]]>People will say it's always been this way, but I disagree. What we're seeing is the end result of attentional decay caused by social media. Social media is a drug. Full stop. It was crafted in a lab to take advantage of human psychology and pull you in deeper and deeper. And once it has its hooks in you, it starts to fuck with your reasoning skills and push you towards radical and conspiratorial viewpoints. It does this in order to drive "engagement", which for social media companies translates to profit. That "engagement" takes the form of showing people upsetting and controversial content and making it appear organic. People think that what they're seeing is the truth of the world, when really they're being fed a very specific and radical view of the world by social media companies in order to drive up their profit. And this is all without even mentioning the ways that social media deteriorates people's attentional skills by giving them shorter and shorter forms of content with less deep analysis. When you train your brain on such shallow content, your critical thinking skills are going to start weakening.
So yeah. We're living in a world full of addicts right now and people only just seem to be coming to terms with it. Short form, highly controversial content is toxic to critical thinking skills.
]]>Increased idleness means, on the one hand, increased chance of survival, but it also gives humans idle time in which to engage in activities other than self-maintenance. It is in this idle time that humans can do as they wish, rather than as they must, and they can think, talk, and play - i.e. act as free moral agents. In Idle Theory, humans are seen as part-time free moral agents, only free to the extent that they are idle.
This is what happens when we treat public infrastructure like a tech platform... always on, low overhead, minimal headcount. My own diverted flight was just one minor data point in a much larger pattern of problems. The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly. Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures anymore.
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When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.
Two tangents from that post: Kayfabe is a word from pro wrestling, meaning the portrayal of staged events as real, which has become normal in the world of politics.
And an article about the psychology of the resentful right, Weak Men Create Hard Times:
Who goes out of their way to spend hours each day posting slurs on the internet? Who obsesses over harmless cultural artifacts like a silly TikTok dance? The guy who does this (and it's almost always a guy) is not someone who is succeeding in his own life.
What this article fails to understand is the insanity of the whole project of modernity, which is too big a subject for this post, but I'm not going to judge anyone for being a loser, where winning is about conforming to a human-made world that is going farther and farther from human nature. Trumpers aren't wrong to want a simpler world, they're just unable to imagine less complexity without more domination. The author quotes Francis Fukuyama:
]]>Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.