Perhaps you didn’t have controversial views in the past 3 years. Ideas that one was banned for as recently as last year under the umbrella of misinformation are now acceptable and even common knowledge in some cases. That’s real mass suppression of discourse. This has an effect on social networks. (Edit: the suppression continues. The original thread is flagged right now. It said the campaign against “misinformation” led to the crazy situation on Reddit and Twitter that we have today.)
Think of it like a seismograph [0]. A violent swing in one direction is proceeded by a violent swing in the other direction. We’re living through the big swings right now.
I think it’s reductive to blame a single person. The people at the top are usually vessels for the people’s energy anyways. That’s why running these institutions is so hard, because you constantly feel powerless even though you’re responsible for making all the decisions.
We should find ways to settle each other, and I think that starts with setting ourselves and those close to us like our family and friends.
How about placing more emphasis on the family unit? Family bonds are stronger than anything else. If you encourage everyone to work then people may get the misguided idea that careers are more important than families.
I don’t see this happening because it’s usually a better financial proposition to have everyone work all the time.
We invent dishwashers, washing machines, baby monitors, vacuums, television, HVAC etc and the life of a housewife, particularly after the children go to school was made comparatively much easier and much more comfortable, that was the moment we somehow all decided that being a housewife was slavery and its better to commute to an office and do all those chores on the weekend.
In the next few decades productivity doubled and wages were halved relative to productivity. Has to be the biggest scam in human history.
Family can be a great place to provide connection, purpose, someone to lean on and so many things. But it can't be our only solution - it can't be required to get along - because not everyone has a family that can provide this. Some people just don't have a family outright (often the most vulnerable people in the first place) and some don't have families that are outright harmful.
Other kinds of community including religious groups, sports teams and even work can help, if set up right. People have to be able to be in them long term (which means no precarious jobs) and actually build connection.
Whenever I follow a link to a Twitter post now, after maybe five replies there's a bunch of Musk's irrelevant tweets wheeled about. Quite the stench on that public square.
If I needed Twitter for anything, I'd have registered and blocked the stench. But it's easier to just pass by and laugh at the antics from afar.
A lot more overt racism? You could always search "white people" and find plenty of dark and nasty things, including from very public people who get plenty of praise for it. Overt and celebrated racism has always had a home on Twitter, and if anything there seems to be somewhat less of it.
Well the question is, do you want a town square or do you want a gated community? Town squares have a lot of filth. To filter it out is to pretend that humanity is something that it isn’t.
You can filter it out in your own Twitter by following people you like.
Town squares have racists, hedonists, nihilists, globalists, misanthropists, moralists, pacifists, anarchists, theologists and everything else. The only new thing about this town square is that everyone has a megaphone. It’s up to you to find the crowd you want.
Some of the things you don’t tolerate are benign to others. And some of the things you like are cancerous to others.
Ten years on and these threads still get hundreds of comments. This must be the world’s biggest salt mine. Ten years ago, millions of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly compelled to moan about the loss of their favorite RSS reader for eternity. The volume of the protests are out of alignment with the value that any RSS reader could possibly give, so I assume the nerds are all crying out for the loss of their innocence.
This is more of an indictment of alcoholism than self driving cars. Anyone who’s routinely getting drunk has a big problem that will cloud their judgement.
Because those same people were pointed at as the cause of all problems and physically expelled, at least when they weren't murdered, like a hundred times over centuries. Kings, rulers, thought leaders always pointed at the jews and said "look they charge you interest on your debt, theyre so evil" while they were the only religion that ALLOWED them to charge interest on debt, meaning they were basically the only class who could be bankers by Christian rules, which often meant regional laws.
What's actually kind of neat is that Islam majority countries solved the same problem by inventing new financial instruments and skirting the rules as written. "I'm not charging interest, this is a fee for the service of this weird rent to own structure we made". I don't think it's common in Islam to hate jews for being "The bankers".
But you knew this, because you didn't ask this question in earnest.
Wow Google’s culture has really gone to the dumps. I think this is a direct consequence of hiring too many people and hoping for the best. There’s no way their quality bar is anywhere near what it was 10 years ago.
Google needs a careful visionary at the helm. A surgeon with a scalpel.
Sorry for sounding cryptic, it is hard to pin down exactly, but I somehow see Zuckerberg himself kind of like that; maybe someone who likes technical problems, but sees human relations in a kind of formulaic way, and oblivious to ethical consequences of technical work, not interested in the classics or humanities.
I don’t think anyone realized the full extent of the consequences until very recently. Even now, we’re still learning just how pervasive the mental health consequences of social media have been. See the recently released CDC data on teen mental health.
The trajectory for Facebook has been consistently bad. Not knowing the "full extent" is not absolution.
The CDC study is a lagging indicator; it describes the trendline of a mental health crisis that's self-evident to practitioners. On the research side, there have been many studies in the last 10 years associating Facebook use with poor mental health outcomes.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out 5 years ago.
