Since 2020 I’ve increasingly felt like we’re in a digital dark ages, where illiteracy is skyrocketing, people believe in magic, disease is rampant, oligarchs rule, and it’s all facilitated by ultra modern technology that has evolved to reinforce it
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
The last two grown ass adults I trained at the job I just left could barely read or write. When they can't read something, they just guess (horribly). When they can't spell something, they just type gibberish and hope spell check will fix it. You don't want to know the profession.
The internet, where if you don't like the facts you just read, just keep looking to find someone with different facts, now that's the actual "facts". Everything's now made up and truth doesn't matter.
It drives me so bonkers that tech has remains so ardently a scholar-clas system, that we have so few attempts to make love systems which can be explored & tinkered with.
We have to let in understanding. The natural world's observability amid artifice.
I agree, nowadays AI or social media is the source of truth. Which make people highly Susceptible for disinformation because information is not checked. With Elon musk probably going to participate into politics it quite clear that x will become propaganda machine for trump.
TBF it was clear from the day he announced the final deal structure that Twitter would be remade into an explicit propaganda tool for global right wing interests.
In hindsight, giving nearly every single person a microphone to the entire world may have ended the age of expertise. People used to need to have credibility to get a platform, now anyone can build a platform from nothing.
i blame facebook, they made selling users' brains to subversive advertisers the norm and every platform that's popped up since just feels like part of that gold rush to me...
it’s extremely readable, he was a wonderful author and obviously very prescient. it will probably be even more rage-inducing now than when i read it in 2002, unfortunately
I wrote an extended post to FB friends today, and I mentioned Sagan's love and wonder of the universe coupled with his commitment to approaching it with the fact-based respect it deserved.
And then I said I was glad he was dead, so he didn't have to see this, and it breaks my heart into pieces.
I know that's part bitterness, and I'd love to actually still have him around, but what a disappointment this country has become. We've pushed forward in so many ways, and a bunch of bigoted fascists want to yank us all back.
I remember that book "The Secret" becoming famous and that woman getting interviewed and stuff and she even made a documentary. Exactly like this stuff.
There was a guy in my college speech class who would not shut up about What The Bleep Do We Know, and I'm so grateful that it arrived too early to go viral
Sorry, this reminded me - while looking at families to "adopt" for Xmas, there was one where a young 23 year old mother asked for some wildly expensive bs supplements and a gold necklace with her angel numbers which were 888. I was kind of flabbergasted.
I don’t think it popularized it tbh we’d been trending in that way for a long time. The algorithm definitely has its own magic to it. Is it wrong to say I don’t mind more reenchantment?
Our education system is not teaching critical thinking skills; aka what you see on that screen is not automatically true just because it's on that screen.
I agree! I think I benefitted enormously from technology and even social media in the early 2010s. I think it’s a confluence of factors, one being adoption of tech without any education like you said, another being the way social platforms have evolved under capitalism
The concept of "free internet" was good, however user education didn't convey that nothing is free & our education system left out "If you're not paying for a service, *you* are the product."
"Capitalism" made cell phones possible, but without informed/educated consumers, they are just screens.
The building of the internet in its original decentralized form was dependent on large amounts of government money: via ARPA for the infrastructure itself, or via CERN for the WWW.
Once capitalists took over the Web, they sought to build walled gardens which they could monetize.
True (ref the origins of the internet). And of course, it's been monetized. But the primary functionality has saved so many lives and improved the living standards of millions around the world. Individuals are responsible for any evil outcomes. Not technology.
Social media is a platform (car). Technology is the transportation method (road). If cars don't function, they need to be fixed. If roads have potholes, they need filling.
The issue with social media (car) isn't the technology (road). The people who own/drive cars need rules/lessons. Same with SM.
Those feelings are about to become a stark raving reality come 2025. I hope everyone who failed to vote or protest voted enjoys their moral high horses, but the military that comes to big cities by Feb or so probably won't allow them to be ridden in the streets. Will interfere with the round ups.
Scientists in 1200 BC: Aha! By measuring this shadow and the distance between it and a place with no shadow, I have calculated the circumference of the earth!
Scientists in 1200: So actually the earth isn't flat
Scientists in 2020: Can we PLEASE move on from this?! It's a sphere!
We’ve too long had dry, polite, careful, journalistic books but now if ever is a time for people to start writing polemic again, there’s a hunger for it
A woman in my neighborhood who I’ve had a normal, friendly relationship with for years, revealed to me that she’s a flat-earther. It was so profoundly shocking I couldn’t even argue with her. She has kids, a small business, and a nice house. How does this happen?
Years before the pandemic, a lawyer from another office I had a meeting with casually revealed, out of nowhere, that he “didn’t believe in” germ theory. My cousin has a new baby & is afraid for his MIL to visit because she “doesn’t believe in” vaccines or antibiotics. It’s bad.
Had a similar experience with a fellow elementary-school mom. I'd known her for three years, and suddenly it turns out she believes in chemtrails and went on about it for almost an hour.
I thought she was joking at first. Pretty sure I insulted her. Oh well.
I just wonder if any of these idiots suffer a heart attack? Do they want someone that specializes in medicine or the one that did not pass the board exam ? 🤣🤣🤣
I was working with an undergrad student who couldn't get a file to load, and they sent me a screen shot. They had the path to the file, and then the file twice like "c:\path\file.txtfile.txt" and I'm like how can someone not just instantly figure this out?
We had much much much better technology education even when I was a kid in computer class in the mid-2000s. Those classes don’t even exist anymore. Kids (and adults) use advanced tech with no understanding of it. I’ve read about widespread Chromebook use in schools contributing to this issue
Yeah. One thing I have learned over the years is that Mac users tend to be the ones who struggle the most when it comes to doing tasks that require them to step outside the box, like figuring out how to find the path to a file on their computer :-)
That makes a lot of sense. My dad is in compsci and he only recently started using a Mac and it really frustrated him at first because it’s so counterintuitive compared to Microsoft computers. But those ~aesthetics~
When I lucked into my current job my one real strength was the ability to find things on the internet, and I figured people would just vault past me. It hasn't really happened and that was 20 years ago.
Having spent some time in high school classrooms recently I definitely agree with this. So many kids who can't write, can't read, have zero historical knowledge, and teachers who can't get through.
The education system lacks the ability to modify how it instructs because those entrusted with doing so also lack the knowledge of how technology works and exactly how it can be used negatively.
Even now we discover textbooks are slanted information.
With school books there was at least some sort of "guarding" against bad information or outdated.
Most teachers have zero idea how to see that digitally.
They themselves are victims of disinformation.
How many made a vote Tuesday based on the data they were presented?
This is at least a hundred year old complaint, which I say not to dismiss it but rather to suggest that the problem may be more about people than technology. Trotsky writing in '33:
Omfg if the people I work with talk about Jay z and Beyonce worshipping the devil, or whoever and whatever being in the bohemian Grove conspiracy, do you go to mediums to speak with the dead? I live in the bluest of blue States, we're supposed to be smart. They sound like absolute fools!
I thought "dark ages" were called that because of the relative lack of historical records, rather than because they were an age of un-enlightenment. Though that's still a fair observation to make--thanks to copyright maximalism and the tendency to use temporary web storage to share one's work.
Digital preservation is being thwarted at every turn by efforts to shut down any website that tries to archive old content that some random executive thinks they might decide they want to make a dollar off of despite not making the media available to purchase or doing their own archiving.
The recent attacks against the Internet Archive, Nintendo's ever widening effort to destroy any emulators that have ever existed (including going after emulators themselves, rather than roms--generally in the past emulators have been deemed non-infringing unless they include official bios dumps)
There are so many titles that will *never* be re-released by the owners, and where the owners don't even have their own copies of the work to release them if they wanted to, and where there's no way to play them if one *did* have a dump because the emulators are not able to do their jobs.
Which sounds like a trifling matter to someone only tangentially involved, sure, but media like that--even seemingly trashy / uninteresting media--is how so much of recorded history is recorded! We learn what people thought and did by looking at what they wrote about in their media.
An example I saw someone give one was about a bit of trashy fiction from ancient Rome that made a bunch of dumb jokes. Seems like it would be valueless, right? But because one of the presumptions in one of the sex jokes, we learned about a connection between religious practices and sex workers.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
I remember when Tech was new, fun, and the good kind of scary. All that seemed to end about 20 or so years ago. It became consumed by RW Authoritarian porn and influencers most inane thoughts. It became late stage MTV reality programming and we haven’t recovered. Who knows if we ever will.
Here's the thing... pervasive access to the Internet has made it easier than ever in human history to learn and better yourself...but it has also made it easier than ever in human history to just absolutely pickle your mind.
My feeling in 2007 or so, when it became clear to me that so-called "social media" would be a huge thing, was dread. Did not know then the exact ways in which it would be bad, but was sure that it would be. I think history since then has shown that this was entirely correct.
I use Facebook primarily for a few games I can't give up + keeping in touch with some friends and family. The rest 99.9999999...% terrifying. When I first created a FB account there was an innocence to it; now it's a platform to market bat guano & social division w/smart peeps arguing with fools.
“Dark ages” are usually characterized by the amount of *surviving* text.
We’re making a lot of information, the long term archival rate is extremely low. Only takes a few mistakes at https://archive.org for future generations to know surprisingly little about us.
Producing noise that gets called knowledge is easy, and the work of maintaining useful and well considered knowledge requires serious authority and education to make itself (and its serious experts) salient.
People are trained towards a set of digestible narratives, predictions, and charisma.
Not only that but the digital medium it is all happening in is ephemeral, once it's gone there won't be a robust record written down either. A literal dark age
I used to naively believe that the internet and the free flow of information would gradually lead to the demise of oppressive governments, as censorship would become almost impossible. A quick look at X shows just how foolish I was.
☝️ there is no way to understand this moment without grasping the impact of a digital lobotomy that provides unlimited knowledge with no discernment to use it.
I got into the biz during the dotcom, which was all about finding & exploiting magic money portals to hitherto unknown fiscal dimensions. Pure magical thinking - dot-commies were expected to manifest so hard that their business plan became reality.
Bizarrely, it’s in no small part due to actual illiteracy rates which were impacted by 9/11 deterring the singular good thing Bush2 ever had plans for, following through on reading goals.
Remember when we thought access to more information would make us collectively smarter? It feels like those delivery systems have been co-opted in order to make us less intelligent, and certainly more easily dragged around by our feelings.
The overlap with alt-right stuff online with chaos magick goes back to early 00s. I was tracking it and people would laugh when I talked about it. 2016 Pepe meme magick didn’t just come from nowhere. It’s only gotten broader since then.
I started keeping an eye on a guy named Gordon White who has a popular magick blog “Rune Soup” - which had a lot of overlap with conspiracy circles that fed Rogan, etc. White was chaos magick left anarchist type but man the horseshoe theory stuff got real with Trump era. Too long to explain but …
I found a lot of overlap with the techbro ntf/pepe meme magick crowd quoting White and other fellow travelers of occult stuff … watching those two streams come together in 2015/16 was interesting… and here we are
And yeah the goofy parallels/resonances with Weimar era occult fascination / Nazi overlap were pretty apparent but also so ridiculous if you started talking to normal people I felt I was crazy for pointing it out
And the overlap between the idea of occult reality creation and WWE Kayfabe suspension of belief necessary for its fandom - both very operative in Trump/MAGA/Q thinking I would argue is a very real thing used purposefully as a technique in those circles
Took a global capitalism class during my grad work and finally got the professor to tell us what he thought was really happening with the economic restructuring. He said a techno feudalism. We were all astonished in 2014. I think this fits in with the digital dark age idea very well.
as a software engineer, more and more of my coworkers seem to be leaning on chatgpt to just completely solve their problems and write large amounts of software for them, and I'm worried that most don't really understand what the oracle is telling them, only bits and pieces, taking the rest on faith
I’m hearing about and seeing this all over the place. People are unlearning their ability to think or not forming it at all. AI is like all the other societal tech issues and some new ones, on hyperspeed
As both a PhD student / TA and a sessional instructor, there is a massive push to guide students to use AI ‘ethically’ on their assignments. I do not understand why it’s so embraced in higher Ed but comparing notes with friends, it seems to be going on at all universities.
It's at mine too. I pushed back and said there's no way to use it 'ethically', but was told there's no excuse and as a student I need to be using it. They're offering work placements that involve creating dodgy AI stuff as well. I hate it so much and do not understand why some faculty love it.
I said the same in a mandatory training session and people reacted as if I said the dullest thing they had ever heard. I don’t care if it’s ostensibly here to stay; I refuse to teach my students to be prompt crafters. Writing has value, research has value, drawing and image composition has value.
Exactly! And it takes time away from actually learning how to research, write, etc! Skills you need to be competent at in order to generate anything remotely useful, or to understand if what you've generated is trash.
Also worth noting that there's been a definite change in course content this year across many subjects.
Lots of wordy blocks of text that are inconsistent or don't actually say anything meaningful. Most commonly found in subjects with faculty who don't seem confident with the content themselves. 🙃
I mean, I personally found “A Discovery of Witches” an enjoyable romp on Netflix — but I also know that it’s FICTION. Am I now in the minority to hold this opinion?
Not gonna knock on believing in magic (except if it's viewed as the only way to fix things), but you're absolutely right. This is a dark age, and it's up to us to bring on the enlightenment.
The so-called 'Dark Ages' are called that because it was an intervening period between powerful empires... So history, being utterly obsessed with empire, thinks nothing important happened.
1/
2/ So in fact, it wasn't particularly oligarchial. The arts did not disappear, in fact they flourished. Literacy was low because it was irrelevent to daily life for most people, both before and after. And technology continued to advance at the same pace.
To elaborate slightly, by 2012 you had fun social media, good online video and photos, search that worked, blogs, the golden age of browser games, decent e-commerce, Wikipedia, etc. but the worst of the advertising, influencers, dark patterns, seo-speak, and general gross hadn’t taken off yet.
you mean the letsplay years right? that's 2008 to like 2014, yeah that was all there then and to go back and watch it is tough, the internet got a better handle on it's uh everything problem after that, its still not perfect but better then a slur being every other punchline or a shock site
now 1999 to 2004 that was the peak of the internet, tv tuners hooked up to video cards used to create the first torrents, music that was actually free, every tv channel had a line of flash games, while the message boards had to start cleaning themselves up after bobcat goldthwait's lawsuit
For clarity, the term also refers to the challenge of archiving our digital lives in the present & the potential gaps this will create in historical records for future generations.
I've said it for years: Covid has messed is up horribly. In some ways, it is still at face value, but a lot of people were able to think rationally pre-pandemic, and now nobody can say anything without spinning some sort of conspiracy and we have AI that they're using as proof
TBF, the more I learn about medicine, the more I feel like even with all our advances and medicines we're still in the dark ages and loads of people just guessing or making stuff up, nevermind the woohoo stuff.
We have the greatest communication methods ever created and the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips at all times...and we somehow have more people who think the Earth is flat in 2024 than we did in 1624.
@kattenbarge.bsky.social I strongly recommend The Religion of Technology by YorkU prof David Noble. On how the religious culture of our time is actually tied to technology, each feeding each other. https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.1998v23n4a1072
I think the downfall started with reality tv. and then the downfall of History and Discovery channels into a mire of pseudoscience, conspiracy, ancient aliens and ghost hunting. That was well before 2020 by at least a decade.
I view reality TV as a huge precursor to and symbiosis with influencer culture, and I think you’re onto something with the History/Discovery channels—I’d add TLC, too. And I enjoy a lot of this junk stuff, but the problem is it eroded and replaced the healthier alternative.
"digital dark ages" is honestly a lot more literal than most people realize when you read about the "dark enlightenment" ideologies kicking around among tech oligarchs. they'd love nothing more than a modern feudalism complete with monarchs reigning over the rest of us as peasants
I was just ruminating today on whether modern America is compatible with democracy, not in a "let's go fash!" way, but in the sense of whether we have the societal ability to withstand the targeted disinformation that attacks our cognitive weak points. Just poking that lizard brain over and over.
True! Critical thinking and thinking outside the box is almost non-existent now. Online info is taken at face value as true but those of is that know it's false are argued with if we try to explain/expose the falsehoods. It's unreal how much gullibility exists today.
my crackpot theory that the "balanced literacy" movement created a generation of adults who are not only dependent on youtubers and podcasters due to illiteracy but also cognitively adapted to bullshitting is feeling less crackpot these days
Could you say more about what it would mean to be 'cognitively adapted to bullshitting'? (This is not a troll, I'm really interested in 'bullshit' as an ethical/rhetorical concept, & that sounds like what you're talking about.)
sure. the "balanced literacy" approach teaches kids to find the meaning of an unfamiliar word by looking at the first letter and guessing some words that make sense in context, rather than actually reading all the letters in the word. this is a compensating strategy used by illiterate people
but that school of literacy instruction teaches it as how you're actually supposed to read. kids practice this method over and over again and as a result, never learn to actually decode words; they instead just memorize words by encountering them
the result is adults who avoid any text with words they haven't already memorized and who make lots of errors based on reading the word they assume "should" be there rather than what's actually printed. they implicitly transform any text they read into something that matches their own assumptions
they can be surprisingly confident they're reading correctly, though. they've practiced reading as a guessing game or a participatory sense-making exercise, not as understanding texts based on decoding the actual words printed
In the UK the big anti-intellectualism punch in the face ('we are tired of experts') was Brexit in 2016. That was a terrible starting point for covid. It's still deeply upsetting because it has caused so much harm.
billionaires have all the money and all the data, and they use it to control the emotions and fates of adoring rubes. My sense is that things are going to get much, much worse for the world before there's any chance it gets better. We basically have to hit some kind of rock bottom at this point.
Well, obviously. I’m not saying technology created any of these problems. I’m saying it was used to exacerbate them. The internet didn’t start out this way. It was weaponized.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
The great Web—source of so much hope for me & many others—turning out far more akin to the Great Krell Machine of Forbidden Planet than I'd ever have thought—& becoming so at a speed I'd never have been cynical enough to conjure.
"The secret devil of every soul on the planet, set loose all at once"
I don't think it's the web per se. The web is great. The problem is the appetite for minimum-regulation mass content production to facilitate data harvesting.
"we didn’t find ways to help regular people on & offline communicate effectively across difference…maintain solidarity w/o interest group leaders to negotiate & maintain it.
Cultural and technological change & our failure to adapt it to human needs is…the substory of the post-Obama years."
Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics... there lives alongside the twentieth century the thirteenth...people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!
When you say “people believe in magic,” are you referring to Christian nationalists who give God too much credit for their successes, or people who practice witchcraft/Wicca? Or both?
I’m thinking more about people who have bought into a very surface level version of magic on social media, like spells and love potions and angel numbers. Also psychics and mediums and astrology to some extent
I'm in a trying for a baby support group, and it's been a bit of a culture shock to me seeing how many women there believe in things like tarot readings, meaningful dreams or even little superstitions like seeing magpies.
I think we need to be able to say that all supernaturalism is bad. I don't think there's a way out of things that preserves the mysticism that people want to keep.
"Dems are bad at the economy" is mysticism. "Angel numbers" are mysticism. "Yeshua ben Yosef turned water to wine" is mysticism.
Don't peeps watch enough fantasy magic/witchcraft movies/tv and original Twilight Zones to know love spells never work as hoped/intended and it is a real PITA getting a refund?
"Power of positive thinking/prosperity gospel/The Secret" shit too, and really a lot of "self help" and "hustle culture" stuff is just all that disguised with business jargon or whatever
"Whatever you think will happen if you do it right, and good people have wealth and health."
I do fear we’re entering an Age of Stultification, or Anti-Enlightenment, where the rate of scientific discovery, breaking free of religious dogma, and liberalization of our institutions will decline. And it’s partly because our brains are not wired to live in the modern world.
All the incel looks-maxxers convinced that if they can suck in their cheeks long enough to get those chins looking all chiseled and manly they’ll pass that chin on to their male heirs.
If they ever stop being incel long enough to have a male heir at least
Comments
We have to let in understanding. The natural world's observability amid artifice.
Make *live systems.
The enemy of the social contract just has to lead people off the path. Sucker them into deviance deep enough to break them off.
The project of the left anchors in truth and justice. I'm not id or ego, but manifesting superego.
https://bsky.app/profile/philippmarkolin.bsky.social/post/3lacunviavu2c
I’m not buying it:
And then I said I was glad he was dead, so he didn't have to see this, and it breaks my heart into pieces.
when I worked at a casino our Lunar New Year buffet specials were always $8.88
Our education system is not teaching critical thinking skills; aka what you see on that screen is not automatically true just because it's on that screen.
"Capitalism" made cell phones possible, but without informed/educated consumers, they are just screens.
Once capitalists took over the Web, they sought to build walled gardens which they could monetize.
(🧵)
https://bsky.app/profile/wang.social/post/3la4mu4vpg22t
The issue with social media (car) isn't the technology (road). The people who own/drive cars need rules/lessons. Same with SM.
Scientists in 1200: So actually the earth isn't flat
Scientists in 2020: Can we PLEASE move on from this?! It's a sphere!
@kattenbarge.bsky.social I strongly recommend The Religion of Technology by YorkU prof David Noble. On how the religious culture of our time is actually tied to technology, each feeding each other.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/122339/the-religion-of-technology-by-david-f-noble/9780307828538
I thought she was joking at first. Pretty sure I insulted her. Oh well.
Gold. Pure gold.
The education system lacks the ability to modify how it instructs because those entrusted with doing so also lack the knowledge of how technology works and exactly how it can be used negatively.
Even now we discover textbooks are slanted information.
Most teachers have zero idea how to see that digitally.
They themselves are victims of disinformation.
How many made a vote Tuesday based on the data they were presented?
"How i push alarm?"
.... SEE WHAT YOU MEAN?
We're the Eloi. The ones who had all their thinking done for them by machine and morlock and eventually lost the ability to think at all.
https://bsky.app/profile/sorayamcdonald.bsky.social/post/3ladgsnncp52q
Edward O. Wilson
Abrahamic religion = organized ignorance.
All of the complaints about tech come from a lack of education.
Think about how many people utter the phrase DAILY, "I'm not a tech person." yet they have Macs, iPhones, iPads.
The disconnect is e d u c a t i o n.
We’re making a lot of information, the long term archival rate is extremely low. Only takes a few mistakes at https://archive.org for future generations to know surprisingly little about us.
Written records won't survive as long so you're right there.
I always carried around books and magazines for something to read back then, but non-readers needed the smartphone to cure them of their dull boredom.
People are trained towards a set of digestible narratives, predictions, and charisma.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-foreboding-of-an-america-in-my-children-s
Think about the amount of hours children have been on their phone each day.
I can't help thinking about what my generation did with those hours before phones!
Be bored, obviously 😜 but I think you'd call that being in the moment now. Thinking. I was always out! I got up to stuff.
Memories ♾️
People have created new social networks and institutions around this crap - it's the new social reality.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558407/dark-star-rising-by-gary-lachman/
The world is moving too fast to really understand so people are just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lots of wordy blocks of text that are inconsistent or don't actually say anything meaningful. Most commonly found in subjects with faculty who don't seem confident with the content themselves. 🙃
Probably some investors on the Boards of Governors.
#FunFact
singer Greg Graffin holds a PhD from Cornell in zoology
"Welcome to the new dark ages
Yeah, I hope you're living right
These are the new dark ages
And the world might end tonight"
https://youtu.be/Mxa4mm3t8vI?t=1311
1/
https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.1998v23n4a1072
Media Literacy is a vastly underdeveloped skill set in the general population.
2) Give platform owners incentives and freedoms to pursue profit by any means.
3) Watch every gain of civilization be undone in real time.
Ma'am? Magic has existed since before the internet. Before technology.
Just bc humans use technology to abuse others is not PC/internet's fault. lol
Education. Education.
Save the fibs for the next election. 👉🏻
― Frank Herbert, Dune
— Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
"The secret devil of every soul on the planet, set loose all at once"
Also, quarterly-earnings-driven churn always seems to be shuttering communities and killing beloved tools. So much gets lost.
Context-collapse & the lack of nonverbal cues (+ other missing affordances of older communications media) also amplify negativity, atomization.
"we didn’t find ways to help regular people on & offline communicate effectively across difference…maintain solidarity w/o interest group leaders to negotiate & maintain it.
Cultural and technological change & our failure to adapt it to human needs is…the substory of the post-Obama years."
once silly little niche websites left us, it became inevitable
I know how much technology can help us, but I hope we start to distance from it the following decades
- Trotsky, 1933
you can’t pour nonsense in your ear for “fun” without consequences
I'd also guess all these "angel numbers" and "cheat codes" are about feeling in control when society makes you feel powerless?
"Dems are bad at the economy" is mysticism. "Angel numbers" are mysticism. "Yeshua ben Yosef turned water to wine" is mysticism.
"Whatever you think will happen if you do it right, and good people have wealth and health."
This place ain’t much better but Elon can’t use it as a propaganda tool.
If they ever stop being incel long enough to have a male heir at least