These read as all to familiar, strikes me as having all the ingredients to spiral us down into the nightmare of Sagan's Demon Haunted World. Which has been a lovely dark thread going on today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404373
It feels like we're deep in the whirlpool of such a radically non-empathetic zero-sum dis-reality based thinking.
" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”"
My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.
Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.
Social media companies have managed to figure out what can keep a person glued to a screen for hours on end. The result is a clearly fucked up generation that took in endless staged content as reality and their brains have been shaped accordingly. Young men do not have a working model of the world that is based in reality.
Congratulations to the social media companies and their infinite ad revenue, and so sorry to the rest of us who have to live in a Tiktok society.
Your thesis that the social issues are caused by the internet would become very weak; seeing as this started during the dial up era; pre smart phones, pre social media.
>I don’t know how to stop political violence in America.
"sad young terminally online men" is not an American thing it's a global phenomenon yet America has something that most other countries don't. Simple as that.
I often wonder what the internet would look like if we just banned paid advertising. Facebook, instagram, X, TikTok, they’d all have to start charging users to stay alive and I don’t think anyone would choose to pay for the brainrot. I’d like to see us remove the incentives these companies have for just gluing us to our phones.
Social media is probably somewhat responsible, but I don't think it's the biggest problem here. It's the fact that Gen Z is checking out on life, for many people there is no hope of owning a house even if you give up all luxury spending and grind, it's impossible for many on a typical job.
It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasingly high rents, and charge increasing amounts. You could go out to the bar and spend $100, or you could stay at home and play video games for free.
We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.
I don't think it would change at all. Look at creators on Youtube. The majority are clickbait and other crap, people trying to get money and/or influence. It doesn't require advertising by the platform. All it requires is the internet itself and nearly everyone on it. Ads might have accelerated things but the basic incentives are "more viewers = more money / influence", with or without ads. And those incentives eventually lead to where we are.
For those of us online in the 90s we don’t have to wonder
It was literally a utopia before business came along. Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.
I’d go one step further and ban the consolidation of platforms by billionaires. The open internet no longer exists or will ever exist again
I'd like to think parents would be more involved if they had to buy their kids internet things but they'd probably end up swiping their creditcard on the same stupid stuff.
I'm not sure what sentence fragments you're referring to (I didn't see any in the initial pass) but em dashes have been characteristic of Derek's work since we'll before the commercialization of LLMs
> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender
I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender."
What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy. Nobody is held personally responsible for being born into the patriarchy, and the patriarchy is just as toxic to young men as it is to women. The main people who get held responsible are the ones who enthusiastically perpetuate the system and plug their ears when they hear evidence that it might not be super great for everyone.
Yeeep. I don’t consider myself terminally online, but am a mid-20s male who doesn’t see the path forward. I make software money and can’t buy a house locally without it feeling really irresponsible. I have no idea where women who think the way I do would be. Everyone I meet in my age bracket is unbelievably immature, or married.
AI might take my job in the next single digit years, so taking on liabilities seems foolish anyway.
The stuff about being told I’m evil for skin color or whatever doesn’t resonate much with me. Sure, I’ve heard it from fringe people, and I guess I could see how someone could get wrapped up in it, but it doesn’t really stick with me.
I feel like you outlined actually all the messages of online and then said say that “online communities offer them a far more rewarding life than the hostility of meatspace.”
Like almost all toxic feminism is an online/media phenomenon. Most people aren’t these extremes. Meatspace is the solution to all of the messages you fault.
> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender, told you're inherently evil due to your race, cannot earn enough for a dignified life supporting a family, see no path to owning your own home, have watched as your country has been flooded with millions of military-aged foreign men, have few to no serious dating prospects, and watch powerlessly as laws are passed to persecute you for complaining about any of this... Why bother?
This seems like a distorted world view of someone with a massive persecution complex and who is already susceptible to conspiracy theories. Nobody's telling lonely white men they're inherently evil for their gender. Nobody's telling them they're inherently evil due to their race. And nobody's passing laws to persecute you for making these silly complaints on HN.
Most people benefit immensely from and are indeed dependent on our existing institutions. They pretend they don't and aren't because it's cool and edgy to seem apart from it all. Yes, there are people who fall through the cracks, but by and large, things like public education, public health and safety, emergency services like fire departments, infrastructure like roads and airports, water, sewage, waste management services, libraries, museums, and so on, all benefit far more people than not. As someone else quotes: "They're like housecats: convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
I do agree that more and more people cannot earn enough for a dignified life supporting a family, and see no path to owning their own home, and that's a real and growing problem. But that's no reason to nuke the whole country and start over.
jauntywundrkind|5 months ago
> 1) Negativity bias increases clicks. 2) Extreme opinions increase sharing. 3) Out-group animosity increases engagement. 4) Moral-emotional language goes viral.
These read as all to familiar, strikes me as having all the ingredients to spiral us down into the nightmare of Sagan's Demon Haunted World. Which has been a lovely dark thread going on today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404373
It feels like we're deep in the whirlpool of such a radically non-empathetic zero-sum dis-reality based thinking.
drchopchop|5 months ago
My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.
positron26|5 months ago
Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.
pyuser583|5 months ago
recallingmemory|5 months ago
Congratulations to the social media companies and their infinite ad revenue, and so sorry to the rest of us who have to live in a Tiktok society.
incomingpain|5 months ago
Afterall, the actual issue derives more from the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Your thesis that the social issues are caused by the internet would become very weak; seeing as this started during the dial up era; pre smart phones, pre social media.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
haunter|5 months ago
"sad young terminally online men" is not an American thing it's a global phenomenon yet America has something that most other countries don't. Simple as that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation...
Not even mention this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_State...
tolerance|5 months ago
ryandrake|5 months ago
1: https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
ViscountPenguin|5 months ago
[deleted]
mindwok|5 months ago
Gigachad|5 months ago
It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasingly high rents, and charge increasing amounts. You could go out to the bar and spend $100, or you could stay at home and play video games for free.
We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.
socalgal2|5 months ago
mingus88|5 months ago
It was literally a utopia before business came along. Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.
I’d go one step further and ban the consolidation of platforms by billionaires. The open internet no longer exists or will ever exist again
AuthAuth|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
zinodaur|5 months ago
[deleted]
kaonwarb|5 months ago
derektank|5 months ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/job-...
billy99k|5 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
setterle|5 months ago
[deleted]
mullingitover|5 months ago
I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender."
What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy. Nobody is held personally responsible for being born into the patriarchy, and the patriarchy is just as toxic to young men as it is to women. The main people who get held responsible are the ones who enthusiastically perpetuate the system and plug their ears when they hear evidence that it might not be super great for everyone.
rogerrogerr|5 months ago
AI might take my job in the next single digit years, so taking on liabilities seems foolish anyway.
The stuff about being told I’m evil for skin color or whatever doesn’t resonate much with me. Sure, I’ve heard it from fringe people, and I guess I could see how someone could get wrapped up in it, but it doesn’t really stick with me.
techblueberry|5 months ago
Like almost all toxic feminism is an online/media phenomenon. Most people aren’t these extremes. Meatspace is the solution to all of the messages you fault.
ryandrake|5 months ago
This seems like a distorted world view of someone with a massive persecution complex and who is already susceptible to conspiracy theories. Nobody's telling lonely white men they're inherently evil for their gender. Nobody's telling them they're inherently evil due to their race. And nobody's passing laws to persecute you for making these silly complaints on HN.
Most people benefit immensely from and are indeed dependent on our existing institutions. They pretend they don't and aren't because it's cool and edgy to seem apart from it all. Yes, there are people who fall through the cracks, but by and large, things like public education, public health and safety, emergency services like fire departments, infrastructure like roads and airports, water, sewage, waste management services, libraries, museums, and so on, all benefit far more people than not. As someone else quotes: "They're like housecats: convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
I do agree that more and more people cannot earn enough for a dignified life supporting a family, and see no path to owning their own home, and that's a real and growing problem. But that's no reason to nuke the whole country and start over.