6 ms·

I read the title and it triggered something I've been thinking a lot lately: there's too much for everyone to care about right now. Article didn't really touch

by 1dom 1y ago

I read the title and it triggered something I've been thinking a lot lately: there's too much for everyone to care about right now. Article didn't really touch on it directly, but: > something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later. It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained. 15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable. A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create.

nine_zeros 1y ago
[flagged]
- hnthrow90348765 1y ago
  Or they offshored the project and fired people, and are bringing it back, and now you have to deal with that mess Your potential reward for fixing all of it and reminding them to not do it again? Nothing!
  - malfist 1y ago
    The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put out.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      Sadly many of us in tech get a rush from the 'superman' feeling that gives us. Our sheer force of effort/genius saves the day yet again. Until it burns us out, or we get dropped and realize we weren't actually valued.
      - malfist 1y ago
        I dare say at Amazon managers are encouraged to promote that sort of thing. Every project is understaffed and too short of a timeline and you bet half your team will get pulled to work on an escalation and the timelines won't change. Capacity planning assumes regretted attrition, mostly though burnout. I just saw my org deliver a project that saved the company $4m dollars a year, and we understaffed it and burnt a heck of a lot of people out. 50% of our senior engineers have resigned in the month since launch, and 6 of our L4/L5 have too. Several without backup plans. Two off our managers left and so did a product person. But our org head is getting a lot of praise for how cheaply and quickly the project was delivered. Our roadmap plan for the next year is over budget by 63%, so I'm guessing we're about to do this again
    - blooalien 1y ago
      > The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put out. And the reward for working tirelessly and successfully to ensure those fires never start in the first place is being "downsized" / laid-off because the job you do is apparently pointless, as "we've never had any problems in that department..." Damned if you do, damned if you don't... and double-damned if you do...
Night_Thastus 1y ago
>It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of people in other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Things changed more slowly and the only time you heard about about a tragedy was if it was truly enormous - or very local. Now, there is this constant vying for attention/support/outrage/etc. It's exhausting. People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met, or some event halfway across the world, or some new thing that released now like literally now. I think that a lot of people have subconsciously hit their limit. They can't muster the energy needed to genuinely think about or care about a lot of this stuff because they're bombarded with so much of it. And over time, I think that shifts thinking. "Why did I not care when X happened?" leads to "Those people don't matter/are less than human" instead of the real "Because I'm completely exhausted from so much happening".
- fragmede 1y ago
  > People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really. You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you don't have to just because other people expect you to. I still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about other stuff.
  - kmacdough 1y ago
    I similarly don't have those specific expectations, but plenty of others. I'm expected to understand the most recent updates in Gaza, and the latest DOGE cuts. People act smug when I don't have a good understanding of current medical theory on cholesterol. I'm expected to have a nuanced opinion on trans kids in sports despite having no kids, and knowing exactly zero trans people. I mean I generally believe in letting people be who they are, but beyond that I really have no business talking about it.
jasminebelmont 1y ago
This hits harder than I expected. There’s a bleak kind of irony in how tech gave us infinite visibility but shredded our ability to process any of it. Stuxnet was a wake-up call. Now it’s just another push alert we swipe past while ordering oat milk. The caring bandwidth’s not just saturated—it’s been monetized, splintered, and stuffed with things designed to trigger micro-concern at scale. You’re not a cynical old man. You’re just sober in a system that treats numbness like adaptation. The worst part? I’m not even surprised the BBC article didn’t trend.
Nifty3929 1y ago
Yes, and also there's no sense of proportion as we are being asked to care about every single possible thing. There's only one volume setting for everything: 11. It's exhausting.
- jmye 1y ago
  So… turn it off. Social media is 99% of the firehose, and people adamantly refuse to do anything about it. There’s no reason anyone needs the minute-by-minute Twitter-esque “information” feed, just like 24-hour news stations are a laughably idiotic waste of time and attention. There’s no reason “you” need to spend hours refreshing and obsessing about where your 6th-degree ‘friend’ is on vacation, or their promotion, or their new car or whatever. Turn shit off. Or drown, I guess.
  - testing22321 1y ago
    100% this. Turn off all notifications. Don’t listen to radio, don’t have a TV, don’t buy newspapers or magazines. Talk to your neighbours, friends and family. Join the community garden, go on toddler led walks, go hiking/fishing/swimming/camping. Live in the real world and fill your life with things from the real world. The rest is pure noise designed for the specific purpose of grabbing and holding your attention and keeping you in a state of panic or concern. You wouldn’t put toxic items in your pantry to eat, don’t put this toxic crap into your awareness.
nthingtohide 1y ago
This is why Institutions are important. They should be truthful and unbiased and undogmatic. But given intentional pollution of information environment. The same lessons being learnt again and again. New generations growing up and trying to navigate this new polluted environment, all of this is taking a toll. Hence delulu is the solulu.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  You're asking for more from the institution than we can ever expect from the individuals within the institution. Humans are fallible. Rather, we should expect that institutions are never so powerful that we have no recourse when we have been wronged by one, and that we have options when one lets us down.
  - nthingtohide 1y ago
    The problem isn't being wrong one time. But being wrong time and again and that too intentionally. When your job depends on not understanding...you won't understand.
nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
> the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create The emergence of the smartphone and The Internet (as a cultural phenomenon) was such an exciting time. I came of age during the dawn of the smartphone (graduated right as the iPhone was released) and watched all of these nascent markets emerge, connecting people in exciting and novel ways. Seemed like it went downhill so fast.
colechristensen 1y ago
>It's not that the dudes don't care Nope, I don't care. Everything is garbage filler vying to buy my attention for some purpose or another and I expect bullshit from everyone. I am generally outraged, but for specific instances of bullshit? Not at all, those are expected. It's not desensitization, you just can't have less than 0 trust in an entity and once you get there specific instances of outrage no longer happen. The major reason I think tiktok is so successful is it is the platform for punishing BS. You've got 3 seconds to get to the point and if you don't, you don't have attention. People complain about modern tech ruining attention span but I think it's the opposite, traditional content sold out to become ever less worthy of people's attention so people used tech to circumvent it.
- mieubrisse 1y ago
  I'm not sure if I'm convinced, but I find this perspective very interesting to think about - that Tiktok might actually be about finding signal in the noise. My objection is around whether "getting the point" really means "getting to the most dopamine-producing thing" (which can still be bullshit).
bakuninsbart 1y ago
My initial reaction was to be rather dismissive as to AI being the thing to care about, but rather the rise of fascism and authoritarianism across the West - rather clearly proving your point. I do truly believe that AI will be bad for some people (myself included to a degree), but it is far less dangerous than the political shift we are feeling. But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty, athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so much more... Each of these points is individually good, but social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning the good life into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people get burnt out on.
- chasd00 1y ago
  A clever trick by BigOutrage was labeling people choosing not to engage as part of the enemy de jour. now, not having enough information and choosing to not participate in the debate puts you firmly in their bad guy territory.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
JKCalhoun 1y ago
> the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create "No one would have designed it this way," is the refrain that comes to my mind so often. Raising kids and realizing the amount of "institutional knowledge" you need just to have a bank account (for example) underscores this thought (and refrain) frequently.
oooyay 1y ago
I agree with you to some degree. When I got to the bottom of the article I read this: > Be yourself. > Be imperfect. > Be human. > Care. It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans. Should someone at that paper or the products being represented care? Yes, because it's their job. To blame the reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout. What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.
- 1dom 1y ago
  I guess it comes down to world view, since we can never know the answer: when a human has everything they need, including enough bandwidth, how many will care by default vs being apathetic by default. If they care by default, all we need to do is give them everything they need and they'll do what is wanted. If not, then giving them everything they need will result in them doing nothing more.
leptons 1y ago
>15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable. Stuxnet did not impact any "normal people" at all. It was very explicitly targeted at the Iran nuclear program. I'd bet that most "normal people" have never even heard of "stuxnet" or know if it had any impact at all in their lives. I know plenty of "normal" people and I'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them that even know what stuxnet was. Outside of people very interested in computers and cyber attacks, very few people could tell you what stuxnet was. Maybe if Iran had been able to create a nuclear bomb, and maybe if they had actually tried to use it (which would be extremely foolish and would destroy Iran) then maybe the hypothetical non-existence of stuxnet would have impacted some lives, but that's a big IF. Most people have no clue at all.
groby_b 1y ago
Let's be clear, it's not just the age of tech. It's been normalized to offload things to the recipients, because it reduces cost. Be it self-checkout, be it governments and large corporate entities doing the absolute minimum and asking you to jump through endless hoops to achieve something. We're shaving off costs everywhere, without eliminating the need to do that work. And so it travels down to the leaf nodes, to individuals. Who cares, quarterly results are up, OpEx is down, good times. Tech has enabled some of these things, but ultimately it's the fetishization of Taylorism that got us here. If you can't measure it, it's not worth doing, and not doing it saves money, which you can measure. This has now spread all the ways to individuals. The commons, always a resource in a precarious position, is now the place for everybody to proudly defecate on. Throwing away litter, listening to music without headphones, rudely shouldering people away - all of it is accepted, because heaven forbid the individual sacrifices for the group. It is, after all, not a thing that has positive impact for themselves. I don't know what will break us out of it, but yes, caring is missing because we've eliminated non-egocentric things from the rewards function we think we should apply.
bowsamic 1y ago
> caring capacity feels like a biological limit I agree with that. At some point you just give up because there's literally nothing left for you to give. I've learnt to be very selective with what I choose to care about
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
xnx 1y ago
Concern for things beyond our immediate survival is a cursed luxury.

by 1dom 1y ago

nine_zeros 1y ago

[flagged]

hnthrow90348765 1y ago
Or they offshored the project and fired people, and are bringing it back, and now you have to deal with that mess Your potential reward for fixing all of it and reminding them to not do it again? Nothing!
- malfist 1y ago
  The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put out.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    Sadly many of us in tech get a rush from the 'superman' feeling that gives us. Our sheer force of effort/genius saves the day yet again. Until it burns us out, or we get dropped and realize we weren't actually valued.
    - malfist 1y ago
      I dare say at Amazon managers are encouraged to promote that sort of thing. Every project is understaffed and too short of a timeline and you bet half your team will get pulled to work on an escalation and the timelines won't change. Capacity planning assumes regretted attrition, mostly though burnout. I just saw my org deliver a project that saved the company $4m dollars a year, and we understaffed it and burnt a heck of a lot of people out. 50% of our senior engineers have resigned in the month since launch, and 6 of our L4/L5 have too. Several without backup plans. Two off our managers left and so did a product person. But our org head is getting a lot of praise for how cheaply and quickly the project was delivered. Our roadmap plan for the next year is over budget by 63%, so I'm guessing we're about to do this again
  - blooalien 1y ago
    > The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put out. And the reward for working tirelessly and successfully to ensure those fires never start in the first place is being "downsized" / laid-off because the job you do is apparently pointless, as "we've never had any problems in that department..." Damned if you do, damned if you don't... and double-damned if you do...

Night_Thastus 1y ago

>It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of people in other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Things changed more slowly and the only time you heard about about a tragedy was if it was truly enormous - or very local. Now, there is this constant vying for attention/support/outrage/etc. It's exhausting. People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met, or some event halfway across the world, or some new thing that released now like literally now. I think that a lot of people have subconsciously hit their limit. They can't muster the energy needed to genuinely think about or care about a lot of this stuff because they're bombarded with so much of it. And over time, I think that shifts thinking. "Why did I not care when X happened?" leads to "Those people don't matter/are less than human" instead of the real "Because I'm completely exhausted from so much happening".

fragmede 1y ago
> People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really. You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you don't have to just because other people expect you to. I still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about other stuff.
- kmacdough 1y ago
  I similarly don't have those specific expectations, but plenty of others. I'm expected to understand the most recent updates in Gaza, and the latest DOGE cuts. People act smug when I don't have a good understanding of current medical theory on cholesterol. I'm expected to have a nuanced opinion on trans kids in sports despite having no kids, and knowing exactly zero trans people. I mean I generally believe in letting people be who they are, but beyond that I really have no business talking about it.

jasminebelmont 1y ago

This hits harder than I expected. There’s a bleak kind of irony in how tech gave us infinite visibility but shredded our ability to process any of it. Stuxnet was a wake-up call. Now it’s just another push alert we swipe past while ordering oat milk. The caring bandwidth’s not just saturated—it’s been monetized, splintered, and stuffed with things designed to trigger micro-concern at scale. You’re not a cynical old man. You’re just sober in a system that treats numbness like adaptation. The worst part? I’m not even surprised the BBC article didn’t trend.

Nifty3929 1y ago

Yes, and also there's no sense of proportion as we are being asked to care about every single possible thing. There's only one volume setting for everything: 11. It's exhausting.

jmye 1y ago
So… turn it off. Social media is 99% of the firehose, and people adamantly refuse to do anything about it. There’s no reason anyone needs the minute-by-minute Twitter-esque “information” feed, just like 24-hour news stations are a laughably idiotic waste of time and attention. There’s no reason “you” need to spend hours refreshing and obsessing about where your 6th-degree ‘friend’ is on vacation, or their promotion, or their new car or whatever. Turn shit off. Or drown, I guess.
- testing22321 1y ago
  100% this. Turn off all notifications. Don’t listen to radio, don’t have a TV, don’t buy newspapers or magazines. Talk to your neighbours, friends and family. Join the community garden, go on toddler led walks, go hiking/fishing/swimming/camping. Live in the real world and fill your life with things from the real world. The rest is pure noise designed for the specific purpose of grabbing and holding your attention and keeping you in a state of panic or concern. You wouldn’t put toxic items in your pantry to eat, don’t put this toxic crap into your awareness.

nthingtohide 1y ago

This is why Institutions are important. They should be truthful and unbiased and undogmatic. But given intentional pollution of information environment. The same lessons being learnt again and again. New generations growing up and trying to navigate this new polluted environment, all of this is taking a toll. Hence delulu is the solulu.

zdragnar 1y ago
You're asking for more from the institution than we can ever expect from the individuals within the institution. Humans are fallible. Rather, we should expect that institutions are never so powerful that we have no recourse when we have been wronged by one, and that we have options when one lets us down.
- nthingtohide 1y ago
  The problem isn't being wrong one time. But being wrong time and again and that too intentionally. When your job depends on not understanding...you won't understand.

nyarlathotep_ 1y ago

> the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create The emergence of the smartphone and The Internet (as a cultural phenomenon) was such an exciting time. I came of age during the dawn of the smartphone (graduated right as the iPhone was released) and watched all of these nascent markets emerge, connecting people in exciting and novel ways. Seemed like it went downhill so fast.

colechristensen 1y ago

>It's not that the dudes don't care Nope, I don't care. Everything is garbage filler vying to buy my attention for some purpose or another and I expect bullshit from everyone. I am generally outraged, but for specific instances of bullshit? Not at all, those are expected. It's not desensitization, you just can't have less than 0 trust in an entity and once you get there specific instances of outrage no longer happen. The major reason I think tiktok is so successful is it is the platform for punishing BS. You've got 3 seconds to get to the point and if you don't, you don't have attention. People complain about modern tech ruining attention span but I think it's the opposite, traditional content sold out to become ever less worthy of people's attention so people used tech to circumvent it.

mieubrisse 1y ago
I'm not sure if I'm convinced, but I find this perspective very interesting to think about - that Tiktok might actually be about finding signal in the noise. My objection is around whether "getting the point" really means "getting to the most dopamine-producing thing" (which can still be bullshit).

bakuninsbart 1y ago

My initial reaction was to be rather dismissive as to AI being the thing to care about, but rather the rise of fascism and authoritarianism across the West - rather clearly proving your point. I do truly believe that AI will be bad for some people (myself included to a degree), but it is far less dangerous than the political shift we are feeling. But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty, athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so much more... Each of these points is individually good, but social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning the good life into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people get burnt out on.

chasd00 1y ago
A clever trick by BigOutrage was labeling people choosing not to engage as part of the enemy de jour. now, not having enough information and choosing to not participate in the debate puts you firmly in their bad guy territory.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

JKCalhoun 1y ago

> the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create "No one would have designed it this way," is the refrain that comes to my mind so often. Raising kids and realizing the amount of "institutional knowledge" you need just to have a bank account (for example) underscores this thought (and refrain) frequently.

oooyay 1y ago

I agree with you to some degree. When I got to the bottom of the article I read this: > Be yourself. > Be imperfect. > Be human. > Care. It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans. Should someone at that paper or the products being represented care? Yes, because it's their job. To blame the reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout. What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.

1dom 1y ago
I guess it comes down to world view, since we can never know the answer: when a human has everything they need, including enough bandwidth, how many will care by default vs being apathetic by default. If they care by default, all we need to do is give them everything they need and they'll do what is wanted. If not, then giving them everything they need will result in them doing nothing more.

leptons 1y ago

>15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable. Stuxnet did not impact any "normal people" at all. It was very explicitly targeted at the Iran nuclear program. I'd bet that most "normal people" have never even heard of "stuxnet" or know if it had any impact at all in their lives. I know plenty of "normal" people and I'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them that even know what stuxnet was. Outside of people very interested in computers and cyber attacks, very few people could tell you what stuxnet was. Maybe if Iran had been able to create a nuclear bomb, and maybe if they had actually tried to use it (which would be extremely foolish and would destroy Iran) then maybe the hypothetical non-existence of stuxnet would have impacted some lives, but that's a big IF. Most people have no clue at all.

groby_b 1y ago

Let's be clear, it's not just the age of tech. It's been normalized to offload things to the recipients, because it reduces cost. Be it self-checkout, be it governments and large corporate entities doing the absolute minimum and asking you to jump through endless hoops to achieve something. We're shaving off costs everywhere, without eliminating the need to do that work. And so it travels down to the leaf nodes, to individuals. Who cares, quarterly results are up, OpEx is down, good times. Tech has enabled some of these things, but ultimately it's the fetishization of Taylorism that got us here. If you can't measure it, it's not worth doing, and not doing it saves money, which you can measure. This has now spread all the ways to individuals. The commons, always a resource in a precarious position, is now the place for everybody to proudly defecate on. Throwing away litter, listening to music without headphones, rudely shouldering people away - all of it is accepted, because heaven forbid the individual sacrifices for the group. It is, after all, not a thing that has positive impact for themselves. I don't know what will break us out of it, but yes, caring is missing because we've eliminated non-egocentric things from the rewards function we think we should apply.

bowsamic 1y ago

> caring capacity feels like a biological limit I agree with that. At some point you just give up because there's literally nothing left for you to give. I've learnt to be very selective with what I choose to care about

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

xnx 1y ago

Concern for things beyond our immediate survival is a cursed luxury.