3 ms·

I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is m

by grebc 9d ago

I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening. Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle. And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.

doginasuit 9d ago
I have a more sympathetic view, I thought covid could have been much worse. Of course there were silly moments like the existential panic from a toilerpaper shortage but it seems like the vast majority of people acted responsibly and kept their heads over the long haul. In the meantime, we developed revolutionary vaccines that solved the problem. There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way. Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.
- grebc 9d ago
  This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived? The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show. I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
  - watwut 9d ago
    Kids mostly forgot and adapted back. It is adult, mostly men, who just cant get over fear of vaccines, injury of having to do something a little uncomfortable for someone else.
    - fabioborellini 9d ago
      Trivialising this to fear of vaccines misses the point. The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here. Especially for ones that didn’t have a lot of social life or family to begin with.
      - moron4hire 8d ago
        Almost every single meetup group in Northern Virginia was completely destroyed and did not grow back. I watched as dozens of local meetups, several running for many years, disappeared over night. I managed one as well and my crew held on to ours for as long as we could. We managed to keep it running online for several more years. But the social damage was done. After running the thing for 12 years, not being able to find anywhere that was willing to host us in-person again, and all of us original organizers having moved to different cities, there was nobody willing to take over.
      - kbelder 8d ago
        And the massive damage this did to children's education. I think people who didn't have a child in the school system at the time might not understand how poorly the schools functioned during that time. My child had two intelligent and supportive parents, including a stay-at-home mother, and it was still rough. Many of her classmates just flat-out lost a year of education. There's still obvious effects on her cohort years later.
      - preg_match 8d ago
        The lack of human connection has been a trend for many decades now, covid just accelerated it all at once. Not like there was much choice, lots of people died, we did what we had to. The communities that did exist were always running on fumes, basically only existing due to inertia. When the inertia was cut, even if only for a couple weeks in some places, they were done. That’s it. The social damage has been here, and we’ve been zombie-ing our way through it. Covid just let the undead stay dead, and turns out we can’t revive it.
- pelotron 9d ago
  I appreciate your optimistic view of it. What I got out of it was that Covid was a sort of dress rehearsal for a far worse outbreak that could eventually happen, and we (Americans) failed miserably.
  - account42 8d ago
    It was a dress rehearsal alright, but for techono-fascist control of the poulation.
alexashka 9d ago
Journalists fear mongering and making sure the hoi polloi know their place as powerless pawns in a game they couldn't possibly understand is a constant. They know what they're doing, the people who fund them know it and the people with half a working brain cell sooner or later hear someone like me and go 'oh, that explains it'. It's much simpler than some mythical cycles - manufactured 'mass stupidity' is a conscious, deliberate, ongoing choice. It used to be religious organizations, then it was newspapers, now its social media platforms. The playbook has been the same for thousands of years - nothing has changed. To save everyone some time - the playbook is you're cattle, I'm shepherd. I'm master, you're slave. It's not anymore complicated. The bit 'educated' people miss is that most people would love nothing more than to be the master (freedom they call it? American doublespeak). They dislike being slaves, not the concept of slavery. Anyhoo.
OutOfHere 9d ago
[flagged]
- grebc 9d ago
  None of them were inherent problems. Good try.
  - tenuousemphasis 8d ago
    TIL a global pandemic that infected hundreds of millions and killed millions of people wasn't an inherent problem.
    - grebc 8d ago
      That’s still correct, yes. The guys edited his response at least 4 times now, it was an appropriate response to his hysterical reply at the time.
      - OutOfHere 8d ago
        It doesn't change that your original comment is utterly ridiculous. The problems were real, and the solutions to them, however imperfect, were correspondingly real. Your rejection of them makes you the fool. If anyone has lost their mind, it is you.
        grebc 8d ago
        Keep speaking that truth, I’m sure someones listening.
        OutOfHere 7d ago
        You are nothing but a conman.
MomsAVoxell 9d ago
I agree with you but I think it happens every 4 years, not every 10. I first started noticing this in the 90’s .. comp-sci grads were entering the industry with no clue whatsoever how to do software. (Of course its gotten worse since then, but I started noticing it in the 90’s..) Everything old was thrown away as being archaic and obsolete - only the New Cool Shit™ mattered .. except nobody had ever done anything, properly, with the New Cool Shit™ - everything was still running on the old. (Unix was dying, everyone was learning only Microsoft tech because “that was the future” ... until it wasn’t. Now, a majority of us are running 21st century Unix workstations given us .. by Apple, of all companies, which didn’t die so easily, after all..) People entered the market not because they were truly interested in improving the world through computerization, but because they wanted the lifestyle afforded to them by a career in “Information Technology”, a nascent term back then which simply meant “career path for the budding materialists”. Trouble is, you can’t be materialistic with computers, they are almost entirely a spiritual device, which value is determined strictly and only on the decision of value made by humans. It is humans which decide the true value of all that physical hardware after all. I think this cyclical amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism. People who take a less material approach to technology, tend to build stuff that lasts a long time. The reason I think it happens in cycles of 4 years, is that is the average time it takes someone to enter the academic churn, and get spit out on the other end, ready to join the work force and do big things. Or .. not.
- andrekandre 8d ago
  > amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism anecdotally, but i see this everywhere not just in tech...

by grebc 9d ago

doginasuit 9d ago

I have a more sympathetic view, I thought covid could have been much worse. Of course there were silly moments like the existential panic from a toilerpaper shortage but it seems like the vast majority of people acted responsibly and kept their heads over the long haul. In the meantime, we developed revolutionary vaccines that solved the problem. There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way. Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.

grebc 9d ago
This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived? The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show. I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
- watwut 9d ago
  Kids mostly forgot and adapted back. It is adult, mostly men, who just cant get over fear of vaccines, injury of having to do something a little uncomfortable for someone else.
  - fabioborellini 9d ago
    Trivialising this to fear of vaccines misses the point. The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here. Especially for ones that didn’t have a lot of social life or family to begin with.
    - moron4hire 8d ago
      Almost every single meetup group in Northern Virginia was completely destroyed and did not grow back. I watched as dozens of local meetups, several running for many years, disappeared over night. I managed one as well and my crew held on to ours for as long as we could. We managed to keep it running online for several more years. But the social damage was done. After running the thing for 12 years, not being able to find anywhere that was willing to host us in-person again, and all of us original organizers having moved to different cities, there was nobody willing to take over.
    - kbelder 8d ago
      And the massive damage this did to children's education. I think people who didn't have a child in the school system at the time might not understand how poorly the schools functioned during that time. My child had two intelligent and supportive parents, including a stay-at-home mother, and it was still rough. Many of her classmates just flat-out lost a year of education. There's still obvious effects on her cohort years later.
    - preg_match 8d ago
      The lack of human connection has been a trend for many decades now, covid just accelerated it all at once. Not like there was much choice, lots of people died, we did what we had to. The communities that did exist were always running on fumes, basically only existing due to inertia. When the inertia was cut, even if only for a couple weeks in some places, they were done. That’s it. The social damage has been here, and we’ve been zombie-ing our way through it. Covid just let the undead stay dead, and turns out we can’t revive it.
pelotron 9d ago
I appreciate your optimistic view of it. What I got out of it was that Covid was a sort of dress rehearsal for a far worse outbreak that could eventually happen, and we (Americans) failed miserably.
- account42 8d ago
  It was a dress rehearsal alright, but for techono-fascist control of the poulation.

alexashka 9d ago

Journalists fear mongering and making sure the hoi polloi know their place as powerless pawns in a game they couldn't possibly understand is a constant. They know what they're doing, the people who fund them know it and the people with half a working brain cell sooner or later hear someone like me and go 'oh, that explains it'. It's much simpler than some mythical cycles - manufactured 'mass stupidity' is a conscious, deliberate, ongoing choice. It used to be religious organizations, then it was newspapers, now its social media platforms. The playbook has been the same for thousands of years - nothing has changed. To save everyone some time - the playbook is you're cattle, I'm shepherd. I'm master, you're slave. It's not anymore complicated. The bit 'educated' people miss is that most people would love nothing more than to be the master (freedom they call it? American doublespeak). They dislike being slaves, not the concept of slavery. Anyhoo.

OutOfHere 9d ago

[flagged]

grebc 9d ago
None of them were inherent problems. Good try.
- tenuousemphasis 8d ago
  TIL a global pandemic that infected hundreds of millions and killed millions of people wasn't an inherent problem.
  - grebc 8d ago
    That’s still correct, yes. The guys edited his response at least 4 times now, it was an appropriate response to his hysterical reply at the time.
    - OutOfHere 8d ago
      It doesn't change that your original comment is utterly ridiculous. The problems were real, and the solutions to them, however imperfect, were correspondingly real. Your rejection of them makes you the fool. If anyone has lost their mind, it is you.
      - grebc 8d ago
        Keep speaking that truth, I’m sure someones listening.
        OutOfHere 7d ago
        You are nothing but a conman.

MomsAVoxell 9d ago

I agree with you but I think it happens every 4 years, not every 10. I first started noticing this in the 90’s .. comp-sci grads were entering the industry with no clue whatsoever how to do software. (Of course its gotten worse since then, but I started noticing it in the 90’s..) Everything old was thrown away as being archaic and obsolete - only the New Cool Shit™ mattered .. except nobody had ever done anything, properly, with the New Cool Shit™ - everything was still running on the old. (Unix was dying, everyone was learning only Microsoft tech because “that was the future” ... until it wasn’t. Now, a majority of us are running 21st century Unix workstations given us .. by Apple, of all companies, which didn’t die so easily, after all..) People entered the market not because they were truly interested in improving the world through computerization, but because they wanted the lifestyle afforded to them by a career in “Information Technology”, a nascent term back then which simply meant “career path for the budding materialists”. Trouble is, you can’t be materialistic with computers, they are almost entirely a spiritual device, which value is determined strictly and only on the decision of value made by humans. It is humans which decide the true value of all that physical hardware after all. I think this cyclical amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism. People who take a less material approach to technology, tend to build stuff that lasts a long time. The reason I think it happens in cycles of 4 years, is that is the average time it takes someone to enter the academic churn, and get spit out on the other end, ready to join the work force and do big things. Or .. not.

andrekandre 8d ago
> amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism anecdotally, but i see this everywhere not just in tech...