[psittacus]

Not to cast any shade on Daniel, but perhaps as a warning of sorts?

Actually reading through the emails was only sporadically fun — a lot of them are from people who seem like they need urgent help and obviously aren't getting it.

His "summary" is "somehow they help me remember that the world we live in is super complicated" and while true, it was more of testament how confused a lot of people are, how lost. And how privileged people who understand computers are, being able to avoid this confusion.

[ryandrake]

I don’t think this is about understanding computers vs not understanding them. We are seeing these particular ones because of a computing related misunderstanding but there are a lot of disturbed or confused people out there in general not getting help.

The Internet (and social media) has shined an uncomfortable light on how widespread our education and mental health crises are. I’m not going to hold myself up as an expert or doctor but jeez there seem to be a lot of people out there that have totally lost the plot yet they have Internet so we can all see them struggling with reality.

The whole COVID thing didn’t help either. It helped to normalize and mainstream: weird conspiracy theories, antivaxxers, unhinged behavior in public, and the Internet was right there with it, hand in hand, taking us further down the crazy train.

I used to think people going through mental health crises were few and far between but now whenever I’m in a crowd I start thinking to myself you know, 10% of these people probably have a tenuous grip on reality and 1% might just have an outburst right here.

[psittacus]

Certainly, the problem is bigger than just computers. I was trying to say that if you don't understand how computers work your chances of getting confused are higher since they are ubiquitous and often the interactions with them are so poorly designed that it's easy to get confused.