclusion is known weeks later. People are going insane. The death of the boring news paper is about as a big problem as Instagram. Modern newspapers just plainly sucks and are mostly rehashes of agency news anyways. I think we need to figuratively pull the plug on the internet. Like make it some sort of loser thing to be hooked on social media and light minded news.
DinoDad13 2y ago
Manufacturing consent is easier than ever. Look at how many Americans feel that immigrants are mostly violent criminals.
- mistermann 2y ago
  How many believe that?
  - tartuffe78 2y ago
    50%+
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Have you some impressive evidence for that?
  - myvoiceismypass 2y ago
    Apparently around 1 in 3 Americans, according to this Monmouth Poll from last year: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_022624/ https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthp... "About 1 in 3 (32%) think that illegal immigrants are more likely than other Americans to commit violent crimes like rape or murder. This marks an increase in this view from prior polls (21% in 2019 and 17% in 2015)."
    - mistermann 2y ago
      This is a similar but different statistic. I suspect "close enough" is adequate here though :)
scarface_74 2y ago
Be hopeful for the future of US when most teens are still on social media and “new media” has more misinformation than old media?
bee_rider 2y ago
Too much cynicism just leads to paralysis. We do need some way to identify a way forward. Top-down centralized corporate media wasn’t it, but this algorithmic social media stuff isn’t great either. The former amplified voices that could pretend to be serious. This current thing amplifies voices that pretend to be stupid. It is a difficult problem.
- deltaburnt 2y ago
  Centralized media at least gives you an entity to rally behind or against. If a news network is pushing propaganda it's easier to say "this place is a problem". With social media it's much more nebulous. Opinions on the source of the problem range from the big tech companies, the algorithms, the concept of social media as a whole, foreign influences, etc.
- deleted 2y ago
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fullshark 2y ago
I share this sentiment, however I don't see anyone really building alternative channels. Just people creating content for big tech platforms, and ultimately chasing short term rewards (money) via short term engagement boosts. Sure we don't trust institutions so naively anymore, but sitting around talking about how everyone sucks gets us no where as a society unless we move forward. It's going to take people interested in more than just money, and the number of people willing to work for more than just money has seemingly never been smaller.
pjc50 2y ago
What I've noticed is that people will identify some inaccuracy or failing in an institution, and then: (a) immediately throw out the bathwater without checking for a baby: discredit all the output of the institution (b) select an alternative source and then become completely credulous about it: discarding mainstream news for places like Infowars or Tiktok (c) everyone is now in their own differently wrong bubble happily consuming all sorts of propaganda and grifter nonsense The result is not an improvement, it's a low-trust society where you get things like an anti-vaxxer being appointed in charge of health.
voidhorse 2y ago
It's one part of the change required but a complete shift will not happen without economic structural changes. As long as the average person is beholden to a corporation to earn enough to provide for basic existential needs, nothing will change. The corporation retain full control and capital dominance, and they are still able to leverage that capital dominion for political gain via horrid mechanisms like lobbying. It doesn't really matter how much the people recognize the BS in the media when those holding the cards can still force policy makers to do their biding. This was the point behind theoretical marxism that people (thanks to those lying media outlets) tend to miss. You are not free until you control the production mechanism and the generators of value. Until that happens, you will always need to bow to those that actually hold and hoard value at the expense of everyone else and at the expense of establishing a truly free society.
AbstractH24 2y ago
Hopeful that we will course correct, but not before an inflection point that's yet to be hit Have no idea what it will look like, but I think it'll be the 9/11 of another era.
indoordin0saur 2y ago
I wonder if we're moving into the full "regulatory capture" part of the cycle. Huge companies which no longer produce value need some way to shield themselves from smaller competitors with better value propositions.
timacles 2y ago
What you see as hope in the future just looks like doom and gloom to me. Yeah people dont trust the institutions, now they trust Tiktok trends and whatever their favorite youtuber says. Except these trends and youtubers are still controlled by the big money media companies. Its not their fault, but the next generations simultaneously doesnt trust anyone and is also too gullible. Its as if we, as a world, are losing our grip on reality because of the internet. Flooded with constant streams of information, our brains cant make sense of it, so we default to going be how things feel. But we all know what feels right is usually wrong
EasyMark 2y ago
I would agree with you if 90% of the "new media" wasn't absolute clickbait trash. So many takes that are in a rush to get it out before their competition that it's usually unverified speculation that is at best a guess and worst an made-up-on-the spot lie. Other takes are just being controversial to be controversial or to serve special interests like "no matter what thou shalt be loyal to the democrat/MAGA literature, f the truth"

by roenxi 2y ago

tomohelix 2y ago

A society where people can trust each other and each individual has enough integrity to not violate that trust is, in my opinion, the closest we can get to a thriving utopia. The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves. Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on. So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.

codr7 2y ago
I see what you see. But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster. Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.
Hizonner 2y ago
[flagged]
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Have you watched US presidential debates across the decades? (1992) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s They've objectively gotten meaner and dumber with each cycle.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - plagiarist 2y ago
    You can also see that Congress has become this trash: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123507 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371... I think a large contribution to this behavior is the limited number of representatives. A terrible law and a huge disservice to the American people.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Also, you know, gerrymandering. The US needs a constitutional amendment that just picks one of the mathematically-based methods for evaluating voting districts and makes it mandatory.
  - myvoiceismypass 2y ago
    It definitely seemed to get very sides-like-sports-teams in the mid 90s just after this (when Newt was speaker) and just gotten progressively worse over time.
taurknaut 2y ago
Mostly I agree with you, but politicians should be insulted and ridiculed. I’ve had enough nauseating bipartisan back-slapping for one lifetime.
- codr7 2y ago
  I would rather replace them with real humans.
rfrey 2y ago
The US might be much closer to an authoritarian lurch than 20 or 30 years ago, but don't romanticize the recent past. My understanding is that polls around the time of the Kent State massacre... Where unarmed students were shot in the back by the military for the crime if protesting the Vietnam war... had almost 50% of the population supporting the military and saying the kids had it coming. Nixon had tons of support right until he resigned. There was never any level of social cohesion, the divisions just hadn't metastasized yet
- AbstractH24 2y ago
  It's a hard thing to accept that in the arch of history our current times aren't as unique as they seem. Even times like this occurring in a world that has the power to self-destruct isn't unique. What is unique is the speed at which information travels.
  - codr7 2y ago
    True, I don't believe the world has ever evolved this fast before.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Like a documented Tiananmen Square massacre ...
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think the problem is seeking social cohesion to begin with, and seeing the US government as the tool that controls it. I think historically people had a much greater sense of distinct social spheres and political spheres.
fullshark 2y ago
The trust was built on basking in the glory of WW2's victory and fear of nuclear annihilation. Maybe part of it too was the quality of life for 80+% of the generation was better than their parents in clear ways beyond "our TVs are better." The first two I'd like to avoid something analogous for a new order based on trust, but maybe the last one we can bring back if our leaders start to have a larger vision beyond focus on GDP, Stock Market returns, inflation, and unemployment rates.
- waspleg 2y ago
  Top bracket taxed at 90%. Wealth disparity not at worse than 1920's levels as it is currently.
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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gradientsrneat 2y ago
"The good old days" is a worn trope, but there may be a point. Women's employment and/or compensation in the United States peaked approximately two decades ago, and has since declined. Xi Jingping wasn't China's dictator yet, so China was a bit more free. Crimea hadn't been annexed yet, and Russians had much more access to the internet. The alt-right was still in its infancy. Brexit hadn't happened yet. Hence, when a British think tank claims freedom is falling across the world, I'm inclined to believe it. And levels of authoritarianism are inversely correlated with trust. On the flipside, a whole generation of people across many of the poorest parts of the world have experienced increases of standards of living due to globalization.
EasyMark 2y ago
I would say that you go back to the past two sets of prez debates and tell me that the "lie" ratio wasn't 10:1 or 20:1 between the two candidates. I would trust most HN people to revisit those and give a reasonable estimate. I think that's why I'm skeptical of "two-sides" most of the time.
chneu 2y ago
American society was only "refined" if you were part of the accepted classes. The US has whitewashed our history with rose tinted glasses. It's always been pretty bad, just the winners get to tell the story.

azinman2 2y ago

It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons. Trust institutions (arguably had been the right choice), and society can move in lockstep forward together.

ARandomerDude 2y ago
> lockstep forward Those words are the problem. Why even have a democratic system if everything is done in “lockstep”? Moreover, “forward” is a highly opinionated term. Perhaps we can all, in lockstep, take a Great Leap Forward. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Coordination and shared purpose are often good things actually. I'm so tired of people decrying any pursuit of consensus and collective action as tyranny, it's intellectually lazy and just leads to further atomization.
  - ARandomerDude 2y ago
    Voluntary coordination and shared purpose are great things. Otherwise, all the “forward” and “shared purpose” euphemisms do not change the fact that you have a tyrannical system, nor do the “intellectually lazy” ad hominems.
    - ribadeo 2y ago
      Uninformed or misinformed people can make choices against their own interests, such is MAGA. Facts and physical primary reality matter more than ones opinion, but we paint the sun on the sky and order the tides to recede to please the king anyway. An informed populace can make informed decisions. Lying fake news not so much... Aka $50million for condoms in Gaza is a lie. Alternative facts will bite us all when the pedal hits the metal.
    - stevenAthompson 2y ago

apeescape 2y ago

I'm not sure I share your optimism. If kids don't trust institutions, who do they trust? The answer is friends and celebrities (=influencers). Maybe they don't trust Big Tech companies per se, but you still need them to facilitate the content of whichever parties they find trustworthy. Decaying trust in institutions is just more ground for a total fantasyland where everybody can justify whatever they believe in. If the NYTs and gov't agencies of the world aren't deemed more reputable than the Andrew Tates of the world, we're on a path to a worse society.

watwut 2y ago
Well, big tech companies are busy to push Andrew Tates of the world on kids accounts. If you open a new account for a young boy, algorithms will feed him Tate kind of philosophy in about a day.
- Aunche 2y ago
  Characterizing Andre Tate as being pushed by big tech is like characterizing YouTube "pushing" people to use iPhones. When it came to people actually putting their thumbs on the scale, that went overwhelmingly against Andrew Tate. A lot of young men genuinely resonated with what Andrew Tate had to say, but admitting to that would be admitting that Andrew Tate was one of the few figures who was actually listening to young men, even if he was doing so soley for his own profit.
Galatians4_16 2y ago
Welcome to the shift show.
Xen9 2y ago
You can't trust anyone. No even yourself, since whether you are insane or not may not be solvable, though you can aim to remember that you couldn't know & stress less. It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on! Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow. Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes. Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it. On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast. Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim. Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule? Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition. The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation. To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.

heavyset_go 2y ago

> Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly. It is a big win for the public discourse if people start applying cynicism where warranted. Instead, people are outsourcing their thinking to people like Joe Rogan and political YouTubers who exploit that cynicism for sponsorships, ad revenue and their own product lines. Say what you will about corporate media, and I'm also a big critic of it and even PBS, but at least something like PBS isn't pure brain rot and can be informative. I highly doubt Mr. Rogers or the News Hour radicalized anyone. These days terrorists are literally putting internet memes in their manifestos, along with shout-outs to their favorite YouTubers and internet pundits. > In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited The "real change" was the Arab Spring era and powers all over the world quickly learned to not let that happen in their own backyards. We are currently experiencing a duality between domestic powers doing their best to stifle or direct change for their benefit, and external powers doing their best to generate unrest elsewhere to their benefit. The internet as it exists enables both to extents the world has never seen before. > Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them. Manufactured consent has modernized, it's happening right now all over the internet. Tech has become the modern Skinner box for owners to manipulate users, and social media has absolutely warped the minds of at least one generation in favor of their owners, too. I wish I had your optimism, and I did like ~20 years ago, but man, the internet is pure poison for the unprepared mind. And I think we're all varying levels of unprepared for the highly optimized digital manipulation on the internet.

rightbyte 2y ago
Algorithmic feeds are pure poison for the mind. But what might be even worse is headline reading. Like you don't read articles like you use to. People read the headlines which are rage bait and click bait. Realtime rage on "developing stories" than nothing when the boring conclusion is known weeks later. People are going insane. The death of the boring news paper is about as a big problem as Instagram. Modern newspapers just plainly sucks and are mostly rehashes of agency news anyways. I think we need to figuratively pull the plug on the internet. Like make it some sort of loser thing to be hooked on social media and light minded news.

DinoDad13 2y ago

Manufacturing consent is easier than ever. Look at how many Americans feel that immigrants are mostly violent criminals.

mistermann 2y ago
How many believe that?
- tartuffe78 2y ago
  50%+
  - mistermann 2y ago
    Have you some impressive evidence for that?
- myvoiceismypass 2y ago
  Apparently around 1 in 3 Americans, according to this Monmouth Poll from last year: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_022624/ https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthp... "About 1 in 3 (32%) think that illegal immigrants are more likely than other Americans to commit violent crimes like rape or murder. This marks an increase in this view from prior polls (21% in 2019 and 17% in 2015)."
  - mistermann 2y ago
    This is a similar but different statistic. I suspect "close enough" is adequate here though :)

scarface_74 2y ago

Be hopeful for the future of US when most teens are still on social media and “new media” has more misinformation than old media?

bee_rider 2y ago

Too much cynicism just leads to paralysis. We do need some way to identify a way forward. Top-down centralized corporate media wasn’t it, but this algorithmic social media stuff isn’t great either. The former amplified voices that could pretend to be serious. This current thing amplifies voices that pretend to be stupid. It is a difficult problem.

deltaburnt 2y ago
Centralized media at least gives you an entity to rally behind or against. If a news network is pushing propaganda it's easier to say "this place is a problem". With social media it's much more nebulous. Opinions on the source of the problem range from the big tech companies, the algorithms, the concept of social media as a whole, foreign influences, etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

fullshark 2y ago

I share this sentiment, however I don't see anyone really building alternative channels. Just people creating content for big tech platforms, and ultimately chasing short term rewards (money) via short term engagement boosts. Sure we don't trust institutions so naively anymore, but sitting around talking about how everyone sucks gets us no where as a society unless we move forward. It's going to take people interested in more than just money, and the number of people willing to work for more than just money has seemingly never been smaller.

pjc50 2y ago

What I've noticed is that people will identify some inaccuracy or failing in an institution, and then: (a) immediately throw out the bathwater without checking for a baby: discredit all the output of the institution (b) select an alternative source and then become completely credulous about it: discarding mainstream news for places like Infowars or Tiktok (c) everyone is now in their own differently wrong bubble happily consuming all sorts of propaganda and grifter nonsense The result is not an improvement, it's a low-trust society where you get things like an anti-vaxxer being appointed in charge of health.

voidhorse 2y ago

It's one part of the change required but a complete shift will not happen without economic structural changes. As long as the average person is beholden to a corporation to earn enough to provide for basic existential needs, nothing will change. The corporation retain full control and capital dominance, and they are still able to leverage that capital dominion for political gain via horrid mechanisms like lobbying. It doesn't really matter how much the people recognize the BS in the media when those holding the cards can still force policy makers to do their biding. This was the point behind theoretical marxism that people (thanks to those lying media outlets) tend to miss. You are not free until you control the production mechanism and the generators of value. Until that happens, you will always need to bow to those that actually hold and hoard value at the expense of everyone else and at the expense of establishing a truly free society.

AbstractH24 2y ago

Hopeful that we will course correct, but not before an inflection point that's yet to be hit Have no idea what it will look like, but I think it'll be the 9/11 of another era.

indoordin0saur 2y ago

I wonder if we're moving into the full "regulatory capture" part of the cycle. Huge companies which no longer produce value need some way to shield themselves from smaller competitors with better value propositions.

timacles 2y ago

What you see as hope in the future just looks like doom and gloom to me. Yeah people dont trust the institutions, now they trust Tiktok trends and whatever their favorite youtuber says. Except these trends and youtubers are still controlled by the big money media companies. Its not their fault, but the next generations simultaneously doesnt trust anyone and is also too gullible. Its as if we, as a world, are losing our grip on reality because of the internet. Flooded with constant streams of information, our brains cant make sense of it, so we default to going be how things feel. But we all know what feels right is usually wrong

EasyMark 2y ago

I would agree with you if 90% of the "new media" wasn't absolute clickbait trash. So many takes that are in a rush to get it out before their competition that it's usually unverified speculation that is at best a guess and worst an made-up-on-the spot lie. Other takes are just being controversial to be controversial or to serve special interests like "no matter what thou shalt be loyal to the democrat/MAGA literature, f the truth"